The Forgotten War | Part 4

(gunfire) - Korea is a small country, thousands of miles away. But what is happening there is important to every American. Pre-nations must be on their guard. We are united in the testing, coming to slavery. We know that the cost of freedom is high, but we are determined to preserve our freedom no matter what the cost. (gunfire) - Every nation has its own mythology. (soft music) People will often say something like, "Oh, that's a myth," meaning that the event in question never happened. But abiding myths are not untrue. They're super true. They capture in a story that likely did not happen. The essence of the character involved. Now, if you look at myths in this way, you see that there are a form of shorthand that reveals a more nuanced, deeper truth. For example, America has mythical stories of George Washington. Young George once chopped down a cherry tree and when confronted about this act of vandalism, replied, "Father, I cannot tell a lie. I chop down the cherry tree." As a young man, Washington threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River. Now, the fact that neither of these stories actually happened is relevant, but it's not important. What's important is that these two myths encompassed the larger truth about George Washington, a man of impeccable moral character and fundamental honesty coupled with his physically imposing six foot two athletic body. If Washington had not really said, "I cannot tell a lie," then it's something that he ended up living instead. And if anyone was physically strong enough to have thrown a silver dollar across the Potomac, that man would have been the young George Washington. - Today in the world of freedom, the proudest post is, is spent on dealing. - The iron curtain has descended across the Potomac. - The only answer to communism is a massive offensive. - Well, communism, of course, be a system of international control and conformity. - You and I have a rendezvous with them. - Never give in. - Never, never, never. - Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this world. (audience cheering) - Russia has its own myths, of course, which, like the stories of George Washington, are still told today. Now, here's one that illuminates Russia in the first decade of the Cold War. About two blocks north of the Kremlin, since the Embassy of Tunisia, tucked away on a quiet, treeline avenue, it's hard to believe that such a bucolic setting could be so close to the heart of Moscow. The embassy had been at one time the residents of Count Orlov, lover of Catherine the Great, who had led the coup against Catherine's husband, saw Peter the Third. Peter the Third was carted off to prison, never to be seen again. Orlov eventually fell out of favor with Catherine and ended up wandering the halls of his mansion, Stark Raving Mad. Now, Moscow, like New York, was built upon a network of high-pressure steam pipes. These pipes ran from the main steam lines into individual houses, where radiators kept the population alive during the brutal Moscow winters. In 1998, as the story goes, a repair crew was called to the Orlov mansion, the building now housing the Tunisian Embassy. A significant leak in the steam line had occurred somewhere, and the Tunisians, hailing from North Africa, were particularly sensitive to the cold. Using compressed air, the repair crew determined that the source of the leak lay within the embassy compound and started digging seven feet down to the elongated, tightly sealed concrete box, that protected the actual steam pipe from the elements. But the night after they began digging, the ambassador's wife was on her way to the second floor bathroom, when she suddenly saw a naked young girl screaming in silent terror, running towards her down the hall. A devout Muslim, the woman was badly shaken by the young girl, who she described as blonde, Russian, very pretty, and perhaps 15 years old. Now, of course, I'll agree that the ambassador's wife had simply had a nightmare of some kind. The repair crew continued to work the following day, and the following evening in a different wing of the embassy, the military agitant was also confronted by a terrified, beautiful, naked young girl looking over her shoulder in wide-eyed terror. This girl, it was said, had short brown hair. In the days that followed, multiple staff members reported similar encounters. Moaning and crying began to be heard throughout the house all through the night, screams, masking the barely detectable voices of young women pleading for their lives, praying aloud for God to save them. Some simply called out for their mothers. Meanwhile, the work crew had worked its way right up to the house itself, still searching for the leak in the steam line. On May 16, 1998, they broke open the concrete box containing the final section of pipes. Layed out beside the hissing steam main, where six sets of human remains, covered in what the work crews called a "costic substance." All were female, all were between the ages of 12 and 16, and all had been shot in the back of the head. No clothes or personal articles of any kind were found. A little detective work revealed that that section of steam pipe had last been sealed in 1949, and in 1949, the mansion housing the Tunisian Embassy had been the official residence of Leventry Barrier, then Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs, and the man who succeeded Nikolay Yezhyev is head of the secret police. Now, there are other, less lurid and more reliable accounts of human remains being found buried beneath those premises. Now, of course, it's easy to shrug this office just a good ghost story, but that ghost story reveals a deeper truth, a super-truth. For instance, my beautiful wife Natasha, who spent 12 years in Moscow as a professional photographer, absolutely believes a story, and virtually all of her friends believe it without question. Because without question, Leventry Barrier was known to cruise the streets of Moscow after dark, searching for young women who would catch his eye. On scores, perhaps even hundreds of occasions, the head of the NKVD would have young women snatched off the streets of Moscow and delivered to that residence in the Black Maria's, the hers like patty wagons of the secret police. There are multiple credible reports. Filed after his fall from Brason, eventual execution, of course, no one would dare say such things while Barrier was still alive, that attested to this horrific practice, which went on for over a decade. One survivor of this horror, who would go on to become a somewhat famous Russian actress, quoted Barrier as starting that particular rape session by saying scream or don't scream, it doesn't matter. No one's gonna hear you either way. And then, as the crowning humiliation, it was Barrier's custom to present the battered and terrified women with a ride back to their houses where the NKVD agents that had kidnapped them, then