Narrative by Jim Lea,
with contributions from Tammy Cournoyer,
Jeremy Kirk and Allison Perkins.
People who remember it say June 24, 1950, was a typical Saturday in Seoul.
The city’s boundaries barely extended beyond the wall that had protected it since it became Korea’s capital in the 14th century. Now, it was the administrative center of South Korea. One hundred miles to the north, Pyongyang ruled the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The two were separated not simply geographically by the 38th parallel, but more important, by ideology. And, on the last Saturday of June 1950, few of the 20 million people in the southern half of the peninsula had any inkling of how soon the sweet breath of peace was to be smothered by a cataclysmic clash of those ideologies.
Dawn broke moments after 5 a.m. The annual monsoon was at hand, but the rain would hold off until late evening.
Few buildings in Seoul reached above two floors and the eight-story Bando Hotel, a billet for the U.S. military occupation force that had left the country in 1949, was the city’s tallest building.
Street cars clattered up and down the major streets and across the single bridge to Yongdungpo, south of the Han River, which bisects the city.
People crowded South Gate Market, then as now, the nation’s largest wholesale and retail center. Many residents spent part of the day strolling the forest-shaded paths of Namsan, the city’s landmark mountain. Across town in Pagoda Park, old men wearing straw hats and white "hanbok" robes sat on benches, smoking pipes and arguing politics.
Many South Korean soldiers were on leave, helping their families with the annual rice planting. No one was thinking of war.
The situation in the American community in Seoul was much the same. Historian T.R. Fehrenback relates in his book This Kind of War that the major topic of conversation was gossip about a U.S. official caught in a love nest with Pyongyang’s top female spy in the South.
Both the Korean Military Advisory Group and the U.S. Embassy had parties planned that Saturday evening. Many South Korean civilian and military officials had been invited. No matter how late the tax-free liquor flowed, all felt they had Sunday to recuperate.
And Sundays were always quiet in Seoul.
Seventeen days earlier, Pyongyang newspapers published a manifesto by the Central Committee of the North’s United Democratic Front. It announced the goal of holding peninsula-wide elections and seating a parliament in Seoul by Aug. 15.
That was reprinted by Izvestia, the Soviets’ official press mouthpiece, and a copy of that newspaper found its way into the Library of Congress in Washington, historian Fehrenback wrote. Because Kim Il Sung, founder and ruler of North Korea, and his Soviet handlers previously had rejected a U.N. proposal to hold an election to create a central government for a unified Korea, the manifesto should have triggered alarm bells in the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon.
U.S. Army records state U.S. officials believed a spring attack was unlikely. They felt the North would only continue its insurgency operations in the South, run primarily out of the Mount Chiri area near Taegu, 170 miles south of Seoul, Army records state.
Earlier warnings similarly had been ignored. Fehrenback wrote that Army Capt. Joseph R. Darrigo — an adviser to the 1st ROK Division’s 12th Regiment along the 38th parallel — had reported unusual military activity north of the line for weeks. His superiors at the KMAG passed his reports to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo and to the Pentagon. MacArthur was the Supreme Allied Commander in the Far East and U.S. proconsul in Japan.
Twice in 1949, North Korean troops had invaded and tried unsuccessfully to occupy the Ongjin Peninsula northwest of Seoul. In the last six months of the year, there were some 400 North Korean-sponsored incidents along the 38th parallel. Those incidents intensified in early 1950, but no one in Washington or Tokyo raised an eyebrow.
After all, Brig. Gen. William Lynn Roberts, who had completed his tour and left that Saturday for the States, told Time magazine in a farewell interview that South Korea had "the best damned army outside the United States."
U.S. Ambassador to Seoul John J. Muccio backed that up, saying the South Korean military "cannot only stop an attack but move north and capture the communist capital in two weeks."
While such comments boosted morale in the South Korean ranks, many senior officers had reservations.
