No, technically, it’s not over, though overt hostilities stopped 70 years ago.  

On June 25, 1950, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) invaded the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea), sparking the first hot conflict of the Cold War—a proxy war between China and the Soviet Union in support of the north, and the United States and its United Nations allies in the south. Crossing the 38th parallel, the DPRK’s Korean People’s Army (KPA) pushed ROK and U.S. forces south, trapping them behind the 140-mile Pusan Perimeter. In response, the U.N. sent troops, 21 nations ultimately contributing to the effort.  

Assuming command of U.N. forces, General Douglas MacArthur turned the tide with Operation Chromite, the amphibious landing of troops at Inchon, southwest of Seoul. Reinforced U.N. forces also broke out of the Pusan Perimeter, pushing the KPA back across the 38th parallel. Coalition forces then invaded North Korea, aiming to reunify the Korean Peninsula, with leading elements reaching the Yalu River border with China.  

At that imminent threat, Chinese troops poured into North Korea and launched a series of offensives against ROK and U.N. forces. The fighting was fierce as combatant forces seesawed back and forth. Notable battles included those on the Chosin Reservoir and the Chongchon River. Eventually, the front lines stabilized along the 38th parallel and a long stalemate ensued, though where fighting broke out, such as the three Battles of the Hook, it proved especially bitter.  

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Peace talks began in July 1951, but disagreement over the repatriation of POWs led to protracted negotiations. The conflict dragged on, claiming the lives of as many as 5 million civilians and military personnel, until the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953. Tensions remain.  

In the mid to late 1960s a series of incidents threatened the armistice, including armed clashes along the DMZ separating north and south, the attempted assassination of South Korean President Park Chung Hee (amid the January 1968 Blue House Raid), the capture of the U.S. spy ship Pueblo that same month and North Korea’s 1969 shootdown of a U.S. Lockheed EC-121M Warning Star spy plane over the Sea of Japan, killing 31 crewmen.  

North Korea has become increasingly isolated on the world stage, particularly in the wake of the Cold War. In 1994 President Bill Clinton, on receiving intel that North Korea was developing nuclear weapons, weighed bombing its nuclear reactor at Nyongbyon. In 2002, in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush included North Korea in his “axis of evil” list of states sponsoring terrorism. In June 2019 Donald Trump tried a different tack, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in North Korea when he stepped into the DMZ to shake hands with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. Despite such overtures, Kim has recently stepped up the rhetoric and since resumed the missile tests.    

Lessons

Beware short-term commitments: The United States occupied South Korea at war’s end in 1945 and withdrew three years later, leaving South Korea weak and ill prepared to resist a North Korean invasion, once again necessitating military intervention.

Ignore intelligence at your own peril: In October 1950 MacArthur dismissed information regarding Chinese troop movements and assured Washington that Beijing would not intervene.
Chinese troops crossed the Yalu on the 19th and attacked on the 25th.

Sometimes divorce is inevitable: Today South Korea is a thriving, modern republic, while North Korea remains a communist backwater. Reconciliation seems unlikely.

This story appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Military History magazine.

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Monica Mohindra On July 27, 1953, the Korean War ended with an armistice but no official treaty, technically meaning a state of war still exists between the combatant nations. Among the multinational participants in that significant flare-up in the Cold War were nearly 7 million U.S. military service personnel, of whom more than 1 million are still living. The 70th anniversary of the armistice spurred the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project to redouble its efforts to record for posterity the memories of those participants while it still can. Military History recently interviewed Veterans History Project director Monica Mohindra about its collection, the pressure of time and ongoing initiatives to honor veterans of that “Forgotten War” and all other American conflicts.

What is the central mission of the Veterans History Project?

Our mission is to collect, preserve and make accessible the first-person remembrances of U.S. veterans who served from World War I through the more recent conflicts. We want all stories, not just those from the foxhole or the battlefronts, but from all veterans who served the United States in uniform. The idea, developed by Congress in October 2000, was to ensure we would all be able to hear directly from veterans about their lived experience, their service, their sacrifice and what they felt on a human scale about their participation in service and/or conflict.  

Is your recent emphasis on the ‘forgotten’ Korean War mainly due to the anniversary?

Correct. But there is so much to share from the history of the Korean War that is relevant. We’re also marking the 75th anniversary of the desegregation of the U.S. military, and researchers have been using our collections to understand, for instance, nurses’ perspectives on what it was like to serve in a desegregated military. Our collection speaks to what it was like prior to and after desegregation.  

To what extent do memories tied to both anniversaries overlap?

One of the real strengths of the Veterans History Project, and of oral history projects in general, is that one can pull generalized opinions from a multiplicity of voices. For example, there’s a story about a veteran named James Allen who “escaped” racially charged Florida to join the military. Serving in Korea in various administrative tasks, he experienced a taste of what life could be like under desegregation. When he returned to the United States, he moved back to Florida, the very place he’d escaped, to help veterans and advance such notions.  

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You’re the spouse of a Navy veteran. Does that shape your perspective on history overall and the project you’ve taken up?

It absolutely adds another layer to the Veterans History Project and what it means on a human scale. This is personal. My husband’s experience, just like each veteran’s, is unique. He’s not ready to share his story—maybe not with me ever. His father, who also served, is not ready to share his story—maybe not with me, maybe not ever. Both of his grandfathers served. My grandfather served, too. So, I feel a personal imperative to help those veterans who are ready to share their stories.

It’s that seriousness of purpose, to create a private resource for future use, the Veterans History Project offers individuals around the country. We already have more than 115,000 such individual perspectives, and that gives us the opportunity to share the wealth of these collections.  

How does the project handle contributions?

Individuals may want to start by conversing with the veterans in their lives or by finding the collection of a veteran.  

To what use does the project put such memories?

People use the Veterans History Project—often online and sometimes in person here at the Folklife Center Reading Room—for a variety of reasons. More than 70 percent of our materials (letters, photographs, audio and video interviews, etc.) are digitized, and more than 3 million annual visitors come to the website. They’re using our materials for everything from school projects to enlivening curricula. Recently researchers have conducted postdoctoral research on desegregation during the Korean War. The project is also useful for beginning deeper conversations among friends and family members.

In this time of AI [artificial intelligence], the collection is a primary resource from those who had the lived experience. What did they hear? What did they see? How did they keep in touch with loved ones? These are the kind of questions we pose.  

What was unique about the Korean War experience?

Perhaps the extraordinary scope of injuries service members suffered because of the cold. Consider the Borinqueneers [65th U.S. Infantry Regiment], out of Puerto Rico, many of whom had never seen snow. On crossing the seas, they arrived in these extreme conditions, and it’s all so foreign. They received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2014, and we are fortunate to have memories from 20 Borinqueneers in our collection.  

Recently, the last American fighter ace of the Korean War died. Are you concerned about the time constraints you face?

Yes. The weight of that actuarial reality was quite heavy on World War I veterans. We had the pleasure to work with Frank Buckles [see “Frank Buckles, 110, Last of the Doughboys,” by David Lauterborn, on HistoryNet.com] several times, and he became sort of an emblem of his cohort, if you will. That was a heavy weight on him, one that he did not shy from.

The burden now is on people like me, you, your readers, to make sure we do sit down with the veterans in our lives. We want people 15 and up to think about doing that.  

What about the memories of U.N. personnel from other nations who served in Korea?

The legislation for the Veterans History Project is very clear. It limits our mission to those who served the U.S. military in uniform. That does include commissioned officers of the U.S. Public Health Service, an often forgotten uniformed service. We cannot accept the collections of Allies who served alongside U.S. troops. However, we do collaborate with other organizations within our sphere. For instance, in cooperation with the Korean Library Association we held an adjunct activity at the Library of Congress, a two-day symposium.  

Do you accept contributions from Gold Star families?

We do. The legislation for the Veterans History Project was amended in 2016 with a new piece of legislation called the Gold Star Families Voices Act. Before that we accepted collections of certain deceased members, including photographs or a journal, diary or unpublished memoir that could capture the first-person perspective.

However, the 2016 legislation put a fine point on a definition for Gold Star families to contribute. Under the Gold Star Family Voices Act, those participating as either interviewers or interviewees must be 18 or older, as one is speaking about a situation that involves trauma. Our definition calls for collections of 10 or more photographs or 20 or more pages of letters or a journal or unpublished memoir. The other way to start a collection is to submit 30 or more minutes of audio or video interviews. This enables us to gain a full perspective of a veterans’ experience, whether they are living or deceased.  

Where can an interested veteran or family member get more information?

There is all sorts of information on our website [loc.gov/vets]. They should also feel free to come to our information center at the Library of Congress [101 Independence Ave. SW, Washington, D.C.], with extended hours on Thursdays until 8 p.m.

This interview appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Military History magazine.

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Monogram released their 1/48-scale Grumman F9F-5 Panther in 1990. While newcomer Trumpeter has released two other versions of the jet, both are earlier editions of the fighter. To build the later F9F-5, the classic Monogram kit is still the way to go. The subject of this model is the F9F-5 Panther that Lieutenant Royce Williams flew on November 18, 1952, when he downed four Soviet MiG-15s, as covered “The Secret Dogfight” from the Winter 2023 issue of Aviation History

Start with the cockpit, painting the one piece “tub” an interior chromate green (FS 34151). Do the same with the interior cockpit walls inside the fuselage halves. The ejection seat is a nicely detailed four-piece affair. Paint the seat a medium sea gray and drybrush the details with an aluminum color to show some typical wear. Add a harness and seatbelts for some extra interest. Use a dark wash to highlight the raised detail on the control panels and pick out dials and switches with white paint on the tip of a toothpick.

Next, assemble the nose gear and its wheel well. At this point, leave the tire and oleo linkage for later. Cement the tailpipe and the arresting hook to the left fuselage half. Don’t forget to add weight to the nose to make sure the jet isn’t a “tail sitter.” Small lead fishing sinkers embedded in a piece of putty will work just fine. Attach the finished cockpit and nose gear assembly and bring the two halves of the fuselage together, and then then set this aside.

The instructions call for adding the four machine guns in the nose before completing the fuselage. Save those parts for later; it will make painting the fuselage easier if you don’t have to mask those tiny pieces.

After the fuselage is dry, attach the bottom half of the wing. Open up the holes that will indicate where weapons pylons will be attached. The Panther can carry a variety of bombs and rockets that are included in the kit. Follow the instructions and check your research to decide how you want to display the finished model. Add the top half of each wing and use a little putty on the seams.

Attach the horizontal stabilizers and sand the overall jet, smoothing out the seams and getting it ready for some paint.

By the end of World War II the Navy had adopted an overall glossy sea blue (FS 15042) for their aircraft, a color scheme that lasted well into the 1950s. Mask off the nose gear and the cockpit, then lay down the dark blue color. After the model has dried thoroughly, paint the wheel wells interior chromate green (FS 34151). Paint the area that will be covered by the jet’s speed brakes insignia red (FS 31136). Give the finished assembly a coat of clear gloss and set the model aside.

Next, paint and assemble the landing gear. The struts should be chromate green and the oleo a chrome silver. Paint the tires a black/brown “rubber” color with aluminum hubs. Assemble the bombs and rockets. The 500-lb. bombs should be an olive drab color with a yellow band indicating that the weapon is “live.” Aftermarket decals of typical bomb stencils are a nice touch. Each rocket should have aluminum-colored fins, a light gray body and an olive drab warhead. A dab of silver on the tip of the rocket looks like the weapon’s fuse. Give the landing gear and the weapons a quick coat of flat varnish.

In 2022 the International Plastic Modelers Society (IPMS) released an excellent decal sheet with markings for six different MiG killers from the Korean War. One of the aircraft included is the our model’s subject Royce Williams’s Panther.

Carefully and methodically add the markings to the jet. These decals look great and need only a little bit of a setting solution help them snuggle into the surface detail. Don’t rush the process. It’s tempting to do that as the model approaches the finish line, but be sure to walk away from time to time and let those decals set.

With the markings on and another coat of clear varnish, it’s time to attach the landing gear and the two speed brakes underneath the airplane. Cement the sway braces to the two inboard weapons pylons and attach the 500-lb. bombs, and then add the rockets to their pylons. Don’t forget the tiny bits—the pitot tube under the left wing, the four .50-caliber machine guns slipped into their place in the nose and, of course, the gunsight.

A little moderate weathering gives the jet the look it might have had aboard the USS Oriskany in November 1952. Accent a few panel lines, particularly the joint where the wings fold. A bit of soot and a dark wash, and some light paint chipping helps bring the model to life.

Carefully mask the clear canopy pieces and paint them the same dark blue as the rest of the airplane. Cement the forward part of the canopy using glue especially made for clear plastic or white school glue. Add the rear canopy, positioning it slid back to show off the hard work in the cockpit. Your Grumman F9F-5 Panther is now ready to head to the catapult for its next sortie. It will make a great addition to a collection of early Navy jet aircraft.

From 1794, when French balloonists dropped messages from the basket of l’Entreprenant to report on Austrian troop movements to the first use of Morse code conveyed by electrical cables by Union aeronauts in 1861, armies developed means of coordinating intelligence gathered from the air to their forces on the ground quickly enough for it to be useful. The airplane entered the picture in 1911 during the Italian invasion of Ottoman-held Libya, when the first scouting flight was followed within days by the first hand-dropped explosives. In 1912 British experiments with wireless signaling enabled the airplane to provide troops and artillerists what they needed to know in real time, and throughout World War I improvements in the aircraft led to more means of harnessing their potential to provide well-coordinated close air support. By 1918 that included airdrops of ammunition and supplies, as well as specialized ground attack planes, taking the fight down on the enemy.

Introduced to military use during World War II and made practical during the Korean War, the helicopter became an indispensable supplement to the airplane, with the added advantage of being able to land and depart from terrain where an airplane could not—a critical asset to which many a medevaced soldier owed his life.

Retired Brig. Gen. Theodore Shigeru Kanamine, the first active-duty Japanese-American general in the U.S. Army, died at his home last Thursday after a brief battle with cancer. He was 93.

