Blowback - S3 Episode 9 - "No More Targets"

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

Stalemate on the battlefield does not stop the United States from obliterating North Korea.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Another enemy position to take. And this is how we take it. First the air burns in in close support. Scorching the place with napalm. scorching the place with napalm, while all the time the artillery softens up for survivors, if any. And whoever runs gets cut down with small arms fire.

Then we move in on foot. And we go in, for this is Korea, chums. This is Korea. Last time, we saw how in spring of 1951 yet another reversal in the Korean War took place, as the North Korean and Chinese troops were overtaken by the UN forces once again. The first three phases of the great communist counterattack had stunned everyone, but the Western armies had learned from it, and now they had pushed back with all their advanced weaponry and technology. The last phases of the counterattack, as the Chinese call them, would concentrate on

merely holding the stalemate won by America, South Korea, and their allies, rather than trying to upset it. At the same time, there was a major upset on the American side. General Douglas MacArthur, American hero, fell from power, fired as Far East commander by President Harry S. Truman. MacArthur had been exercising more and more control over the war, pushing further and further against the designs of the White House to keep it confined to Korea. He manipulated the press, maneuvered armies to maximize complications on the battlefield,

and drove relentlessly to bring the war past the Yalu River into the Chinese mainland. Then, in the spring of 1951, MacArthur went over the head of his own government and declared he would personally meet with the commander of enemy forces to hammer out a truce. in his own way. He all but announced that wartime policy, his policy anyway, was targeting China. And, most offensively to President Truman, McArthur publicly knifed the president in a letter to the Republicans back home, ahead of an election year that looked likely to put a Republican back in the White House. As Truman put it, the big general in the Far East must be recalled. And so he was. The question now is,

Will MacArthur stay down? And so we enter the final phase of what you could call the original Korean War. Yet that final phase drags on for another two years, longer than the entirety of the war so far. What we'll see now is a static battle line across the waste of the Korean Peninsula. We'll see negotiations drop in and out of existence in a series of odd and disturbing maneuvers, while an unrelenting air campaign pummel's what is left of North Korea out of existence. By 20 May, the second phase of the Red Spring Offensive has been thrown back along the entire front, with the last gap closed on the eastern front near Hangi by 24 May.

The UN counterattack has launched immediately, driving the communists in full retreat. By the beginning of June, the pursuit spearheaded by armored columns has carried the allies across the 38th parallel into North Korea, where the enemy braces and halts their retreat, forming a defense triangle anchored at Chorwan, Kumwa, and Pyongyang. By 15 June, UN forces crack the heavy red defenses in their so-called iron triangle, taking Kumwa and Chorwan and advancing north to Pyongyang. During the week 13 to 20 June, the communist air power becomes more aggressive, but suffers heavy losses to the U.N. air arm. On June 23, 1951, the Soviet Union's ambassador to the U.N., Jacob Malik, proposed an offer for peace in Korea, almost a year after the war began. And it was a softball. It could have ended the war essentially on the terms of the United States.

In fact, the Soviet offer, probably to the consternation of the Korean and Chinese comrades, did not include some key terms that communist side had come to hold dear, the immediate withdrawal of all troops, the recognition of red China at the UN, and the return of Formosa from the dictatorship of Chiang Kai Shik. Malik, I have stone notes, offered instead a pure and simple military armistice in the field, and these were essentially President Truman's terms. Dean Rusk, the man who once drew the 38th parallel on a map, was now assistant secretary at the State Department and liaison to the 16 nations,

also in the UN force in Korea. Stone notes that Rusk was, in fact, a darling of the China lobby, those boosters of Chiang Kai Shek in Formosa, and that Rusk had even declared in a speech at the Waldorf Astoria on May 18th, that the United States recognized Chen Kai Shek because he, quote, more authentically represents the views of the great body of the people of China, and that the U.S. would help them if they tried to throw off communist tyranny. Douglas MacArthur may have been out, but as you can begin to see here, much of his legacy had lived on.

On the matter of negotiations in Korea, his successor, Matthew Ridgway, acted quickly to mimic his old boss as best he could. The offer from the Soviets was dismissed by the Americans. Now in Congress, rejection of the Soviet offer was bipartisan, and actually by Republicans specifically, with both the isolationist and so-called internationalist wings of the Republican Party condemning the Soviet offer. This was best summed up by Republican Thomas Dewey, who famously lost to Truman in 1948. Quote, every time the Soviets make a peace move, I get scared. Every time Stalin smiles, beware. Now, perhaps it wasn't so much Stalin, but peace that was spooking Washington.

Defense Secretary George Marshall of the Marshall Plan and himself a former general soon gave a speech to Congress rallying them against a quote-unquote letdown of military build-up should peace come to Korea. Quote, I'm worried whether we'll relax after the Korean action, Marshall had said. Stone notes that, quote, all the top administration, military, and civilian officials followed Marshall's example over the following week. And so, on the 4th of July in 1951, President Truman gave a speech assuring Americans that, even with these dangerous rumors of peace in the air, quote, we face a long period of world tension

and great international danger. The Washington Post editorial page did its duty in a piece titled, quote, peril of communist treachery, in which the paper insisted, quote, that Moscow's desire for an armistice, Koreans apparently not being part of the equation, this Soviet desire for, for Armacist, quote, springs from a belief that the extraordinary stimulus that the aggression in Korea gave to rearmament in the free world must be allowed to subside. The editorial even went as far as to suggest war with China. And as we mentioned last time, America's precious atomic bombs had been transferred to military control, specifically that of Air Force General