The South Korean military had been established as a national police force during the U.S. occupation after World War II. When he became the first president of the Republic of Korea in 1948, Syngman Rhee redesignated the force as an army. But it was that in name and spirit only.
The last of the U.S. occupation force pulled out of the South in 1949. Paik Sun-yup, then a colonel commanding the 5th ROK Division in Kwangju, recalled in an interview that when the occupation force withdrew, "They left us M-1 rifles and ammunition, a few machine guns and bazookas and some short-range 105 mm howitzers. We didn’t have the equipment we needed, and our troops were not fully trained."
Rhee and his senior commanders had pleaded with Washington for more and better equipment, but the requests largely were rejected.
"Lynn Roberts kept saying that the terrain in Korea was not conducive to tank warfare and that our roads and bridges wouldn’t support tanks," Paik said.
The Pentagon had asked for $11 million in Mutual Defense Assistance Program funds for South Korea in fiscal year 1950, but Congress moved slowly in providing the money. The South had supplies enough to last for 15 days of combat, according U.S. records.
On June 24, 1950, Roberts’ observations about tanks in Korea were only hours away from being proven terribly wrong.
Exactly how many troops the South had when the U.S. occupation force left is debatable. U.S. records say 95,000. Paik and other military officials of the day say about 80,000, mostly army.
Chang Chi-ryang, then a major and deputy chief of staff of operations for the South Korean air force, said the U.S. occupation force had left behind 20 light, unarmed artillery observation planes.
"We tried to buy combat planes with money collected in donation campaigns among the Korean people, but Washington wouldn’t sell them to us," he said. "We did manage to buy 10 AT-6 trainers from Canada, but guns for them had not arrived when the war began. Those 10 planes and the 20 given to us by the Americans were the South Korean air force.
"We had a supply of only 45 (33-pound) bombs."
Civilian and military officials in Seoul knew the North’s military machine was far more powerful.
In early 1950, Chang and several other retired South Korean officers said in interviews, North Korean Capt. Yi Gun-sun flew his Soviet-built IL-10 attack plane into Kimhae Airport in Pusan, on the peninsula’s southeast coast. The official story was that he defected, but some believe he landed there by mistake.
The retired officers said Yi brought information that Kim Il Sung had an army of more than 200,000, backed by at least 220 planes, nearly 200 T-34 tanks and more than 1,000 medium-range artillery pieces, all provided by the Soviets.
But the South’s pleas for more equipment fell on deaf ears. Fehrenback and other historians agree the primary reason was that U.S. officials were afraid that with a beefed-up military, Rhee would carry out his threats to invade the North.
On the last Saturday in June 1950, Paik, Chang and Chi Kap-chong were in Seoul.
Paik by then had been transferred to command the 1st ROK Division charged with guarding the vital Western Corridor that provided a straight shot from the 38th to Seoul. Born in Pyongyang, he had served as an officer in the Japanese army during World War II. He moved to Seoul in 1946 and, during the war, rose to major general and became one of the nation’s most decorated war heroes.
On invasion day, he was away from his unit, enrolled in a course at the Infantry School in the capital.
Chang was assigned to Kimpo Air Base, in Seoul’s western suburbs, that day. He also had been an officer in the Japanese military in World War II. A pilot, he trained for a kamikaze suicide mission, but Japan surrendered before he could make his one-way flight.
He returned to Korea and also was commissioned in the constabulary.
Chi was a dental student in Seoul and an interpreter for a KMAG adviser. He spent the war as a correspondent for Reuters News Service and after the conflict founded the U.N. Korean War Allies Association. He still is chairman of that organization, and 50 years of research have made him one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the Korean War.
For more than a week before June 25, 1950, according to historian Fehrenbach, North Korea had been massing seven infantry divisions, an armored brigade, a motorcycle regiment and a border constabulary brigade — 90,000 troops in all — just north of the 210 mile-long 38th parallel. They were equipped, he says, with Soviet-supplied 122 mm howitzers, 76 mm self-propelled guns and T-34 tanks.
