North Korea, a highly militarised state dominated by one family
for over half a century.
The product of a conflict reinforced by a nuclear threat,
that still endures today.
It began with the Korean War fought between 1950 and 1953, a war
that led to deep ideological and physical divisions between North
and South and reverberated across the world.
There is no way to understand what's going on today without understanding
of the Korean War.
How can you understand this Korean conflict that we are having without
understanding of the origin of that conflict?
Nearly 70 years on, this unresolved conflict continues to pose a serious
threat to America and its allies.
The Korean War was one of the bloodiest chapters
in the country's history.
A civil war that nearly ignited World War III.
We are united in detesting Communist slavery.
It took the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers and millions
of Koreans.
When they came, they came in waves - a wave, a wave, a wave, a wave.
I threw three cartons of grenades that night.
We could hear the bugles sound and then all the screaming
and what have you.
And their sole purpose was to annihilate
the 1st Marine Division.
The Korean War was one of the most vicious, violent, nauseating wars
of the 20th century.
The United States dropped more ordnance on North Korea
in that three-year war
than we dropped during the entire Second World War.
For North Koreans, the Korean War is not a memory.
It's still very much alive.
Good evening from the White House in Washington.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped
on Hiroshima, a military base.
Nagasaki - target for the second atomic bomb.
Just three days after Hiroshima... London newspapers this morning
are speculating that a new surrender ultimatum to Japan
may be likely soon.
At the close of World War II, the Americans turn their attention
to the surrender of Japanese forces in Korea.
With Soviet troops already deployed in Northern Korea and marching
southward, the US military needed to act quickly.
The United States was much further away,
its troops were much further away than were Soviet troops.
What that meant was suddenly the Americans had to try
and establish some agreements with Stalin, the leader
in the Soviet Union, on Korea.
The Americans proposed that the United States
and the Soviet Union establish zones.
On August 10th, 1945, two US Army officers were given a mission
to divide Korea before the Soviets could occupy the entire country.
Armed with only a National Geographic map of Asia, Colonels
Rusk and Bonesteel, who knew little about Korea, zeroed
in on the peninsula.
They had 30 minutes to really divide up the country and they looked
at the wall and there was a map of the Korean peninsula
and they said, "Well,
"why don't we just kind of divide it here in this 38th parallel?"
The 38th parallel was just north of Seoul and they wanted the national capital
to be in the American zone, and with very little discussion
that decision goes up to Truman and is made in a proposal to Stalin.
The 38th parallel was simply a line on a map.
It followed no physical features.
It divided farms and villages, severed 300 roads and cut
across six railways.
The Soviets accepted it.
Korea had been cut in two without a word of input
from a single Korean.
Koreans were one people for thousands of years,
and the Koreans didn't have a lot of choice.
You know, it's not even a big country. We're just divided...
And that took all of 30 minutes. It was a 30-minute decision.
And so the 38th parallel becomes this temporary dividing line
between Northern and Southern Korea.
But the temporary dividing line congeals into effectively
a permanent dividing line
when the Soviet Union and the United States fall out,
the Cold War intervened and American troops didn't go home.
At the end of World War II, the United States
and the Soviet Union had emerged as superpowers.
By 1946, the map of the world was split between the conflicting
ideologies of democracy and commerce.
In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin tightened his hold on power
and began to extend communist influence throughout Europe.
US President Truman, sworn in after the death of Franklin D Roosevelt,
was both unpopular and untested on the world stage,
yet he was determined to advance America's post-war interests.
The policy of the Truman administration
was that the United States needed to focus on containing
the Soviet Union, keeping Soviet power and Soviet ideology -
communism - from spreading.
It wasn't simply the tanks and troops of the Soviet Union.
It was this ideology, it was the belief system of communism.
Europe was the Cold War's first battleground.
Neither side was interested in events on the faraway
Korean peninsula.
For US strategic planners, Korea really didn't figure much
in the picture at all.
To the extent that we cared about Asia,
US strategic planners believed that the only power in Asia
would continue to be Japan.
The Japanese defeat in World War II ended their occupation of Korea.
A history marred by the brutal subjugation of the Korean people.
Japan succeeded in colonising Korea in 1910. That led to terrible
hardships for millions of Koreans.
And then the Japanese used Koreans as mobile capital and labour
throughout the empire.
You have the mobilisation of 200,000 Korean soldiers
into the Japanese army -
most of them drafted. As many as 100 to 200,000 women
were dragooned into serving
dozens of Japanese soldiers every day as sex slaves.
So when they were liberated in '45, the Koreans thought
this was the beginning of a bright, bright future for them
and that this division would end very quickly.
TRANSLATION:
Park Kyung-Soon was just nine years old when she heard the news
over the radio that the Japanese had surrendered.
There was celebration, relief that this period of Japanese rule
was over, but there was a power vacuum that opened up dependent
on the evolving relationship between the Soviets
and the Americans.
And as it turned out, the Soviets and the Americans couldn't reach
an agreement on how to unify the Korean peninsula.
To control their occupied territories,
the Soviets and Americans put in power men they could trust.
In the South, the Americans supported Syngman Rhee,
a Princeton educated Christian who'd been lobbying the US government
for the job throughout World War ii.
Syngman Rhee had no faction in Korea.
He had no base in Korea because he had been out of
the country for 40 or 50 years.
But he had a certain charisma.
He had a great smile.
Americans tended to think he was a kindly old gentleman.
Uncle Syngman. Rhee's kindly manner belied an unyielding thirst
for power and desire to unify the two Koreas at any cost.
He was elected president of South Korea in 1948.
To consolidate his authority, Rhee crushed political dissent, killing
thousands of communist guerrillas.
Rhee was an authoritarian, semi-thug with great contacts.
He wasn't a nice man, but Americans, certainly in this period, tended
to believe if somebody could speak English and had been educated
in the United States that, oh, well, that means they've absorbed
all kinds of democratic values.
