THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE COMING CLASS WAR ---Episode 26

                        MacArthur Was Fired On April 11, 1951

MacArthur was replaced by General Matthew Ridgeway, who requested thirty-eight atomic bombs in May 1951. But that spring and summer, with Stalin's help, the UnitedStates, China, and the two Koreas started negotiations, which dragged on for two years.  The U.S. air war continued unabated, unleashing a firebombing campaign similar to the one the United States had visited upon Japan five years earlier. Now the weapon of choice was napalm. New York Times reporter George Barrett described the effect of a napalm attack on a hamlet of two hundred people north of Anyang, which he characterized as "a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war " : 

     The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they had held when the napalm struck --- a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hands a page from a Sears--Roebuck catalogue crayoned at mail order number 3,811,294 for a $2.98 "bewitching bed jacket --- coral." 

Almost every city in North Korea was burned to the ground. Survivors sought shelter in caves. South Koreans fared little better. The British armed forces yearbook reported for 1951, "The war was fought without regard for the South Koreans, and their unfortunate country was regarded as an arena rather than a country to be liberated. As a consequence, fighting was quite ruthless, and it is no exaggeration to state that South Korea no longer exists as a country. Its towns have been destroyed, much of its means of livelihood eradicated, and its people reduced to a sullen mass dependent upon charity. The South Korean, unfortunately, was regarded as a 'gook', like his cousins north of the 38th parallel." Casualty estimates vary widely, but approximately 3 to 4 million Koreans died, out of a total population of 30 million, as did more than a million Chinese and 37,000 Americans. 

By February 1951, only 39 percent of Americans still supported the war. It ended in a stalemate. Americans wondered how their powerful, modern military could fail to defeat an ill-equipped army of Korean and Chinese peasants. 

Korea was only one piece of a rapidly unraveling situation in Asia. In Indochina, the United States had decided to bolster its support for the French, making $10 million available for the French puppet Emperor Bao Dai in Vietnam. Trouble was also brewing in the Philippines, where the U.S.-backed president Manuel Roxas and his successor Elpidio Quirino had been battling the Huk peasant insurgency. After collaborating with the Japanese during the war, Roxas aligned himself with the large landowners and the Catholic Church. The United States built up the Philippine army and began a successful counterinsurgency campaign spearheaded by Major Edward Lansdale and fortified by U.S. airpower. A flamboyant advertising executive who served in the OSS and CIA and was immortalized in two famous novels, Lansdale would later lead  similar counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam and Cuba but with decidedly less success. And even in the Philippines, primary credit for undercutting the Huks should not go to Lansdale but to President Ramon Magsaysay, who instituted land reform and welcomed the Huks back into the political system. 

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