Curtis Bombs Away LeMay. As Bruce Cummings puts it, Truman had sacrificed McArthur's command to further pursue the General's nuclear policy. Again, MacArthur may have been dismissed, his direct threat to the presidency neutralized, but his absence revealed how much he and America's elite had actually agreed on. As the stalemate in Korea dragged on into the summer of 1951, with no battle immediately at hand,

peace talks started up on July 10th at Kaysong, near the parallel. They shut down two days later. The Americans pulled back, insisting this was because the communist side had, quote-unquote, barred some newspaper reporters from covering the talks. Several of the journalists themselves were baffled by this outrage from the U.S. Quote, it is a hell of a note to stop a peace conference over such petulant trivialities, wrote a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. We weren't going to attend the conference sessions anyway. But this stalling could only go on for so long. Talks started up again soon enough. The communist side, perhaps noticing that even the Soviet's softball offer was ignored by the Yankees,

dropped their initial demand that troop withdrawal be settled immediately. Perhaps that got them through the door. Talks went on at Kaysong from July 27th to early August, the main point of contention being where to draw the ceasefire line. The United States stated publicly that the 38th parallel was an acceptable term, but behind the scenes, this was not, in fact, entertained. This was yet another appearance by the spirit of MacArthur, who, unlike the so-called fanatic communists, had never accepted the parallel as a point of negotiation. The U.S. simply did not want to acknowledge it as a dividing boundary, except, of course, if the communists were crossing it in the meantime. But after another breakaway from

the talks, with the U.S. capitalizing on a technicality, there began some actual bargaining over the ceasefire line. The communists at this point were aiming for the parallel. The U.S., no doubt, wanted to hand the South far more North Korean territory. But there was more and more talk of a little give and take. Diplomacy at work. In fact, a U.N. spokesperson would soon claim that the communists were ready to, quote, accept the present battlefront as a ceasefire line. This was a serious concession, given that the U.S. was now pretty well north of the 38th parallel. A year on, the war might be coming to an end. Quote, Red's seen yielding ran the headline in the Nippon Times in Japan on August 18th. A chord seen nearer was the headline the next day.

It was at this moment, Stone reports, when peace at least seemed in sight that UN troops launched the heaviest attack since the Kaysong Armistice Talks began, one of the most devastating artillery bombardments of the Korean War. At the same time, a band of armed men invaded the Kaysong Neutral Zone, ambushed a communist platoon, and killed its commander. Stone writes that the next day, the United Press reported, a third of the Korean Battlefront was aflame. The United States claimed this offensive,

the attack that blew up the negotiations, was the doing of their South Korean allies. The communists appeared to know better and broke off the talks after complaining of several more ambushes, which included one in which U.S. Air Force planes shot up the jeeps of North Korean negotiation teams. These claims were mocked by the United States.

Quote, Ridgeway warns of red trickery ran the headline of U.S. news on an interview with the top commander. It was only until September that reporters discovered beyond a wall of censorship that the Americans had indeed launched the attack and participated. As it happens, the Korean negotiations were torpedoed, so to speak, just before another high-profile

diplomatic scene. Now, ten years after the Japanese sneak attack and six years after Japan surrender aboard the battleship, Missouri, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida arrives in San Francisco with his daughter to sign a peace treaty which the free world has worked to make just and lasting. On September 4, 1951, the final meetings for a post-war treaty with Japan were set to begin in San Francisco. The idea behind this treaty was, of course, that it would set in writing the new era of coexistence between Japan and the rest of the world. The Soviets, who would protest the existing drafts of the treaty, had still decided.

decided to send officials to attend the conference, just as progress seemed to be happening for peace in Korea. Also to San Francisco comes Andre Gromyko. The Soviet deputy foreign minister brushes off reporters with his usual, no comment, no comment. Romico, who is expected to use Russia's well-worn filibustering methods to disrupt the conference, gets a gift of red roses from an anonymous admirer. There was even some speculation that red Chinese officials would accompany.

these Soviet observers. Stone theorizes that the U.S. needed the Korean talks to fail for the U.S. to get what it wanted out of the Treaty of Japan. Quote, only the war made the treaty possible. There were many objections to it. The treaty had been drafted without consulting Japan's most important neighbor, China. Both the nationalists and communists were bitter about this. And it was opposed by Japan's other big neighbor, Russia. It was unsatisfactory to India. A treaty of peace with Japan, which was unacceptable to the three biggest far-eastern powers, was hardly a stabilizing factor. And even Britain, which was more afraid of an economically recovered Japan breaking into British markets in the East,

paid lip service to this general opposition as well. The treaty, crafted chiefly by John Foster Dulles, not only committed to re-arming Japan, but also denied key victims of Japan's war the reparations that they had requested. Now, what did Japan give up for such generous treatment by its former wartime enemy, the United States? Apart from the general control over Japan's recovery, U.S. military bases. The United States, Stonewrites, could not afford to have a ceasefire before the San Francisco Conference. It could not even afford a ceasefire until after the treaty had been safely ratified

in both Washington and Tokyo. The Yalta settlement of World War II, which had recognized Soviet sovereignty over key Pacific islands was disregarded. At the same time, American policy strove to force Japanese recognition of Chiang Kai Shek, a step which would put Japan into hostile relations with communist China. And in fact, Dulles had secured a letter from Japan's Prime Minister that he would not even establish basic economic relations with the People's Republic of China. In other words, Estone says, the sudden burst of incidents in case song at the end of August, served to prevent incidents at San Francisco in September. President Harry Truman flies in aboard the presidential plane Independence and is welcomed by

Mayor Elmer Robinson and Secretary of State Dean Adjison. The Japanese treaty has been planned as a cornerstone of peace for the Far East. October looked to be the month that truce talks could begin again. in earnest. But, once again, in what was described as a boggle by the New York Times, a UN plane strafed the neutral zone around the communist forces at KSong. This killed a 12-year-old boy and wounded his brother. The New York Times referred to the killing, and those like it, as being quote-unquote trumped up by communist forces. With that, the negotiations were once again set to resume at Panmunjam, several miles east. Put some more fire down on those people.