At 4 a.m. that Sunday, those troops surged into the South in three columns: the main force coming down the Western Corridor toward Seoul, with two other slightly smaller forces coming down the center and east coast of the peninsula.
Their orders were to be in Pusan, 240 miles away in the peninsula’s southeast corner, within two weeks.
An hour after the invasion, the North Koreans were filling the then-South Korean city of Kaesong, a few miles south of the parallel. By 7 a.m., it was in communist hands.
Chang got a strong indication that something was amiss when he was awakened at Kimpo by the sound of strange aircraft.
"The propeller sounds were unusual, and I thought perhaps they were some new model U.S. or British aircraft," he recalled.
"I went outside and saw two YAK-9s circling the field. The unusual sound they made came from the fact that propellers on Soviet-built aircraft rotated counter-clockwise instead of clockwise as U.S. propellers do."
The planes did not attack.
Paik didn’t learn of the invasion until three hours after it occurred.
"I received a telephone call from my operations officer at 7 a.m. saying the North Koreans had invaded," he recalled.
He went to South Korean army Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Chae Byong-duk at army headquarters adjacent to Yongsan Garrison.
Seoul was quiet, then, he recalled. "The streets were all but deserted, and the only sound was church bells," he said.
There was bedlam in Chae’s office. It was filled with senior officers — many bleary-eyed from late-night parties — trying to determine what was going on. The chief of staff ordered Paik to get to his division.
Seoul’s streets were now filling with military vehicles, and when he reached his division headquarters at Susaek, he learned that Kaesong had fallen and all communications with his 12th Regiment in the city were lost. He also learned that his 13th Regiment was embroiled in heavy combat with North Korean troops above Munsan and that his 11th Regiment, his reserve unit, could not help because more than 50 percent of its troops were on leave or pass.
"I kept saying to myself, ‘What a hell of a mess!’ " he recalled. "It was easy to see why General Omar Bradley later called it ‘the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy.’ It was certainly all wrong for us."
Chang, who had been planning to spend the day at the movies, said the North Korean planes began circling K-16 airbase, then at Yoido Island in the center of Seoul, at about 10 a.m.
Scores of Seoulites were relaxing on the Han River banks. "When the North Korean planes began strafing the river banks, many people ran to the gate of K-16 shouting, ‘What are you doing? Why are you shooting people on a beautiful Sunday?’
"They didn’t realize the planes were North Korean."
Chang heard there were tanks coming down from the North. "I ordered our pilots to take off with a man in the back seat holding a bomb under each arm. The pilots flew very low over the tanks, and the man in the back seat threw out his bombs."
He said the tactic met with limited success and planes were lost from having to fly so low. The bomb supply was exhausted in a couple of days.
Several days later, 10 South Korean pilots were sent to Itazuke Air Base in Japan to receive training in U.S. F-51 fighters, known as P-51 Mustangs in World War II.
"They were supposed to make five training flights, then bring the planes back to Korea to train other pilots," he said. "But ... they could only make one flight. As soon as they returned to Korea, they immediately began flying combat missions."
Chi was relaxing in his room in Seoul that morning. "Ironically, I was reading a history of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor," he recalled.
"About 10 a.m., a friend stopped by and said the streets were filling up with military vehicles and something was happening to the north."
He called an acquaintance at the U.S. Embassy who told him, he recalled, "Don’t worry, I don’t think this will last too long."
North of the city, Paik couldn’t make contact with his regiment in Kaesong or with the 7th ROK Division on his right flank. "I was concerned that the North Koreans might get around us and isolate us," he said.
His 13th Regiment had managed to hold back the North Korean advance for several hours, and was making an orderly retreat south. But many of his troops suddenly were afflicted with what he called "T-34 disease."
