retirement told the whole truth, following up his complaint about the Pentagon refusing to “turn SAC loose with incendiaries” at the beginning of the war:
So we went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea too. We even burned down [the South Korean port city of] Pusan — an accident, but we burned it down anyway… Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure? Over a period of three years, this seemed to be acceptable to everybody, but to kill a few people at the start right away, no, we can't seem to stomach that.
Besides high explosives, the weapon of choice was napalm, superior in its combustibility to jellied gasoline and used at major scale for the first time in Korea. A mixture of naphthenic and palmitic acids ignited with phosphorous, it continues to burn inside wounds for up to fifteen days. Military dispatches from Korea characterized the bombed areas as “re-mov[ed] from off the map,” “burn[ed] out,” “wilderness of scorched earth.”
Historian Bruce Cumings describes the horrific outcome:
By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea was completely leveled. What was left of the population survived in caves, the North Koreans creating an entire underground society in complexes of dwellings, schools, hospitals and factories… In the final act of this barbaric air war [the US] hit huge irrigation dams that provided water for 75 percent of the North's food production. Agriculture was the only major element of the economy still functioning; the attacks came just after the laborious, back-breaking work of rice transplantation had been done. The Air Force was proud of the destruction created: “The subsequent flash flood scooped clean 27 miles of valley below, and the plunging flood waters wiped out [supply routes, etc.]… The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of [rice] has for the Asian — starvation and slow death.” Many villages were inundated, “washed downstream,” and even Pyongyang, some twenty-seven miles south of one dam, was badly flooded. Untold numbers of peasants died, but they were assumed to be “loyal” to the enemy, providing “direct support to the Communist armed forces.” That is, they were feeding the northern population. The “lessons” adduced from this experience “gave the enemy a sample of the totality of war… embracing the whole of a nation's economy and people.” This was Korea, “the limited war.”
The war dragged on for three years despite all the burning, blasting and killing — and ended, of course, in stalemate, the line dividing the two devastated countries remaining precisely where it had been before the North Korean invasion, at the 38th parallel. Besides at least 1.5 million military dead, wounded or missing on the UN and South Korean side (including 158,000 Americans) and two million North Korean and Chinese casualties, more than two million civilians died in North Korea, almost as many as fire- and atomic-bombing killed in Japan during the Second World War.
Conventional bombing in Korea was destructive enough. The United States also came much closer than most Americans realize to using the atomic bomb in the Korean War. At the first meeting he attended with the Joint Chiefs and Acheson after the North Korean invasion, Truman ordered a study of atomic bombing in case the Soviet Union entered the war. The JCS Plans Division complied with a study of “utilization of atomic bombardment” in Korea. Two weeks later, on July 9,1950, a message from MacArthur led the Joint Chiefs “to consider whether or not A-bombs should be made available to” the Far East commander; the JCS thought some ten to twenty bombs could be spared from the strategic arsenal. MacArthur had grandiose plans to block a Chinese or Soviet intervention if it came. The inner North Korean border abuts both China and the USSR; MacArthur pointed out to an emissary from the Joint Chiefs that the routes that led into the country from Manchuria and Vladivostok had “many tunnels and bridges. I see here a unique use for the atomic bomb — to strike a blocking blow — which would require a six- month repair job.”
To prepare for the possibility that the JCS might send atomic bombs to Korea, a teletype reached SAC headquarters from Washington on July 30 requesting transfer of “ten planes and crews with bombs less nuclear component,” as LeMay's aide recorded it. LeMay had no intention of giving up control of atomic-capable aircraft or of atomic bombs to anyone without a fight; he called Roger Ramey and chewed on him. “What ten, Roger?” LeMay asked the Pentagon staff officer. “Don't you know that the two groups that are going haven't got any [atomic] capability?” Ramey demurred that “the top is running it without letting anyone else know.” “The 509th [is the only wing that]… has the stinger,” LeMay explained ingenuously, “and I don't think they ought to be roaming around… So I talked to Norstad [at the time of the original request for Far East bomber reinforcements] and he said don't break [the 509th] up.” Ramey: “The thing is, he didn't tell us that.” LeMay: “Do you see any drawback to just cancelling that ten job?” Ramey: “No, not at all.” LeMay, passing along what Norstad had told him: “Well, they haven't gone to the President, and [Norstad] isn't expecting that to happen now… ” Ramey, correcting: “That decision [to send atomic-capable aircraft and atomic bombs] went to the President originally. If Norstad told you that [i.e., that it had not gone to the President], he's evidently decided against it and just hasn't let us know.”