Well, that didn't happen to be the case.
Syngman Rhee just happened to be, as Franklin Roosevelt
would have said, our SOB rather than theirs.
In the North, the Soviets picked Kim Il-sung -
an unknown expat who'd been radicalised
by the Japanese occupation.
Kim Il-sung was really unknown.
But then, when the Japanese took control of the Korean peninsula
during the occupation in the first half of the 20th century,
Kim Il-sung transformed.
He became known as a guerrilla fighter
fighting against the Japanese in China.
And from that point on, had basically a price on his head
as an anti-Japan conspirator by the colonial government.
He eventually moved to the Soviet Union, where he learned Russian
and became close to a number of key Russian generals.
Kim quickly solidified his power and amassed a formidable army.
By 1949, Kim had burnished his image as supreme leader, creating the myth
of a fearsome guerrilla fighter who single-handedly
defeated the Japanese.
Idea was - our country has suffered for generations
because we had no great leader. And then great leader
emerged, he liberated us from the Japanese occupation.
It was blatantly untrue because Kim Il-sung, during the
war with Japan, the decisive stage was far away from the front line
in a small Soviet military base.
Kim Il-sung was one of the shrewdest politicians of his era,
but a particularly brutal and ruthless person who knew
how to gain power and hold on to it.
There are striking similarities between Rhee and Kim Il-sung.
Both of them are the same types of expat nationalist leaders
who have big plans - with themselves at the centre.
Both of them have a strong vision of a unified Korea.
And both of them believed that their fundamental power came
from their ability to manipulate outside sponsors - in Rhee's case
the United States,
and in Kim Il-sung's case, the Soviet Union.
In 1949, Mao's victory over the American-backed nationalists
in China emboldened Kim.
The time was right for a unified communist Korea.
Kim travelled to Moscow to lobby Stalin to back an invasion
of the South.
He was rebuffed by the Soviet leader,
who believed the US presence made war too risky.
But by January 1950, Stalin had had a change of heart.
Now, what happened in between, say, September of 1949 and the end
of January 1950...
Dean Acheson, who was the American Secretary of State, in January 1950,
January 12th, made a major speech to the National Press Club
in Washington, DC, and in the speech, he left South Korea
out of the American defence perimeter in the Pacific.
And Stalin obviously noticed that.
Stalin now believes that the Americans will not get
involved in Korea. He's absolutely convinced.
So he says, "OK, I'll give you my blessing.
"But you have to ask now for the final decision."
Stalin's position was something like, "Well, comrades,
"you say that you will win soon, it's your idea,
"and we will provide you with ammunition and money
"and everything, but it will be your responsibility.
"If something gets really bad, don't count on our support."
In May 1950, Kim travelled to China to meet Mao.
Now, as one of the most experienced leaders in the world,
with his own gigantic army that had just proceeded to clear
the mainland of nationalist forces and who had many allies
who had fought with Kim Il-sung and other guerrillas throughout
the 1930s, I think Kim Il-sung had good reason to believe
that he would have plenty of comrades in China
that would help him.
Kim was masterful at manoeuvring between Stalin and Mao
and then ended up getting support from both of them.
By the summer of 1950, Kim Il-sung was ready to invade the South,
assuring Mao that he would be greeted as a liberator and take
the peninsula in a matter of days.
News the communist troops have invaded Southern Korea...
..invading their fellow countrymen to the South to bring another
international crisis to the already long-suffering world.
At 4am on June 25th, 1950, North Korean troops raced
across the 38th parallel.
Kim's invasion of the South had begun.
Basically, the South Korean army either couldn't fight
or didn't fight or ran away.
The North Koreans were in Seoul in three days.
Some South Korean men went into hiding to avoid conscription
into the communist army.
Others were put on trial and publicly shamed for not pledging
allegiance to the party.
Beatings, kidnappings and executions were routine.
The South Koreans just couldn't stop them and they just fell apart.
The reaction in Washington was one of shock.
Gentlemen, we...we face a serious situation.
We hope we face it in the cause of peace.
By now, news of the invasion had reached
the Allied Supreme Commander in Japan.
Douglas MacArthur was an American war hero.
His face had appeared six times already on the cover
of Time magazine.
Douglas MacArthur was the scion of a military family, his father
had fought in the Civil War and won the Medal of Honor.
Douglas MacArthur was a brilliant student at West Point.
He was a gallant soldier in World War I.
He won all of the medals anyone of his generation could win.
He was the Supreme Commander of Allied forces in the southwestern
Pacific during World War II.
MacArthur was a very proud, self-confident, vainglorious
individual who had a complete belief in his own truths,
whether they were based on fact or not.
He considered himself a man of destiny, and he had an ego
the size of China,
but he was a master on the battlefield.
From his command in Tokyo,
MacArthur assured Washington that he could handle
the North Koreans with one arm tied behind his back.
But the Truman administration, intent on shrinking the defence
budget, had only a small advisory team left behind in Korea.
After World War II,
America had built down its military,
not expecting that they would have to be used again -
at least, nothing on that scale.
So at the time of the outbreak of the Korean War, the American
military was a shadow of what it had been in World War II.
As long as we had a monopoly of nuclear weapons, we could relax
a little bit in terms of the manpower we had in the army.
We had to very quickly put together two regiments.
They took half of my platoon and filled me up with reserves -
many of whom had never even been to boot camp.
I had just turned 17 and I was sent to Camp Drake in Japan,
outside of Tokyo.
And all we did was process and train to make an amphibious
landing and head for Korea.
On them, world peace depend.
MILITARY MUSIC
They will not fail.
They never have.
The Americans were pretty confident, you could even argue they maybe
were a little bit cocky.
Their first encounter was with North Korean troops that had
Soviet T-34 tanks, and the American forces had no weapons.
The bazookas they had would not penetrate the armour of a T-34 tank.
And so when they entered into battle, at first they ran.
