INTRO
As a language instructor at an adult language school in Seoul, being assigned new students is pretty commonplace. Last summer, I had a new student in my evening class whom I’ll call Mr. Kim. On the first day, I immediately noticed that Mr. Kim, who appeared to be in his early seventies, was the oldest student I had ever had the opportunity to teach. I was quickly impressed with his diligence and commitment to learning English, which he said he needed to make new contacts for the import/export business he has run himself for the last twenty-five years. There’s another remarkable thing about the man. Prior to starting his own company after retirement, he worked for decades building the first computer system at a major Korean company. But working in proximity to loud machinery without ear protection made him nearly deaf in the process. So, now the 73-year-old is tirelessly working to improve his English despite being heavily hearing-impaired.
As luck would have it, on a recent Friday evening only Mr. Kim decided to show up to class, and the lesson topic was childhood memories. As he had previously mentioned that he was from Incheon, noting his age I put two and two together and innocently asked him if he had any memories of the Korean War. Alas, I was altogether unprepared for his response.
Mr. Kim was a toddler when the Korean War started. Within days, the Communists overran the city and turned his nascent world upside down. Fearing reprisals, his family first evacuated to one of the offshore islands near present-day Incheon Airport, where they hoped to find shelter. A few days later, his parents secured a very risky passage by ship to the Pusan Perimeter and, in what must have been an unimaginably heart-wrenching decision, elected to leave their three children— Mr. Kim and his two slightly older sisters— behind. Nothing in my cozy, modern life gives me a window to the hardship faced by those three kids, spending weeks hiding out under trees, desperately trying to stay alive, and well enough out of sight of communist authorities. All of it was unimaginable to me, and yet it paled in comparison to what came next.
Ten agonizing weeks later, in the middle of the night, I imagined that my student heard the approach of bombers. First a buzz, then a roar, then the explosions as bombs fell on the nearby city. Next, he would have heard— and seen— the naval artillery shells streak across the sky and explode in the distance in a blaze of hellfire. Then he would have seen the ships, and armies of soldiers— foreigners, most likely the first time he’d ever seen them— carrying guns and speaking an incomprehensible language. I imagine, eventually, he came across some Americans who told him, “Everything’s okay now, little son.” Mr. Kim had lived through the famed Incheon landing spearheaded by General MacArthur. The renowned naval, land, and air operation was carried out by tens of thousands of American soldiers and cut off the majority of the North Korean army that was entrenched around modern day Busan.
Mr. Kim and his sisters were profoundly lucky. Several weeks later they were able to reunite with their parents and escape south before the Chinese-led counterattack forced the U.N. forces back again. After the war, Mr. Kim grew up, attended a top Korean university, and went on to have the successful career noted above. Nearly seventy years later, he is still working hard and studying tirelessly to improve his business prospects. I asked him recently if he plans to retire and he responded by saying that he “can’t imagine not working.” I was impressed by his character after hearing of his very difficult childhood and the misfortunes he experienced later in life. He was resilient and determined to do his best, despite setbacks.
My encounter with Mr. Kim not only allowed me to hear his inspiring story, I think it also serves as an important reminder that the Korean War is still living memory. It’s easy enough for people visiting contemporary South Korea to admire its modern skyscrapers, wealth, and technology without even considering what happened all those years ago. Even for those who do learn about the relevant history, it’s just as easy to reduce it to dates, statistics, and “suffering” in the abstract. Being a history buff, I thought I knew enough about the conflict to connect with Mr. Kim’s story. But the revelation inspired me to dig deeper. As I’ve largely eschewed books for podcasts over the last two years, my curiosity led me to Paul Kendrick’s History of the Korean War Podcast.
