April 17, 2005
The More Things Change
One of the first orders to burn towns and villages that I found in the archives was in the far southeast of Korea, during heavy fighting along the Pusan Perimeter in August 1950, when U.S. soldiers were bedevilled by thousands of guerrillas in rear areas. On 6 August a U.S. officer requested "to have the following towns obliterated" by the Air Force: Chongsong, Chinbo, and Kusu-dong. B-29 strategic bombers were also called in for tactical bombing. On 16 August five groups of B-29s hit a rectangular area near the front, with many towns and villages, creating an ocean of fire with hundreds of tons of napalm. Another call went out on the 20 August. On 26 August I found in this same source the single entry: "Fired 11 villages." [...]
...the air war levelled North Korea and killed millions of civilians. North Koreans tell you that for three years they faced a daily threat of being burned with napalm: "You couldn't escape it," one told me in 1981. By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea had been completely levelled. What was left of the population survived in caves.
Over the course of the war, Conrad Crane wrote, the U.S. air force "had wreaked terrible destruction all across North Korea. Bomb damage assessment at the armistice revealed that 18 of 22 major cities had been at least half obliterated." A table he provided showed that the big industrial cities of Hamhung and Hungnam were 80-85% destroyed, Sariwon 95%, Sinanju 100%, the port of Chinnampo 80% and Pyongyang 75%.
Posted by Eddie Tews at April 17, 2005 07:01 PM
Comments
Hey Ed, off-topic, but I fully expect a scathing post from you regarding Pope "Benedict" XVI... check out his past! He can truly be called The Nazi Pope! -- Posted by: Chocodile VI on April 19, 2005 12:55 PM