WAR BEGINS
The Korean War began at 0400 on 25 June 1950, when seven crack divisions of North Korean troops stormed across the thirty-eighth parallel without warning. The non-Communist world was caught by surprise.
When the North Koreans attacked, the United States was enjoying the rewards of a welcome peace earned by a hard-fought victory in World War II, an all-out mobilization that touched every American. After World War II, without a military threat on the horizon, the United States had dismantled the massive armies and fleets that had contributed to the Allied victory. Armament production had been halted, material and supplies abandoned overseas, military equipment scrapped, ships and aircraft mothballed, and the citizen soldiers had returned to their jobs and families or to school. By 1950 force levels had been reduced to well below prewar totals. Of special significance was the exodus of veterans from the active-duty ranks.
The U.S. Navy, which in World War II had more than a hundred aircraft carriers in its operating forces, was programed to reduce its active inventory of fleet carriers — those capable of operating jet fighters — to five. The U.S. Army troops in the Pacific theater were untrained for combat. Recruited largely on the promise that in the Army they would learn a trade, the young and inexperienced soldiers were enjoying duty in Japan, which in 1950 remained an occupied country under General MacArthur’s command. The troops were equipped with obsolescent weapons with which they were only marginally proficient. Neither the troops nor U.S. leadership expected they would be exposed to real battle. They were unprepared for combat.
In spite of the country’s total lack of enthusiasm for a new war, its military unpreparedness, and the lack of any tangible threat to the American people by the North Koreans, President Truman did not hesitate to react. In quick succession after the invasion of 25 June, he committed U.S. naval and air forces to help stem the invasion of the South, then ordered U.S. ground forces into the conflict. At the same time he brought the UN, still in its infancy, into the war against the North Koreans. This was the first occasion of any international world-governing body organizing a military force and conducting warfare.
Truman had made the most difficult decision a president can make: to go to war. It was especially hard in this case, as Americans had not yet recovered from the hardships and trauma of World War II. The invaders were not threatening U.S. lives or property, nor had we any longstanding ethnic or social quarrels with North Korea. President Truman saw the true foe as communism. If a line were not drawn, the totalitarian regimes eventually would threaten most of the free world. The United States had to act before so many democracies were overrun, before it was too late for the Western powers to act collectively. President Truman and his advisors saw this as the time to react with force of arms, the sooner the better.
It was admittedly not the place the United States wanted to stage this first showdown with the forces of communism. Secretary Acheson expressed it welclass="underline" “If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location to fight a war, the unanimous choice would have to be Korea.” But the United States and its allies were not offered a choice in the selection of the initial arena for this long-term struggle for the survival of the free world. The Communists had seized the initiative with their sudden and overpowering assault across the thirty-eighth parallel. Whether or not we liked it, the battleground would be the Korean peninsula. The United States and its allies had collided with the forces of the Soviet Union’s surrogate, North Korea, while the whole world watched. Were the democracies willing to go to war for their principles of human rights? Would they fight at the risk of their citizens’ lives? Could they hold their own in battle against the tough Communist troops, indoctrinated to shed their blood for their cause? At stake were the prestige of the United States and the survivability of free nations.
UNDERESTIMATING THE ENEMY
For the U.S. leadership, the difficult decision to go to war was initially eased by a general underestimation of the enemy. On hearing of the invasion, the commander of U.S. forces in the Far East, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, observed, “This is probably just a reconnaissance in force. If Washington will not hobble me, I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back.” The troops themselves, before their first encounter with the enemy, exhibited an “overconfidence bordering on arrogance,” according to General Barth of the U.S. Army’s 24th Division. The GIs thought the North Koreans would break and run when they first saw U.S. uniforms. The troops were not to blame. Ripped out of their noncombatant occupation duties in Japan, they were rushed to the front by airlift in a matter of hours without any preparation for combat.
The first major event of the shooting war in Korea for the United States occurred on 3 July 1950, when carrier aircraft from the Valley Forge struck Pyongyang in North Korea, destroying much of the small North Korean air force. Two days later, on 5 July 1950, troops from the 24th Infantry Division attempted to ambush the column of tanks and infantry leading the main invasion force at Osan, only two hundred miles from Pusan, the southernmost port of the Republic of Korea (ROK). The small U.S. Army force, its 540 soldiers averaging only twenty years of age, without tanks and with a total of eight antitank artillery rounds, faced a column of thirty Russian-made T-34 tanks and five thousand veteran soldiers. The Americans were routed. As U.S. reinforcements were poured into the port of Pusan, they were rushed to the front piecemeal in an attempt to slow the advance of the North Koreans and keep the entire Korean peninsula from being overrun before enough UN troops and equipment could be landed to engage the enemy on at least equal terms of manpower and equipment. Through the next sixty days, the outnumbered and outgunned Americans and South Koreans fell back before the North Koreans, who, driven by their leaders without regard for casualties, were determined to score a quick and total victory by pushing the Americans off the peninsula.
Exploiting the momentum of their attack and the fanaticism of their troops, the North Koreans enveloped and broke through the UN lines whenever the Americans attempted to make a stand, forcing U.S. and ROK forces into a constantly shrinking perimeter around Pusan. Air strikes by Navy and Marine Corps planes based on carriers offshore slowed enemy forces but could not stop them. By the end of August, the Americans and South Koreans still had not stopped the North Korean advance. The situation was so perilous that the Eighth Army commander, Gen. Walton Walker, asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff whether he should plan for an evacuation of all U.S. forces to Japan or still attempt to establish a secure perimeter around Pusan and depend upon continuing reinforcements to fight off the North Koreans and maintain his foothold in Korea. With President Truman’s concurrence, the JCS instructed Walker to “stand and fight.”
Then, in the first week of September, the UN lines around Pusan held in spite of the human wave attacks. This was the turning point. It had been a close thing, but the United States was not going to be driven off the peninsula. They were in Korea to stay.
From this inauspicious beginning of a war we didn’t plan to fight, in the wrong place, at a bad time, against a determined enemy who had seized the initiative of surprise to come perilously close to driving U.S. troops into the sea in a humiliating defeat, the Americans found a remarkable resiliency. With the courage and a fortitude to justify its qualification for the mantle of leadership for the Western world, the United States stormed back from the very edge of disaster to badly bloody North Korea and defeat its armed forces, and then to throw the Chinese Communist armies out of South Korea, restore the original borders, and conclude the conflict on terms acceptable to our side. In this aspect alone, the Korean War must be viewed as an example to the world, ourselves, our enemies, and our allies of the power and integrity of the United States.