North Korea Thinks Americans Are “Imperialist Aggressors” — Here’s Why [PHOTOS]
By Richard Stockton on October 4, 2017
As tensions between the U.S. and North Korea come to a head, discover how the Korean War's atrocities have fueled the Hermit Kingdom's anger.
Keystone/Getty ImagesAn elderly woman and her grandchild wander among the debris of their wrecked home in the aftermath of an air raid by U.S. planes over Pyongyang. Circa 1950.
When North Korea launched a short-range ballistic missile on a path that took it over Japan on August 29, the world sat up and took notice.
The aggressiveness of this move was beyond the normal will-test-missiles-for-food economic model that the reclusive dictatorship had fallen into in recent years, and the hostility it displayed was harsh even by North Korean standards.
When challenged over such provocations, North Korean officials are in the habit of doubling down on the vitriol and accusing the United States of being an imperialist aggressor.
Even now, after years of tension that have culminated in an alarming standoff, most Americans and other Westerners are baffled by this rage, which, from the outside, seems unprovoked. After all, North Korea and the U.S. may have been at war in the 1950s, but the U.S. and Vietnam fought for much longer and more recently, and those two get along fine now.
Why, many Americans surely wonder, does North Korea have to be so difficult?
While the North Korean governments’s anti-Americanism may have grown to unreasonable heights, it turns out that there is some fire under all that smoke.
During the Korean War, the United States sent air and ground forces into the territory of the North, where they carried out actions that, in most any other context, would be condemned as war crimes. North Korea never forgot these deeds, and bitterness over America’s refusal to acknowledge them remains a sticking point between the two countries to this day.
Now that the relationship between the two countries has grown so tense, it’s worth looking over this forgotten history and finding out more about what has North Korea so angry.
The War That Never Ended
Wikimedia Commons
The Korean War began in June 1950, when Kim Il-sung’s communists launched a surprise invasion of South Korea. The initial attack was overwhelming, and South Korean/UN forces were swiftly driven into a defensible pocket in the southeast of the peninsula, near Pusan.
With a great deal of air and naval bombardment, they held the line until U.S. General Douglas MacArthur organized one of the most daring operations in 20th-century warfare: the amphibious landing at Inchon.
This move severed North Korea’s supply line and doomed their forces pressing on Pusan. As the communists retreated across the border and back into the north, U.S. Army and Marine Corps forces rapidly advanced against very little effective resistance.
For a time, American-led UN forces occupied almost all of North Korea. However, in November, 250,000 Chinese soldiers poured over the border to pushed the UN back south.
The Korean War then stabilized on a single front bear the middle of the peninsula, which eventually became the demilitarized zone (DMZ). This DMZ is what separates the two countries — technically still at war, given that no treaty was ever signed — to this day.
But it was during the period of American occupation between the Inchon landing and the Chinese invasion that chiefly American forces committed most of the atrocities that the North Koreans remain angry about to this day.
In a series of actions that are virtually never taught in American schools, the UN forces bombarded population centers, destroyed North Korean agriculture, and filled mass graves with thousands of people deemed to be politically suspect.
According to North Korea, these actions went far beyond military necessity and were, in fact, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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“Under The Carpet”
Underwood Archives/Contributor/Getty ImagesBoeing B-29 Superfortresses drop bombs during a raid on a chemical plant in Koman-dong, Korea. August 14, 1950.
At the outbreak of the war, notorious U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay approached his colleagues at the Pentagon about the prospects of launching a carpet bombing campaign against the North.
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Given his experience in overseeing the firebombing campaign against Japan during World War II, LeMay figured that the sooner that America deployed overwhelming lethal force against the whole enemy population, the less total force would be needed to ultimately win the war.
LeMay thus saw the massive scorched-earth bombing of civilians as a humane gesture to shorten the war and save lives in the long run. To his dismay, however, the general found his colleagues squeamish. According to an interview he gave decades later:
“Right at the start of the war, unofficially I slipped a message in ‘under the carpet’ in the Pentagon that we ought to turn SAC loose with incendiaries on some North Korean towns. The answer came back, under the carpet again, that there would be too many civilian casualties; we couldn’t do anything like that. So we went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too. We even burned down Pusan. . . an accident, but we burned it down anyway. . . Over a period of three years or so, we killed off – what? – twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure? Over a period of three years, this seemed to be acceptable to everybody, but to kill a few people at the start right away, no, we can’t seem to stomach that.”
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On The Ground
Wikimedia Commons
The consequences of the United States’ bombing policy for those on the ground was horrifying. Over the three years of the Korean War, the UN forces – primarily the U.S. Air Force and Navy – dropped 635,000 tons of munitions from the air onto the Korean Peninsula.
That’s almost 140,000 tons more than were dropped across the entire Pacific Theater throughout all of World War II, and this tally included more than 32,000 tons of napalm and significant quantities of Agent Orange, the defoliant that would eventually become infamous for the damage it did in Vietnam a decade later.
While news outlets focused public attention on the American flying aces involved in dramatic one-on-one arial dogfights, the strategic bomber wing sent hundreds of B-29s over North Korea in long leisurely raids that barely faced opposition from Northern forces.
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Much of the destruction was aimed at the little war production that North Korea had within its borders. However, when those targets were exhausted, the bombers were just as happy to rain down explosives and incendiaries on civilian villages far from the fighting front.
Nobody kept very careful records of who died during these raids. Though, along with those who died from starvation and disease, the numbers killed by direct action here are certainly in the high hundreds of thousands, if not more than 1 million.
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n The Ground
Wikimedia Commons
The consequences of the United States’ bombing policy for those on the ground was horrifying. Over the three years of the Korean War, the UN forces – primarily the U.S. Air Force and Navy – dropped 635,000 tons of munitions from the air onto the Korean Peninsula.
