Korea

This is part of the bomb sites series by elin o'Hara slavick. Also available in book form: Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography.

Korea, 1950-53, "In Korea, thirty-four thousand Americans had died fighting North Korean and Chinese troops without changing the status quo antebellum." Christian Appy, Patriots The war was fought in defense of the Syngman Rhee Regime (South Korea). It is difficult to find a kind word for the man the U.S. brought back to Korea in 1945 after decades of exile in America. Rhee was flown into Korea in one of MacArthurs planes and maneuvered into authority by a US Army Military Government in Korea. The U.S. suppressed a provisional government, the Korean Peoples Republic. In 1950 there were an estimated 14,000 political prisoners in South Korean jails. American airpower in Korea was fearsome to behold. As was the case in Vietnam, its use was celebrated in the wholesale dropping of napalm, destruction of villages, bombing cities so as to leave no useful facilities standing, demolishing dams and dikes to cripple the irrigation system, wiping out rice crops, saturation bombing, and a scorched earth policy. It is worse than useless to destroy to liberate. William Blum, Killing Hope "Three years after the beginning of the war, a cease-fire was finally signed. Everything was back to where it had been in the beginning, with almost the same borders as before the war and the same unfulfilled dream of reunification. No one had won. Everyone had lost. The war is calculated to have cost the lives of 5,000,000 people, by far the majority of them civilians." Sven Lindqvist, The History of Bombing

Published by: elin
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