Original subtitles

[Newscaster] North Korea has achieved its goal

of becoming a rocket power...

[Newscaster] North Korea says it now can strike

anywhere in the U.S. including Washington D.C.

[Cumings] North Korea today is armed with nuclear weapons and

intercontinental ballistic missiles and anybody who

underestimates them does so as their own peril.

[President Trump] Rocket Man should have been handled

a long time ago...

[Terry] North Koreans truly feel that nuclear weapons is

the only way to guarantee their survival.

[Jager] For North Korea, it's still about an

anti-imperialist struggle against the United States.

which the North Koreans take back to the Korean War.

[Narrator] The Korean War was one of the bloodiest chapters

in Korean history.

It was a civil war that nearly ignited World War Three.

[President Truman] We are united in detesting

communist slavery.

[Narrator] A war that took the lives of tens of thousands

of American GIs and millions of Koreans.

[Hanley] What we did in North Korea has never

really been acknowledged.

The Korean War set the template for Vietnam.

[Cumings] The Korean War was one of the most vicious,

violent, nauseating wars of the 20th century.

[Narrator] It was a war many Americans don't remember and

Koreans can never forget.

[Cha] The United States dropped more ordinance on North Korea

in that three year war than we dropped during the

entire Second World War.

For North Koreans and for the state ideology of North Korea,

the Korean War is not a memory.

It's still very much alive.

[Terry] There's no way to understand what's going

on today, without understanding of the Korean War.

How can you understand this Korean conflict that

we are having, without understanding

of the origin of that conflict.

[Newscaster] Good evening from the White House in Washington.

Ladies and gentlemen,

the President of the United States.

[President Truman] The world will note that the first

atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base...

[Newscaster] Nagasaki. Target for the second atomic bomb.

Just three days after Hiroshima.

[Newscaster] London newspapers this morning are speculating

that a new surrender ultimatum to Japan may be likely soon.

♪

[Narrator] With the swift conclusion of World War Two

after President Truman dropped two atomic bombs on

the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

American planners turned their attention to Korea,

where the US military would oversee the orderly

surrender of Japanese forces.

With Soviet troops already deployed in northern Korea and

marching southward the US military needed to act quickly.

[Stueck] The United States was much further away,

its troops were much further away than were Soviet troops.

What that meant was suddenly the Americans

had to try and establish some agreements with Stalin,

the leader in the Soviet Union on Korea.

The Americans proposed that the United States and

the Soviet Union establish zones.

[Narrator] On the sweltering night of August 10th, 1945

two young army officers, on loan to the state department,

were tasked with quickly finding a dividing line,

before the Soviets managed to occupy the entire country.

Armed only with a national geographic map of Asia

colonels Rusk and Bonesteel, neither one experts on Korea,

zeroed in on the peninsula.

[Terry] They had 30 minutes to really divide up the country,

and they looked at the wall, and there was a map of the

Korean peninsula, and they said,

"Well, why don't we just kind of divide it here,

on this 38th parallel?"

[Stueck] The 38th parallel is just north of Seoul and

they wanted the national capital to be in the American zone,

and with very little discussion,

that decision goes up to Truman and is made in

a proposal to Stalin.

[Narrator] The 38th parallel was simply a line on a map.

It followed no physical features.

It divided farms and whole villages.

Severed 300 roads, and cut across six railways.

But the Soviets accepted it.

Korea had been cut in two without a word of input from

a single Korean.

Two Koreas created solely to oppose each other.

[Terry] Koreans were one people for thousands of years,

and the Koreans didn't have a lot of choice.

You know, it's not even a big country.

It was just divided, and that took all of 30 minutes,

it was a 30-minute decision.

[Brands] And so, the 38th parallel becomes this

temporary dividing line between

northern and southern Korea.

But the temporary dividing line congeals into,

effectively, a permanent dividing line when the

Soviet Union and the United States fall out.

The cold war intervened and American troops didn't go home.

[Narrator] With the end of World War II,

the United States and the Soviet Union emerged

as superpowers.

By 1946, the twin godheads of democracy and communism

collided to redraw the map of the world

along ideological lines.

In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin tightened his

hold on power and without pause continued to extend communist

influence throughout Europe.

US President Truman, sworn in after the death of

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was both unpopular and untested

yet determined to advance America's post war interests,

chief among them the containment of communism.

[Brands] The policy of the Truman administration was that the

United States needed to focus on containing the Soviet Union,

keeping Soviet power and Soviet ideology,

communism, from spreading.

It wasn't simply the tanks and troops of the Soviet Union,

it was this ideology.

It was the belief system of communism.

[Narrator] For Stalin and Truman the first rounds of

the Cold War would be fought in Europe.

And neither man was particularly interested in

events on the faraway Korean peninsula.

[Cha] For us strategic planners Korea really

didn't figure much in the picture at all.

To the extent that we cared about Asia,

us strategic planners believed that the only power

in Asia would continue to be Japan.

[Narrator] The Japanese defeat in WWII ended their occupation

of Korea, a history marred by the brutal subjugation

of the Korean people.

[Cumings] Japan succeeded in colonizing Korea in 1910,

that led to terrible hardships for millions of Koreans,

and then the Japanese used Koreans as mobile capital and

labor throughout the empire.

You have the mobilization of 200,000 Korean soldiers

into the Japanese army,

most of them drafted, as many as 100 to 200,000

women were dragooned into serving dozens of

Japanese soldiers every day as sex slaves.

[Hanley] So when they were liberated in '45,

the Koreans thought this was the beginning of a bright,

bright future for them, and that this division would

end very quickly.

[Narrator] Park Kyung Soon was just nine years old when she

heard over the radio that the Japanese had surrendered.

[Stueck] There was celebration, relief that this period of

Japanese rule was over.

But there was a power vacuum that opened up.

Dependent on the evolving relationship between the

Soviets and the Americans, and as it turned out the Soviets

and the Americans couldn't reach an agreement on how

to unify the Korean peninsula.

[Narrator] To fill this power vacuum the Soviets

and Americans backed their own leadership.

To preside over South Korea the Americans chose Syngman Rhee,

an English-speaking, Princeton-educated Christian

who had been lobbying the American government

for the job throughout the war.

[Cumings] Syngman Rhee haunted the halls of the

State Department in Washington, hoping to be taken as the

odds-on titular leader of postwar Korea.

He had no faction in Korea.

He had no base in Korea, because he had been out of

the country for 40 or 50 years, but he had a certain charisma.

He had a great smile.

Americans tended to think he was a kindly,

old gentleman, Uncle Syngman.

[Narrator] But Rhee's kindly manner belied an unyielding

thirst for power and desire to unify the

two Koreas at any cost.

By 1948, Rhee was elected president.

To consolidate his authority over the South,

Rhee carried out a sustained nationalist campaign to snuff

out political dissent, killing Communist guerrilla

groups by the tens of thousands.

[Millett] Rhee was as an authoritarian,

semi-thug with great contacts.

He wasn't a nice man, but Americans,

certainly of this period, tended to believe if somebody

could speak English and had been educated in the

United States, oh well that means they've absorbed

all kinds of democratic values.

Well, that doesn't happen to be the case.

[Brands] Syngman Rhee just happened to be,

as Franklin Roosevelt would've said,

our S.O.B. rather than theirs.

[Narrator] In North Korea, the Soviets hand-picked

Kim Il-sung, a little known Korean ex-patriot who

had been radicalized by the Japanese occupation.

[Cha] Kim Il-sung was really unknown.

But then when the Japanese took control of the Korean

peninsula during the occupation in the first half

of the 20th century, Kim Il-sung transformed.

He became known as a gorilla fighter,

fighting against the Japanese, and China and from that point

on had basically a price on his head as a anti-Japan

conspirator by the colonial government.

He eventually moved to the Soviet Union where he learned

Russian and became close to a number of

key Russian generals.

[Narrator] By 1948, Kim had transformed himself

into a fiery, committed Korean nationalist.

[Narrator] Kim quickly solidified his power and

amassed a formidable army.

By 1949, Kim had burnished his image as supreme leader

by embellishing his history as a fearsome guerilla fighter

who single-handedly defeated the Japanese.

[Lankov] Idea was "Our country has suffered for

generations because we had no great leader,

and then great leader emerged.

He liberated us from the Japanese occupation."

