Curtis Lemay himself. "Right at the start of the war, unofficially I slipped a message in under the carpet in the Pentagon that we ought to turn SAC loose with incendiaries on some North Korean towns. The answer came back, under the carpet again, that there would be too many civilian casualties; we couldn't do anything like that. So we went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too. We even burned down Pusan-an accident, but we burned it down anyway. The Marines started a battle down there with no enemy in sight. Over a period of three years or so, we killed off-what-twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure? Over a period of three years, this seemed to be acceptable to everybody, but to kill a few people at the start right away, no, we cant seem to stomach that." Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with Generals (1988) He's actually wrong. Most historians place the number at closer to 13-14% The U.S. dropped a total of 635,000 tons of bombs, including 32,557 tons of napalm, on Korea, more than during the whole Pacific campaign of World War II. USAF assessments at the end of the war assessed the destruction of North Korea's 22 major cities at the following numbers. Anju15% Chinnampo 80% Chongju 60% Haeju 75% Hamhung 80% Hungnam 85% Hwangju 97% Kanggye60% Kunu-ri 100% Kyomipo 80% Musan 5% Najin 5% Pyongyang 75% Sariwon 95% Sinanj 100% Sinuij 50% Songjin 50% Sunan 90% Unggi 5% Wonsan 80%
It's pretty hard to win a war after it turns into a brutal stalemate, and unfortunately brutal stalemates are the worst kind of war when it comes to civilian casualties. Much could have been avoided had the Chinese not entered on the North Korean side of the war, or if North Korea hadn't tried to invade South Korea in the first place. ---
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