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Single Step



The Second Korean War

Part 2 By Chris Oakley

(adapted from material submitted by the author to Jeff Provine's blog)

Summary: In the first part of this series, we recapped the situation leading to the start of the 2nd Korean War in August of 1962. In this chapter, we'll review how the West and the Soviet bloc reacted to the start of hostilities and delve into the role played by U.S. Forces Korea commander-in-chief Gen. Guy S. Meloy Jr. in directing U.S. and allied combat operations against the NKPA in the weeks following the Dresnok incident.


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Popular legend in some far right-wing conspiracy theory circles has it that Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet premier at the time Joseph Dresnok took his ill-fated stroll across the DMZ, instigated the start of the Second Korean War just as his predecessor Joseph Stalin had orchestrated the outbreak of the first. No solid evidence has turned up to prove this claim, however; if anything, most available Kremlin records from those days suggest Khrushchev was trying to dampen down the fires of war. Khrushchev's defense minister at the time, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, would recall in his autobiography that the Soviet premier was visibly furious when his aides notified him about the NKPA's initial bombardment of U.S. outposts along the Korean DMZ. Coming at a time when the Soviet Union was locked in a geopolitical standoff with NATO in Europe and increasingly at odds with the People's Republic of China about Communism's future in the Third World, the outbreak of a new shooting war on the Korean Peninsula was a distraction Moscow could ill afford.


Nor was Khrushchev alone in his dread of what the consequences of such a war would be for the Soviet bloc. While in public every Warsaw Pact diplomat in Pyongyang voiced confidence that the NKPA would easily smash the U.S. and ROK forces in a short time, behind closed doors those same diplomats fretted they were witnessing a disaster in the making. The chief defense attaché for the Polish embassy in Pyongyang cabled his superiors in Warsaw with a seven- page report grimly predicting North Korea would collapse within a matter of months or even weeks without massive outside military aid(and even then, the attaché warned, it was still questionable how long the NKPA could hold out). His East German and Czech colleagues were equally pessimistic, believing the skirmishes along the DMZ were only a prelude to a broader U.S.-South Korean campaign which would only stop when it reached the Chinese border. Hungary's second-highest ranking diplomatic representative in North Korea bluntly told Kim Il Sung in a 40-minute phone call that the DPRK had signed its own death warrant with its artillery strikes on the U.S. outposts in the DMZ.


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The prevailing sentiment among Washington's allies in the Far East and Europe was that the United States was right to take stern action against the DPRK in response to what most Western military and diplomatic officials saw as an unprovoked North Korean attack against the South. Great Britain, as an act of solidarity with its longtime chief trans-Atlantic partner and a tacit warning to Communist China not to doubt Whitehall's commitment to defend its interests in Asia, put the British Army garrisons in Hong Kong and Singapore on full alert. West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer personally telephoned the White House to assure President Kennedy of Bonn's support for U.S. armed intervention in defense of South Korea. Japan, while barred by Article 9 of its 1947 constitution from playing any direct military role in the steadily growing conflict on the Korean Peninsula, did agree to provide intelligence and medical support to U.S. forces in the region. South Vietnam, then in the midst of a serious guerrilla war of its own, nonetheless offered to send two of its best marine battalions to augment U.S. and ROK troop strength.


The point man for the United States' second conflict with North Korea was General Guy S. Meloy Jr., then U.S. Forces Korea commander-in-chief. A relatively anonymous figure at the time hostilities broke out, he would soon find himself thrust into the public spotlight as he assumed the primary role in directing U.S. and allied combat operations. From his headquarters in the Yongsan district of the South Korean capital Seoul, General Meloy supervised one of the most massive ground campaigns American troops had fought anywhere since the Civil War; knowing that air power would make or break the combined U.S.-ROK offensive along the 38th parallel, he authorized heavy airstrikes on NKPA positions throughout the DMZ. For that matter he had no misgivings when it when it came to going after targets north of the DMZ; on August 21st, just six days after the initial outbreak of hostilities between the United States and North Korea, Gen. Meloy authorized U.S. Air Force bombers in the region to attack military and industrial targets in Pyongyang and the strategically vital port city Wonsan.


Operation Jackhammer, as the raids were collectively known, marked the baptism of fire for the B-52 Stratofortress, the U.S. Air Force's principal long range bomber at the time the Second Korean War broke out. Although the Stratofortress had officially been in service nearly seven years, Operation Jackhammer saw the plane's first use under actual combat conditions, and it proved to be devastatingly effective. Pyongyang's central water, power, and gas facilities were crippled for weeks and Wonsan's naval base was rendered all but useless-- a loss that would come back to haunt the Communist regime as the war intensified and U.S. and ROK ground forces kept pushing northward into DPRK territory.


Closer to the battlefront F-100 Super Sabres and F-4 Phantoms flew low- altitude attack runs in support of ground troops; on August 23rd, 1962 an F-4 squadron based near Inchon scored the first confirmed air combat kill of the war when it shot down a North Korean air force J-7(a Chinese-made variant of the Soviet MiG-21 fighter). For the North Korean government, already reeling from its army's failure to prevent U.S. and ROK forces from crossing the DMZ into North Korea, the J-7 kill was a further wound to its collective morale. An infuriated Kim Il Sung had the entire North Korean air force high command shot by firing squad and threatened to do the same to the army general staff if the "imperialist" forces were not turned back soon. The generals knew all too well this wasn't an idle threat; he had ruthlessly purged many civilians from his government in the late 1950s on far less pretext.


