
Photos from the Korean War - curtis
http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/07/remembering-the-korean-war/493235/?single_page=true
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13of40
I lived by the DMZ for a couple of years in the mid-90s, and being an
outdoorsy type, I did some hiking in the hills around Soyo-San, Inchon, and
other spots. It's amazing how much the war changed the landscape, even decades
later. At the time you couldn't find a single tree more than five or six
inches wide, and all of the hills are crisscrosses with old trenches, etc.
Inside the DMZ is supposedly a little bit more wild, and there are supposed to
be some actual old-growth trees on the north side, but I doubt any westerner
could get there to see them. If the North Korean government ever folds, it's
right near the top of my bucket list to go take a look, though.

~~~
cjslep
I just recently had the pleasure of visiting Seoul, but was sad to see JSA
tours booked about 3 weeks in advance so I did not get to do the DMZ tour.

My grandfather was in the CIA during the Korean War and has quite an
interesting perspective. Apparently it wasn't until Eisenhower was elected
that North Korea finally was more willing to sign an armstice because, unlike
Truman, Eisenhower was happy to drop hints that he was OK with using the
atomic bomb to end the war.

Gives an interesting dimension as to why North Korea is so gung-ho about
obtaining one. They did not like being bullied with one.

~~~
douche
Ah, Korea, the first "Rules of Engagement" war. I wonder what would have
actually happened if MacArthur had expanded the war as he planned, before
Truman clapped the muzzle on him.

Similar to Vietnam, the suggestion that the US military is ready to take the
gloves off and actually fight a real war is usually enough to bring anything
less than a first-rate military power to the negotiating table. Well, assuming
that the enemy is anything like an actual government with real
responsibilities to its people, rather than a decentralized rabble of Islamic
thugs.

~~~
jsnk
"I wonder what would have actually happened if MacArthur had expanded the war
as he planned, before Truman clapped the muzzle on him."

I like MacArthur, and he is an amazing general. Inchon landing was a
remarkable gamble that proves MacArthur is a tactical genius. In my South
Korean heart, I want to believe that MacArthur was right. But when I think
more about the issue and the historical context behind the war, I think Truman
made the prudent choice.

WWII is still very much fresh in everyone's mind. People know even the
smallest spark can trail-blaze its way to start the biggest war at an
unimaginable. The Korean war should have stayed as a proxy war and ended as a
proxy war. I am glad that the war had not spilt itself to becoming full scale
war between communist side vs capitalist side. Also US's use of atomic bomb in
Japan during WWII was viable because Japan did not have an atomic bomb. USSR
did. If US used an atomic bomb against North Korea, that would be an open
invitation for USSR to use it. So yeah, I think Truman was right in the end.

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perishabledave
These photos bring up a lot of family history for me. Thanks for sharing them.

My mother's family lived in Seoul when the war broken out. During my mother's
first birthday party, her aunt and her children came through the door looking
half dead. My aunt lived further north and made the few days trek with her
children and only the clothes on her back. Her husband was an engineer on a
power plant, when the communist party took over. He was taken away by soldiers
never to be seen again. My mother's family eventually had to flee as well,
losing all their possessions and farmland.

Though my mother was too young for a first hand account of the war, we still
have a single photograph of my mother's first birthday party. You can see her
sitting in front of all the celebratory food. What you can't see in the
picture is my aunt and her children on the other side of the room on the verge
of death.

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gw
Not surprisingly, the hospital photo looks eerily like a set from MASH. I even
squinted and saw Henry Blake in the back. I grew up watching the show and it
was my earliest exposure to art that was explicitly (and powerfully) anti-war.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/07/remembering-the-
kor...](http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/07/remembering-the-korean-
war/493235/#img15)

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zghst
Absolutely wonderful gallery, first one on the web from a major organization
that made the experience enjoyable!

Also try adding scroll-behavior: smooth; to the body or :root

~~~
lostlogin
I agree. Hiding half the image captions was a weird choice though. I'm on
mobile so that might be part of it.

~~~
joshmaker
We only truncate the captions on mobile and only if the are longer than a set
number of characters. If I recall, the thinking was that the captions might be
pretty long on some galleries and we didn't want to detract too much from the
visual experience for readers who just wanted to scroll through the gallery
without reading 100% of the text.

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the gallery even on a phone. Making an image
heavy page work well like these is always tricky for mobile, but it's an
experience we care about and plan on improving in the future.

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bane
My father fought in this war, came in with the main U.N. invasion, fought in
North Korea before being shot a couple times and sitting out the rest in a
hospital in Japan trying to beat a new found morphine addiction. He very
rarely talks about his time there, but pictures of modern South Korea make him
stop in his tracks.

My wife is Korean, and her father and his brother were the only surviving
family members from their side. Orphaned at 8 or 9, my father-in-law remembers
very fondly American soldiers volunteering time to come to the orphanage and
play with the kids, bring them candy, whatever.

It's not entirely impossible that my father may have been one of those
soldiers giving my father-in-law chocolate. When my wife and I announced our
engagement, my father-in-law felt it was deeply appropriate for the son of one
of those soldiers who may have saved his life to marry one of his daughters.

If you want to better understand that kind of bond, I recommend watching this
documentary on a reunion between a Korean orphan and her Turkish soldier
guardian (the Allies were a U.N. force and Turkey was a major contributor of
troops).
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98KBGvZymMA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98KBGvZymMA)

Sometime during the war, in order to slow the southward advancing Communist
forces, all of the bridges crossing the numerous rivers in South Korea were
destroyed, leaving hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees to crawl over
wreckage and ford rivers on foot.
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/Flight_of_Ref...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/Flight_of_Refugees_Across_Wrecked_Bridge_1950.jpg)

So rapidly and completely displaced were people, and so decimated the country
had been, that families who were separated in the rush away from the war often
never found their relatives again. In the 1980s a short run of shows trying to
reconnect families swept the nation as people desperately tried to remember
the names and faces of their long-lost, hopefully still living, relatives. At
one point the show ran for 13 hours a day. Over 10,000 families were reunited
-- decades after the war had ceased.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/18/world/war-scattered-
korean...](http://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/18/world/war-scattered-korean-kin-
find-their-kin-at-last.html)

[http://www.koreabang.com/2013/pictures/photos-in-1983-all-
of...](http://www.koreabang.com/2013/pictures/photos-in-1983-all-of-korea-was-
crying.html)

~~~
jsnk
That's an amazing story. Thanks for sharing.

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duckwho
If it weren't for the US's gracious intervention, S. Korea would have been
swallowed by N. Korea and China. Unfortunately some pro-communism, pro-N.
Korea activists hate the US. These people have forgotten the grace of the US.
Without US support, S. Korea would still be dirt poor, just like current South
Eastern countries.

~~~
rangibaby
ROK was as poor as and just as crazy as DPRK for a lot of it's history too.

~~~
Pinckney
Indeed. It's surprising to me that the Atlantic chooses not to document the
Bodo League massacre. Rhee was a butcher, and our support of him is one of the
great moral failings of the Truman administration.