It was patently untrue, because Kim Il-sung,

during the war with Japan, the decisive stage,

was far away from the front line in a small Soviet

military base.

[Cumings] Kim Il-sung was one of the shrewdest politicians

of his era, but a particularly brutal and ruthless

person who knew how to gain power and hold onto it.

[Millett] There are striking similarities between Rhee

and Kim Il-sung.

Both are the same types of expat nationalist leaders,

who have big plans with themselves at the center.

Both of them had a strong vision of a unified Korea,

and both of them believed that their fundamental power came

from their ability to manipulate outside sponsors,

in Rhee's case, the United States,

and in Kim Il-sung's case, the Soviet Union.

[Narrator] In 1949, after Mao Zedong's Communist victory

over the American-backed nationalists in China,

Kim Il-sung was emboldened.

The time was right to execute his plan to unify

Korea in his mold.

That March, Kim had traveled to Moscow to lobby Stalin to

back an invasion of the South,

only to be rebuffed by the Soviet leader,

who believed the American presence there

made a war too risky.

But then, only months later, in January 1950,

Stalin suddenly had a change of heart.

[Stueck] Now, what happened in between say

September of 1949 and the end of January 1950?

Dean Acheson, who was the American Secretary of State,

in January of 1950, January 12,

made a major speech to the National Press Club

in Washington D.C., and in the speech,

he left South Korea out of the American defense perimeter

in the Pacific, and Stalin, obviously noticed that.

[Jager] Stalin now believes that the Americans will not

get involved in Korea.

He's absolutely convinced.

So he says "Okay, I'll give you my blessing but

you have to ask Mao for the final decision."

He says something like "If you shall get kicked in the

teeth I shall not lift a finger.

Mao will have to do all the help."

[Lankov] Stalin's position was something like,

"Well, comrades, you say that you will win soon,

it's your idea, and we will provide you with ammunition

and money and everything, but it will be your responsibility.

If something gets really bad, don't count on our support."

[Narrator] In May of 1950,

Kim traveled to China to meet with Mao.

[Cummings] Mao is one of the most experienced leaders

in the word, with his own gigantic army that

had just proceeded to clear the mainland of nationalist

forces and who had many allies who had fought with Kim Il-sung

and other guerillas throughout the 1930s.

I think Kim Il-sung had good reason to believe that he

would have plenty of comrades in China that would help him.

Kim was masterful at maneuvering between Stalin

and Mao and then ended up getting support

from both of them.

[Narrator] By the summer of 1950,

Kim Il-sung was prepared for an invasion of the South,

assuring Mao that he would be greeted as a liberator,

and that he would take the peninsula in a matter of days.

[Newscaster] News that communist troops have invaded

southern Korea...

[Newscaster] Invading their fellow countrymen to the South,

to bring another international crisis to the

already long-suffering world.

[Narrator] At 4 am on the morning of June 25th, 1950,

the border separating North and South Korea erupted with

the repeated crash of artillery.

With hundreds of Soviet-made T-34 tanks,

North Korean troops, part of the Korean People's Army,

raced across the 38th parallel.

Kim's invasion of the South had begun.

[Cumings] Basically the South Korean army either couldn't

fight or didn't fight or ran away.

The North Koreans were in Seoul in three days.

[Narrator] Some South Korean men who did not escape were

forced into hiding, rather than face conscription into

the Communist army, others were put on trial in town

squares, in what were known as people's courts,

where men were publicly shamed for not pledging

allegiance to the party.

Beatings, kidnapping and executions were routine.

[Hanley] The South Koreans just couldn't stop them,

and they just fell apart.

The reaction in Washington was one of shock.

[President Truman] Gentlemen, we face a serious situation.

We hope we face it in the cause of peace.

[Narrator] By now, news of the invasion had reached

the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers,

stationed in Japan.

Douglas MacArthur was a genuine American war hero,

one of the nation's most famous living generals,

whose face had graced the cover of Time magazine

no fewer than six times.

[Brands] Douglas MacArthur was the scion of a military family.

His father had fought in the Civil War and

won the Medal of Honor.

Douglas MacArthur was a brilliant student at West Point,

he was a gallant soldier in World War I,

he won all of the medals any one of his generation could win.

He was the supreme commander of Allied forces in

the southwestern Pacific during World War II.

He was clearly brave.

He was brilliant.

He was also quite egotistical, and he tended to believe that

the world revolved around him.

And MacArthur convinced himself that he understood

what he called, the Oriental mind,

that he understood how Asians thought about the world.

[Cummings] MacArthur was a very proud, self-confident,

vainglorious individual who had a complete belief in his

own truths, whether they were based on fact or not.

He considered himself a man of destiny,

and he had an ego the size of China,

but he was a master on the battlefield.

[Narrator] From his perch in Tokyo,

MacArthur famously assured Washington that he could

handle the North Koreans with one arm tied behind his back.

But after World War Two the Truman administration was

intent on shrinking the defense budget and only a

small advisory team was left behind in Korea.

By June of 1950 most branches of the military were

undermanned and ill-equipped.

[Brands] After World War II, America built down its military

not expecting that it would have to be used again,

at least nothing on that scale.

So at the time of the outbreak of the Korean War the American

military was a shadow of what it had been in World War II.

[Steuk] As long as we had a monopoly of nuclear weapons,

we could relax a little bit in terms of the manpower we had

in the army, and that's what happened really from 1945

to 1949, there was a continued reduction in the

size of the US army.

[Carey] We had to very quickly put together two regiments.

They took half of my platoon and filled me

up with reserves.

Many of whom had never even been to boot camp.

[Garza] I had just turned 17.

And I was sent to camp Drake, in Japan there,

outside of Tokyo and all we'd done was processed and

trained to make an amphibious landing and head for Korea.

[Newscaster] On them, world peace depends...

They will not fail.

They never have.

[Stueck] The Americans were pretty confident.

You could even argue they maybe were a little bit cocky.

Their first encounter was with North Korean troops that

had Soviet T34 tanks,

and the American forces had no weapons.

The bazookas they had would not penetrate the armor

of a T34 tank.

[Hanley] And so when they entered into battle,

at first, they ran.

They saw their comrades being killed around them.

And it gradually got a name.

It was called "bugging out."

They would "bug out."

[Garza] When we were still in Camp Drake in Japan,

we were told at that time that it was going to be

an easy war to finish, you know.

We were told that the North Koreans,

"slant eyes" they couldn't see to the right

or the left flank.

They could only see to the front.

That you could actually sneak in behind the North Koreans

and get them, you know, but we found out that,

that wasn't true, you know.

Them suckers had eyes in the back and also in the front.

All we could do was just run back as fast as we could

and they were right after us, you know.

[McCarthy] I'm getting very, very weary of sitting here and

acting as though we're playing some little game.

We've got to clean up, those who were responsible,

Mr. Chairman, covering up communists and traitors,

not dead ones but live ones...

[Narrator] Half a world away from the frontlines of Korea,

the United States was in the throes of a panic about

the spread of communism within American society.

[McCarthy] Even if there were only one communist in

the state department, that would still be one

communist too many.

[Narrator] President Truman's policy of containing communism

was being pushed to its limits around the world.

[President Truman] World conquest by Soviet Russia

endangers our liberty, and endangers the kind of world

in which the free spirit of men can survive.

[Narrator] By now the Soviet Union had an atomic bomb,

was tightening its grip on Eastern Europe,

and in Asia had forged a powerful alliance

with Mao's China.

At home, Truman stood accused by Republicans of losing China

to an unchristian ideology.

[Brands] It wasn't a good thing that China went communist.

This was a dire threat to the United States.

And so, when communist forces of North Korea invaded South

Korea Truman figured, I need to do something about this.

If politically, the Truman administration,

loses South Korea it's going to appear, first of all,

"to my domestic critics that I am a terrible president,"

and there's the whole question of American credibility.

[Stueck] Our potential allies like in Europe,

which was our top priority, would say, well, in the end,

the Americans can't be depended upon.

[President Truman] Korea is a small country thousands of

miles away, but what is happening there is important

to every American.

[Stueck] It was really inevitable that the Americans

were going to do whatever they could to stop

the North Koreans.

[President Truman] We are united in detesting

communist slavery.

We know that the cost of freedom is high,

but we are determined to preserve our freedom

no matter what the cost.

[Brands] The Korean War came to America within the

decade of World War II.

