Response to Article, " Korea's 20the Century Odyssey."

[Maria Blake]

         The information gained through the article on “Korea’s 20^th Century Odyssey” was new to me  in most respects and familiar in fewer others.  

            To begin with, it was known to me that the U.S. military went to fight in Korea for reasons that had to do with fears of a new Communistic wave that would spread through the rest of the world, if left unchecked. It was known to me, moreover, that the war engaged the U.S. and Korea in a war that depended on napalm bombing and that there were deaths as a result of such a warfare. At different times, I have had students who told me they had one grandparent who fought during the Korean war. 

              Nonetheless, there were many more things that were unfamiliar to me. For one thing, it was how the war was perceived by the U.S. as a “police action,” or a conflict, but not a war. In this light, the United Nations came to be the overarching commanding entity that became involved and sanctioned the use of weapons for the purpose of defending peace and order. The commander of the United Nations military representation in Korea was an American commander, general MacArthur, who was blamed later for risking the lives of the military by attempting to forge forward, when the outcome would have been potentially disastrous, particularly, when China joined the North Koreans in their effort to defeat the attacks with their own use of weaponry. Some intellectuals were, also, fearful of the onset of the WWIII, if nuclear weapons were part of the subsequent military conflicts on the ground. In the same light, I did not know the confrontations were so intense at different times during the war that would lead to the city of Seoul being overrun four times in the three-year war, assumingly, by both the North Koreans and the South Koreans, which suggests the war front was moving north and south depending on how the military was positioned toward the two major cities, Seoul and Pyongyang, which determined the degree of success of either sides involved in the conflict; that is, if the front line was moving down to Seoul, it meant the North Koreans were being successful in maintaining their defense and they were aggressively moving south to defeat the foreign troops and South Koreans and occupy the entire Korean peninsula. But, if the front line was moving up to Pyongyang, it suggested the UN troops were making progress. 

            Furthermore, other things that were unfamiliar to me were how there were so many victims from both sides, but mostly from the Korean side, regardless of whether they were North, or South Korean. The article points out that there were: “ 33,626 Americans, while hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans(North and South) soldiers, and millions of civilians died in the brutal police action.”(Robinson) The heartbreaking truth was the high death toll of civilians, which makes me think that in every war the civilians are those who suffer the most, even though the government and those involved in directly conflict suffer less. The war ended in a truce, also, although I thought it ended after two-to-three years. This makes it clearer why today the situation between the North and South Koreas are still intense, and there is military at the border division between the two countries, which remained the same ever since the first establishment of the 38 parallel division line before the outbreak of the war. 

            Finally, the article spoke about North Korean’s bunker mentality, which was something I did not know, and how such a mentality originated in the fear the country has of a future threat of bombing. That the country was devastated  during the war is the cause of this fear and the hatred that exists in the history of North Korea towards the West, and in particular, towards the U.S. that had caused all the devastation. The thought that the country was able “ with “the tenacious will of the government, the determined leadership of the centralized mass party” to make the country stand on its own feet is a testament of how strong the government exerts its influence on the people. The author describes the people’s bunker mentality as paranoia, which had led to the building of “defenses and strategic industries into Korea’s ubiquitous granite hills and mountains.” (Robinson)The use of nuclear weapons is one way the country could defend itself and that is a scary reality. The latter explains why not only the West but also China, Japan, and South Korea are on the alert and supporting sanctions on North Korea to keep the area safe. The U.S. is also supportive of such measures because any nuclear  conflict has global consequences.