Mr. Kendrick, who appears to be a retired British gent with some time on his hands, has produced an engaging and detailed account of all the important events from 1950-53. In my opinion, the one major weakness is his frequent butchering of Korean pronunciation. My interest was great enough that I took a few notes, which I have compiled into this essay. Overall, I was astonished at how poorly I understood the nature of the conflict, even as someone with a keen interest in history. Moreover, much of what I did know about the conflict likely came from a few trips I made to Seoul’s War Memorial museum years back, which presented an account that I now understand to be heavily sanitized. Of course, that should not be an eye- opener. How surprising ought that to be, really?
If there is sufficient interest in this post, I will write a follow-up with more details from the podcast later, but reading the following sections in this piece are a good place to start in order to get an understanding of what happened during the conflict. I would like to inform readers that all feedback is welcome. I find it helpful to hear what the audience thinks and if they have anything to add— I can’t claim to be an expert after simply listening to a 20 hour-long podcast. I should also add that for the dedicated readers viewing this essay, the podcast and its website contain links to numerous more literary sources.
OVERLOOKED: U.S. negligence was a direct cause of the war
Many Americans tend to believe that their military has been in crack-fighting shape since World War II. This is inaccurate. Despite rising Cold War tensions, inertia in the government post-1945 seemed to be towards the status quo peacetime situation that the US had always known before 1941. Drastic budget cuts reduced the effectiveness and morale of the 1.6 million troops who remained in uniform. It was down from 12 million in 1945. The U.S. garrison troops in Japan, who would make the first and most substantial contribution to the fighting, were not the professionals who had fought in Okinawa. Very few had served in combat in the war, and they were under-supplied and subject to lax discipline, spending lots of time drinking and whoring. They were also missing, or short on, all sorts of essential equipment, from medical supplies to vehicle and radio maintenance equipment, and the General Staff hadn’t even drawn up plans for a defensive operation in Korea. Indeed, no U.S. military force had entered a war in such a hopelessly unprepared state since the start of the Civil War in 1861. The disastrous consequences of this lack of preparation would quickly be seen. It was really only after the Korean War that the paradigm of the U.S. Army as a permanent professional fighting force was fully adopted. Despite their later acts of resolve and determination to fight, President Truman and the General Staff deserve their share of blame for this lack of preparedness, leading as it did to thousands of American casualties and the untold suffering of millions in South Korea. In modern times, Truman has rarely been criticized for these disastrous oversights. But the evidence against his administration here is damning, and also casts his contemporary critics in a much more favorable light.
The political mistakes of the Truman administration in causing the war are perhaps more well known. In a disastrous speech during the spring of 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson outlined American commitments to defend a perimeter of countries in Asia and explicitly omitted South Korea from the list of countries. Historians still speculate over why. Some believe that Truman still naively hoped to avoid conflict and wanted to avoid antagonizing Stalin, while others have suggested that Acheson was trying to deter Syngman Rhee from an offensive action, something he clearly wanted to do. In any case, Kim Il-Sung and Stalin both interpreted this as an admission that the U.S. would not intervene. Few, if any, worse speeches have ever been given in American history.
MYTH: The South Korean army in 1950 was a hopeless basket case
The Republic of Korea (ROK) army’s performance in the early days of the fighting has often been portrayed as one of hapless cowards running away in terror from a menacing enemy— this doesn’t give them enough credit. Note that their performance later in the war was much worse, but that will need to wait until Part II. However, despite having 98,000 troops in the field in June 1950, which was nearly equal to North Korean strength and with a defensive advantage, the ROK army had two glaring disadvantages.
For reasons that seem similarly inexplicable in retrospect, even considering their worries about Rhee, the U.S. had refused to provide the ROK army with heavy weapons. The South Koreans had no tanks, and their artillery was ineffective against the Soviet T-34 tank. Had the U.S. made one almost innocuous decision and agreed to supply the ROK with antitank mines, the first few days of the war could have gone much differently. Things were so badly mismanaged in the armed forces that even the U.S. garrisons in Japan did not have a substantial supply of mines. Yet, overall, ROK soldiers fought bravely in the early days, and in cases when they were served with competent leadership (see below) and used the terrain to their advantage (i.e. where it was difficult for tanks to operate effectively), they were able to give as good as they got. In the eastern half of the peninsula, ROK forces fought multiple battles that, while resulting in defeat, effectively delayed the enemy and gave the U.N. forces time to regroup in Busan. These little-known actions may have decisively saved the country from being fully overrun.