presented them with a bouquet of flowers. Now, if you try to stretch your imagination to the absolute limit, you can almost get a sense of how a bouquet of flowers would in Barrier's sick and sickening mind make these multiple rapes feel somehow consensual. Barrier had seemed to radiate an aura of disgust and revulsion from the moment he first appeared at Stalin's Dacha in Sochi, the Russian resort town on the Black Sea. All of the top Kremlin leaders, including Stalin, murderers, all, loathed and feared Barrier. Upon seeing Barrier bouncing Stalin's young daughters that Lana on his knee, Stalin's personal secretary, the long-suffering Alexander Puskribuchev, called Stalin's daughter away on made-up pretenses and told her to never, ever get in a car with a Leventry Barrier. By the way, Puskribyuchev, one of the few people in Stalin's inner circle who had some humanity left intact, had a wife that he deeply adored, a young doctor whose name was Bronis Slava. Stalin's personal secretary adored his young wife, but that didn't matter. Because when she went to appeal to see about her own brother who'd been locked up by Barrier's forces, Barrier had her arrested, and then he had her shot. You know, so often the Cold War is presented in terms of military movements and economic contests, but that is to miss the point completely. The Cold War was not a contest between Coke and Pepsi, two more or less similar societies on a level playing field, no matter how many times it's been described that way. Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, personally signed, 40,000 death warrants, including those for his closest friends and family members. Dwight David Eisenhower, president of the United States, once through a golf club at an aid. Russian spy chief Leventry Barrier raped and murdered scores of underage girls, American spy chief Alan Delas, once had a consensual affair with Queen Frederica of Greece. If you cannot see the difference between these people and the societies that produced and elevated them, then there is something very seriously wrong with you. Barrier was repugnant in every way, even to hardened Kremlin leaders, but Barrier was no-yagoda Oriashov. barrier was approved. Billion administrator and organizer and his ability to grind out work was nothing less than astonishing. Several people who had worked with him said that if he'd been born in America, he would've gone on to become a CEO, some kind of great captain of industry, but Berria hadn't been born in America. He'd been born in the Caucasus in Georgia, like his boss, Comrade Stalin. Berria was repugnant, but he was also irreplaceable. For example, Yuri Karaton in his book The First War of Physics had this to say about Leventry Berria. Quote, "Berria understood the necessary scope and dynamics of research. This man, who was the personification of evil to modern Russian history, also possessed the great energy and capacity to work. The scientists who met him could not fail to recognize his intelligence, his willpower, and his purposefulness. They found him a first class administrator who could carry a job through to completion." Now, we've already seen how Stalin had missed the game-changing importance of the American atomic bomb until well after it had exploded. But once it became clear that this new American toy had the ability to utterly destroy both his enormous advantage in conventional forces not to mention his home city of Moscow. Stalin came close to panic. The Soviets needed an atomic bomb of their own and badly. The Americans had spent many years a great deal of money and employed the best minds on the planet on the Manhattan Project that eventually developed the atomic bomb. The Russians had nothing like the same time, money, nor expertise. But they did have Berria. 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So to get the special offer, text the word "cold" to 64,000, that's C-O-L-D to 64,000. Again, that's text "cold" to 64,000 and get that portrait started today. Various first challenge was to find the physicists and engineers he would need to actually construct the device. This was a serious problem. Russia had long had a deep bench of world-class physicists. Various problem was that so many of them had been shot during the purges and the ones who hadn't been killed, engineering geniuses like aircraft designer Andre Tupelov and the eventual father of the Soviet space program, the brilliant Sergei Korolev, had been lost, cast into the frozen waste of the gulags. And so Tupelov and Korolev and many other intellectuals, the scientists and engineers who had survived the executions only to be condemned to a slower death from starvation and exposure, suddenly found themselves being recalled from the work teams where they've been breaking rocks with sledgehammers at 30 degrees below zero or slowly dying of radiation poisoning in the uranium mines. Suddenly, they were whisked away to brand new apartments and given the best food in the country and whatever equipment they dared ask for. Beria would go on to create a number of these top secret research centers, small cities so well concealed that they didn't even appear on Russian maps. Now the work ethos in these new research centers which were essentially well-appointed prisons for scientists and engineers was very clear and very simple. It went something like this. The Soviet Union needs you to build an atomic bomb. It will give you everything you need in order to complete the project. If the bomb successfully explodes, you will each be awarded the order of Lenin. If it does not explode, you'll be shot. Now these Soviet scientists had a good understanding of the physics of the A-bomb, but that wasn't the problem. The problem lay mostly in the engineering, hundreds and hundreds of cases of trial and error on the part of the Americans years of research and experimentation to get the bomb to actually work. This is one example for the more efficient plutonium-based implosion bomb to actually split atoms and release energy. A sphere, studded with explosive charges surrounded the plutonium core and when it detonated, that explosion would compress the plutonium inside past criticality. Those charges had to be timed to the millisecond, meaning that the difference in the time it takes for an electrical current to travel 10 feet had to be factored in against the amount of time it took for electricity to travel 11 feet. And this was just one of the oceans of problems it had to be solved, and which had been solved. At great expense, through the work done on the Manhattan Project. And not just engineering issues, either, to the later amazement of Russian physicists, the American team had used the gaseous diffusion method of separating the necessary uranium isotopes. In fact, the very idea of using plutonium as the atomic core rather than uranium was one of the thousands of discoveries unknown to the Russians which had been methodically worked