They saw their comrades being killed around them and it gradually got
a name that was called the bugging out - they would bug out.
When we were still in Camp Drake in Japan, we were told at that time
that it was going to be
an easy war to finish, you know?
We were told that the North Koreans, "slant eyes",
they couldn't say to the right or the left flank.
They could only see to the front.
That you could actually sneak in behind
the North Koreans and get them, you know.
But we found out that wasn't true!
Them suckers had eyes in the back and also in the front.
All we could do was just run back as fast as we could,
and they were right after us.
World conquest by Soviet Russia
endangers our liberty and endangers the kind of world
in which the free spirit of men can survive.
The Soviet Union had an atomic bomb,
a tight grip on Eastern Europe and a powerful alliance
with Mao's China.
It wasn't a good thing that China went communist.
This was a dire threat to the United States.
And so, when communist forces of North Korea invaded South Korea,
Truman figured - I need to do something about this.
If, politically, the Truman administration loses South Korea,
it's going to appear, first of all, to my domestic critics that I am
a terrible President,
and there's the whole question of American credibility.
Our potential allies, like in Europe, which was our top
priority, would say, "Well, in the end, the Americans
"can't be depended upon." Korea is a small country thousands
of miles away.
But what is happening there is important to every American.
It was really inevitable that the Americans were going to do
whatever they could to stop the North Koreans.
We are united in detesting communist slavery.
We know that the cost of freedom is high, but we are determined
to preserve our freedom, no matter what the cost.
What Americans most wanted after World War II was to come home
and to have families and to get about the business
of peacetime affairs.
Harry Truman recognised that if a lot of Americans started
getting killed in Korea, the war could turn unpopular very quickly.
To share the burden would make the war in Korea politically
more acceptable. To show his resolve,
Truman bypassed Congress and took his plan directly
to the newly formed United Nations.
The armed invasion of the Republic of Korea continues.
This is, in fact, an attack on the United Nations itself.
On June 27th, two days after the invasion, the Security Council
passed a resolution authorising military intervention.
By June 30th, Truman had approved the use of American troops -
the first time an American President had unilaterally committed
the country to war.
I didn't know where Korea was until I heard
that we was having a war with North Korea.
I lied. I was 16 when I went in,
but the Second World War had just finished and I had no idea
that I would ever be involved in a war.
When the war started in June of 1950,
early one morning, I received a telephone call saying,
"Lieutenant Kinard, you're now in the army."
I said, "What's this?"
Because I didn't really know where Korea was until I looked at the map
and figured out the... it was far from my home.
The term of art at the time was a "police action".
There is someone who has disturbed the peace,
you call out the police and the police go to it.
And so this term, police action, seemed to be a nice dodge,
around why Truman wasn't asking Congress for a declaration of war -
it's not really a war, it's just this police action.
You know, we was, uh... Harry's police force.
It was kind of funny - here we are fighting a war,
and he'd call it a police action.
By July 1950, some 50,000 US troops, followed by thousands
more from Great Britain, Australia, Thailand and 12 other nations,
headed toward Korea.
North Korean troops were streaming down the peninsula
at lightning speed.
Kim Il-sung's promise that he would take the South in a matter of days
was coming true.
All up and down the line, people couldn't quite figure out the North Koreans.
John Foster Dulles, who was Truman's roving ambassador for East Asia
policy, said he can't figure out what keeps these masses of troops
come shrieking on -
maybe they're on drugs or maybe the Soviets have found some way
to programme these people.
And in fact, they were fighting and dying for their homeland,
for the unification of their homeland.
What you have really in this situation is this brutal civil
war overlaid with an international war between two ideological foes
of the Cold War - the Soviet Union and the United States.
To try to slow the North Korean onslaught,
MacArthur sent the US Army's 7th Cavalry to intercept them
in the city of Taejon.
We could see the North Koreans, they were coming in waves.
So by the time we killed the first two waves,
we were fighting with bayonets because we were out of ammunition.
The North Koreans, by mid-July, had a pincer down the east coast
from the north, and then coming around from the southwest
and along the southern coast,
and if the Marines had not landed around that time and stiffened
the lines, the war would have been lost.
They form what we call the Pusan Perimeter, which is considered
basically the last good spot across the peninsula to establish
a defensive position.
Caught in the crossfire between advancing North Korean
troops and UN forces were hundreds of thousands of Korean
refugees who now filled the roads between Seoul and Pusan.
My father and my grandparents had to walk the distance
from Seoul to Pusan.
That's really walking the distance from Washington, DC to New York.
When the war broke out, my grandparents talked about
how they ran to Pusan Perimeter,
the family split up,
my grandmother went with my aunts and my grandfather went
with the boys - my uncle and my father.
And he'd lost, actually, one of my uncles during the move to Pusan.
For UN troops already outmanned and overwhelmed
by the North Korean army,
the refugee crisis presented yet another challenge -
North Korean soldiers hiding amongst villagers to get behind enemy lines.
There were only a handful of main roads along which you could travel
with tanks or with other sorts of equipment.
On those very same roads,
you had civilians that were trying to evacuate.
American troops did not know who was the enemy and who was the ally.
There was always this fear about refugees that created
a great deal of moral dilemma among American soldiers.
You see a bunch of refugees,
you think that North Koreans are hiding among them.
Do you shoot against them or not?
In some instances, US forces DID shoot, and refugees
were sacrificed in the panic.
Yang Hye-Suk was 13 in July 1950, when war came to Im Ke Ri - a tiny
farming town 100 miles south of Seoul.
1st Calvary Division troops had forced the people of these
two villages, called Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri,
to evacuate and get on the main road south.
Chung Koo-Do's family were also among the hundreds of refugees
led by US troops to a place called No Gun Ri.
As the refugees gathered on nearby railway tracks, American planes
began to circle before opening fire.
The refugees ran for cover under a bridge,
where survivors claim the 7th Cavalry
fired on them for three days and nights - fearful North Korean
soldiers were among them.
