century Blood on the Hills: summer 1951-summer 1953

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.