Perhaps even more disastrously, President Rhee had compromised the army by filling senior leadership positions with political allies rather than capable men who commanded the respect of their soldiers. The most glaring example was General Staff Chairman Byeong-Duk “Fat Boy” Chae, who was given command of the armed forces despite being only 35 years old and never having seen combat while serving in the Japanese army. If you think it is strange that former Japanese army officers practically ran the South Korean military, its because you are removed from the pressing needs of that era. To a man, ROK officers in 1950 were former Japanese officers, while North Korean personnel were former guerrillas or veterans of the Chinese Communist Army or Soviet Army. The uniforms might’ve changed but the men fighting in them were largely the same. Returning to the leadership’s incompetence, Chae inexplicably canceled a military alert the day before the invasion, causing thousands of soldiers to be given weekend leave on June 24th. Chae himself drank heavily that Saturday night. Then, days later, he and Rhee made the political rather than strategic decision to try to defend Seoul rather than falling back. That wasn’t even his worst move. With the North Koreans still on the northern perimeter of Seoul, Chae prematurely ordered the demolition of the Han River bridges, which tragically killed hundreds of refugees trying to cross. Even more tragically, the demolitions trapped the bulk of the ROK army and nearly all of its heavy equipment on the wrong side of the river. A number of soldiers managed to swim or raft across, but could carry only their rifles and had to leave all their heavy equipment behind. Afterwards, the army rapidly disintegrated. Had the majority of the 40,000 plus soldiers in Seoul been able to retreat in good order, many of the disasters of the coming months might have been prevented.
Given Chae’s actions in these days one might expect him to be included in a national pantheon of infamy with the likes of Lee Wan-Yong and Hong Sa-Ik, but prior to listening to the podcast I had never heard of him, and he doesn’t even have an English Wikipedia page. I’m curious how others feel about this. Or perhaps this episode should call for an even more damning analysis of Rhee than most contemporary observers usually present.
OVERLOOKED: American racial prejudice was a large factor in early failures and casualties
The American military, government, and public in 1950 had no idea of the kind of enemy they were dealing with in the North Koreans. The civilian press was also largely unaware of the weakened state of the armed forces, for that matter. All sorts of commentators, both military and political, predicted that the North Koreans were cowardly peasants who could be easily dealt with once a few Americans arrived. The fact that this sentiment was widespread surprised me given both the unprecedented ferocity of the Japanese in WWII and the tenacity of the U.S.’s Chinese allies, both of which were widely remarked upon during the conflict. But apparently it was widespread. In reality, of course, the invading North Korea army was staffed by thousands of men with a decade-plus experience fighting both the Japanese and the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War. They knew both how to fight and how to survive under very difficult conditions, and were often able to function as both a standing force and a guerrilla force depending on the situation. This is amazingly hard to do, folks. Just ask any army officer.
For an almost comical example of the catastrophe that ensued when these forces squared off against the soft, lazy, and unprepared Americans, look at the Battle of Osan. In this battle, several battalions of the aforementioned garrison troops were rushed up to the front line and routed with very heavy casualties. Mr. Kendrick rightly notes that such a small and unprepared force would never have been sent to face a European enemy. Equally shocking to observers at the time was the phenomenon of bugging out. This referred to when groups of soldiers disobeyed orders and ran rather than stay and fight, triggering mass panic. Before I listened to the podcast, I had only a vague idea that any American troops had participated in the war before the September counter-offensive. As it turned out they did, and with few exceptions they were heavily defeated by the North Koreans. Only Allied air superiority, and devastating airstrikes that both weakened and delayed the North Koreans, saved the UN and South Korea from total defeat.
