Bombing of North Korea 1950-1953 / Documented background (excerpts)



DOCUMENTED INFORMATION REGARDING QUOTES FROM MILITARY COMMANDERS AND BOTH DAMAGE AND DEATH TOLL ESTIMATES (COMPILED FOR WIKIPEDIA)  

Bombing of North Korea 1950-1953

INCLUDES A STUNNING SERIES OF DIRECT QUOTES FROM U.S. MILITARY COMMANDERS AS THEY GAVE ORDERS FOR FIRE-BOMBING ATTACKS ON NORTH KOREAN CITIES. 

ALSO INCLUDED IS A LIST OF NORTH KOREAN CITIES AND THE DEGREE TO WHICH THEY WERE DESTROYED.   

Excerpts from: Bombing of North Korea 1950-1953

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The U.S. Air Force (USAF) carried out an extensive bombing campaign against North Korea from 1950 to 1953. During the campaign, conventional explosives, incendiary bombs, and napalm destroyed nearly all of the country's cities and towns, including an estimated 85 percent of its buildings. [1] Deaths among the civilian population have been estimated at approximately one million people, a number comparable to or greater than the toll from the World War II bombing of Germany (400,000 to 600,000 civilian deaths) and Japan (330,000 to 900,000 civilian deaths).........
During this period, U.S. Far East Air Forces (FEAF) B-29 bombers carried out massive aerial attacks on transport centers and industrial hubs in North Korea. Having soon established air supremacy by the destruction of North Korean aircraft in the air and on the ground, FEAF bombers encountered no resistance and "the sky over North Korea was their safe front yard." [2] ..........

November 1950 - July 1953: Incendiary Attacks on Cities, Towns, and Villages

On November 3, 1950, General Stratemeyer forwarded to MacArthur the request of Fifth Air Force commander General Earle E. Partridge for clearance to "burn Sinuiju." As he had done previously in July and October, MacArthur again denied the request, explaining that he planned to use the town's facilities after seizing it. However, at the same meeting, MacArthur agreed for the first time to a firebombing campaign, agreeing to Stratemeyer's request to burn the city of Kanggye and several other towns: "Burn it if you so desire. Not only that, Strat, but burn and destroy as a lesson any other of those towns that you consider of military value to the enemy." The same evening, MacArthur's chief of staff told Stratemeyer that the firebombing of Sinuiju had also been approved. In his diary, Stratemeyer summarized the instructions as follows: "Every installation, facility, and village in North Korea now becomes a military and tactical target." Stratemeyer sent orders to the Fifth Air Force and Bomber Command to "destroy every means of communications and every installation, factory, city, and village." [10]
On November 5, 1950, General Stratemeyer gave the following order to the commanding general of the Fifth Air Force: "Aircraft under Fifth Air Force control will destroy all other targets including all buildings capable of affording shelter." [11] The same day, twenty-two B-29s attacked Kanggye, destroying 75% of the city.[12]


 In the wake of the Kanggye attack, FEAF began an intensive firebombing campaign that quickly incinerated multiple Korean cities. Three weeks after the attacks began, the air force assessed the damage as follows:[13][14]

  • Ch'osan - 85%
  • Hoeryong (Hoeryŏng)- 90%
  • Huich'on (Hŭich'ŏn)- 75%
  • Kanggye - 75%
  • Kointong - 90%
  • Manp'ochin - 95%
  • Namsi - 90%
  • Sakchu - 75%
  • Sinuichu - 60%
  • Uichu - 20%



On November 17, 1950, General MacArthur told U.S. ambassador to Korea John J. Muccio, "Unfortunately, this area will be left a desert." By "this area" MacArthur meant the entire area between "our present positions and the border." [15]

In May 1951, an international fact finding team from East Germany, West Germany, China, and the Netherlands stated, "The members, in the whole course of their journey, did not see one town that had not been destroyed, and there were very few undamaged villages." [16]
On June 25, 1951, General O'Donnell, commander of the Far Eastern Air Force Bomber Command, testified in answer to a question from Senator John C. Stennis ("...North Korea has been virtually destroyed, hasn't it?): "Oh, yes; ... I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name ... Just before the Chinese came in we were grounded. There were no more targets in Korea." [17]
In June 1952, as part of a strategy to maintain "air pressure" during armistice negotiations, FEAF's Fifth Air Force selected seventy-eight villages for destruction by B-26 light bombers.[18]
In August 1951, war correspondent Tibor Meráy stated that he had witnessed "a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital." He said that there were "no more cities in North Korea." He added, "My impression was that I am traveling on the moon because there was only devastation—every city was a collection of chimneys." [19]



At the conclusion of the war, the Air Force assessed the destruction of twenty-two major cities as follows:[20]

The bombing campaign destroyed almost every substantial building in North Korea.[21][22] The war's highest-ranking U.S. POW, U.S. Major General William F. Dean,[23] reported that the majority of North Korean cities and villages he saw were either rubble or snow-covered wasteland.[24][25] North Korean factories, schools, hospitals, and government offices were forced to move underground.[26] In November 1950, the North Korean leadership instructed the population to build dugouts and mud huts and to dig underground tunnels, in order to solve the acute housing problem.[27]
U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay commented, "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." [28] 

Pyongyang, which saw 75 percent of its area destroyed, was so devastated that bombing was halted as there were no longer any worthy targets.[29][30] By the end of the campaign, US bombers had difficulty in finding targets and were reduced to bombing footbridges or jettisoning their bombs into the sea.[31]

May 1953: Attacks on Major Dams

 

On May 13, 1953, twenty F-84s of the Fifty-eighth Fighter Bomber Wing attacked the Toksan Dam, producing a flood that destroyed seven hundred buildings in Pyongyang and thousands of acres of rice. On May 15 and 16, two groups of F-84s attacked the Chasan Dam. [32] The flood from the destruction of the Toksan dam "scooped clean" twenty-seven miles of river valley. The attacks were followed by the bombing of the Kuwonga Dam, the Namsi Dam, and the Taechon Dam.[33][34]

Tonnage Dropped: Korea vs. World War II and Vietnam War

The U.S. dropped a total of 635,000 tons of bombs, including 32,557 tons of napalm, on Korea.[35] By comparison, 503,000 tons were dropped in the Pacific theater during World War II, 864,000 tons were dropped on North Vietnam through December 31, 1967 during Operation Rolling Thunder,[36][37] and 500,000 tons were dropped on Cambodia from 1969 to 1973.[38]


Death Toll

In contrast to the detailed calculations of civilian casualties that followed the strategic bombing campaign against Japan, in North Korea the U.S. Air Force assessed the extent of area destroyed by bombing on a city-by-city basis but not did not estimate casualties resulting from the bombing campaign. General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, stated, "Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—twenty percent of the population of [North] Korea...." [39]

 
Applied to the population of North Korea, 9,726,000 in 1950, the estimate of 20 percent would imply a death toll of approximately two million.[40]
The most fully documented and recent estimate of North Korean civilian deaths comes from the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset, developed by researchers at the Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). Assessing a variety of sources, the PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset researchers concluded that the "best estimate" of civilian deaths in North Korea was 995,000, with a low estimate of 644,696 and a high estimate of 1.5 million.[41]
The Republic of Korea Ministry of Defense estimated total South Korean civilian casualties of 990,968, of which 373,599 (37.7%) were deaths. For North Korea, the Ministry estimated 1,500,000 total civilian casualties, including deaths, injuries, and missing, but did not separately report the number of deaths. [42]
Charles Armstrong, Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University, estimated that 12–15 percent of the North Korean population was killed in the war, or approximately 1,167,000 to 1,459,000 people.[43]



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