The Korean War: A History (23 page)

The Joint Chiefs again considered the use of nuclear weapons in June 1951, this time in tactical battlefield circumstances, and there were many more such suggestions as the war continued to 1953. Robert Oppenheimer went to Korea as part of Project Vista, designed to gauge the feasibililty of tactical use of atomic weapons. In early 1951 a young man named Samuel Cohen, on a secret assignment for the Defense Department, observed the battles for the second recapture of Seoul, and thought there should be a way to destroy the enemy without destroying the city. He became the father of the neutron bomb.
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Most daunting, perhaps, 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.” This project sought to establish the capability to use 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, dropping “dummy” A-bombs or heavy TNT bombs. The project called for “actual functioning of all activities which would be involved in an atomic strike, including weapons assembly and testing, leading, ground control of bomb aiming,” and the like. The project indicated that the bombs were probably not useful, for purely technical reaons: “timely identification of large masses of
enemy troops was extremely rare.”
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But one can imagine the steel nerves required of leaders in Pyongyang, observing a lone B-29 simulating the attack lines that had resulted in the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just six years earlier, each time unsure of whether the bomb was real or a dummy.

After his release from North Korean custody Gen. William F. Dean wrote that “the town of Huichon amazed me. The city I’d seen before—two-storied buildings, a prominent main street—wasn’t there any more.” He encountered the “unoccupied shells” of town after town, and villages where rubble or “snowy open spaces” were all that remained.
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The Hungarian writer Tibor Meray had been a correspondent in North Korea during the war, and left Budapest for Paris after his participation in the 1956 rebellion against Communist rule. When a Thames Television team interviewed him, he said that however brutal Koreans on either side might have been in this war, “I saw destruction and horrible things committed by the American forces”:

Meray had arrived in August 1951 and witnessed “a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital,” Pyongyang. There were simply “no more cities in North Korea.” The incessant, indiscriminate bombing forced his party always to drive by night:

Rebuilding Pyongyang after the war, 1957.
Courtesy of the artist, Chris Marker, and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

A British reporter found communities where nothing was left but “a low, wide mound of violet ashes.” At 10:00
P.M.
on July 27 the air attacks finally ceased, as a B-26 dropped its radar-guided bomb load some twenty-four minutes before the armistice went into effect.

In the end the scale of urban destruction quite exceeded that in Germany and Japan, according to U.S. Air Force estimates. Friedrich estimated that the RAF dropped 657,000 tons of bombs on Germany from 1942 to 1945, and the total tonnage dropped by the UK and the United States at 1.2 million tons. The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea (not counting 32,557 tons of napalm), compared to 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II. Whereas sixty Japanese cities were destroyed to an average of 43 percent, estimates of the destruction of towns and
cities in North Korea “ranged from forty to ninety percent”; at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the North’s twenty-two major cities were obliterated. A partial table looks this:
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As another official American history put it,

Then the authors ask, was this any worse than “killing thousands of invisible civilians with the blockbusters and atomic bombs …?” Not really, they say, because the enemy’s “savagery toward the people” was even worse than “the Nazis’ campaign of terror in Poland and the Ukraine.”
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Apart from this astonishing distortion, note the logic: they are savages, so that gives us the right to shower napalm on innocents.

After the war the air force convinced many that its saturation bombing forced the Communists to conclude the war. The air force general Otto Weyland determined that “the panic and civil disorder” created in the North by round-the-clock bombing was “the most compelling factor” in reaching the armistice.
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He was wrong, just as he had been in World War II, but that did not stop the air
force from repeating the same mindless and purposeless destruction in Vietnam. Saturation bombing was not conclusive in either war—just unimaginably destructive.

The United Nation’s Genocide Convention defined the term as acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This would include “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” It was approved in 1948 and entered into force in 1951—just as the USAF was inflicting genocide, under this definition and under the aegis of the United Nations Command, on the citizens of North Korea. Others note that area bombing of enemy cities was not illegal in World War II, but became so only after the Red Cross Convention on the Protection of Civilians in Wartime, signed in Stockholm in August 1948.
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Neither measure had the slightest impact on this air war, which operated with a mindless and implacable automaticity.