And what Americans most wanted after World War II was to come

home and to have families and to get about the business

of peacetime affairs.

And then just five years later the world

needs re-saving again.

Harry Truman recognized that if a lot of Americans started

getting killed in Korea the war could turn

unpopular very quickly.

To share the burden would make the war in Korea

politically more acceptable.

[Narrator] In a show of presidential resolve,

Truman bypassed Congress while also appealing directly

to the newly-formed United Nations.

[President Truman] The armed invasion of the

Republic of Korea continues.

This is, in fact, an attack on the United Nations itself.

[Narrator] And on June 27, the Security Council passed

a resolution authorizing military intervention.

By June 30, Truman had approved the use of

American troops, the first time an American president

had unilaterally committed the country to war.

For a generation of young men who never thought they'd

see another war, the news came as shock.

[Odell] I didn't know where Korea was until I heard

that we was having a war with North Korea.

[Petrey] I lied.

I was 16 when I went in, but the second World War had just

finished and I had no idea that I would ever

be involved in a war.

[Kinard] When the war started in June of 1950,

early one morning I received a telephone call saying,

"Lieutenant Kinard, you're now in the army."

I said, "What's this?"

Because I didn't really know where Korea was until I looked

at the map and figured out the,

it was far from my home at that time,

I wondered if I would ever really go there.

[Brands] The term of art at the time was a "Police Action."

There is someone who has disturbed the peace,

you call out the police, and the police go to it.

And so this term "Police action" seemed to be a nice

dodge around why Truman wasn't asking Congress for

a declaration of war.

It's not really a war.

It's just this "Police action."

[Odell] You know, we was Harry's police force.

Thought it was kind of funny.

Here we are fighting a war and he's calling it a

"police action."

[Narrator] By July 1950, some 50,000 US troops,

followed by thousands more from Great Britain, Australia,

Thailand and 12 other nations, headed toward Korea.

After only a month of war, the North was streaming down

the peninsula at lightning speed,

gaining new ground by the day.

Kim Il-sung's wager that he would take the South in matter

of days seemed to be coming true.

[Cumings] All up and down the line,

people couldn't quite figure out the North Koreans.

John Foster Dulles, who was Truman's roving ambassador

for East Asia policy, said he can't figure out what keeps

these masses of troops come shrieking on,

or maybe they're on drugs, or maybe the Soviets have found

some way to program these people,

and in fact they were fighting and dying for their homeland,

for the unification of their homeland.

[Jager] What you have really in this situation is this

brutal civil war overlaid with an international war

between two ideological foes of the Cold War,

the Soviet Union and the United States.

[Narrator] To try to slow the North Korean onslaught,

MacArthur sent the the US Army's 7th Cavalry

to intercept them near the city of Taejon but

the regiment ran into resistance.

[Garza] We could see the North Koreans,

they were coming in waves.

So by the time we would kill the first two waves,

we were fighting with bayonets because we were

out of ammunition.

[Cumings] The North Koreans, by mid-July,

had a pincer down the east coast from the north and

then coming around from the southwest and

along the southern coast.

And if the Marines had not landed around that time

and stiffened the lines,

the war would've been lost.

[Stueck] They formed what we call the Pusan Perimeter.

Which is considered basically the last good spot across

the peninsula to establish a defensive position.

[Narrator] Caught in the crossfire between advancing

North Korean troops and UN forces were hundreds of

thousands of Korean refugees who now filled

the roads between Seoul and Pusan.

[Cha] My father and my grandparents had to walk

the distance from Seoul to Pusan.

That's really walking the distance

from Washington D.C. to New York.

[Terry] When the war broke out,

my grandparents talked about how they ran to Pusan Perimeter,

the family split up.

My grandmother went with my aunts,

and my grandfather went with the boys,

my uncle and my father, and he lost, actually,

one of my uncles during the move to Pusan.

[Narrator] For U.N. troops, already outmanned and

overwhelmed by the surging North Korean army,

the refugee crisis presented yet another challenge.

North Korean soldiers hiding amongst peasants in

order to get behind enemy lines.

[Cha] There were only a handful of main roads along which you

could travel with tanks or with other sorts of equipment.

On those very same roads you had civilians that

were trying to evacuate.

American troops did not know who was the enemy

and who was the ally.

[Jager] There was always this fear about refugees.

That created a great deal of moral dilemma

among American soldiers.

You see a bunch of refugees.

You think that North Koreans are hiding among them,

do you shoot against them or not?

[Narrator] In some instances, U.S. forces did shoot and

refugees were sacrificed in the panic.

[Narrator] Yang Hye Suk was 13 in July of 1950 when war

came to Imgye-ri, a tiny farm town 100 miles

south of Seoul.

[Hanley] 1st Cavalry Division troops had forced the people

of these two villages called Joo Gok Ri and Im Gae Ri,

to evacuate and get on the main road south.

[Narrator] Chung Koo-do's family was from the same area

as Yang, and his parents and siblings were among the

hundreds of refugees who were led by U.S. troops

to a place called No Gun Ri.

As refugees gathered on nearby train tracks,

eyewitnesses remember American planes beginning to circle

and then opening fire.

[Narrator] Refugees ran for cover under a railroad

overpass where for three days and three nights they say

they were fired upon by the 7th Cavalry.

Fearful North Korean soldiers were among them.

Yang Hye Suk, surrounded by casualties was hiding under

her mother's hemp skirt when she heard her uncle

cry out in pain.

[Hanley] Every war is horrible.

But the Korean War, among American wars,

was the war that had the greatest proportion

of civilian casualties.

[Cumings] It was a very dirty war,

and that also demoralized American soldiers.

They didn't quite know what they were fighting for,

and they were forced to do things that they didn't

do in World War II.

[Narrator] For U.N. troops it was becoming increasingly clear

by the day that they were mired in a bloody conflict

unbound by modern rules of engagement.

Atrocities could be found on all sides of the fight.

[Hanley] Early in August there was a massacre of

captured American troops by the North Koreans,

as the North Koreans left a hilltop, Hill 303.

They, they simply bound and then shot in the back of the head

about 30 American prisoners.

Photos of this were run in the Stars and Stripes newspaper,

which was getting to the troops in Korea,

and some of them cut the photo out and carried it

in the inside of their helmets.

So once something like that happens,

that sort of frees some men at least to do the same thing

to the enemy.

[Garza] We would capture 15, 20 enemy and supply one or

two men to escort this POWs back to the rear.

I says, "If they try to get away from you,

open up with your machine guns and your rifles.

Don't let them get away."

And they would be gone for 10 or 15 minutes when

we would hear the machine gun going off.

[Narrator] While casualties continued to mount through the

summer of 1950, the North Korean army maintained

their advantage.

[Newscaster] Already America has suffered 500 casualties.

Five short years after a global war,

Americans again pay in blood...

[Cumings] All the high American officers had been heroes

of World War II, whether it's General MacArthur or

Curtis LeMay or Matthew Ridgway.

These were people who were famous in the battles that

defeated the Nazis and the Japanese...

[Newscaster] The tide of battle still favors the aggressors.

The United Nations' forces in Korea are forced to improvise

their defense...

[Cumings] And here it is 1950, only five years later,

and they're getting their butt whipped by

rough peasant armies.

[Narrator] United Nations commander General MacArthur

was used to fighting with his back against the ropes.

From his headquarters in Japan,

he was quietly putting together a plan for a bold

counter attack that he believed could break

the North Korean army.

He hoped to utilize the element of surprise by

attacking the communist forces from behind,

landing at the port of Inchon and cutting off supply lines.

With extreme tides and a shallow shoreline,

the port of Inchon was a highly risky spot

for an invasion, precisely the reason MacArthur thought

it would work.

[Jager] Nobody thought it was practical.

Everybody was against it, because it was so impractical.

The timeframe for landing those amphibious vehicles was

very limited to a few hours but MacArthur really believed

that, because of its impracticality the North

Koreans wouldn't defend.

[Brands] The Joint Chiefs of Staff thought that this

was not a particularly good idea,

but they were in an odd position.

MacArthur was essentially politically untouchable,

and there was nobody in the military chain of command

who would tell MacArthur "no."

[Millett] I think that so many people said you can't do this,

the more you do that to somebody like MacArthur,

it's going to increase their resistance to change.

The more you tell them not to do something,

the more likely it is you're going to get it.