But the President had not decided against moving an atomic delivery capability to the Korean theater of war, and Lauris Norstad was working on LeMay to pry the bombers loose within minutes after the SAC commander finished with Roger Ramey. “The Chief [i.e., Vandenberg] wants the number that was indicated the other day out there,” Norstad told LeMay, speaking cryptically over the telephone, “and they want that [atomic] capability.” LeMay argued against relinquishing ten atomic-capable bombers to MacAr-thur's control: “I think we ought to divorce that completely with this other move… ” Norstad saw LeMay's objection and accepted it: “Well, let's divorce this. Let's have a separate item on this goddamn thing.” LeMay clinched the deal: “Okay, Larry. Have Hank send a wire out cancelling that last one he sent on these ten… We'll make the necessary advance preparations and be all set on it.” Norstad was happy to have the dispute resolved: “Yes, that's the best way of doing it, Curt.” The next day, July 31, LeMay heard from Ramey that “the ten aircraft are to follow the two Groups now on the way to the Pacific theater”; they would “be under the control of the JCS, not the Theater” — that is, under LeMay's control (SAC reported directly to the Joint Chiefs, which gave LeMay a legal basis for his unusual independence of command). LeMay still wanted to hear the order directly from Vandenberg. He flew to Washington on August 1, where the “decision was made to send the 9th Bomb Wing to Guam as an atomic task force immediately.”
Ten B-29s loaded with unarmed atomic bombs and heavy with fuel prepared to leave Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base, east of San Francisco above Suisun Bay, late on the night of August 5. General Robert Travis, an old friend of LeMay's who was commanding the mission, flew as a passenger in one of the bombers. As Travis's B-29 reached 130 miles per hour on takeoff, still on the runway, its number three propeller ran away to 3,500 rpm. The pilot made a quick decision not to abort the takeoff, feathered the propeller and got off the ground at 150 mph. He began a ninety-degree turn to land the plane, discovered he could not retract his landing gear, saw his number two engine start to run away and crashed approaching the landing runway with forty-five degrees still remaining in his turn. “The crash was not hard,” LeMay's aide reports, “and all but twelve people survived. General Travis was hit on the head or hit his head on some object and died on the way to the hospital. His aide, the pilot and co-pilot were not injured.” Twenty minutes after the crash, the B-29 exploded, “killing several additional people, firefighters, and injuring approximately sixty others.” The explosion — fuel plus the high-explosive shell of the Mark IV atomic bomb aboard — destroyed the bomb and scattered tamper uranium, mildly radioactive, around the airfield. Not ten but nine unarmed atomic bombs went out to Guam that August. The aircraft of the 9th Bomb Group were recalled to the US on September 13, but the bombs and their maintenance teams remained on Guam.
A National Security Council study issued on August 25 argued that Korea might be “the first phase of a general Soviet plan for global war.” Despite its contingency preparations, however, the Pentagon did not judge Korea to be a place where atomic bombs would be effective. Frank Pace, the Secretary of the Army at the time, remembered the military's reasoning in an oral history interview:
[Atomic-bombing] was always discarded on [three] grounds: The first, that it would not be productive, that this was not the kind of war in which the use of the atomic bomb would be effective… Second, was the concern about the moral use of weapons of this nature against a smaller country in this kind of war, and the third was that if it proved ineffective then its function as a shield for Europe would be either minimized or lost. So you had really three quite compelling reasons against its use…