Officers in those early days also made a number of inexplicable decisions: the general in command of the initial task force, for example, was knocked unconscious and later captured when he decided to go out tank-hunting with a rocket launcher rather than coordinating the battle with his staff.
OVERLOOKED: Friendly fire incidents
While air power was the decisive factor in preventing the North Koreans’ outright victory, lack of coordination, especially in the early days, before dispatchers arrived at the front, led to a series of tragic and devastating mistakes where both South Korean and Allied units were bombed by the U.S. Air Force. A particularly heinous incident later in the summer saw napalm dropped on a Commonwealth battalion, with devastating casualties. In many of the cases, language barrier was an issue, but also in 1950 ground troops and pilots could not communicate directly. That wouldn’t be possible until Vietnam.
DOWNPLAYED: The “police action”
This is somewhat more well known, but the Korean War was the first instance where the US entered a major conflict without a formal declaration of war, which set a powerful, and in the eyes of many, negative, precedent that continues to influence US foreign policy to this day.
What is less well known is that the characterization of the war as a police action emboldened the press to report freely— and often, salaciously— on the conflict. During WWII, they had acquiesced to heavy censorship with few complaints. This in itself set an important precedent for what unfolded in Vietnam fifteen years later, and the causality has largely been forgotten. One noteworthy heroic figure was Marguerite Higgins, who distinguished herself as much for her personal bravery filing writing muckraking reports for the New York Herald Tribune as for her tenacious challenge to gender prejudices of the era. After the commanding general in Korea tried to have her expelled from the country on the grounds that “war [was] no place for a woman,” she made a successful appeal to General MacArthur who, much impressed by her gumption as well as her ability, permitted her to stay. Higgins’ bravery and professionalism can be credited with helping to change perceptions of gender roles in combat zones.
FORGOTTEN: North Korean war crimes and atrocities
Before I begin this section, it’s important to remember that the Korean War was nothing if not a civil war, and Mr. Kendrick reminds us that civil wars are usually more fraught and bloody than ordinary ones. This makes perfect sense: not only opposing armies but also civilians are all too easily seen as traitors rather than people with the misfortune of being born somewhere else.
I should also confess that when I heard accounts of the North Korean atrocities committed both against the U.S. armed forces and South Koreans, I often had a visceral personal reaction of a different sort than when I read about, say, Nazi or Japanese war crimes. The difference is that I still regard North Korea as an enemy nation and unlike in those other cases, the North Korean state still celebrates these actions. If readers think this is unfair, I might agree, especially given the context explained below. It is also a good lesson that few episodes in history are more likely to contribute to, and expose, personal biases more than war crimes.
As mentioned above, the North Korean soldiers who invaded in 1950 were hardened veterans of ten plus years of war against both the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. Both of those conflicts were brutish bloodbaths in which atrocities against opponents were seen by all sides as necessary and quarter was rarely offered. In other words, brutality in warfare was what a large part of the soldiers had known for the majority of their lives. Also indelibly ingrained into the North Koreans, by both communist ideology and experience, was the feeling that human life came very cheap.
There was never any doubt, or secret, about the North Korean desire to eliminate “unreliables.” Doubtlessly some victims were people who would have opposed them, though one can assume that their greatest opponents were wealthier citizens with the means to flee. But a more common situation usually involved ordinary people who figured that denouncing a neighbor who had let his cow graze on their rice paddy was preferable to being shot outright themselves. Other mass killings were quite deliberate: The fall of Seoul on June 28th saw the first wave of horrific massacres as the North Korean army viciously executed anyone deemed an opponent. A particularly vile incident occurred at Seoul National University Hospital, one of the country’s few modern medical facilities at the time, when soldiers overran a battalion guarding the hospital and slaughtered over 900 doctors, nurses, and patients in cold blood. After the liberation of Daejeon later in the fall 1950, UN soldiers remarked that the city resembled a hellscape. The police station was filled with hundreds of rotting, fly-ridden bodies of people, including women and children, killed weeks earlier. Many had been bludgeoned to death with clubs and bricks to conserve ammunition. A nearby church basement was found filled to the brim with the bodies of hundreds of women. These were far from isolated incidents. Many similar ones were reported in other towns throughout the counteroffensive.