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The official line coming out of Beijing in the first days following the outbreak of the Second Korean War was that the people of mainland China were completely and unshakably unified in supporting North Korea against what Mao Zedong labeled "brutal unprovoked aggression" by the United States and South Korea. Expressions of solidarity with the embattled DPRK rang out every hour on the hour from Radio Peking and foreign minister Chen Yi had begun to drop ominous hints China might intervene on North Korea's behalf. But behind the façade of monolithic unity, the Chinese people and their government were, in fact, sharply divided over how China should respond to the mounting crisis. The first Korean conflict had seen the People's Liberation Army sustain over 800,000 casualties against the United Nations and achieve little more than a stalemate for their troubles, even if Communist propaganda did keep claiming the North Korean side had won. It wasn't a performance many Chinese cared to see repeated.


A notable example of the discord simmering under the surface of Chinese society as a result of the outbreak of the Second Korean War was a meeting of the Communist Party of China(CPC) Central Committee on August 19th, 1962 convened to weigh options for responding to the hostilities. At the time of the special session, the war had been going on for nearly four days and U.S. and South Korean forces had started to gain some footholds(albeit they were tenuous ones) in North Korean territory; one U.S. armored division had even succeeded in capturing part of the industrial city of Kaesong. At least two senior PLA intelligence officers had expressed concerns that the pace of the U.S.-ROK advance might eventually put U.S. troops within striking distance of the Chinese frontier. But to the dismay of these two men, the CPC Central Committee was unable to reach any kind of consensus about what steps to take next.


While the Central Committee argued, the staff at the Chinese embassy in Pyongyang kept a nervous eye on developments in the south. Although none of them said it openly they were worried about one of two possible worst-case scenarios: (A)that they might become inadvertent casualties of a full-blown fight to the death between NKPA and U.S.-ROK forces for control of the city; or (B)that vengeful North Korean civilians angered by Beijing's inaction in the face of an apparent U.S.-ROK invasion of their country might break down the embassy doors and lynch the diplomats. The embassy's defense attaché was sufficiently concerned about these grim contingencies to keep a fully loaded Type 54 semi-automatic pistol with him at all times in order to be able to protect himself if worst came to worst.


Along the Chinese-North Korean border thousands of PLA troops champed at the bit to get in the fight. They were eager to finish the job that their comrades had started when China intervened on North Korea's behalf more than a decade earlier in the first Korean war, but the infighting in the ranks of the CPC leadership made it difficult to reach any kind of consensus on what military action should or even could be taken in response to the outbreak of a second conflict on the 38th parallel. This essentially meant the PLA border divisions were stuck on the sidelines for the time being. The same held true for the People's Liberation Air Force squadrons stationed along the banks of the Yalu River; had the civilian leadership not been hamstrung by discord at the top it's possible these squadrons might have acted as a counterweight to the substantial U.S. air presence in southern Korea and Japan.


Further complicating CPC efforts to achieve a unified consensus about how to handle the renewed hostilities in Korea was the knowledge that China faced a potential military conflict of its own with India over a disputed frontier section of Himalayan territory claimed by both countries. Since the late 1950s, when India had granted the 14th Dalai Lama political asylum after a failed Tibetan insurrection against Chinese occupation, relations between Beijing and New Delhi had grown increasingly adversarial, and the Himalayan border quarrel had only served to make an already severe animosity that much worse. The question seemed to be less if war with India would break out than when and where the first shots would be fired; under those circumstances, it was no easy task to garner support for a new PLA intervention in Korea. Even deciding whether to stockpile fuel or ammunition for defensive operations on the Yalu River posed a serious dilemma for the PLA general staff.


******


On August 27th, 1962 the NKPA launched a three-pronged counterattack with the goal of ejecting U.S. and ROK forces from Kaesong. In addition to the staggering numbers of conventional troops taking part in the assault, there were suicide squads whose mission was to force gaps in the U.S.-ROK lines by blowing themselves up; the thinking behind this tactic was that the explosions would not only inflict severe casualties on U.S. and South Korean forces but also sow panic among the remaining troops and drive them into headlong retreat. It was a tactic influenced by the Japanese kamikaze attacks on U.S. naval vessels in the closing months of the Second World War and the "human wave" assaults employed by Chinese Communist forces against the Kuomintang during the Chinese Civil War.


At first, it seemed like the suicide attacks might accomplish their goal as U.S. advance units inside Kaesong found it necessary to withdraw to the edge of the city to preserve cohesion among the U.S.-ROK front. As the North Koreans drove further into the city, however, a flanking attack on their western side by U.S. Marines abruptly threw them off-balance and put them on the defensive. With the NKPA push stymied, U.S. and ROK troops were able to regroup and retake the initiative; by August 31st, four days after the suicide squads launched their first attacks, U.S. and ROK units were back in control of most of Kaesong and were making a determined drive to take the rest of the city. On September 3rd U.S. and South Korean tanks unleashed a full-tilt charge against the last remaining NKPA strongpoints inside the city, backed up by air strikes from U.S. Navy carrier jets and U.S. Air Force B-52s. In spite of heated exhortations from their political commissars to fight to the death, the last remnants of the NKPA forces in the city chose to surrender at midday on September 4th. When news about the city's fall reached the NKPA high command in Pyongyang, it sent shock waves throughout the entire North Korean government....


To Be Continued

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