Things were not only going sour at the 38th parallel. They were also going sour between the United States military and the American press corps. It was discovered by Western reporters that the communists had been telling the truth about a recent U.S. attack on Korean forces in the neutral zone, which the U.N. investigators had been insisting was, quote, unquote, inconclusive. After tasting a bit of a cover-up, two reporters for the Herald Tribune asked a bunch of officers what was being done to prevent a repeat occurrence of this. One army officer, they reported, at first advised correspondence that their questions were, quote,

unquote, none of your business. One U.S. General's first reaction to the questions had been a warning to the correspondence. Don't forget which side you're on. There was by now a real tension between the UN command and many correspondents on the Allied side, who were actually barred from approaching officials and barred from entering base camp without a designated military handler. Stone, one of the more critical reporters, entrenched critics on the home front, singled out praise for the two Western journalists actually based in Korea at that point, reporting for the other side. These correspondents, for London's daily worker and Paris's Césoire, quote, can more easily afford to tell the truth.

Meanwhile, even the pro-war New York Times was starting to talk about how in, quote, the pattern of most of the announcements from Korea since the start of the war, embellished adjectives had replaced facts. MacArthur had not held many actual press conferences, and his replacement General Ridgeway carried on this tradition as well, preferring instead to issue, quote, a grab bag of service claims, as Hansen Baldwin, called them from Skapp's Perch in Tokyo. With the artillery right behind the lines and the air

support coming in from above. They use napole made out of gasoline, very hot stuff. At the same time the artillery threw in white phosphorus shells. The sound of shells going over can be a mighty friendly sound. Support fire thins out the enemy and sometimes there's Nothing left but the mopping up. With negotiations set to resume, the U.S. again raised the alarm on the possibility of peace. On October 4th, another public statement from a U.S. official. The U.S. deputy representative on the Security Council

told the United Nations Correspondents Association that a Korean ceasefire would allow the Soviet Union to reduce the sense of urgency in the emerging Cold War. Tokyo H.Q followed this up weeks later, with a communique downplaying the likelihood of a real armistice. Yet, the armistice talks, last punctuated by the surprise UN bombing of a Korean child in the neutral zone, resumed on October 25th. Communists, all but insisting they were ready to end this if the U.S. was ready, said that they would concede the border at the current battle line. To this promising development, the U.N. side suddenly demanded that case

Kaysong, currently held by the communists, would also have to be a part of South Korea's new dominion. And so, another roadblock to an armistice. The New York Times, November 11th, wrote, There was some mystification why Kaysong had taken on such importance when both sides had agreed on the principle that the battlefront should be the basis for the armistice line. Ksong, the paper noted, had little military value. Behind the scenes, the British and even some within the U.S. government, they felt like this was really pushing it. Even worse, unlike their masters in Tokyo, the U.S. troops on the ground in

Korea were showing serious fatigue. That month, the New York Times reported that all across the front, GIs on the ground were now asking, why don't we have a ceasefire now? The troops had heard the communists had conceded quite a bit, and well, they were confused why the UN command was finding new ways to postpone an agreement. The paper reported that some soldiers were now convinced, quote, that their own commanders, for reasons unknown to the troops, are throwing up blocks against an agreement. This was not, as the lingo goes, good optics.

Even U.S. troops fighting the war and the press covering it were starting to wonder why the U.S. was not committing to some kind of armistice. And so, as Stone puts it, there come atrocities to the rescue. The U.S. announced that the communists had killed 5,500 American captives, a tally soon raised to over 6,000. The Associated Press blasted out the headline. Reds butchered more Americans than fell in 1776. The story was everywhere that U.S. troops could hear it, on the radio, in the communiques, and, of course, headlines in the major papers. This, you see, was why the armistice talks.

were going so slowly. General Ridgway ascribed this alleged massacre of U.S. captives as a blessing from the Lord himself, saying in mid-November, quote, it may perhaps be well to note with deep reverence that in his inscrutable way God chose to bring home to our people and to the conscience of the world the moral principles of the leaders of the forces against which we fight in Korea. But reporter Hugh Dean notes that once this story made and initial splash, quote, the atrocity story faded out of the headlines and dispatches within two weeks,

but we will come back to it soon. The Korean War was at its bloodiest during those months after the Chinese entered at the end of 1950 and the beginning months of 1951. Quote, the entire civilian population of North Korea, writes Thomas Powell, dug into caves, bunkers, and bomb shelters for safety against General Ridgeway's bombing campaign. The North Koreans even constructed a protective maze of underground tunnels, what Powell calls, quote, an underground great wall.

The Great Underground Wall was one effective fortification, Powell writes. The prisoners of war became another weapon of resistance located behind enemy lines, which challenged both the U.S. detainers and the legitimacy of the U.N.'s sanctioning role. Last episode, we talked about the massive accumulation of Korean POWs that the U.N. forces had made in late 1950 and early 1951 during the rollback period of America's strategy. We also mentioned the largest POW camp, located on Kojai Island, containing about 170,000 people, prisoners' staff combined. It was a violent, ideologically contentious place, where communists and anti-communists and people suspected of being communists were routinely targeted for harassment.

It was also disgusting and unsanitary. While the first year of the camp's operation was at least somewhat peaceable, with only 102 recorded incidents, tensions increased dramatically in 1952, particularly after MacArthur's firing and the introduction of the unparalleled, quote-unquote, voluntary repatriation policy in which Koreans were forced to choose North or South, freedom, or communism. May 7, 1952 was a key flashpoint. Here's Monica Kim. The POW spokesman for Compactors,

176, a subdivision of the Kojee Island complex, placed multiple repeated requests to meet with the camp commander, Brigadier General Francis Dodd. And that afternoon, Dodd finally agreed to meet with him. They met at the main gate of the compound, the barbed wire fence between them. One of the POWs from the compound served as translator. The gate opened during the meeting to let a large truck carrying several tons worth of tents through. One of the POWs, Song Mojin, a large man of considerable strength, walked slowly through the gate, waited until Dodd put away the piece of wood he was whittling, stretched his arms as he pretended to yawn, and then grabbed Dodd.

