The Korean War You Never Saw (Part One)

By Tim Shorrock | July 29, 2026 | This article was produced by Empire Blues by Tim Shorrock

This is the first of three introductions written by investigative journalist, and KPI Associate, Tim Shorrock, to the three volume book, The Korean War you never Saw, released on July 27, the 73^rd anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, by Newstapa/Korea Center for Investigative Journalism.  Volume 1 is Scorched Earth Bombing; Volume 2 is Leaflet Psychological Warfare; Volume 3 is Prisoners and Panmunjom.  

Shorrock has written the introduction to each volume and has given KPI permission to reprint them.  For additional investigative reporting on Korea and U.S.-Korea policies subscribe to Shorrock’s, Empire Blues, a reader supported publication.

The caption reads: “TEARS AMID THE RUINS: A frightened little South Korean boy cries in the midst of the ruins of his home in Seoul. The child was found by American soldiers at the end of a bitter battle.” In the original document, the last sentence is crossed out, suggesting that the archivist did not want American Christian donors to know that the little boy’s home was destroyed by lethal U.S. firepower. (Credit: Presbyterian Historical Society)

On July 27th, 2026, the 73rd anniversary of the 1953 Armistice in Korea, Newstapa/The Korea Center for Investigative Journalism published three new books on Amazon Kindle about the Korean War, translated into English for an American audience. I was honored to write the introductions to all three volumes. Here is my opening essay for Scorched Earth Bombing.

I first heard about the Korean War when my father was a missionary in postwar Japan and South Korea with Church World Service, then America’s largest private relief organization. In 1957, after his post-World War II relief work in Tokyo was ending, he began traveling regularly to South Korea to help it recover from the Korean War. When he arrived, the country was still a mess, with the terminal at Gimpo Airport marked with bullet and shell holes from the battles with North Korean troops entrenched in Seoul. Shacks filled with refugees crowded onto hillsides along the Han River.

“These bombs and the shell and bullet damage came during the Korean War when the communist soldiers were trying to win control of South Korea,” my father explained in a letter to his children. “With the help of American, English, French, and Canadian soldiers, however, the South Korea Army pushed the communists back to North Korea.” The Christian aid to Korea, he added, “gives the Korean people hope and courage even though their country is so badly destroyed.” In 1959, he moved us to Seoul, where we lived until May 1961.

As a child who had seen the aftermath of the terrible U.S. fire-bombing of Tokyo, I understood a little of what Koreans had lived through in the war. At the same time, the nature of the war was clear to me from the work my father did for Church World Service: running homes for orphans and widows, operating hospitals for people with missing limbs, and distributing powdered milk, grain, and used clothing to destitute survivors all over the country. This had obviously been one hell of a war.

These are still photographs from a slide show called “Traveling Man” that was distributed in America by Church World Service to show the virtuous contributions made by U.S. Christians to South Korea after the war. Note the identifying words “Pusan Korea” in the photo on the left. (Credit: Presbyterian Historical Society)

In fact, these relief programs were made necessary by the terrible damage inflicted on the Korean people by U.S. policies that maximized bombs and fire power. Between 1950 and 1953, over 3 million Koreans were killed, probably half of them civilians, in fighting and bombing runs that raged all over the peninsula. Nearly 40,000 Americans, about 4,000 foreign troops in the US-run UN Command, and over 100,000 Chinese died. Millions of Koreans were left homeless, their lives forever scarred by the fratricidal and imperial violence. Their shacks were among those we could see from our house in Seoul during our time in Korea.

As I learned more about America’s conduct in the war as an adult, I became appalled at its “scorched earth” tactics described in their full, horrific detail in this volume.

For three years and one month between 1950 and 1953, U.S. aircraft flew 710,886 sorties over the Korean peninsula — about 630 every single day. They dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm, more than twice the napalm the United States used in all of World War II. Entire cities were, in the U.S. military’s own words, “erased from the map.”

The Korean War, I concluded, was a vicious war fought for spurious reasons that undermined the very notion of “freedom” that American leaders promised the Korean people.

These three books published by Newstapa underscore the genocidal nature of the Korean War and explains the enormous propaganda and psychological warfare methods undertaken by the United States to win over the Korean population and convince Americans it was a righteous war.

Volume One describes the U.S. strategy of carpet bombing that began during World War II and was perfected in Korea. After MacArthur’s landing at Incheon and the US counter-invasion of North Korea two months later, the U.S. military spent three years bombing, strafing, and splashing napalm - “the devil’s weapon” - everywhere it could find the “communist” enemy.

Left: A formation of B-29 heavy bombers carpet-bombs the skies of North Korea. Between July and August 1950, B-29s dropped a staggering 24 million pounds of destruction bombs. Right: 24 August 1950. U.S. Air Force carpet bombing of the Wonsan area in North Korea sends up countless mushroom clouds. (Newstapa/US National Archives)

In November, 1950, as China’s intervention loomed, MacArthur pronounced a virtual death sentence on millions of Koreans. “Every installation, facility, and village in North Korea now becomes a military and tactical target,” he ordered. His directive was carried out by General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff who had masterminded the firebombing of Japan just five years before. “Over a period of three years or so, we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too,” LeMay would later boast. “We even burned down Pusan. That was an accident, but we burned it down anyway.”

As we learn in this volume, the U.S. Air Force began bombing runs south of the 38^th parallel immediately after the North Korean invasion. That July, a phalanx of B-29s attacked the Yongsan area of Seoul; over 1,300 civilians died and were buried in mass graves. Even MacArthur’s much-celebrated Incheon invasion was tainted when U.S. planes firebombed the island of Wolmi, massacring hundreds of civilians living there. The consequences for people caught in these free-fire combat zones were horrific, as these gruesome photos carefully preserved in the U.S. National Archives demonstrate.

Top: In Incheon, reduced to rubble after the landing operation, a child hauls scrap metal. A mother and child who had set out as refugees froze to death in a snowfield. Bottom: Refugees killed by gunfire while passing through a combat zone as their village burns. (Newstapa/US National Archives)

Sadly, many Americans didn’t learn of the U.S. atrocities in Korea until 1999, when the Associated Press broke the story of the U.S. Army’s deliberate shelling of Korean civilians hiding under a bridge near the South Korean hamlet known as Nogunri. The late Los Angeles Times editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad compared Nogunri to the mass slaughter of Vietnamese peasants at My Lai in Vietnam.

Paul Conrad compared Nogunri to My Lai. The U.S. orders to its soldiers in both Korea and Vietnam were aptly described by war reporter Nick Turse: “kill anything that moves.” (Los Angeles Times)

Yet amidst this horror, many Americans still refer to Korea as “the forgotten war.” Its origins and denouement are shrouded in a miasma of myths and double-speak about America’s manifest destiny propagated by the Pentagon, the CIA and the national security establishment in Washington. With these three books, it will be forgotten no more.

Click here to order The Korean War You Never Saw: Scorched Earth Bombing.

Tim Shorrock is a journalist and writer who grew up in Japan and South Korea in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War. His 3-volume collection of declassified U.S. government documents revealing the complicity of the United States in the South Korean Army’s suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising was published in Korean translation in 2024. He lives in Washington, D.C.