Born in North Hollywood, California, Kanamine often reflected on growing up in an entertainment-rich area, where he and other neighborhood kids would frequently receive invites from Walt Disney Studios to view unfinished cartoons right down the hill from his family’s home. His pleasant childhood, however, would be interrupted in December 1941 following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

With President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066 in 1942, the Kanamine family — his two parents, younger sister and himself — were relocated to an internment camp in Jerome, Arkansas, where they would remain for two years until a lawyer from Nebraska took the family into his home.

Kanamine would go on to major in criminal psychology and attend law school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Upon finishing his studies in 1954, Kanamine married Mary Stuben. The two were wed right across the Nebraska border in Council Bluffs, Iowa, due to Nebraska laws that banned interracial marriage.

One year later, Kanamine answered the call to serve and commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Military Police Corps.

Kanamine deployed in both the Korean War and Vietnam War, where he was an aide to 4-star Gen. Creighton Abrams. He later took command of the 716th Military Police Battalion, which provided security to the capital city of Saigon.

Once he returned stateside, Kanamine took charge of the Army Criminal Investigation Division’s look into the Mỹ Lai massacre. He concluded his 28 years in the military as chief of staff of the First Army at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Discussing his career in a 2012 interview with Discover Nikkei, Kanamine credited his success to “personal discipline to know what is right and develop the skills necessary to do whatever the task is in the best way you know how.

“This reflects my development in the military and the way I live my life today,” he said during the interview. “I believe in the philosophy of ‘Duty – Honor – Country.’ I think my family and friends know this.”

Kanamine’s eldest son and namesake, retired Col. Theodore Kanamine, told Military Times he hopes people will remember his father for the way he listened and responded to people, even while disagreeing.

“He was a very kind and civilized person,” the younger Kamanine said. “I don’t think he ever responded very angrily, aggressively. Even if he felt those [inclinations], he was always very measured in what he did, and I think one of the things he taught us is things aren’t always as they initially present themselves. Withhold your judgement until you get the whole side of the story.”

Kanamine’s many awards include the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Bronze Star, and a Meritorious Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster.

He is survived by his wife, their five children, 12 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

“You are about to embark on a crusade, a crusade as important to the world as was the great crusade years ago when it became necessary to eliminate certain people, the Barbarians, who stood in the way of Christianity. So today we have something standing in the way of the peace of this world and the enjoyment of freedom. The Nazis. When you come face to face with him, don’t think of him as a person or a human being, but as something in the way of this peace and freedom and eliminate him at once.”

No, that was not Gen. George S. Patton Jr. speaking. However it is a reminder to us that “Old Blood and Guts” had his share of disciples and kindred spirits. In this case, it was Col. John W. O’Daniel, who would become famously known as “Iron Mike” to his men, addressing Task Force 168 before unleashing that unit on Vichy French costal defenses west of Algiers in November 1942.

On the 22nd he was promoted to brigadier general. On June 25, 1943 he went from Invasion Training for the upcoming landings on Sicily to deputy commander of the unit with which his name is most associated, the 3rd Infantry Division.

Through much of Sharpen Your Bayonets!, author Timothy R. Stoy apologetically confesses the limits of his source material and how it leaves much of his biography of this hitherto overlooked commander to speculation. 

Still, he presents enough—including plenty from the general himself—to present a classic career of a top-notch administrator, a strict disciplinarian, an equally strict believer in Russian general Aleksandr Suvorov’s philosophy of “train hard, fight easy,” and an aggressive combat commander, all elements in a lifetime of successful leadership. 

Overcoming his fears on his first day of battle at the start of the St. Mihiel offensive on Sept. 12, 1918, he went on to distinction in World War II and as I Corps commander in Korea. 

The author does note, however, that his transfer of hatred from Nazism to communism gave him a “one-size-fits-all” approach that fell short when advising the French army and training the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. In sum, however, O’Daniel’s life and times were consistently Pattonesque.

Sharpen Your Bayonets

A biography of Lieutenant General John Wilson “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, Commander, 3rd Infantry Division in World War II
by Lt. Col. (Ret.) Timothy R. Stoy and Maj. Gen. Anthony A. Cucolo III

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On the night of Jan. 17, 1968, 31 commandos from the North Korean Peoples’ Army (KPA) cut holes in the chain-link fence running along the southern edge of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and crawled past sleeping U.S. soldiers. Their mission was to infiltrate Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea (ROK), and kill President Park Chung-hee. 

It was the most audacious act the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (DPRK) had initiated since the 1950 invasion of the ROK. The death of Park was intended to spark a popular uprising and allow communist sympathizers to take control of the government. This endeavor was the defining event of the little-known Second Korean Conflict from November 1966 to December 1969. 

Except for the Americans who served in it and the families of 75 military personnel killed in action, details of the assassination attempt and the three-year struggle against North Korean aggression were lost in the turbulence of the 1960s. The Vietnam War relegated U.S. military operations in Korea to a holding action, underfunded by the Department of Defense, downplayed by Washington bureaucrats and out of the sight of the American people.

The Blue House Raid

For South Koreans, the Second Korean Conflict was a war of national survival. It cost the lives of 270 soldiers and 75 civilians. Memories of the fallen, particularly of those who died thwarting the attempt on President Park’s life, are still revered. 

Known as the Blue House Raid, this blow came close to fracturing the ROK-U.S. alliance and was a grave embarrassment for the United States. 

The Korean Armistice Agreement, signed July 27, 1953, ended three years of fighting that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians. The agreement established a Military Demarcation Line (MDL) with a two-kilometer buffer area, a demilitarized zone (DMZ), on either side. The 151-mile MDL became the de facto border between North and South Korea. 

Armistice rules limited the number of troops and types of weapons allowed in the DMZ. The intent was for small constabulary formations to be there. From the outset, the KPA flouted those provisions and built fortified outposts manned by heavily armed troops who regularly fired across the MDL.

In the decade following the armistice, seven G.I.s, 13 ROK soldiers and eight KPA fighters were killed in DMZ-related skirmishes. Authorities in Washington were not overly concerned and attributed the casualties to lingering animosity from the Korean War.

North Korea’s Assassination Plot

North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung was obsessed with uniting the two Koreas under communist rule. By the mid-1960s he faced a formidable opponent. The ROK Army rivaled the KPA in quality and numbers. South Korea’s economy had grown to double the size of its northern adversary. ROK defenses were augmented by 50,000 U.S. troops, including the 2nd and 7th Infantry divisions, whose units were responsible for 18.5 miles of the DMZ. Against such strength, Kim turned to unconventional warfare to destabilize South Korea, initially setting 1968 as the campaign start date. 

Kim Il-sung knew hit-and-run engagements would not overwhelm the ROK government. His opponent was an autocratic strongman, President Park Chung-hee, a former general who led a military coup in 1961, had a firm grip on power and used draconian measures to curb opposition. However, during his presidency, quality of life for average citizens vastly improved due to the growing economy. Hence, conditions for a viable insurgency did not exist.

Kim concluded that only Park Chung-hee’s violent death would create a political vacuum and lead to an uprising to ultimately allow him to rule the Korean peninsula. But planning and training for such a dangerous act would take time.World events accelerated Kim’s plans. By late 1966, the United States was immersed in Vietnam where its military commitment exceeded 300,000 and was increasing. For the first time, South Korea diverted forces from homeland defense and sent 50,000 men to assist the U.S. in Southeast Asia. 

North Korea’s dictator believed the time was right to strike. The opening salvo of the Second Korean Conflict was fired on Nov. 2, 1966, during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s visit to Seoul. A U.S. Army patrol from the 2nd Infantry Division was ambushed by the KPA. Seven men were killed while one played dead and escaped with multiple wounds. Further east, an ROK squad was surprised by North Koreans and suffered two killed. This was front-page news for a day. Yet once Johnson returned to Washington, Vietnam again dominated U.S. headlines. 

Rookies and Mistakes

Gen. Charles H. Bonesteel III, the commander of all United Nations forces in Korea, believed this aggression was part of a new strategy aimed at undermining the ROK government and eroding U.S. will. A Rhodes scholar from West Point’s class of 1931, Bonesteel was a brilliant officer who analyzed Kim’s oratory plus intelligence reports. His options to counter the new threat were limited because most resources, including experienced leaders, new equipment, spare parts and dollars, were earmarked for Vietnam. When he took command on Sept. 1, 1966, his charter from the Secretary of Defense contained explicit instructions not to adversely affect the Vietnam effort. 

The theater was in a poor state of readiness. Most helicopters had been sent to Vietnam and modernization plans were on hold. American troops still carried the 7.62mm M14 rifle instead of the lighter M16. Facilities, especially the Quonset huts erected after the Korean War, suffered due to lack of maintenance money for basic repairs or upgrades. Shortages of spare parts left many vehicles non-operational.

U.S. Army personnel issues exacerbated the logistical problems. To expand the nation’s manpower pool, enlistment and induction standards were lowered, forcing the Selective Service to draft men who should never have been in the armed forces. Lack of experienced leaders had the biggest impact on combat effectiveness. On the DMZ, a single lieutenant colonel and lieutenants manned infantry battalions.

As captains completed their tours in Korea in 1966, they were replaced by second lieutenants. The personnel pipeline had barely enough infantry captains to fill the requisitions for Vietnam and Korea took the shortfall. As a result, young officers on their first assignments were commanding companies—positions normally held by captains. Rookie leaders made mistakes inevitable. 

The Infiltrator problem

Clashes with unidentified infiltrators, called UIs, had not abated since President Johnson’s visit. Bonesteel proposed building a barrier and obstacles to impede enemy infiltration, and to enhance surveillance. He emphasized “impede” since no obstacle would stop determined infiltrators. The concept centered on a series of platoon guard posts inside the DMZ and a 10-foot-high chain link fence along the southern trace of the zone. Watchtowers were to be constructed along the fence. Patrols would be increased. Improved bunkers and firing positions would be emplaced so the entire fence was under observation. Sensors, mines and mechanized quick reaction units were part of the mix.

The general ordered two more U.S. infantry battalions to the DMZ, bringing the total to five. But money was required and there was nothing in the budget to cover the $30 million ($274 million today) needed to start the project. The proposal was derided inside the Department of Defense and in the press as “Bonesteel’s Folly.” Yet snide comments did not dissuade the general.

Knowing how to work the bureaucracy, Bonesteel obtained research and development funds for a “DMZ Barrier Test.” He knew if the enterprise started in the U.S. sector, “getting a foot under the tent flap” he called it, the concept could ultimately expand to encompass the entire DMZ.

Construction began in summer 1967. Immediately GIs named it “The Barrier.” While work was in progress, 11 more U.S. soldiers were killed. Exasperated by the shortage of seasoned infantry company commanders, Bonesteel went directly to the Chief of Staff of the Army, Gen. Harold K. Johnson, and asked for 40 infantry captains with Vietnam combat service to fill the void. Johnson was convinced and told the personnel people to make it happen. Captains returning from Vietnam in the summer and fall of 1966 began arriving in Korea in November 1967 as the first stage of the Barrier was completed. 

These company commanders were sorely needed. The year 1967 saw a sevenfold increase in firefights, with 150 occurring in the U.S. sector alone. Sixteen GIs were killed and 51 seriously wounded. The ROK Army suffered more grievously with 115 KIA and 243 wounded. Unlike Vietnam, where body counts were liberally estimated, the corpses of 228 North Korean soldiers killed were dragged to central locations for verification. 

The Commandos Strike

On Jan. 17, 1968, 31 communist commandos crossed over the border, dramatically changing the tenor of operations. They were headed for the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential residence distinguished by its bright roof tiles. The North Korean general who oversaw their six months of training gave the final briefing, exhorting them to “cut off the head of Park Chung-hee.” Notwithstanding fiery rhetoric, the team’s primary weapon for the assassination was the obsolete Soviet submachine gun, the PPSh-43, instead of the more modern AK-47.

North Korean scouts reconnoitered the route through the DMZ and chose rugged terrain in the eastern portion of the 2nd Infantry Division’s area of responsibility. Their approach to the barrier fence was along brush-covered ground where U.S. soldiers were lackadaisical and rarely checked by leaders.

The GIs from B Company, 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry were more concerned with staying warm during the sub-zero winter nights than being observant. 

Weeks of careful planning paid off. The team was undetected as it moved up to the fence and cut several holes in it, allowing all 31 men to slip through. There was no report the following morning citing the breach. Failure to raise an alarm allowed the infiltrators to cross the partially frozen Imjin River and follow isolated mountain trails to Seoul, located 35 miles away. 

Foiled by Woodcutters

The plan unraveled on the afternoon of Jan. 19 when four South Korean woodcutters stumbled on the raiders’ mountain “hide” position. The bewildered woodsmen were held at gunpoint and lectured on the virtues of Kim Il-sung’s communist “utopia,” and then were released with the admonishment to tell no one what they had seen. This was a fatal error. It was also astonishing behavior for ruthless fighters trained to kill without provocation.

The woodcutters immediately went to the police and apprised them there were “many” North Koreans in the mountains. A nationwide alarm was sounded. No one knew President Park was the target. Throughout South Korea, all police and military forces were placed on high alert.

The North Korean team assumed the woodcutters did as they were told and pressed onward, thinking their presence was still secret. In the early evening of Jan. 20, two and three-man cells slipped into Seoul and rendezvoused at a safe house. They were alarmed by the amount of security around government facilities and the number of soldiers and policemen patrolling the streets.

Even though the odds were against them, they decided to continue the mission, posing as a returning patrol and moving to the Blue House. 

An inquisitive police contingent stopped them at a checkpoint 800 meters from their goal. Their faltering answers to questions were suspicious. The police captain drew his pistol and was killed instantly as a major firefight erupted. The raiders scattered, trying to escape, leaving behind two dead.

Shooting continued throughout the night as the police and soldiers pursed groups of fleeing commandos. Two-dozen innocent civilians caught in crossfire while riding on a municipal bus were among the casualties.

