Bombing of North Korea 1950-1953

The United States Air Force (USAF) carried out an extensive bombing campaign against North Korea from 1950 to 1953 during the Korean War. It was the first major bombing campaign for the USAF since its inception in 1947 from the United States Army Air Forces. During the campaign, conventional weapons such as explosives, incendiary bombs, and napalm destroyed nearly all of the country's cities and towns, including an estimated 85 percent of its buildings.[1] Deaths among the civilian population have been estimated at approximately one million people, a number comparable to or greater than the toll from the World War II bombing of Germany (400,000 to 600,000 civilian deaths) and Japan (330,000 to 900,000 civilian deaths).

Background to Bombing Campaign: Seesaw War from June 1950 to July 1951; Stalemate July 1951 to July 1953

During the first several months of the Korean War, from June to September 1950, the North Korean Army succeeded in occupying most of the Korean Peninsula, rapidly routing U.S. and South Korean forces. On September 15, 1950, U.S. forces reversed the situation by landing behind North Korean lines at Incheon and forcing the North Korean Army to retreat to the north. The situation reversed again when Chinese troops entered the conflict on October 19, triggering a retreat by UN troops until mid-1951.

June–October 1950: "Precision Bombing" But High Casualties

During this period, U.S. Far East Air Forces (FEAF) B-29 bombers carried out massive aerial attacks on transport centers and industrial hubs in North Korea. Having soon established air supremacy by the destruction of North Korean aircraft in the air and on the ground, FEAF bombers encountered no resistance and "the sky over North Korea was their safe front yard."[2]

The first bombing attack on North Korea was approved on the fourth day of the war, June 29, 1950, by General Douglas MacArthur immediately upon request by FEAF's commanding general, George E. Stratemeyer. MacArthur's order preceded the receipt of an order of President Harry Truman to expand air operations into North Korean areas, also issued on June 29 but not received in Tokyo until June 30.[3]

During this period, the official U.S. policy was to pursue precision bombing aimed at communication centers (railroad stations, marshaling yards, main yards, and railways) and industrial facilities deemed vital to war making capacity. The policy was the result of debates after World War II, in which U.S. policy rejected the mass civilian bombings that had been conducted in the later stages of World War II as unproductive and immoral.[4]

In early July, General Emmett "Rosie" O'Donnell requested permission to incinerate five North Korean cities. He proposed that MacArthur announce that the UN would employ the firebombing methods that "brought Japan to its knees." The announcement would warn the leaders of North Korea "to get women and children and other noncombatants the hell out."[5]

According to O'Donnell, MacArthur responded, "No, Rosy, I'm not prepared to go that far yet. My instructions are very explicit; however, I want you to know that I have no compunction whatever to your bombing bona fide military objectives, with high explosives, in those five industrial centers. If you miss your target and kill people or destroy other parts of the city, I accept that as a part of war."[5]

In September 1950, MacArthur said in his public report the United Nations, "The problem of avoiding the killing of innocent civilians and damages to the civilian economy is continually present and given my personal attention."[5]

In October 1950, FEAF commander General Stratemeyer requested permission to attack the city of Sinuiju, a provincial capital with an estimated population of 60,000, "over the widest area of the city, without warning, by burning and high explosive." MacArthur's headquarters responded the following day: "The general policy enunciated from Washington negates such an attack unless the military situation clearly requires it. Under present circumstances this is not the case."[5]

Despite the official precision bombing policy, North Korea reported extensive civilian casualties. According to military analyst Taewoo Kim, the apparent contradiction between a policy of precision bombing and reports of high civilian casualties is explained by the very low accuracy of bombing. According to a FEAF analysis, 209 bombs needed to be dropped in order to reach an 80 percent likelihood of hitting a 20-foot by 500-foot target. For such a target, 99.3 percent of bombs dropped did not hit the target. Since many targets of the "precision" campaign were located in populated areas, high numbers of civilians were killed despite the policy of limited targeting.[6]

November 1950 - July 1953: Incendiary Attacks on Cities, Towns, and Villages

On November 3, 1950, General Stratemeyer forwarded to MacArthur the request of Fifth Air Force commander General Earle E. Partridge for clearance to "burn Sinuiju." As he had done previously in July and October, MacArthur again denied the request, explaining that he planned to use the town's facilities after seizing it. However, at the same meeting, MacArthur agreed for the first time to a firebombing campaign, agreeing to Stratemeyer's request to burn the city of Kanggye and several other towns: "Burn it if you so desire. Not only that, Strat, but burn and destroy as a lesson any other of those towns that you consider of military value to the enemy." The same evening, MacArthur's chief of staff told Stratemeyer that the firebombing of Sinuiju had also been approved. In his diary, Stratemeyer summarized the instructions as follows: "Every installation, facility, and village in North Korea now becomes a military and tactical target." Stratemeyer sent orders to the Fifth Air Force and Bomber Command to "destroy every means of communications and every installation, factory, city, and village."[5]

