Veterans Magazine 2021 - The War in Korea

The War in Korea
(1950 – 1953)
By: Col. H. Avery Chenoweth
USMCR Ret. (Perry)
Right after World War II, former ally, the Soviet Union,
dropped an “iron curtain” across Europe and challenged the
West to a “Cold War.” Five years later, to test the West’s will
to confront Soviet encroachment, it ordered its communist
puppet, North Korea, to invade free South Korea in a surprise
attack across the 38th Parallel on June 25, 1950.
Just freed from the Japanese, South Korea was a backward
country of reeking rice paddies, thatched-roof huts, and no
paved roads or two-story buildings, except in a few cities. Its
meager army, weak and untrained.
Tough President Harry Truman unhesitatingly ordered sparse
Pacific U.S. air components into battle and convinced
the United Nations Security Council to approve the U.N.’s
involvement to support the United States in saving the
vulnerable fledgling democratic country.
With worn out weapons from World War II, it took three
years of bloody fighting, mostly by seven American infantry
divisions supporting weaker South Korean divisions
at a cost of over 38,000 Americans killed with 8,000
still missing. Fighting ended 68-years in July 1953 in a
ceasefire (Armistice) with the South Korean army and a U.S.
mechanized division poised face-to-face on a Demilitarized
Zone (DMZ) against a million-man North Korean communist
army led by a crazed dictator—still today in an unresolved
“State of War”—with both North Korea and China!
Incredibly—thanks to America, with the United Nations’
token assistance—while North Korea still remains a dismal,
backward, enslaved and starving country—free and
democratic South Korea has grown into one of the richest
economies in Asia. Its capital city, Seoul—which has been
conquered and rendered into rubble three times by the
communist North—now leads one of the most impressively
modern, wealthy and technologically top countries,
in league with China, Japan, Russia, the U.S., Britain,
Germany—and unlike any other Asian nation, has a large
Christian population.
As a Marine infantry officer, I spent all of 1951 leading rifle,
machine gun, and recoilless rifle platoons in combat and
witnessed, and later wrote about, a lot of history that has
since been sanitized and revised.
The first part of the
Korean War was an
outright debacle. The U.S.
had downsized all of its
armed forces so quickly
immediately after the
end of WWII that in 1950,
only the 28,000-man 1st
Marine Division and its
Air Wing were capable of
combat. All six 10,000-
man U.S. Army divisions
thrown into combat got
clobbered and wiped
out as untrained, soft,
poorly led, draftee
replacements—some
never having even fired a
rifle!—were fed piecemeal
back into them.
1 st Lt. Avery Chenoweth USMCR, Korea 1951
After Korea, he remained active in the Reserves,
serving in Vietnam and Gulf wars, became
a noted military historian and combat artist,
retired at rank of colonel.
In the third month of the war, had the Marine division not
rescued the trapped remnants of the U.S. Eighth Army and
South Korean units driven into a final defense perimeter
at Pusan at the southern tip of the country—and then, on
September 15, pulled off the last amphibious invasion in
history behind the enemy lines and recaptured the capital,
Seoul—the North Koreans would have won the war hands
down. A month later, China entered the war, throwing the
American-UN forces into another panicked “bug-out” retreat.
Only the Marine division retained its unit integrity, saving
remnants of Army 7th and 3rd divisions while destroying 12
surrounding Chinese divisions as it withdrew in a two-weeklong
December battle in sub-freezing temperatures from
the frozen Chosin Reservoir in North Korea; one of the most
incredible feats in the annals of warfare.
The final two years were static WWI trench-type warfare at
the DMZ. Korea was the great General Douglas MacArthur’s
“Waterloo.” In 1951, President Truman relieved him of his
command due to misjudgment and insubordination to
Constitutional civil authority over the military.
November 2021
The WAR in KOREA
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