The POWs literally carried Dodd into the compound, closing the barbed wire fence behind him. On the large banner they unfurled shortly thereafter. Written in English was the following. We have captured Dodd. He will not be harmed if P.W. problems are resolved. If you shoot, his life will be in danger. Three days later, during a heavy rain, Patton and Sherman tanks rolled up to the Koje Island facility.

Despite an explicit press prohibition, according to Monica Kim, one journalist, Sanford L. Zolberg had gotten to the island, quote, by the graces of a Korean fisherman. His May 12th front-page story on the cover of the Chicago Daily Tribune ran under the headline, 20 tanks scare reds into freeing Dodd. Harry Truman, meanwhile, before Dodd had even been released peacefully by the prisoners, released a statement decrying the commie demand for forced repatriation, you know, the standard recently established by international law like the Geneva Convention. According to the transcript of a prisoner's subsequent interrogation,

He said that after the prisoners had carried Dodd into the compound, quote, I then told the general that we were sorry that we had captured him against his will and that we would guarantee his safety and not harm him. Though the potential rebellion had been quelled, the violence and degradation continued. On June 10th, a month later, American paratroopers raided compound 76 and killed 31 prisoners and wounded more than 80, burning their buildings and possessions. Thirty-four prisoners of war were charged with mutiny for kidnapping Dodd,

though, as Monica Kim notes, ten of those 34 prisoners were born in South Korea. Quote, they patently did not fit the later narrative of the U.S. press and military of, quote, fanatic communist North Koreans, end quote. The ages of the prisoners of war, Kim writes, ranged from 19 to 37. All of them had been born during Japanese. colonial rule. These prisoners of war were a particular group among the rest of the P.O.W

population. It was most probable that many of the prisoners who had participated in the kidnapping, all of whom were spokesmen and women for the other POW compounds, had a certain level of experience in anti-colonial resistance movements. The effort to get North Korean prisoners of war to not repatriate and to move to the south failed. At the time of the ceasefire in 19, Only 7,800 of the 76,000 North Korean POWs chose not to repatriate. Although American leaders pointed to a higher rejection of repatriation from Chinese prisoners of war, their decision had little to do with Korea and much more to do with the lasting damage of the Chinese civil war that had ended just a few years earlier.

It's worth recalling here that repatriation had been the reason for the collapse of diplomatic progress in 1951, the issue that led to the prolonging of the war for another year and a half, from one White House to another. It is not a question of who wants war and who wants peace. All men of good conscience earnestly seek peace. The method alone is the issue. Some, with me, would achieve peace through a prompt and decisive victory at a saving of human life. Others, through appeasement,

and compromise of moral principle was less regard for human life. Douglas MacArthur was sacked in April 1951, and though it was the end of his military career, it seemed as if the stars had now aligned for MacArthur's political career. The one course follows our great American tradition, the other can but lead

to unending slaughter and our country's moral debasement. Everyone, from Richard Nixon to Walter Ruther, not to mention your average crew-cut Republican at home, railed against Truman's firing of America's most beloved and most victorious general. Truman's decision prompted one of the most savage attacks of public opinion ever directed against the president.

After MacArthur delivered a quote-unquote retirement address to much applause and standing ovations, The political establishment was a buzz. Former President Herbert Hoover, who had rung MacArthur up before Truman had gotten to him on the day of MacArthur's firing, who Hoover called the general, quote, a reincarnation of St. Paul into a great general of the army who came out of the east.

Congressman Dewey Short, a hero of Richard Nixon's and an enemy of FDR, proclaimed that, quote, we heard God speak here today. God in the flesh, the voice of God. The subsequent parades in Washington, which clocked in at half a million people strong, and in New York City, meant that in total there were several million people on hand to watch old Mac check into the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, with his wife and son, Arthur. As William Manchester puts it, MacArthur then sat back and began to receive guests, like a medieval lord receives vassals.

However, as the American Caesar was building his political base, A congressional committee was quickly formed to investigate MacArthur's dismissal. These hearings were incredibly long in duration. One-time magazine article quoted a member of Congress amazed at MacArthur's lack of bathroom breaks. Quote, I don't believe MacArthur is 71 years old. He must have the bladder of a college boy. The hearings were punctuated, of course, by MacArthur's bombastic Christian anti-communism. There could be no compromise with atheistic communism, he said.

No halfway in the preservation of freedom and religion. It must be all or nothing. Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas played a key role in formulating the congressional Democrats' inquiry into the scandal. Though the public was with MacArthur, Democratic power brokers had little reason to embarrass their president, Harry Truman.

And like Truman's own advisors as well as the Joint Chiefs, they knew MacArthur had gone rogue. The plan, according to Michael Schaller, was to, quote, permit MacArthur to speak at great length without interruption. In effect, the Democrats planned to give him enough rope to hang himself. After the hearings, MacArthur embarked on a nationwide speaking tour that would go until the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. This was financed by the Texas oilman H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison.

On the trail, MacArthur's stump speech was all right-wing invective. horrible Harry Truman, the red menace, and high taxation. This was MacArthur's new itty fix he couldn't get over. Harry Truman, meanwhile, was having a bad time. As the stalemate on the battlefront in Korea settled in during 1951, Truman's approval rating hovered at or below 30%, where it remained for the duration of his presidency. Compounding his problems was the economic situation in the U.S.