[inaudible radio chatter]

[Edwards] When we got on the ship,

we didn't know where we were going.

Out in the ocean, we were told we were going

to Inchon to make a landing.

I don't think I knew enough to be scared.

[Carey] It had a 26-foot tide, and you had to go in at high

tide, and it takes a lot of time to get a division ashore,

total division.

So I was pretty, I was nervous, naturally.

[Narrator] On September 15th, 70,000 US troops

stood at anchor off the Korean coast,

awaiting high tide and MacArthur's order to attack.

Nobody knew what was in store for them once they

made it to shore.

[Millet] One admiral said if you drew up all the things

that made amphibious operations difficult,

Inchon had them all.

The tides are bad, the harbor's all mud.

Who knew how many guns were sitting in it.

[Narrator] Lt. Richard Carey was leading a platoon

of Marines that day,

when at 5pm MacArthur gave his unit the order to attack.

[Carey] We only had a couple hours before it was dark.

The only place we could go in was into an inlet.

And when we got into the inlet it was surrounded

by barbed wire.

I started cutting the wire.

A sniper shot off my radio, was strapped on my shoulder.

And the guy on the other side of me took one

right between the eye.

[Edwards] We were getting shot at when we hit the beach,

but I don't think they expected us.

[Narrator] Despite initial resistance,

as an unrelenting waves of troops landed onshore,

the advantage quickly shifted.

By evening, U.N. forces had secured the beach and

headed east to cut off North Korean supply lines.

Remarkably, MacArthur had caught the North Koreans

by surprise.

His gamble had paid off.

[Brands] It was such a daring strike and such a rapid strike

that it changed the momentum in the war entirely.

The United States and the South Koreans were

losing badly until then.

All of a sudden they were winning!

[Jager] I mean, it was such a risky operation,

and the fact that he brought it off without any problem.

MacArthur was viewed as a kind of god.

[Narrator] In a single stroke, MacArthur had cemented his

reputation for military genius.

The tide of the war had shifted,

as North Korean troops scrambled back toward

the 38th parallel.

In just two weeks, Seoul was back in the hands of

the United Nations and President Rhee was restored

to the capitol building.

MacArthur's forces were now sitting at the 38th parallel,

with fresh troops, superior airpower, and momentum.

[Newscaster] The United Nations man of the hour,

General MacArthur, with the capture of Seoul will have the

Communist aggressors between a crushing millstone.

[Newscaster] MacArthur had planned one daring master

stroke and turned the whole tide of battle.

[Stueck] There's a drastic alteration of

the military situation.

Suddenly, the Americans and South Koreans are on the

verge of going across the 38th parallel and into the north,

and obviously, military leaders want to take advantage

of the immediate situation.

[Narrator] With the course of the war changing

so dramatically, General MacArthur saw an opening

to widen the conflict into North Korea.

It would allow him to unite the peninsula in the name

of democracy, and to issue a decisive blow against

communism in Asia.

The general's aggressive worldview was always at odds

with President Truman's ideas of containment,

and of a limited war.

But with MacArthur's success at Inchon,

Truman suddenly saw an opportunity.

[Brands] MacArthur says give me just a little bit more time

and I can end the war.

I can capture or destroy all the North Korean forces.

Truman, who just weeks before had worried about the

fact that he was going to be charged with losing more

ground to the Communists, thought "I can do something

that no president before me has ever done.

I can take ground back from the Communists."

[Narrator] On October 7th 1950,

MacArthur's troops stormed across the border.

Victories came quickly as UN forces pursued the remnants

of the North Korean army and continued to pound

them from the sky.

[Cumings] People were lighting cigars all over Washington

and Seoul when American troops were marching up

the peninsula in October 1950.

MacArthur arrived in Pyongyang,

the capital of North Korea, he gets off his plane,

and he says "Where's Kim Buck too?

Isn't he here to greet me?"

Referring, of course, to Kim Il-sung.

[Narrator] Only two months after U.N. troops had faced

annihilation at Pusan, their flag flew above Kim's

capital city, Pyongyang.

[Edwards] We had already taken Pyongyang.

We didn't have too much resistance from

the Koreans at all.

[Narrator] A devastating blow against communism

seemed within reach.

MacArthur's forces moved with lightning speed.

Each day, they pressed closer to the Yalu River,

North Korea's border with China.

[Stueck] MacArthur argues that really he needs American

forces to go all the way to the Yalu in order to clean up

the situation and do it quickly,

and the administration back in Washington,

faced with strong Republican attacks on the Democratic

administration being weak on Asia.

The Truman administration does not say no to MacArthur.

[Narrator] Saying no to MacArthur was becoming

increasingly difficult for Truman an unpopular president,

who was seen at home as badly mismanaging the war in Korea.

But needing assurances from his general on the future

course of the war, Truman requested a meeting.

Since MacArthur would not travel more than a half-day

from Tokyo, Truman flew to Wake Island in the Pacific,

where he was greeted by his general not with

a traditional salute but with a civilian handshake.

[Brands] MacArthur had been overstating his authority

for many months, he would hold news conferences,

and he would speak very often as the United Nations

commander and not report directly to the

president of the United States.

So Truman flies all the way out to Wake Island

in the Pacific hoping on the basis of MacArthur's

repeated assurances, the war is nearly over and

Korea will be liberated.

And he puts the question to MacArthur,

if American troops get close to the border will the

Chinese enter the war, and MacArthur says they won't

dare and if they do I will annihilate them.

[Carey] We were pumped up.

MacArthur put it out, he said, "We're going as far as

the Yalu, probably you're going right into China."

So, we were, we were pretty enthusiastic.

We said, "This is going to be the end of it.

We'll win the war right here."

[Brands] MacArthur is assuring them that the

war is nearly over.

He kept saying that American troops will be

home by Christmas, that the war is wrapping up.

When American troops had their Thanksgiving dinner

and they're thinking,

"Christmas, that's only a month away.

We're all going to get to go home."

[Narrator] A final victory, and an end to the war,

was in sight.

In late November, 1950, 30,000 United Nations troops

paused their advance and sat down in the frozen hills

and valleys that surrounded the Chosin Reservoir.

There they enjoyed a hot Thanksgiving dinner courtesy

of the U.S. government.

[Odell] We was dug in in the hills up there.

Headquarters had set up cooks and

we had our Thanksgiving dinner.

They didn't have serving trays at the time

I got through there, and I just went ahead

and took my helmet liner out of the helmet and used my helmet,

and I had my Thanksgiving dinner in 1950 in a helmet.

And then when we moved out of where we was dug in after

Thanksgiving, we went on up through Yudam-II.

That's when all hell broke loose.

[Narrator] The U.N. forces had been caught in a massive trap,

sprung by the Chinese.

MacArthur it seemed had miscalculated.

Mao's army had entered the war.

Attacking at night to retain the element of surprise and

to avoid aerial bombardment, hundreds of thousands of

Chinese troops stormed the frontline in an overwhelming

display of force.

[Brands] Over 200,000 Chinese managed to infiltrate across

the Yalu River.

When the Americans are taken by surprise they find that

they're basically surrounded, and instead of fighting for

victory they're fighting for their lives.

[Odell] We could hear the bugles sounding and all the

screaming and what have you,

and the Chinese coming at you in hordes.

We was outnumbered probably 5 to 1, 10 to 1,

something like that.

And their sole purpose was to annihilate the

1st Marine Division.

[Carey] When they came, they came in waves.

A wave, a wave, a wave, a wave.

The platoon sergeant and I were in a foxhole together.

So, he took the grenades out all night, handed them to me,

I counted "one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two"

and threw them.

I threw three cartons of grenades that night.

That night was bitterly cold.

God, it was cold.

It was below 50 below zero.

[Brands] Many of these soldiers,

they pretty much consigned themselves

to die one way or the other.

They were going to get killed by a Chinese bullet

or a mortar round or they were going to freeze,

and it was merely a matter of how long can we put this off.

[Narrator] Homer Garza and the Army's 7th Cav were west

of Chosin battling two enemies, the Chinese and the cold.

[Garza] Our fingers would crack as you tried to close your

hand with it being so damn cold and we got the old

blanket sleeping bags and we cut strips of the blankets

and wrap it around our feet to try to keep our

feet from freezing,

but it was so cold that it wouldn't take more

than four or five minutes after a guy was killed that he

was froze solid, if we were staying in the same hill for

a while, we would get the dead Chinese and

the dead Koreans and stand them up against

the trees frozen solid.