out in the New Mexican desert at Los Alamos. The size and the extent of these technical hurdles were so great that US intelligence analysts had predicted that the Soviets could not possibly replicate the plutonium bomb like the one named Gadget for the Trinity test firing at Los Alamos and Fatman, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Until 1953, at the absolute earliest. British analysis insisted it would be at least 1954, and many scientific advisors told President Harry Truman in 1946 that most likely, the technically backward Russians would not actually develop an atomic weapon until about 1960. Now these analyses were perfectly correct. Those were reasonable estimates of the time it would take the Soviets to discover the designs and procedures learned during the long years of the Manhattan Project. So you might have some idea of the shock and horror among Western leaders when a weather reporting US Air Force WB-29 detected the unmistakable traces of an above-the-stakeable ground plutonium explosion, not 1960 or 1954 or 1953, but rather on September 1, 1949 easily, four or five years before the most optimistic assessment. Be that as it may, two days before the West discovered the telltale plutonium isotopes, the Soviet Union had detonated RDS-1, a plutonium implosion bomb like Gadget and Fatman. This bomb too had a nickname, Prevaya Molnya, Russian for first lightning, astonished and mortified American analysts simply named it Joe-1. Both visually and internally, first lightning is virtually indistinguishable from Fatman. But how? How had Barious team been able to recreate the efforts of the Manhattan Project five years ahead of schedule? Well, the fact is that they didn't recreate the work done by the Americans at Los Alamos, that top secret, priceless data, was stolen by Barious Intelligence Service. You know, actually, that's not quite fair. Because Barious spies did not have to penetrate the tremendous security cordon put up by the United States surrounding the Manhattan Project. The secrets of the atomic bomb were in stolen. They were walked out of Los Alamos by American scientists with communist sympathies and simply handed to the Russians on a silver platter. That an active, efficient and extraordinarily successful Soviet spiring existed in America was a thesis vigorously denied by the American left for the entire duration of the Cold War. It took the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the eventual revelation of KGB internal documents to confirm what so many American intellectuals on the left had so loudly and passionately denied, namely, that many branches of the US government were filled with communist sympathizers as well as actual Soviet spies. Just as one of the most important things that happened in the US was that the Soviet Union On high profile example, Alger His, a high ranking State Department official pleaded innocent on charges of espionage and the prosecution of Alger His would be a staple of the left wing claim that no such network existed except in the minds of deranged and jingoistic American conservatives. The innocence of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted and executed in a case that rocked the country to its core, was another article of faith among American liberals. It took the archives of the KGB to finally show that all three and many others were actively and willingly handing over American top secret atomic designs and procedures. To a very large extent, the scientists and engineers being kept in various research city prisons didn't have to plumb the depths of subtle twists and unexpected conclusions won at such high cost during the Manhattan Project. They didn't have to come up with their own atomic bomb at all. For all intents and purposes, they were handed the blueprints of the American bomb and merely assembled it according to the instruction manual provided by people like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Now, Barrier did not deliver the bomb to Stalin in time for it to affect his decisions during the Berlin blockade, but it would absolutely be a major factor in his decision to support the first of the so-called proxy wars that would continue for the entire length of this Titanic struggle. It sometimes called the Forgotten War, sandwiched in between American triumph in World War II and the slow torture of Vietnam. But it wasn't something easily forgotten by the men who fought there, shivering through mountain passes by day and waking up terrified to the sounds of gongs and trumpets and screaming troops launching human wave attacks in the dark of the night. Korea was to Asia, what Germany had become to Europe, split down the middle, suddenly two separate countries, one in the eastern camp and one in the western one, with entire families separated by an invisible line and now each at the throat of the other. The relative positions of the Allied and Soviet armies at the time of Germany's surrender had become a set of ideological trenches running in an iron curtain across Europe. Now, likewise, the division of Korea, not into east and west as in Germany, but rather into north and south, marked the approximate location where the Red Army had encountered their ally, the American Navy, having clawed its way island by bloody island across the entire Pacific, a process that began at Pearl Harbor and ended with US troops facing Russian forces on the Korean peninsula. Having declared war on Japan two days after the bombing of Hiroshima and the day before the bombing of Nagasaki, Russian forces had swept down from the north to feast on the remains of the Japanese Empire blood white for more than a decade in China before finally being shattered by the US Navy and the United States Marine Corps. This contact took place close to 38 degrees north latitude and this artificial boundary called the 38th parallel, unlike longitude lines of latitude or parallel to each other, would sear itself into the minds of the men who had gone to fight both below and above it. As the post-World War II cooperation between the former allies continued to unravel, a former US ally in name at least went to Moscow to present Joseph Stalin with a proposal. Kim Il Sung had led the Korean Communist forces in the fight against the occupying army of Japan, but in the years after the war and the division of Korea at the 38th parallel, Kim was determined to reconquer the entire peninsula under his own communist leadership. Now this process began with North Korean insurgents testing the waters south of the 38th parallel agitating, sermonizing and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Kim interpreted the reactions to this infiltration or more precisely the lack of reaction as a sign of support from the South Korean people. And so Kim Il Sung, father to Kim Jong Il and grandfather of the current North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, found himself in March of 1949 sitting across from the emperor of half of the world. Joseph Stalin himself. Kim claimed that with Soviet logistical support, his North Korean forces could sweep the entire peninsula clear of the poorly led and poorly equipped South Korean army well before. The United States could recover from its massive post-World War II demobilization and get enough troops and armor across the Pacific to contest the invasion. But Kim was offering was a chance to not only secure the rear of the Soviet Union with a fully communist Korean peninsula, but also to bleed the Americans in a war that Kim assured Stalin they could not win. Stalin needed little convincing regarding America's aversion to another war. Despite the successful show of Western resolve that resulted in the Berlin airlift and the defeat of Stalin's Berlin blockade, Stalin had watched as the Chinese communist forces under Mao Zedong, methodically drove Chang Kai's shecks U.S.