The crisis on the Korean peninsula with a nuclear North and its Dear Leader is a direct result of an unfinished war and half-measures. Here’s why.
The Korean War ended in an armistice without clear military resolution. Technically, the North Koreans and the US/UN/South Korean forces have been in a state of war since July 1953. Apart from deterring direct North Korean and Chinese aggression, the war solved nothing and was a severe blow to US prestige. The final armistice line at the 38th parallel fell within a few miles of the original demarcation between North and South prior to the war. The armistice merely delayed a Korean political or military settlement.
When the Russians entered World War II against the Japanese in August 1945, they occupied the North with the understanding that Korea would be reunified after the war. Instead of reunification, however, the Russians installed Kim Il-Sung as their man in the North. By any normal standard, Kim was a psychopath and he instilled his own pathology in the North Korean army, which he unleashed on the south in June 1950.
Until World War II, the US way of war was to massively mobilize and then just as massively demobilize when hostilities were concluded. When Kim invaded the South, the US military – particularly in the far east – was a shell of itself. The army units in Japan in 1950 were garrison troops with formations undermanned and poorly equipped.
The troops themselves were physically and psychologically unprepared for difficult combat against a fanatical enemy. When they were rushed to the peninsula to stem the North Korean advance south of Seoul, they expected that their mere presence would overawe the North Korean troops. Reading the story of Task Force Smith – which fought the meeting engagement with Kim’s forces just north of Osan - is a guaranteed heartache.
When the North Koreans pushed US forces into a pocket around the southern port of Pusan, Douglas MacArthur countered brilliantly with the amphibious landings at Inchon near Seoul. With the North Koreans in full retreat, US forces, reinforced now by better equipped units from the US mainland, pushed north to the Manchurian border in November.
The rest of the story is one of hubris and tragedy. The Chinese intervened massively, defeating the UN forces and throwing them back down the penninsula to a position south of Seoul. Matthew Ridgeway rebuilt US forces and in a series of drives, pushed the Chinese back north of Seoul to the 38th parallel. For the next two years, the lines remained static as the two sides fought sanguinary battles at places like Heartbreak Ridge and Pork Chop Hill.
After the war, Kim ruled until his death in 1994, when he was succeed by his son, the equally demented Kim Jong-Il. While the North has languished in isolation, starvation and fanaticism, the South slowly rebuilt and eventually reconstituted itself as a modern industrial democracy.
The point of the lecture, however, is that the crazy fanaticism we see in the North today is the same behavior that our fathers and grandfathers faced in the early 1950s. Which underscores the danger of our present situation.
Another point is this: what was unresolved in 1953 still remains to be resolved in our own day. We can’t know the final shape of a resolution, but it must and will happen. Violently or peacefully, we cannot know.
But the present signs are not encouraging. And half-measures probably won’t do this time.
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