In part 1 of this two-part series, we looked at whether the Korean War was necessary at all, whether South Korea was a bastion of freedom needing protecting, and whether the North Korea was aggressive in its invasion and solely to blame for hostilities. In part 2, we will look at the effects of the war, how it was waged and whether its results represent a true net positive for America, Korea, or the world at large.
A Tragic Expansion of the War Into China
As history has it, after indirect bombing in Korea failed to prevent the North Korean advance, Truman ordered US ground forces to join in the effort. Together with South Koreans, they effectively pushed the North Koreans back across the original partition lines at the 38th parallel. However, instead of stopping there, Truman pushed forward, intent on liberating the capital, perhaps making an example of this first major Cold War conflict. Unfortunately, this overreach would lead to far more trouble in the long run.
As UN troops advanced north, they naturally approached ever closer to the Chinese border which elicited repeated warnings to stay well enough away. But when spillover from the war became too much for them to accept, the Chinese formally entered the conflict.
The expansion of the war involving China is particularly scarring for the legacy of the Korean war. The initial expectation for the war was that it could resolved within months and even and even five months into the conflict, General MacArther maintained hope that “we can get the boys home by Christmas.” But as historian Ralph Raico relates, China’s entering of the war “prolong[ed] it by another three years, during which most of the American casualties were sustained.” As well, there were rampant reports of biological or germ warfare waged along the border. William Blum records that “The Chinese devoted a great deal of effort to publicizing their claim that the United States, particularly during January to March 1952, had dropped quantities of bacteria and bacteria-laden insects over Korea and northeast China” and a group of international scientists, after researching the claims, indeed concluded that “the peoples of Korea and China have indeed been the objectives of bacteriological weapons.” The inclusion of China into what was originally supposed to be a “police action” to counter North Korean aggression, having nothing to do with China, represents quite the dishonorable and unwarranted usage of military forces and quite the departure from the originally stated war aims.
Don’t Forget the Domestic Effects of War
One of the often overlooked facets of war is the legacy of domestic political life that is left as a result of how a war is waged. In the long run, the Korean War may have been just as damaging domestically as it turned out to be internationally.
For one, the Korean War represented the first major initiative of what we would term the Cold War era. As we have highlighted before, US foreign policy had been effectively taken over by the Truman Doctrine, which proposed to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures…”, and its successor, NSC-68 which proposed “that every nation in the world should be considered friend or foe” and that “a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.”The Korean War broke out in the same timeframe as Truman signed off on NSC-68 and in many ways represents the establishment of further actions and interventions years and decades later. As one of Truman’s advisors attested, while the public was not quite convinced of the Communist bogeyman, “we were sweating over it…[but] thank God Korea came along.”
One fairly obvious negative outcome of the Korean War, from a purely domestic point of view, was the establishment of a precedent for unilateral executive action when it comes to war and military intervention. Immediately following the North Korean invasion, Truman pledged the support of the US. At the time, Truman defined his initiative as a “police action,” conveniently avoiding language of all out war. This was despite a widely known statement by then Secretary of State Dean Acheson stating that Korea was considered to be outside of the area deemed important for US defense. Many will be familiar with the language found in the US Consitution granting the President the role of “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States” as well as Article I, Section 8 which vests war-making powers within the Congress. And yet, this role had, previously, been restricted to times of formally declared war.
But as historian Tom Woods testifies, “ever since the Korean War, Article II, Section 2 has been interpreted to mean that the president may act with an essentially free hand in foreign affairs, or at the very least that he may send men into battle without consulting Congress.” Instead of seeking the formal approval of the US Congress, Truman justified his actions as being necessary to fulfill duties and obligations to the United Nations. After the invasion, the UN took up the matter of blame and, with the Soviet representative absent, unable to oppose the measure, the United States helped to push through a resolution that blamed North Korea as the aggressor and called for military support of the South Koreans. This is exacerbated by the fact that North Korea was never allowed to present a case to the General Assembly, neither during the initial discussion at the behest of some member states, nor a few months later when the Soviets again sought to have both sides presented. All told, as William Blum surmises, “The Council made its historic decision with the barest of information available to it, and all of it derived from and selected by only one side of the conflict.”
Truman and Acheson continued to use the “police action” language and UN resolution as justified or binding even though “according to the U.N. Charter, any Security Council commitment of members’ troops must be consistent with the members’ ‘respective constitutional processes.'” As well Truman was even brazen in the face of United Nations support throughout the process, claiming “that he would send the troops even without United Nations authorization” and even, according to Raico, “express[ing] the wish that the Russians had vetoed that UN declaration — so that it would have been crystal clear that, as president, he needed no authority beyond his own will to plunge the nation into war.”
