One more fantasy exploded, gone! The truth about the Korean War

The North Koreans had ample cause to fear such aggressive posturing, based on bitter memories of their last experience with the U.S. military during the 1950-3 Korean War.

In the first year of that war, on November 5, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur ordered the destruction of "every means of communication, every installation, factory, city and village" in an area stretching from the Yalu River to the battle line. The first city to be leveled was Sinuiju, and napalm soon began to be employed during bombing raids against civilians. Over 2,300 gallons of napalm were dropped on Pyongyang in one raid alone, in July 1952.

Mass fire bombings systematically wiped out one town after another,

WAR CRIME - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETTING CIVILIANS

and U.S. planes also targeted power stations and irrigation dams that supported rice fields. As irrigation dams were destroyed, villages downstream were swept away in the resulting floods, inflicting enormous death and destruction.

WAR CRIME - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETING CIVILIANS

At various times during the war, the U.S. even considered use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Hungarian correspondent Tibor Meray witnessed the "destruction and horrible things committed by the American forces. Everything which moved in North Korea was a military target, peasants in the fields were often machine gunned by pilots" motivated by what seemed to him amusement.

WAR CRIME - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETING CIVILIANS

Meray saw "complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital" of North Korea. There were "no more cities in North Korea," he reported. Every city Meray passed through "was a collection of chimneys. I don’t know why houses collapsed and chimneys did not, but I went through a city of 200,000 inhabitants and I saw thousands of chimneys and that was all."

General William Dean, taken prisoner during the war, remembered being amazed at the sight of the city of Huichon. "The city I’d seen before – two storied buildings, a prominent main street – wasn’t there anymore," while "most of the towns were just rubble or snowy open spaces where buildings had been." All of these towns, he said, "once full of people, were unoccupied shells. The villagers lived in entirely new temporary villages, hidden in canyons."


Executions of civilians occurred on a mass scale, both by American troops and by U.S.-installed South Korean President Syngman Rhee’s forces. As U.S. soldiers were pushed out of North Korea by advancing Chinese and North Korean troops, they deliberately destroyed everything in their path. The war diary of the 24th Infantry Division relates, "Razing of villages along our withdrawal routes and destruction of food staples became the order of the day."

ADMITTED WAR CRIMES - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETTING CIVILIANS

A Chinese soldier remembers that virtually no house was left standing and that the region was filled with homeless people during the winter of 1950-1 when temperatures dropped to 40 below zero.


According to General Curtis LeMay, "We burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both," and "we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes."

WAR CRIME - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETTING CIVILIANS - the war criminal of WWII, Curtis Lemay was pressed into service to continue his war crimes against North Korean civilians. In the eyes of the American government and the military establishment, he performed admirably.

What say you, Cy, FailuresArt, MM, Okie, Ican, Firefly, do you consider him to have lived up to the high standards set by others in their military incursions into poor defenseless countries?

During the war, North Korean responded to such terror tactics by building underground factories and housing on a large scale. (12) North Korean concerns over U.S. threats are routinely dismissed as over-sensitivity, but such a view can only be sustained by ignorance of the history of the Korean War.

The North Koreans haven’t forgotten the experience, building many post-war factories and military facilities underground. It should be pointed out that such underground facilities fall into the second category of targets the Bush Administration identifies as justifying the use of nuclear weapons: targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack.

same old same old WAR CRIMES - PURPOSEFULLY TARGETING CIVILIANS[/color]