A Diplomatic Crisis

At first light, South Korean and U.S. soldiers began scouring the mountains surrounding the capital. Clerks, cooks and mechanics were formed into provisional platoons on the DMZ to beef up surveillance and stop any escapees.

Within days, 29 raiders were killed, one escaped to North Korea and one was captured. Yet it was a costly victory—68 South Koreans (military, police and civilians) and three Americans were killed. Scores more were wounded.

The captive’s debriefing created a crisis in confidence between the Republic of Korea and the United States. The KPA lieutenant, Kim Shin-jo, was brought to the DMZ where he identified the exact location they cut the Barrier fence.

Not only had the guards been sleeping, but the chain-link fence was crudely repaired, indicating that the holes had been discovered and someone had tried to cover them up. If leaders had checked their men and the fence in accord with the division’s standard operating procedure, this would not have happened.

South Korean officials were infuriated by this dereliction of duty and threatened to withdraw Korean forces from Vietnam, claiming U.S. soldiers were incapable of defending Korea.

News of the fiasco spread through the 2nd Infantry Division. Retired Col. William A. “Bud” Henry, then a captain and a company commander in an adjacent infantry battalion, recalled: “It was a terrible screw-up…bad enough troops were sleeping on duty but far worse when they found the holes in the fence, fixed them and did not report it. The troops pretended nothing happened and probably hoped the whole thing would go away…We assumed somebody was going to jail over it.”

The Tet Offensive

One bad thing followed another. On Jan. 23, as details about the Blue House Raid were being sorted, North Korea’snavy seized the USS Pueblo, an intelligence ship sailing in the Sea of Japan. One U.S. sailor was killed and 82 crewmen were taken hostage. No one in South Korea knew of the ship’s presence,negating the possibility of mounting a rescue. Again the United States appeared impotent and incompetent. 

A week later, the Tet Offensive engulfed Vietnam. On Jan. 30-31, nationwide attacks struck 42 cities and the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. The allies quickly gained the upper hand, but fighting in the ancient capital of Hue dragged on for a month. American TV audiences were saturated with combat footage. Tet was a watershed event because the military success blunting the war’s largest offensive failed to dampen negative political fallout. Previous supporters of the war now viewed it as unwinnable.

To Park Chung-hee and his generals, the Tet Offensive was a sideshow. They deemed the Blue House Raid and the Pueblo hijacking as acts of war and the lack of American retaliation as inexcusable. Their inflammatory statements denigrating the United States brought the relationship between the countries to a new low. 

Johnson had his hands full in Vietnam and was in no position to start another war with North Korea. He sent his personal emissary, Cyrus Vance, to placate Park with a $100M military aid package ($850M in today’s dollars). Showing his disdain, Park initially refused to see Vance but ultimately relented. After several days of contentious discussions, relations between the two countries were patched up. Yet the alliance remained badly frayed.

Tet and the Pueblo diverted the attention of journalists who might have dug into rumors of a DMZ cover-up and published the story in New York Times headlines. Yet the current big story was in Vietnam. Talk of the DMZ breach died a natural death and U.S. authorities were glad to see potential scrutiny go away.

There were no reliefs or courts-martial in the 2nd Infantry Division. Bonesteel used transfers and tour curtailments to hasten the departure of weak officers in the 2nd Battalion. He believed the acrimony between the United States and the Republic of Korea did not need further incitement by airing more dirty laundry with public punishments. Soon there were new leaders in the battalion and the cover-up was not mentioned in official postmortems.

Shows of Force

Kim Il-sung suffered no consequences for his actions. Emboldened, he stepped up pressure on South Korea. On April 21, an outnumbered U.S. patrol fought 50 North Koreans. Five KPA soldiers were killed while the U.S. sustained one KIA and three wounded. It was one of 236 DMZ firefights in 1968 that resulted in 17 more Americans and 145 South Korean soldiers killed. Yet momentum had shifted in favor of the allies; 321 KPA fighters were killed and all enemy forays across the MDL were repelled.

Despite failures, North Korea’s dictator would not give up. Now he faced a new U.S. president, Richard M. Nixon, who ordered fighter aircraft and a large contingent from the 82nd Airborne Division to South Korea for a March 1969 joint training exercise. This show of the alliance’s strength unsettled Kim, who believed it was a precursor to an all-out invasion of North Korea. 

He rolled the dice one more time with a premeditated attack on the United States. On April 15, Kim Il-sung’s birthday, two MiG-21 fighters shot down a U.S. Navy intelligence aircraft 95 miles off the coast of the DPRK. Thirty-one U.S. servicemen died.

President Nixon was irate but opted for a show of force versus bombing North Korea. He immediately resumed intelligence flights but they were escorted by heavily armed jet fighters. Nixon ordered a naval task force of two carrier battle groups into the Sea of Japan. Kim declined to test his enemy further.

In fall 1969, the communist dictator ordered a decrease in offensive activity and purged KPA leadership. Failure had dire consequences in Kim’s hermit kingdom. Many high-ranking military officers were executed or condemned to life in prison. 

The general who planned the Blue House Raid was the first to face torture and the firing squad. At the time, no one realized United Nations troops had defeated the DPRK’s unconventional warfare campaign…except Kim Il-sung.

The Blue House Raid and that period of violence are described in Maj. Daniel Bolger’s 1991 study, “Scenes from an Unfinished War: Low Intensity Conflict in Korea, 1966-1969.” Even in his account, there is no mention of deception on the DMZ. Misguided efforts of a few U.S. soldiers were swept away, overshadowed by the Pueblo and 3600 Americans killed during the Tet Offensive. In his summary, Bolger stated, “the Second Korean Conflict has drifted into obscurity, a curious episode, a footnote to the Vietnam era.”

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Throughout the history of human warfare the backbone of any army has been the common soldier, who has had to endure terrifying inventions—from the chariot to the mounted cavalryman to the motorized armored fighting vehicle—an enemy develops to gain an edge over him. Against every such juggernaut, however, the infantryman hasn’t been entirely helpless—not as long as his own mad scientists have applied their ingenuity to develop countermeasures and increase his odds of survival.

On Sept. 15, 1916, Britain introduced its Mark I tank at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, amid the Somme campaign, with modest success. It wasn’t long before the Germans tried to counter it with the steel-cored K (Kern, or “core”) bullet, a 7.92×57 mm round able to pierce tank armor when fired from a standard Mauser Gewehr 98 rifle. In 1918, as the Allies rolled out tanks with thicker armor, Mauser introduced the specialized T-Gewehr rifle, firing a 13.2×92 mm TuF (Tank und Flieger, or “tank and plane”) round. Thereafter, the arms race was on, as opponents rushed to counter newer, deadlier armored vehicles with more sophisticated “equalizers” intended to give the infantryman a chance of holding his ground. Tanks have since acquired their share of enhanced protection. But aided by such pivotal creations as rocket propulsion, the shaped charge and computerized guidance systems, the current species of “ground pounder” carries his own means to pound back.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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Richard Edward Cavazos, born Jan. 31, 1929, was a sixth-generation Texan of Mexican American descent related to Francita Alvarez, known as the “Angel of Goliad” for persuading a Mexican officer not to kill Texas prisoners of war in the Goliad Massacre of 1836 during the Texas Revolution. Cavazos was born in Kingsville and grew up on the King Ranch, where his father, a World War I veteran, was employed.

Cavazos entered Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech University) and graduated in 1951, two years behind older brother Lauro, who became secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan and was the first person of Hispanic descent to serve in a president’s Cabinet.

Richard Cavazos went to college on a football scholarship, but his hopes for a football career ended when he broke a leg during his sophomore year. He enrolled in the Army ROTC and was commissioned as a distinguished graduate. After basic officer training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and jump school, he deployed to Korea in 1952 as a first lieutenant in Company E of the largely Puerto Rican 65th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division.

On Feb. 25, 1953, Cavazos saw a wounded enemy soldier near his position and ran alone through a blanket of hostile fire to return with a valuable prisoner. For his actions he was awarded a Silver Star. Four months later, on June 14, 1953, Cavazos led his company through a heavy barrage in three different assaults on an enemy position, each time destroying vital personnel and equipment. When the company withdrew, he remained behind alone to locate and evacuate five wounded comrades. These heroics resulted in a Distinguished Service Cross.

Cavazos returned to combat 14 years later as a lieutenant colonel commanding the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, in Vietnam. On Oct. 30, 1967, near Loc Ninh, north of Saigon about 12 miles from Cambodia, one of his companies came under fire on a hillside during a reconnaissance mission.

The colonel led his other elements forward to aid the company under assault. While continuously exposed to enemy fire and shrapnel from exploding grenades, Cavazos directed his troops in a counterattack. As enemy soldiers left their fortified positions, he called in airstrikes and artillery fire to cut off their line of retreat before personally leading an assault on the enemy positions.

Cavazos was awarded a second Distinguished Service Cross. The citation states: “When the fighting reached such close quarters that supporting fire could no longer be used, he completely disregarded his own safety and personally led a determined assault on the enemy positions. The assault was carried out with such force and aggressiveness that the Viet Cong were overrun and fled their trenches. Colonel Cavazos then directed artillery fire on the hilltop, and the insurgents were destroyed as they ran.”

Before his tour in Vietnam ended, Cavazos received another Silver Star. In addition to getting two Distinguished Service Crosses and two Silver Stars in two wars, Cavazos collected a Distinguished Flying Cross, five Bronze Stars, including at least one for valor, and the Purple Heart. He was also authorized a Combat Infantryman’s Badge with one star, which denoted service as an Army infantryman in two wars.

In 1976 Cavazos was appointed a brigadier general, becoming the first Hispanic American general in the U.S. Army. Six years later he received his fourth star, again making history.

After more than 30 years of service, he retired in 1984. Throughout his military career, Cavazos claimed San Antonio as his home, the place where his wife lived and his four children grew up. He died on Oct. 29, 2017, and was buried at San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.

In 2021, Congress created a commission to recommend new names for Army bases that honor Confederate leaders, including Fort Hood, a Texas base memorializing Gen. John Bell Hood. The recommendations, announced in May 2022, would rename that base to honor Cavazos.

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On the evening of Oct. 1, 1950, the submarine USS Perch surfaced 4 miles off the east coast of North Korea. A veteran of World War II combat against Japan, the warship had been converted into a troop transport and in place of torpedo tubes carried troops—67 members of Britain’s 41 (Independent) Commando, Royal Marines. Led by Lt. Col. Douglas B. Drysdale, the men were among the first members of their service to go into action behind enemy lines in the Korean War. Their target that night was a rail line used by the North Koreans to transport supplies and personnel south.

The commandos busied themselves retrieving a 24-foot motorboat, dubbed the “skimmer,” and inflatable rafts from an airtight 36-foot-long cylindrical cargo hangar welded to the submarine’s aft deck—a feature that led the marines to dub the vessel the “Pregnant Perch.” With the boats in the water, the skimmer towed the rafts toward the beach while Perch waited on the surface. Once ashore the raiders planted explosives along the tracks in tunnels and an adjoining culvert, though the latter presented an unexpected challenge. “The plan was to crawl to the center [of the culvert], then pack in as much explosives as possible,” commando Fred Hayhurst recalled. “The culvert, however, housed years and years of rotting, smelly rubbish. The first task was to clear some of the obstacles, then crawl through the slimy mess with packs of explosives.”

Detonated as planned, the explosives destroyed a long section of railway, and the raiders made it back to Perch in the predawn darkness. They returned with the body of Peter R. Jones, the first Royal Marine casualty of the war, who’d been killed during a firefight with North Korean troops. Despite that loss—and others to come—the successful raid marked the beginning of a highly effective covert war carried out by Britain’s famed “green berets.” 

Assembling the Team

The Royal Marines’ participation in the Korean War officially began just two months before the rail line attack with the Aug. 16, 1950, formation of 41 (Independent) Commando at Bickleigh Barracks, on the outskirts of Plymouth in southwest England. The unit’s hasty creation stemmed from a request by Vice Adm. C. Turner Joy, commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Far East, for a raiding force to disrupt enemy supply lines on North Korea’s east coast. Amphibious raiding was exactly the type of operation at which the British commandos excelled, and Royal Navy Vice Adm. Sir Patrick Brind offered such a force to the United Nations Command.

The only problem was that 3 Commando Brigade—the Royal Marines’ primary field formation—was already battling communist guerrillas in Malaya. The marines were thus forced to recruit volunteers (though few former members of 41 Commando recall “volunteering”) from three different groups. The first were marines under Drysdale from the commando school at Bickleigh Barracks. The second comprised sailors and marines of the British Pacific Fleet, who became known as the “Fleet Volunteers.” The final volunteers were marines en route to Malaya aboard the troopship Devonshire who were diverted to Japan.

Assembling the Fleet Volunteers and Devonshire men in Japan was easy enough. Deploying those at Bickleigh Barracks was more complicated. The British-based marines ultimately flew to Japan via a chartered civilian flight. So as not to attract attention during fueling stops in neutral countries, they traveled in civilian clothes. Their weak disguise likely fooled few onlookers, however, given that most of the men wore their combat boots.

All three marine groups eventually gathered in Japan at Camp McGill, a U.S. Army training facility near the sprawling American naval base at Yokosuka. As 41 Commando would be under U.S. naval operational command, the British troops were issued American uniforms, weapons and equipment, though they retained their boots and distinctive green berets. Accents aside, there was little to distinguish them from their American counterparts. After familiarizing themselves with the weapons, the marines underwent rigorous training on raiding techniques. By late September elements of 41 Commando were ready for operations. 

The Train Wreckers

The first members of 41 Commando to see action belonged to Poundforce, a 14-man team under the command of Lt. Edgar Pounds. Attached to a U.S. Army Ranger battalion, Poundforce supported the Inchon landings by conducting a diversionary raid along the Korean west coast on the night of September 12/13. Following the raid, Poundforce was attached to the U.S. 1st Marine Division (1st MARDIV), which by month’s end helped liberate Seoul.

