History Warns

歷史警告

President Kim Il Sung

“The myth exploded to atoms, and it became clear to everyone that the United States was not so strong as others had thought her to be.”

This is an admission made by George Marshall, who held the post of US Defence Secretary during the Korean war (1950-1953).

The Korean war was recorded in history as the first defeat of the US.

When war broke out between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which was less than two years since its founding, and the United States that was known as a victor in over 110 previous wars, the whole world worried over the fate of the former.

When it started the Korean war, the US believed that it could easily occupy the northern half of Korea by dint of its numerical, military and technological superiority. The American generals boasted that they would finish the war within 72 hours before the journalists.

The US hurled into the Korean war one-third of its ground force, one-fifth of its air force, the greater part of the Pacific Fleet, troops of its 15 vassal states and south Korea totalling over two million strong, and large quantities of up-to-date technical combat equipment. The so-called “ever-victorious generals” of the US were sent to the war.

However, what awaited them was only death and defeat.

President Kim Il Sung has a talk with the Heroes of the Republic and model combatants in June ,1951

The battle in the sea off Jumunjin early in July 1950 was one of the major battles in which Korea shattered to smithereens the myth of the US “mightiness.”

It was a fierce battle unprecedented in the balance of power that was beyond comparison; the US force was comprised of a light cruiser and a destroyer including the heavy cruiser Baltimore, called a “floating island” and built with the expenditure of money, materials and manpower great enough to be able to build 13 000 torpedoes; the naval force of the Korean People’s Army, however, had only four torpedoes. To everybody’s surprise, the US heavy cruiser Baltimore was sunk and the light cruiser damaged in the battle. It was a miracle unheard-of in the world history of war.

Such miracles were wrought out in all the battle areas of the Korean war. The American “ever-victorious generals” were branded as “defeated generals.”

The US 24th Division that had boasted of its being “ever-victorious” was annihilated in Taejon and Dean, its commander, was captured by a little soldier of the KPA. Walton Walker, the then commander of the US Eighth Army, was killed in an raid of a KPA unit active in the enemy-held areas. Van Fleet who succeeded Walker was dismissed after earning bad reputation as “incompetent.”

Douglas MacArthur, commander of the US Armed Forces in the Far East and also the United Nations Forces, was sacked, and his successor Matthew Ridgway could not escape the fate of his predecessor.

Finally the US which had been boasting of being “the strongest” in the world, suffered the political, military and moral defeats unprecedented in its history. In the Korean war the US sustained great loss in manpower and war supplies, nearly 2.3 times greater than what it had suffered in the Pacific War, before signing the armistice agreement.

After signing the armistice agreement, a surrender document of the US, Mark Clark lamented, “In carrying out the instructions of my government I gained the unenviable distinction of being the first United States Army Commander in history to sign an armistice agreement without victory. I suffered a sense of frustration that was shared, I imagine, by my two predecessors, Generals Douglas MacArthur and Matthew Ridgway.”

President Kim Il Sung examines and ratifies the Korean Armistice Agreement in July,1953

Omar Bradley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, confessed that the Korean war was a great military disaster and the wrong war the US waged at the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy.

It is obvious that the US had misjudged its opponent. The defeat of the US suffered in the Korean war brought home to the international community that there was no match in the world for the Korean army and people under the leadership of President Kim Il Sung, an iron-willed brilliant commander. The US administration in particular must have been aware of this.

Present Korea is not that young country as it was in the early 1950s. It inflicted an ignominious defeat on the US, and that with the military hardware incomparably inferior to its counterpart. Today it has developed into a power with invincible armed forces possessed of all kinds of the latest military hardware and a reliable nuclear deterrent by dint of Songun politics administered by General Kim Jong Il.

The Korean army and people are now following the leadership of their supreme leader Kim Jong Un, who is admired by the world to be identical with President Kim Il Sung.

If a new war breaks out in Korea, it will produce quite a different result from the Korean war.

The previous Korean war marked the beginning of the US downfall, but the new one will bring the US to a final end.

The Korean war in the 1950s warns the US administration not to attempt to start another Korean war.

Source: Consulate General of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in Hong Kong

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