-backed nationalist forces right off of the Chinese mainland and onto the island of Formosa now known as Taiwan. If the Americans were willing to lose China, a staunch but weak American ally throughout the Pacific War, then Stalin could see no reason why they would fight to protect South Korea with whom they had no solid relationship and which was a far, far lesser strategic value. So Stalin considered his options. Berrius spies and technicians had just given him the atomic bomb dramatically altering the balance of power. And so Stalin decided that he would back Kim's gambit on the condition that Mao would also agree to reinforce the invasion if things went badly. A delighted Kim set sail for Beijing where he found the master of the people's liberation army by far, the largest standing army in the world, enthusiastically in favor of throwing the imperialist Americans completely off the Asian mainland. So Kim returned to Pyongyang and prepared to do exactly that. At dawn on Sunday, June 25, 1950, a massive artillery barrage erupted along the 38th parallel. Behind it followed wave after wave of the KPA, the Korean People's Army. The actual shooting started at the extreme western edge of the 38th parallel on the strategically important Hongjin Peninsula. Accounting North Korea's KPA was its South Korean equivalent, the rocks, the armies of the Republic of Korea. Kim is actually a deceptive word for the South Korean Army. Rock forces had no tanks, no anti-tank weapons, and no heavy artillery to stop the flood rushing down from the North all along the 38th parallel. Kim Ailsung claimed that the South had fired first, of course, and the invasion was merely an attempt to arrest and execute the person Kim called, the bandit trader, Sengman Ri, the leader of the South Korean government, who would become a thorn in the side of his allies long past the end of the conflict. On June 27, only two days after the fighting began, Ri and the South Korean government were forced to abandon the South Korean capital of Seoul. At 2 a.m. the next morning, June 28, the retreating South Korean forces blew up the Hangbang Bridge across the Han River in an attempt to slow the pursuing KPA. Here was the first instance of what this war was going to do to the Korean people. Because at the time the bridge was demolished, some 4,000 refugees were actually on the bridge, part of a seemingly endless stream of civilians fleeing the capital and advancing North Koreans. Hundreds of South Korean civilians died in that explosion. Despite this appalling sacrifice, Seoul fell later that same day. On June 28, it would also cost the communist a great deal of pain from that same day, Sengman Ri ordered the execution of his political opponents all across South Korea. Of the 300,000 communist sympathizers re-adherted into his re-education program known as the 'Bodo League', no less than 60,000 and perhaps as many as 200,000 were shot in the back of the head and buried in hastily bulldozed ditches. In addition to the commused invasion, this appalling massacre had been conducted by America's potential ally. With the United States not yet committed to the conflict, it was already clear that whatever the Korean War would turn out to be, it was not going to be the good guys versus the bad guys as it had been a mere five years earlier. The United States, with its attention locked into the center of Europe, had been caught completely by surprise. Just a few weeks before the invasion, the CIA had called the idea of an armed invasion "unlikely" on June 23, 1950. United Nations observers examined the entire border with the North Korea and did not detect anything alarming. But two days later, 10 infantry divisions of the Korean People's Army, almost 200,000 Chinese trained soldiers, swarmed across the 38th parallel supported by a tank division and a further Air Force division. Standing in their way were 65,000 combat troops from the Republic of Korea. With roughly twice the population of North Korea, there were 20 million South Koreans on the morning of the invasion, rock forces were nevertheless one-third the size of the North Korean troops committed to the attack and relative to the North Korean KPA forces. The units of the Republic of Korea were in a pitiful state of readiness. For example, in addition to 200,000 combat infantry, the KPA had 274 Soviet-made T-3485 tanks on balance the best tank of World War II. The rock forces from the South resisting them had not a single tank in their inventory, not one, and no anti-tank weapons whatsoever. While the North was supported by 114 fighters and 78 bombers, the South Korean Air Force totaled 22 aircraft. 12 of them were observation planes and the other 10 being 86 training aircraft, the venerable Texans that had taught thousands of American pilots the basics during World War II, but which were utterly obsolete by 1950 and, like the spotter aircraft that had no artillery to direct, they were utterly useless as well. There were US Army troops in South Korea at the time of the invasion a little over 200 of them. Unless or until the United States decided to commit to the Korean conflict, the communist soldiers of the KPA outnumbered American forces in Korea by literally a thousand to one. Now that meant that US President Harry Truman had some very important decisions to make and given the speed of the North Korean advance, he was going to have to make them very quickly. In the days when trying to escape responsibility was called passing the buck, Truman had famously placed a placard on his desk in the Oval Office that read, "The buck stops here." Whether or not to commit to the defense of South Korea was a complex and agonizing decision. There were strong arguments against it. In the five years since the end of World War II, the United States was just wrapping up the largest demilitarization in human history. There were large US garrison stationed in post-war Japan and while the Korean straight separating the two countries narrowed to only 120 