Mr. Kendrick remarks offhand that these massacres had the effect of “turning the South Korean people against communism up to the present- day.” This struck me as an interesting observation. The anti-communism prevalent among the older generation, and in particular of those aligned with the political right, is often chalked up to the education system of the Park Chung-Hee era, which relentlessly portrayed North Koreans as “red devils.” It should not be forgotten that these caricatures, however crude or exaggerated, to a large extent reflected the genuine experiences of those many South Koreans who witnessed these events.
The second category of North Korean atrocities, which I am quite surprised are not more well known, are their vicious war crimes against South Korean and Allied POWs. As mentioned above, veterans of a decade of brutal war were not likely to be well disposed to treat prisoners humanely, but an explanation should not be the same thing as an excuse. Simply put, for the first few months of the war Allied prisoners were in a very large number of cases viciously beaten, tortured, and then executed, often with blunt objects to save ammunition. In addition to the moral depravity of such acts and the fact that they plainly violated multiple international treaties, the massacres quickly worried the North Korean High Command for the simple reason that they were counterproductive. Upon learning what would happen if they surrendered, Allied troops quickly hardened their resolve and made life much more difficult for the North Koreans. Seeing this development, commanders ordered that prisoners be treated humanely, but even despite the Communists’ penchant for brutal discipline, old habits died hard, and the massacres would continue for months through the U.N. counteroffensive.
The extent of the third category of atrocities will likely never be known. Unsurprisingly, although North Korea’s most fervent anti-Communists had already fled the country before the war, not everyone in North Korea was a fan of the “Red utopia,” especially after the regime had shown it’s true colors, not to mention the strain caused by the wartime situation. Church bells rang in Pyongyang to greet the Allies when they entered the city, and a cheering crowd formed to greet Rhee when he visited, though one might take that incident with a grain of salt. It’s more than reasonable to assume that Kim and his cronies mercilessly slaughtered any alleged traitors who failed to escape south after the Allies retreated.
BURIED: South Koreans also committed atrocities, and what they did may have been worse when factoring in the official propaganda that they were fighting “for freedom”
Before diving into this issue, it should be noted that plenty of South Korean citizens in 1948 were either convinced Communists or had a the general opinion that the North was a better wagon to hitch onto. The fact that Rhee’s prominent supporters were, almost to a man, Japanese collaborators is important to consider here. A significant though certainly not decisive factor in Kim’s decision to invade was a promise from the leader of the South’s underground communist movement that 200,000 willing recruits would quickly rise up and support him. While nothing close to this ever happened, and many of the several tens of thousands of South Koreans pressed into DPRK service during the invasion did so under duress, there was a real national security threat.
Perhaps the single most ruthless act of the entire war was president Rhee’s decision to execute tens of thousands of suspected Communists en masse as his army retreated. The so-called Bodo League massacres saw 60,000-200,000 South Korean citizens killed by their own government in cold blood. This was not, let’s repeat, a limited operation that got out of control in the heat of the moment, as the vague casualty estimates ought to suggest. Rhee ordered it and pretty much made it known to all that the more that were killed, the better. As for the victims, it is safe to assume that some minority were communists and fellow travelers who were ready to aid the enemy when they arrived. A majority, however, were most likely innocent people caught in the crossfire. Here again, denunciations motivated by venality and resentment played as much a role as suspicions of treasonous activities.
An ongoing controversy involves the failure of the U.S. to do anything to stop these massacres. Some documented incidents exist of American commanders trying to intervene, but MacArthur himself set the tone by referring to the massacres as an “internal matter.”
