Korean War

Document A: Memo from George Kennan to Secretary of State

Dean Acheson, August 23, 1950 (Modified)

The course we are moving upon today is…so little promising and so fraught (filled) with danger that I could not honestly urge you to continue to take responsibility for it. These are the main reasons why I feel this way:

We have not achieved a clear and realistic…view of our objectives in Korea and…the public are indulging themselves in emotional, moralistic attitudes toward Korea which, unless corrected, can easily carry us toward real conflict with the Russians…

So far as Korea is concerned...While It was not tolerable to us that communist control should be extended to South Korea… Nevertheless, it is not essential to us to see an anti-Soviet Korean regime extended to all of Korea for all time

Source: George Kennan was the author of the “Long Telegram” which introduced the concept of containment.

Document B: Excerpts from National Security Council Report

September 9, 1950

The political objective of the United Nations in Korea is to bring about the complete independence and unity of Korea....

As U.N. forces succeed in stabilizing the front, driving back the North Korean forces, and approaching the 38th parallel…

It is possible that the Soviet Union, although this would increase the chance of general war, may endeavor (attempt) to persuade the Chinese Communists to enter the Korean campaign with the purpose of avoiding the defeat of the North Korean forces…

 [...] It is difficult to appraise (evaluate) the risk at this time, and our action in moving major forces north of the 38th parallel would create a situation to which the Soviet Union would be almost certain to react in some manner…the possibility of Soviet or Chinese Communist intervention would not be precluded....

Document C: Excerpts from a CIA Report, September 27, 1950

Despite statements by the Chinese Premier and troop movements in Manchuria...there are no convincing indications of an actual Chinese Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in Korea.... From a military standpoint the most favorable time for intervention in Korea has passed....

While full-scale Chinese Communist intervention in Korea must be regarded as continuing possibility, a consideration of all known factors leads to the conclusion that barring a Soviet decision for global war, such action is not probable in 1950. During this period, intervention will probably be confined to continued covert assistance to the North Koreans.

The consensus of the US top military is that the Russians are not ready for global war while China is not militarily capable of unilateral intervention - specifically, there will be no Soviet or Chinese communist intervention in Korea.

Document D: “The U.S. war crime North Korea won’t forget” (Modified)

March 20, 2015. Blaine Harden, a former Post reporter, is the author of the book “The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot.”

North Korea cheered this month when a man with a knife and a history of violent behavior slashed the face of Mark Lippert, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea. The attack in Seoul was “a knife shower of justice,” North Korea said, praising it as “deserved punishment for warmonger United States.”

The hate, though, is not all manufactured. It is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets. The story dates to the early 1950s, when the U.S. Air Force, in response to the North Korean invasion that started the Korean War, bombed and napalmed cities, towns and villages across the North.

It was mostly easy pickings for the Air Force, whose B-29s faced little or no opposition on many missions. The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the New Yorker in 1995. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.

Although the ferocity of the bombing was criticized as racist and unjustified elsewhere in the world, it was never a big story back home. U.S. press coverage of the air war focused, instead, on “MiG alley,” a narrow patch of North Korea near the Chinese border. There, in the world’s first jet-powered aerial war, American fighter pilots competed against each other to shoot down five or more Soviet-made fighters and become “aces.” War reporters rarely mentioned civilian casualties from U.S. carpet-bombing. It is perhaps the most forgotten part of a forgotten war.