miles, there was real doubt about whether or not those troops could be equipped, transported, and supplied before the Korean People's Army wiped South Korea from the map completely. Truman was also worried that the entire invasion might be a distraction on the part of the communist, a gigantic faint designed to tie down US troops in Asia, freeing the Soviets to invade Western Europe. And finally, there was the very real risk that Russia or China or both would fully commit their enormous land forces into the battlefield on their backyards while the US would have to move resources halfway around the planet. And on top of that, the Army, Air Force Marines, and US Navy that had done just that half a decade before no longer existed. Much of that US fleet was scattered across the American homeland in the form of new cars and razor blades, and the shiny aluminum that was once the signature of US aircraft had been in large part reduced to cans of coke and Pepsi. And since Korea had not been part of the Asian Defense perimeter outlined by Truman's Secretary of State, Dean Atchison, there were many, many, solid reasons to sit this one out. And not the least among them was the shock of discovering that the communists also had the A-BOMM, which the US was still reeling from a mere 10 months after it had been detected. But on the other hand, if the US did not commit to defend the Republic of South Korea, then Harry Truman would be in violation of the Truman Doctrine, which read in part. "But it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." While it had taken a while, the confront and contain policy advocated by George Kenan and the long telegram had become the official foreign policy of the United States ever since Harry Truman announced his intentions in a speech given to Congress on March 12, 1947. And there was also the brand new United Nations to consider. Nearly unanimous in their condemnation of the North Koreans, Russia and China, noticeably untainted by the outrage of it all, this would be the first test of the entire concept of the United Nations, and if it failed, it would certainly be the last test as well. But there were two even greater motivations to commit the United States and the UN to an all-out shooting war in Korea. The first of those was Japan itself. In August of 1945, Emperor Hirohito had spoken on the radio. It was the first time that the Japanese people had heard his voice, telling his nation that they would all have to endure the unendurable and suffer that which is not sufferable. Aside from a very small number of isolated incidents, the American occupiers were astonished at the respect, civility and cooperation they received from their bitterly hated mortal enemy, Japan. While the surrender had been unconditional, the Japanese had understood or at the very least hoped that the imperial family would remain intact if powerless. As it turned out, allowing the Japanese to keep their emperor turned out to be an exceedingly wise decision on the part of the United States, with the buck on that decision stopping at the same desk as the one that had just appeared from Korea. The Americans had traded the emperor of Japan for a peaceful occupation and reconstruction, and all things considered, it turned out to be a very, very good deal. And besides, what had really mattered in the end was that Japan now had a new emperor. In the person of the vain, flamboyant but brilliant general Douglas MacArthur, who alone it seemed, deeply understood that Japanese peoples need for authority, pomp and an alloof expectation of instant obedience. As a result of Douglas MacArthur's deep understanding of Japanese culture, the United States' treatment of Japan had in five short years turned it into what I consider to be the single greatest victory in the history of warfare, not for the defeat that had been inflicted, although God knows that had been as brutal as it was necessary. But rather, for the astonishing fact that America's bitterest foe had become virtually overnight, America's greatest ally in Asia, and it has remained so to the present day, at all costs, Truman had to protect the burgeoning promise of the Japanese experiment. But there was a yet more important consideration. Less than a year after the end of the Berlin airlift, Truman saw Stalin's hand and mouse behind the North Korean gambit. But if the United States was not willing to fight an armed communist invasion of Korea, then where would that line be drawn? Japan? Hawaii? San Francisco. President Truman's home state of Missouri, maybe. The Korean War turned out to be a bloody stalemate that resulted in nearly 50,000 dead Americans a long way from home, but if it had not been fought, the Cold War would have ended after three or four years. World War III would be over. Lost. All of the key American decision-makers had watched the world tear itself apart not only due to the megalomaniacal fantasies of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, but also due to the West's fatal unwillingness to stand up to such aggression. The image of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, grinning widely at the adoring crowd as he stepped out of his airplane, was one remembered with revulsion. Chamberlain had held up a piece of paper signed in Munich by Adolf Hitler, and he said, "We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German naval agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two people never to go to war with one another again." Later, in front of the Prime Minister's residence at Ten Downing Street, he reread the statement he had signed with Adolf Hitler, and this time he added, "My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep." That moment, that image of that elegant man in the morning jacket, standing with his umbrella, holding a loft, a promise from a man who had never and would never keep a promise in his entire life. That image was seared into the memory of that greatest generation. That, more than any other single consideration, was what was on Harry Truman's mind as he weighed the future of his country and the future of the free world. A transcript from a closed-door meeting with his security council around this time was declassified finally in 1975. Truman had told the NSC, "Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had ten, fifteen, and twenty years." years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores. If the communists were permitted to force their way into the Republic of Korea without opposition from the free world, no small nation would have the courage to resist threat and aggression by stronger communist neighbors. So Harry Truman did what Harry Truman seemed to do best. He made a decision, a tough decision, that was with 2020 hindsight clearly the correct decision. But now the question was, would South Korea still be on the map by the time the United Nations led by the United States could arrive to stem the tide? The