Invasion! Breakout of Korean War on June 25, 1950

By Andrew Salmon
Korea Times columnist

On the afternoon of Sunday, June 25, 1950, a fine, early summer day, a slight, cheerful-looking high-school student named Kim Song-hwan was sitting with several of his father’s friends on a hilltop on the northern outskirts of Seoul.

At their feet were the curved roof tiles and thatch of a typical Korean village; beyond stretched paddy fields and a dusty road heading northward.

All eyes were focused on the blue hills on the northern horizon, where great puffs of pale grey smoke were blossoming, then dispersing.

Kim got to work. As always, he had pens, watercolors and a sketchbook with him, for the student was also an artist, earning money sketching for newspapers, few of which could afford cameramen.

The watchers knew the smoke was from artillery impacts, but were unconcerned. “We had heard over the radio that North Korea had invaded, but were told that the South Korean Army was pushing them back,” Kim recalled.

The information was wrong. The barrage on the hills heralded the arrival of armored spearheads of the North Korean People’s Army, or NKPA; its tanks had smashed aside flimsy frontier barriers in the early hours and were now barreling down the road toward the capital.

“I am bitter about those broadcasts,” Kim said. “Because of them, many people did not flee.”

The invasion bearing down on the young artist had been unleashed from the north in the early hours in a bold -- and ruthless -- gambit to unify the divided nation under the red banner.

Korea, a Japanese colony for 35 years, had been divided by allied powers in a virtual afterthought at the end of World War II:

The unexpected speed of the Soviet offensive in Manchuria and North Korea during the closing days of the conflict, had driven the United States to suggest a separation of the peninsula.

The 38th parallel -- literally, a line on a map -- was pinpointed by the Americans.

To the surprise of many, the Soviets, who actually fought the Japanese in North Korea, halted at the agreed-upon limit of exploitation. American troops landed in the South a month later.

Korean leadership, after 35 years of colonial rule, was fractured and severely polarized. Attempts to hold unified elections failed.

Divisions hardened. In 1948, competing states were established on both sides of the parallel. Kim Il-sung, a former communist guerilla in Manchuria and a captain in the Red Army, based in the Soviet Far East, was installed in Pyongyang.

Syngman Rhee, a nationalist who had sat out the Japanese occupation in the United States, took office in Seoul.

Two years of frontier clashes and guerilla fighting followed, but what was happening on this summer weekend in 1950 was a massive escalation, for Kim’s assault was a full-scale blitzkrieg, its planning undertaken in Moscow, its equipment supplied by the Red Army, and its timing signed off by Stalin himself.

The South could do little to defend itself. Rhee had been so voluble about his ambitions for unification that his sponsors, the United States, had been unwilling to grant him the weapons -- armor, heavy artillery, war planes -- to achieve it.

Hence, the first weeks of the war would be an uneven struggle as under-equipped South Koreans attempted to hold off a much more powerful force.

Kim’s spearhead comprised armored brigades of T-34 medium tanks, with overhead cover provided by Yak fighters.

Russian built, the T-34 was the machine that had smashed Hitler’s armored legions on the Eastern Front, the outstanding tank of World War II, the conflict in which this tank had become the key weapon.

Exacerbating the Republic of Korea, or the ROK Army’s lack of heavy equipment was its unpreparedness. “We thought the North would someday invade,” said 30-year-old Gen. Paik Sun-yeop, soon to gain a reputation as the ROK Army’s most formidable leader. “But that general attack was a complete shock.”

One of his subordinates, Col. Kim Chum-kon, had been fighting guerillas in the south, but had been summoned to return to Seoul by Paik months earlier, due to the increasing violence of the border clashes.

“That was the process of training the NKPA and testing the south,” Kim said of the frontier combat. “But few people considered it a prelude to war.”

Kim himself had been predicting all-out hostilities, but few listened; the night before the invasion, he had watched couples dancing the night away in Seoul.

Early reports indicated just another skirmish, but Kim was uneasy. When he reached the capital’s War Room, he was told enemy tanks had reached Uijeongbu, just 15 miles north.

Paik and Kim departed for their unit, the ROK 1st Division, northwest of Seoul. The two soldiers, China veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army, were plunged immediately into desperate combat.

Some ROK units -- such as Paik and Kim’s crack 1st Division, holding the “Munsan Corridor” north of Seoul -- resisted fiercely:

Paik sent suicide squads with bombs strapped to their bodies against the T-34s. But few ROK units fought that hard. Most cracked. The great summer retreat -- one that would lead to the gates of Busan, in the distant southeast -- was beginning.

One Seoul resident that Sunday was a student of English literature, Lee Jong-yun. A native of the border city of Gaeseong, he had read a 300-year book of divination which had prophesied a terrible war in 1950, but as a native of Gaeseong, had grown used to the sound of gunfire.

Like many, he believed early reports of the fighting referred to frontier clashes. Then he saw refugees arriving from Uijeongbu.

Though he was not political, he was convinced that the North Koreans would recruit him into their army -- something he wanted to avoid. He decided to flee.

