Quote:For historians such as David Reynolds, some one hundred thousand Koreans had already been killed in border fighting and uprisings in the south prior to the outbreak of formal hostilities. Indeed, analysts have gone as far as to hypothesise that the situation in 1950 degraded so rapidly precisely due to the ROK assault on the north Korean town of Haeju, something that prompted the DPRK to consider redoubled measures against an increasingly aggressive neighbour.

The US were also not about to let a golden opportunity slip by. After losing influence across much of East Asia with the defeat of the pro-US Kuomintang in ’49 (itself a deeply corrupt and authoritarian entity with a propensity for massacring its own people) Washington found itself looking for opportunities to regain lost ground. A reunified Korea under western influence seemed like an eminently desirable scenario. Korea could not be allowed to unite on its own terms, given US fears of left-wing success in national elections. The outbreak of hostilities on the peninsula were too good an opportunity to pass up.

The Americans moved fast. Refusing to wait for authorisation from an already fractured UN Security Council, the US committed itself to an extensive and protracted campaign, ultimately overrunning much of northern Korea before being driven back by the intervention of substantial Chinese forces. In the process, the US inflicted numerous war crimes against the general population, with the air force targeting civilian and military centres with well over six hundred thousand tons worth of bombs and thirty thousand tons of napalm.

By the end of the war, General MacArthur’s order to “destroy every means of communication and every installation, and factories and cities and villages” had been carried out. Much of the DPRK, alongside swathes of the ROK, were in ruins, with US aerial bombardment ensuring the vast majority of urban areas were decimated and their populations either dead or displaced.

Pyongyang was effectively levelled, having gone from being home to some half a million citizens in 1950 to having just two structures left intact three years later. In the south, Seoul changed hands a total of four times in just nine months, with its “liberation” ensuring only the capital building and a railway station were left intact. Over twenty percent of the northern population is believe to have been killed, many of them civilians blown to pieces or immolated in napalm during the incessant pulverisation of their homes. Well over a million southerners also lost their lives.

“We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea both,” claimed one young American officer, Curtis LeMay, “we killed off over a million Korean civilians and drove several million more from their homes”. This was no idle boast. In ’52, William Douglas, himself Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, visited the war-torn nation to see such sights first-hand, remarking “”I had seen the war-battered cities of Europe; but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea”.

Quote:Mapoui, IF I blindfold you :

could you tell the difference between a female and male HUMAN

by smelling dem arse ???