[KOREA ENCOUNTERS] US Embassy evacuates Seoul in June 1950

A woman assumed to be an employee of the Naija Hotel poses for Shirley Dawes' camera on the hotel's roof in Seoul in the late 1940s or early 1950. Courtesy of Lynn Thompson

By Matt VanVolkenburg

The founding of the Republic of Korea in August 1948 brought the U.S. occupation of southern Korea to an end. As U.S. military administrators left, the new State Department-run American Mission in Korea (AMIK) was organized.

According to John Caldwell, who worked for the United States Information Service (USIS) in Korea from 1947 to early 1950, "AMIK, and its component parts ― the embassy proper, the Economic Cooperation Administration, the Joint Administrative Services, the Korean Military Advisory Group, and the [USIS] ― totaled some fifteen hundred Americans."

AMIK was "one of the first, and certainly the largest, of the 'coordinated missions' where all parts of the American program were united under one head and for one purpose," which was "to help a fledgling nation to its feet, to help build its economy and its political structure, and to arm it sufficiently to protect what we had assisted in building."

Seoul as seen before the start of the Korean War, likely from the former Mitsui Building, now the Seoul City Euljiro Annex, by Shirley Dawes / Courtesy of Lynn Thompson

The U.S. Embassy was based in the Bando Hotel, which opened in 1938 and, at eight stories, was Korea's tallest building until the 1960s.

Most of the Americans in Seoul at that time "lived in one or another of the embassy hotels (Traymore, Capitol, Bando, Naija, Chosun, Kukje, Yongsan) or in one of the 375 private homes owned by the American Government and scattered throughout the city."

The Naija Hotel in downtown Seoul, published in The Korea Times Jan. 19, 1989. / Korea Times Archive

As well, "The hotels were well equipped with bars and lounges. Two had roof gardens. The season's first dinner dance was always scheduled for the roof of the Naija Hotel." Caldwell, however, criticized the alcohol consumption at the twice-weekly cocktail parties, and the way in which high-ranking staff, despite living in homes that "were completely furnished, were rent free, and were supplied with two servants on the payroll of the United States government," complained endlessly about their lot in life.

Though Korea was, Caldwell thought, "one of the most beautiful countries of the world, with a history well worth exploration by scholar and traveler alike… few of the Americans stationed in Seoul ever went outside the city."

Women do laundry near Hwaseong Fortress' Hwahongmun in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, photographed by Shirley Dawes. / Courtesy of Lynn Thompson

This was not true of all the embassy staff however. Shirley Dawes, a secretary at the embassy who had worked previously for The Seattle Times and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, took dozens of photos of not only landmarks and people in Seoul, but of the Korean countryside as well.

A U.S. Embassy employee poses for Shirley Dawes' camera next to the White Buddha in northwestern Seoul in the late 1940s or early 1950. Courtesy of Lynn Thompson

Among the photos are images of a monk at a Buddhist temple, the White Buddha statue in northwestern Seoul, the Secret Garden in Changdeok Palace and the Hwangudan Altar next to the Chosun Hotel, as well as images of an American on a mountaintop and women doing laundry near Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon, south of Seoul. There are also images of farmers planting rice, children playing games, a fish market and fishing boats. Her daughter, Lynn Thompson, told The Korea Times, "She was definitely a compassionate person and deeply interested in the people and culture."

Korean children in the late 1940s or early 1950 play on a see-saw, photographed by Shirley Dawes / Courtesy of Lynn Thompson

Other photos include AMIK staffers playing tennis at Paichai High School, a Korean woman, presumably a hotel worker, on the roof of the Naija Hotel and, in what must be a rare photo of Korea in the 1940s, embassy staff sunbathing on the roof of the same hotel.

Employees of the American Mission in Korea sunbathe on the roof of the Naija Hotel in the late 1940s or early 1950, in this photo by Shirley Dawes/ Courtesy of Lynn Thompson

Though the political situation became tenser as time went on, according to Donald MacDonald, who had spent a year in Korea at the beginning of the occupation and worked as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy starting in 1948, "Even though we recognized the threat and were planning for the eventuality of a war, when it actually happened it was a total surprise."