total South Korean rock forces numbered 95,000 men on the morning of the invasion from the North, five days later, only 22,000 exhausted, frightened, and under armed men remained. The United States had traded in the most powerful military in the world for an atomic air force. It wasn't just a problem of getting men and airplanes and tanks to Korea. It was a problem getting the men and airplanes and tanks at all. And it wasn't just war material. Truman needed to secure political support as well. The Republicans had just retaken both the House and the Senate for the first time since the early 1930s. Truman and the Republicans had been locked in an ongoing bitter political brawl. And now Truman essentially had to go head in hand to a hostile Congress to get support for something the American conservatives despised with a passion, a land war in Asia. But there was something that they hated worse, and that was communism. This wasn't about treaties or promises. A communist dictators army had invaded and was overrunning a free republic. A free republic representing the will of the South Korean people themselves. Despite the unsavory nature of Sigmund Rhee and his methods, South Korea was in fact a democracy, and that democracy was being rolled back by what seemed to be an unstoppable red tide. Truman got his votes, although not for a declaration of war. This conflict would be known as a police action, and the semantics of that alone would determine the half-in, half-out nature on both sides of these proxy wars with the Soviet Union. Secretary of State Dean Acheson recommended that overall command be given to MacArthur, whose Japan-based forces would make up much of the needed troop commitment. Truman agreed with reluctance for reasons that will soon reveal themselves. The anti-communist Chinese nationalist on Formosa actually petitioned Truman to let them join in the Korean fight. Truman declined, fearing it would provoke Mao's communist forces to enter the war on the side of the North. Immediate, full-scale bombing of North Korea with conventional weapons was proposed, but Truman declined that as well. This was a new type of war. The measured response, the lack of total commitment, the police action. Ten days after the North Korean assault, the first US troops were thrown into the fight. 540 men from the 24th Infantry Division were organized into a unit called Task Force Smith. On July 5, 1950, Task Force Smith counter-attacked KPA forces at Osan, just south of Seoul. At 7.30am, the US troops spotted a column of 8 North Korean T-34 tanks. They called in what limited artillery they had on hand, but the North Korean tanks simply sailed on serenely unaffected by the barrage. As the tanks grew closer, the Americans opened fire with bazookas, but these two seemed to bounce off of the Korean tanks that had been caught streaming south after the fleeing rock army. As the KPA armor rolled past Task Force Smith's forward positions, the American GIs discovered to their anger and their horror that their anti-tank weapons could not penetrate even the rear armor of the T-34, which was far thinner than the armor up front. Like so much else in the Western Superpowers inventory, the explosives had deteriorated with age, either failing to detonate or firing with greatly reduced impact. Peace-time defense cutbacks had kept the newer M28A2 bazookas capable of reaching even the front of the T-34s armor out of the hands of the men of Task Force Smith. Low on ammunition, the Americans began to withdraw, which has always proven to be the deadliest part of any battle. It was no different here. Underarmed and under-trained, the fleeing American soldiers were no match for the cracked North Korean troops. And there was another difference between these two forces. As the retreat started to turn into a route, C Company's second platoon did not get the order to fall back. Now most of them managed to escape with several GIs were on stretchers badly wounded, and since there was no time to evacuate them, a medic volunteered to remain behind and stay with the wounded as they were forced to surrender. A short time later, the wounded men were discovered shot to death while still in the litters. Other soldiers, with hands tied behind their backs, had been shot in the back of the head. The courageous medic was never seen again. This was the kind of war that this would turn out to be. The Korean People's Army continued to roll south, driving the 24th Division back as it advanced. In the town of Taichon, they dug in and tried to hold, but the KPA continued its astonishingly effective offensive. 3,602 Americans would die at Taichon, roughly, the total member of US killed during the entire Iraq War. 2,962 more had been captured and would undergo a new kind of hell at the hands of the Korean Communists. By early August, the entire US 8th Army was falling back all along the peninsula as the North Korean wave rolled on seemingly unstoppable. Truman's earlier draconian cuts to the defense budget was now bearing bitter fruit for the US forces long accustomed to being the most well-supplied army in the world. In a seemingly endless series of rear-guard actions, the 8th Army did what it could to slow the KPA advance. But not only were they running out of time, they were running out of Korea. The KPA pushed on executing untold South Korean civilians in their wake until finally the entire Korean Peninsula was bright red with the exception of a tiny blue island to the southeast, isolated perimeter around the port city of Busan. Here at Busan, the battered and bloodied ground forces which had retreated for virtually the entire length of the South Korean Peninsula began to benefit from the power of US combined arms dispatched from Japan. The US Air Force flew 40 sorties a day, interdicting KPA supply lines by bombing North Korean logistics centers, petroleum refineries, and fuel depots. Air-based naval aviation hit KPA assembly points in convoys. In the span of a week or two, the North Koreans went from being an unstoppable assault force to a badly weakened army that simply could not move by daylight so pervasive and lethal was the American air cover. And all the time, day by day, more and more US troops and supplies arrived from Japan. American tanks began to be delivered to the port of Busan directly from San Francisco by the end of August, the American genius for logistics really began to be felt. By that time, there were 500 US tanks inside the Busan perimeter. When the war had begun on June 25, 2000, North Korean troops faced 65,000 rock soldiers without tanks or the means to stop them. And 250 or so US soldiers. But by early September, occupation garrisons and battle losses had cut the KPA force in half to about 100,000 exhausted troops. And facing them now, were 180,000 UN troops, most of them American, and they had done enough running. After the total surprise at the end of June by early September, the US Army