Yang Hye-Suk, surrounded by casualties,
was hiding under her mother's skirt,
when she heard her uncle cry out in pain.
An investigation found Pentagon files that supported
the survivors' accounts.
There were orders flying around the warfront to treat
civilians as enemy.
Orders from the very top command, the Eighth Army, to stop any refugee
movement across lines.
Every war is horrible,
but the Korean War among American wars was
the war that had the greatest proportion of civilian casualties.
Homer Garza was a 17-year-old private with the Army's 7th Cavalry.
He arrived at No Gun RI just as the massacre ended.
There were two tunnels side by side.
When we got there, there must have been
about 300 South Korean civilians
that were killed there.
One thing I'll never forget, there was a woman, a mother, laying
there on her back, and she had a little baby
about...probably about not more than eight or nine months old,
trying to trying to nurse on the dead body there.
It was a very dirty war,
and that also demoralised American soldiers.
They didn't quite know what they were fighting for
and they were forced to do things that they didn't do
in World War II.
We received orders that anything in front of us was the enemy, no
matter who was in front of us.
If they didn't shoot at you, you shot, you would shoot at them.
It was increasingly clear to the UN troops that this bloody
conflict was not bound by modern rules of engagement.
Atrocities were being committed on both sides.
Early in August, there was a massacre of captured American
troops by the North Koreans, as the North Koreans left a hilltop,
Hill 303, uh, they simply bound and then shot
in the back of the head about 30 American prisoners.
Photos of this were run in the Stars And Stripes newspaper,
which was getting to the troops in Korea.
Some of them cut the photo out and carried it
inside of their helmets.
So, once something like that happens,
that sort of frees some men at least
to do the same thing to the enemy.
We would captured 15, 20 enemy and supply one or two men to escort
this...POWs back to the rear.
If they try to get away from you...
..open up with your machineguns and your rifles.
Don't let them get away. And they would be gone
for 10 or 15 minutes, when we would hear the machinegun going off.
While casualties continued to mount through the summer of 1950,
the North Korean army maintained their advantage.
All the high American officers had been heroes of World War II.
Whether it's General MacArthur or Curtis LeMay or Matthew Ridgway.
These were people who were famous in the battles that defeated
the Nazis and the Japanese.
The tide of battle still favours the aggressors.
The United Nations' forces in Korea are forced
to improvise their defence.
And here it is, 1950, only five years later, and they're getting
their butt whipped by rough peasant armies.
MacArthur was used to fighting with his back to the wall.
From his headquarters in Japan, he was quietly putting together
a plan for a bold counterattack.
He hoped to ambush the communist forces behind their lines, landing
at the Port of Incheon and cutting off their supply lines.
Extreme tides and shallow waters made Incheon a risky
spot for invasion.
Precisely the reason MacArthur believed it would work.
Nobody thought it was practical.
Everybody was against it because it was so impractical.
The timeframe for landing those amphibious vehicles
was very limited to a few hours.
But MacArthur really believed that because of its impracticality,
the North Koreans wouldn't defend.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff thought that this was not a particularly
good idea, but they were in an odd position.
MacArthur was essentially politically untouchable
and there was nobody in the military chain of command who would
tell MacArthur "no".
I think that so many people said you can't do this - the more you do
that to somebody like MacArthur, you kind of increase
their resistance to change.
The more you tell them not to do some thing, the more likely
it is you're going to get it.
When you got on the ship, we didn't know where we were going.
Out in the ocean,
we were told we were going to Incheon to make a landing.
I don't think I knew enough to be scared.
It had a 26ft tide, and you had to go in at high tide,
and it takes a lot of time to get a division ashore,
total division.
So I was pretty... I was nervous.
Naturally.
On September 15th, 70,000 UN troops stood at anchor
off the Korean coast,
awaiting high tide and MacArthur's order to attack.
One Admiral said, if you drew up all the things that made
amphibious operations difficult, Incheon had them all.
The tides are bad, the harbour's all mud.
Who knew how many guns were sitting in it?
Lieutenant Richard Carey was leading a platoon of Marines that day.
At 5pm, MacArthur gave his unit the order to attack.
Well, I had a couple of hours before it was dark, and the only place
we could go in was into an inlet.
And when we got into the inlet, it was surrounded by barbed wire.
I started cutting a wire,
and a sniper shot off my radio
that was strapped on my shoulder, and the guy on the other side of me
took one right between the eyes.
We were getting shot at when we hit the beach, but I don't think
they expected this.
Despite initial resistance, the UN forces had secured
the beach by evening.
They then headed east to cut off North Korean supply lines.
MacArthur had caught the North Koreans by surprise.
His gamble had paid off.
It was such a daring strike and such a rapid strike
that it changed the momentum in the war entirely.
The United States and the South Koreans were losing
badly until then. All of a sudden they were winning.
It was such a risky operation, and the fact that he brought
it off without any problem,
MacArthur was viewed as a kind of God.
In one stroke, MacArthur cemented his reputation
for military genius.
The tide of the war turned as the North Korean troops scrambled
back to the 38th parallel.
In just two weeks, Seoul was back in the hands of the United Nations
and President Rhee was restored.
MacArthur's forces were now sitting at the 38th parallel with fresh
troops, superior air power and momentum.
There is a drastic alteration of the military situation.
Suddenly, the Americans and South Koreans are on the verge
of going across the 38th parallel and into the North.
Now, obviously, military leaders want to take advantage
of the immediate situation.
Having taken the advantage,
MacArthur wanted to pursue the conflict into North Korea.
He wanted to unite the peninsula in the name of democracy, and issued
a decisive blow against communism in Asia.
MacArthur's aggressive worldview was at odds with President Truman's
idea of a limited war.
But with MacArthur's success at Incheon,
Truman saw an opportunity.
MacArthur says, "Give me just a little bit more time and I can end
"the war. I can capture or destroy all the North Korean forces."