On Sunday, June 25, 1950, he was awoken by a phone call. "MacDonald, we have a little emergency. You'd better get to the office."

As economic officer Morton Bach remembered it, "Many of us went up to the roof" of the embassy "and looked into the distance. One could observe clouds of smoke as the Yak planes were hitting petroleum facilities on the outskirts."

After confirming North Korea's invasion was real, and that the South's army would not hold, the evacuations began. The first group left after embassy staff found a Norwegian fertilizer freighter in Incheon. After ordering it to dump its cargo, "We placed 830-odd women and children on that fertilizer freighter and they departed shortly before dusk on Sunday night." Tragically for Bach, his very pregnant wife was forced to climb a rope ladder to get aboard and ultimately miscarried.

Other embassy staff were flown out in two waves. As MacDonald described it, "I wasn't a personal witness, but there seems to be no doubt that there was a disgraceful episode at plane-side Tuesday morning when some of our senior officials were elbowing each other out of the way to get on the plane first" with their possessions that just "had to go along with them. It was a mess."

Among the AMIK staff were 20 members of the Marine Security Guard Detachment who had arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul in January 1949. After returning home from night duty on June 25, Marine guard George Lampman was called and told to gather all of the guards and go to the embassy.

After avoiding being strafed by a North Korean Yak fighter, they were given "extremely precise" pre-prepared evacuation orders. After destroying all of the phones in the embassy, "We took a couple of M-1 rifles, a couple cases of armor piercing ammunition, and destroyed perhaps two hundred jeeps and other vehicles." As this was happening, classified documents were burned, first in furnaces and then, once they became overloaded, in a burning bin in the parking lot. A final task was to destroy code machines by hooking them up to jeep batteries, which left behind "two football-size lumps of molten metal."

Embassy workers board a plane at Gimpo Airport in 1950, photographed by Shirley Dawes. Courtesy of Lynn Thompson

Still, some embassy staff remained. As recounted in a letter home published in The Seattle Times, Dawes wrote, "The boss called me to work at 3 o'clock the afternoon of the invasion and I worked until 8 o'clock the following morning." There she worked at the switchboard and "handled all the telephone calls to Tokyo," where she was witness to a particularly dramatic phone call.

"President [Syngman] Rhee called [General Douglas] MacArthur's headquarters and made a plaintive appeal for ammunition and guns. His voice was breaking." When his secretary, who did not speak English well, took over, things became confused. "One item they needed badly, but he could give only the phonetic spelling, and neither the general in Tokyo nor myself could figure out what it was."

After going back to work the next evening, at 11 p.m. she and other staff were told to "pack a bag, and return in half an hour," after which they were taken to Gimpo Airport, which had already been strafed numerous times. They were ordered indoors as planes approached because "They expected more strafing, but it turned out to be our own transport planes with jet fighter support."

Thinking the last plane had left, Lampman and the Marine guards started to head south by jeep but learned one last plane was on its way. By the time they and the remaining civilians had boarded, the C-54 was overloaded with 110 people, so the Marines "assisted in tossing lots of stuff out the doors ― life rafts, weapons, cargo boxes ― and we were just barely able to lift off."

After spending time in Japan, Dawes moved on to a new assignment ― one which also proved more "exciting" than she might have wished. As her daughter remembers, "Her next posting was to Guatemala, just in time for the U.S. government to topple a democratically elected president who'd vowed to redistribute land owned by the United Fruit Company. I think she grew disillusioned after that and came back to Seattle where I was born and raised."

As for MacDonald, once the tides of the war turned, he interviewed refugees in North Korea's northwest, and examined captured documents in Pyongyang before being transferred to Istanbul. As he put it, "There wasn't much an Embassy staff could do in a war. Furthermore, once the American military arrived, they virtually took over Korea again."

Matt VanVolkenburg has a master's degree in Korean studies from the University of Washington. He is the blogger behind populargusts.blogspot.kr, and co-author of "Called by Another Name: A Memoir of the Gwangju Uprising."