Current crisis on Korean peninsula reminds us of our involvement there, and elsewhere. by Billy Roper
(libertarian)
Friday, May 28, 2010
North Koreans have torpedoed and sunk a South Korean naval ship, with the loss of 46 South Korean lives. The U.S. is leveraging (or pleading with) China into exerting influence on North Korea to stand down. For this Memorial Day weekend, let's think about how this came to be...
Many readers of Nolan Chart are not old enough to remember the Korean War of 1950 to 1953. I was born during the Nixon administration, so I was not around for it either. However, one learns a valuable lesson when studying the "forgotten war" as it is commonly called by those who were of age to remember it, and is, ironically, still going on at the day of this writing.
The war on the Korean peninsula in east Asia never ended in a formal peace deal; it stopped from a truce, a cease-fire called in late July of 1953, and the line where the two combatants faced each other has become the most reinforced area in the world. Known as the "de-militarized zone" or DMZ, this strip of land barely a half mile wide stretching across the Korean peninsula for about two hundred miles is marked by mine fields, barbed wire, tank traps, observation towers, lots of concrete bunkers filled with guns and ammunition and most likely deadly weapons of greater menace. It is all set up to keep the Republic of South Korea from being over-run by the communists of the Peoples Democratic Republic of North Korea, led by a fanatical little guy named Kim Jong Il.
How did the Korean War come to be, you ask? It came along from the evil mind of the Soviet bolshevist tyrant Josef Stalin, who escaped annihilation by German forces in World War Two with the help of the United States. Stalin was the only one of the "Big Three" to remain in a seat of power after the end of the second world war; the U.S. president, Franklin Roosevelt, had died; the British leader, Winston Churchill, had retired, but Josef Stalin was still head of Russia and the Soviet Union, climbing out of the rubble of its cities from the German onslaught. Realizing his position, he commenced to harass the "west" however possible in the name of destroying its democracy and strengthening Marxist bolshevism to rule the world.
However, the Soviet hand on the Korean peninsula was nearly invisible except for its small weaponry. The much more visible threat was from Red China.
With the defeat of Japan in 1945, its military was forced from China and off the Korean peninsula, which it had ruled since about 1910. The decision was made by the "Big Three" - the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain - to divide Korea into two parts, north and south, along the 38th parallel line, with the United States governing the south while the Soviet Union oversaw the north until a political solution could be agreed to for a single Korea. The peace was never a stable one, however, since a steady stream of agents trained by the Soviets were flowing down into the south, destabilizing the region through political insurgency and social unrest. When the north's leader, Kim Il Sung, father of the current regime's head, thought his power was sufficient, he asked Stalin to approve an attack across the parallel line into the south to overtake it in the name of communism. Stalin gave the green light in the spring of 1950.
The attack was swift and strong in the early morning of June 25, with small units of United Nations forces (mostly composed of American troops) being completely surprised and offering scant resistance to Russian tanks and mobile artillery. They retreated for their lives in front of it and called for help from a town named Pusan in the southeast corner of Korea while the forces of the north ravaged the south and closed in around them.
The summer of 1950 was a frustrating one for the United States. It had to call out the draft, military conscription, for its young men in the midst of enjoying a good deal of prosperity from its victory in World War Two. Young American men were ready to start making a life for themselves after fighting in the forests of Europe, the cities of Germany, the islands of the Pacific and other lands. Jobs and money were easily had, and they had little interest in fighting for a place named Korea.
No matter. The U.S. Army, along with a sprinkling of United Nations troops, was thrown into the task of pushing the North Koreans from South Korea. They made little gain trying to fight out of the trap called "the Pusan Perimeter" as it grew smaller by the day. A daring military plan created by the American general named Douglas MacArthur, leader of the U.S. military's Pacific operations during the Second World War, to split the Korean peninsula into two at the parallel line was given the go-ahead. The U.N. forces offered token resistance to the North Korean forces in the south over the summer of 1950.
In mid-September, U.S. Marines launched an amphibious landing on the west coast of the peninsula, landing west of the South Korean city of Seoul and driving inland to meet the North Koreans with firepower. They met scattered resistance and took the city of Seoul in under a week. From there, they drove east with the U.S. Army, following the parallel line as closely as possible and capturing tens of thousands of North Koreans. General MacArthur held a ceremony and gave the capitol city of Seoul back to the South Koreans.
Seeing the small amount of resistance it offered, MacArthur decided to move his forces north into the communist country and punish the North Korean regime for its aggression on the south as the autumn grew colder.