Following the October 1/2 raid from Perch, Drysdale’s second-in-command, Maj. Dennis Aldridge, led two separate raids on October 5 and 6 by 125 men of the commandos’ C and D Troops. Put ashore by landing craft from the U.S. high-speed transports Bass and Wantuck, the raiders detonated 4 tons of explosives beneath bridges and culverts and in tunnels along the same key rail line. Another commando was killed, but that operation was also successful. It and further raids on the North Korean rail system led 41 Commando to be widely referred to as the “Train Wreckers.”

As U.N. forces rapidly advanced northward up the Korean Peninsula, opportunities for coastal raiding tapered off, and 41 Commando was put under the command of 1st MARDIV, the latter having transferred east following the liberation of Seoul. Numbering just 235 men, 41 Commando was to serve as a reconnaissance company on the division’s left flank as it advanced north from Yudam-ni.

After enjoying Thanksgiving with their American brothers-in-arms at Hungnam, the men of 41 Commando boarded twenty-two 2½-ton trucks and, accompanied by a weapons carrier and Drysdale’s jeep, traveled north through Funchilin Pass to Koto-ri. On their arrival famed World War II U.S. Marine combat leader Col. Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment, informed Drysdale that upward of 120,000 Chinese troops had attacked the U.S. X Corps along a broad front west and south of the Chosin Reservoir, blocking the road to the north. 

As part of a plan for the 1st MARDIV to fight its way through to Hagaru-ri, at the southern tip of the reservoir, the Royal Marines formed the nucleus of Task Force Drysdale, which included Company G, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines; Company B, 3rd Battalion, 31st U.S. Infantry; and 1st MARDIV support elements. The task force—922 men and 141 vehicles under Drysdale’s command—began its advance at 9:30 a.m. November 29, with 41 Commando and Company G leading the way.

Task Force Drysdale had advanced not 2 miles before its lead elements contacted the Chinese. Enemy resistance was heavy, but 17 tanks pushed up the line drove back the Chinese. The task force resumed its advance at 1:50 p.m. and continued until Drysdale called a halt at 4:15 to confer with 1st MARDIV headquarters. Increasingly concerned the Chinese might capture Hagaru-ri, division commander Maj. Gen. Oliver P. Smith ordered Drysdale to press on. As soon as the tanks had refueled, the task force resumed its advance. When Drysdale asked the commander of the armored element to disperse his vehicles throughout the convoy, the latter refused, fearing individual tanks would be easier for the Chinese to pick off. His decision proved disastrous. Halfway to Hagaru-ri the convoy entered a defile and came under ambush by the Chinese, who hit a truck with a mortar round, splitting the column.

“The trucks jerked to a halt,” Royal Marine Dave Brady recalled, “and as they did so, there was some fairly intensive firing from the hills alongside.” Tumbling over the side of his truck, Brady heard someone shout, “Get off the road and up the hill!” He did as told and sought cover. “I rolled onto my side and drew my bayonet and, with trembling fingers, after many attempts attached it to my stupidly small carbine. Alongside me was [an American] soldier. His face was cradled in his hands.…I pushed him, and he rolled onto his side, face toward mine, or rather, what was left of his face.”

The latter half of the split column comprised one of 41 Commando’s heavy weapons sections, the assault engineers, most of Company B and elements of Drysdale’s command group. Strung out along the road in several defensive positions, they managed to hold off Chinese assaults throughout the night. Most of the heavy weapons section, led by Cpl. Ernest Cruse, managed to reach Hagaru-ri the next day, albeit reporting many cases of frostbite. Those from the command group, led by Capt. Patrick Ovens, narrowly avoided capture by withdrawing to Koto-ri. Meanwhile, the lead half of the column pressed on under intense Chinese fire until halted by mortar fire less than a mile from Hagaru-ri. Three Royal Marines were killed and several others, including Drysdale, wounded during that stage of the advance. Rallying, the men fought through into town. 

The advance had cost Task Force Drysdale 321 casualties and 75 vehicles. Scarcely 100 members of 41 Commando made it to Hagaru-ri, while 60 fell as casualties. Those in the column managing to reach town were given food and welcome shelter from temperatures that plunged to -24°F. Placed under the command of the U.S. 5th Marines’ Regimental Combat Team (RCT), the surviving Royal Marines were designated as “garrison reserve.” Yet before long they were in action again, launching a counterattack to retake Company G’s left flank on East Hill, a crucial feature in Hagaru-ri’s defenses. 

A Freezing Ordeal

Unknown to the defenders of Hagaru-ri, the Chinese had suffered some 5,000 casualties. Such horrific losses didn’t prevent the enemy from pressing their offensive and rolling back U.N. forces. Farther west Eighth Army had been compelled to withdraw, and three U.S. Army battalions east of the Chosin Reservoir had suffered up to 75 percent casualties. The situation for U.N. forces looked bleak.

During a high-level briefing at Hagaru-ri the commander of X Corps authorized 1st MARDIV commander Smith to destroy his heavy equipment before retiring to Hungnam. But Smith said the division would fight its way out and take its equipment with it. The general also made it clear “withdrawal” was not a word in the Marine Corps vocabulary. The coming move would represent an “advance” to the south.

The U.S. 5th and 7th Marine RCTs at Yudam-ni were first withdrawn south to Hagaru-ri, arriving on December 4 in subzero temperatures to a warm welcome by members of 41 Commando. The next day the Royal Marines tried to recover nine 155 mm howitzers that had earlier been abandoned. The attempt failed, though they later destroyed the guns. On the positive side, U.N. aircraft managed to fly in 537 reinforcements to Hagaru-ri and evacuate a number of casualties—including 25 Royal Marines. 

Smith’s plan to “advance” south called for the besieged garrison at Hagaru-ri to break through to Koto-ri. The 7th Marine RCT was to lead the way with the 5th RCT and 41 Commando acting as a rear guard. The move would be dangerous, though U.S. and British troops would receive air support from carrier-based U.S. Navy and Marine Corps aircraft. The withdrawal began on December 6, with 10,000 men and 1,000 vehicles setting out under constant threat of Chinese attack. “The whole column moved at a very slow pace,” one Royal Marine recalled. “All except the drivers were walking. This was to prevent the enemy getting close enough to toss grenades at the vehicles. It was also to prevent people freezing to death in the backs of trucks.”

The move toward Hungnam ran into a delay, as the Chinese had destroyed a section of bridge at a hydroelectric plant spillway in Funchilin Pass. U.S. engineers rushed to span the gap using steel trackway parachuted into the pass. With repairs completed, 41 Commando moved out of Koto-ri amid a snowstorm on the evening of December 8, tasked with holding high ground along the road ahead to guard against Chinese attack. The next morning the marines turned back to Koto-ri to relieve 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, in defense of the perimeter. Finally, 41 Commando left Koto-ri with the 5th RCT, marching the 23 miles to Hungnam in awful weather conditions. On arrival Drysdale’s men were loaded onto trucks and taken to a tented assembly area. Their ordeal of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir was over. 

On December 11 the remaining elements of 1st MARDIV arrived at Koto-ri. As promised, Smith and his Marines had fought their way out and managed to bring most of their equipment with them. After greeting the battered but unbowed Americans, the men of 41 Commando embarked on transports waiting off the coast at Hungnam, bound first for Pusan and then Masan. All told during the Chosin Reservoir campaign 41 Commando suffered 93 casualties, including most of the assault engineers, signalmen and NCOs of the heavy weapons sections. Thus the unit was withdrawn to Japan. After a period of R&R at Ebisu Camp in suburban Tokyo 41 Commando were sent to HMAS Commonwealth, the Australian naval base at Kure, where they received replacement personnel and equipment. The commando also undertook additional training, for their combat role in Korea was only just beginning.

More Raiding

On April 2, 1951, the reconstituted 41 Commando embarked on the dock landing ship USS Fort Marion and high-speed transport USS Begor to mount another demolition raid. Their target was the coastal rail line near Sorye-dong, North Korea, which the enemy was using to transport men and materiel from Manchuria to Hungnam. The U.S. Navy provided both air and naval gunfire support.

Delayed by thick fog, the raid began just after dawn on April 7. After a two-hour naval bombardment D Troop landed at 8:05 a.m., followed an hour later by the engineers. After blasting out 16 boreholes along a load-bearing railway embankment, the raiders packed each cavity with 80-pound TNT charges. After detonating the initial charges, the team repeated the process, the subsequent explosions opening a gap in the embankment some 100 feet wide and 16 feet deep. Finally, the commandos salted the craters with dozens of anti-personnel mines to hinder North Korean repair efforts. Eight hours after landing the Royal Marines boarded landing craft and returned to the waiting ships. The raid had been a smashing success, and no casualties were incurred, despite a brief firefight between members of C Troop and the enemy. 

The next target for 41 Commando was Yo-do, an island in Wonsan Harbor, some 60 miles behind enemy lines. Secured in early July and established as a forward base from which to mount further raids, the island was initially garrisoned by South Korean marines. Through that autumn the commandos established forward bases on the neighboring islands of Mo-do, Tae-do and Hwangto-do, from which several raids were mounted. During one August 30 raid against enemy artillery batteries on Ho-do Pan-do island B Troop lost two marines in a clash with enemy soldiers, and five other members of the commando were captured when their landing craft ran aground on nearby Kalma-gak.

On September 27 Drysdale and B Troop embarked on the high-speed transport Wantuck for a raid on Songjin (present-day Kimchaek), a port city on North Korea’s northeast coast. The intention was to ambush enemy reinforcements in the area. Two parties landed, one tasked with creating a diversion while the second carried out the ambush. Though one of their own was wounded during the raid, the marines managed to place mines on the main road and heard several detonate as they withdrew.

On October 3/4 the commando targeted the railway south of Chongjin, though they withdrew on finding it heavily guarded. Two days later the marines attempted another landing near Sorye-dong, but their canoes came under fire as they reached shore, forcing another withdrawal. 

On October 15 Drysdale was appointed the Royal Marine representative at the U.S. Marine Corps Schools in Quantico, Va. Succeeding him as commander of 41 Commando was Lt. Col. Ferris N. Grant. Meanwhile, the raids against North Korean targets continued, with B Troop landing midway between Songjin and Hungnam on December 2. The commandos returned the following evening, landing a half mile farther north, but again were compelled to withdraw.

The Royal Marines intended to keep raiding that winter, hoping to tie down enemy troops that otherwise would be deployed against U.N. forces elsewhere. But by year’s end 41 Commando received an order to withdraw. Before leaving they mounted a final raid, dubbed Operation Swansong, during which D Troop destroyed enemy vessels at Changguok-hang, on the west coast of Ho-do Pan-do. Finally, on December 22/23 they returned by ship to Sasebo, Japan. Those who’d served a year in Korea returned home to England, while those with time remaining in service joined 3 Commando Brigade in Malaya. 

In its 18 months of existence 41 Commando had conducted 18 amphibious landings, most targeting enemy rail and road supply routes. Their actions forced the North Koreans and Chinese to divert considerable resources to the coast to guard against attack. During its raiding operations and participation in the Chosin campaign, 41 Commando lost 21 killed and 28 captured, 10 of whom died in captivity, bringing the total number of fatalities to 31. Several unit members received medals from both the British and U.S. governments, and the commando itself received a U.S. Presidential Unit Citation. Perhaps more important are the lasting bonds formed between the Royal Marines and U.S. Marine Corps. 

On Feb. 2, 1952, 41 (Independent) Commando, Royal Marines, formally disbanded. Re-formed in 1960, the unit saw action in East Africa, Northern Ireland and other trouble spots until again disbanded in 1981.

British military historian Mark Simner is a regular contributor to several international history magazines. For further reading he recommends Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950, by Andrew Salmon; Green Berets in Korea: The Story of 41 Independent Commando, Royal Marines, by Fred Hayhurst; and One of the Chosin Few: A Royal Marine Commando’s Fight for Survival Behind Enemy Lines in Korea, by Dave Brady.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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You’d be forgiven for being surprised after seeing “Devotion” and realizing it is not, in fact, a military action movie.

The film, based on a true Korean War story written by Adam Makos, has all the makings of a war epic, including a few tense dogfight scenes sure to leave audience members sweating bullets.

Its story, however, centers not on the war itself, but on the unlikely friendship that develops between a swaggering Lt. Tom Hudner (played by Glen Powell), and the Navy’s first Black aviator, Ensign Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors).

The pacing of the movie is, at times, slow, dramatic, and a little dark. In 1950, racial tension is set against a backdrop of a post-World-War-II America that is reforming its identity. It is also home to a majority who have no interest in another global conflict.

Alas, the pair become eventual heroes in the nation’s “Forgotten War,” serving as a stunning example of what anti-prejudice might have looked like well before the Civil Rights movement.

Much of the exclusion felt by Brown in the film is overt. Racism is an ever-present character in this story, shown mostly through a lens of Brown’s poor treatment at the hands of civilians. This, despite his status as a college-educated pilot in the U.S. Navy.

In one scene, for example, Brown is nearly barred from a casino on the French Riviera, where he must prove he speaks the language and had received a formal invitation by actress Elizabeth Taylor.

And while some of these scenes may seem like unnecessary diversions from the larger story, they allow more time to explore the ways Brown surprised Hudner, further earning his respect both as a pilot and person.

Ultimately, Brown’s relationship with Hudner and the squadron at-large proved what many familiar with the military know — there is profound equality among the troops, especially amid dire circumstances. The implicit message is that those you fight or fly beside are the same as you, no matter how they look or where they come from.

Unfortunately, the slow spark of mutual respect that kindled the relationship between Brown and Hudner is snuffed out before it ever truly gets the chance to burn.

Brown’s Corsair goes down after the squadron’s Dec. 4 mission to the Chosin Reservoir. Hudner, proving the aptness of the movie’s title, decides he can’t leave his wingman behind and crashes his own aircraft in a reckless but valiant rescue effort. Brown, trapped, doesn’t make it out but tells Hudner to relay a message of love to his wife.