Truman, who just weeks before, had worried about the fact
that he was going to be charged with losing more ground
to the communists, thought, "I can do something that no President
"before me has ever done.
"I can take ground back from the communists."
On October 7th, 1950, MacArthur's troops stormed north
across the border.
Victories came quickly as UN forces pursued the remaining
North Korean army and continued to pound them from the sky.
People were lighting cigars all over Washington and Seoul
when American troops were marching up the peninsula
in October 1950.
MacArthur arrived in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
He gets off his plane and he says, "where's Kim Buck Too?
"Isn't he here to greet me?"
Only two months after UN troops had faced annihilation at Pusan,
their flag flew above Kim's capital city, Pyongyang.
We had already taken Pyongyang. We didn't have...
..too much resistance from the Koreans at all.
A devastating blow against communism was within reach.
MacArthur's forces pressed closer to the Yalu River, North Korea's
border with China.
MacArthur argues that really he needs American forces to go
all the way to the Yalu in order to clean up the situation
and do it quickly.
And the administration back in Washington faced with strong
Republican attacks on the Democratic administration being weak on Asia.
The Truman administration does not say no to MacArthur.
Saying no to MacArthur was difficult for Truman, an unpopular President
seen as badly mismanaging the war in Korea.
Needing assurances from his general on the war's future course,
Truman requested a meeting.
MacArthur, ensconced in Tokyo, forced Truman to fly to Wake Island
in the Pacific.
MacArthur greeted his Commander-in-chief
not with the traditional salute, but with a mere handshake.
MacArthur had been overstating his authority for many months.
He would hold news conferences and he would speak very often
as the United Nations Commander, and not report directly
to the President of the United States.
So Truman flies all the way out to Wake Island in the Pacific,
hoping, on the basis of MacArthur's repeated assurances,
the war is nearly over and Korea will be liberated.
He puts the question to MacArthur -
if American troops get close to the border, will the Chinese
enter the war?
And MacArthur says, "They won't dare.
"And if they do, I will annihilate them."
We were pumped up, MacArthur put it out, he said
we're going as far as the Yalu and probably going right into China.
So we were pretty enthusiastic.
We said, "This is going to be the end of it.
"We'll win the war right here."
MacArthur is assuring them that the war is nearly over.
He kept saying that American troops will be home by Christmas,
that the war is wrapping up. When American troops
had their Thanksgiving dinner, and they're thinking, "Christmas -
"that's only a month away.
"We're all going to get to go home."
In late November 1950, 30,000 UN troops paused their advance.
They sat down in the frozen hills and valleys around the Chosin
Reservoir to enjoy a hot Thanksgiving dinner courtesy
of the US government.
We was dug in in the hills, up there. Headquarters had set
up cooks and we had our Thanksgiving dinner.
They didn't have serving trays
at the time I got through there and I just went ahead
and took my helmet liner out of the helmet and used my helmet,
and I had my Thanksgiving dinner in 1950 in a helmet.
And then when we moved out of where we was dug in after Thanksgiving,
we went out to Yudam-ni, that's when all hell broke loose.
The UN forces were caught in a massive trap sprung
by the Chinese.
MacArthur had miscalculated.
Mao's army had entered the war.
Attacking at night to retain the element of surprise and to avoid
aerial bombardment,
hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops stormed the front line
in an overwhelming display of force.
Over 200,000 Chinese managed to infiltrate across the Yalu River.
When the Americans are taken by surprise, they find
that they're basically surrounded.
And instead of fighting for victory, they're fighting for their lives.
We could hear the bugles sound and all the screaming and what have you.
The Chinese coming at you in hordes.
But we was outnumbered probably five to one, ten to one, something like it.
And their sole purpose was to annihilate
the 1st Marine Division.
When they came, they came in waves - a wave, a wave, a wave.
The platoon sergeant, he and I were in a foxhole together.
So he took the grenades out all night, handed them to me.
I counted them. 1001, 1002, and threw them.
I threw three cartons of grenades that night.
That night was bitterly cold - God, it was cold.
It was below 50 below zero.
Many of these soldiers, they pretty much consigned themselves to die one
way or the other.
They were going to get killed by a Chinese bullet or a mortar
round or they were going to freeze.
And it was merely a matter of - how long can we put this off?
West of Chosin, the 7th Cavalry were also battling the Chinese
and extreme cold.
Our fingers would crack if you tried to close your hand,
with it being so damn cold. And we got the old blanket sleeping bags
and we cut strips of the blanket and wrap it around our feet...
..to try to keep our feet from freezing.
It was so cold that it wouldn't take more than four or five minutes
after a guy was killed that he was froze solid.
If we were staying in the same hill for a while,
we would get the dead Chinese and the dead Koreans,
and stand them up against the trees,
frozen solid, yeah.
When you saw one of those Marines' bodies froze stiff,
that was sad. Arms sticking out, legs sticking out.
You really knew you was at war then.
Hard to describe. It truly is.
Had to be careful how you picked them up. If you pick them
up by an arm, for example,
you'd break the arm off.
There was no option but to retreat.
Over ten days, UN troops fought their way out of the reservoir
at the cost of 18,000 casualties.
The whole ethos of the American approach to war
was "advance, attack".
And when the soldiers saw that we can't attack, in fact,
it's going to be everything we can do simply to escape, to flee
and get out of this alive.
It was exceedingly disorienting.
These were soldiers, many of them whom were in their first combat.
They hadn't seen anything like this.
They had never really confronted the basic questions
of life and death.
They told us to straighten up as we was coming into Hagaru-ri.
You come in there like real Marines.
We're singing the Marine Corps hymn, "All Gung Ho," you know.
The tide of the war had changed once again.
UN troops were forced back below the 38th parallel.
Within weeks, Seoul fell to the combined North Korean
and Chinese forces.
Bloody fighting in and around Seoul would see the capital change sides
four times.
With bad news from the front and growing public discontent,
Truman was forced to confront the war that seemed unwinnable.
