WHY WE IGNORE THE KOREAN WAR
...and it's not over yet.
Three weeks ago the nation observed the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of northern France that led to the end of World War Two in Europe. Reporters from every news medium reported on it with pride.
This past Wednesday marked the 75th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. You’d have needed a microscope to find coverage of it in American media. Maybe an electron microscope.
In late June of 1950, North Korean Communists charged across the border into South Korea in hopes of pushing its soldiers and American army forces into the Pacific. It nearly worked. Within a few days, everyone defending the South was bunched up around Pusan, a city in the southeast corner of the Korean Peninsula. Calling it a “toehold” was almost an exaggeration.
At the time, General Douglas MacArthur was running Japan, having been given that assignment at the end of the previous war. It was his job to solve this new problem, which he did by landing troops at the city of Inchon on Korea’s west coast. Because of the vicious tides in the area, it was about as easy as stepping off a moving elevator to the ninth floor without mussing your hair. Communist forces were surprised, MacArthur’s troops cut across the peninsula, slashed the supply lines of the enemy, and pushed north toward the Yalu River, which separates Korea from Communist China.
All hell broke loose. Tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers crossed the Yalu headed south. The United Nations forces (us and a few Brits) fought them to a standstill and started pushing them back.
And then, in April of 1951, just as we were winning, Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur. It either saved us from nuclear war or condemned us to today’s uneasy relationship with China.
It was the time of The Big Red Scare, when Senator Joseph McCarthy was seeing Communists everywhere, especially in our State Department. The chic Eastern liberals dismissed him as an uncultured hick trying to make a name for himself, and perhaps he was. But even paranoids have enemies, as they say. Perhaps there were people on the Communist side in our government. After all, our super-secret Manhattan Project had been easily penetrated by a spy, physicist Klaus Fuchs. The Soviet Union had exploded its own A-bomb in 1949 and in 1951 was ahead of us in developing the H-bomb. State Department higher-up Alger Hiss had been spying for the Soviets for years, yet he served as FDR’s chief off staff during the Yalta Conference in early 1945 when Roosevelt gave half of Europe to Stalin for 50 years, and was named as the first Secretary-General of the United Nations by Truman. At the same time MacArthur was fired, actor Sterling Hayden* was telling a Congressional committee about having been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. So there were Commies out there, even if there wasn’t one under every bed.
MacArthur was exactly right. No peace treaty has ever been signed. The war came to a halt but has never ended.
In those days the Chicago Tribune was one of the few conservative newspapers still around. It came down strongly on MacArthur’s side, citing “the fundamentals in his writings and speeches.”
1. First was MacArthur’s claim that the Korean conflict “Is aimless and without any political, economic or geographic objective. Nevertheless, Washington insists that it be continued indefinitely.”
2. Second was that our troops, being slaughtered by Communists, “have been hampered by orders to refrain from bombing Manchurian supply depots, airfields whence enemy fighters fly to attack American planes, and ports where enemy material is accumulated.”
3. Third, the State Department and Harry Truman opposed bringing Nationalist Chinese forces (in Taiwan then and now) into the war to attack the Red Chinese, who had been in control of the mainland for less than two years. MacArthur, knowing he was fighting Chinese soldiers, felt the solution to the problem was to wipe out Communist forces there. Putting limits on his troops, MacArthur felt, would result in “no victory but a stalemate.”
MacArthur was replaced by General Matthew Ridgeway, who did as he was told. He fought defensive battles for a year and finally in 1953, new president Dwight Eisenhower arranged an armistice to stop the fighting.
And guess what? The result was “no victory but a stalemate,” and the war has indeed “continued indefinitely.” MacArthur was exactly right. No peace treaty has ever been signed. The war came to a halt but has never ended.
So was it Communist influence in our government or just bureaucratic fears of the conflict getting out of hand? It could have been either or both. Senator Joe McCarthy, the oft-maligned Red baiter, said MacArthur’s firing was “perhaps the greatest victory the Communists have ever won.”
Minnesota Congressman Walter Judd said MacArthur’s strategy “was the only one I saw that gave us the best hope of winning the struggle in Asia and thereby preventing World War Three.”
Truman’s excuse for the firing was just silly, He cited an executive order from the previous December that stated “No speech, press release or other public statement should be released until it has received clearance from the Department of Defense.” The idea was that MacArthur had been communicating with Republican members of Congress over the issue of widening the war, which Truman opposed. So? In our time, General Mark Milley messaged Chinese forces that he would warn them if then-President Donald Trump tried to start a war, something much closer to treason than anything MacArthur did.
Harry Truman could have been planning to run for president again in 1952. Yes, the Twenty-second Amendment had been passed to limit presidents to two terms, but Truman had only been elected president once, in 1948, having filled almost an entire term after Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945. MacArthur’s unpopular firing made it clear Truman couldn’t be elected again; although MacArthur didn’t generate enough interest to be nominated himself, the public chose another former general, Dwight Eisenhower, in 1952.
World War Two was the good war; we fought two enemies and won it fair and square. It’s been the subject of hundreds of movies from black-and-white” B” movies during the war itself up through Saving Private Ryan. The Korean War, which killed 60,000 American boys, was fought in one small area. We couldn’t win it. Instead we came away with a tie and we’re still technically at war 75 years later.
No wonder nobody wants to commemorate it.
*Hayden is best remembered by modern audiences as the crooked police captain shot by Michael Corleone in the movie “The Godfather.”