Powell and Majors are powerhouses throughout this at-times crawling story, painting the picture of two very different people with polar opposite backgrounds who form an unlikely bond that extends well beyond death.

In the aftermath, Hudner remained devoted to two things: Brown’s beloved Daisy and their daughter Pamela, and the recovery of his remains, which he fought to bring back from Korea until his death in 2017.

“Devotion” lands in theaters Nov. 23.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

Entering service in December 1950 as the first carrier-based jet night fighter for the Navy and Marine Corps, the Douglas F3D Skyknight began operations in Korea with Marine night fighter squadron VMF(N)-513, whose nickname, “Nightmares,” could well be applied to the protracted training and delays that held up its use in combat until August 1952.

In the months that followed, however, the crews of the improved F3D-2s mastered their radar and learned how to deal with enemy threats as varied as MiG-15 jet fighters, low, slow and elusive Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes and Yakovlev Yak-18 trainers used by the North Koreans to harass United Nations positions at night.

By the end of the war, VMF(N)-513’s “Whales” were credited with downing six Soviet, Chinese and North Korean aircraft without a loss of their own. Those shoot downs had a big benefit: From February through July 1953 the Air Force did not lose a single Boeing B-29 night bomber to enemy aircraft.

With its straight wings, the F3D was obsolete by the end of the Korean War. Yet, upgraded with more sophisticated electronics, the Skyknight saw use during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was just the beginning, as Marine air expert Joe Copalman describes in intimate detail in his first contribution to Osprey’s “Combat Aircraft” series, F3D/EF-10 Skyknight Units of the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Redesignated EF-10Bs, Skyknights of composite reconnaissance squadron VMCJ-1 accompanied bombing raids over North Vietnam and greatly reduced American aircraft losses by jamming the enemy’s radar.

That technology was applied to a variety of situations, including deadly cat-and-mouse games with the radar that directed North Vietnamese anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles before the U.S. Air Force developed its specialized “Wild Weasels,” a code name for aircraft that could home in on SAM sites and destroy them with missiles.

After the first six of the vastly more up-to-date Grumman EA-6A Electric Intruders arrived at Da Nang on Oct. 28, 1966, those planes initially suffered maintenance and readiness problems. Therefore, during 1967-68 the obsolete but reliable Whales conducted operations alongside their intended successors.

Finally retired by the Marines in 1970, the Skyknight is, in the author’s opinion, the most unsung hero of its two major wars. A look through the many firsthand experiences that accompany the wealth of photographs and profiles should convince anyone interested in the air war that it was the most valuable warplane in proportion to the few that flew in both Korea and Vietnam.

This book review appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Vietnam magazine.

F3D/EF-10 Skyknight Units of the Korean and Vietnam Wars

By Joe Copalman

Osprey Publishing

Bloomsbury USA, 2022

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If asked, “When did America lose the Vietnam War?” most respondents with some knowledge of the war would likely answer, “April 30, 1975.” That day, North Vietnamese Army tanks crashed through the gates of the Republic of Vietnam’s Presidential Palace in Saigon and celebrated a communist victory in the Second Indochina War (1955-1975). Certainly, that day was the end of the shooting war.

But when exactly did the U.S. and its allies lose their ability to win the war? When did defeat become inevitable in America’s efforts to preserve a democratic South Vietnam in the face of North Vietnam’s relentless, ruthless aggression? The answer to that question is key—determining when America lost reveals how and why the decades-long effort failed.

The “Usual Suspects”

If asked to pinpoint the date when the U.S. irretrievably lost the war, some historians would suggest the following “usual suspects”:

Nov. 2, 1963 – Those recognizing the importance of political leaders’ influence might single out the day when South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was killed in a coup. President John F. Kennedy knew of preparations for the coup and his administration supported the overthrow of Diem, who was assassinated in the process. Diem’s murder removed the struggling democracy’s “last, best hope,” as some have called Diem, the only leader whose charisma, popularity, willpower and effectiveness rivaled that of North Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh.

Nov. 22, 1963 – Some tout Kennedy’s assassination as the date the war was irretrievably lost because they believe he would have kept the U.S. out of Vietnam’s “quagmire” or have beaten the Viet Cong insurgency with U.S. Army Special Forces troops, the “Green Berets,” eschewing a massive buildup of conventional forces. However, those are conjectures rather than certainties.

Democrat Kennedy politically could not afford to “lose Vietnam,” especially after another Democratic president, Harry S. Truman, was castigated as the one who “lost China” to Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949. Speculation that Kennedy would not have backed up South Vietnam with whatever U.S. military support was necessary to match Hanoi’s escalation ignores the reality of Cold War politics.

Aug. 1, 1964 – Many are convinced the U.S. lost due to a misguided military strategy that focused too much on overwhelming firepower in a futile conventional war to destroy the communist insurgency through attrition. They believe it would have been more effective to emphasize less brutal methods to win the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese and weaken the Viet Cong’s influence in towns and villages. For people with that view, the fateful date might be the day that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the leader most closely associated with the attrition strategy, assumed leadership of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, commanding all U.S. combat forces inside South Vietnam.

Aug. 2 and 4, 1964 – In the Gulf of Tonkin incident, North Vietnamese gunboats attacked a U.S. destroyer that suffered just one bullet hole. Two days later, two destroyers fired in the direction of signals that appeared to be emanating from approaching North Vietnamese vessels, but were not. These alleged “attacks” prompted an Aug. 7 joint congressional resolution authorizing President Lyndon B. Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” This gave Johnson permission to escalate the smoldering insurgency into a full-blown and—many historians have claimed—ultimately unwinnable war.

March 8, 1965 – Those believing that the introduction of U.S. “boots on the ground” was the fatal mistake might champion the date when the 9th Marine Regiment, 9th Expeditionary Brigade, 3rd Marine Division, came ashore at Da Nang as America’s first combat troops in Vietnam. From that point, the U.S. was “all in” and the quagmire became inevitable, some would argue.

The Long View

Historians placing Vietnam within the context of the global Cold War might take a longer view that pushes a presumed foreordained U.S. failure further back in history. They might suggest these key historical mileposts:

June 1924 – Nguyen Sinh Cung (Ho Chi Minh’s birth name) was rebuffed in 1919 when he pleaded Vietnam’s case for independence from colonial ruler France at the Versailles peace conference after World War I. Shunned by Western powers, he became a committed communist. That month he attended the Fifth Congress of the Soviet-led Comintern (Communist International) in Moscow. Thereafter radicalized into much more than a “Vietnamese nationalist,” Ho Chi Minh cleverly manipulated Vietnamese popular support for independence to propel his single-minded effort to establish a communist Vietnam.

Sept. 22, 1940 – Imperial Japanese forces occupied Indochina, ruled then by the Nazi-backed Vichy France government. The Japanese invasion united competing Vietnamese factions of the resistance to French colonial rule into a solidified “nationalist” crusade. Japanese imperialism gave Ho Chi Minh the unifying spark he needed to build support for a prolonged resistance to defeat all foreign intervention.

Feb. 22, 1946 – The U.S. deputy chief of mission in Moscow, George F. Kennan, sent his “Long Telegram” to Washington explaining the roots and basis of Soviet expansionism, eventually prompting the April 7, 1950, National Security Council policy paper 68, establishing “containment of communism” as U.S. Cold War policy. This policy ensured that the U.S. would become involved in opposing the communist takeover of Vietnam.

May 7, 1954 – The humiliating defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu by Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh independence fighters led to an agreement, signed July 21 in Geneva, partitioning the former French colony into a communist-controlled North and a democratic South. Inevitably, the United States—committed to NSC 68’s global containment policy, recently demonstrated in the Korean War at the cost of over 36,000 American dead—stepped forward to replace French imperialists and to create and defend a Southeast Asian democracy.

All of the dates listed above are important Vietnam War milestones, but they are not the most significant. To understand why, it’s necessary to first address the enduring but egregiously wrong “popular wisdom” about the war.

What Popular Wisdom Gets Wrong

Historians who claim the U.S. lost the Vietnam War due to a failed warfighting strategy are correct. However, they are wrong if they claim Vietnam was lost because Westmoreland adopted a conventional war strategy rather than a revolutionary war/insurgency strategy.

The communists did not win through a classic revolutionary guerrilla war of national liberation in which South Vietnam’s government was toppled by a widespread popular insurgency of disaffected citizens overthrowing a hated regime. Instead, the Vietnam War was a brutal war of conquest mounted by communist North Vietnam to overthrow South Vietnam’s democratic (and admittedly imperfect) government, initially by guerrilla warfare tactics, but ultimately by a conventional warfare invasion strategy.

From 1954 through 1968, North Vietnam pursued a military strategy incorporating guerrilla war tactics. That effort failed miserably. As early as 1966, Hanoi was forced to replenish its South Vietnamese Viet Cong cadres with northerners brought down via the Ho Chi Minh Trail running through Laos and Cambodia. The communists’ early-1968 Tet Offensive, which relied heavily on Viet Cong forces, was a military failure with catastrophic VC losses. In many places the offensive’s losses virtually eradicated the VC “infrastructure,” eliminating local political and administrative “shadow government” personnel.

Committed to winning a decades-long war, Hanoi’s leaders simply changed their overall strategy and turned to outright invasions using overpowering NVA conventional forces (infantry, armor, artillery) to conquer the South. With U.S. combat forces still fighting in support of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, this new strategy also initially failed. During Easter weekend in 1972, the communists launched a widespread infantry-armor-artillery offensive that achieved early successes, but beleaguered ARVN forces, bolstered by overwhelming U.S. firepower, rallied to totally crush the invasion, inflicting 100,000 NVA casualties.

However, in 1975—after all American combat forces were withdrawn and the U.S. had dramatically reduced financial support for South Vietnam’s military—a similar-sized NVA conventional force executed essentially the same invasion strategy, but this time conquered South Vietnam that April.

For purely propaganda reasons, Hanoi cynically argued that its conquest was led by South Vietnamese VC insurgents—claiming its 1975 victory was the triumph of a “revolutionary war of national liberation,” even though depleted VC ranks between 1968 and 1975 were increasingly filled by North Vietnamese troops filtering south and operating from sanctuaries in officially “neutral” Laos and Cambodia. Additionally, the January 1973 Peace Accords allowed thousands of communist troops to remain inside South Vietnam’s borders, pre-positioned to participate in the final assault.

Facing overwhelming U.S./ARVN firepower throughout the war, North Vietnamese forces necessarily employed guerrilla tactics (including ambushes, hit-and-run attacks, sabotage, assassinations). To actually win the war, Hanoi abandoned its guerrilla strategy of fomenting insurgency and instead was compelled to turn to an invasion by conventional forces to overthrow the South Vietnamese government.

The North Vietnamese communist dictatorship was willing to pay any price in blood and treasure to ultimately conquer the Republic of South Vietnam. Significantly, Westmoreland, on the other hand, was never given the mission of winning the war, only of preventing the South Vietnamese from losing it—two profoundly different missions.

Contrary to popular wisdom, the war was lost due to a combination of failures in strategy, geographic ignorance and a lack of national will. Each of those three factors is associated with a date that marks a defining event inevitably leading to America’s defeat.

Strategy for Failure

Oct. 25, 1950 – America’s defeat in Vietnam was due to a fundamental error in judgment that has bedeviled military campaigns throughout history: refighting the last war. Political and military warriors leading American efforts in Vietnam based U.S. strategy on their last conflict: the 1950-53 Korea War.

America’s Vietnam War leaders were misled because of coincidental, superficial similarities. The Korean War was also fought in a divided Asian nation with a communist North, supported by China and the Soviet Union, attacking a democratic South backed by the U.S. Thus, American leaders assumed Vietnam was merely a rematch.

The date when the result of one president’s decision later compelled the U.S. to commit to a strategy doomed to fail in Vietnam was Oct. 25, 1950. On that day, in response to Truman’s fateful order a few weeks earlier to his theater commander in Korea, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, to cross the 38th parallel dividing the two Koreas and invade North Korea, the first counterattacks against United Nations forces were launched by 300,000 Chinese troops.

 Suddenly, due to Truman’s misjudgment, Americans were in a major war with Mao Zedong’s communist China. For the remainder of the three-year-long Korean War, U.S./U.N. forces fought bloody, costly battles before the fighting finally ended in a stalemate with a July 1953 armistice

A decade later U.S. leaders, profoundly influenced by their woeful experience in Korea, were determined not to repeat that mistake in a new anti-communist Asian war. Fear of another Chinese intervention set the parameters governing U.S. ground combat operations in Vietnam. Primarily intended to give China no possible excuse to replicate its Korean War incursion, American ground combat was restricted to actions solely within South Vietnam. North Vietnam would be off-limits for ground forces—or even the threat of them—throughout the war.

Those restrictions did not apply to U.S. air operations. North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia were bombed extensively, although the Hanoi area and the key port at Haiphong were not targeted until late in the war when it was too late to be decisive.

Restricting the ground war to South Vietnamese territory meant U.S. military commanders could never win the war outright. They could only keep South Vietnam from losing it, if possible. This was the defining strategic element in the U.S. defeat: American forces were confined to the strategic defensive. Although U.S. and ARVN forces did conduct offensive operations within South Vietnam, the U.S. permanently surrendered the strategic initiative to North Vietnam, which could totally control the tempo of combat by sending troops and war materiel southward whenever it wanted.

The result was a brutal, localized war of attrition that dragged on as long as both sides possessed the will to continue. Hanoi had the “weapons” it needed to continuing fight as long as it took to win: a ruthless disregard of heavy casualties and a tightly controlled population without the freedom to protest.

The Geography of Defeat

July 23, 1962 – Some critics of America’s strategy in Vietnam compare the failure there to successful campaigns against communist-led insurgencies elsewhere in Asia, most notably the British counterinsurgency victory in Malaysia (1948-60) and the defeat of the Hukbalahap Rebellion in the Philippines (1945-54). But victory over those insurgencies owed as much to the countries’ unique geographies as to innovative counterinsurgency tactics and strategy.