At the beginning of 1951, after a spike in inflation following the Chinese entry into the war, Truman stepped up the price and wage controls that he had already implemented. Capital and labor, most critically in the steel industry, were going at each other harder than at any time, arguably, since the strikes of World War won. The years 1950 and 1951 saw more strikes than all but three years since then. Through the various stabilization agencies set up, the wage stabilization, board, most notably, representatives of labor, big business, and government squared off in bureaucratic battle. Labor wanted compensation for every rise in the cost of living, as well as for

increased productivity, writes scholar Maiva Marcus. Businessmen insisted that their profit margins be protected. Congress succumbed to the view that no major sacrifices were needed. Price controls meant to accommodate the war-related price increases were weakened dramatically. by Congress. Truman's Justice Department was also a mess. In fact, because of widening corruption scandals, Truman had no Attorney General from January 1952 to late May 1952. This would prove to be a big problem. Because the steel companies and the government at that time could not agree on an increase in the price of steel, unions were prepared to strike if wages weren't raised to match the increases in costs of living, and the steel companies wouldn't promise to raise wages unless

the government let them sell the steel at a higher price. Truman's advisors told him that any slowdown in steel production would be a disaster for America's armaments program, which in addition to being militarily vital also employed millions of Americans nationwide. Not for the first time, but for one of the last times of his presidency, Truman wanted a third option. In early April, 1952, he decided to seize the steel mills. Truman and his staff realized that seizure of the steel industry by the federal government would not end the labor dispute, Mavamarkis writes. But seizure would offer a new context in which the president could pursue his goals,

continued steel production and reasonable price control, and intensify his efforts to affect a settlement. At 10.30 at night on April 8, 1952, Truman announced in a televised address that he was seizing the steel industry. He was preempting a labor strike and thereby authorizing the Department of Commerce to operate the steel mills. He had declared the steel mills nationally vital, deriving his authority from the Defense Production Act that passed in 1950 after the outbreak of the Korean War. This set off nothing less than a constitutional crisis. Though Truman may have hoped that Americans would rally behind his magnanimous, even-handed gesture to elevate national security above all else, in this, Truman failed.

With no Attorney General representing the administration, the Supreme Court took up the case, ruling on June 2nd that Truman's seizure of steel had been unconstitutional. hours later, the steelworkers went on strike. When they won their strike, a month later in July, they had achieved basically the same wage increases they had offered to management at the outset of the strike. With this, American steelworkers had secured perhaps the biggest victory in American labor since the crushing defeat suffered with the passage

of the Taft-Hartley Act back in the 40s. Harry Truman, Democratic president, shared none of the rewards. Neither did the Democratic Party. There was new political talent on the scene, after all. Now, on the other side of the aisle. Now, let's get back to that earlier story that was released by the U.S. military about atrocities committed against U.S. soldiers. On November 14th, Ridgway had said that over 5,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed, slaughtered, by the North Koreans and the Chinese. The next day that went up to 6,000. But on November 20th, I have Stone writes, Ridgway issued a second statement, and this time he said that it was possible that

6,000 American soldiers might have been killed as prisoners, but that there was proof of only 365 such murders. Two days after this statement, a fourth estimate turned up also by Ridgeway. He cited a report which had been released, but ignored, the day before this first statement about atrocities, which alleged that 8,000 Americans had been killed as prisoners of war. Nine days later, he said this figure included other UN forces as well. This, as the Wire Services reported, actually had the effect of further reducing the number of actual known atrocities suffered by American forces in Korea.

President Truman, vacationing at Key West, said that the account by the U.S. military was the most uncivilized thing which had happened in this century, but was smart enough to add, if true. And Stone combs through every single wrinkle of this entire story, destroying any basis for the figures that the U.S. military was citing. The atrocity story, he writes, faded out of the headlines and the dispatches within two weeks.

Soon afterwards, a long wrangle over prisoners of war began in the truce negotiations. But the question of the treatment of American prisoners was apparently never even raised. This, Stone writes, is sheer statistical slapstick, understandable enough if the purpose was merely to stir up hate and upset peace talks, utterly inexcusable if intended as a serious accounting on the murder of American men by the enemy.

In the memoirs of captured U.S. General William F. Dean, there is an interesting vignette titled My Friend Wilfred Burchett. In early 1952, General Dean, still in captivity in North Korea, met Wilfred Burchett, correspondent for the left-wing French paper Césois. We've mentioned and cited Burchett before in the show. He was a communist and openly supported the North Korean side in this war. And despite his own politics, General Dean would refer to this Australian as his friend. for after Birchett's visit, he was treated with every courtesy.

Once Birchett arrived to interview Dean in captivity, he said, now to get started, I'd like to ask you what you know about the war situation. I said I knew very little about anything that had happened since July 1950. Then I'll bring you up to date, Birchett said. I'll brief you. And to my amazement, he did just that, relating in a few minutes the whole course of the war telling me how far United Nations forces had driven north in 1950, how far south we had withdrawn, and how far north we had pushed the second time. He said that since the last of May 51, the line had been relatively stable along the 38th parallel. The United Nations forces were north

of it on the east coast, and North Korean and Chinese forces, which he always referred to in the first person, that is our side or we, held in approximately equal territory south of the parallel on the West. The briefing was quite accurate, the only bias being the method of telling, not the facts, as I verified for myself later. Burchett said that a Russian spokesman had suggested an armistice, that Kimmel-sung had agreed to discuss it, and that after a great deal of delay, United Nations forces also had agreed, sending representatives to meet with those from North Korea. Then, he went into detail about the various interruptions that ensued, but in each case intimated that the difficulties

were due to the Americans. He also said that the first meeting place was to have been in Kaysong, but that American aircraft had violated the truce area, almost ending the negotiations altogether. Remembering Burchett in his memoirs, Dean writes, quote, I cannot honestly complain about the major points of my personal treatment after that day. So I don't think it's surprising that I like Burchett, and I'm grateful to him. I'm also very sorry that he is where he is, and sees things as he apparently does. In a couple of subsequent meetings,

I came to know a little more about him, but never arrived at any real explanation, either for his choice of the communist side in this war, or for his special kindness to me. As Truman struggled with his own declining political fortunes, America's next president stepped into the limelight, Dwight Eisenhower, Previously a junior officer to Douglas MacArthur, and who privately considered MacArthur, a dangerous opportunist,

had thrown his hat into the ring for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. How could he hope to supersede the big general back home from the east? Well, fellow Americans, I now present with great pride, the keynote of the Republican. National Convention of 1952, General Douglas MacArthur. Let him break loose again. At least the delegates succeeded, most of them, and possibly this time, General Havich.

