ForgottenWar
Inchon. The 38th Parallel. Pusan. The Chosin Few. Syngman Rhee. The Yalu River. Few today know the significance of these names and phrases.
They are the obscure signposts in a forgotten conflict: the Korean War.
This weekend marks the 60th anniversary of the July 27, 1953, armistice that ended the war but settled nothing.
Today, the Korean peninsula is still divided between North and South. The grandson of North Korea's founder Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong Un, continues to threaten South and the United States with missile tests and bellicose posturing.
And academics are still debating the Korean War.
Bill Weisberger, Butler County Community College professor of humanities and social sciences, said that at the end of World War II the Korean peninsula, which had been ruled by Japan since 1910, was divided at the 38th Parallel. U.S. military forces occupied the southern half, and Soviet military forces, which had joined the fight against Japan late in the war after the defeat of Germany, occupied the northern half.
“Korea was divided as a temporary solution,” said Alan Levy, a history professor at Slippery Rock University. “There was no stipulation on how this was to be resolved. Kim Il-sung was the Soviet Union's man in North Korea, and he became the head of North Korea.”
“Joseph Stalin was still alive,” said Weisberger. “It was nationalism, Stalinism and communist ideologies versus the U.S./United Nations involvement.”
“This nationalism had a lot to do with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and Korea,” Weisberger said.
“In June 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea,” said Levy. “Without access to North Korean government archives, we don't know exactly what Stalin or Mao (Zedong, Communist Chinese leader) told Kim Il-sung. We are never going to know for sure what happened.”
Weisberger said perhaps the North Koreans viewed the south under its leader Syngman Rhee as weak and divided because of its 40 political parties' bickering.
The North Korean forces took the world and South Korea by surprise, Levy said. By that September, the North Koreans had uncontested control of all the south except for the southeastern province of Pusan, said Levy.
The United Nations, with U.S. support, condemned the invasion, said Weisberger, and the United States, Belgium, Britain and other U.N. members sent troops to the peninsula.On Sept. 15, 1950, U.N. troops, chiefly U.S. Marines, under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, made a surprise amphibious assault at Inchon, far from Pusan, said Weisberger.MacArthur went against the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the victory at Inchon led to U.N. and South Korean forces driving the North Koreans into retreat almost to the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China.“By October 1950, as they went northward into North Korea, it looked like victory was coming,” said Levy. “The Chinese had made it be known they did not want U.N. troops so close to their border or they would intervene themselves.”“The Chinese attacked the U.N. advance with 300,000 troops, a major counter advance,” on Oct. 25, said Levy. “And that's how the phrase 'bug out' came into being. The U.N. forces retreated south.”The Chinese 9th Army surprised and surrounded the US X Corps at the Chosin Reservoir.After a brutal 17-day battle in freezing weather, the U.N. forces broke out of the encirclement while inflicting crippling losses on the Chinese, but their evacuation marked the complete withdrawal of U.N. troops from North Korea.After MacArthur, who was pressing to widen the war by invading the Chinese mainland and using nuclear weapons on the Chinese troops, was relieved of his command on April 11, 1951 by President Harry Truman, Levy said the war settled into a two-year stalemate of attacks and counterattacks around the 38th Parallel.Levy said most of the fighting and dying was done by Koreans despite what Americans may have believed from watching the long-running “M*A*S*H” television show about American military doctors during the conflict.Ken Blair, 84 of Sarver, isn't a big fan of the show because he lived the reality of being a medic in Korea.“I was there mostly in 1952,” said Blair. “I had completed basic training, and they sent me to Baltimore for Counter Intelligence Corps training.”“But I flunked out. I couldn't interrogate. I didn't make a good spymaster,” Blair said. So he was on his way to Korea as a rifleman in November 1951. However, Blair said, “When I got to Camp Drake in Tokyo, they pulled me out and gave me medical aide training. I became a medic after 90 days.”
