AMERICA’S ‘FORGOTTEN WAR’ -- KOREA 1950-1953

The costly lessons of America’s ‘Forgotten War’ are being ignored once again.

Two thirds of a century ago, American lack of understanding of complex Asian realities coupled with a large dose of military hubris embroiled the country in a Korean conflict which nearly escalated into a nuclear-enabled World War III.

Responding to a reckless North Korean attempt to reunify the artificially divided peninsula by force, President Truman, with United Nations backing, authorized Far Eastern Commander, General Douglas MacArthur, to defend the South and drive the attackers back across the 38^th Parallel. MacArthur’s brilliant Inchon landing succeeded in beating back the intruders, liberating Seoul and re-establishing a pro-Western government in the South.

General Douglas MacArthur
Public Domain-author unknown

Encouraged by his victories, however, MacArthur pushed well beyond his orders and pressed the attack northward with the goal of destroying the Northern armies and defeating the Communist-dominated State. The effect of his actions, while aimed at reunifying the peninsula in America’s favor, also directly challenged the newly-established Red Chinese government by threatening military action up to and potentially beyond the Chinese border in Manchuria.

Ignoring Chinese warnings as well as overt directions from more cautious diplomatic and military leaders in Washington, MacArthur’s miscalculation triggered the surprising and overwhelming Communist Chinese response which led to an additional three years of costly and bloody land warfare in Asia leading the death of more than 36,000 U.S. soldiers—ending with the uneasy stalemate which has existed for nearly 65 years at the same 38^th Parallel where the conflict began.

Bodies of U.S., U.K., and ROK soldiers 
before mass burial at Koto-ri,1950 

(Photo by Sgt. F. C. Kerr)

Currently, a newly energized American leader, without foreign policy experience and with a tendency to make provocative and aggressive statements ("if China won’t help, we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A”) and also led by generals is currently convinced that the show of and possible use of overwhelming military force, rather than diplomacy, will succeed in defanging the rhetorically aggressive and now nuclear-armed North. In the process, it runs the risk of pushing the ever more paranoid leadership in Pyongyang toward a point of no return where the slightest miscalculation, a missile test gone astray, a nuclear test, a misreading of intentions, may trigger unintended and disastrous military results.

Once again U.S. leadership is relying on the tenuous belief that China, Russia or others will not intervene—even if the United States acts unilaterally to destroy the North’s capacity to employ weapons of mass destruction-- or that unanticipated events in a newly-destabilized region will not widen the conflict well beyond Korea.

While analysts have been comparing theevolving conflict to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a much more apt comparison should be that of Korea in 1950 and 1951, when an ambitious and arrogant General blundered into a world of trouble neither he nor the American people ever fully expected or understood.

Les Adler, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus of History and Interdisciplinary Studies

Sonoma State University

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