No-one seriously talked about the use of atomic weapons
in Korea until the end of November, beginning of December 1950.
When American forces were fleeing for their lives upon the Chinese
entry into the war, then it certainly occurred to members
of the public to ask, "Well, how can we lose to North Korea?
"How can we lose to China when we've got the bomb
"and they don't?"
In the press, General MacArthur made a case to expand the conflict
into China. In the war room,
he was making plans to use the atomic bomb.
MacArthur wanted an unlimited war.
He wanted to use 24 atomic bombs. In December 1950,
he said, "I want 24 atomic bombs to establish a radiation cordon
"along the Yalu River, using cobalt, which has a half-life of 90 years,
"and the two places will be separated, you know, for a long
"time, generations to come."
In November of '50,
Truman was asked about the use of atomic weapons, and he said, yes,
this would have to be considered.
That was the first mentioned by him.
Then the next question is, "Well, who is going to determine
"whether the bomb will be used or not?"
Truman said without thinking very clearly that the decision
will be made by the commander in the field.
Well, everybody realised the commander in the field
is Douglas MacArthur.
Harry Truman has just announced this policy that the atom bomb
is available for use in Korea and that Douglas MacArthur
is going to make the decision. Oh, boy. What have we gotten ourselves in for?
The President has stated that the use of the atomic bomb
is being considered to halt the communist onrush and may well
precipitate World War III.
News that Truman was considering a nuclear attack
set America's allies on edge.
Clement Attlee is the British Prime Minister, and he is in a meeting
of Parliament and he hears this stir in the back and kind of wonders
what's going on, and somebody passes him a note explaining
that the President of the United States has threatened
the use of the atom bomb in Korea.
A new war brought Britain's Prime Minister Attlee to Washington
for talks with President Truman.
The Prime Minister of Great Britain raced across the Atlantic to try
and bring some sanity back into the situation.
Truman's statement deepened public scepticism of his abilities
as Commander-in-chief.
General MacArthur's campaign for the expansion of the war
into China increasingly put the two men at odds.
MacArthur wanted a rollback.
He wanted to keep on going into China and try to settle the hash
of the Chinese revolution.
That was his great error in Truman's eyes.
Truman wanted a limited rollback,
he wanted to roll North Korean communists back
and unify the peninsula.
MacArthur feels like this is the place where we're going
to have to have this great battle against communism, even
to the extent that he's willing to risk World War III.
Truman said to MacArthur, "If this war gets any bigger,
"we don't have the resources, we don't have the military
"establishment to do that.
"General MacArthur, your job is to buy time."
Well, that cut against everything that MacArthur wanted. "No, no.
"In war, there is no substitute for victory.
"We fight to win, not simply to hold ground."
Truman learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that no true victory
in that sense is possible any more.
And so he really wanted to limit the war.
MacArthur couldn't deal with that defeat.
Truman had given him a directive on December 5th not to say anything
publicly against the policy of the Truman administration,
and MacArthur consistently defied that directive.
On April 11th 1951, President Truman addressed the nation.
I have considered it essential to relieve General MacArthur
so that there would be no doubt or confusion as to the real purpose
and aim of our policy.
It is with the deepest personal regret that I found myself compelled
to take this action.
General MacArthur is one of our greatest military commanders,
but the cause of world peace is much more important than any individual.
For Truman, this was an issue that transcended the moment in Korea.
This had everything to do with how America was going
to be governed in the Cold War.
Truman recognised that the Korean War was not one of a kind.
There would be other challenges like this.
And so he made a point of relieving MacArthur simply because his view
of what American policy should be was different
than the President's.
General MacArthur was far from damaged.
On April 16th, he left Japan. In New York,
he was given a ticker tape parade and was invited to speak to Congress.
For many, MacArthur was the last great World War II hero.
In living rooms across the country,
Americans hung on his every word.
MacArthur knows that this audience is primed to approve of him.
I stand on this rostrum with a sense of deep humility and great pride.
And he speaks in a very stentorian voice.
And he plays the crowd.
But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular
barrack ballads of that day, which proclaimed most proudly...
..that old soldiers never die, they just fade away.
And like the old soldier of that ballad...
..I now close my military career
and just...fade away.
And there was not a dry eye in the house.
In private, Truman fumed, calling the speech a bunch of damn bullshit.
His decision to fire MacArthur nearly cost him his presidency.
I think his popularity rate sank to 22%.
I mean, he was an extremely unpopular leader because he didn't
see in terms of victory or defeat.
He said we had to limit this war.
By the spring of 1951, the Korean War had reached a stalemate.
Under the new leadership of General Matthew Ridgway, UN forces
were dug in around the 38th parallel.
..trading ground against North Korean and Chinese forces,
one bloody battle at a time.
What we were doing at that time was very different
than what had been earlier in the war.
They called that the stalemate at the time, which is what it was.
But living in the trenches there, was like living as animals,
you were living in the dirt, you ate in the dirt.
That was a little bit hard on the morale.
It was a terribly bloody and demoralising experience.
There was a dynamic that basically meant that neither side could win.
Most of the casualties take place in this period, for no good purpose.
Armistice talks between the UN, China and North Korea, begun
in the summer of 1951, dragged on for months, then years.
The Soviet Union continued stonewalling.
United Kingdom. Yes. United States. Yes.
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
No.
Stalin was willing to fight the Korean War
to the last Chinese soldier.
It was keeping the Americans engaged in Korea
rather than building up in Europe.
In order to break the communists' will, Americans stepped up their air
campaign in North Korea.
All of the cities in North Korea were essentially flattened.
It got so that the pilots and the squadron leaders etc
were complaining they had no more targets.
A written directive to the 5th Air Force in North Korea had ordered
that every installation, every town, every village be destroyed.
They dropped a lot of napalm, and napalm had been invented
at the end of World War II, but not used much.
It was used indiscriminately across North Korea.