A
mbrose Bierce once wrote a short story called “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Like the late Joseph Heller, the books by Paul Fussell on his experience in World War II, or the wonderful novels by Michael Herr and Tim Duncan about Vietnam, the realities of the battlefield turned Ambrose Bierce into a specialist in black humor, if not cynicism, about the human condition. Bierce is best known for a handful of short stories—“Owl Creek Bridge,” “Chickamauga,” “The Mocking-Bird,” “Three and One Are One,” “An Affair of Outposts”—all of them drawn from his experience in the American civil war. That was the last war to rage back and forth across American soil. Six hundred thousand Americans lost their lives in it, more than the total number of American deaths in all the wars of the twentieth century, from World Wars I and II through Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf War. The civil war pitted brother against brother, son against father, mother against herself. Memories of that war lasted so long that we still have a bitter controversy about the flag of the Confederacy that flies over the Mississippi statehouse. I first went to the South when I was twelve years old, to spend some time with relatives in Memphis, and my shock at seeing Jim Crow in action was only slightly greater than my shock at finding out I was a Yankee—almost a century after the war ended.

Bierce specialized in surprise endings to his stories, ones that drove home a truth about the human nature of civil war: in “The Mocking-Bird,” Private Grayrock of the Federal Army, posted as a sentinel, sees something moving in the woods of southwestern Virginia and fires his musket. Convinced that he actually hit something, he spends hours scouring the area. In the end John Grayrock
finds the body, a single bullet hole marking the gray uniform. Inside the uniform is William Grayrock, his brother.

In the course of this sad story, Bierce refers without explanation to the “unconverted civilians” of southwestern Virginia in 1861, who torment John Grayrock’s mind in their imagined multitude, materializing from all angles to kill him—peeping from behind trees, rushing out of the woods, hiding in a home. In “The Story of a Conscience” a man kills himself after realizing that he has killed an enemy spy who once spared his own life, earlier in the war. In “Chickamauga,” a soldier dreams so vividly that we believe him to be reunited with his family and kinsmen, but the story ends with the man standing over his mother’s dead body, her hands clutched full of grass, beside the burned-out remains of his childhood home.

In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Peyton Farquhar, a well-to-do Alabaman and “southern planter,” that is to say, slaveholder, is about to be hanged from a railroad bridge. This is Bierce’s most famous story, so many would know that it also involves an elegiac dream of reuniting with his beloved family after the rope snaps and plunges him into the raging river below, followed by a justly famous surprise ending—when the rope breaks the man’s neck. Less well known, perhaps, is that the Yankee commandant had “issued an order, which is posted everywhere, declaring that any civilians caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges, tunnels or trains will be summarily hanged.”
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In the summer of 2000, and for every summer of the previous half century, a soldier named Art Hunter awakened in the middle of the night with cold sweats, imagining the faces of two old people, a man and a woman, hovering above his bed. These two weathered faces had made his life “a living hell,” and when they haunted him he would arise, get his hunting rifle, go sit on the porch, and smoke a cigarette. In 1991 the former soldier Hunter finally got the U.S. government to give him full disability pay for his severe post-traumatic stress disorder, but the nightmares still came to him in his home in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.
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On September 30, 1999, a woman named Chon Chun-ja appeared on the front page of
The New York Times
, dressed as if she were yet another middle-aged and middle-class Korean housewife going shopping. Instead she stood at the mouth of a tall tunnel in Nogun village and pointed to a hill where, she alleged, in July 1950 “American soldiers machine-gunned hundreds of helpless civilians under a railroad bridge.” She and other survivors went on to say that they had been petitioning their government and the American government for years, seeking compensation for this massacre; they had been completely stonewalled in both Seoul and Washington. Meanwhile, the article also carried the testimony of American soldiers who did the firing, who said that their commander had ordered them to fire on civilians.
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Art Hunter was one of those soldiers, shooting into a white-clad mass of women, children, and elderly people gathered under the railroad bridge.