Yeah.

[Odell] When you saw one of those Marine's

bodies frozen stiff, that was sad.

Arms sticking out, legs sticking out.

You really knew you was at war then.

[Carey] It's hard to describe it truly is.

You had to be careful how you picked them up.

If you pick them up by an the arm, for example,

you can break the arm off.

[Narrator] There was no option but to retreat.

Over ten days, U.N. troops fought their way out of

the reservoir, suffering 18,000 casualties along the way.

[Brands] The whole ethos of the American approach to

war was advance, attack, and when the soldiers saw

that we can't attack.

In fact, it's going to be everything we can do simply

to escape, to flee and get out of this alive,

it was exceedingly disorienting.

These were soldiers, many of them whom were in

their first combat.

They hadn't seen anything like this.

They had never really confronted the basic questions

of life and death.

[Odell] They told us to straighten up as we was coming

in to Hagaru-ri, we come in their like real Marines,

we was singin' the Marine Corps Hymn,

all gong ho, you know?

[Narrator] The tide of the war had changed yet again.

U.N. troops were forced back below the 38th parallel,

and within weeks, Seoul had fallen to the combined

North Korean and Chinese forces.

Bloody fighting in and around Seoul would see the capitol

change sides four times.

With an American public growing restless with bad news

from the frontlines and body counts of American servicemen

increasing everyday, Truman was forced to confront

a war that seemed unwinnable with conventional forces.

[Brands] No one seriously talked about the use of

atomic weapons in Korea until the end of November,

beginning of December, 1950, when American forces were

fleeing for their lives upon the Chinese entry into

the war, then it certainly occurred to members of

the public to ask, well, "How can we lose

to North Korea, how can we lose to China when we've

got the bomb and they don't?"

[Narrator] In the press, General MacArthur made clear

his belief in expanding the conflict into China.

And in the war room, he was making plans for

the use of the atomic bomb.

[Cumings] MacArthur wanted an unlimited war.

He wanted to use 24 atomic bombs.

In December 1950, he said, I want 24 atomic bombs to

establish a radiation cordon along the Yalu River,

you know, using cobalt, which has a half-life of 90 years,

and the two places will be separated, you know,

for a long time, generations to come.

[Hanley] In November of '50, Truman was asked about the

use of atomic weapons, and he said

"Yes, this would have to be considered."

That was the first mention by him.

[Brands] Then the next question is, well,

who is going to determine whether the bomb

will be used or not?

Truman said, without thinking very clearly,

"The decision will be made by the commander in the field."

Well, everybody realized the commander in the field

is Douglas MacArthur.

Harry Truman has just announced this policy that

the atom bomb is available for use in Korea and

that Douglas MacArthur is going to make the decision.

Oh, boy, what have we got ourselves in for?

[Newscaster] The president has stated that the use of

the atomic bomb is being considered to halt

the communist onrush...

It may well precipitate World War III...

[Narrator] News of Truman's consideration of using the

atomic bomb set America's allies around

the world on edge.

[Brands] Clement Attlee is the British prime minister and

he is in a meeting of parliament and he hears this

stir in the back and kind of wonders what's going on

and somebody passes him a note explaining that the president

of the United States has threatened the use of

the atom bomb in Korea.

[Newscaster] A new war brought prime minister Attlee

to Washington for talks with president Truman...

[Stueck] The prime minister of Great Britain raced across

the Atlantic to try and bring some sanity back

into the situation.

[Narrator] At home, Truman's confusing remarks

only deepened the public's skepticism of his abilities

as commander in chief.

And General MacArthur's public campaign for the expansion

of the war into China increasingly put the

two men at odds.

[Cumings] MacArthur wanted a rollback.

He wanted to keep on going into China and try

to settle the hash of the Chinese revolution.

That was his great error in Truman's eyes.

Truman wanted a limited rollback.

He wanted to roll North Korean communists back and

unify the peninsula.

[Jager] MacArthur feels like this is the place where

we're going to have to have this great battle against

communism, even to the extent that he's willing

to risk World War III.

[Brands] Truman said to MacArthur "If this war gets

any bigger, we don't have the resources,

we don't have the military establishment to do that.

General MacArthur, your job is to buy time."

Well that cut against everything MacArthur.

No, no, in war there is no substitute for victory.

We fight to win.

Not simply to hold ground.

[Jager] Truman learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that

no true victory in that sense is possible anymore and

so he really wanted to limit the war.

MacArthur couldn't deal with that defeat.

Truman had given him a directive on December 5th not

to say anything publicly against the policy of the

Truman administration, and MacArthur consistently

defied that directive.

[Narrator] On April 11th 1951,

President Truman addressed the nation.

[President Truman] I have considered it essential to

relieve General MacArthur so that there would be no doubt

or confusion as to the real purpose and aim of our policy.

It was with the deepest personal regret

that I found myself compelled to take this action.

General MacArthur is one of our

greatest military commanders.

But the cause of world peace is much more important

than any individual.

[Brands] For Truman this was an issue that transcended

the moment in Korea.

This had everything to do with how America was going to

be governed in the Cold War.

Truman recognized that the Korean War was not

one of a kind.

There would be other challenges like this.

And so he made a point of relieving MacArthur simply

because his view of what American policy should

be was different than the president's.

[Narrator] General MacArthur was far from wounded.

On April 16th, he boarded his plane and left Japan.

In New York, he was given a ticker tape parade down

Broadway, and he was invited to give a speech in front of

a joint session of Congress.

For many, MacArthur was the personification of

American exceptionalism, the last great World War II hero.

And in living rooms across the country,

Americans hung on his every word.

[Brands] MacArthur knows that this audience is primed

to approve of him.

[MacArthur] I stand on this rostrum with a sense of

deep humility and great pride.

[Brands] And he speaks in a very stentorian voice

and he plays the crowd.

[MacArthur] But I still remember the refrain of one

of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which

proclaimed most proudly that

"Old soldiers never die; they just fade away."

And like the old soldier of that ballad,

I now close my military career and just fade away.

[applause]

[Brands] And there was not a dry eye in the house.

[Narrator] In private, Truman fumed,

calling the speech quote, "A bunch of damn bullshit."

But his decision to fire MacArthur nearly cost

him his presidency.

[Jager] I think his popularity rate sank to 22%.

I mean he was an extremely unpopular leader because

he didn't see in terms of victory or defeat.

He said we had to limit this war.

[Narrator] Despite continued pressure from Republicans

to expand the war against communism into China

and beyond, Truman stayed the course.

♪

By the spring of 1951,

the Korean War had reached a stalemate.

Under the new leadership of General Matthew Ridgway,

UN forces were dug in around the 38th parallel,

trading ground against North Korean and Chinese forces

one bloody battle at a time.

[Kinard] What we were doing at that time was very different

than what had been earlier in the war.

They called that the stalemate at the time,

which is what it was, but living in the trenches

there is like living as animals.

You're living in the dirt.

You ate in the dirt.

That was a little bit hard on the morale.

[Brands] It was a terribly bloody and

demoralizing experience.

There was a dynamic that basically meant that

neither side could win.

Most of the casualties take place in this period,

for no good purpose.

[Narrator] Armistice talks between the UN, China,

and North Korea, which had begun in the summer of 1951,

dragged on for months, then years.

At every venue the Soviet Union continued

its stonewalling.

[U.N. delegate'] United Kingdom?

[Man] Yes.

[U.N. delegate] United States?

[Man] Yes.

[U.N. delegate] Union of Socialist Republics?

[Man] No.

[Narrator] For Stalin and the Communist forces,

keeping the Americans stalled in East Asia was preferable.

[Stueck] Stalin was willing to fight the Korean War to

the last Chinese soldier.

It was keeping the Americans engaged in Korea rather

than building up in Europe.

[Narrator] In order to break the Communists' will,

Americans stepped up their air campaign in North Korea.

[Hanley] All of the cities in North Korea were

essentially flattened.

It got so that the pilots and the squadron leaders,

et cetera, were complaining they had no more targets.

A written directive to the 5th Air Force in North Korea,

had ordered that every installation, every town,

every village be destroyed.

[Cumings] They dropped a lot of napalm.

Napalm had been invented at the end of World War II,

but not used much.

It was used indiscriminately across North Korea.

