With the beginning of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, military forces from the north rapidly liberated more than 90 percent of Korean territory. Acting under the banner of the United Nations, Washington then sent in a massive military force. Troops from its imperialist allies of Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and South Africa were also involved, along with Turkish and Thai forces.

The imperialist armies succeeded in pushing the northern troops back to the Yalu River on the Chinese border. At that point, Beijing sent hundreds of thousands of troops into the war on the side of the north. U.S. forces were driven back, almost to where the demarcation line had been at the start of the conflict. The armistice established the Demilitarized Zone at the 38th Parallel, dividing the Korean peninsula nearly in half. No peace treaty has ever been signed.

In the course of the war, the U.S. air force dropped more than 428,000 bombs on the northern capital of Pyongyang, a city whose population stood at 400,000 before World War II. Millions of Koreans were killed, along with 54,000 U.S. soldiers—the same number as in the Vietnam War, but in a much shorter time period—along with many others who fought under the blue UN helmets.

The war met with little enthusiasm among workers and farmers in the United States. The Militant campaigned against the U.S.-led imperialist intervention throughout the war. In its Aug. 17, 1953, issue, the paper published the article “Korea War—Its Costly Lesson” by staff writer Art Preis. The article is excerpted below. Subheading is by the Militant.
 

The duration, scope and intensity of the Korean war are in themselves facts of tremendous significance. Added to them, moreover, are two absolutely unique developments which demonstrate that the Korean war has marked a vast change in the relationship of forces in the world today—a change that will have great, if not decisive, bearing on the future of mankind.

First and foremost is the gigantic fact that two backward Asian countries but newly emerged from foreign exploitation and colonialism, China and North Korea, have more than held their own against an imperialist army that has had tremendous advantages from the military technical standpoint.

Second is the fact that the United States, foremost capitalist power and chief military spearhead of world imperialism, for the first time in its history has come out of a war without victory. On the contrary, it has just barely held its own and, in fact, on at least two occasions was on the brink of military defeat….

In an editorial July 24, 1950, [the Militant warned] against “the arrogant assumption that a war against any colonial people fighting for their national independence is just a pushover, a ‘little’ war….  
 
Revolutionary tide of colonial peoples
We explained further that “the colonial peoples are in revolt and their number is legion. American armies in Korea, or anywhere else in Asia, are confronting a revolutionary tide, millions upon millions of people who are fighting for a cause they believe in and for which they are ready to lay down their lives. The American boys being sent over to die in Korea are completely surrounded by hostile people. Their guns do not intimidate but only inflame the populace. They are learning in blood the difference between subduing a passive people and an armed people in revolt…”

Our estimation of the Korean struggle has been confirmed completely by the events themselves. The generals and propagandists have tried to blame the unfavorable military developments in Korea on the so-called “overwhelming hordes” thrown against the U.S. forces and allies. This fiction of the “overwhelming hordes” has been repeatedly exploited; today it is acknowledged that the U.S.-south Korean armies number 800,000 to the 1,000,000 of the Chinese-North Korean forces. Moreover, the U.S. possesses an immeasurable superiority in bomber planes, tanks, heavy artillery and mobile equipment.

The explanation for the remarkable capacity of the Chinese-North Korean forces to successfully resist and even to wage hard-hitting offensives lies in their revolutionary spirit.

American soldiers who went to Korea to put down “gooks”—the epithet of racial inferiority applied to the people of Korea and China—learned to their astonishment that these backward people are first-class fighting men, resourceful and clever, with a driving purpose, a cause they believe in. That cause was their “secret weapon,” their great advantage over the GIs and the South Korean conscripts, who never ceased to ask, “What are we fighting for?”…

More than two million U.S. personnel have gone through the Korean war theatre. At the moment of the truce more than a half million Americans from all the armed forces—including 300,000 front-line infantrymen—were engaged in combat duty.

The U.S. sustained over 141,000 so-called “battle” casualties and as many more “non-battle” casualties due to oriental diseases, frost-bite, accidents, etc.

Total casualties of the U.S. and its allies, according to the UN report of August 7, were 456,000; the losses of their foes were estimated three times as great.
 
 
Related article:
Let Korean people alone!  
 
 
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