Commentary

Remembering The Korean War

By Gerard Arthur Sheehan

On June 25 our nation will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. It was a so-called “police action” to which the United States committed its resources in an effort to halt the  spread of Communist aggression on the Korean peninsula and in the northern Pacific area. Both South Korea and Japan were sovereign nations under the sphere of America’s protective influence. Ultimately 16 countries sent forces to fight in Korea alongside the United States in affirmation of the United Nations Security Council’s stand. This war became the first full-scale clash of the Cold War!

It began without warning on Sunday morning, June 25, 1950, when a militarily superior North Korea under the tyrant-dictator Kim II Sung, as an ideological client of two Communist super-powers, Soviet Russia and Red China (the latter flush from its victory the year before over Nationalist China) sliced quickly over its 38th Parallel border with South Korea and in two days captured the capital city of Seoul, sending thousands of fleeing civilians and demoralized South Korean defenders southward. If positive action did not come from outside, assuredly the whole of South Korea would have fallen swiftly and Communism would have stood threateningly on the shores overlooking the tip of Japan.

Those were days when militant Communism was fully prepared to challenge the West and aggressively bully any free nation without the means to defend itself. The example had already been set in Europe even as World War II hostilities had just ceased.

In Korea, however, President Truman took a firm stand and to the surprise of global Communism ordered American forces to the defense of the South Koreans, first by use of Air and Naval forces, then followed days later by the introduction of US ground troops out of their stations in Japan. The North Korean invasion took Allied forces by complete surprise and those troops sent into action from occupational duties in Japan were vastly overwhelmed in terms of troop strength and materials. America had so drastically demobilized following its victory over Germany and Japan in World War II that its remaining forces on all tactical levels were reduced to bare minimums. Not for the first time in our nation’s history did we then have to urgently rebuild our military structure in the face of overt aggression.

Until then our Army in Japan was comprised largely of young men like myself who enlisted in the regular Army for travel and educational opportunities, along with a small cadre of professionals who continued to remain on active duty. The latter proved to be a great stabilizing influence, and I shall forever be in the debt of those with whom I served.

It is with a strong sense of personal pride that I recall my service as a soldier of the First Cavalry Division, ordered to South Korea in July of 1950 with two other under-strength divisions out of Japan, the 24th and 25th US Army Divisions. It was young men from the 24th who were the first to arrive and as small elements attempted to check the advance of the North Korean Peoples Army (NKPA). Many of these units were devastated in the process.

My own experience in that war, which went through various phases before it was ended by a truce in July of 1953, encompassed the period from July of 1950 to April 1951. The first five months were both a “holding action” and a “break out” from behind a last-ditch defense line, the Pusan Perimeter, a small corner in southeastern Korea around the port of Pusan surrounded by mountains and the Naktong River. It was from behind that position in September of 1950, prior to the strike by the Marines and the Army’s Seventh Division at Inchon, that Eighth Army Commander General Walton Walker ordered henceforth there would be no further withdrawals and that a “Dunkirk” -like stand would be the order of the day. Indeed there was little else left to retreat into in any event.

That early period especially was marked by some of the war’s most bitter fighting for survival, and by viciousness rarely seen before by American men at arms. The very “fluid” nature of the fighting in those early months, distinguished by the fact that due to limited manpower there could be no frontlines per se, required that American and UN forces maintain the integrity of their individual units within concentrated sectors, at the same time striving to protect and keep open those stretches of road which were our essential lines of supply and reinforcement. In fulfilling those missions units were subject to surrounding and being infiltrated by the regular NKPA and their guerillas. Many Americans were thus cut off or overrun. Communist armies are not known for their adherence to the Geneva Convention “rules of war” and those weeks were often marked by the commission of atrocities against surrendered GIs. Our First Cavalry Division uncovered numerous instances of summary executions performed by the NKPA on captured American soldiers, who were found murdered with their hands tied behind their backs.

My thoughts are also haunted by whatever may have happened to those unfortunate troopers who were to become the MIAs. By war’s end, some 8,000 soldiers were missing in action. Many young men have remained unaccounted for all these years. We have only painful speculation about their fate.

By war’s end, over a half million UN troops and a million and a half Korean and Chinese soldiers lost their lives in the three bloody years of what came to be called the “Forgotten War.” The US alone had nearly 147,000 casualties and 33,000 battle deaths.

It is difficult for me to accept the fact that a war of such magnitude could somehow have become “forgotten,” primarily by the media, and beginning almost even as the last of our (known) captured soldiers were being repatriated upon cessation of the hostilities. The American involvement in that cause, and her resultant suffered losses, is something which never should have been reduced to a mere historical footnote. Those who served and returned, and most especially those who would not ever return, all deserve better.

My hope then is that persons who were not yet born at the time, and those who were too young to have any recollections of that war in Korea, shall all join fittingly with the rest of us on June 25 and set some time aside for reflection and prayer both in gratitude for what others accomplished in defense of freedom and as an assurance to all who served with pride and distinction that their deeds will forever be remembered.

(Gerard Arthur Sheehan of Monroe is a member of the Danbury Chapter of the Korean War Veterans Association. He works here in Newtown with his son, Tom Sheehan, at Nationwide Insurance.)