[Jager] And they thought that that was the price that

you had to pay to avoid a larger war, World War III,

with China.

And so basically North Korea became that kind of victim,

to force the communists to negotiate the armistice.

[Newscaster] The Republican party is back in power.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected!

[Narrator] Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower,

a Republican who had won the 1952 election

on a pledge to go to Korea to end the war,

could do little to change the situation on the ground.

[Brands] The mere fact that Dwight Eisenhower,

the hero of the European side of World War II,

was going to go.

He was going to put his mind to it.

Now, in fact, the end came not because Eisenhower went

to Korea, he went, he looked around, basically came home.

But the key was the death of Josef Stalin.

[Narrator] In March of 1953, the Soviet dictator died

unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Stalin's successors wasted no time.

[Millett] Once Stalin's gone, his body's hardly cold when

the reigning central committee, the presidium,

sends a message to the Chinese and North Koreans,

"Get an armistice."

[Stueck] It took several months to agree on an armistice line.

The communists initially argued for the 38th parallel,

which was an indefensible line on a map.

The Americans insisted on another line,

a line that was defensible.

They wanted the armistice to survive.

[Narrator] Even as negotiators argued over the last details,

battles continued to rage.

At Pork Chop Hill, an 800-foot-high ridge near

the 38th parallel, the US army lost nearly 1,000 men

to death or injury fighting over a plot of land

of no strategic or tactical value.

To the soldiers in the trenches,

it seemed the fighting would never end.

[Kinard] We didn't know too much about what was going

on with negotiations except they were happening.

All of us hoped and thought any day we were going

to have a treaty signed.

You always thought, I don't want to be the last

one to die in this war.

[Steuk] Eventually the two sides agreed not to accept

the 38th parallel.

They would accept a demilitarized zone on each

side of the line of battle, so there would be a minor retreat

of anywhere from three to five kilometers at the end

of the war, but it would be essentially the battle line.

[Newscaster] Then the exodus begins,

and from the disputed hills hundreds of thousands of men

pull back, and there's not a regret in a truckload...

[Narrator] While US forces were happy to pull back,

for many Koreans the location of the new border

had serious consequences.

Families would be permanently separated as territory once

situated in the south suddenly came under northern control.

Park Kyung Soon's hometown of Kaesong was one such

city that was now caught behind enemy lines.

Kyung Soon lived at home with her two younger siblings.

Her mother, fearing what might happen to her daughter

in North Korea, told her to flee.

[Narrator] On July 27th, 1953, an armistice was finally

reached between the UN, China and North Korea.

It called for a cessation of hostilities and armed force

until an official peace treaty is signed.

[Terry] North Korea was completely destroyed,

not a building left standing.

South Korea was completely destroyed.

China lost a million people.

Mao lost his own son.

And U.S. too,

what do we accomplish after three years of destruction?

We're left with where we started,

with the, with the DMZ and the 38th parallel.

♪

♪ Some people love to love ♪

♪ While some people seem to wait... ♪

[Kinard] Most of us when we came back really felt like

we had not accomplished much.

The American people generally,

most of them really didn't even know where we'd been.

A number of the Korean veterans that I know of that

came back home would walk down the street and

their friends would ask them, 'Where have you been?'

And they said, 'Oh, we've been in a war in Korea.'

'Where's Korea?'

[Brands] No one could gin up enthusiasm for a victory

parade because there wasn't a victory.

In fact, when the troops came home there was this armistice.

There was the possibility that they might have to go back.

[Narrator] Despite the end of major combat,

the Korean War was far from over.

There was no official peace treaty,

thousands of POWs were still awaiting repatriation

and tensions along the DMZ would require

President Eisenhower to commit tens of thousands

of troops to act as a standing force along the border.

But at home, Americans were tired of war and had long lost

interest in events in Korea.

[Brands] Americans conclude that not that much

was at stake in Korea.

We're not going to World War III over Korea,

and the Communists aren't going to take over South Korea.

It didn't seem to be threatening to America's

actual life and livelihood.

Let's just forget about this.

[Nat King Cole] ♪ Some people dream of you ♪

[Narrator] The luxury of forgetting the war was not

possible on the Korean peninsula.

Three years of bloody conflict had left both

Koreas devastated, their cities flattened and

their economies destroyed.

[Cha] After the armistice was signed,

the Korean peninsula was basically a field of rubble.

The United States dropped more ordinance on North Korea

in that three-year war than we dropped during the entire

Second World War, basically leveled the country.

The southern side of the peninsula was no better.

Everything was leveled.

They were starting very much from scratch.

[Narrator] Despite an influx of millions of American dollars

to rebuild South Korea, the country remained among

the world's poorest.

Syngman Rhee, who after the armistice continued his

authoritarian regime, ruled over a government rife with

corruption and mismanagement.

[Cha] Syngman Rhee ruled the country ostensibly as a

constitutional democracy, but really in a very brutal and

ruthless way, very cliquish, focusing on providing benefits

to his followers, punishing his detractors,

and he essentially sought economic assistance from the

United States and from other countries,

but was using it largely to subsidize his own rule and

was not really putting it into an economic plan.

[Narrator] In the countryside and in major cities food

and basic resources remained scant for years.

[Terry] I was raised in Gangnam,

Apgujeong-dong in Gangnam, with Psy, the singer,

sings about it.

So, I have a memory of that, when it was just a field,

and had none of these buildings.

South Korea, people forget, was one of the poorest

countries in the world.

[Narrator] In North Korea, despite the complete

destruction of its infrastructure,

Kim Il-sung quickly oversaw the complete transformation

of his country and rebuilt it in his image.

[Cha] After the end of the Korean War,

the North Korean economy developed quite rapidly

because they had a great deal of support from the

Soviet Union and from Communist China.

[Stueck] Economic growth in North Korea through the '50s,

after the armistice and really into the early '60s,

was clearly greater than that of South Korea.

[Narrator] Kim Il-sung used the memory of the war

to double down on his authority.

In his re-writing of history, America and South Korea were

the aggressors who instigated the war and it was he who

lead North Korea to victory over American tyranny.

[Terry] The way the North Koreans learn about the

Korean War is that the United States, first of all,

divided the Korean peninsula, then invaded North Korea,

but under the great leadership of Kim Il-sung,

the North Koreans emerged victorious,

yet you have to continually fight against the Americans,

because the Americans are bent on destruction of North Korea,

and this is sort of repeated over and over and over.

[Narrator] To strengthen this mythology and consolidate

his power, Kim enforced a series of brutal purges.

[Jager] After the war, Kim Il-sung was in a very

vulnerable position, because he led the country into this

disaster but Kim Il-sung is a survivor and he then begins to

consolidate his power and then a huge purge happens

in '58 and '59.

Some people say like 100,000 people then are killed,

by '61, he's totally in power.

[Narrator] Kim even created his own political philosophy

in order to govern the country.

He called it "Juche" a revolutionary theory that

focused on independence, nationalism

and most importantly self-defense.

[Narrator] Before he defected to the south in 2004,

Jang Jin Sung was a prominent member of the North Korean

propaganda wing and was raised under the influence

of Kim Il-sung.

[Narrator] Though increasingly isolated,

Kim Il-sung's vision for his country remained true,

to build an army strong enough to defend itself from America

and South Korea and to one day unify the peninsula.

♪

[Singing in native language]

By 1968 South Korea had emerged from the era of

corruption and economic stagnation that had marred

Syngman Rhee's administration.

Under the leadership of General Park Chung Hee,

a military leader with an eye toward modernity,

South Korea's economy was booming.

[Jager] By the late 1960s and early '70s,

Park Chung-hee implemented an export-oriented economy and

it was through his guidance that South Korea as we

know it really began to take off economically.

I mean he was also a dictator, but he was able to create the

economic platform from which South Korea could

then develop into a democracy.

And of course South Korea's rise and global power and

success then reflected back on the success

of the American war.

[Narrator] While South Korea's prosperity was heralded across

the Western world, to Kim Il-sung and North Korea

it was a threat.

[Jager] As South Korea started to take off

economically, North Korea then saw the window for

reunification closing because it had surpassed

North Korea's economy.

North Korea was going down economically,

South Korea was going up.

With thousands of American troops sitting on its border,

and a well-armed South Korean military,

Kim Il-sung saw his opportunities to unite the

peninsula under his own control shrinking by the day.

