Full of hope for a future free of foreign rule, they proudly declared their independence; however, Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur announced that the US and the USSR would be occupying — and dividing — the entire Korean peninsula. Adding insult to injury, vanquished but no less vicious Japanese forces would be employed to violently repress dissent.

Like so many other imperial endeavors, the division of Korea along the 38th parallel was an exercise in arbitrariness and utter disregard for the wishes of the people it affected. The US, which claimed to champion freedom, denied it to the people of Korea, who very quickly realized that they were merely trading one occupying empire for another.

A survey of Koreans in the summer of 1946 found that 77 percent preferred socialism or communism, while only 14 percent favored capitalism. However, the US backed the right-wing dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, a staunch anticommunist who ruled the South with an iron fist. By early 1950, there were more than 100,000 political prisoners in the South. Summary executions of leftists, both real and imagined, claimed tens of thousands of lives as the South’s police state reign of terror rivaled the worst outrages of the communist North, which was unifying under the former anti-Japanese guerrilla leader Kim Il-sung.

As efforts to negotiate a unified Korean state failed, a nascent antigovernment insurgency grew in the South and was brutally repressed. Brief but bloody border skirmishes escalated; both Rhee and Kim wanted to force unification through invasion. On June 25, 1950, Northern forces launched an all-out invasion of the South. Seoul, the Southern capital, fell three days later. Although the US initially insisted that no US ground troops would be needed in the fight, MacArthur was soon convinced that American boots on the ground were the key to repulsing Northern aggression. President Harry S. Truman agreed, calling the intervention a “police action.”

The US military, strutting with atomic swagger and still puffed up with the pride of victory, expected a short war. Green, flabby GIs, more fit for the pomp and parades of Japanese occupation duty than for the horrors of close combat that awaited them in Korea, imagined they would be back to the bars and bordellos of Tokyo in a matter of weeks, maybe a couple of months at the longest. However, Northern forces routed both the South’s army and the Americans, who hastily retreated southward toward Busan along with hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees.

One area in which US forces enjoyed near total supremacy was in aerial bombardment. Overcoming initial reluctance from MacArthur, Gen. George Stratemeyer ordered US bombers to "destroy every means of communications and every installation, factory, city, and village” in North Korea. More bombs were dropped on Korea than during the entire World War II Pacific campaign.

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