Malaya (today’s Malaysia) is nearly surrounded by water—the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca. Only a narrow 65-mile-wide neck of land connects Malaya with Southeast Asia. The Philippines, an island nation, is surrounded by water—the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea. Government control over the sea and narrow land approaches helped those countries strangle their insurgencies. Their much-vaunted counterinsurgency strategies were essentially irrelevant as the insurrections died on the vine.

The South Vietnamese government, however, had only the South China Sea on its eastern/southern border as a buffer. It shared a long, highly vulnerable land border with Laos and Cambodia all along its western side—the Achilles’ heel of U.S.-South Vietnamese efforts to defeat the North Vietnamese invaders. The Viet Minh fighting the French and later NVA-Viet Cong forces attacking South Vietnam occupied remote jungles in eastern Laos and Cambodia. They used them as marshalling bases and access routes for funneling troops, ammunition and equipment from North Vietnam into all regions of the South.

This intricate network of footpaths and dirt roads, called the Ho Chi Minh Trail system, was literally the communists’ “highway to victory.” If the Americans and South Vietnamese could stop the movement of troops and materiel down the trail, communist military operations in South Vietnam would be doomed. With the trail open, however, Hanoi could prolong the war as long as it wished, control its tempo and eventually win.

On July 23, 1962, that geographical “win” for North Vietnam was assured when Kennedy administration negotiators signed the International Treaty on the Neutrality of Laos with 13 other nations pledging “to respect” the “sovereignty, independence, neutrality, unity and territorial integrity” of Laos, which was in the midst of a communist insurrection. The other signatories included China, the Soviet Union, North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

Years before the treaty was signed, the NVA had occupied areas of eastern Laos and Cambodia. After the document was signed, the North Vietnamese expanded their control and further developed the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

More than any other event, the Laos treaty all but guaranteed that the U.S. would eventually lose the Vietnam War. Efforts to overcome the treaty mistake through major U.S./ARVN incursions into Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971 were too little and years too late.

The Death of U.S. Will

July 1, 1973 – Despite strategic and geographic failures, there remained as late as 1973 a slim chance that America’s national will—the inherent spirit to overcome adversity and eventually triumph —might win out and prevent a communist takeover of democratic South Vietnam. Failures in war-fighting strategy and missteps in redressing geographic disadvantages might have been overcome if Americans had retained faith in the mission to save South Vietnam from communist aggression.

The deterioration of the American public’s willingness to persevere and win in Vietnam, as reflected in the resolve of its elected leaders, was not precipitated by a single, specific event. It eroded over time.

Even so, one event, in particular, was a serious blow to public support for the war: The communists’ Tet Offensive, which began Jan. 30, 1968, struck military bases and cities throughout South Vietnam. Although the attackers suffered a military defeat with heavy losses, the extensiveness of the assaults and high U.S. casualties came as a shock to many Americans.

There were also “doom and gloom” press reports and commentary that had demoralizing effects on the public. Support for the war, already declining in Gallup opinion polls, dropped to 40 percent in the months after Tet, compared to 50 percent a year earlier, and never recovered.

The real dagger in the heart of the country’s national will was congressional passage of the Case-Church Amendment, signed into law on July 1, 1973. Named for principal sponsors Republican Sen. Clifford P. Chase of New Jersey and Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, the amendment (attached to a bill funding the State Department) prohibited further U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia without specific prior approval by Congress. This was, in effect, a death sentence for the Republic of Vietnam.

The Nixon Question

Although defeated in 1972 when first proposed, the Case-Church Amendment was reintroduced in January 1973 and passed in June. President Richard Nixon, politically hamstrung by the ongoing Watergate fiasco—springing from the June 17, 1972, break-in and burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building—was unable to prevent its passage. The Case-Church Amendment was followed by the crippling November 1973 War Powers Resolution severely limiting the president’s ability commit military forces to combat.

Support for the war, already declining, dropped to 40 percent in the months after Tet, compared to 50 percent a year earlier, and never recovered.

Arguably, Nixon still had the power to overcome such congressional obstacles and possibly “snatch victory from the jaws of defeat” if he had still been president in 1975 when North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. Nixon, technically, could have been legally and fully justified in employing overwhelming U.S. air and naval firepower to protect South Vietnam and enforce provisions of the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords, egregiously violated by North Vietnam’s unprovoked invasion.

Nixon knew that the Paris Peace Accords were meaningless unless backed by American military power if necessary, according to his national security adviser and later secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. In his 1994 book Diplomacy, Kissinger explained: “We [he and Nixon] took it for granted that we had the right—indeed, the responsibility—to defend an agreement in the pursuit of which 50,000 Americans had died…Terms that will not be defended amount to surrender…Nixon and his key advisers announced their intention to defend the agreement on innumerable occasions [emphasis added].”

Without U.S. military power backing up the treaty, the Paris Peace Accords amounted to mere words on paper. Congress, controlled by politicians committed to ending the war, focused its attention on Nixon’s presidency rather than on the struggling Republic of Vietnam facing obliteration by communist North Vietnam.

Weakened by the Watergate scandal and facing inevitable impeachment and Senate conviction, Nixon was forced to resign. After he left the White House on Aug. 9, 1974, his successor, Gerald R. Ford, politically crippled by being an appointed vice president after elected Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in a corruption scandal, was neither inclined to nor had the political standing to order the U.S. military back to South Vietnam.

Three Factors

The final vestige of America’s national will to save the South—an effort that killed 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese—died on Aug. 9, 1974, when Nixon boarded the presidential helicopter for the final time.

Incompetent strategy, ignorance of geography and a lack of national willpower combined to hand the communists running North Vietnam a victory in a war that was, at its beginning, America’s to lose.

The next time you hear someone blathering about why or, in particular, when the U.S. “lost” the Vietnam War, ask them about Oct. 25, 1950; July 23, 1962; and July 1, 1973. After noting their blank stares, explain it to them.

Jerry Morelock is senior editor of Vietnam magazine.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Vietnam magazine.

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Driving winds blew blinding snow across the deck of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Oriskany on November 18, 1952. Inside the cockpit of his Grumman F9F-5 Panther, Lt. Royce Williams watched the blizzard while waiting for the signal to take off from the Essex-class carrier as it plowed through the Sea of Japan. Snow was not uncommon at that time of year along the upper coast of North Korea, not far from the Soviet Union’s easternmost seaport of Vladivostok.

Williams was preparing to fly a combat air patrol to cover the naval task force to which the carrier belonged. This mission turned out to be different than he expected, though. Instead of flying a routine patrol, Williams made history by tangling with seven Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15s and, according to his account, downing four of them. However, because of military secrecy and U.S. concerns over broadening the Korean conflict, the details of Williams’ combat success remained secret for four decades and the veteran Navy pilot was not allowed to talk about what he had done. “When I finally told my wife, Camilla said, ‘Oh, Royce!’” Williams, 97 and a veteran of three wars, recalled recently. “She was very surprised.” 

Williams earned the Silver Star for his bravery that day, but some believed that wasn’t enough. A bipartisan effort in Congress tried to upgrade the award to the Medal of Honor. “If I get a say in the matter, I would recommend an upgrade,” said Samuel Cox, a retired admiral and current director of Naval History and Heritage Command for the Navy. “I’m convinced that his account is accurate. But that’s the problem: it’s his account and you can’t be your own witness at an upgrade review.” Finally, in December 2022, Williams was approved for an upgrade to the Navy Cross. He received it in a ceremony at the San Diego Air & Space Museum on January 20, 2023.

Royce Williams’ road to naval aviation started out rather inauspiciously. Born in South Dakota in 1925, he was a corporal in the Minnesota National Guard when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. Hoping for a chance to become a combat pilot, Williams enlisted in the Navy. During the war he flew Grumman F6F Hellcats and Vought F4U Corsairs, primarily on sub-hunting sorties, though he never saw combat. Williams was still in the Navy when the conflict in Korea broke out, and he received jet training and learned how to fly the F9F-5 Panther. 

The Panther was the Navy’s first successful carrier-based jet fighter. The prototype, powered by 5,700 pounds of thrust from a Rolls-Royce Nene engine (licensed in the United States as the Pratt & Whitney J42 P-8), first flew on November 24, 1947. The production version, the F9F-2, entered Navy service in 1949. Williams was flying the most-produced version of the Panther, the F9F-5. Powered by a more powerful water-injected Pratt & Whitney J48 (another Rolls Royce-derived engine) and armed with four 20mm cannons, it could also carry rockets and bombs for ground support and attacks on fortified positions. While the Panther’s role in the Korean conflict has been overshadowed by the Air Force’s North American F-86 Sabre, the single-engine, straight-winged aircraft performed admirably for the Navy in more than 78,000 combat missions over Korea.

The Panther had one major drawback, however: its speed. Maxing out at around 600 miles per hour, the F9F-5 was noticeably slower than one of its main opponents, the MiG-15. The Soviet-made jet was about 100 miles per hour faster and could easily outclimb the Panther. The swept-wing Soviet aircraft also came armed with three cannons: two 23mm and a single 37mm. The North Korean air force was outfitted with thousands of MiG-15s for the war (and the aircraft reportedly remains in service there today as a trainer). North Korean pilots flew most of them, although a number of aviators were Chinese—and some were Soviets. “It was a completely unique event in the Cold War,” Cox said. “There was nothing else like it. During the Korean War, there were Russian pilots flying Russian aircraft with North Korean markings from bases in Chinese Manchuria. It was all a big secret, but everyone knew because the pilots would speak Russian.” The Oriskany’s presence close to Soviet territory meant that Soviet pilots in Soviet MiGs were also in the vicinity that day.

Snow was still blowing across the Oriskany’s deck when Williams launched with three other Navy pilots into the blizzard, with a ceiling of about 400 feet. Lt. Claire Elwood was division leader but he and his wingman, Lt. (jg) John Middleton, were forced to return to the carrier when Elwood’s jet developed a mechanical problem. That left Williams, the section leader, and his wingman, Lt. (jg) Dave Rowlands, alone to fly the patrol.

They struggled through the scud to about 12,000 feet, then broke through into blue skies. The controllers on the carrier alerted them to “bogies” in the area and Williams noticed the contrails of seven aircraft at about 26,000 feet. The two pilots continued their ascent, and then they saw the suspect aircraft split into two groups and start a steep descent. 

Williams was expecting trouble, but not from these airplanes. His patrol was providing cover for the task force, which was anticipating reprisals for an earlier attack by U.S. Navy aircraft in North Korea near the Soviet border. But these jets weren’t North Korean—they belonged to the Soviet Union. After Russian radar had picked up the American Panthers, the MiG-15s had scrambled from their air base at Vladivostok. “They came diving at us and were coming in hot,” Williams remembered recently. “They fired first, so we knew we were in a fight.”

Williams flipped on his gunsight and fired a test burst; he was ready for combat. The next 35 minutes would find him twisting and turning in a deadly dance with the seven Soviet jets, using all his senses and experience to gain the upper hand on the enemy while trying to stay out of their gunsights.

The Navy pilot realized he was at a disadvantage. His Panther could easily fall prey to the swifter MiG-15s if he weren’t careful. Williams would have to rely on his skills as a pilot and take advantage of any errors by his adversaries. “They made mistakes,” he said, “and when they did, I capitalized on them.”

He got his first chance at the start of the fray. Four of the MiGs zoomed at him, with one firing at but missing the Panther. Williams pulled into a hard climbing turn and came down behind the formation. “As they went on by, that put me in position to shoot at their number four guy,” he recalled. “I was within range and tracking. I fired a short burst and he started smoking and going down.”

Wingman Rowlands followed the damaged jet to the sea. That left Williams alone with the six remaining MiGs. He began making a series of high-G turns to avoid his pursuers and get behind one of them. The remaining jets quickly climbed to about 2,000 feet above the Panther, turned and dove for a head-on attack. Williams zeroed in on the lead plane and made his move. “I was able to adjust and track on him,” he said. “He was firing on me. When he got in range, I had my gunsight aiming point on him and pulled the trigger with a short burst. He turned away. I think I hit him in the fuel tank. I learned he later crashed and died in the ocean, probably having run out of fuel.”

At that moment, Williams didn’t have the luxury of wondering what happened to that target. He now had to focus on the enemy’s wingman, who was flying directly at him. The Navy pilot locked on and fired away. “He kept coming at me, but I’m pretty sure he was dead,” Williams said. “He stopped firing and he didn’t maneuver at all. His plane went right under mine and I’m certain that one went right in the water.”

The perilous battle continued as the combatants soared and swerved above the clouds. The other three Soviet jets joined the fight and Williams had to stay sharp as they tried to knock him out of the air. “One of the jets made a run at me,” he stated. “He didn’t pull up while he was still behind me. He passed in front of me and that set me up for a close-in shot. I hit him good and pieces of his airplane came off. I had to maneuver to avoid hitting them.”

By that point Rowlands had rejoined the fight, but he soon ran out of ammunition. Williams then fired a burst at another jet, which started smoking. But Williams had also exhausted his ammunition and couldn’t finish off the MiG. In addition, he had another MiG on his tail. The Soviet fighter fired and a single 37mm round struck the Panther’s left wing and then passed into the engine area, where it exploded and knocked out the hydraulics. The Panther began shaking violently. Williams had lost control of his rudder and flaps and only had partial use of his ailerons, which he had to operate manually. With Rowlands following, Williams dived toward the clouds at 12,000 feet, porpoising all the way to avoid getting hit again by his pursuer.

“We lost sight of each other in the clouds,” he said. Rowlands lost track of the other airplanes, too, and headed through the clouds back to the carrier. “Normally, I would have ejected but with the cold-water conditions I wouldn’t have lasted long,” said Williams. “It would have been sure death. So I stuck with it and headed back to the task force.” Williams couldn’t have known it at the time, but his encounter with the MiGs was the first and last time U.S. fighters and Russian jets from a base in the Soviet Union would engage in air-to-air combat.