and Marine Corps was ready to fight for real. The North Koreans had made the same calculations as the Germans had in World War One and that the Japanese had made in World War Two and that scores of armies in hundreds of battles had made namely. Could they win the war quickly enough for it to be over before the enemy rebuilt their strength after the initial surprise assault? What had been North Korea's greatest triumph now became their worst liability. They had pushed their army to the very tip of the peninsula virtually all of Korea was theirs. But like so many armies before them, they were not able to finish the job. The American army stepped southward, had lengthened their supply lines and shortened those of the UN. Strung out, overextended and far from home, the North Koreans began to get hungry, both for food and additional ammunition. American Air Force and Navy pilots had severed the slender supply thread winding all the way back to Pyongyang. The Americans and their UN allies certainly did not win the war at Busan, but they're stand in the Busan pocket meant that there was no longer any serious chance of them losing it. and then the Thunderbolt hit. In terms of both strategy and execution, it was MacArthur's finest hour. Kim Il Sung had naturally expected U.S. reinforcements to head to Pusan. But MacArthur was not headed to the southeast. Still out at sea, MacArthur's army, Marines, and rock forces were heading in the opposite direction. They were heading northwest. On September 15, MacArthur unleashed Operation Chromite, the amphibious landing of 75,000 U.N. troops at the furthest possible point from the embattled Pusan perimeter. Achieving total surprise, the U.N. troops waited up Po Hang Beach completely unopposed at the coastal city of Incheon. And just like that, the Korean War turned upside down. Douglas MacArthur and 75,000 revenge-minded troops were now astride the North Korean supply lines some 200 miles to the rear of the KPA Communist forces surrounding the Pusan perimeter. Cleanly decapitated by MacArthur's masterstroke, their lines of supply, communication, and retreat block that Incheon, just west of Seoul, the North Korean forces had taken a brutal right uppercut to the chin. The day after the Incheon landing, September 16, the Americans followed up with a smashing left hook as the beleaguered and surrounded U.N. forces in the Pusan pocket broke out with a vengeance. Smashed at both ends of their South Korean conquest, the KPA forces simply collapsed. In less than a month, the Korean War took on the aspect of a film being run backwards and run backwards at high speed, no less, as the former victors now retreated in panic. North Korean forces not annihilated and battled desperately thought their way back to what they thought would be, the safety of the North side of the 38th parallel. Very few of them made it, some 25,000 stragglers of the 200,000 man strong invasion managed to limp across the border back into North Korea. By September 25, Seoul was back in the hands of the South Koreans, and the stunned survivors from the North Korean army now hunkered down on their side of the border that they had overrun so easily, barely three months before. Four days after the recapture of Seoul, MacArthur in his inimitable fashion, grandly declared that the South Korean Republic had been restored. The next day, September 30, the American Caesar received what he had been long waiting for, a telegram, but this wasn't a telegram, this was the telegram. It was a top secret, eyes only message from Washington, written by Truman's Defense Secretary George Marshall, and it read, "In part, we want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel." There in his hands was what he'd been waiting for and argued for since the war began. Not only had UN forces retaken all of South Korea, now MacArthur was clutching his permission slip to turn the tables completely and knocked North Korea off the map. By October 1st, UN forces were north of the border at the 38th parallel, the North Koreans continuing to retreat with MacArthur hot on their heels. The counterattack included amphibious landings in the North Korean towns of Wonsan and Risan, the troops coming ashore in both cases to discover that South Korean forces had already captured both locations in their lightning advance up the mainland. On October 19th, a month and two days after the Incheon landing, and less than three weeks after recapturing the South Korean capital at Seoul, the North Korean capital of Pyongyang surrendered to UN forces. The Korean War was over, won, and then the second Thunderbolt struck. Back in early August, long before the recapture of South Korea to say nothing about the invasion of the North, the Communist Chinese dictator Mao Zedong had decided to intervene. The presence of a battle-hardened, victorious Western army at his back door was intolerable from both the military and propaganda viewpoint, and the active and aggressive presence of the United States Navy had derailed his greatly cherished invasion of Formosa and the elimination of the much-hated nationalist Chinese forces forever. Watching as the American Air Force in Navy had chewed up the KPA forces before MacArthur spat them out, Mao had decided to enter the war if Stalin would guarantee Soviet air cover. Stalin agreed. On October 15th, just before the fall of Pyongyang, MacArthur had been summoned by Truman to Washington for consultation. In an appalling act of insubordination, MacArthur refused to go, but added he would be willing to meet the President of the United States at the American base on Wake Island. And Truman obliged him, but this was not something to be soon forgotten. At the conference on Wake, MacArthur told Truman that there was now very little chance that China would intervene. The time for intervention had passed he argued, adding that since Pyongyang was about to fall, any Chinese Communist army bold enough to march by the light of day would be easily smashed by US air power. Truman wasn't so sure, and while having long grown tired of arguing with Douglas MacArthur, there seemed to be no arguing with Douglas MacArthur's results. The President advised caution regarding the Chinese border with Korea, then climbed back into his airplane and returned to Washington. MacArthur had been right about it being suicidal for the Chinese to march into Korea by the light of day. But Mao had spent most of his life as a guerrilla leader, did not march into Korea by light of day the 200,000 men Chinese army marched into Korea by dark of night. Traveling from dark to dark, marching from around 7 or 8 at night till about 3 30 AM, then spending the day under masses of camouflage netting, this huge force managed to enter North Korea by crossing the Yalu River on October 19th, just four days after MacArthur had dismissed this exact move in his conference with Truman on Wake Island. Initial Soviet air cover promised by Stalin proved meager at best, but Mao didn't seem to be too distressed about that. However, the Soviet air cover picked up dramatically after China began their first base offensive on October 25th, smashing South Korean forces at Amjong. One week later, Chinese and American forces first engaged each other at Unshan. Shocked by their apparent materialization from thin air and further unnerved by the assaulting tactics of the Chinese Communist, the US forces retreated. And the Chinese strangely enough chose not to pursue them and simply melted away into the mountain passes, but not for long. On November 27th, multiple Chinese forces launched their second phase offensive, converging on US forces at the Chosen Reservoir. What followed was one of the most wrenching battles in US history, a 17-day slugfest in sub-zero weather. 