The Korean War You Never Saw (Part Two)
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By Tim Shorrock | July 31, 2026 | Originally published in Empire Blues by Tim Shorrock
This is the second 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 73rd 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.
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 essay for Leaflet Psychological Warfare.
Volume Two of The Korean War You Never Saw shows the importance of propaganda and psychological warfare to both sides in the Korean War, when the United States “scattered more than 2.5 billion leaflets and North Korea more than 300 million” in their attempts to demonize each other and convince enemy soldiers to abandon their posts. The book’s authors explain:
Psychological warfare is said to be propaganda and other information activity that a state or military plans so as to influence the thoughts, beliefs, and behavior of a “target” in order to achieve some objective. The U.S. Department of Defense’s 1950 propaganda documentary “Psychological Warfare: A Combat Weapon in Korea” defines it this way:
Psychological warfare is as old as the history of war. Today it has taken a new form as an essential element of combat. Its means are varied — printed type, the spoken word — but the aim is one: to defeat the enemy. Its target is not the enemy’s body but the enemy’s mind; by influencing the mind, it weakens the enemy.
In the film, Brigadier General Robert McClure, then the U.S. Army’s chief of psychological warfare, argued that “psychological warfare is a war of ideology — a more total, global war than anything we knew before. The enemy waged propaganda, subversion, and infiltration in the Cold War, and does the same in Korea where the hot war rages,” declaring that “we too wage this ideological struggle on the front lines of the Korean Peninsula.”
As he said, psychological warfare — especially leaflet warfare — promoting ideological, doctrinal, and systemic superiority was waged very fiercely during the war.
On the U.S./South Korean side, the book displays U.S. leaflets that described the war as “started by Soviet imperialism” in which even children know they must “fight the communist enemy.” One leaflet smeared Kim Il Sung’s land distribution policies that it knew would spark calls for similar efforts in the South. Another was elaborately drawn from a revolutionary scene in Tapgol Park in Seoul and suggested that the nationwide March 1st 1919 movement against Japanese colonization was in reality a symbol of anticommunism. U.S. Eighth Army propagandists inadvertently described the Korean “conflict” as a civil war with their “Mount Jiri Bulletin,” which targeted the many partisans fighting in the mountains for a unified Korea.
Many of the leaflets from the North Korean/Chinese side sought to convince South Koreans that the ROK government of Syngman Rhee was illegitimate because of its roots in the colonial period and its collusion with the U.S. occupiers of Japan hoping to revive Japanese militarism. One leaflet distributed by North Korean and Chinese forces ridicules the “post-liberation record” of ROK Army Chief of Staff Paik Sun-yup, who led the U.S.-ROK counterinsurgency campaign against partisan rebels fighting behind the lines in the Jiri Mountains. As many Koreans knew, Paik was a collaborator with the Japanese Army’s “Gando Special Force” that fought Korean independence fighters in Manchuria.
Some leaflets had more than the ring of truth to them. Take the cartoon at the top on John Foster Dulles.. On June 19, 1950, this Christian statesman had stood sternly at the 38th parallel and told the Rhee government that the U.S. would gladly assist the South in the battle against communism. He then flew to Tokyo to meet with the U.S. Secretary of Defense and senior Japanese security and industrial officials to discuss the upcoming peace treaty that would guarantee U.S. bases in Japan for perpetuity. While Dulles was in Tokyo, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel and nearly overran the entire peninsula. In turn, the Korean War and U.S.. military procurements fueled Japan’s postwar rise as an industrial power, selling vehicles and weapons, including napalm, to U.S. forces.
Korean War Comic Books
As I read through the U.S. and North Korean leaflets, I was struck by the similarities between U.S. propaganda dropped on Korea and U.S. comic books about the Korean War. They portrayed all communists as treacherous and cruel scoundrels who turned into “seething, screaming mobs” in U.S. prison camps and sneakily attacked U.S. and South Korean negotiators during the truce talks in Panmunjom. Others glorified killing in racist terms.
One story in “Fighting Air Force” in 1953 shows U.S. planes strafing a North Korean anti-aircraft battery. “First the bullets, gooks, then the rockets - and then you get the dessert: NAPALM!” “Ugh, we burn!” the “reds” cry out. “Why do our planes never come?”
One of the most absurd American comic stories was secretly funded by the U.S. State Department, according to cartoonist Leonard Rifas, the author of Korean War Comic Books and the Militarization of US Masculinity. These incredible strips depicted injured U.S. soldiers in South Korea finding refuge with an “English plantation owner” in South Korea who sends his “native boy” for help.
When “Red Korean Soldiers” show up, the Englishman bravely stands up to them and is cruelly machine-gunned to death. This strip was a blatant attempt to hide the fact that most farmland in the South after Korea’s liberation was owned by Japanese absentee landlords and Korean collaborators. That, of course, was one of the key reasons for the rural uprisings that took place in the ROK from 1946 on and marked the true beginning of the Korean War.
The images of North Korean leaders as “beasts” still persists today
Finally, it’s also clear how much the U.S. depiction of North Korea as a beastly creation of Stalin’s USSR has persisted in the United States “long after the war stopped,” as the authors state, and “even into the 1980s.” This cover of Newsweek, printed just after the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994, calls North Korea “the headless beast,” just like the U.S. leaflets from the Korean War. Even today, the U.S. media, both conservative and liberal, depict Kim Jong Un the same way. No wonder the Korean War has never ended.
Order and download The Korean War You Never Saw: Leaflet Psychological Warfare on Amazon Kindle here.
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.
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