Disappeared News

by Larry Geller

President Obama may be playing with fire by escalating the military presence near North Korea. He may be assuming that North Korea is afraid of US retaliation should it attack S. Korea, Japan or the US. Perhaps they are afraid, or perhaps not.  During the Korean War, the North endured unbelievable casualties, and yet the war continued.

Civilian casualties in North Korea were so extensive as to have been described as a war crime. And the slaughter proved ineffective in deterring the North’s military. Here are two snips—the first describing the casualties, and the second describing the lack of effect.

North Korea lost close to thirty percent of its population as a result of US led bombings in the 1950s. US military sources confirm that 20 percent of North Korea’s  population was killed off over a three period of intensive bombings:

“After destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians, [General] LeMay remarked, “Over a period of three years or so we killed off – what – twenty percent of the population.” It is now believed that the population north of the imposed 38th Parallel lost nearly a third its population of 8 – 9 million people during the 37-month long “hot” war, 1950 – 1953, perhaps an unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to the belligerance of another.”

During The Second World War the United Kingdom lost 0.94% of its population, France lost 1.35%, China lost 1.89% and the US lost 0.32%. During the Korean war, North Korea lost close to 30 % of its population.

These figures of civilian deaths in North Korea should also be compared to those compiled for Iraq  by the Lancet Study (John Hopkins School of Public Health). The Lancet study estimated a total of 655,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, following the US led invasion (March 2003- June 2006). 

[Global Research, KNOW THE FACTS: North Korea lost close to 30% of its population as a result of US bombings in the 1950s, 11/27/2010]

The following is snipped from The Korean War by Max Hastings (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1987) with my emphasis added:

Operation PRESSURE PUMP was designed to impress upon the communist delegation at Panmunjom the urgency of signing an armistice. Bomber attack, wrote Bradley as Chief of the JCS in November 1952, ‘constitutes the most potent means at present available to UNC, of maintaining the degree of military pressure which might impel the communists to agree, finally, to acceptable armistice terms’. Yet American attacks upon the huge Suiho hydroelectric plant on the Yalu in June 1952 aroused intense controversy around the world, and especially in Britain where strategic bombing in Korea was a sensitive issue. Installations in Pyongyang were hit again by massed bomber raids in July and August, along with key mineral workings. By the end of 1952, every worthwhile industrial target in the North seemed to the planners in Tokyo, poring over their photo mosaics, to have been battered into ruin. Pyongyang and other major cities had been flattened, hundreds of thousands of North Korean civilians killed. Yet there remained no evidence of the predicted collapse in the communist will to win. In the summer of 1953, the airmen claimed that the communist signature on the armistice document represented a last victory for air power, following a new campaign of attacks on dams critical for the irrigation of North Korea. There remains no decisive evidence to support or deny their claims. It is probably fair to assume that once the communists had reached a political decision to accept the armistice, the prospect of further serious damage to North Korea’s national infrastructure can scarcely have encouraged them to delay. The lessons of the Korean War for air power seemed self-evident to the ground force commanders, and to those politicians who took the trouble to inform themselves about such things. The experience of World War II showed that intensive strategic bombing could kill large numbers of civilians without decisive impact upon the battlefield, or even upon the war-making capacity of an industrial power. Bombing could inflict a catastrophe upon a nation without defeating it.

The mainstream media frequently dismiss North Korean leaders as crackpots. All the more reason to avoid a military confrontation, you’d think. Wouldn’t we be seen as crazy if we provoked one, given the history of war on that peninsula?

Permalink posted by Larry @ 4/07/2013 05:27:00 PM