Korea by Michael Pembroke

Author:Michael Pembroke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Hardie Grant
Published: 2018-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

A Shattered Land

MacArthur was right about the devastating effect of the bombing in North Korea—‘a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind’. By the time an armistice was agreed in July 1953, civil society was broken. Conventional explosives and napalm had achieved their intended effect. Not only were more bombs dropped on Korea than in the whole of the Pacific theatre during World War II—635,000 tons as against 503,000 tons—but more of what fell was napalm in both absolute and relative terms. Over a million sorties were flown, mostly in North Korean air space behind the front line; the amount of napalm used was about double that dropped on Japan; and except for opposition from MIG-15s in the vicinity of the Yalu River, resistance was limited. At the beginning of the war about 21,000 gallons of napalm hit Korea every day. When China intervened, that number more than tripled. An Eighth Army chemical officer said that on an ‘average good day’ United Nations pilots dropped 70,000 gallons of napalm: 45,000 by the United States Air Force, 10,000–12,000 by the Navy, 4000–5000 by the Marines and some by Australian and South African Mustangs.

By the end of the war, North Korea’s industrial infrastructure had been knocked out. Electricity generation was only 17.2 per cent of its 1949 output; coal was 17.7 per cent; steel was 2.8 per cent; and cement was 5 per cent. A report from the United States embassy in Seoul stated that everything was flattened and that the ‘air bombing was so devastating that rebuilding North Korean industry is largely a problem of new construction rather than rehabilitation’. Little remained standing in Pyongyang. And the casualties were heart-rending. On one account, the number was ‘two to four million…most of it noncombatants’. According to another, ‘about three million Koreans were killed, wounded or missing. Those whose families were broken up by the war numbered an astounding ten million…civilians accounted for over 70 percent of all Korean casualties.’ The damage to the people of North Korea was incalculable—in lives lost, families broken, property destroyed and psychological dysfunction. By the end of the war, the country’s total population had declined by 1.3 million people, a great number of whom had been able-bodied men.

The immediate cause of this human and material wreckage was the prolonged exercise of overwhelming air power directed at cities, towns and installations. The bombing campaign continued relentlessly for nearly three years after the North Korean invasion had been repulsed in September 1950. And it kept going for fifteen months when the only outstanding issue at the truce talks was the question of the release and repatriation of prisoners. Dulles liked to call it ‘massive retaliation’. Even when peace was in sight, Dulles had misgivings about letting up on the bombing campaign. He did not want an armistice ‘until we have shown—before all Asia—our clear superiority’. He would probably never have agreed to the modern statement of proportionality in the first additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions.

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