Circa1865

Though MacArthur recognized that American use of chemical weapons against Chinese and North Korean forces would open the door to retaliation, it was “requested [that] sufficient quantities to be shipped immediately in the event use of gas is approved [by Washington].” The destruction of huge irrigation dams in northern Korea was considered “barbaric” as it not only destroyed rice to starve the population, but also drowned countless thousands of old men, women and children.  The Truman administration censored reporters to keep civilian deaths and atrocities from the American public, as did Lincoln in his day.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Sherman’s Legacy in Korea

“The United States came closest to using atomic weapons in early April 1951, precisely the time that Truman removed McArthur. It is now clear that Truman removed MacArthur not simply because of his repeated insubordination, but because he wanted a reliable commander on the scene if Washington decided to use nuclear weapons: that is, Truman traded McArthur for his atomic policies.

Perhaps the most daunting and terrible project, however, was Operation Hudson Harbor. It appears to have been part of a larger project involving “overt exploitation in Korea by the Department of Defense and covert exploitation by the Central Intelligence Agency of the possible use of novel weapons.”

The project sought to establish the capability of the use of atomic weapons on the battlefield, and in pursuit of this goal lone B-29 bombers were lifted from Okinawa in September and October 1951 and sent over North Korea on simulated atomic bombing runs . . .

The record also shows that massive use of chemical weapons against Sino-North Korean forces was considered. In penciled diary notes written on December 16, [General Matthew] Ridgeway referred cryptically to a subcommittee on “clandestine introduction [of] wea[pon]s of mass destruction and unconventional warfare.

[The] air war nonetheless leveled North Korea and killed millions before the war ended. From early November 1950 on, MacArthur ordered that a wasteland be created between the front and the Chinese border, destroying from the air every “installation, factory, city, and village” over thousands of square miles of North Korean territory.

On November 8, seventy B-29’s dropped 550 tons of incendiary bombs on Sinuiju, “removing [it] from . . . the map”; a week later Hoeryong was hit with napalm “to burn out the place” . . . this was all before the major Sino-North Korean offensive.

A bit later George Barrett of the New York Times found a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war” in a village north of Anyang:

“The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck – a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage . . .”

[Secretary of State Dean] Acheson wanted censorship authorities notified about this kind of “sensationalized reporting,” so it could be stopped.

By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea was completely leveled. What was left of the population survived in caves, the North Koreans created an entire life underground, in complexes of dwellings, schools, hospitals and factories . . . [and such attacks only stiffened enemy resistance].

The Americans did go right ahead and in the final act of this barbaric war hit huge irrigation dams that provided water for 75 percent of the North’s food production. “The subsequent flash flood scooped clean 27 miles of the valley below , and he plunging flood waters wiped out [supply routes, etc.] . . . The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of [rice] has for the Asian – starvation and slow death.”

(Korea’s Place in the Sun, a Modern History, Bruce Cumings, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997, excerpts, pp. 291-295)