SPRING LAKE, N.C. – It was America’s fifth-bloodiest war, yet today, 60 years later, it is more often than not just considered “America’s Forgotten War.” Sixty years later, the American public seems to remember it, if at all, as a conflict occurring sometime between World War II and Vietnam, or maybe as the background for the 1970s TV show “M-A-S-H” (actually a Vietnam War story only superficially set in Korea).

World War II had ended in victory celebrations across the nation, and even the Vietnam War has about it something of a 1960s dramatic, romantic aura: peace, love, drugs, youth, protest (“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”). By contrast, the Korean War (195053) was a part of the supposedly bland 1950s.

But at the time of the sudden, unexpected North Korean invasion on June 25, 1950, Americans saw this attack as a thrust directed by the Kremlin through its North Korean communist proxies. Such overt aggression roused even the United Nations, which branded North Korea the aggressor and commissioned the U.S. Far East commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, as chief of all U.N. forces in Korea. Ultimately, 16 U.N. nations contributed ground, air, or sea forces to the U.N. Command.

Two days after the invasion, in one of the most momentous decisions of his career, President Harry Truman, ordered U.S. military forces to the aid of South Korea. U.S. naval and air power quickly established absolute control of Korean waters and airspace. The introduction of U.S. ground forces did not go so smoothly.

The post-World War II years had been ones of savage cutbacks in U.S. military funding and development. At any rate, pundits had pontificated that the next war would be one of push buttons and atomic bombs dropped on Moscow by huge B-36 intercontinental bombers. Almost no one in Washington anticipated that U.S. troops only five years after V-J Day would find themselves down and dirty in someone else’s rice paddy.

NORTHERN JUGGERNAUT

U.S. and North Korean troops first clashed at the village of Osan on July 5. The outgunned and outnumbered Americans of Task Force Smith saw their WW II bazooka rounds bounce harmlessly off Soviet-built T-34 tanks. The North Koreans shook off their infantry losses, rolled southward, and by August had pushed the Americans and their South Korean allies back into a tight perimeter around the port city of Pusan.

There the U.N. forces held – barely – even though they had complete control of the air and vast artillery superiority, until MacArthur’s brilliant amphibious September landing at Inchon, well behind enemy lines. That operation opened the way for the devastation of the North Korean Army and its retreat back across the 38th Parallel. MacArthur affirmatively and quickly answered the question of whether the United Nations should advance northward across that artificial line, thus beginning the “Race to the Yalu,” the river separating North Korea from China.

But the United States once again was caught flat-footed, this time by the Chinese Communists. MacArthur’s forces were pushed back below the 38th Parallel in the longest retreat in U.S. military history. Finally, the Chinese, hammered relentlessly by U.N. air power, outran their supply train. U.N. resistance stiffened, and from early 1951 on, the battle lines stabilized.

After the Chinese intervention, MacArthur publicly demanded something like all-out war in Korea, including operations (possibly nuclear) against China. His challenge to the Truman administration and the Joint Chiefs of Staff led to the general’s very unpopular and sensational firing by the president.

THE LONG PARLEY

All belligerent powers by this time were not keen on all-out war over Korea, MacArthur to the contrary. Then, on the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the communists called for armistice discussions. But in another surprise of the Korean War, the armistice negotiations would drag out for more than two years.

While negotiating at the border village of Panmunjom, both sides were determined to hold and improve their battlefield positions, beginning the wearying round of bitter battles for such obscure hills and ridges as Pork Chop Hill, Old Baldy, and Jane Russell Hill. The war in Korea by this time resembled something out of WW I’s trench warfare with gains and retreats measured in yards. It was all far removed from the breathless “push-button, nuclear war” fantasies of the Sunday supplements.

Up to this point, the summer of 1951, the U.S. public had basically supported the war; North Korea had obviously committed aggression, and Americans focused on the seesaw conflict itself. But with the battle line stabilized, resentment surfaced. Stalemate is never popular. Was it right that American boys, embattled in Korea, might have to “die for a tie”? Many looked to MacArthur for a way out and came to detest the Truman administration’s efforts to limit the war. Those who opposed the war (except for the hard left) wanted to wrap it up, “take the kid gloves off,” even “drop the bomb.”