“They were having a lot of casualties at the time and they wanted to build up the medics corps,” he said.“I ended up in a little area seven to 10 miles from the demilitarized zone backing up the 194th Combat Engineers and a Korean Service Corps unit,” Blair said.“Things became stalemated, and we sat there in this little village. Artillery would be firing at various times. We weren't moving anymore, it was a stable front,” said Blair. “The combat engineers were building and repairing roads and bridges.”“I was not busy as a medic. One of the of the biggest problems was food poisoning,” Blair said. “We had very little contact with the enemy. Mostly it was accidents, injuries and sick calls. Somebody would lose fingers in a stone grinder or something.”He said his time in Korea was mostly dull except when a famous person turned up.Blair said Dwight Eisenhower himself drove past on his way to visit his son, John, who was assigned to the Third Division, and once one of Blair's friends, George Govier of Broken Bow, Neb., got to have lunch with actor William Holden when Holden was on an inspection tour for the Screen Actors Guild.“We had some Ethiopians attached to us at one point,” said Blair. “Everyone thought they were North Americans, but they didn't speak the language. Handsome looking guys but they didn't speak English.”“We thought the United Nations was effectively working. We were under the U.N. command,” said Blair. “It was hard service, you went there wanting to win a war, and I felt at the time there was a lot of politics behind the scenes between the British, the Russians.”“MacArthur said victory should be the end result. There was no intention to have victory here,” Blair said. “We had these guys on hills, and there would be tremendous bloodshed for no good reason as far as I was concerned, because we weren't trying to win the war. We would fight for a hill and then give the hill up.”
His service in Korea left him unable to appreciate the TV doctors of “M*A*S*H*.”“I couldn't take it,” said Blair. “It was too close to home. I never saw the humor, it wasn't funny. When you were that close to it, it was not funny at all.”Samuel Oesterling, 82, saw a lot more of the war's carnage as a nurse in a naval hospital in Yokokuski, Japan, from 1952 to 1954.“I worked in the operating room, and we had a lot of casualties,” Oesterling recalled. “I handed instruments and assisted surgeons, handing them the necessities.”Oesterling said the patients were soldiers and Marines brought from Korean battlefields.“I think most of them were airlifted,” he said. “We worked seven days a week with a day off here and there for what we called liberty.”The Butler native enlisted in January 1951.“It was the thing to do for a young man at that time. I did. I went to the service with six friends from Butler,” said Oesterling.After boot camp, he said he went to corpsman school in Bainbridge, Md., and then for further training at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital.“I had worked as an orderly at Butler Hospital. That was an interest for me,” he said.Another Butler County man, Richard Scott, 85, of Chicora, was a combat medic with the 32nd Regiment of the 7th Division, but it was he himself who was wounded.
Just before Christmas 1951, Scott said his platoon was ambushed by either the North Koreans or the Chinese.“I was shot in the ankle. We got a little help from another platoon,” said Scott. He was sent to Japan to recuperate and then returned to Korea.Scott remembers the countryside as being desolate.“There just wasn't much there. We didn't get into any big towns,” said Scott, who was in battles such as the fight for Hill 1118.James Barnes, 82, of Fairview Township was in Korea in 1953 and 1954.Assigned to the Army's combat engineers in Pusan, Barnes said, “I was a company clerk. I was on a base where they supplied the troops with their heavy equipment and so forth. We were a 'repo-depot,' we took all our heavy equipment, dozers and cranes and tank retrievers and sent them to the front line.”Barnes said he never saw any enemy action, but he was there when “part of Pusan burned. It caught fire one night and burned half the town because of the way it was built.”When the armistice was signed, Barnes said, “I saw the troops being exchanged, when they brought ours back and sent the North Koreans home.”“It was an experience I know and appreciate, but I wouldn't want to go over it again,” said Barnes.Alan Lowe, 82 of Butler said he was drafted into the Army the same day as some of his friends, Dec. 12, 1952.“When I went in, there were four of us from Butler: Bob Miklosavic, George Kopie, and Jack McKain,” Lowe said.He said he was a military policeman assigned to Company D of the 724th MP Battalion. He arrived in Korea in May 1953.