Many South Korean soldiers had little training in anti-tank tactics and had never even seen a tank.
"Even the word ‘tank’ terrified them," Paik said.
But his men overcame their fear and formed suicide teams, crawling atop the behemoths with steel rods, trying to pry open the turrets to drop grenades inside. There were some small successes, but more than 100 South Korean soldiers died using this tactic, Paik and Fehrenbach said.
Although Paik’s troops held the North Koreans at bay north of Munsan for much of June 26, a column of T-34s broke through the defenses, and Paik was forced to retreat south.
It was still Saturday in Washington when word of the invasion arrived. Early on Sunday, Washington time, the United States called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council. A resolution was passed calling for an immediate halt to the fighting. The United Nations demanded that North Korean troops return north of the 38th. Pyongyang ignored the demand.
President Harry Truman ordered MacArthur to send ammunition and other supplies to the South Korean army and to evacuate U.S. dependents. He also told MacArthur to make a personal survey of the situation.
Muccio in Seoul, Fehrenbach wrote, had told the U.S. community via the embassy radio station there was no reason for concern or an evacuation. The South Korean army had stopped the North Korean advance, he said.
Although that information was grossly incorrect, Seoul radio stations were backing him up, broadcasting that the invasion had miscarried.
Throughout Sunday evening, KMAG officers and Muccio argued over his decision not to order an evacuation and, in the end, he changed his mind. Early Monday, 682 embassy and KMAG dependents left for southern Japan, Fehrenbach wrote.
On June 27, Washington time, the Security Council met again, passing a resolution asking member nations to provide military assistance to South Korea. Fifteen nations agreed. Three others and Italy, at the time not a U.N. member, agreed to send medical units.
The formation of the U.N. Command was the result of a fluke. The Soviet Union, a permanent member of the council with veto power, was at the time boycotting council sessions. Had the Soviet delegates attended meetings in which the resolutions were passed, they certainly would have vetoed those moves. Then the United States either would have had to go into Korea alone or stay out of the fight.
Truman sent new orders to MacArthur, authorizing him to attack North Korean targets south of the 38th parallel with air and naval bombardment. After the U.N. resolution asked for military assistance for the South, Truman authorized MacArthur to attack targets north of the parallel. He also authorized the use of U.S. troops to protect the major port city of Pusan.
According to U.S. Army records, Truman felt that if South Korea fell, other smaller nations would lose the will to resist communist aggression.
U.S. advisers assigned to South Korean units guarding the center and eastern end of the 38th began relaying messages to KMAG late June 25 that they were under heavy attack.
At midday Sunday, crowds lined the streets of Seoul, shouting encouragement to the South Korean troops streaming north. Morale was high, even though the sounds of cannon fire seemed to be drawing closer.
The mood began to change quickly Monday when refugees and wounded soldiers began pouring into the city with frightening tales. Word also spread that the Americans were evacuating. That, along with the fact that North Korean planes began dropping leaflets demanding surrender Tuesday, sparked panic.
An event on June 28 sealed the fate of many Seoul residents.
Late on June 27, the South Korean Defense Ministry ordered the bridge across the Han River destroyed. Col. Chae Chong-shik, the army’s chief engineer, began setting the charges.
KMAG officers argued with the South Korean command not to blow the bridge. Those pleas were rejected, and the bridge was blown at 2:15 a.m. June 28.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of refugees and soldiers either died in the explosions or drowned. Tens of thousands were trapped in the city.
Chae later was tried by court-martial and executed for blowing the bridge.
An American mistake was to cost thousands of South Korean lives.
On Tuesday, Muccio, the embassy staff and some KMAG officers began evacuating to Japan. Some KMAG officers stayed behind at Shihung, just south of Yongdungpo, where the South Korean high command had moved.
Before leaving Seoul, the embassy staffers burned classified files. But they left the personnel records of some 5,000 Korean employees. North Koreans seized the records and, Fehrenbach wrote, all of the embassy employees unable to get out of the city were killed.