They thought that that was the price that you had to pay to avoid
a larger war,
World War III, with China, and so basically North Korea became
that kind of victim to force the communists
to negotiate the armistice.
The Republican Party is back in power.
General Dwight D Eisenhower is elected.
Even President Eisenhower, a Republican who'd won the 1952
election on a pledge to end the war in Korea, could do little to change
the situation on the ground.
The mere fact that Dwight Eisenhower, the hero
of the European side of World War II, was going to go,
he was going put his mind to it now.
Now, in fact, the end came not because Eisenhower went to Korea,
he went, he looked around, basically came home.
But the key was the death of Joseph Stalin.
In March 1953, the Soviet dictator unexpectedly died
of a cerebral haemorrhage.
Once Stalin's gone, his body's hardly cold when the reigning
Central Committee, the Presidium, sends a message to the Chinese
and North Koreans - get an armistice.
It took several months to agree on an armistice line.
The communists initially argued for the 38th parallel,
which was an indefensible line on a map.
The Americans insisted on another line, a line that was defensible.
They wanted the armistice to survive.
As negotiators argued, battles continued to rage.
At Pork Chop Hill, nearly a thousand US soldiers were killed or injured
fighting over a plot of land of no strategic value.
It seemed the fighting would never end.
We didn't know too much about what was going on with
the negotiations, except they were happening.
All of us hoped and thought any day we were going
to have a treaty signed.
You always thought, I don't want to be the last one to die
in this war.
Eventually, the two sides agreed not to accept the 38th parallel,
they would accept a demilitarised zone on each side of the line
of battle, so there would be a minor retreat of anywhere from three
to 5km at the end of the war,
but it would be essentially the battle line.
Then the exodus begins. And from the disputed hills, hundreds of thousands
of men pull back.
And there is not a regret in a truckload.
The new border had serious consequences for many Koreans.
Families were permanently separated,
as territory once part of the South came under Northern control.
Kaesong, Park Kyung-Soon's hometown, was caught behind enemy lines.
Her mother, fearing what might happen to her daughter,
told her to flee.
On July 27th, 1953, an armistice was finally reached
between the UN, China and North Korea.
It called for a cessation of hostilities until an official
peace treaty could be signed.
North Korea was completely destroyed, not
a building left standing.
South Korea was completely destroyed.
China lost a million people.
Mao lost his own son. And US, too,
what do we accomplish after three years of destruction?
We're left with where we started with the DMZ
and the 38th parallel.
Most of us, when we came back...
..really felt like we had not accomplished much.
The American people generally, most of them really didn't even know
where we'd been.
No-one could gin up enthusiasm for a victory parade because there
wasn't a victory.
In fact, when the troops came home, there was this armistice,
there was the possibility that they might have to go back.
The war was far from over.
There was no official peace treaty.
Thousands of POWs awaited repatriation,
and continuing tensions
forced President Eisenhower to commit thousands of troops
along the border.
The world had lost interest in events in Korea, but the luxury
of forgetting the war was not possible for Koreans.
Three years of bloody conflict left both countries devastated.
After the armistice was signed,
the Korean Peninsula was basically a field of rubble.
The United States dropped more ordnance on North Korea
in that three-year war
than we dropped during the entire Second World War. Basically
levelled the country.
The southern side of the peninsula was no better.
Everything was levelled.
They were starting very much from scratch.
Despite receiving millions of American dollars to rebuild
South Korea, the country remained destitute.
Syngman Rhee continued his authoritarian rule, his government
rife with corruption.
Syngman Rhee ruled the country ostensibly as a constitutional
democracy, but really in a very brutal and ruthless way,
very cliquish, focusing on providing benefits to his followers,
punishing his detractors,
and he essentially sought economic assistance from the United States
and from other countries,
but was using it largely to subsidise his own rule and was not
really putting it in to an economic plan.
In the countryside and in major cities, food and basic resources
remained scarce for years.
I was raised in Gangnam, Apgujeong-dong in Gangnam,
where Psy, the singer, sings about it.
So I have a memory of that when it was just a field and has none
of these buildings.
South Korea, People forget, was one of the poorest countries in the world.
In North Korea, Kim Il-sung oversaw a rapid transformation
of his country, rebuilding it to glorify his image.
After the end of the Korean War, the North Korean economy developed
quite rapidly because they had a great deal of support
from the Soviet Union and from communist China.
Kim Il-sung used the painful memory of the war to bolster his authority.
After the war, Kim Il-sung was in a very vulnerable
position because he had led the country into this disaster.
But Kim Il-sung is a survivor.
The way the North Koreans learn about the Korean War
is that the United States first of all divided the Korean Peninsula,
then invaded North Korea,
but under the great leadership of Kim Il-sung, the
North Koreans emerged victorious.
Yet you have to continually fight against Americans because Americans
are bent on destruction of North Korea.
And this is sort of repeated over and over and over.
To strengthen this mythology and consolidate his power, Kim
enforced a series of brutal purges.
And then a huge purge happens in '58 and '59.
Some people say like 100,000 people then are killed.
By '61, he's totally in power.
Kim created a political philosophy to govern the country.
He called it "juche" - a doctrine that focused on independence,
nationalism and, most importantly, self-defence.
Before he defected to the South in 2004, Jang Jin-sung
was a prominent North Korean propaganda officer.
Though increasingly isolated, Kim Il-sung held
onto his vision - to build an army strong enough to defend
against America and South Korea and to one day unify the peninsula.
POP MUSIC PLAYS
By 1968, South Korea had emerged from a corrupt and economically
stagnant era that had marred Syngman Rhee's administration.
Under the leadership of Park Chung-hee, a military leader
with a modernist bent, South Korea's economy was booming.
By the late 1960s and early '70s, Park Chung-hee implemented
an export-oriented economy.
And it was through his guidance that South Korea, as we know it,
really began to take off economically.
