"Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population," Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. 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.
Americans don't really consider that the Korean War was the first real conflict of the Cold War, and as such was conducted when things weren't exactly cold. Neither the US nor the Soviet Union could nuke the other out of existence but both could nuke each other. Targeted bombing didn't exist and strategic bombing had won WWII. As a result, we treated North Korea as if it were Dresden or Tokyo and smothered it in ordnance.
- For Americans, the journalist Blaine Harden has written, this bombing was "perhaps the most forgotten part of a forgotten war," even though it was almost certainly "a major war crime." Yet it shows that North Korea's hatred of America "is not all manufactured," he wrote. "It is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets."
Important side note: As Robert Kaplan points out in Asia's Cauldron, Americans have an overly-important sense of our own impact on the Asia Pacific region. Most Americans, for example, think that Vietnam as a country is deeply resentful of the US for the Vietnam War, without recognizing that while the US occupied Vietnam once, the Chinese invade regularly and continue to be Vietnam's biggest trading partner. America is very much North Korea's biggest bugaboo but that's only because the Japanese are gone.
That's part of it. The "human" experience of Americans in Korea was refugee crises, daring-do dogfights and conventional warfare across a solid battle line. It fits into the mentality of "WWII." The "inhuman" experience of Americans in Korea was high-altitude saturation bombing and you can say "yeah, well we did that to Japan, we did that to Germany" but it was a bit more... asymmetrical in Korea.
But yes. Hawkeye and Trapper didn't spend a lot of time picking body parts out of the aftermath of a B-29 raid.
It wasn't just the North that America fucked over. The US military set-up the hard-line anti-Communist Rhee Syngman as the first president (dictator, really) of the Republic of Korea. Before and during the war he ordered mass killings of political dissidents. The Jeju Massacre was one such event. One incident where Americans directly killed civilians was the Nogeun-ri Massacre. Tens to hundreds of thousands of lives lost due to American influence.
Yeah I remember reading a long while back about how we supported the oppressive regime in the South, and just thinking "Man, they must hate us." I was pretty surprised to learn that we're viewed pretty favorably, but I guess that probably has more to do with South Korean relations with the North and China more than anything.
Really it's Japan. Compared to them, we're angels in the Korean consciousness. Japan colonized Korea from 1910-1945. During that time the Japanese destroyed/confiscated cultural artifacts and buildings, instituted forced labor (including forced prostitution), and eventually began a policy of cultural assimilation. By contrast the American influence on the peninsula is realtively hands-off or indirect. In my experience there definitely are a lot of people who are discontent with the prescence of US troops in Korea, but there's not the visceral prejudice that many have against Japan. What was surprising to me was that far right-wing nationalists are also typically very pro-American. Which is awkward as I have much more sympathy toward
- we supported the oppressive regime in the South
This unfortunately appears to be our country's MO in foreign countries. We have a much lengthier track record of setting up despotisms than democracies.
I always knew that we did some pretty horrible stuff in the Korean War - I mean, hell, we treated North Korea in the same way that we treated Japan and Germany and those countries were technically Great Powers - but I didn't know it was quite so horrific. I think it's probably fair to say that there haven't been many wars where either side didn't commit war crimes, but that doesn't excuse our actions, certainly. I'm glad at least that we probably would never engage in another conventional, total war again - at least not on this scale. The loss of life on that scale is impossible to comprehend.