Children, who would be the most pitiable victims of the conflict, were innocent of what was underway. On Sunday night, the sleep of Lee Chun-hee, a 12-year old schoolgirl, had been disturbed by a strange thunder rumbling steadily from the north.

The following day, she headed to school as usual. She was delighted when, around mid-morning, her teacher told the children that all classes were cancelled.

Gaily, she skipped off to spend the day with her parents, North Korean refugees who ran a profitable shoe shop in the lively East Gate market.

Heading there, she noticed something odd: The streets were bustling with people, many running, with bundles of possessions on their heads.

Kim, the young newspaper artist, had returned to Seoul and found a vantage point to record events:

He stood on the medieval city walls, where they climbed up the mountain ridge flanking the fortress-like East Gate, watching brown smoke rise over the market and northern suburbs.

In the foreground, curious civilians crowded, trying to see what was going on. In the background, ROK soldiers were posted nervously in doorways, unsure what to do next: this war was not proceeding according to plan.

An infectious panic was setting in. Soldiers started to lose their nerve:

Kim watched troops changing into civilian clothes, hiding uniforms and weapons.

Lee Jong-yun, meanwhile, was heading south, caught up in what was becoming, for some, a mad rush: “I ran like I was running from a volcano,” he said.

Soon he was out of the city proper, moving across paddy dikes, through the rice fields and thatched farming hamlets of the countryside. “It was pretty peaceful there,” Lee said. “People were just watching what was going on.”

He reached the kilometer wide Han River. The bridges had been blown by ROK engineers -- Kim was not to know it, but hundreds of civilians had been killed in the mistimed blasts -- and the brown river was swollen and fast flowing from the summer rains.

No ferries were available; they had been commandeered by the military.

However, Lee was a strong swimmer. Stripping off, he held his clothes on his head, and entered the swirl. He was carried downstream, but reached the south bank safely.

By June 28, resistance north of Seoul had collapsed: The capital fell to the NKPA.

Kim watched the victorious columns trundling through the city’s wide, tree-lined boulevards.

First came the armor: T-34s with shock troops riding on their hulls, accompanied by scout cars and motorcycle side-cars, all heavily camouflaged with scrub.

Then the infantry: lines of marching men, their bayoneted rifles and “burp guns” slung over their shoulder.

Finally, the logistic tail: lumbering bullock carts, also camouflaged with scrub.

The Northern troops in their tan uniforms were dusty from the road, and some, under their peaked caps, were wide-eyed with battle shock, but to Kim, most looked stern, tough and competent.

Many NKPA soldiers were combat veterans of Mao’s 8th Route Army, immunized to spartan living and hard fighting. Splashing color across the scene were the red banners and flags the men from the north were carrying. Modest crowds lined the route, cheering them on.

“Some workers welcomed them -- they thought it would be a different world! -- but not as many as I thought,” said Kim. “There were NKPA going by in jeeps saying ‘Give them a big hand!’ but it was only some workers and children who did.”

Sophisticated Seoulites would soon chuckle to hear of the NKPA troops who had knelt to drink from the toilets of the Chosun Hotel, an establishment they had never seen the likes of.

Lee Jong-yun, temporarily safe south of the Han, had halted. “I thought I would return to Seoul in a few days and the North Koreans would be defeated,” he said.

He stayed in a Buddhist temple for three days, buying food from nearby farming villages. Then he heard that the NKPA had crossed the river.

Lee set off again, down the dusty tracks, heading for Daegu. Arriving in the square in front of the rail station, he saw a sign asking for English interpreters.

As a student of English literature -- his favorite poem was Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” a work appropriate to the times -- Lee spoke the language with reasonable proficiency. English speakers were suddenly in high demand: The Americans had landed.

Korea, an unknown land to most of the world, including those soon to fight there, was, for the first time in centuries, about to explode across the global consciousness.

In the summer of 1950, Kim’s invasion was widely seen as part of a global communist conspiracy. That paradigm would not be challenged until the 1970s, when the attack was re-interpreted as something akin to a civil war, a bid by a strong man for national unification.

With the release of Soviet archive material in the 1990s, the traditional interpretation of a communist plot had reasserted itself.

Stalin, we now know, was a key player, who not only supplied Kim with weaponry and planned his attack, but ordered him to consult with Mao before D-day.

But this falls into the realm of strategy and ideology -- things far from the mind of the average 1950 Korean citizen, over whom a terrible nightmare was descending.

With U.S. forces bringing the full destructiveness of modern weaponry to bear, and with another mighty force massing north of the Sino-Korean border, the most devastating experience in the peninsula’s long history was underway.

Kim’s June 25 invasion had unleashed a great demon -- one that would stalk the land for three years, laying waste to its towns and villages and scattering its mountains and valleys with the corpses of millions.

Andrew Salmon is the author of the Korean War battlefield history to the Last Round and the upcoming Scorched Earth, Black Snow. This article is sourced from those works. He can be reached at andrewcsalmon@yahoo.co.uk.

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