Dean Acheson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. From Kim’s perspective, Communism seemed to be on the winning side of history, while Europe was in tatters. Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists finally prevailed in their civil war, defeating the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. The Soviet Union successfully detonated an atomic bomb that same year, elevating itself as a nuclear power alongside the United States.
For Kim Il Sung, the time seemed ripe to unify the divided Korean Peninsula under Communism.
KIM’S HUBRIS
North Korea attacked the South on June 25, 1950. One hundred thirty-five thousand well-equipped and well-trained Korean People’s Army troops, many thousands of them veterans of the Manchuria guerrilla campaign, poured south of the thirty-eighth parallel and easily captured Seoul within three days. By the end of that summer, the North Korean army had taken control of almost all of South Korea, except for a small corner of land in Busan, on the southeast coast of the peninsula. Just a week before the invasion, the CIA had provided strategic warning about North Korea’s intentions to invade and that the North had the military superiority to overwhelm the South to achieve “its main external aim of extending control over southern Korea.” President Truman ordered U.S. troops into action, and within three months the United Nations forces had outflanked Kim’s armies and begun a drive northward past the thirty-eighth parallel. That was enough to trigger a reaction from China; over the course of the conflict, the newly established Communist nation would deploy as many as three million troops in support of North Korea. On July 27, 1953, an armistice was signed, and the first “hot war” of the emerging Cold War ended in a stalemate that deepened the division of the Korean Peninsula and cemented the U.S. commitment to defend South Korea. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Halberstam concluded in his book The Coldest Winter, “Korea was a place where almost every key decision on both sides turned on a miscalculation.”
Miscalculation based on false assumptions and hubris led to the brutal conflict, and those actions taken seven decades ago still resonate today. Kim Il Sung thought his army would be met by cheering crowds, sparking a revolution, and he and his Soviet sponsors calculated that the United States would not fight back. Not heeding Chinese warnings or the presence of Chinese fighters on the battlefield, a confident United States led by General Douglas MacArthur pushed north of the thirty-eighth parallel, toward the Yalu River, eliciting a massive Chinese counteroffensive that pushed the U.S. and South Korean armies to retreat southward. The Chinese offensive and the escalation of the war in the winter of 1950 placed political pressure on President Truman to consider using the atomic bomb to keep the conflict short and contained. General MacArthur was a strong advocate of deploying the bomb, even in China, and openly challenged Truman’s authority. Despite MacArthur’s removal for repeated insubordination, Truman kept the nuclear option on the table well into 1951.
The war’s casualty figures speak only superficially to the human toll and tragedy. Nearly three million Koreans—10 percent of the overall population of the two Koreas—were dead, missing, or injured. Around 900,000 Chinese fighters, 500,000 North Korean soldiers, and 400,000 United Nations Command troops were killed or wounded. Nearly 34,000 U.S. troops lost their lives, with about 110,000 wounded, missing, or captured. All actors committed atrocities, including mass executions of political prisoners and the killing of civilians. North Korea abducted South Koreans and conscripted them into the North Korean army, while people at home whom the regime considered anti-Communist were executed. The United States dropped more bombs on North Korea than it had in the entire Pacific theater in World War II. The historian Charles Armstrong wrote that the U.S. Air Force used 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea compared with 503,000 tons during World War II in the Pacific. Even battle-hardened General MacArthur, shortly after he was relieved of his duties by Truman, testified in the Senate, “I have never seen such devastation. I have seen…as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach, the last time I was there. After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited.” A veteran of the Korean War who was involved in the infamous massacre at No Gun Ri—where American soldiers killed hundreds of Korean civilians—decades later recalled, “On summer nights, when the breeze is blowing, I