[Lankov] Between 1967 and 1972, it did look like that

North Koreans really wanted to restart hostilities and

maybe create havoc by successful assassinations

of high level officials.

So, a short period which is sometimes called

the second Korean war began.

[Jager] And it was at that point that North Korea then

begins a series of provocative actions in order

to unify the peninsula under Kim Il-sung's rule.

[Narrator] On January 21st 1968,

Kim Il-sung ordered his most brazen military operation

since the signing of the 1953 armistice.

A unit of highly trained North Korean commandos cut their way

through barbed wire along the DMZ and snuck into the south.

Donning South Korean military uniforms and credentials,

the commandos stormed the Blue House,

the private residence of President Park Chung Hee.

The commandos' orders, which came directly from

Kim Il-sung, were concise and explicit.

[Cha] The instructions were basically,

to go to the Blue House to kill the South Korean

president, Park Chung-Hee, to cut off his head and

bring it back to North Korea.

[Narrator] The North Koreans got within yards of

the president before they were discovered,

and the assassination was thwarted.

[General Bonesteel] And I sincerely hope Kim Il-sung

and his people up north recognize the futility and

the unwisdom of continuing this action.

[Narrator] But just days later, North Korea captured the USS

Pueblo which had been sailing off of the coast of Korea.

The 82-man crew was bound, blindfolded,

and transported to Pyongyang,

where they were charged as spies.

For eleven months, the ship's crew was tortured

and subjected to harsh interrogations.

[President Johnson] The North Koreans committed yet

another wanton and aggressive act by

seizing an American ship and its crew.

Clearly, this cannot be accepted.

[Narrator] By the winter of 1968,

it seemed America was once again being pulled into

the conflict in Korea just as their war in Vietnam

was heating up.

[Cumings] The seizure of the Pueblo happened almost

conterminously with the Tet offensive and was designed

to put pressure on the US by the North Koreans,

who were helping the North Vietnamese

as pilots and things like that.

[Stueck] The Pueblo incident kind of illustrates

the dilemma that the Americans have always been in,

because we do have major interests in Korea,

but we have global interests as well.

So the Americans were deeply engaged in Vietnam,

and were scared to death that Park Chung Hee would take some

kind of action that would create a renewed Korean war.

[Jager] Park Chung-hee is furious.

He wants to go north.

He wants to seek revenge for the Blue House raid,

but all the other powers around the Korean Peninsula,

of course, are not interested in restarting the Korean War.

The Americans are bogged down in Vietnam.

The Soviet Union has distractions in Eastern

Europe, it invades Czechoslovakia in 1968,

and the Chinese are involved in their cultural revolution,

so the outside powers outside of the Korean Peninsula have

no interest in starting the Korean War,

but the two Koreas want, again, to start a war.

[Narrator] With pressure from America Korean

President Park stood down.

The American crew of the Pueblo were released in

December 1968 but the ship was never returned.

[Cha] I think it's fair to say that after the initial hot war

between North and South Korea,

there was a cold war competition between the

North and the South that was quite intense.

Lots of hostilities day to day along the border,

and every time in that history whenever we saw the south

Koreans doing something good, the North Koreans would always

seek to spoil that party.

[Narrator] Simmering tensions between the two Koreas

continued throughout the 70's and 80's.

Then as the decade wound down,

North Korea would strike yet again,

this time while the whole world watched.

[Lankov] These games were widely seen worldwide as

a triumph of the south Korean anti-communist regimes.

And well, North Koreans wanted to spoil the show.

[Narrator] In November of 1987, just weeks before South Korea

was to hold its first democratic elections while

busily preparing for the Olympic games,

two North Korean agents working under orders from

the Kim regime planted a bomb aboard Korean air flight 858.

All 104 passengers and 11 crew members were killed.

[U.S. official] The republic of Korea has produced evidence

that KAL 858 was destroyed by an act of terrorism

by North Korea.

[Lankov] This bombing of the Korean Airlines plane was

just a part of their efforts to create a climate of fear,

to prevent people from going to the Seoul Olympic Games.

[Narrator] But the desperate act of terror by

Kim Il-sung backfired.

[Jager] And it's at that point, that really,

you can say that the Korean War has been won

by South Korea.

[Announcer] The world to Seoul, Seoul to the world...

[Jager] And then the Soviet Union establishes diplomatic

relations with South Korea in 1990.

China follows in 1992.

So North Korea is now diplomatically isolated,

humiliated by the Seoul Olympics,

and unable to deal with South Korea on any equal terms.

And it's that time then, that the North Korean regime

seeks its nuclear program for its own security.

♪

[Narrator] On July 8th 1994, Kim Il-sung died.

Ordinary North Koreans were forced into a state

of prolonged mourning.

[Narrator] Kim's son,

Kim Jong-il was made supreme leader.

He inherited a country in crisis.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90's

devastated the North Korean economy and a series

of successive famines killed an estimated one million Koreans.

But even as his people were starving,

Kim doubled down on his father's expensive

nuclear ambitions.

[Jager] So everyone really thinks at that point that

North Korea's going to collapse and yet it doesn't.

Kim Jong-il continues with his nuclear program and

he knows that is the only leverage he has for survival.

[President Clinton] The situation in Korea is serious,

we are examining what we can do,

we're talking to our South Korean partners...

[Narrator] In 1994, after it was discovered that the

North was secretly producing plutonium for a bomb,

President Bill Clinton dispatched a team of American

diplomats to Geneva to defuse the crisis.

[President Clinton] We are pursuing our sanctions

discussions in the United Nations.

[Narrator] After months of negotiations,

Kim Jong-il consented to freeze his nuclear program

in exchange for increased aid.

They called it the "Agreed Framework."

Bill Clinton referred to the deal as the first step

on the road to a nuclear free Korean peninsula.

[Terry] So, that was sort of the height of diplomacy.

Madeleine Albright as the Secretary of State went

to North Korea.

The problem is that North Koreans were pursuing

a separate track, a uranium enrichment program,

before the 1994 agreed framework,

during the negotiation, and after the agreed framework.

So, North Koreans were always bent on keeping some aspect

of their nuclear program.

[Cha] For North Korea, nuclear weapons are not only

the ultimate sign of strength,

but they have meaning for North Korea and their history

because Kim Il-sung saw how Japan's occupation of Korea,

which looked like it would never end,

suddenly being terminated by two atomic bombs

that the United States dropped on Japan.

They saw China explode a nuclear device in 1964 and

then become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.

These are the interpretations, the lessons the North Koreans

learned from the ability to have nuclear weapons.

[Narrator] As North Korea retreated further and further

into isolation, South Korea was becoming a paragon of

capitalism, and democracy.

Even though the war between the two had not ended,

memories of it receded behind glowing monuments to economic

progress, spearheaded by the success of companies

like Samsung and Hyundai.

But by the late 90s, as democracy ripened and with it

a free press, harrowing truths about the war finally came

to light and threatened to strain the long standing

alliance between America and South Korea.

[Narrator] Choe Sang-Hun was reporter for the Associated

Press in Seoul in the late '90s.

[Narrator] Choe partnered with a team at AP's New York

bureau, led by Charles Hanley.

[Hanley] The investigation was a very detailed,

very arduous, onerous, drawn-out investigation.

It wasn't easy.

[Narrator] The team began to interview survivors who

described atrocities perpetrated by American

military in the earliest days of the war.

One of the worst was the massacre at No Gun Ri where

hundreds of South Korean civilian refugees were killed

while they huddled under a train overpass.

[Hanley] The stories from the Korean survivors

were just horrible.

And the key thing then was to find the Americans involved.

We needed to find corroboration.

My colleague Martha Mendoza and I began making

cold calls to these veterans.

[Narrator] Homer Garza was a 17 year old private with

the Army's 7th Cavalry.

He says he arrived at No Gun Ri just after the massacre ended.

[Garza] There was two tunnels side by side.

When we got there, there must've been about

300 South Korean civilians that were killed there.

One thing I'll never forget, there was a woman, a mother,

laying there on her back.

And she had a little baby about, probably about,

not more than 8 or 9 months old trying to nurse on the

dead body there, you know.

[Narrator] Garza contends American soldiers were not

to blame for the massacre but along with other veterans

he has confirmed that their orders during

the war were clear.

[Garza] We received orders that anything in front of us

was the enemy, no matter who was in front of us.

