was too broken, and the NKPA was never completely road bound. Its units and its supplies, often on foot, went through the valleys and over the ridges, and too much of them arrived at the front. The NKPA did not amass the great, vulnerable mountains of materiel common to Western armies, because in the main it did not have them.
Tactical air burned and destroyed much supply on the ground, but more reached the front. This ability to resupply itself over the broken terrain of Korea without transport and in the teeth of air power was one of the minor miracles achieved by the Inmun Gun.
Because there was a certain lack of good targets in North Korea, but mainly due to the near desperate condition of the defending ground forces, FEAF early in the war devoted itself to supporting the front lines. It is expensive to use aircraft in place of artillery—but in 1950 the United States had more aircraft, relatively, than cannon in the Far East. Without the constant air cover over the Perimeter, without the strafing and rocketing and napalming that greatly hampered the NKPA attacks, it is; probable that the Perimeter would have been breached fatally.
All through the Korean War, whenever the enemy came out into the open, he was subject to immediate, effective air attack. Another minor miracle was his ability to learn to live with this handicap. The NKPA became very good at camouflage and at night movement.
The early months of the war were fought under weird circumstances by the American fighter and bomber pilots. Based in Japan, which never changed from peacetime ways, many of them had wives and family stationed at their fields. Many a pilot flew out in the predawn darkness to strafe and rocket enemy troops all day across the burning hills of Korea, then returned to play cards with his wife at night.
This was harder on both pilots and family than if the dependents had been an ocean away.
While the United States Navy never engaged in heavy combat during the Korean conflict, it was as essential as the Air Force to the American continuance on the peninsula. It ferried troops and supplies in endless quantity. Without this ability to reinforce Korea immediately by sea, all would have been lost. Without control of the adjacent waters, the United Nations effort would have been constantly imperiled.
Without both air and sea power no nation can hope to guard the far frontier beyond its shores. While neither air nor sea forces were fully permitted to fulfill their primary mission—the carrying of the war to the enemy—it is more than probable that their very presence enabled the United States to contain the war. In the air, and on sea, America was by no means so weak as she had been on the ground, and she was immeasurably stronger than the immediate enemies, North Korea and Red China.
The enemy never seriously attempted to strike at American bases or lifelines beyond Korea, vulnerable as the bases continued to be. An air or sea strike—and both planes and submarines were available in quantity within the Communist bloc—might have wreaked havoc with American reinforcement of Korea, but it would also have exposed the enemy to even more serious retaliation. During the fighting, both air and sea forces continued to operate from their own 'privileged sanctuaries' on both sides.
The fact that the United States was not seriously challenged in the air, or at sea, where it was strong, indicates that had the nation been equally prepared on the ground, the war would not have occurred, or having begun, could have been quickly contained.
But while air power and sea power were absolutely vital to American hope of success, this was to be a ground war, by the enemy's choice. A French minister of state, in the days when Bourbon France was the land power par excellence of the world, once respectfully pointed out to his government that if France seriously intended to challenge Britain, a sea power, she must first have a navy. Two hundred years later the United States was in the same position. If it seriously desired to check the Communist advance on the ground, the United States would have to take to the mud, too.
Korea was an infantry war, essentially no different from any infantry war of the twentieth century. This was one of the factors, along with the political, that made the fighting so distasteful to a people who had subconsciously come to regard infantry warfare as obsolete.
Air Force and Navy fought, and spent long hours on dangerous and arduous duty. Airmen and sailors died— but it was an infantry war. Two typical days' casualties figures for American forces tell the story: Army—615 (20 KIA, 126 WIA, 417 MIA); Navy—0; Air Force—1 (MIA); and Army—328 (20 KIA, 181 WIA, 127 MIA); Navy-0; Air Force—3 (1 WIA, 2 MIA).
It was in the misty valleys and on the cruel mountains and hills that the fighting took place, and it was in these narrow valleys and barren hills that the story of Korea was told.
The North Korean Army came across the 38th parallel as conquerors, and as conquerors it prepared to remain. The Communists, to a greater degree than had been realized, had infiltrated the South, and as the Inmun Gun captured city after city, Communist cadres were ready to assume control.
Hundreds of thousands of South Koreans fled ahead of the armies, but the entire population of twenty million had nowhere to flee. As with most populations, the bulk of the people remained in place, particularly the peasants of the land.
The North Koreans were prepared to assume civilian control, and while the bulk of the Korean population was anti-Communist, the Reds quickly assumed such control. There was a pattern to the conquest following that of all Communist conquest in Asia.
The North Korean rulers had absolutely no interest in the merchants of the towns, or the middle classes, except eventually to get rid of them. Generally, these people were left alone or arrested, for later attention. But other groups received immediate attention. Former officials of the Republic, down to clerks, were jailed or killed. People such as moneylenders and prominent landowners were executed at once for political capital. Few, in any land, love the rich. The North Korean State acted on the assumption that men and women who could not be easily controlled or assimilated into a Communist state must be killed.
What happened in Seoul and Taejon was typical. In Seoul, every man or woman who had worked for the Americans in any capacity was executed if found, and the American Embassy had conveniently left their personnel files behind. All former government employees were killed or jailed. Steps were taken immediately to induct many of the youth of the city into the NKPA, and others in labor forces.
Outside Taejon, after the city had been scoured for possible enemies to a Communist regime, shivering hordes of unfortunates, in groups of one hundred or more, were led to mass graves, hands bound, wired to each other. Then the shooting began. When the United States Army came back through in September, a burial trench containing more than 7,000 bodies, including those of 40 American soldiers, was uncovered.
There were mass graves outside Amui, Mokp'o, Kongju, and Hamyang, wherever the Inmun Gun had marched.
The killing was not sheer savagery. The regime was ridding itself of people it could never trust, for the best of political reasons.
Revolution and terror are synonymous; only with the passage of time does any revolution become respectable. After the military triumph of the American Revolution the hard-core adherents of the Crown—more than a quarter-million out of a population of three million—were stripped of their property and forced into exile in Canada and elsewhere. Much of the success of the United States in early days was due to the lack of organized dissent within the Republic.
After the French Revolution, thousands of aristocrats and others who fought the revolution were permitted to return to France, where their descendants have not accepted the principles of the revolution to this day, causing perpetual instability.
In a hideously practical way the Communists knew what they were doing.
The Korean terror exceeded that of now respectable Western social upheavals only in degree, and in brutal Communist efficiency.
But while it was shooting the officials and anti-Communists, the regime made every effort to cater to the poorer masses. Asian Communists have always realized that in nations largely peasant, the peasantry alone is of any real political value. Land was redistributed. It would be taken back later, when the regime was consolidated— but first, it was a necessary step, as in China, to secure the backing of the millions of the poor.
The middle classes, so vital to Western democracy, do not exist in most of Asia. Where they do exist, they are more of a political liability with the mass of people than an asset, for they are regarded with envy and hatred by men who break their backs on the soil. The peasant feels he can live without them.
While the proscribed classes were being wiped out, the Inmun Gun showed every courtesy to the workers of the soil. When the Inmun Gun required food or lodging of the poor, these were paid for—in worthless currency, but
