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).
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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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THE KOREAN WAR by Bruce Cummings (book excerpt)
Enjoy this excerpt from THE KOREAN WAR by Bruce Cummings, on sale JUly 27, 2010.
A bracing account of a war that lingers in our collective memory as both ambiguous and unjustly ignored
For Americans, it… (More)
A bracing account of a war that lingers in our collective memory as both ambiguous and unjustly ignored
For Americans, it… (More)
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