In fact, the editors of Life Magazine apocalyptically wrote soon after the Chinese intervention that the U.S. must recognize that it really was engaged in a global war against communist global expansionism, and should act accordingly, even if that meant war with the Soviet Union!

Imaginings of an imminent Third World War began to subside after the spring of 1951; the battle lines had stabilized, truce talks were ongoing, and fewer U.S. soldiers were dying, even though a sad brief notice might appear in a local newspaper that some hometown boy had been killed in Korea. A sullen disgust began to dominate the American home front.

LIFE GOES ON

Not that it was much of a home front anyway. There was no rationing, and the American economy continued to pump out autos, refrigerators, washing machines, TVs, and suburban tract houses. There were no protest marches, no waving of “End the War NOW” or “Bring the Boys Home” placards. Those activities would have been deemed illegal, even “treasonous.” Many Americans did feel a passing elation with the electrocution of the communist atom-bomb spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

MacArthur’s star did “fade away” in the wake of the MacArthur congressional hearings of 1951, followed by his hall-emptying speech before the 1952 GOP presidential nominating convention. By then, the Korean War was tangibly reaching Americans only through higher taxes and the draft, although substantially more U.S. inductees were being sent to Europe to head off the unlikely scenario of a massive Soviet invasion of West Germany.

Those Americans who cared enough to follow the war on television could view on their bulky black-and-white, three-channel TV sets the likes of the “Camel News Caravan” (all 15 minutes of it) in which anchorman John Cameron Swayze would chirp, “Sit back, light up a Camel, and enjoy today’s news today.” The “news” from Korea consisted of a few minutes of days-old film, heavily sanitized by the networks and the UN Command.

Meanwhile, theater newsreels might offer a few weekly clips, with dramatic background music, on the order of “UN Forces Battle Reds on Old Baldy,” sandwiched between fashion shows or natural disasters. Hollywood produced few Korean War action films. Even John Wayne missed this one. The only war excitement by this time was focused over “MiG Alley,” where the USAF’s F-86 jet-fighter “kerosene cowboys” ultimately racked up a score of 12:1 in kills against their Soviet, North Korean, and Chinese MiG counterparts.

IKE’S ITINERARY

By 1952 Americans were so sick of the war that when GOP presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower simply announced that “If elected, I shall go to Korea,” the election was basically over. (Truman privately fumed that it was all just a “grandstand play.”) President-elect Eisenhower duly went to Korea, ate Army chow, looked involved and presidential, and returned home.

Even the communists by then were getting tired of the war. The death of Josef Stalin in March 1953 opened the way for an armistice. Although Stalin hadn’t actually started the war, he had express pleasure that “This war is getting on the nerves of the Americans.” But early in 1953, communist negotiators no longer demanded that all U.N.-held POWs be forced to return against their will. (Twenty-one American POWs chose to remain on the Communist side, but all survivors subsequently returned to their capitalist hells.)

The signing of the armistice agreement at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953 fixed the status quo. Both sides agreed to stay in place along the battle line, which was not all that different from the border between North and South Korea on June 25, 1950. No cheers, no jubilation followed the signing – just a sigh of relief.

Men had indeed “died for a tie” – more than 36,000 Americans in combat, and about a million or more North and South Koreans and Chinese. However, South Korea had been saved, the apocalypse tarried, Ike was settled in the White House, and most of the boys were coming home.

But today U.S. and South Korean troops still face a nuclear-armed North Korean rogue state. Will the Korean peninsula hang fire for another six decades?

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Stanley Sandler, a military historian, formerly held the Conquest ’14 chair in history at Virginia Military Institute. He is the author of, among other books, “The Korean War: No Victors, No Vanquished.” He can be contacted at stanthehistoryman

juno.com. This commentary originally appeared in The Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Va.

This essay is available to McClatchy-Tribune News Service subscribers. McClatchy-Tribune did not subsidize the writing of this column; the opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of McClatchy-Tribune or its editors.