120,000 Chinese troops had surrounded 30,000 UN troops and was sustaining heavy losses as they unsuccessfully tried to grind out the UN forces that had started to refer to themselves as the Chosen few, but it wasn't enough. Troops from the US Army 10th Corps set up a perimeter and the result was a well-managed, successful tactical withdrawal largely by sea. During the evacuation of the Chosen Reservoir, a World War II Liberty ship, the SS Meredith Victory and her crew, managed to pull off the largest number of people saved by a single ship. 14,000 soldiers rode the ship of miracles to freedom, which by itself is an impressive number. The miraculous part is that it managed to save 14,000 lives with a passenger capacity of 12 people. 12. It was such a strange war. Although it went on for three grinding years, virtually all of the action was over in the first five months, as UN, Chinese, and North Korean forces ebbed back and forth across the 38th parallel, finally ending in a World War I style trench stillmate. After he'd been caught napping by the Chinese intervention, MacArthur argued vehemently for the use of American tactical nuclear weapons against Chinese air and land bases, which continued to supply both the North Koreans and their own troops from seemingly politically untouchable bases across the Yellow River in China proper. MacArthur, who during World War II, has slogged his way up from Port and Wars B-Tamanila over three long years simply could not understand how the United States could be in a war that would go on to cost 50,000 American lives and still not commit to total victory. MacArthur's solution to the Korean conflict was to invade China and supported by nuclear weapons dictate surrender terms in Beijing the way he had dictated them in Tokyo. But it had become a different world. The communists now had the A-BOM and Truman too cautious to go for the win, decided to settle on a tie. MacArthur was relieved of command for insubordination, one article of which was his vocal insistence that he, as theater commander, should decide whether or not to deploy nuclear weapons and not the president. And so the Korean War dragged on. Moral fell lower and lower, although the elevation of the immensely popular Matthew Ridgeway, as MacArthur's replacement certainly provided a much needed boost. In World War II, Ridgeway had been in command as the 82nd Division was converted to the 82nd Airborne Division. America's first all-perish-you-dust unit, and he was on the front lines during the last gas-German offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge. In order to reinstall the natural fighting spirit of U.S. troops, Ridgeway made a point of never being seen without two live grenades clipped to a shirt pockets. This aggressive, gun-host style earned him the love and admiration of his men, as well as the nickname "Tin Tits." But two years of bloody stalemate had thoroughly soured the American people on Korea a sneak peek of a much bigger drama yet to come. Harry Truman, the sitting president, withdrew his candidacy after losing the 1952 New Hampshire Democratic primary to Tennessee Senator Estee's Kevhover. The American people wanted out of Korea. Two world wars, one great depression and one still-mated police action in one lifetime was enough for even the greatest generation. Republican Dwight David Eisenhower Ike, who'd commanded the Allied Forces in Europe, projected the serene confidence of a man who had delivered America victory in the biggest war of all time. He handily blew out the egghead Democratic nominee Adelae Stevenson by an electoral count of 442 to 89. There would be a rematch four years later. Ike whipped him even more badly in 1956, beating Stevenson by 457 electoral votes versus 73 for the Democrat. America would retreat into Hulu Hoops and jet-age pins on the back of streamlined Cadillacs and would spend the next decade and more fighting worldwide communism from the bombshelter in the backyard. Eisenhower got an armistice that halted the fighting in Korea, although technically speaking, North and South Korea continued to be officially at war to this day. The Korean War would become the most destructive conflict in the history of post-World War 2 Asia. Three million Koreans died as a result of Kim Il Sung's delusions. That's more than either the Chinese Civil War and the Vietnam War yet to come. On a per capita basis, the Koreans suffered a greater percentage of their population killed than even the Russians had in World War II seemingly a thousand years before. And while the UN forces in Korea were made up from such diverse countries as Great Britain, Colombia, Turkey, Australia, Belgium, Ethiopia, and many others, over 90% of the non-Korean combat deaths suffered by the United Nations forces had been American servicemen. 33,686 Americans were killed in battle during the Korean War. That number had been 8,516 killed until coming into contact with the Chinese. The Chinese themselves now admit to 183,108 of their soldiers killed in combat during the Korean War. Combined with the appalling losses among both North and South Korean civilians, a lot of blood had been shed in order to end the war with both sides in exactly the same positions as they were when it began. So take a moment when you can, as I do, to remember the men who fought and died in the forgotten war. When it was all said and done, containment had worked, and their sacrifice freed millions and millions of ordinary people from the curse that communism would inflict on millions more who'd not been so lucky. The Cold War, what we saw, is written and presented by Bill Whittle, produced by Robert Sterling, directed by Jonathan Hay. Executive producer is Jeremy Boring. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our associate producer is Katie Swinerton. Post-production producer Alex Singaro, story producer Jared Sashel, edited by Matthew Scheller, audio recorded by Mike Koromina, original music and mixed by Kyle Perrin, designed by Cynthia Angulo. The Cold War, what we saw, is an esoteric radio theater production copyright, esoteric radio theater 2020.