The Punch Bowl, in Yanggu, Gangwon Province, was one of the hills where fighting continued as truce talks faltered over the issue of the line of the Demilitarized Zone during the Korean War.

Front line of Demilitarized Zone took shape

By Andrew Salmon

This is the 29th in a 60-part series featuring 60 major events in Korea's modern history from 1884 till now. The project is part of the 60th anniversary of The Korea Times, which falls on Nov. 1.

Blood on the Hills: Summer 1951­Summer 1953

By the summer of 1951, the most dangerous front line of the Cold War was taking shape: legions of soldiers, engineers and porters were hacking it deeply into the waist of the Korean Peninsula.


Few of the soldiers living and fighting on the battlefront carved into the hills and ridges would have appreciated it, but the conflict they were now fighting had become the first “limited war.”

While North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and South Korean President Syngman Rhee might still lust to unite the peninsula under their own rule, their more powerful backers -- respectively, the People’s Republic of China and the U.S.-led United Nations Command (UNC) -- had lost the stomach for a decisive victory.

In the space of one year, the strategic situation in Korea had changed beyond all recognition.

What had stared, in June 1950, as an internecine war between two ideologically competing states had almost immediately morphed into the first United Nations war, as U.S.-led U.N. troops entered the fight.

With the shock entry of China into the arena in November 1950, Korea had become a clash of the superpowers, its terrain a battlescape over which total war raged as massive offensives and counteroffensives ranged up and down the peninsula.

After the failure of the largest series of Chinese attacks, the massive, two-phase “Spring Offensive” that started on April 22 and ended on May 20, 1951, U.N. forces had begun to push back north, meeting increasing Chinese and North Korean resistance north of the 38th parallel.

On June 23, the Soviet delegate to the U.N., Jacob Malik, suggested armistice talks.

On June 30, U.S. Commander-in-Chief Far East Gen. Matthew Ridgway consented. On July 10, truce talks began at the ancient Korean capital of Gaeseong, unoccupied, at the time, by either side.

In October, the talks moved to Panmunjeom. The lines, once so fluid, began to solidify as the end of 1951 approached.

But with talks consistently faltering over the issue of the line of the Demilitarized Zone, the makeup and duties of the Military Armistice Commission, and -- most critically and intractably -- the most appropriate procedure for the repatriation of POWs, fighting on the hills continued.

What was this new -- and final, if long drawn-out -- phase of the war like for the U.N. Command soldiers on the ground?

The northward-facing slopes of the hills, ridges and mountains were held by the men of the UNC.

These features were pockmarked with craters, furrowed with trenches, piled with sandbags and forested with barbed wire.

Their reverse slopes were honeycombed with tunnels, packed with ammunition, stores, aid posts and vehicles.

Behind them, elevated to fire over the ridges, artillery pieces and rocket launchers pointed up at the sky.

Some miles behind this front was “the rear”: Camp towns and makeshift villages, inhabited by second-echelon troops and porters, haunted by beggars and orphans and serviced by laundry workers, “house boys” and prostitutes.

Lucky soldiers would find themselves posted to an unnamed geographical feature, distinguished only by its contour height: Hill 327 say, or Hill 235.

The photo shows a memorial marking the war of the White Horse Hill in Chorwon, Gangwon Province. As Chinese and South Korean troops fought over White Horse Hill, its summit changed hands 24 times. Korea Times file

Less fortunate men would find themselves fighting for a mountain, hill or ridgeline that had earned an ominous name, for soldiers, generals and writers took to branding the battlefields where particularly intense fighting took place.

Some were named after the shape of the features in relief; others after their shape on the map; still others were simply nicknamed by the soldiers, reflecting their feelings about the desolate positions they were assigned to defend. White Horse Hill. The Punchbowl. Pork Chop Hill. Old Baldy. Heartbreak Ridge. The Hook.

In daytime, men stayed under cover, for movement attracted enemy fire: Snipers, mortars or even artillery attacks.