Flying at full throttle, Williams radioed in that his plane was severely damaged and he was trying to make it back to the carrier, which was now at general quarters. Unfortunately for him, the gun crews on an escorting destroyer did not receive word, and they opened up on the approaching aircraft until another Navy pilot reported that the incoming airplane was a friendly.

“I told the carrier I’m going to be landing at about 200 miles per hour, about 95 miles an hour faster than normal,” Williams said. “I’m also having control problems and can’t line up with the ship. I’m off by about 15 degrees. We also had heavy winds and a pitching deck. It was going to be interesting!”

The Oriskany’s captain, Courtney Shands, was aware of the situation and ordered the ship to alter its course to line up with William’s landing vector. The crippled craft caught the number-three wire on the landing deck and lurched to an abrupt stop.

After examining the damage to his Panther, Williams was surprised that he made it back at all. The flight crew counted 263 holes—most of them caused by shrapnel created when the 37mm round exploded in the accessory section of the engine compartment. It appeared that the airplane was a total loss. In fact, Williams heard the jet was going to be dumped into the sea because it was beyond repair. He believed that for decades until he learned that his old airplane had been fixed up and eventually saw service in Vietnam.

“I am the luckiest guy,” Williams chuckled. “We always have raffles and I win about 50 percent of the time. One Christmas, I went to three different parties and won all of the door prizes. It’s amazing!”

Despite Williams’ combat success, Vice Admiral Robert P. Briscoe ordered him to keep silent about the air battle. Since the enemy jets were Soviet, there was concern that announcing the news might draw Russia into the war, in which the U.S. and United Nations forces were already battling those of North Korea and China. In addition, Briscoe told Williams that a National Security Agency intelligence team on one of the ships in the task force had been intercepting Soviet radio messages. If word got out, the Russians might start wondering if the task force had been eavesdropping, imperiling other projects. “I was instructed by Admiral Briscoe to never, ever talk about it,” Williams recalled. “We had people who were tracking and listening to the Russians and we didn’t want them to know we had this ability.”

One person who did hear about Williams’ encounter with Soviet MiGs was Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II and now president-elect of the United States. During the 1952 campaign, Eisenhower promised he would go to Korea if elected. He made good on that pledge on December 2, 1952, when he landed in Seoul. Williams and two other Navy pilots from that day—Middleton and Rowlands—received a summons for a high-level session with the president-elect. The three men had been told that Eisenhower wanted to learn more about the MiG-15 and how it stacked up against American aircraft, but Williams doubted that. “I think he just wanted to meet me,” he said. “That was just an excuse.”

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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Williams remembers being ushered into a room where he saw more admirals and five-star generals than he had ever seen in his life. In addition to Eisenhower, generals Omar Bradley and Mark Clark were in attendance. The president-elect’s son, Maj. John Eisenhower, served as bartender. After some initial discussion, Eisenhower asked Williams if he wanted a drink. “We have the world’s greatest scotch here,” the Navy pilot remembers the general saying. Williams said he preferred bourbon. Eisenhower wouldn’t take no for an answer and kept offering him scotch. “I didn’t want it,” Williams laughed. “That got the attention of the generals and admirals. They looked at me like, ‘What is this snot-nosed kid up to?’”

For his heroics that cold day in November, Williams received credit for one kill and one probable. Middleton, who had turned back to help Williams, was also recognized with a kill while Rowlands earned a probable. Some historians question those numbers and think a review is necessary. The secrecy of that mission and confusing after-battle reports likely led to a less-than-thorough examination of what happened that day.

From the beginning, Williams believed he got four kills, though he never talked about what happened or protested the Navy’s count. In fact, there was a great deal of uncertainty as to how many Soviet planes went down that day. It wasn’t until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the truth came out. Secret files released by the Russians showed that four MiG-15s had been downed during the action. All four pilots were killed. The Navy never changed the record, though, despite growing evidence that it might be incorrect. With the Russian admission of four Soviet planes being shot down, Williams was finally free to talk about his role in the air battle that day.

One of those who believes the record should be updated is Cox, who has extensively studied the air battle. “As Director of Naval History, I look at everything I can find,” Admiral Cox said. “I would give him credit for four. I think Royce’s account is pretty doggone accurate. There are discrepancies between all of the reports, but I’m confident that what he said is what happened.”

Not only should the record be changed, but some came to believe that Williams’ Silver Star should be upgraded to the Medal of Honor. U.S. Representative Darrell Issa has sponsored a bill authorizing the president to bestow the nation’s highest military award to Williams, who lives in the same congressional district in Southern California as the congressman. Issa wanted to see the medal presented to Williams as soon as possible. Though still tough and sharp as ever, the former flyer is 97 years old, making time an issue. The House passed the measure in July 2022 and it advanced to the Senate.

“I’m flabbergasted,” Williams said about the effort to upgrade his Silver Star. “They’re comparing what I did to Maj. George Davis of the U.S. Air Force, who was credited with shooting down two MiGs on his final flight when he got shot down and killed in Korea in 1952. In short order, they had the Medal of Honor for him.”

It appears that Williams will have to be satisfied with the Navy Cross. In December 2022, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro approved the upgrade from the Silver Star. “Having reviewed the findings of now numerous investigations related to the case of Capt. Royce Williams, I have determined this case to be special and extraordinary,” Del Toro announced. “Lt. Williams took the lead of an incredibly critical mission during the Korean War which led to the protection of Task Force 77 from enemy attack. I authorize the Navy Cross be awarded for his valorous actions committed from personal bravery and self-sacrifice to country. His actions clearly distinguished himself during a high-risk mission and deserves proper recognition.”

“This is the kind of thing I’ve seen in the movies,” Williams told the San Diego Union-Tribune after the ceremony on January 20. “Never thought I’d be part of it. I’m thrilled.”

Another person pleased with the upgrade is CJ Machado, a filmmaker who chronicled Williams’ story in the 2017 short film Forgotten Hero. Machado believes the secrecy about what happened that day over the Sea of Japan has prevented Williams from getting the credit he deserves. For Machado, the effort to get him tan upgrade is deeply personal. Over the years, she has become close to the retired Navy officer and looks upon him as a father figure. “Captain Royce Williams is a wonderful and dear soul,” she said. “I’m biased because I know him so well, but I believe Royce deserves to be acknowledged for that amazing feat.”

Williams ended up flying 70 combat missions in Korea. In Vietnam, he flew 110 missions in the Vought F-8E Crusader and McDonnell Douglas F-4B Phantom II. By the time he retired in 1980 as a captain and flag officer he had spent 37 years in the Navy. In all that time he had no mission more remarkable than the one he flew on November 18, 1952.  

Massachusetts-based author Dave Kindy is a frequent contributor to Aviation History and other HistoryNet publications, as well as Air & Space Quarterly, the Washington Post and Smithsonian. For further reading, he recommends Holding the Line: The Naval Air Campaign in Korea by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, Korean Air War: Sabres, MiGs and Meteors, 1950-1953 by Michael Napier and “The story of the Top-Secret Dogfight where legendary US Korean War F9F Naval Aviator E. Royce Williams, Jr., shot down 4 Soviet MiG-15s,” an article written by Dario Leone for theaviationgeekclub.com.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Aviation History.

In September, production for director Steve Barnett’s “Valiant One” began in Vancouver, Canada.

The movie, backed by Monarch Media, is set amid rising tensions between North and South Korea. When a U.S. helicopter crashes on the northern side, survivors of the wreck must make their way back to friendly territory without the help of the U.S. military.

“With tensions between the North and South already on the verge of war, the surviving U.S. Army non-combat tech soldiers must work together to protect a civilian tech-specialist and find their way across the DMZ,” Deadline wrote on the film’s synopsis.

Filmed between Sept. 1 and Oct. 31, the movie features a cast that includes Lana Condor (”To All the Boys” trilogy), Desmin Borges (”The Time Traveler’s Wife”), Callan Mulvey (”Captain America: The Winter Soldier”) and Chase Stokes (”Outer Banks”).

Condor will play a character named Selby, an immigrant-turned-service member who enlists as a medic. Other roles have been loosely defined, Deadline noted.

Details so far do not specify the exact time frame in which the movie is meant to take place, although given Deadline’s description of one character as “an adrenaline junkie who grew up on video games,” it appears to be set in a more modern era.

As of this writing, the studio has not yet confirmed a release date.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

Today, sadly, a vast number of Americans seemingly have heard of only one valor award—the Medal of Honor. This narrow-minded focus unfairly diminishes the honors of Vietnam veterans and others awarded different valor medals. Ask the “person on the street” to name another medal awarded for heroism besides the Medal of Honor. Perhaps some people will think of “the Purple Heart,” awarded for wounds or death in combat. Only a few would be able to cite the armed services’ second-highest valor award, the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy/Marine Corps’ Navy Cross, the Coast Guard Cross, or the Air Force/Space Force Cross.

The Silver Star might vaguely “ring a bell” with some, but many would likely be hard-pressed to describe its significance and probably wouldn’t know it is the third-highest valor award for all military services. The military’s Bronze Star Medal and Commendation Medal with “V” (for valor) devices are arguably beyond the ken of most Americans.

Yet the heroism those awards represent is no less deserving of recognition than the valor of the celebrated few who have received the Medal of Honor. Although the Medal of Honor is appropriately placed atop the “Pyramid of Valor” all valor awards reflect the bravery, blood and sacrifice of America’s finest, often earned at the price of their lives in desperate combat with communist forces in Vietnam and other foes elsewhere.

As a result of the general public’s unfamiliarity with the military and a focus on the Medal of Honor, the carefully crafted Pyramid of Valor is collapsing into a single “all or nothing” award.

Some people believe that a service member’s heroism must be rewarded with the Medal of Honor to be properly recognized, and therefore the family or other advocates will call for a medal upgrade by claiming that the courage and sacrifice of someone previously recognized with the Distinguished Service Cross, Navy Cross or Silver Star is being unfairly denied the Medal of Honor.

Those whose knowledge of military awards is limited to the Medal of Honor think even the nation’s second-highest valor awards, the service crosses, are somehow insufficient recognition. Anything less than the Medal of Honor is considered an insult to the service member’s valor, an “injustice” or not equal to the heroic actions that took place. This attitude diminishes the true heroism of tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans whose valor was justly recognized by medals less prestigious than the Medal of Honor.

The Medal of Honor, created in 1861 during the Civil War, was first presented in March 1863 to six members of Andrews’ Raiders, who captured a Confederate train in Georgia in 1862, an action re-created in the 1956 film The Great Locomotive Chase. (Some acts of valor that took place prior to the Andrews’ raid were recognized with the Medal of Honor after the war.)

The Medal of Honor was the only valor award a heroic service member could receive and wear on his chest from the Civil War until the Distinguished Service Cross was established in January 1918 in the midst of World War I. The other valor recognitions during that period were limited to a “mention in dispatches” and a written “certificate.” Thus, if a medal was to be awarded, it had to be the Medal of Honor, regardless of circumstances and the degree of valor exhibited.

Of the 3,530 Medals of Honor awarded up to 2021, more than 2,000 of them were presented before World War I for a variety of acts such as capturing enemy flags, rescuing comrades under fire, standing steadfast in the face of an enemy attack and delivering dispatches through hostile territory. That wide range of heroics, ranging from true blood sacrifices “above and beyond the call of duty” to relatively mundane but nonetheless valorous acts, convinced U.S. military authorities that a hierarchy of valor recognition was necessary to ensure that a fair and equitable system of medals was created. 

The Pyramid of Valor began to take shape just as the U.S. entered World War I when the military and Congress added not only the Distinguished Service Cross but also other awards for heroism that didn’t quite meet the Medal of Honor’s exceptionally high bar.

Second tier: The Distinguished Service Cross, created in 1918; Navy Cross, 1919; Air Force Cross, 1960.

Third tier: Silver Star, established in 1918 as the Army’s Citation Star, became the Silver Star in 1932 (available for the Air Force after it became a separate service); authorized for the Navy and Marine Corps, 1942.   

Fourth tier: Distinguished Flying Cross, all services, for aerial achievement or valor, created in 1926, retroactive to 1918; Bronze Star, 1944, for meritorious achievements or valor.

Fifth tier: Purple Heart, created by George Washington in 1782 as the Badge of Military Merit for “meritorious action” but little used and converted in 1932 to a medal honoring the wounded and killed.

Sixth tier: Air Medal, established in 1942 for aerial achievement or valor.

Seventh tier: Commendation Medal, for meritorious achievement, service or valor, introduced in the Navy (and Marines) in 1944, in the Army in 1945 and the Air Force in 1958.

Medals that may be awarded for either achievement or valor (the Bronze Star, Commendation Medal, etc.) include a “V for valor” device when presented for heroism.

Medal of Honor Awards

3,530—Total Medals
3,511—Individuals
1,523—U.S. Civil War
110—Spanish-American War
126—World War I
472—World War II
146—Korean War
262—Vietnam War
20—Afghanistan War
8—Iraq War
Current as of June 30, 2022.

All of our Vietnam War heroes who earned any of those medals should be remembered for their courage and sacrifice—not simply the one in 10,000 whose actions resulted in an award of the Medal of Honor. The attitude that somehow the Medal of Honor is the only worthwhile valor medal is a regression to 1861 when it was just that: “one or none” and egregiously unfair to history and our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

Don’t let a tunnel-like focus on the Medal of Honor lead us to unfairly ignore the valor of heroes whose bravery was recognized “only” with awards of the Distinguished Service Cross (or Navy, Air Force variants), Silver Star, Bronze Star/Commendation Medal with “V” device or Purple Heart. All those heroes must be celebrated and honored.

—Jerry Morelock is senior editor of Vietnam magazine.

Do you have reflections on the war you would like to share?
Email your idea or article to Vietnam@historynet.com, subject line: Reflections

This article appeared in the Autumn 2022 issue of Vietnam magazine.

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U.S. Navy F4U Corsair fighter-bombers returning from a 1951 combat mission over Korea circle the aircraft carrier USS Boxer as they wait for the planes of the next strike group to clear the ship’s decks.

