(This is the first in United Press International's five-part series to mark the end of the 1950-53 Korean War)
WASHINGTON, July 24 (UPI) -- The Korean War, which ended half a century ago this week, is the most forgotten and misunderstood war the United States has fought in the last century.
Sandwiched between World War II, the so-called good war, and the domestically divisive Vietnam conflict, it was overshadowed by both. Yet it cost almost as many American lives as Vietnam, 53,000 against 58,000, and even more civilian casualties, around 3 million, in one-third the time.
Perhaps Korea was so quickly forgotten because Vietnam followed so quickly. The massive U.S. military commitment in Vietnam was ordered by President Johnson in 1964 11 years after President Eisenhower negotiated an armistice at Panmunjon to end the Korean hostilities.
Korea was remembered in popular American memory as a frustrating stalemate that foreshadowed the humiliating U.S. military withdrawal from -- and eventual fall of -- South Vietnam.
Yet the Korean War saw three of the most brilliant exploits in U.S. military history: the defense of the Pusan perimeter; Gen. Douglas MacArthur's annihilation of North Korean military power by his daring amphibious landing at Inchon; and the U.S. Eighth Army's rally under the inspiring leadership of Gen. Matthew Ridgeway to destroy the offensive capabilities of China's People's Liberation Army.
Korea was not a clear-cut war, however. The U.S. military achievements in it were complex. Even the name of the war was misleading.
It was called a war, and no one who lived through it on the home front or in the combat zones ever had the slightest doubt that it was as intense and brutal and bloody as any full-scale military engagement of World War II. But the U.S. government of President Truman that fought it insisted on calling it a "police action."
This political sleight of hand prepared the way for the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was pushed through Congress by Johnson, that became the controversial constitutional justification for fighting Vietnam without a formal declaration of war.
The resolution provoked the most intense political controversy over any war in the United States since the Civil War a century before. Truman's "police action" designation was certainly criticized at the time by opposition Republicans and helped cause his politically mortal slump in popularity. But it has been largely overlooked by historians and in the popular memory for its constitutionally dubious nature and the cynical precedent it set in allowing the executive branch to wage a full-scale war without winning the formal approval of Congress.
The Korean War was fought overwhelmingly by the North, which was supported by China, and by the South, which was backed by the United States. Britain, Australia, Turkey and several other U.S. allies sent significant, but relatively small, military contingents. Yet the U.S. government insisted it was really a war fought by the United Nations, on the basis of a U.N. Security Council resolution.
It was called the Korean War and it was certainly fought in Korea. But for 2 ½ of its 3 years, it was in all ways an undeclared but full-scale Sino-American war.
After 200,000 Chinese troops swept across the Yalu River to retake North Korea, MacArthur and the U.S. 8th Army were taken by surprise.
Truman and MacArthur were both disastrous war leaders, but they were immensely lucky twice over. They were lucky not to preside over total, humiliating defeats and the deaths or capture of hundreds of thousands of American troops. And they were lucky that their exceptional bungles were virtually forgotten by history.
Truman let the U.S. Army deteriorate to an extraordinary degree through the five years after the end of World War II. He persisted in this course of almost-criminal incompetence, as historian Clay Blair demonstrated in his classic history "The Forgotten War," despite the military challenge of the Soviet Union, the communist takeover in China, and his own creation of NATO.
Two of the most popular and prestigious generals in U.S. military history -- Eisenhower and Omar N. Bradley -- both sought in vain to warn Truman and his exceptionally incompetent Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson about the risks they were running in neglecting the Army before the war. But both veteran combat generals were ignored.
MacArthur, whose South West Pacific campaigns of World War II were among the most brilliant in the entire history of warfare, was caught by surprise disgracefully and needlessly not once, but twice in Korea.
He was astonished when the North invaded the South and drove the Republic of Korea forces and their ill prepared, miserably trained U.S. 8th Army reinforcements from MacArthur's Japan command almost off the Korean peninsula, except for a desperate foothold around the city of Pusan.
Then, after his great Inchon landing -- as brilliant an accomplishment as any of his great World War II victories -- MacArthur was blind to the blizzard of warning signs the PLA was going to strike across the border with hundreds of thousands of men against his victorious troops.
Yet MacArthur became a greater American hero in defeat -- after Truman correctly fired him for defying civilian authority -- than he had ever been in victory. It is he who is still remembered in both South Korea and the United States as Korea's savior. But Ridgeway, his successor as theater commander, who defeated the Chinese army against overwhelming odds, is now forgotten by the American public. Yet Ridgeway's defensive battle victories were among the greatest-such tactical successes of all time and they had enormous strategic and historic consequences.
China never dared to fight a full-scale conventional conflict against any neighbor for the next half century after the drubbing its army received at the hands of Ridgeway's revitalized 8th Army. Possibly as many as half a million of them died, including the son of China's then ruler, Mao Zedong.
If it had not been for China's disastrous defeat in Korea, its revolutionary zealots would almost certainly have sought to spread its communist revolutionary gospel by fire and sword across all of Asia, just as the Bolsheviks tried throughout Central Europe after the 1917 Russian Revolution and just as the French Revolutionaries did after their 1789 Revolution.
Yet no one except a handful of U.S. military historians and students now remembers that, or even recognizes Ridgeway's name.
Truman himself went down in history as a courageous defender of an embattled ally against naked military aggression instead of the disastrous bungler who had so dangerously neglected the conventional armed forces of the nation and been caught by surprise by an enemy attack only half a decade after he presided over America's total victories over Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan.
In Vietnam, the United States, after 11 years of major involvement and 58,000 dead, failed to prevent the total conquest of an East Asian ally state to conventional communist military power. In Korea, it preserved the independence of its mainland east Asian ally.
Yet Korea is linked in the American memory with Vietnam rather than with World War II. It is seen as a "good war" rather than a conflict of moral ambiguity. But its real lessons: its shames, its disasters and its astonishing recoveries and triumphs against all odds, are now equally forgotten.
Perhaps -- after half a century -- it is finally time to start remembering.
(Next: An unsteady peace)