Much activity took place after dark. In the Vietnam War, it would be said “the night belongs to Charlie,” but in Korea, too, the Chinese were particularly feared for their excellence at night fighting.

To remedy this, mortars fired, and aircraft dropped, strings of illumination flares that floated over the front line like giant fireworks.

When weather permitted it, gigantic searchlights were beamed up to and reflected off the clouds, creating an eerie radiance: “artificial moonlight.”

What the soldiers would come to dread would be the patrols into No Man’s Land, the battleground between their lines and the enemy.

There were various types of patrols: listening patrols to outposts; reconnaissance patrols to scope out the ground; ambush patrols designed to cut down unwary enemy patrols.

The most dangerous patrols were prisoner snatch operations, designed to seize an enemy soldier for intelligence, or fighting patrols, designed to take out an enemy position.

Then there were the battles. For the U.N. forces, if truce talks were not heading in the direction they desired, they had the option of air offensives to pressure their opposite numbers across the negotiating table.

The communist forces used massive ground attacks to strengthen their negotiating hand. Yet these were not major battles for strategic objectives, these were savage, limited-objective fights for dominant terrain.

Many U.N. soldiers would be bitter at being ordered to fight -- and often, to die -- for just an acre or two of cratered hilltop.

Some of these combats went on for weeks: As Chinese and South Korean troops fought over White Horse Hill, its summit changed hands 24 times

By now the enemy had heavy artillery, and his ground assaults were preceded by earth-shaking, ear-drum shattering bombardments that often proved more terrifying to the men huddled in crumbling trenches and rocking bunkers than the infantry attack itself.

Attacks, almost always launched after dark, were made en masse, with the enemy attempting to overrun positions. When overrun, a position -- churned up hilltop; smashed bunkers; collapsed trenches; and the position’s valuable supply of wounded and captured men -- could only be retaken by fast, violent counterattack.

Such fighting was reminiscent of the trench fighting on the Western Front in World War I -- albeit with its stresses and discomforts increased by Korea’s vertical terrain, primitive conditions and extreme climate.

The grinding but inconsequential nature of the fighting and the lack of movement caused the media to lose interest in the war, and the U.S. public turned increasingly against it. U.S. President Harry Truman declined to run for re-election in 1952. Dwight Eisenhower won the race for the White House and secretly visited Korea in December 1952.

There, he decided that the grand schemes advanced by U.S. General Mark Clark and South Korean President Rhee for major offensives were undesirable, deciding instead on a negotiated solution.

To pressure the communist side, he threatened air attacks on China and a naval blockade, and also unsubtly raised the specter of tactical nuclear weapons.

When Stalin died in March 1953, conditions were ripe for serious negotiations: Moscow had had good reasons for seeing Washington bogged down indefinitely in Korea, and had pressed Beijing to continue hostilities.

To the fury of Rhee who did everything he could to sabotage an armistice, conditions were agreed upon. Rhee’s price was a massive U.S. economic aid package, and a defense treaty with Washington.

On April 27, along the front, artillery commanders ordered their guns to fire a last, massive barrage prior to the imminent end of the war. At midnight, the firing ceased. An eerie silence -- one unheard for three years -- descended over the blackened, battered hills and devastated villages.

Some U.N. troops were horrified to hear mortars firing on the other side -- was the long-awaited ceasefire breaking down already? -- but were then relieved to see that their former enemies were firing celebratory flares, not high explosive.

The following morning, at various sectors of the front, U.N. and Chinese troops ventured out of their fortifications, beyond their barbed wire, through the minefields and down into No Man’s Land, where they greeted each other, photographed each other and fraternized.

These scenes did not extend to Korean troops, however, whose land remained divided and whose differences had been exacerbated, not solved by, three years of carnage.

Fraternization was soon halted as both sides pulled back by two miles and began constructing new positions along the so-called Demilitarized Zone -- positions that have, in most cases, been there ever since.

The writer is the author of the Korean War battlefield histories “To the Last Round” (London, 2009) and “Scorched Earth, Black Snow” (scheduled for publication in Spring 2011).

London
http://tothelastround.wordpress.com