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Excessive American use of firepower in Korea during the Korean War

One of the books written during the Korean War that criticized excessive American use of firepower in Korea was called The Hidden History of the Korean War. One of the several charges that its author, I. F. Stone, contended against the United States was that the U.N. Command had demonstrated "a complete indifference to the welfare of non-combatants through its policies of bombing and village destruction." Stone argued that American bombing had ignored Truman's instructions to strike only specific military targets when necessary. Stone condemned "the scorched earth policy that U.N. forces had implemented in their retreat from the Chinese. He asserted that the military's press releases substantiated these charges of indiscriminate destruction. Stone pointed to the Air Force's claimed destruction of Sinuiju and the Navy's extensive shelling of Wonsan."

Conway-Lanz, Sahr (2006). Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-97828-6.

[forgottenhistoryofwar]

Protection of Civilians (PoC) in Armed Conflict

Specific mention of civilians as a protected class in international humanitarian law (IHL) would wait until after World War II.

The Fourth Geneva Convention introduced an entirely new body of law on the protection of civilians in time of war.

[forgottenhistoryofwar]

The International Norm of Noncombatant Immunity

At its core, noncombatant immunity has been the belief that individuals not directly participating in war should and could be protected from it.

Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, a series of international conventions on the conduct of war gave formal legal sanction to aspects of the general custom of noncombatant immunity.

In the early 1950s, a new American interpretation of noncombatant immunity emerged which incorporated elastic definitions of a "military target" in war, but more significantly made intent the dividing line between justifiable and unjustifiable action.

In the Korean War, as the war became more destructive, an expansive definition of what constituted a "military target" helped to sustain optimistic American views of the war. The vague distinction between military and civilian segments of an enemy society allowed American military and civilian officials to stretch the term "military target" to include virtually every human-made structure in North Korea.

The notion of atrocity for Americans had shrunk.

What precisely constituted a “military target,” and how much of the enemy’s society would be left immune from attack would undergo a transformation as the Korean War continued, but the division between combatant and noncombatant elements would remain.

[forgottenhistoryofwar]

The new and unprecedented American military-industrial complex that arose in the 1950s is a forgotten legacy of the Korean War

In 2015, the amount spent by the United States on defense was approximately 10 times that of Russia and greater than the total defense expenditure of Russia, China, Japan, the UK, France, Saudi Arabia, and India....combined.

In 2005, an eminent military historian made the alarming observation that "by some calculations, the United States spends more on defense than all other nations in the world together."

[forgottenhistoryofwar]

A "Forgotten War" that Remade the United States and the Cold War

Quotes from The Korean War: A History (2010)

The Korean War may be forgotten or unknown to the general public, but it was the occasion for transforming the United States into a country that the founding fathers would barely recognize: one with hundreds of permanent military bases abroad, a large standing army, and a permanent national security state at home.

Americans assume that the Vietnam War is far more important, but the Korean War had an enormous refractory effect back upon the United States, including American foreign policy and interventions abroad.

KENNAN AND ACHESON

Korea was a critical presence in American policy at the dawn of the Cold War. The Truman administration identified its stake in Korea in the same “fifteen weeks” in which the containment doctrine and the Marshall Plan were hammered out.

Dean Acheson, then undersecretary of state, and George Marshall, the new secretary of state, reoriented American policy away from the Pentagon’s idea that the Korean peninsula had no strategic significance, toward seeing its value in the context of rebuilding the Japanese economy and applying the containment doctrine to South Korea—in George Kennan’s original, limited meaning of using economic and military aid and the resources of the United Nations to prop up nations threatened by communism.

It was at this time, in early 1947, that Washington finally got control of Korea policy from from the Pentagon and the occupation, the effect was essentially to ratify the de facto containment policies against the Korean left wing that the occupation had been following since September 1945.

Around the same time, Acheson remarked in secret Senate testimony that the United States had drawn the line in Korea, and sought funding for a major program to turn back communism there on the model of “Truman Doctrine” aid to Greece and Turkey.

However, Congress and the Pentagon balked at a major commitment to Korea ($600 million was the State Department’s figure, compared to the $225 million for Greece and Turkey that Congress approved in June 1947), and so Acheson and his advisers took the problem to the United Nations, thus to reposition and contain Korea through collective security mechanisms.

So Kim Il Sung attacked in June 1950, hoping to unify Korea, and quickly dispatched the Southern army and government. That led the United States to intervene to reestablish the Republic of Korea, essentially under a containment doctrine commitment that was three years old by then.

That goal was nearly accomplished in late September, three months into the war, but in the meantime Truman and Acheson had decided to roll back the Northern regime as part of a general offensive against communism, exemplified by NSC 68 in April 1950.

The defeat of American and allied forces in North Korea by Chinese and Korean peasant armies in the early winter of 1950 caused the worst crisis in U.S. foreign relations between 1945 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, led Truman to declare a national emergency, and essentially “demolished” the Truman administration.

The Korean War was the crisis that, in Acheson's subsequent words, "came along and saved us"; by that he meant that it enabled the final approval of NSC 68 and passage through Congress of a quadrupling of American defense spending.

More than that, it was this war and not World War II that occasioned the enormous foreign military base structure and the domestic military-industrial complex to service it and which has come to define the sinews of American global power ever since.

[forgottenhistoryofwar]

"The Most Disproportionate Result": The Air War in Korea

Quotes from The Korean War: A History (2012)

What hardly any Americans know or remember is that we carpet-bombed North Korea for three years, with next to no concern for civilian casualties.

The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea (not counting 32,557 tons of napalm), compared to 503,000 to 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific War 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 18 out of twenty-two major cities were obliterated. A partial table looks like this:

Pyongyang, 75% Chongjin, 65% Hamhung, 80% Hungnam, 75% Sariwon, 90% Sinanju, 100% Wonsan, 80%

It was an application and elaboration of the air campaigns against Japan and Germany, except that North Korea was a small Third World country that had lost control of the air to the United States within days of the war's start.

Whereas German fighter planes and antiaircraft batteries made these allied bombing runs harrowing, with high loss of life among British and American pilots and crew, American pilots had virtual free-fire zones until later in the war, when formidable Soviet MIGs were deployed.

Curtis LeMay subsequently said that he had wanted to burn down North Korea's big cities at the inception of the war, but the Pentagon refused — "it's too horrible. So over a period of three years, he went on:

We burned down every [sic] town in North Korea and South Korea, too....

To take just one example of these "limited" raids, on July 11, 1952, an "all-out assault" of Pyongyang involved 1,254 air sorties by day and 54 B-29 assaults by night, the prelude to bombing thirty other cities and industrial objectives under "operation PRESSURE PUMP." Highly concentrated incendiary bombs were followed up with delayed demolition explosives.

As another official American history put it:

So, we killed civilians, friendly civilians, and bombed their homes, fired whole villages with the occupants—women and children and ten times as many hidden Communist soldiers—under showers of napalm, and the pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do.

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 Nazi’s campaign of terror in Poland and the Ukraine. Apart from this astonishing distortion, note the logic: they are savages, so that gives us the right to show 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.

He was wrong, just as he had been in World War II, but that did not stop the Air Force from spending the same mindless and purposeless destruction in Vietnam. Saturation bombing war snot 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, ethnically, 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.