First flown in May 1940, from 1943 on the Corsair saw World War II combat service with the Navy and Marine Corps, Britain’s Fleet Air Arm and the Royal New Zealand Air Force. More than a match for the enemy aircraft it encountered, the Corsair was the mount for scores of Navy and Marine Corps aces (as well as a British Royal Marine and a pilot of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve).

The Corsair remained in American and RNZAF service following the end of World War II, and was also adopted by France (which used it in Indochina), Argentina, El Salvador and Honduras. Despite the advent of first-generation jet aircraft, the “bent-wing bird” (so called because of its inverted gull wings) also saw extensive service in Korea as a fighter bomber and night fighter. In both roles the Corsair tangled with — and bested — North Korean MiG-15 jet fighters and several occasions.

The Corsair was withdrawn from U.S. service in the late 1960s and saw its last combat service during the 1969 “Soccer War” between  El Salvador and Honduras. Some 30 Corsairs remain flyable worldwide, with several being used in the making of the upcoming Korean War film “Devotion.”

That movie tells the story of Navy pilots Jesse Brown (who in 1948 became the nation’s first African American naval aviator) and Tom Hudner. On Dec. 4, 1950, Brown crashed-landed in Korea after his Corsair was disabled by ground fire. Hudner, his wingman, intentionally crash-landed his own aircraft in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue the trapped Brown, who ultimately died of his injuries. Hudner was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions.

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Retired Capt. Andrew Clark of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment recalled the day that Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year-reign as British monarch all began — and the role he played himself. When the queen was crowned on June 2, 1953, he marched in the procession.

Clark, born in Coventry in 1934, was called up for National Service in November 1952.

“At that time when we joined up, we were due to serve two years with the colours — that’s full time military service – and 3 ½ years on reserve, and so that’s how the whole thing kicked off,” he said.

Marching At the Coronation

Serving with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, he was selected for infantry officer cadet school and was participating in a 16-week course when he was chosen to march in the coronation.

“I just happened to be picked out,” he said. “We went on Sunday by train down to London and stayed in the Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot because next morning we needed to train how to march 12 abreast and how to get through Marble Arch. That all happened on the Monday. The next day was the coronation itself.”

He estimated that attendees of the coronation ceremony were in Westminster Abbey by 6:30 a.m. The troops themselves arrived later.

“We were actually not required in London until the queen was crowned — that was the time we were brought up to attention,” he said. “We had to be there.”

Clark recalled that the queen stopped for lunch before the procession to Buckingham Palace. The soldiers had lunch supplied for them.

“There was a famous chain of cafes called Lion’s Corner House, and they provided a packed lunch for us — what I distinctly remember was two barley sugars!”

Much like the Platinum Jubilee festivities in 2022, the coronation procession drew massive crowds and wild fanfare. Although it rained in the afternoon, Clark said, the weather didn’t dampen people’s spirits.  

“We were supporting her. Huge numbers of people lined the route. We hadn’t really had anything like that before, even for the wedding,” he said.

“It was one of my proudest moments. Not many people can say they actually physically marched in the coronation,” he said. “I marched in the coronation representing infantry officer cadets at that point in time.”

Remembering Prince Philip and George VI

Clark was commissioned on Aug. 1, 1953 into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Both of his parents were doctors — his mother an ophthalmic surgeon and his father a general practitioner. His paternal grandfather was a master tailor who worked on behalf of Hugh Cecil Lowther, the fifth earl of Lonsdale. His maternal grandfather was a missionary and physician.

“Within my family, without realizing it, I do inherit traditions of service,” he said.

He was a child during World War II, and was kept safe from German bombings at boarding school in Wales. He recalled a time when royal events were more interwoven with daily life, such as the occasion of Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to Prince Philip on Nov. 20, 1947. Then attending Bromsgrove school in Worcestershire, he and other students were permitted to go home for the occasion.

“Just like this weekend [for the Platinum Jubilee], there was an extra holiday to mark that wedding,” he said. “Though I had already had seven years of boarding and was quite used to being a boarder, that was a very great relief to me.”

He also vividly remembered the death of King George VI. He and fellow Bromsgrove students gathered for a solemn memorial at their school chapel, which included a memorial built to commemorate all the boys who’d been killed in World War I.

“When we heard that King George VI had died, we went to a longer service at chapel and we sang this hymn that still sticks in my mind: “The strife is o’er, the battle done,” he said. “It was a very distinctive and memorable service for him.”

Military Service in Korea and Egypt

As a soldier, Clark deployed to Korea on Sept. 20, 1953, at age 19, setting sail from Southampton. Initially the troops were held back in Hong Kong to abide by the terms of the armistice signed on July 27, 1953. He did eventually travel to Korea and was stationed below the 38th parallel.

“There were a lot of American troops there and they had some very good rations. But we [British] had access to alcohol — gin, whiskey and things,” he said. “We would trade our gin and alcohol for wonderful rations.”

He expressed great admiration for the people of South Korea.

“It gives me enormous pride that here was this nation, which we eventually came home from, with not a building standing, and it subsequently developed from an aid-borrowing nation into an aid-giving nation,” he said. “South Korea rehoused its citizens and got its industry going. They have even run the G-7 and the winter and summer Olympic games. It’s just extraordinary.”

After Korea, Clark deployed to Egypt, arriving at Port Said after a long journey by ship and being assigned to guard a section of the Suez Canal. He met Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery there.

“Monty actually came to meet us in Egypt in July 1954. It was the first time he’d been in the Middle East since the end of the war,” he said. “There was a special parade for him.”

Clark, who studied Latin in school, associates a quote from the first book of Virgil’s “Aeneid” with British soldiers’ victory in North Africa after their numerous wartime hardships. “’Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit’ means ‘perhaps one day even these things will be good to remember,’” Clark said. “How can a man write that 2,000 years ago? I tell you there were soldiers who supported Monty who met for 30 years in the Albert Hall, because ‘forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.’ It’s incredible if you see it that way.”  

Clark returned to the U.K. in November 1954 and worked for Alfred Herbert Ltd., a Coventry-based engineering company. He married Wendy, also from Coventry, on May 9, 1964. They had two children, Judith and Fiona. 

Continuing Support for the Queen and Her Legacy

The coronation march was not the last time that Clark would encounter the Queen. He was chosen to carry the colors during a March 23, 1956, ceremony in which the Queen placed the foundation stone for a new Coventry cathedral.

The ceremony was especially poignant, as it saw the beginnings of a new cathedral rising beside the ruins of the former cathedral destroyed by the Luftwaffe during World War II on Nov. 14, 1940.

Speaking prior to the queen’s death in September 2022, Clark expressed his admiration for her. “For people like me, the queen cannot do anything wrong. She’s amazing,” Clark said. “She has absolutely done important things for the country. She also binds us all together.” He said that he admired the queen for her travels to build bridges with many different countries, including the United States. He also enjoyed watching her interact on the balcony during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations with Prince William’s children, especially the young Prince Louis.

“The traditions are important because they’re cohesive and hold things together,” he said. “I think it is good.”

Clark’s daughter Fiona said her father was a hero for his tradition of service. “I’m proud of him,” she said. “And I don’t think he realizes how proud I am of him.”

Five men who served in the Vietnam War are in line to have U.S. Army bases named in their honor, according to a list released by the commission established by Congress in 2021 to rename bases named after Confederates. 

Of the nine forts due to be renamed, nearly half would be renamed after Vietnam veterans — which many see as a major step in U.S. history towards giving Vietnam War veterans greater recognition.

According to Politico, the commission received over 34,000 recommendations at the outset. The commission, which reports to the House and Senate Armed Service Committees, must present its final report to Congress on Oct. 1, 2022. Afterwards the report will be given to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, by whose authority the name changes can be made.

Here are the Vietnam War candidates whose names await approval.

Fort Benning Becomes Fort Moore

Fort Benning, Georgia would be renamed for Lt. Gen. Harold “Hal” Moore. Moore, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) became famous for his heroism in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965 and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. 

“For three days, Moore led a defense on the ground that combined prescient strategy with excellent tactics, and resulted in a secure position and repulse of the enemy,” according to the commission.  

He became well-known for his bestselling book, “We Were Soldiers Once … And Young,” which he co-authored with correspondent Joe Galloway. Moore was depicted by Mel Gibson in the 2002 film based on the book, “We Were Soldiers.”

“He was a phenomenal man of great strength and character, courageous and like a father to his troops who got most of his boys out of there after he landed in a hornet’s nest,” Gibson said of Moore, according to the New York Times.  

The fort’s new name would also honor Moore’s wife, Julia, who lived on the base and was known for personally helping to deliver telegrams informing the families of her husband’s soldiers when they were killed or wounded.

Fort Hood Becomes Fort Cavazos

Gen. Richard E. Cavazos would become the new namesake of Fort Hood, Texas. A sixth-generation Texan, Cavazos served in the Korean War and was stationed at Fort Hood before going to Vietnam, where he commanded the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment.  

“When the Vietnam War began, then-Lt. Col. Cavazos was ready to bring men into battle once more: he commanded an infantry battalion, often fighting in the field — and frequently leading from the front,” according to the commission.

Bill Fee, who served under Cavazos, called him a hands-on leader who stayed with his men through thick and thin: “Most battalion commanders stood in the rear or in a helicopter above to direct the battle … [He] had nothing to do with that. He fought on the ground with his troops during battle … he was on the ground with us as we were facing the North Vietnamese Army.”  

In 1973, Cavazos became the first Hispanic-American to achieve the rank of brigadier general. In 1982, he became the first to receive the rank of four-star general.  

Fort Rucker Becomes Fort Novosel

CW4 Michael J. Novosel Sr. would become the new namesake of Fort Rucker, Alabama. Volunteering for active duty in the 1960s as U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was sharply increasing, he resigned his commission in the U.S. Air Force to join the U.S. Army as a warrant officer and helicopter pilot. He served two tours in Vietnam as a “dustoff” pilot evacuating casualties from the battlefield amid enemy fire and dangerous conditions.

On Oct. 2, 1969, while serving in the 82nd Medical Detachment, Novosel performed 15 extractions and rescued 29 soldiers from combat zones in Kien Tuong province in the Mekong Delta, despite being repelled six times by enemy fire and wounded during his final rescue. He was 47. For his heroic actions that day he received the Medal of Honor from President Richard Nixon on June 15, 1971.   

Fort Lee Becomes Fort Gregg-Adams

Fort Lee, Virginia, named after Gen. Robert E. Lee, would be named Fort Gregg-Adams, after two Black service members: Lt. Gen. Arthur Gregg, who served in Korea and Vietnam, and Lt. Col. Charity Adams, who served in World War II.  

Gregg, a military logistician, was an instructor at the Quartermaster Leadership School at Fort Lee before his promotion to lieutenant colonel in 1965. Assigned to command the 96th Supply and Service Battalion at Fort Riley, he arrived in Vietnam in May 1966.

Gregg later spoke with appreciation of his time in Vietnam. “We had a demanding mission, 24 hours a day. There was no time for people to get into trouble. Everyone was well-disciplined, worked hard, and had pride in the mission,” Gregg said.

He went on to serve as director of logistics for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later as deputy chief of staff of logistics for the U.S. Army. He retired in 1981.

Fort Pickett Becomes Fort Barfoot

Tech. Sgt. Van T. Barfoot took out three German machine gun nests and a tank in one day during World War II. He served as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. He flew 177 combat hours and earned an Air Medal as well as a Legion of Merit, according to the Army Aviation Association of America.

The Other 4 Forts

The remaining forts would be named for President Dwight D. Eisenhower; Sgt. William Henry Johnson, a Black World War I soldier who single-handedly fought off two dozen Germans; and Dr. Mary Walker, a Union doctor who was the country’s first female Army surgeon and first female Medal of Honor recipient. Fort Bragg, North Carolina, would be renamed Fort Liberty.

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On May 21, 2021, President Joe Biden presented 1st Lt. Ralph Puckett with the Medal of Honor for valorous action in the Korean War on November 25, 1950. But his story takes on new life in the form of a graphic novel.

The latest issue of “Medal of Honor,” an illustrated series produced by the Association of the U.S. Army, portrays his mission in the Battle of the Ch’ongch’on River, part of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s “Home-by-Christmas Offensive” that left the Army Ranger fragged.

Puckett risked his life serving as Commander, Eighth Army Ranger Company, Task Force Dolvin. In an attack on Hill 205, the enemy directed mortar, Puckett “mounted the closest tank exposing himself to the deadly enemy fire,” the Army wrote in a news story.

The threat of enemy fire pinned down a platoon, so Puckett made the decision to run out from the tank and draw enemy fire so his Rangers could take out machine guns and take Hill 205. Despite being injured by a grenade fragment, he refused to be evacuated.

He “intentionally exposed himself three more times to an enemy sniper before the sniper was killed,” his citation reads.

“Unable to obtain artillery support to repel the sixth enemy assault, 1st Lt. Puckett and his command were overrun by the enemy. Two mortar rounds detonated in 1st Lt. Puckett’s foxhole inflicting severe wounds to his feet, buttocks, and left arm.”

Puckett was originally presented with the Distinguished Service Cross before being upgraded to the Medal of Honor.

“The Association of the United States Army celebrates their valor with the Medal of Honor graphic novel series,” according to a release from AUSA.

“These full-color digital books are created by a talented team of professionals drawn from the world of comic book industry, and the details are vetted by professional historians. Each eight-page issue profiles a true American hero, bringing to life the daring deeds that distinguished themselves by gallantry in action ‘above and beyond the call of duty.’”

In October 2018, AUSA released its first edition of “Medal of Honor: Alvin York.”

“To date, a dozen issues have been published, commemorating such heroes as Audie Murphy, Mary Walker, Daniel Inouye, Henry Johnson, and Roy Benavidez,” the release added.

To read “Medal of Honor: Ralph Puckett,” you can visit www.ausa.org/puckett.

Originally published on Military Times, our sister publication.