part0051

A partial price list: 54,246 Americans died during the Korean War; 33,629 were killed in action. In addition, 228,000 Korean soldiers and untold numbers of civilians, 717 Turkish soldiers, 1,109 soldiers of the United Kingdom, and many other UN volunteers gave their lives, and over 110,000 American were wounded and MIA.

Over 53,000 ROK and UN troops, including over 8,000 Americans, are MIA. One assumes the great majority of them were murdered by North Korean soldiers after surrendering, or being found wounded.

American estimates of enemy casualties, including prisoners, exceed 1,500,000, of which 900,000, almost two-thirds, were Chinese. Other estimates are higher; official Chinese figures are much lower.

Half of our dead were killed after the truce talks began. Artillery concentrations on the small outposts and contested hills of the MLR exceeded anything in WW I or WW II; typically a thousand rounds exploding in 10 minutes or so, followed by battalion- and regiment-scale assaults against positions scarcely large enough to hold a company. The Marines fought for Bunker Hill, Reno, Carson, and Vegas; the ROKs for Sniper Ridge, Triangle Hill, and Big Nori; our 2nd Division fought for Old Baldy, Arrowhead, and Pork Chop, as did our 7th Division in their turn.

Those of us defending static positions on hills which changed hands like dollar bills will no doubt recall the first wave of attackers as Giant Mongolians armed only with mats to throw over the barbed wire and played their parts in the attacks as did the Japanese “Kami-Kazi” pilots in the Pacific…they were sometimes followed by another wave of North Koreans being egged on by armed Chinese officers…so it didn’t matter whether they ran forwards or backwards, as they were all treated merely as fodder, and usually to be found in the following weeks as “ghostly white” figures laid over the wire and covered in lime to keep the stench down.

United Nations Command, Troop Strengths: Peak strength for the UNC was 932,964 on July 27, 1953—the day the Armistice Agreement was signed: