Korean War: The American General Who Almost Started Nuclear War

By: Myles Burke / BBC
Translation: Telegrafi.com

"All the roads leading out of the city were filled with refugees. Few of them knew where they were going,” the BBC reported, as it broadcast footage of desperate North Koreans trying to escape the burning city of Pyongyang on December 5, 1950.

The footage was shot by BBC cameraman Cyril Page during his final hours in the North Korean capital. After news that UN troops - who had occupied the city - were withdrawing, Page had taken to the streets to document the chaos and fear as word spread of the arrival of Chinese troops. In bitter winter conditions, he filmed terrified refugees holding on to whatever they could as smoke rose from burning buildings behind them.

The panicked evacuation was symbolic of the dramatic reversal of fortunes for the UN forces led by General Douglas MacArthur. Just a few weeks ago, the general had promised the US president, Harry S. Truman, that he was close to the unification of the Koreas. The fall of Pyongyang and the complete collapse of its military offensive in North Korea would prompt MacArthur to threaten all-out nuclear war.

The destruction and bloodshed caused by the Korean War had begun six months earlier. In the years leading up to the end of World War II, Korea had suffered under a brutal Japanese occupation. The US proposed to its wartime ally, the Soviet Union, that after the surrender of Japan they would temporarily share control of Korea together. The idea was to manage the withdrawal of Japanese forces. In 1945, the superpowers divided the country into two parts along an arbitrary demarcation line, the 38th parallel. The Soviets supported Kim Il-sung in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north, while the US supported Syngman Rhee in the Republic of Korea in the south.

From the beginning, neither of the newly established Korean governments recognized the other's legitimacy or the line of demarcation. “It was never considered, in any sense, legitimate or meaningful by the Koreans. It was completely meaningless for them", said Dr. Owen Miller of the Center for Korean Studies at SOAS [School of Oriental and African Studies], University of London, for the podcast BBC History Magazine in 2024. Both leaders intended to reunify the country by force. By 1949, both superpowers had withdrawn most of their occupation troops from Korea, but this did little to ease simmering tensions. Increasingly bloody clashes erupted regularly throughout de facto the border.

On June 25, 1950, North Korean communist leader Kim Il-sung made his move. In the early hours of the morning, he launched a surprise attack with a well-trained fighting force, crossing the 38th parallel. North Korean troops, equipped with Soviet weapons, quickly overwhelmed the ROK army. Within days they occupied the southern capital, Seoul, forcing many of its residents to swear allegiance to the Communist Party or face imprisonment or execution.

In the US, President Truman was unprepared for the speed and success of the North Korean attack. A believer in the “Domino Theory” – according to which if one country fell under communism, others would follow – he turned to the newly formed UN to defend South Korea. The Soviet Union could have vetoed this vote. But, at that time, it was boycotting the UN Security Council because of this body's refusal to accept the People's Republic of China. Thus, on June 28, 1950, a resolution was passed calling on all UN member states to help repel the invasion. American General Douglas MacArthur – who had accepted Japan's surrender at the end of World War II – was appointed commander of the combined UN forces.

The US was the first to react, hastily sending its troops stationed in Japan. But these troops were unprepared to face the superior North Korean forces, which rapidly advanced south, forcing them to retreat. As the battle escalated, thousands of ordinary Korean civilians, caught up in the conflict, lost their lives. By September, South Korean and UN forces were encircled, defending a small enclave around the port of Busan in the south. North Korea seemed close to reunifying the entire Korean peninsula.

In a bold move, MacArthur decided to launch a dangerous naval attack on Inchon, a port deep behind North Korean lines. Under heavy bombardment, UN forces landed on September 15, 1950, capturing the port and then quickly advancing to retake Seoul. After the recapture of the capital, tens of thousands of residents who had sworn allegiance to the city's previous occupiers were executed as collaborators by South Korean forces. This was just one of a series of horrific and uncontrolled massacres of civilians that would occur during the war. "During the war there were many massacres, not on the front lines, but far from them, where people were arrested because they were considered disloyal," said Dr. Miller.

The Inchon operation succeeded in cutting the North Korean army's supply and communication lines, and UN forces managed to break out of Busan, launching a powerful counteroffensive. This turned the tide of the conflict, forcing North Korean soldiers to retreat northward and cross the 38th parallel again.

But having met the objectives of the UN resolution, MacArthur was determined to completely destroy the communist forces and ordered his troops to follow the North Koreans across the border. By October 19, 1950, UN forces had occupied Pyongyang and were advancing toward the Yalu River on the border with China. The situation that seemed so desperate for South Korea just a few months ago now seemed to have changed.

Truman was reluctant to escalate a conflict that might drag not only China but also Russia—which by then had developed its own nuclear bomb—into another world war. But MacArthur was convinced he was close to a quick and decisive victory that would reunite the country under pro-Western South Korea. He assured the president that the war would be over before Christmas.

But the UN's rapid advance toward its border worried China's communist leader, Mao Zedong. Fearing the presence of a hostile Western military power near the country, he ordered the Chinese army to secretly assemble on the border to meet MacArthur's advancing armies. At the end of November, with a terrible surprise, China again changed the course of the Korean War.

Thousands of Chinese troops launched a series of devastating attacks on the advancing UN forces. Suffering heavy losses and suffering from cold winter conditions, MacArthur's troops were unable to hold the vast territories they had captured only a few weeks earlier. At the Battle of the Chongchon River, Chinese troops inflicted a catastrophic defeat on UN forces, causing one of the largest and bloodiest retreats in US Marine Corps history.

As the Chinese offensive gathered momentum, the citizens of Pyongyang, which had been taken over by UN forces less than two months earlier, found themselves at the center of the storm again. Unable to stop the relentless Chinese advance, MacArthur made the decision to abandon the city. UN forces began evacuation preparations and were ordered to burn any supplies and equipment that could aid the approaching soldiers, causing many buildings in the city to go up in flames. Aware that the North Korean and Chinese armies were threatening to purge anyone suspected of collaborating with UN forces, thousands of terrified and exhausted Pyongyang residents fled the city.

In freezing weather, Page filmed these North Koreans, under the watchful eye of the British Army, desperately trying to cross the Taedong River to avoid encirclement when the troops were about to leave. "Due to priority for military vehicles, refugees were not allowed to cross the bridges over the Taedong River south of Pyongyang," the BBC reported. American engineers were preparing these bridges to destroy them after the last military vehicles crossed, in order to slow the North Korean advance. "However, fearing that they would remain in the city, thousands of people went to the river bank," the report continues. "There, all kinds of vessels were preparing to pass."

Page himself was ordered to leave an airfield just before dark. When he got there, he found that much of it was also engulfed in flames, with UN troops busy destroying any material they thought the North Koreans could use. "As night fell, burning hangars and workshops lit up the night sky," the BBC reported. "By midnight, hundreds of private houses near the airfield were also engulfed in flames."

As Page's plane departed, he captured the last glimpses of Pyongyang, once a symbol of triumph for MacArthur but now seen as symbolizing the failure of his military strategy. "It was nearly dawn when our cameraman left Pyongyang's airfield," the BBC reported, "and as his plane, one of the last to fly, was taking him away, he saw from above the UN retreat, with the road southwards under a cloud of dust from the endless line of vehicles”.

On December 6, 1950, as Chinese and North Korean forces re-entered Pyongyang, the American strategy to end the war began to shift to a much more dangerous idea. Truman had always had a difficult relationship with MacArthur, due to the general's tendency to overstep his authority and ignore direct orders. Now, faced with a rapidly deteriorating situation in Korea, the two men found themselves constantly clashing over how to conduct the war.

After ignoring Truman's warnings that Mao Zedong might intervene in the war, MacArthur began publicly calling for an escalation of the conflict. He suggested that the US should threaten to use nuclear weapons and bomb China itself if the communist forces in Korea did not surrender. This idea was also supported by Curtis LeMay, head of the US Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, who believed that a nuclear war was inevitable. Later, LeMay would try to convince President John F. Kennedy to bomb nuclear missile sites during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

However, the insistence on the use of atomic weapons deeply alarmed other UN countries involved in the conflict, including British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who flew to Washington to oppose the idea. But MacArthur was confident that his plan would work, believing that the Russians would cower and take no action against a US attack on China.

On December 9, 1950, MacArthur formally requested the authority to have the discretion to use atomic weapons. Truman refused. Two weeks later, MacArthur submitted a list of targets for attack, including targets inside China, and specified the number of atomic bombs he wanted. He went on to demand that the Pentagon give a field commander the discretion to use nuclear weapons — as needed. By late December 1950, UN forces had been pushed back beyond the 38th parallel, while Chinese and North Korean troops retook the ruined city of Seoul in January 1951.

"Probably, if some commanders like Curtis LeMay had more influence over the president, nuclear weapons might have been used, because both LeMay and MacArthur wanted to use them," said Dr. Miller. "They thought, 'What's the point of having nuclear weapons if we don't use them'"? Fearing that he could not control MacArthur and the possibility that the general's aggressive stance would spark World War III, Truman fired him for insubordination in April 1951.

The Korean War would continue for two more years, with Seoul changing hands for the fourth time. With neither side able to secure a decisive victory, the conflict degenerated into a long and bloody war of attrition. "One of the great ironies of the war is that, in the spring of 1951, the front line of both forces was close to the dividing line, the 38th parallel," said Dr. Miller. "All these huge losses on both sides, despite the absolute civilian destruction that had occurred, they were basically back where they started."

The two countries eventually ended the war with an uncertain armistice in 1953, but did not sign a peace treaty, meaning they are technically still at war. The conflict was devastating for the peninsula. Estimates vary, but it is believed that around four million people lost their lives during the Korean War, half of whom were civilians. Many others were displaced or starved. Massive bombings destroyed entire towns and villages. The families separated by this partition of the country have never been reunited.

Decades later, the two countries remain locked in a frozen conflict, separated by a 250-kilometer demilitarized zone littered with landmines and guarded by hundreds of soldiers — a legacy of a war that never ended. /Telegraph/