If they didn't shoot at you, you would shoot at them.

Yeah.

Whether they was a male or a female.

[Narrator] Choe, Hanley, and a team of AP reporters dug

into the Pentagon's files,

many of them formerly classified

what they found there supported the survivors' accounts.

[Hanley] There were orders flying around the warfront

to treat civilians as enemy.

Orders from the very top command, the 8th Army,

to stop any refugee movement across lines.

This was just a prima facie case of a war crime.

Targeting noncombatants has always been considered

a war crime,

and these were the first documents like this

to be turned up.

[Narrator] On September 29, 1999,

the AP published the first piece of

their investigative report.

[Hanley] By the next day, Defense Secretary

William Cohen had ordered an Army investigation,

which dragged on for many months.

[Garza] Somehow my name got all the way to the Pentagon.

And I got on the phone and he said,

"This is Colonel so-and-so."

Says, "We want to talk to you about No Gun Ri."

I says, "Neither one of you have been in combat so

you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

You're fighting to keep your ass alive.

That's what you're doing."

[Narrator] Outraged South Koreans demanded an official

apology from the U.S. but one never came.

[President Clinton] We know things happen which

should not have happened.

And that things happen which were wrong.

[Hanley] President Clinton did not offer an apology.

An apology would be an admission of culpability.

What Clinton issued was a statement of regret.

Which of course simply says, "It's too bad this thing

happened to you, we really feel sorry for you."

♪

[Newscaster] A major disaster is occurring in New York City

this morning.

If you are a New York City firefighter,

drop what you're doing.

Report to your company.

[President Bush] Every nation, in every region,

now has a decision to make.

Either you're with us.

Or you are with the terrorists.

[Narrator] In a speech after the devastating terrorist

attacks on September 11th, 2001,

President Bush thrust North Korea back into America's

consciousness, using the rogue nation as justification for

his broader war on terror.

[President Bush] North Korea is a regime arming with missiles

and weapons of mass destruction while

starving its citizens.

States like these, and their terrorist allies,

constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten

the peace of the world.

[applause]

[Narrator] President Bush took a hardline approach to

North Korea, applying economic sanctions to force

Kim Jong-il to give up his nuclear program,

but his efforts failed.

On October 9, 2006, Kim achieved the goal that he and

his father had long hoped for,

the successful test of a nuclear weapon.

[President Bush] What we don't know is his intentions.

And so, I think we've got to plan for the worst

and hope for the best.

And planning for the worst means to make sure that we

continue to send a unified message to Kim Jong-il that,

you know, we expect you to adhere to international norms.

[Narrator] Kim Jong-il continued to defy the

international community,

refusing to allow nuclear inspections.

And after his sudden death in 2011,

his son Kim Jong-un vowed to carry on the family's

nuclear dreams.

At just 28 years of age, Kim Jong-un became the

youngest leader in North Korean history.

In order to solidify his authority he drew

on the imagery of his iconic grandfather.

[Jager] You know, here is this guy, who's a young guy,

educated in the west, he was not introduced to the

North Korean public until a year before his

father's death in 2011.

And yet, he comes in there and is able to consolidate

his power so quickly.

That just shows the power of the Kim Il-sung myth,

and how it's still alive.

His power has something to do with the fact that he is

Kim Il-sung's grandson.

[Terry] He knows that Kim Il-sung had popularity and

love of the Korean people, North Korean people.

So that's why he wanted to sort of even look like

his grandfather, the way he dresses, his haircut,

just the whole outer appearance looks like his

grandfather, and his behavior is also more like

his grandfather.

[Narrator] By 2016, President Obama,

hoping to pressure the young leader to end his pursuit

of nuclear weapons, piled on more sanctions.

[President Obama] North Korea's continued pursuit of nuclear

weapons is a path that leads only to more isolation.

It's not a sign of strength.

[Narrator] But rather than capitulate,

Kim Jong-un ratcheted up his nuclear program invoking

the memory of the Korean War.

[Narrator] In the final weeks of Obama's presidency,

North Korea tested their 5th nuclear warhead,

their most powerful yet.

[Stueck] The North Koreans, the message that their leaders

give them is that we're not going to let the United States

to do us what they did between 1950 and '53,

and that's why we need nuclear weapons and that's

why we need to have missiles that can deliver them

to the continental United States.

[President Obama] I just had the opportunity to have

an excellent conversation with President-elect Trump,

it was wide ranging...

[Narrator] In a meeting in the Oval Office,

Obama told his successor Donald Trump that North Korea

would be his greatest challenge as president.

Soon after, President Trump went on the offensive...

[President Trump] North Korea best not make any more threats

to the United States.

They will be met with fire and fury.

[Narrator] Starting a war of words with the North Korean

leader, that pushed the two nations toward World War III.

[Man, archival] From Kim Jong-un, a first message in English,

vowing to make President Trump quote "pay dearly",

calling him a "mentally deranged dotard"

or senile old man.

[President Trump] Rocket man should have been handled

a long time ago.

[applause]

Little rocket man.

[President Trump] North Korea better get their act together,

or they're going to be in trouble,

like few nations ever have been in trouble,

in this world.

[Cumings] To call Trump a bull in a China shop

is an understatement.

[President Trump] The United States has great strength and

patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its

allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy,

North Korea.

[Cumings] Threatening to totally destroy North Korea,

at the UN, without anybody pointing out that we already

did that during the Korean War.

[Narrator] But underneath the fiery rhetoric,

Trump was preparing a step none of his predecessors

were willing to take.

[Blitzer] President Trump and Kim Jong-un

are scheduled to shake hands and

sit down for a summit meeting.

The whole world will be watching.

[Narrator] Against the backdrop of North Korean

and American flags, Trump and Kim shook hands,

the first time in history leaders from these

two countries had ever met in person.

The two men spoke for a few hours and later signed

a declaration vowing to work toward peace

and denuclearization.

Despite the vague and tepid language of the document,

Trump left Singapore proclaiming victory.

[President Trump] They're gonna get rid of their nuclear

weapons, I really believe that he will, I've gotten to...

[Stephanopoulos] Did he tell you that?

[President Trump] In a short period of time, yeah sure,

it's denuc-denuclearize, he's denuking the whole place,

and he's going to start very quickly,

I think he's going to start now.

[Terry] Trump administration thinks if Kim Jong-un is

saying, "I'm now interested in denuclearization of the

Korean peninsula," that he's now willing to give up

North Korea's nuclear weapons,

but that's not what Kim Jong-un is talking about.

Kim Jong-un is talking about concluding a peace treaty,

ending US/South Korea alliance,

and then he's saying, only then,

when the regime's security is guaranteed,

he will think about giving up nuclear weapons.

[Reporter] US intelligence says,

'no significant signs of denuclearization',

contradicting this tweet from President Trump

one day after Singapore.

Declaring, "There is no longer a nuclear threat

from North Korea."

[Reporter] The Trump administration is being

taken for a ride.

[Reporter] I think it's becoming increasingly clear

that he got played.

[Graham] Are they playing us?

I don't know.

This is the last, best chance for peace right here.

[Cha] The United States started entering negotiations from

the Clinton administration onwards.

And in all of these cases what the United States has put

on offer is remarkably consistent which is the promise

of normal political relations, the promise of a peace treaty

ending the Korean war, economic assistance,

energy assistance.

All of these things would be on offer to North Korea

if they did one thing which is give up their nuclear weapons

and ballistic missiles.

But I think the main lesson we've learned from all of this

is that the problem is not the United States.

The problem is that North Korea doesn't want

to give up its weapons.

[Narrator] In the end, the prospects for peace may depend

not on the United States, but on the two leaders of

this long-divided nation and on its people,

still separated by a never-ending conflict.

[Narrator] For these Koreans who wish for reunification,

their hope to see their families may only be

fulfilled with an official end to the war.

[Terry] This is a blip in the history of Korea.

This division since 1945 and then the

Korean war since 1950.

It's the same ethnic make-up, same language, same culture.

The two Koreas were one Korea for thousands of years.

So I'm hoping that this division is

the anomaly in history.

[Cha] We don't get fairy tale endings on

the Korean peninsula.

So whether it is the Japanese occupation of Korea,

the start of the Korean war in 1950,

democratization in South Korea in 1987,

the list goes on and on.

History has shown that change on the Korean peninsula

always comes suddenly, it never comes gradually.

[applause]