“I worked patrol and ran patrol. And I was on a platoon that guarded oil and gas lines that ran from Inchon to Seoul,” he said.“The fighting was pretty much done. We were 20 miles behind the lines. You would see a flash on the horizon that was gunfire, cannon fire,” Lowe said.“But we mainly had patrol duty to keep people safe while driving and to look for anyone to go AWOL, although there was nothing there from them to go AWOL for,” said Lowe.Lowe said when he thinks about the Korean War, he doesn't think much of it.“I thought it was a waste of my life, there really wasn't much to it. We did what they told us to do, not much else,” he said.A sentiment echoed by Michael Mizerak of Butler, who fought in Korea as a 20-year-old Marine in 1950 and 1951.“I have mixed emotions. It was a huge waste of life, really,” said Mizerak. “All we were doing over there was making a point, that's all.”“We took a lot of hills, and we lost a lot of hills,” Mizerak said.Levy said despite the fact that 36,000 Americans died and another 92,000 were wounded in three years of intense fighting, “Americans don't appreciate it because it was a war fought to a standstill.”“Korea has been overlooked like the War of 1812,” said Weisberger. “After World War II, we were victorious. It did just not play out in Korea. It was a tie or it was just not a victory.”
Lowe said when he thinks about the Korean War, he doesn't think much of it.“I thought it was a waste of my life, there really wasn't much to it. We did what they told us to do, not much else,” he said.A sentiment echoed by Michael Mizerak of Butler, who fought in Korea as a 20-year-old Marine in 1950 and 1951.“I have mixed emotions. It was a huge waste of life, really,” said Mizerak. “All we were doing over there was making a point, that's all.”“We took a lot of hills, and we lost a lot of hills,” Mizerak said.Levy said despite the fact that 36,000 Americans died and another 92,000 were wounded in three years of intense fighting, “Americans don't appreciate it because it was a war fought to a standstill.”“Korea has been overlooked like the War of 1812,” said Weisberger. “After World War II, we were victorious. It did just not play out in Korea. It was a tie or it was just not a victory.”
The Korean peninsula was divided into two zones, with U.S. forces in the south and Soviet forces in the north after the defeat of the Japanese Empire, which had occupied Korea since 1910. The latitudinal line at the 38th parallel roughly marks the division.In 1948, two countries were formed: the communist Democratic People's Republic of Korea led by Kim Il-sung in the north and the Republic of Korea led by Syngman Rhee in the south. Both Rhee and Il-sung were nationalists obsessed with the idea of ruling a unified Korean nation.Perceiving South Korea as weak and divided, North Korea invaded the south in an attempt to forcibly unify the country on June 25, 1950.1.North Korea advances. Despite the intervention of United Nations troops led by the United States, North Korea occupies all but the southeastern corner of South Korea.2.Counterattack. U.N. forces, mostly U.S. Marines led by U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, land at Inchon on Sept. 15, 1950.3.U.N. advances. By Nov. 24, 1950, U.N. forces occupy most of North Korea.4.China enters war. Alarmed by U.N. forces approaching its border and by the Oct. 15 meeting of President Harry Truman and Gen. MacArthur on Wake Island, which the Chinese feared were preparations for invasion, 300,000 Chinese “volunteers” cross the border on Oct. 25, 1950.5.Maximum Chinese/North Korean advance. Jan. 21, 1951.6.Stalemate. The war continues for two more years until a truce is announced on July 27, 1953.
To make better sense of the circumstances, attitudes, politicians and military leaders associated with the Korean War, Butler County Community College professor of humanities and social sciences Richard Weisberger recommended the following books:“The Presidents Club” Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity” by Nancy Gibson and Michael Duffy. “Eisenhower looms large in this,” said Weisberger.“Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman” by Alonzo Hamby. “There's an excellent chapter on the Korean War in here,” said Weisberger.“Truman” by David McCullough.“Eisenhower and the American Crusades” by Herbert Parmet.“Eisenhower in War and Peace” by Jean Edward Smith.