They along with thousands of other Seoulites — government employees, policemen, teachers, wealthy businessmen and landowners and their families — were convicted by "people’s courts" as "enemies of the state" and executed.
Seoul fell Wednesday, June 28.
The day before, Chi Kap-chong’s friends tried to persuade him to flee. "I wanted to stay one more day to see what would happen," he said.
By dawn Wednesday, with Seoul’s streets filled with North Korean tanks and communist agents wearing red armbands, Chi decided it was time to leave. He called a cousin, asking him to flee with him.
"He asked, ‘Why should we leave? We’ve won!’ I didn’t know until then that he was a communist."
Chi tried to leave the city, but was caught and taken before a "people’s court."
"The judge said that since my father was a wealthy landowner, I should be executed," he said.
He spent several nights in jail, but persuaded a guard that he, too, was a communist. He was released, spent several days in hiding, then ventured out and met a friend. They found scraps of red material to use as armbands.
"We went to a boat landing (on the Han River) and I told a guard in a very officious and rough tone that we were agents on a special mission," Chi said. "I ordered him to get a boat for us to cross the river. He did, and we escaped."
Chi walked 170 miles to his parents’ home in Kwangju.
On the same day Seoul fell, the first four Americans died in the war.
A B-26 bomber crashed near Chindo Island, off the peninsula’s southwest coast. Air Force 1st Lts. Remer L. Harding and Derrell B. Sayre and Staff Sgts. Jose C. Campos Jr. and William J. Goodwin were killed.
MacArthur left Tokyo on June 29 for Korea to survey the situation.He recommended sending a regiment to the peninsula immediately and increasing that to at least two divisions. At his disposal were the 8th Army’s 1st Cavalry, 7th, 24th and 25th Infantry Divisions in Japan and the 58th Regimental Combat Team on Okinawa.
Undermanned, underequipped and softened by occupation duty, those units were as unprepared for combat as their South Korean counterparts. Not to send them, though, meant the republic’s days were numbered, and the general had an unshakable faith in the U.S. servicemember’s ability to cope.
The entry of U.S. troops into the war was a disaster in terms of casualties, and the stuff of Army legend.
The first U.S. combat troops to set foot on Korean soil after the invasion were from the 24th Infantry Division’s 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, commanded by Lt. Col. Charles B. Smith. They were the only troops that division commander Maj. Gen. William Dean could scrape together for immediate deployment.
Smith and just over 400 men from his battalion’s B and C companies — beefed up with men from the division’s 3rd Battalion — began landing at Pusan. They were joined the next day by the 52nd Field Artillery Battalion. Later that day, the 540 men of Task Force Smith headed north.
Members of the unit were in high spirits, arrogant even, writes historian Clay Blair in his book, The Forgotten War. As the unit moved north, it came upon a South Korean army engineer unit rigging a bridge for demolition to stall the North Koreans. Smith angrily threw the explosives into the river, calling the South Koreans "cowards," Blair wrote.
Smith’s force was underequipped. William Wyrick, a first lieutenant and infantry platoon leader in 1950, said the infantrymen had 130 rounds of M-1 rifle ammunition each. Worse, the rifles and their six 105 mm howitzers were tagged "not combat serviceable."
At about 8 a.m. July 5, 33 T-34 tanks followed by truckloads of infantry approached Suwon. It was the first time U.S. and North Korean ground troops met in combat. With air support grounded by rain, the battle went badly for the Americans.
Radios conked out in the weather, and "We were out of contact with the infantry more than we were in contact," said Lt. Col. Miller Perry, in command of the artillery. He said most of his unit’s shells "bounced harmlessly off the tanks."
The fight lasted into the afternoon, and the U.S. troops knocked out four tanks. Forty-two North Korean soldiers were killed and 85 wounded, according to Army records.