One major event of the post-World War Two period was the fall of China to the communists in October 1949. A long-fought war between the Nationalist Chinese led by General Chaing-Kai Shek, who was supported by the United States, and by the red communists led by Mao Tse-Tung, came to its end when Mao was welcomed into the capitol city, Peking, on October 1 as Chaing and his ministers fled to Taiwan, where they live to this day. This is the reason that you might see labels on some products that state, "made in Taiwan, R.O.C." meaning "Republic of China", emphacising the government that fled the communists back then.
As MacArthur and his forces pushed northward up the Korean peninsula, the Red Chinese saw the events with concern and spread the word for "volunteers" to help their comrades in North Korea repel the "Imperialists" from America. Fully one and a half million "volunteers" answered the call to serve and the war for the U.N. and American forces changed for the worse in early November 1950.
Wave after wave of Chinese soldiers washed over the U.N. troops on North Korea battlefields over the winter of 1950 and 1951. I can recall some talks I had with several veterans of the Korean "conflict', including my stepfather, who relayed their images to me of machine gun barrels sagging from the heat, pouring endless rounds of 50 caliber fire down hillsides at oncoming Chinese communist troops. The gunners would pee on the barrels trying to keep them cool enough, or thaw them out from the sub-zero cold, one way or another, from one extreme to the other. The guns would keep firing, but the waves of Chinese would keep coming, with no letting up after darkness fell. The Chinese would mount sneak attacks nightly, following the signal of bugles or tin whistles, rolling over hillsides to catch the American troops unaware. Pursuant to communist ideology of little regard for the individual, each Red Chinese soldier would carry a cheaply made Soviet machine gun with one ammo magazine in it. When his ammunition was expended, he was expected to fight with his hands -and that is how many an American soldier confronted the enemy - hand to hand combat.
Most American soldiers and marines who were taken prisoner over 1950 and early 1951 by the communists (either North Koreans or Chinese) perished in captivity, mostly from exposure to bitter cold Siberian temperatures along with starvation. Prison camps were crudely constructed around the border region between Korea and China, and in Manchuria. The Asians treated the "western" U.N. troops no better than animals, and they especially enjoyed torturing and killing American prisoners. Only when the United Nations discovered that the prisoners were being held in those conditions did the Chinese step in to oversee the prison camps from the North Koreans. However, prison conditions improved little for the Americans and they remained like that until later than July of 1953.
The American and U.N. troops were driven back south to below the parallel line during 1951 and the Korean War became rather a tug-of-war all along the geographic map line. South Korea's capitol city, Seoul, changed hands several times over the next two years, with brutal battles of house-to-house fighting every time to regain it back again. Military campaigns were waged crossing over both sides of the line, and each advance was pushed back by one side or the other. When the "cease fire" was declared in effect in late July 1953, the border became the places where North Koreans faced American and U.N. troops, and it remains the "border" today. Prisoner exchanges were held along the DMZ but nearly ten thousand American troops remain missing in action from the war.
I ask all the readers of this column to keep in mind that history which I relay to you the next time you go shopping for your favorite name brands. When you see that label staring back at you that reads, "made in China" or "made in Viet Nam", don't forget to consider how those who make that item viewed you and me at one time not long ago. You can take the easy way out and state that those days are long-gone, but you'd be surprised at how much those peoples retain their past in the present. As recently as 1976, when asked why his country offered the level of material support to the Vietnamese communists fighting the American-backed government there, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai declared, "because we hate them and we seek to defeat them both inside and outside Vietnam."
This statement came from the same man who helped Deng Ziaoping, the creator of modern China, wage the war on the Korean peninsula.
If you choose to go without an item of convenience that is certainly made in China or made in Vietnam, then you are showing your support for your country. Far better would be effort made to obtain that item from a local or domestic source; perhaps a local man or woman who can sew clothes who would be open to making a garment for you in his or her spare time while you used or wore the old one. Or the local guy who can build furniture making you that desk or table you need or want.
This is the kind of situation our nation and our people face today, the laws and the rules offering our domestic industries protection from unfair competition and price wars now a thing of the past. Meanwhile, that foreign competition takes all of the advantages given it to destroy our country, our economy and our people.
Fight back, you American! Fight for your life, your country, your future! The goons in countries that hate America see it to their advantage the favors that the U.S. government did them by refusing to initiate tariffs and trade barriers to help our industries and businesses. Therefore, we must take the initiative and change our lifestyles and our habits to nurture our domestic producers, our domestic industries and our own people. If you call yourself an American, doing that would be easy and enjoyable for you.
(For a good primer on the Korean War, the film titled, "Pork Chop Hill" depicts the conflict well. It is available on videotape and DVD. Other films on the Korean War are available in documentary form through popular television networks.)
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