War: KOREA: THREE YEARS OF WAR

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On June 29, 1950, the President of the U.S. told the American people that a "bunch of bandits" had crossed the 38th parallel in Korea. "Under the circumstances," said Harry Truman, "I have ordered U.S. air and sea forces to give the Korean government troops cover and support."

Korea is a war in which the U.S. 1) within six months, decisively defeated the original aggressor, North Korea; 2) has fought inconclusively for 2½ years with a second, Red China. It is an international war, piled onto a civil war, undertaken in behalf of the "free world." It is the first U.N. war, the first jet-air war.

It is also a war of superlatives that brought more men (5,000,000) from more countries (16) to a smaller piece of real estate (85,000 sq. mi.) than any other war in history. It has kept the U.S. fighting longer than World War I; it has already cost the U.S. $22 billion.

The human cost is higher. On democracy's side:

¶ Killed in combat: 71,500. ROKs: 45,000; Americans: 24,000; British 600; others 1,900.

¶ Wounded: 250,000.

¶Missing & captured: 83,263.

Communist losses were far greater, though U.N. estimates are unreliable: 1,347,000 killed or wounded.

The war to save Korea has also killed 400,000 Korean civilians, left 500,000 homes wrecked beyond repair. One fourth of all Koreans are homeless, and 100,000 are orphans; all are underfed. In North Korea, 40% of all habitations are destroyed, and of military targets—factories, power plants, etc.—U.N. airmen agree that there is not much left to destroy. Its army is smashed, its civilian population has diminished from 8,000,000 to 4,000,000.

South Korea, likewise, is a war-wrecked shell: 75% of its mines and textile factories are out of action, ⅔ of its schools unusable. But out of disaster has grown a tough army of 16 divisions, and a sense of nationhood.

In the air over North Korea, U.S. pilots learned to fight at 40,000 ft. and 600 m.p.h. and won their war (see BUSINESS). On the ground, the U.S. Army fought a war that resembled the Somme.

World War II had brought to near perfection two major techniques of modern war: the fast-moving, armored blitzkrieg, and strategic air bombardment, culminating in the Abomb. Korea saw both techniques disabled by physiography (mud and jagged hills) and politics (no bombs beyond the Yalu, a decision made in the U.S. in the summer of 1951). The result: a return to sitzkrieg, a mode of warfare that forced the mobile U.S. to fight on the enemy's terms. Thus it was that the most powerful nation in the world failed for the first time to win a war that it engaged in.

The U.S. & Korea. Britain, in the nineteenth century, fought scores of "police actions." Its people got used to having their young men dying in some corner of a foreign field while the nation, half forgetting, remained forever England.

Korea made the same demand on the U.S., but Americans, new to the controlled exercise of great power, resisted the role. They could not forget Korea (the newspapers saw to that), and it spoiled some of their pleasure in TV sets and Cadillacs that a handful of young men knew death each day in a strange land far from home.