As the war continued there were more massacres committed by South Korean troops, first as they advanced during the counteroffensive and later as they retreated ahead of the Chinese. The details are horrific but I won’t dwell on them here except to say that zealously carrying out these war crimes was not met with punishment by Rhee. It was quite the opposite. Such officers, including a notorious colonel nicknamed Tiger Kim, only rose higher amid reports of their activities. In the last stalemate phase of the war, there were a few limited, and strategically negligible, operations in the South by pro-North guerillas. In response, an army regiment massacred an entire village which army commanders believed, with scant evidence, had harbored rebels, including women and children. Remarkably, this incident, the Geochang Massacre, was so egregious it generated controversy even in the heat of the war under Rhee’s stifling dictatorship. A local national assembly member first publicized the incident, and the army arrested him and sentenced him to death for treason in response. By then, however, enough public anger had mounted that Rhee was forced to launch a second investigation that saw the lawmaker exonerated and two army generals sentenced to life in prison, though they were later pardoned.
What struck me about all this history is how it seems to have remained buried even as other brutal historical events like the Jeju and Gwangju massacres have gotten more publicity, to say nothing of the attention given to Japanese colonial-era atrocities. I’m told there is now a memorial in Geochang and some efforts have been made to compensate relatives of the victims, but it still seems like necessary attention is lacking.
And that, naturally, has to have something to do with the fact that the military is still, to put it very charitably, apprehensive about these events getting public attention. As recently as 2010, a researcher was fired from the military-backed Truth and Reconciliation Commission for reporting on documents related to Geochang they had only been allowed to view on the condition of confidentiality. And as with Jeju and Gwangju, increased attention to these incidents has also elicited defenses from some of the surviving perpetrators and their families. In 2008, the BBC tracked down a retired police officer who had executed dozens of alleged communist sympathizers in the frantic first days of the war. The man defiantly justified his actions as a desperate measure necessary to save the nation from crisis. Even as men like this have mostly died off, I would say the issues underlying the narrative are very far from resolution.
BURIED AND FORGOTTEN: The nightmare for refugees
In the wake of the invasion, millions of people were displaced. Any South Korean with the means to sought to flee from the communist advance and terror of war. In the initial stages, refugee movements along Korea’s primitive road network were a large factor complicating the allied response. The North Koreans, for their part, quickly realized that they could use the crisis to their advantage by disguising special forces as refugees who could then commit acts of espionage, sabotage, and terrorism behind enemy lines. It is unknown how widespread these tactics were, but a few incidents, such as one where a seemingly pregnant refugee was discovered to be an infiltrator smuggling a radio through a checkpoint, appeared to confirm the Allies worst fears.
The results were some of the most heartbreaking scenes imaginable in any war, ever. As tens of thousands of desperate refugees streamed toward the Pusan Perimeter, allied troops, both U.N. and South Korean, were ordered to prevent their entry, by force if necessary. Procedure was to fire warning shots first, then use live ammunition. Surviving accounts indicate that many soldiers and officers were very uncomfortable carrying out this order. Some refused. But most accepted. I have never heard of any serious effort to explore this controversy in contemporary Korea, have you?
FORGOTTEN: Against the might of the U.S. and U.N., North Korea nearly won the Battle of the Pusan Perimeter
However interested you may be in military history, the Battle of the Pusan Perimeter is a battle to remember. Mr. Kendrick convincingly argues that it deserves its place alongside the Marne, Midway, and Stalingrad as one of the most pivotal of the 20th century. This bears repeating to readers currently in Korea: if a few developments in August and September 1950 had gone differently, you would not be sitting where you are right now, reading this on a Samsung or LG smartphone screen.