He was also a dictator, but he was able to create
the economic platform from which South Korea could then develop
into a democracy. While South Korea's prosperity was praised
across the Western world,
to Kim Il-sung and North Korea, it was a threat.
As South Korea started to take off economically, North Korea
then saw the window for reunification closing
because it had surpassed North Korea's economy.
North Korea was going down economically, South Korea was going up.
With thousands of American troops sitting on the border
and the well-armed South Korean military, Kim Il-sung saw his chance
to unite the peninsula disappearing.
Between 1967 and 1972,
it did look like that North Koreans really wanted to restart
hostilities and maybe create havoc by successful assassinations
of high-level officials.
So a short period, which is sometimes called
the Second Korean War began. And it was at that point that North Korea
then begins a series of provocative actions in order to unify
the peninsula under Kim Il-sung's rule.
On January 21st, 1968, Kim Il-sung ordered his most brazen military
operation since the end of the war.
A unit of highly trained North Korean commandos cut their way
through barbed wire along the DMZ and slipped into the South with fake
military uniforms and papers.
The orders from Kim Il-sung were explicit.
Their instructions were basically to go to the Blue House to kill
the South Korean president Park Chung-hee, to cut off his head
and to bring it back to North Korea.
The North Koreans got within yards of the president
before they were discovered, and the assassination was foiled.
And I sincerely hope Kim Il-sung and his people up north recognise
the futility and the unwisdom of continuing this action.
Days later, North Korea captured the USS Pueblo.
The ship's 82 men and crew was bound, blindfolded
and transported to Pyongyang, where they were charged as spies.
For 11 months, the ship's crew was tortured and subjected
to harsh interrogations.
The North Koreans committed yet another wanton and aggressive act
by seizing an American ship and its crew.
Clearly, this cannot be accepted.
By the winter of 1968, America was being dragged towards conflict
in Korea, just as the war in Vietnam was heating up.
Park Chung-hee is furious.
He wants to go north,
he wants to seek revenge for the Blue House raid.
But all the other powers around the Korean Peninsula, of course, are not
interested in restarting the Korean War.
The Americans are back down in Vietnam.
The Soviet Union has distractions in Eastern Europe,
it invades Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the Chinese are involved
in their cultural revolution.
So the outside powers outside of the Korean Peninsula
have no interest in starting the Korean War,
but the two Koreas want, again, to start a war.
With pressure from America, President Park stood down.
The American crew of the Pueblo were released in December 1968.
The ship was never returned.
Simmering tensions between the two Koreas continued throughout the '70s
and '80s, with Kim attempting to undermine the South's burgeoning
prosperity. And then the Soviet Union establishes
diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1990,
China follows in 1992.
So North Korea is now diplomatically isolated and unable to deal
with South Korea on any equal terms.
And it's that time, then, that the North Korean regime
seeks its nuclear programme for its own security.
On July 8th, 1994, Kim Il-sung died.
Kim's son, Kim Jong-il became supreme leader.
He inherited a country in crisis. The collapse of the Soviet Union
in the early nineties devastated the North Korean economy,
and a serious of successive famines killed an estimated
one million Koreans.
Yet even as his people were starving, Kim ramped
up his father's nuclear ambitions.
So everyone really thinks at that point that North Korea
is going to collapse, and yet it doesn't.
Kim Jong-il continues with his nuclear programme and he knows
that that is the only leverage he has for survival.
For North Korea, nuclear weapons are not only the ultimate sign
of strength, but they have meaning for North Korea and their history
because Kim Il-sung saw how Japan's occupation of Korea, which looked
like it would never end...
..suddenly being terminated by two atomic bombs that the United States
dropped on Japan.
They saw China explode a nuclear device in 1964 and then become
a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
These are the interpretations, the lessons the North Koreans learned
from the ability to have nuclear weapons.
Despite international pressure on Kim Jong-il to give up his nuclear
programme, on October 9th 2006, North Korea completed a successful
nuclear weapons test,
achieving a long-cherished ambition.
And after his sudden death in 2011, his son, Kim Jong-un vowed
to continue the family's nuclear dream.
Here's this guy who's like a young guy, educated in the West,
who was not introduced to the North Korean public until a year
before his father's death in 2011,
and yet he comes in there and is able to consolidate
his power so quickly -
that just shows the power of the Kim Il-sung myth
and how it's still alive.
He knows that Kim Il-sung had popularity and love of the Korean
people, North Korean people.
So that's why he wanted to sort of even look like his grandfather,
the way he dresses, his haircut,
just the whole outer appearance looks like his grandfather,
and his behaviour is also more like his grandfather.
In September 2016, North Korea tested their fifth and most
powerful nuclear warhead.
The North Koreans,
the message that their leaders give them is that we're not going to let
the United States do to us what they did between 1950 and '53,
and that's why we need nuclear weapons and that's why
we need to have missiles that can deliver them
to the continental United States.
The United States started entering negotiations from the Clinton
administration onwards, and in all of these cases,
what the United States has put on offer is remarkably consistent,
which is the promise of normal political relations,
the promise of a peace treaty ending the Korean War, economic
assistance, energy assistance.
And all of these things would be on offer to North Korea if they did one
thing, which is give up their nuclear weapons
and ballistic missiles. But I think the main lesson we've learned
from all of this is that the problem is not the United States.
The problem is that North Korea doesn't want to give up its weapons.
In the end, the prospects for peace could hinge not on the Western
powers, but on the two leaders of this long-divided nation,
and on its people, still separated by a never ending conflict.
This is a blip in the history of Korea, this division since 1945,
and then the Korean War since 1950.
It's same ethnic make-up, same language, same culture. The two
Koreas were one Korea for thousands of years.
We don't get fairy tale endings on the Korean Peninsula.
So whether it is the Japanese occupation of Korea, the start
of the Korean War in 1950, democratisation in South Korea in
1987, the list goes on and on.
History has shown that change on the Korean Peninsula
always comes suddenly, it never comes gradually.