For the record, it was the North
Koreans, and not the Americans or their South Korean allies, who
started the war in June 1950, when they crossed the 38th Parallel and
invaded the south. Nevertheless, “What hardly any Americans know or
remember,” University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings writes in
his book “The Korean War: A History,” “is that we carpet-bombed
the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian
casualties.”
How many Americans, for example,
are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean
peninsula more bombs — 635,000 tons — and napalm — 32,557 tons
— than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese
during World War II?
How many Americans know that “over
a period of three years or so,” to quote Air Force General Curtis
LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, “we
killed off … 20 percent of the population”?
Twenty. Percent. For a point of
comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World
War II population. According to LeMay, “We went over there and
fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”
Every. Town. More than three
million civilians are believed to have been killed in the fighting,
the vast majority of them in the north.
How many Americans are familiar
with the statements of Secretary of State Dean Rusk or Supreme Court
Justice William O. Douglas? Rusk, who was a State Department official
in charge of Far Eastern affairs during the Korean War, would later
admit that the United States bombed “every brick that was standing
on top of another, everything that moved.” American pilots, he
noted, “were just bombing the heck out of North Korea.”
Douglas visited Korea in the
summer of 1952 and was stunned by the “misery, disease, pain and
suffering, starvation” that had been “compounded” by air
strikes. U.S. warplanes, having run out of military targets, had
bombed farms, dams, factories and hospitals. “I had seen the
war-battered cities of Europe,” the Supreme Court justice
confessed, “but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea.”
How many Americans have ever come
across General Douglas MacArthur’s unhinged plan to win the war
against North Korea in just 10 days? MacArthur, who led the United
Nations Command during the conflict, wanted to drop “between 30 and
50 atomic bombs … strung across the neck of Manchuria” that would
have “spread behind us … a belt of radioactive cobalt.”
How many Americans have heard of
the No Gun Ri massacre, in July 1950, in which hundreds of Koreans
were killed by U.S. warplanes and members of the 7th U.S. Cavalry
regiment as they huddled under a bridge? Details of the massacre
emerged in 1999, when the Associated Press interviewed dozens of
retired U.S. military personnel. “The hell with all those people,”
one American veteran recalled his captain as saying. “Let’s get
rid of all of them.”
How many Americans are taught in
school about the Bodo League massacre of tens of thousands of
suspected communists on the orders of the U.S.-backed South Korean
strongman, President Syngman Rhee, in the summer of 1950? Eyewitness
accounts suggest “jeeploads” of U.S. military officers were
present and “supervised the butchery.”
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