That’s almost 140,000 tons more than were dropped across the entire Pacific Theater throughout all of World War II, and this tally included more than 32,000 tons of napalm and significant quantities of Agent Orange, the defoliant that would eventually become infamous for the damage it did in Vietnam a decade later.
While news outlets focused public attention on the American flying aces involved in dramatic one-on-one arial dogfights, the strategic bomber wing sent hundreds of B-29s over North Korea in long leisurely raids that barely faced opposition from Northern forces.
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Much of the destruction was aimed at the little war production that North Korea had within its borders. However, when those targets were exhausted, the bombers were just as happy to rain down explosives and incendiaries on civilian villages far from the fighting front.
Nobody kept very careful records of who died during these raids. Though, along with those who died from starvation and disease, the numbers killed by direct action here are certainly in the high hundreds of thousands, if not more than 1 million.
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Political Cleansing
Wikimedia CommonsTerrified civilian members of the Bodo League await execution over a ditch in Daejeon, South Korea. June 1950.
As brutal as the air war against the North was, much of the devastation could conceivably be excused as the collateral damage of ordinary war operations. This could not be said, however, for the mass shootings of civilians who were suspected of having communist sympathies.
Starting in the summer of 1950, just weeks before the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korean “self-defense forces” rounded up and shot tens of thousands of people.
The first major shooting took place in Daejeon, South Korea. Here, South Korean military and civil police rounded up between 100,000 and 300,000 members of the Bodo League — a national re-education organization aimed at purging the South of communists — and shot them and their families.
This massacre seems to have been motivated by expediency, as reeducating hundreds of thousands of people was taking a really long time and war was looming. Therefore, the authorities evidently felt the need to eliminate a potential Fifth Column before it could aid the enemy.
League members were taken from their forced-labor details and led to open trenches in the Daejeon area. From there, their hands were bound and they were shot while kneeling at the edge of the ditches. The bodies were covered with earth, and the surviving members of the league were told they would get similar treatment if they ever talked about what they saw.
In recent years, many of the execution sites have been excavated, and the remains of men, women, and children have been recovered from the mass graves.
Wikimedia CommonsPolitical prisoners huddle together before their execution in Daejong, South Korea. The unidentified man in the foreground may be an American military observer. Date unspecified.
The National Self-Defense Forces didn’t limit themselves to shooting South Koreans of suspect loyalties, either.
Once Allied forces occupied the North, these “civilian” units swept over the conquered territory and began a political cleansing of Korean Workers’ Party members and sympathizers, along with anybody suspected of being less than enthusiastic about all the new “freedom” that North Korea was getting thanks to the invading UN forces.
At Sinchon, in southwestern North Korea, South Korean forces shot another huge number of people. How many exactly is not known, and it probably never will be known because of subsequent communist propaganda, which unnecessarily inflated every number until it bore little connection to reality.
The North claims that 35,000 people were shot at Sinchon between October and December 1950. If true, this number represents 25 percent of Sinchon’s entire population at the time.
North Korean sources also claim that the United States led and perpetrated the massacre, though this remains very much in dispute.
North Korean accounts tell of American soldiers chopping off civilians’ heads with samurai swords. This last detail is telling, as postwar North Korean propaganda has always drawn a straight line between the American presence in Korea and the Japanese occupation in the decades beforehand. Thus, if accounts of Americans with samurai swords are fictional, they are likely an attempt by North Korea to evoke the imagery of the hated Japanese when teaching children the approved history of the “Imperialist Aggressor” War.
But, samurai swords or no samurai swords, however the executions were done, and whatever the final body count, many were clearly murdered at Sinchon and the mass shootings didn’t stop until UN forces were driven out of the North.
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A Bitter Harvest
Sinchon Museum of American War AtrocitiesNorth Korean image depicting purported crimes perpetrated by U.S. soldiers during the war.
Since the end of the Korean War’s hostilities — an armistice was signed but no peace treaty — in 1953, we’ve been left with an uncomfortable stalemate and the parties involved have gone their separate ways over how they tell the story of the war.
For many decades, South Korea’s policy was to obscure and deny everything, threatening witnesses to the massacres with blacklisting and prison if they talked.
Britain and the United States went into an oblivious information blackout, with virtually none of the gory details of the Korean War finding their way into school textbooks or popular histories of the war.
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The Korean War itself even earned the nickname “the forgotten war” because of the neglect it faced among average Americans and because of the dismissive veterans’ policies throughout the 1950s and 1960s. For most Westerners, it’s as if the mass graves and firebombed cities never happened, and the grievances that North Korea keeps harping on might as well be the rantings of lunatics.
In North Korea, the guardians of popular history took a dramatically different tack.
Every child in North Korea is given extensive instruction in the Workers’ Party-approved version of events, where the dastardly United States invaded peaceful Korea for no reason at all, and where U.S. Imperialist Aggression Forces (the name the U.S. military has in North Korean media) gratuitously butchered innocent children to satisfy their bloodlust.
All visitors to North Korea are marched through multiple museum exhibits and shown photographs and artifacts of the slaughters. The museum even includes one exhibit in Sinchon that goes out of its way to slander U.S. General William Harrison by blaming him for a mass shooting, despite the event taking place before he was even deployed to Korea.
In all, so many lies and exaggerations have been told on the North Korean side, seemingly to counter the suppression and secrecy perpetrated in the South, that the honest truth may never be known about the atrocities committed and suffered during the Korean War.
Today, as the two countries gird themselves for another round of fighting, Westerners would do well to remember that the North Korean soldiers they may soon face have all been raised on the North Korean version of history, however much fact or fiction that happens to contain.
Next, check out how Americans are depicted in North Korean propaganda. Then, take a look at some of the most heartbreaking Korean War photos.
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