I think to see that we'd get underway. Keynoting the Republican Convention that July, with the steel strike ongoing, Douglas MacArthur delivered what was supposed to have been his coronation speech. In this unusual assignment, I feel a deep consciousness of the nature and gravity of the crusade upon which we now involve. A crusade to which all sound and patriotic Americans, irrespective of party, may well dedicate their hearts and minds and fullest effort.

Only thus can our beloved country restore its spiritual and temporal strength and regain once again the universal respect. But in fact, the speech was a dud, so bad that it tanked his campaign. Religion and morality have always exerted upon political stability. They know from the lessons of history that national strength and greatness inevitably find their true measure in existing moral and ethical standards.

McArthur, having been humiliated in the primaries during his last political go-round in the 40s, opted to bypass them altogether for his 19. 1952 presidential bid. After a year spent publicly branding himself as a right-wing warrior for Christ, there would be a lot riding on this convention speech, especially now that the only living military man with a career that could hold a candle to his, Ike Eisenhower, was his opponent.

MacArthur's gambit was to go all out against Harry Truman. But it didn't come across as an effective laceration of the president. Instead, it made MacArthur sound quite shrill. Those reckless men who yielding to international intrigue set the stage for Soviet ascendancy as a world power and our own relative decline. Speaking about the Democrats, the general said, quote, that party of noble heritage has become captive to this,

gamers and planners who have infiltrated its ranks of leadership to set the national course unerringly toward the socialistic regimentation of a totalitarian state. The speech goes on like that. In fact, the transcript of the speech took up a whole page of the New York Times. This was, as Lyndon Johnson might have described it, a whole lot of noose with which the general hung himself. He was no longer the hero of World War II or the comeback conqueror of Incheon. MacArthur just sounded like a bitter crank, preaching a vision of apocalypse

in an age that was supposed to promise the post-war American dream. First Republican delegates and then American voters affirmed that year, they liked Ike. General Eisenhower signs that register early on the morning of Election Day. After an illustrious military career and a fighting political campaign,

he stands before the American electorate awaiting their answer. While on the opposite side of the country, his running mate Richard Nixon and his wife take their turn at the polls in California. Eisenhower steamrolled the Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson. Remember him? 442 electoral votes to 89. It's Eisenhower by a landslide. The greatest plurality of any reason.

Republican standard bearer with 30 million votes, well over 400 electoral votes. And now, my friends, it's been a long and sometimes hard road. But it's been great to meet you people, to work with you, all of us, for a common cause. Good night. All Americans hail their president-elect, their next commander-in-chief, Dwight D. Eisenhower. is all set to March, wrote I.F. Stone after the January 1953 inauguration. Just where is not clear. Eisenhower is no fire eater, but seems to be a rather simple man who enjoys his bridge and his golf, and doesn't like to be too much bothered. In the meantime, Congress, impatient as ever, wants something done about Korea. It would like to widen the war, but without enlarging the risk, and at the same

time to reduce the military budget. All it wants is a miracle. In a later column, as Eisenhower pressed diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula, published in June 1953, Stone issued a sober, prescient warning to others on the left. He said that they were acting, quote, as giddy as a punch-drunk fighter who has had too many blows on the head. They are suddenly certain that the U.S. is so weak and unpopular with its own Western allies in Korea, that it must make peace and call off the Cold War. But a powerful wing of the Republican Party is against a settlement in Korea. The American military bureaucracy has been and continues to be opposed to a settlement in Korea. The military, if given its head, is quite capable of stretching out the talks for another year.

There was an ominous ring in the happy announcement from Panmunjum as we went to press. quote, remember this is not the armist disagreement. It deals with the prisoner of war issue only. It is a mistake, Stone wrote, to believe that Eisenhower has to contend only with a few wild men and reactionaries. Napalm again. Napalm again.

with the infantry moving up under the fire curtain. Over the past few episodes, the tide of battle has flowed back and forth, at one point in favor of the North Koreans and Chinese, and at another in favor of the U.S. and the South Koreans. But one constant of the Korean war was America, America's total supremacy over the skies. At bases in Japan and Okinawa, B-29s prepare for an historic mission. For the first time in history, the super forts, each carrying 40, 500-pound bombs,

will attack enemy troops instead of strategic targets behind the front. Although from the American GI's perspective, literally on the ground, the Korean War was about attrition and stalemate, that wasn't the view from the North Korean side, or even the American generals themselves. Attrition, or stalemate, after all, implies a gradual grinding down of the enemy's willpower and resources. But in spite of the stasis

settling in on the battlefront positions in 1951, there was very little that was gradual about the U.S. Air War. It bombed North Korea into submission. Air power, in fact, was the linchpin of this whole operation. Air Force General George Kenney, the man who preceded Curtis LeMay as the head of the strategic air command, he summed it up like this.

The Korean show is not a war. He was referring to situations in Korea, writes a story in Su Kyung Huang, where all sorts of unwarranted strategies were deployed to test their effectiveness in the early phase of the war. It was also the case that the bombing served as the ultimate show of power. General Matthew Ridgway, meanwhile, pushed all the time for bigger and better napalm bombs to, quote, wipe out all life in tactical locality and save the lives of our soldiers. In her book, Huang takes note of a 1951 essay from the think tank that would become famous for its research into Vietnam War era counterinsurgency, the Rand Corporation, the essay's title,

Air Force Psychological Warfare in Korea. The Rand researcher who authored the paper claimed that in Korea, the psychological benefit of the American air power campaign the previous year had come as a surprise. The intervention of American planes and bombs had been the decisive factor in the changing tides of the war, and their psychological effects were, quote,

for the most part, unplanned and unanticipated. That claim isn't totally defensible. As we mentioned last time, the men who were running the show in Korea, like Curtis LeMay, had previously relied on a massive bombardment strategy to, among other things, break Japanese morale in World War II. That's why this strategy was so readily applied in Korea. World War II taught us that a city is, quote, easier to burn down than to blow up. The magic formula was conventional.