By late August 1950, the U.S. and its South Korean and U.N. allies were hemmed in around Pusan(also called Busan), not far in front of what commanding General Walker had called the last feasible defensive line. Since June, the U.S. had rapidly mobilized for war, arriving with tens of thousands of fresh, if often green and untested, soldiers. In June and July, the Allies has repeatedly sacrificed space for time, and now space had run out. For the North Koreans, however, time was running out. Their supply lines were long and tenuous, constantly subject to U.S. bombing. By the first of September, they were outnumbered nearly 2-1, and faced as much as a 6-1 disadvantage in heavy artillery. Note that those numbers are somewhat misleading, as the North’s army had a much lower ratio of support staff to front-line soldiers. Thanks to great improvements in logistics, including the installation of several heavy loading cranes from Japan in Busan, the Allies were by now as well supplied with ammunition and supplies as any fighting force could expect to be. And yet, they nearly suffered a gruesome and humiliating retreat that would have made Dunkirk seem orderly and reduced the ROK government to control of a few offshore islands.
It would be easy to say that the Allies won the battle due to superior numbers, overwhelming firepower, and total air superiority, but that is not the end of the story. North Korean generals of course knew well about the odds they were facing. In response, they decided on a tactic that would produce devastating casualties for both sides: get as close as possible to the enemy lines to negate the advantage of artillery and airstrikes and fight the enemy at point-blank range, often hand to hand. The Communists wagered that their superior fighting skills would be enough to overcome superior numbers and firepower, and judging from their rampant successes over the last two months, it was a chillingly plausible assumption. In the end, they failed, but only barely. Though pushed perilously close to disaster on multiple occasions, at great cost U.S., South Korean, and Allied troops held the line. Through their sacrifice, they made possible the lives many South Koreans and Korea-based expats enjoy in the country we know today.
Those soldiers, of course, would also soon get a boost from another action hundreds of kilometers to the north, in a place called Incheon.
Further Reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_South_Korea?wprov=sfla1
Things You Probably Didn’t Know, or Misunderstood about the Korean War is a guest post written by Christopher Burton. He can be reached on Twitter at @observations87. Burton holds all rights to this work. The post was edited by David Kute.
Update on May 20, 2022: Christopher Burton wrote the next piece in the series and published it on Substack in September of 2020. The piece and the now revised series can be found here.
Image Attribution
1. A market scene in Seoul, 1952. Trondheim Municipal Archives, Norway. Photograph by Inger Schulstad. Norweigan Mobile Army Surgial Specialist Unit.
2. American M26 Pershing tanks in downtown Seoul, South Korea, in the Second Battle of Seoul during the Korean War. In the foreground, United Nations troops round up North Korean prisoners-of-war. September 1950. Naval Historical Center.
3. A Russian made M-1944 (KS-18) 85mm anti-aircraft gun, captured from the North Korean forces in the village of Chuchon-ni, Korea. American Official Photographer.
4. The U.S. Navy battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) fires a 406 mm (16 inch) shell toward a North Korean target, in mid-1952. Official U.S. Navy photo from the US Navy Naval History and Heritage Command.
5. Members of Taskforce Indianhead set up hot coffee on the capitol ground less than 24 hours after the liberation of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, Korea. October 21, 1950. US Army. Public Domain.
6. Marine tank commander is waving Leathernecks to rear of his tank as it prepares to take out a point of resistance on Wolmi Island, gateway to Incheon. Staff Frank C. Kerr, U.S. Marines.
7. A United States Air Force 3rd Bombardment Group (light) B-26 Invader attacks the railyard at Iri, South Korea, with rockets during the Korean War as part of the deception operations to draw enemy attention away from amphibious landings at Incheon. Early September 1950. Scanned from Utz, Curtis A.
8. A market scene in Seoul, 1952. Trondheim Municipal Archives, Norway. Photograph by Inger Schulstad. Norweigan Mobile Army Surgial Specialist Unit.
9. Original caption: “With her brother on the back a war weary Korean girl trudges by a stalled M-26 tank, at Haengju, Korea. June 9,1951.” Maj R. V. Spencer, USAF. National Archives and Records Administration.
10. United Nations troops fighting in the streets of Seoul, Korea. September 20, 1950. Lt. Robert L. Strickland and Cpl. John Romanowski. Photo by Lt. Strickland/Cpl. Romanowski.
Special to the Rooftop on the Hanok features guest posts on a variety of Korea related topics.