But by 2:30 p.m., Smith had suffered 150 troops dead or dying and ordered a wi</CF>thdrawal. Men abandoned their weapons, pulled off their boots and plunged into the knee-deep muck of rice paddies, struggling to escape. Some wounded were left behind.
High school student Kim Hae-young straggled through the battle site later and found three wounded Americans — a captain, a lieutenant and a sergeant — who had been left behind. He said he volunteered to help them, guiding them south through the mountains.
"The sergeant was very badly wounded, and I had to carry him most of the way," he said.
On the third day, "We ran into some Korean soldiers who asked where we were going," he said. "I told them, and they said, ‘We’re North Korean. We’ll take the Americans,’ and told me to go home."
Although the engagement was a disaster, MacArthur later called it "an arrogant display of strength." And Task Force Smith did what it was supposed to do: stall the North Korean drive south while reinforcements were being rushed to the peninsula.
After Task Force Smith, U.S. troops fell back toward Taejon in a series of delaying actions with South Korean troops in support.
Paik had attempted to organize a counterattack. He was unable to, partially because U.S. aircraft began bombing his unit in one of the "friendly fire" incidents that occur in every war.
Seoul’s single bridge across the Han River had been blown, so Paik took his men to Haengju, across the river from Kimpo. The troops began crossing the river in small boats. The division became fragmented, and it took Paik several days to regroup with about 2,000 men.
On July 7, Washington time, the Security Council established the U.N. Command with the United States as its executive agent. MacArthur was named commander in chief and, in turn, named Lt. Gen. Walton H. Walker, 8th Army commander, as head of the ground force in Korea. On July 15, Walker established his headquarters at Taegu. Rhee assigned all South Korean troops to the command the same day.
U.S. and South Korean units edged south, establishing defensive lines, holding them briefly, then falling back under attacks.
Walker’s plan was to form a final defense line at the Naktong River, which flows north of Taegu and to the sea west of Pusan.
Taejon fell on July 20, and the U.S. 24th ID began moving south. During the retreat, Maj. Gen. Dean, the division commander, was captured. He spent the next three years as a prisoner of war and, when repatriated in 1953, learned that he was one of 131 U.S. soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen awarded the Medal of Honor in Korea.
At the Naktong, Walker — pinned into the peninsula’s southeast corner — reorganized troops along what came to be known as the "Pusan Perimeter." He told his troops there would be "no more retreating, withdrawal, or readjustment of the lines, or anything else you want to call it."
There was heavy fighting all along the perimeter and a few North Korean breakthroughs. But, with reinforcements and hundreds of thousands of tons of materialpouring into Pusan, the line held.
Eventually, 15 U.N. member states sent ground, sea and air forces to fight alongside U.S. and South Korean troops.
By September, Walker was ready to support one of the most audacious actions of the war.
MacArthur realized that the faster Kim’s troops advanced, the longer and thinner their supply lines became.
Those supply lines could be cut easily with an unexpected amphibious assault. If that assault were made at Inchon, just west of North Korean-occupied Seoul, the capital would be in easy reach.
There were many detractors. The U.S. Navy’s admirals and MacArthur’s Pentagon bosses argued that Inchon’s 30-plus-foot tides — some of the highest in the world — made an amphibious assault there impossible. Officers of the 1st Marine Division, felt that Marines, who would have to use ladders to scale the seawalls, would be extremely vulnerable.
MacArthur prevailed. The Army and Marine assault force landed Sept. 15, and by Sept. 29, the invasion force had recaptured Seoul and Suwon.
The day after the landing, Walker’s forces broke out of the Pusan Perimeter and headed north to link up with the landing force. With U.N. forces in front of and behind them, North Korean invaders fled, some making their way back across the 38th parallel. Others hid in the southern mountains of South Korea to fight a guerrilla war.
By the end of September, there was no organized North Korean army in the South.
There was in the North, though, and Kim had help waiting in the wings.