On November 5, 1950, General Stratemeyer gave the following order to the commanding general of the Fifth Air Force: "Aircraft under Fifth Air Force control will destroy all other targets including all buildings capable of affording shelter."[7] The same day, twenty-two B-29s attacked Kanggye, destroying 75% of the city.[8]

In the wake of the Kanggye attack, FEAF began an intensive firebombing campaign that quickly incinerated multiple Korean cities. Three weeks after the attacks began, the air force assessed the damage as follows:[8][5]

  • Ch'osan - 85%
  • Hoeryong (Hoeryŏng)- 90%
  • Huich'on (Hŭich'ŏn)- 75%
  • Kanggye - 75%
  • Kointong - 90%
  • Manp'ochin - 95%
  • Namsi - 90%
  • Sakchu - 75%
  • Sinuichu - 60%
  • Uichu - 20%

On November 17, 1950, General MacArthur told U.S. ambassador to Korea John J. Muccio, "Unfortunately, this area will be left a desert." By "this area" MacArthur meant the entire area between "our present positions and the border."[9]

In May 1951, an international fact finding team from East Germany, West Germany, China, and the Netherlands stated, "The members, in the whole course of their journey, did not see one town that had not been destroyed, and there were very few undamaged villages."[10]

On June 25, 1951, General O'Donnell, commander of the Far Eastern Air Force Bomber Command, testified in answer to a question from Senator John C. Stennis ("...North Korea has been virtually destroyed, hasn't it?): "Oh, yes; ... I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name ... Just before the Chinese came in we were grounded. There were no more targets in Korea."[11]

In June 1952, as part of a strategy to maintain "air pressure" during armistice negotiations, FEAF's Fifth Air Force selected seventy-eight villages for destruction by B-26 light bombers.[10]

In August 1951, war correspondent Tibor Meráy stated that he had witnessed "a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital." He said that there were "no more cities in North Korea." He added, "My impression was that I am traveling on the moon because there was only devastation—every city was a collection of chimneys."[9]

Napalm was widely used. In John Ford's 1951 documentary, This is Korea, footage of napalm deployment is accompanied by a voice-over by John Wayne saying, "Burn 'em out, cook 'em, fry 'em"; the New York Herald Tribune hailed "Napalm, the No. 1 Weapon in Korea".[12] Winston Churchill, among others, criticized American use of napalm, calling it "very cruel", as the US/UN forces, he said, were "splashing it all over the civilian population", "tortur[ing] great masses of people". The American official who took this statement declined to publicize it.[13]

At the conclusion of the war, the Air Force assessed the destruction of twenty-two major cities as follows:[14]

The bombing campaign destroyed almost every substantial building in North Korea.[15][16] The war's highest-ranking U.S. POW, U.S. Major General William F. Dean,[17] reported that the majority of North Korean cities and villages he saw were either rubble or snow-covered wasteland.[18][19] North Korean factories, schools, hospitals, and government offices were forced to move underground.[20] In November 1950, the North Korean leadership instructed the population to build dugouts and mud huts and to dig underground tunnels, in order to solve the acute housing problem.[21]

U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay commented, "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."[22] Pyongyang, which saw 75 percent of its area destroyed, was so devastated that bombing was halted as there were no longer any worthy targets.[23][24] By the end of the campaign, US bombers had difficulty in finding targets and were reduced to bombing footbridges or jettisoning their bombs into the sea.[25]

May 1953: Attacks on Major Dams

On May 13, 1953, twenty F-84s of the Fifty-eighth Fighter Bomber Wing attacked the Toksan Dam, producing a flood that destroyed seven hundred buildings in Pyongyang and thousands of acres of rice. On May 15 and 16, two groups of F-84s attacked the Chasan Dam.[26] The flood from the destruction of the Toksan dam "scooped clean" twenty-seven miles of river valley. The attacks were followed by the bombing of the Kuwonga Dam, the Namsi Dam, and the Taechon Dam.[27][28]

Tonnage Dropped: Korea vs. World War II and Vietnam War

The U.S. dropped a total of 635,000 tons of bombs, including 32,557 tons of napalm, on Korea.[20] By comparison, 503,000 tons were dropped in the Pacific theater during World War II, 864,000 tons were dropped on North Vietnam through December 31, 1967 during Operation Rolling Thunder,[29][30] and 500,000 tons were dropped on Cambodia from 1969 to 1973.[31]