The potential impact of Truman’s actions were not lost on statesmen at the time. As Robert Taft warned, “if the President can intervene in Korea without congressional approval, we can go to war in Malaya or Indonesia or Iran or South America.” How true this statement turned out to be.
The Korean War also held domestic economic and civil liberty encroachments. As part of war mobilization, in September of 1950, the Defense Production Act helped grant Truman additional war production powers. He began to use those powers to establish a number of agencies to control economic production and wage-price controls. The American public seemed adept at adapting to these controls which indicated “evidence that the American public was growing accustomed to the type of action that must be taken in economic mobilization.”
As well, the Korean War extended the gruesome legacy of the “draft” or military conscription. A Selective Service Act was debated and eventually passed earlier in 1948 and, as Representative Howard Buffett argued, “this measure would declare to the world that Hitler was right—that the threat of communism externally justified militarism and regimentation at home.” The Selective Service Act was slated to expire the very month in 1950 that the conflict erupted and the involvement of the US prompted its extension for yet another year, after which, it was officially reinstated into the next decade, thus further cementing the practice. Officially, “more than 1.5 million men were inducted into the armed services during the Korean War, and an additional 1.5 million were inducted between 1954 and 1961.”
Was Korea or the World Better Off Because of the War?
Another one of the oft-quoted positive aspects of the Korean War is its positive results, mainly that of a thriving, independent South Korea safe from the tyranny of Communism. It is argued that US intervention in defending South Korea from the North effectively protected the South from oppressive governance and helped to cultivate a healthy democracy and free market.
The belief that the US protection of South Korean independence can be credited with cultivating a thriving democracy is simplistic and does not actually follow from the record of history. We have already seen that US political control explicitly suppressed any native democratic rule during its early years of occupation and this control finally ceased after 1961. However, in contrast to popular opinion, according to James Payne, when South Koreans were eventually given back that control, instead of pursuing those same democratic paths, what followed was “a military dictatorship under General Park Chung-Hee, which lasted until his murder by other officials in 1979. Thereafter followed two coups, a violent uprising in Kwangju, and many bloody street demonstrations.” From 1985 on, the climate has since leveled out a bit and resulted in the South Korea we know today. Regardless, “here is a case in which sixteen years of tutelage under the Americans brought failure with regard to the establishment of democracy, but the country evolved to democracy on its own twenty-five years after U.S. involvement in local politics ceased.”
We must also remember that the only Koreans who could have enjoyed freedom in the first place were those who actually survived. The Korean War inevitably led to abject and wanton destruction of property and persons in the peninsula. Major General Emmett O’Donnell testified that “everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name.” The British yearbook, “Brassey’s Annual”, also described the state of Korea in 1951: “It is no exaggeration to state that South Korea no longer exists as a country. Its towns have been destroyed, much of its means of livelihood eradicated, and its people reduced to a sullen mass dependent upon charity and exposed to subversive influences. When the war ends no gratitude can be expected from the South Koreans, but it is to be hoped that the lesson will have been learned that it is worse than useless to destroy to liberate.” Korea also became a proving ground for the first prominent use of napalm as a weapon of war, a weapon that would go on to infamy in the next decade with its use in Vietnam.
The costs of the war were quite extensive. In American casualties alone, Richard Ebeling lists that the war “cost the lives of 54,250 Americans and another 103,300 wounded.” General LeMay testified that, “we burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both [and] killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes.” As well, CIA operations behind enemy lines in North Korea also resulted in quite a few casualties. As Michael Swanson attests, “fifteen hundred were sent to their deaths in North Korea.”
But even more than the immediate physical costs, the Korean War cemented US-Soviet relations and the escalation of Cold War hostilities. Ralph Raico relates that “the misinterpretation of the North Korean aggression as part of a grand design at world conquest originating in and controlled by Moscow resulted in a drastic militarization of the cold war in the form of a conventional and nuclear armaments race, the frantic search for alliances, and the establishment of military bases.” General MacArthur himself, in a moment of great clarity, near the close of the war, offered a great compromise when he “claimed that Ike should try to bring a close to the entire Cold War by proposing to the Soviet Union to allow both Korea and Germany to reunite their halves with elections and to remove all troops from both of them and from Japan.” If only Eisenhower had taken this snippet of advice, all parties involved could have been spared the following decades of Cold War escalation and its after-effects.
The Bottom Line
William Blum asks the following rhetorical question: “Once upon a time, the United States fought a great civil war in which the North attempted to reunite the divided country through military force. Did Korea or China or any other foreign power send in an army to slaughter Americans, charging Lincoln with aggression?” A fitting question, indeed. The Korean War continues to be misunderstood by a great many Americans and yet a proper understanding of many of the facts presented here would do wonders in dispelling the fictitiously honorable impression of American and, by extension, State wars throughout history.