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Enjoy this excerpt from
THE KOREAN WAR
by Bruce Cummings
 
 
A
mericans now in retirement will remember, perhaps, that wenever won the Korean War. We helped the South defend itself in a successful war to contain communism in the summer of 1950,and then we lost our attempt to invade and overthrow communismin the North in the terrible winter of 1950–51. As the war draggedon it became as unpopular as Vietnam was by 1968, and madeHarry Truman as disliked as any American president in history,with a 23 percent approval rating in December 1951 (until GeorgeW. Bush beat him).
1
What hardly any Americans know or remem-ber, however, is that we carpet-bombed the North for three yearswith next to no concern for civilian casualties. Even fewer will feelany connection to this. Yet when foreigners visit North Korea, thisis the first thing they hear about the war. The air assaults rangedfrom the widespread and continual use of firebombing (mainly withnapalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, finally tothe destruction of huge North Korean dams in the last stages of thewar. It was an application and elaboration of the air campaignsagainst Japan and Germany, except that North Korea was a smallThird World country that lost control of the air to the UnitedStates within days of the war’s start.After much experimentation and scientific study by Germany,Britain, and the United States, by 1943 it became clear that “a citywas easier to burn down than to blow up.” Combinations of incen-diaries and conventional explosives, followed up by delayed- detonation bombs to keep firefighters at bay, could destroy largesections of a city, whereas conventional bombs had a much morelimited impact. Magnesium-alloy thermite sticks, manufactured by
 
the million and bundled together, did the trick; when supple-mented by mixtures of benzol, rubber, resins, gels, and phosphorus,they formed unprecedentedly destructive blockbuster flamingbombs that could wipe out cities in a matter of minutes (seventeenin the case of the attack on Wurzburg, March 16, 1945). The cre-ation of urban “annihilation zones” destroyed masses of civilianlives, an outcome accepted by all sides in the war—and “by thepeople, parliaments, and armed forces.” And with that, in JörgFriedrich’s words, “modernity gave itself up to a new, incalculable,and uncontrollable fate.”Pretensions of precision targeting were put out for public con-sumption, while secret estimates showed that fewer than half thelarge bombs hit their targets. But in favorable atmospheric condi-tions these bombs ignited firestorms that razed Darmstadt, Heil-bronn, Pforzheim, Wurzburg, and, of course, Hamburg (40,000deaths), Dresden (12,000), and Tokyo (88,000). Or in WinstonChurchill’s words, “We will make Germany a desert, yes, a desert”through the power of incendiary bombing—only “an absolutelydevastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers” would fi-nally bring Hitler to his knees. The goal was to destroy the moraleof the enemy and the people, a horizon that receded even as the at-tacks intensified.
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The postwar
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey 
demon-strated that enemy morale was mostly unaffected by the bombing,but also that the actual level of civilian deaths was less than pre-dicted—that is, “far removed from the generally anticipated totalof several millions.” Morale was not broken, and even the harvest of blackened, scorched, blasted, or asphyxiated human beings was an-ticlimactic (not even several millions). Furthermore, both countrieswere democracies, so some rose up to criticize mass attacks againstcivilians (Bishop George Bell told the House of Lords that “toobliterate a whole town” because it may have some industrial tar-gets violated “a fair balance between the means employed and thepurpose achieved”
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).
150· The Korean War 
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KCinLA

And some sixty years from now we might (some might) read about the real accounts that have gone on in Iraq and other middle-eastern 'conflicts'.

reply07 / 24 / 2010
KCinLA

On page 7 of this PDF: "... its largest conventional bomb at 12,000 pounds, which had been deployed in December 1950 to try to decapitate DPRK leaders in deep bunkers." I think the use of the word 'decapitate' is not quite accurate; destroy or kill is more valid since bombs don't necessarily remove the head of those that are killed by them.

reply07 / 24 / 2010
Steve Mattison

A tribute to oft forgotten VETS!

reply07 / 23 / 2010
An béar mór

I have read, and recommend, "The Coldest War," by James Brady.

reply07 / 23 / 2010
Tammy Nam

It's Korea day in my feeds. I took a class from Bruce Cummings at Northwestern; he's one of the world's (non-Korean) experts on Korean history.

reply07 / 22 / 2010
Scribd

(A war that many Americans know too little about.) "As the war dragged on it became as unpopular as Vietnam was by 1968, and made Harry Truman as disliked as any American president in history, with a 23 percent approval rating in December 1951 (until George W. Bush beat him)."

reply07 / 22 / 2010
MotanulIonel

so many wars that we know so little :(

07 / 24 / 2010
Rex Cox

So little time, so many wars..."In The Year 2525"

07 / 22 / 2010
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