Explosives mixed with incendiaries and delayed bombs to stave off firefighters. But the RAND essay, which was republished by the Professional Journal of the Air Force, made some interesting points. It said that of 200 North Korean prisoners who had been questioned, 43% quote, said that desertions occurred in their units during air attacks, and some units lost more men through such desertions than by casualties from air ordinance. What's more, according to unnamed senior officers, quote-unquote, carpet bombing, like that at Weguan, along the Naktong River, was a big morale boost to UN forces. The Rand Corporation reported that, quote, a large proportion of UN soldiers who were questioned

about the effects of air support made such statements as, it helps you get going, or it lets you get started. Here's friend of the show, journalist Tim Shorak. It was just, you know, and MacArthur's own psychological warfare chief, this guy named Bonner Fellers, did a memo that the firebomings of Japan were one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history. 66 cities destroyed, 40% of their urban areas reduced to ashes, 30% of the people made homeless. In Korea, every city was destroyed. all their urban areas 100% was reduced to ashes.

There was no targets left. Koreans never forgot that. And the other thing about the U.S. bombing of North Korea is that the U.S. bombed South Korea too. It's just incredible to read stories in the early in the 1990s. There was a Truth in Reconciliation Commission created to look into war crimes

during the Korean War. And, you know, what they found was, like, even when the U.S. was, when MacArthur invaded Inshan, they just came in to the nearby islands and just sprayed napalm everywhere and killed hundreds of people, civilians. That's how the U.S. liberated Korea was with napal. In further foreshadowing, of the Vietnam War, the Korean War also saw the deployment of what the Air Force called its wonder weapon. Napalm. Described in the press as jelly bombs, Napalm, Bruce Cummings notes,

though infamous in the Vietnam War, washed over Korea quietly for several years, with much more devastating effect, since the DPRK had many more populous cities and urban industrial installations then did Vietnam. And Navy air comes strafing. And marine air with rockets and napalm to burn him out. On a whim, whole Korean villages were given so-called saturation treatment with napalm to dislodge even just a few soldiers. One frontline New York Times correspondent wrote,

A napalm triad hit the village three or four days ago when the Chinese were holding up the advance, and nowhere in the village have they buried the dead because there is nobody left to do so. The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they had held when the napalm struck. A man about to get on his bicycle,

50 boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife, strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears catalog. Another U.S. history says this. We killed civilians, women and children, and ten times as many hidden communist soldiers under showers of napalm. Pilots came back to their ships, stinking of vomit. That was just the reaction they had to dropping the napalm. Some U.S. troops learned that getting the napalm dropped on you was quite well.

worse. Bruce Cummings relates, one day, private first class James Ransom Jr's unit suffered a quote-unquote friendly hit of this wonder weapon. His men rolled in the snow in agony and begged him to shoot them. Their skin burned to a crisp and peeled back, quote, like fried potato chips. The British journalist Renee Cutforth, who reported from Korea, called the unique fiery destruction of Napalm in a 1969 newspaper column. Partly to test my position as their correspondent, I sent the BBC two extremely stark and unpleasant pieces about Napalm. Neither was used.

Almost nobody, it appeared, had heard of Napalm, even after all those months of war and those hundreds of correspondence. Only the Archbishop of York had the nerve to ask in a letter to the Manchester Guardian why we had been kept in ignorance. There was no reply and little reaction. Recently, the poet Adrian Mitchell asked my permission to quote from a piece I had written about a man struck by Napalm during the Korean War. He used it as a continuous line across the tops of all the pages in a book of poems.

It reads, In front of us, a curious figure was standing, a little crouched, leg straddled, arms held out from his sides. He had no eyes, and his whole body, nearly all of which was standing. visible through tatters of burnt rags, was covered with a hard black crust, speckled with yellow pus. A Korean woman by his side began to speak, and the interpreter said, He has to stand, sir. He cannot sit or lie down. He had to stand because he was no longer covered with a skin, but with a crust-like crackling, which broke easily. This, cut-forth wrote, was the part of the Korean War, which stays with me.

The United States Air Force reported these kinds of things differently. Quote, F80s from the 8th reported excellent results in attacks on villages near Turwan. The villages were hit with bombs, as well as rockets, and napalm. After one flight of F-51 Mustangs dumped Napalm near the town of Hong Chun, hunting down a mere 50 enemy troops, an American captain is logged saying, quote, you can kiss that group of villages goodbye. Another hill and another village, and the Marines move on up. American air power had ruled the day since the very beginning of the police action in Korea

in the summer of 1950. After MacArthur's dismissal and the repeated sabotage of peace talks, the role of the Air Force became more critical in the American strategy. UN forces were not going to initiate World War III on the ground. Instead, a lack of fireproof buildings, to quote an Air Force history, and the tremendous fear and physical devastation caused by American air weaponry, this would be the new focal point of battle. Although MacArthur was no longer leading the war effort. The American destruction that rained down on Korea for the rest of the war, particularly the North, bore all the hallmarks of MacArthur's fire and brimstone ethos. We carpet bombed the North for three years with next to no concern for civilian

casualties, writes Bruce Cummings. By the end of the war, most North Korean cities had been left as ashes. That is not an exaggeration. Here's Cummings. By 1952, about everything in northern and Central Korea was completely leveled. What was left of the population survived in caves, the North Koreans creating an entire life underground, in complexes of dwellings, schools, hospitals, and factories. The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea, not counting 32,557, tons of napalm compared to 500,000 tons, 100,000 tons fewer, in the entire Pacific theater in World War II. Whereas 60 Japanese cities were destroyed to an average of 43 percent in World War II, estimates of the destruction of towns and cities in North Korea ranged from 40 to 90

And at least 50% of 18 out of the north's 22 major cities were obliterated. The capital, Pyongyang, was reduced to rubble, 75% destroyed. Bombing communiques describe again and again total destruction, eventually leaving U.S. Air Force staffers saying, quote, it's hard to find good targets, for we have burned out almost everything. Curtis LeMay later remarked that, at the start of the war, quote, I slipped a message to the Pentagon, that the U.S. Army should simply be let loose on Korea, bombing North Korean towns with abandon.

