The Korean War:
1950–1953
The Start of the
Korean War
It seemed that Korea
might become a flash point in the Cold War, but then Truman’s secretary of
state, Dean Acheson, effectively announced in 1950 that the
United States had no interest in Korea because it had no geopolitical
significance. The Soviet Union, however, may have interpreted Acheson’s remarks
as giving the USSR carte blanche regarding Korea and therefore allowed the
North Korean Communist government in Pyongyang to invade South Korea in June 1950, with some
Soviet support. Outnumbered and outgunned, the South Korean forces retreated to
the city of Pusan on the peninsula’s southern shore. Truman
watched, stunned, as the North Korean forces captured almost the entire
peninsula within the span of a few months. He capitalized on the Soviet Union’s
absence in the United Nations Security Council, however, to convince the other
members that North Korea had been the sole aggressor. After a vote of unanimous
approval, the Security Council asked all member nations to help restore peace.
NSC-68
Both conservative and liberal foreign policy
makers in the United States viewed the North Korean invasion as evidence that
the Soviet Union did in fact hope to spread Communism and as a threat to
American efforts to rebuild and democratize Japan. The invasion thus made
George F. Kennan’s theories about containment all the more
pertinent: Truman worried that if the United States failed to act, the Soviet
Union would continue to expand and threaten democracy.
In order to check this feared expansion,
Truman’s new National Security Council submitted a classified document known
simply as National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC-68), which
suggested that Truman quadruple military spending for purposes of containment.
The president readily consented and asked Congress for more funds and more men.
Within a few years, the U.S. armed forces boasted more than 3 million men, and
the United States was spending roughly 15percent of its gross national product on the
military.
The Inchon Landing
Truman made sure that General MacArthur, who
had been an effective in overseeing occupied postwar Japan, was made commander
of the UN forces sent to Korea. Truman then ordered MacArthur to pull U.S.
troops out of Japan and retake South Korea below the 38th parallel.
In September 1950, MacArthur and his troops flanked
the North Koreans by making an amphibious landing at Inchon, near Seoul. The
surprise Inchon landing allowed U.S. forces to enter the
peninsula quickly, without having to break through the enormous forces
surrounding Pusan. Caught entirely off guard, the North Korean forces panicked
and fled north, well past the 38th parallel. Truman ordered MacArthur to cross
the parallel and pursue the North Koreans.
Disaster at the Yalu River
MacArthur’s crossing of
the 38th
parallel troubled the Soviet Union and Communist China, especially considering
that Truman had entered the war vowing to restore peace and the status quo—not
to conquer the entire peninsula. China therefore warned the United States not
to approach the Chinese–North Korean border at theYalu River. However,
MacArthur ignored the warning and pursued the North Koreans farther up the
peninsula. Interpreting this move as an act of war, the Chinese sent hundreds
of thousands of soldiers across the Yalu to meet MacArthur’s men in North
Korea. Overwhelmed, MacArthur and his forces retreated back to the 38th
parallel.
MacArthur’s Dismissal
Stalemated once again at the38th parallel, MacArthur
pressured Truman to drop nuclear bombs on mainland China. Doing so, MacArthur
reasoned, would not only allow his forces to take the entire Korean Peninsula
but would also topple the Communist regime in Beijing. Truman and U.S. military
officials, however, knew they lacked the resources to fight a war with China,
defend Western Europe, contain the Soviet Union, occupy Japan, and hold Korea
at the same time. They also wanted to keep the war limited and knew that the
deployment of nuclear weapons would bring the Soviet Union into what could
quickly devolve into World War III. MacArthur rebuffed these arguments and
instead tried to turn the American people against Truman by criticizing him in
public. Truman removed MacArthur from command in April 1951, for
insubordination.
The Election of 1952
Even though MacArthur
had disobeyed orders and publicly rebuked the commander-in-chief, blame fell on
Truman for “losing” Korea to the Communists. Since Truman had little chance of
being reelected, Democrats instead nominated Illinois governor Adlai E. Stevenson for the presidency in 1952.
Republicans, meanwhile, nominated former World War II general and NATO supreme
commanderDwight D. Eisenhower for
president, with former Red-hunter Richard
M. Nixon as his running mate.
Eisenhower’s status as a war hero and Nixon’s reputation for being tough on Communists
gave the Republicans an easy victory. They won the popular vote by a 7
million-vote margin and also won a landslide in the electoral college, with 442 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 89.
The End of the Korean
War
By the time Eisenhower
took the oath of office in 1953,
American soldiers had been entrenched in Korea for nearly three years. In the
time since MacArthur’s final retreat to the 38th
parallel, thousands more Americans had died without any territorial loss or
gain. Eisenhower eventually brought about an armistice with North Korea, in part by making it
known that he, unlike Truman, would consider the use of nuclear weapons in
Korea. Despite the armistice, however, the border between North and South Korea
has remained one of the most heavily fortified Cold War “hot spots” in the
world for more than fifty years.
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