Death Toll

In contrast to the detailed calculations of civilian casualties that followed the strategic bombing campaign against Japan, in North Korea the U.S. Air Force assessed the extent of area destroyed by bombing on a city-by-city basis but not did not estimate casualties resulting from the bombing campaign. General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, stated, "Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—twenty percent of the population of [North] Korea...."[32]

Applied to the population of North Korea, 9,726,000 in 1950, the estimate of 20 percent would imply a death toll of approximately two million.[33]

The most fully documented and recent estimate of North Korean civilian deaths comes from the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset, developed by researchers at the Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). Assessing a variety of sources, the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset researchers concluded that the "best estimate" of civilian deaths in North Korea was 995,000, with a low estimate of 644,696 and a high estimate of 1.5 million.[34]

The Republic of Korea Ministry of Defense estimated total South Korean civilian casualties of 990,968, of which 373,599 (37.7%) were deaths. For North Korea, the Ministry estimated 1,500,000 total civilian casualties, including deaths, injuries, and missing, but did not separately report the number of deaths.[35]

Charles Armstrong, Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University, estimated that 12–15 percent of the North Korean population was killed in the war, or approximately 1,167,000 to 1,459,000 people.[36] Armstrong did not separately estimate bombing deaths. Estimates of battle deaths range from a U.S. Department of Defense estimate of 214,899 to a Republic of Korea estimate of 294,931, according to the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset.[34]

Irish historian Jon Halliday cites "a Soviet source" showing that the overall population of North Korea fell by 11.76 percent between 1949 and 1953, from 4,782,000 males and 4,840,000 females in 1949 to 3,982,000 males and 4,509,000 females in 1953, a decline of 800,000 males and 331,000 females.[37]

China border exclusion

For the entire duration of the war, areas on the border between Korea and China were excluded from bombing due to State Department concerns.[38]

Notes

  1. ↑ Harden (2017), p. 9
  2. ↑ Kim (2012), p. 470
  3. ↑ Kim (2012), p. 471
  4. ↑ Kim (2012), p. 473-477
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Conway-Lanz (2014)
  6. ↑ Kim (2012), p. 478
  7. ↑ Kim (2012), p. 480
  8. 1 2 Kim (2012), p. 483
  9. 1 2 Kim (2012), p. 484
  10. 1 2 Kim (2012), p. 485
  11. ↑ Stone (1969), p. 312
  12. ↑ Pembroke, Michael (2018). Korea: Where the American Century Began. Hardie Grant Books. p. 152.
  13. ↑ Neer, Robert M. (2013). Napalm: An American Biography. Harvard University Press. pp. 102–3.
  14. ↑ Crane (2000), p. 168
  15. ↑ Cumings (2005), p. 297–98
  16. ↑ Jager (2013), p. 237–42.
  17. ↑ Witt (2005)
  18. ↑ Cumings 2004
  19. ↑ Dean (1954), p. 272-273
  20. 1 2 Armstrong (2010)
  21. ↑ Kim (2014), p. 244-245
  22. ↑ Kohn and Harahan, p. 88
  23. ↑ Oberdorfer (2014), p. 181
  24. ↑ Kim (2014)
  25. ↑ Robinson (2007), p. 119
  26. ↑ Kim (2012), p. 487
  27. ↑ Crane (2000), pp. 160-163
  28. ↑ Cumings (2011)
  29. ↑ Walkom (2010)
  30. ↑ Berger (1977), p. 366.
  31. ↑ Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, "Making More Enemies than We Kill? "Calculating U.S. Bomb Tonnages Dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and Weighing Their Implications," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 17, No. 3, April 27, 2015 (cached)
  32. ↑ Richard Rhodes, "The General and World War III," The New Yorker, June 19, 1995, p. 53
  33. ↑ "North Korea: Historical Demographic Data of the Whole Country," Jan Lahmeyer, accessed November 2017
  34. 1 2 Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch, 2005. ―Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths.‖ European Journal of Population: 21(2–3): 145–166. Korean data available at "The PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset, 1946-2008, Version 3.0," pp. 361-362
  35. ↑ "Casualties of Korean War" (in Korean). Ministry of National Defense of Republic of Korea. Archived from the original on 20 January 2013. Retrieved 14 February 2007.
  36. ↑ Armstrong (2009)
  37. ↑ Halliday (1981)
  38. ↑ Kim (2012), p. 472

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