And the answer came back that there'd be too many civilian casualties, LeMay said. And this was post-World War II, America, the Liberator of the World, etc. We couldn't do anything like that. So, LeMay continued, we went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway. Over a period of three years or so, we killed off what?

LeMay asked. 20% of the population? This seemed to be acceptable to everybody. Bruce Cummings, who you now know, is one of the foremost scholars of the Korean War, asks the question, should this be categorized as a genocide? Actually, Cummings asks it and then answers it.

Quote, the UN Genocide Convention was approved in 1948 and entered into force in 1951, just as the U.S. Air Force was inflicting genocide and under the aegis of the United Nations command on the citizens

of North Korea. I mean, does it rise to the level or fit the description of something like genocide, do you think? I think it is genocidal in that It targeted a civilian population for, you know, just time and time again. And it started at the top. I mean, Robert Lovett, who was Defense Secretary under Eisenhower,

at a, you know, a top-level meeting, he says, well, you know, we're making it very hard for the North Koreans. We're tearing up their society. But we should just go right ahead and do it. It's, yeah, it's vicious. itself came to a close. General William Dean was finally released from captivity. Dean was shocked to see the destruction in North Korea that he had in his captivity celebrated within his own mind. Quote, the town of Huichon amazed me, he writes. The city I'd seen before, two-storied buildings,

a prominent main street, wasn't there anymore. Mrs. Mildred Dean greets her husband, General William Dean, home after three years a red prisoner. His mother shares in the emotional reunion at Travis Air Force Base, California, and so does his grandson. The hero of Korea embraces his wife, but protests he isn't a hero. I'm just a dog-faced soldier. In a prescient passage of writing, British correspondent Reginald Thompson said this. Death comes now in ever more hideous guises, death to the unseen, the unknown multitudes, the remote communities, unaware as they go about their business, of living and loving, growing things, and making things, that someone may have surrounded them on a map and may press a button.

Soldiers have become the street cleaners of the new war. The Freedom Village at Panmunjom opens its gates in welcome to United Nations troops returning from prison camps behind red lines. After a final and unglamorous set of negotiations, armistice came to Korea in the summer of 1953. Not an end to the war, as anyone in that part of the world will tell you, but to the immediate military engagement. In early June, the communists gave in to the U.S. demand

that prisoners of war who, quote unquote, refused repatriation be placed under supervision for several months. in an effort to make them choose freedom in the West. For more on how Koreans themselves understood the armistice at the time, here's historian Monica Kim, whose work we've cited frequently these past several episodes. In 1953, Koreans themselves on the ground are still trying to imagine a unified Korean peninsula, and they're trying to imagine a world beyond that war and a world beyond

Japanese colonialism and a world beyond foreign military occupation. And so I think in a way, the kind of violence of the 1953 armistice is that it really puts into place a constant continuous, basically deferral. of addressing the issue of reunification, of addressing the ending of the Korean War, and therefore addressing what did Koreans on the ground want in terms of liberation and decolonization. So the POW's story as put forth by the U.S. military, you know, exactly what you're saying, this really simplified binary. Koreans just have to choose between North or South, as if North and South, were these kinds of set in stone, you know, one is communist evil and one is American-sponsored good.

The Sino-Korean troops had attempted one last stab at Goliath, but came up short. The coup de grace was a U.N. attack that destroyed yet another massive dam in North Korea, which Cummings notes provided water for 75% of the North's food production. And so, the armistice was. signed, July 27, 1953. My fellow citizens, tonight we greet with prayers of Thanksgiving, the official news that are enormous to have signed almost an hour ago in Korea. It will quickly bring, at an end, the fighting between the United Nations forces and the

communist armies. There is, in this moment of sober satisfaction, one thought that must be the discipline our emotions and steady our resolution. It is this. We have won an armistice on the single battleground, not peace in the world. We may not now relax our guard nor cease our quest. Throughout the coming months, during the period

of prisoner screening and exchange, and during the possibly longer period of the political conference which looks toward unification of Korea, we and our united nation allies must be vigilant against the possibility of untoward developments. From the summer of 1950, when Truman began his police action in Korea, through the signing of the armistice in the summer of 1953, an estimated 2 million to 4 million people were dead and missing as a result of the conflict. Most of the casualty being in the north.

But shortly after, over 6,000 miles away, an Iowa court ruled that, since there had been no congressional declaration of war, there had been no state of war against Korea at all. On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. After being betrayed to the government by Ethel's brother, the two had maintained their innocence of the charges of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union since their conviction in March, 1951.

In his statement sentencing the Rosenbergs to death, the judge wrote that in his opinion they were also responsible for dead Americans in Korea, since casualties of that, quote, communist aggression were exceeding 50,000, and who knows but that millions more innocent people may pay the price of your treason. In Havana, Cuba, as in many other cities around the world, there is a memorial to the Rosenbergs. In English, this reads, For peace, bread, and roses, we will face the executioner.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, murdered June 19, 1953. Well, what's it all about? You tell us. Ask any of these guys what they're fighting for, and they can't put it into words. Maybe it's just pure cussedness and pride in the Marine Corps. A job to do, and beauty. And wounds don't count.

And dead men tell no tales. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. But for little babe Ruth DiMaggio, it's his whole future and all of his life ahead. And that goes double for our own son's lives and yours. For this is everybody's fight, that the doctrine of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness shall not perish from this earth. Remember us.

And remember us. And good luck.