KOREA’S FIVE CAMPAIGNS
From the military standpoint, the Korean War falls into five distinct phases. The first campaign began in June 1950, when the North Koreans, without warning, crossed the thirty-eighth parallel to invade an unsuspecting South Korea, then in the sphere of the Western powers. Against the lightly armed South Koreans — more of a police force than an army — the North Koreans, one-third of them veterans of the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army, quickly overran most of South Korea. The introduction of U.S. troops from the forces occupying Japan could at first only slow the North Korean columns of armor and infantry. In early September 1950, the UN lines stiffened and held, and the Americans poured reinforcements and supplies into the Pusan perimeter, while the North Koreans, battered and exhausted from their drive south, regrouped. Although all of the tactical military air bases in South Korea had been overrun by the enemy, there were now three aircraft carriers on station to provide air support for the beleaguered UN ground forces and attack the main supply routes of the invading North Korean troops.
The second campaign began on 15 September 1950, when the 230-ship Joint Task Force 7 landed the 1st Marine Division at Inchon. The Marines then drove east across the peninsula to link up with the U.S. Army divisions breaking out of the Pusan perimeter from the south. This bold strategic strike caught the Communists by surprise, and the bulk of the North Korean army was caught in a massive trap, surrounded and cut off from their bases of resupply. Most were killed or captured, and others, deserting their units and abandoning their weapons, infiltrated through the UN lines to flee to the North. As the North Korean army disintegrated, the UN forces quickly retook Seoul, crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, and pushed north. General MacArthur, the commander in chief, Far East Command, intended to occupy all of North Korea up to the Yalu River, the border with China. There were international murmurings that this advance would be considered a threat by China and could only result in an armed response. In Washington as well there was a growing desire to avoid any provocation for China to enter the conflict.
By mid-November, with the Communist forces in a complete rout, the Americans and ROKs were racing north and a U.S. Army column actually reached the Yalu River, at the town of Hysesanjin. As the U.S. troops paused to regroup and enjoy a hot Thanksgiving dinner in the field, General MacArthur announced that North Korea had been defeated, its armies destroyed, and that South Korea had been liberated and its borders restored. The Americans would be out of Korea and on their way home by Christmas.
The third phase of the Korean War began on 25 November 1950, when Chinese Communist armies entered the conflict with massed attacks in depth across the UN front. The Chinese offensive came as a surprise to General MacArthur and his field commanders, in spite of the fact that in Washington and other foreign capitals there had been a sober apprehension that China would not stand idle if the UN forces advanced to the Yalu. China had been able to infiltrate more than two hundred thousand regular army troops, euphemistically referred to as “volunteers,” into North Korea without detection by UN intelligence and deployed them to cut off the overextended UN columns pushing toward the Chinese border. The surprise and the ferocity of this Chinese offensive overran and destroyed the most exposed UN forces — the U.S. and ROK divisions in the west and the U.S. Army task force at the Chosin Reservoir — and forced the entire UN front to fall back. For U.S. troops, the withdrawal back was rapid — twenty miles per day — but orderly. The retiring troops were able to break contact with the advancing Chinese but had to abandon and destroy huge supply dumps of equipment and ammunition. Again the question arose: Should the United States evacuate its forces from Korea rather than attempt to fight the armies of Communist China in their own backyard, ten thousand miles from home? In spite of popular polls in the United States that, by 66 percent, favored abandoning the war, President Truman said, “Stay.”
For the third time in five months, the capital city of Seoul changed hands as UN forces fell back to re-form their lines at the narrow waist of Korea, where their available forces could fill the gaps left by the badly battered U.S. and ROK divisions and present a solid front to the advancing Chinese. In January 1951 the UN armies reestablished and stabilized their front on a line just south of the thirty-eighth parallel and held against the Chinese advance.
GENERAL MACARTHUR SACKED
On 15 April 1951, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had been relieved by President Truman as supreme commander of the Pacific for being “unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the United States Government and of the United Nations in matters pertaining to his official duties.” Gen. Matthew B. Ridgeway, USA, had been named his successor. MacArthur had continued to advocate an “all-out” war in Korea, to occupy the entire peninsula, a course that could have brought the USSR into the conflict. Washington wanted to pursue a negotiated settlement along the general lines of the original boundaries of demarcation.
Earlier, on 25 January, General Ridgway, then in command of the UN forces in Korea following the death of General Walker in a jeep accident, kicked off the fourth campaign of the war with a full-scale offensive all along the front. The objective was to inflict heavy casualties on the Communists and drive them out of South Korea. Ridgeway’s fresh leadership and the growing battle experience of the U.S. troops were paying off. There was a palpable upswing in morale as troops found themselves on the offensive again after a month of retreating. U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force planes devastated enemy troop concentrations. Seoul was quickly retaken, and at the end of March UN troops were again north of the thirty-eighth parallel, in spite of determined opposition. China continued to rush fresh troops and equipment south to the front, and in late April it mounted a major offensive of its own, with the main weight of the counterattack down the historic Seoul invasion corridor. The UN lines held and the Chinese were stopped outside of Seoul. A second Chinese offensive in May was thrown back with heavy losses from U.S. air and artillery. By June the UN lines were again firmly reestablished along the thirty-eighth parallel. The key city of Chorwon in the central plains, controlling the invasion route to Seoul, was captured and held by U.S. forces. By midsummer, the two opposing armies had stalled and were dug in along the front, which generally followed the line of the original border.
On 10 July 1951, with the opposing armies facing each other in a stalemate, along a boundary heavily fortified on both sides, peace talks were initiated at Kaesong and later at a special compound in the village of Panmunjom in no-man’s-land between the UN and the Communist forces. This marked the beginning of the fifth phase of the Korean War. The original dividing line between North and South Korea had been drawn by the Allied powers at Potsdam, to lie along the thirty-eighth parallel, an abstract geographical reference line. This was simply a matter of convenience, without any serious considerations of terrain or historical precedent. It was impractical as a defensible national border. The 10 July positions of the opposing forces followed a line of defendable terrain close to, but not superimposed upon, the thirty-eighth parallel. The de facto line of demarcation between North and South Korea was now more realistic for purposes of a natural national boundary. The final campaign, which lasted more than two years while the peacemakers bargained with threats and boycotts, saw some of the heaviest fighting of the war as the Chinese and newly reorganized North Korean divisions mounted attacks and limited offensives to frustrate the UN negotiators and seize more real estate. In these last two years, the United States suffered more than twelve thousand killed before the cease-fire took place on 27 July 1953. It had been three years, a month, and two days since a surprisingly well-trained and — equipped North Korean army of twenty-two divisions had crossed this same border (now restored as the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ) in a carefully planned and unanticipated attack with the intention of conquering South Korea and annexing its territory to the Communist nation of Korea.