This piece was published on Veterans Day 2020 in the Arizona Daily Star
Lt. Col. (Ret.) Robert Matte Jr.
On Veterans Day it is appropriate to remember those who fought in Korea during the “Forgotten War,” So named because it is seen as a mere sideshow to Word War II and the Vietnam conflict. But it was not a sideshow. Seventy years ago on June 25, 1950, some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th parallel with the intent of overrunning the Republic of Korea in the south. North Korea was a Soviet puppet state that was established after WW II when the Korean peninsula was divided between the Russian and American Forces.
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson once said, “If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location in the world to fight this damnable war, the unanimous choice would have been Korea.” By July, American troops had entered the war to try to save the South. “If we let Korea down,” said President Harry Truman, “the Soviets will keep right on going and swallow up one place after another.” This was going to be a war against the forces of international communism. During the conflict, Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force, but the United States provided 90% of the combat troops.
Initially, American troops were poorly prepared for the fight. There had been a great demobilization of U.S. troops after WWII and as a result preparedness and training had suffered. By early September 1950, American and South Korean troops has been pushed to the brink and were holding a small defensive perimeter near Pusan in the south. Then in late September, General Douglas MacArthur launched an amphibious counter invasion in the north at the port of Incheon near Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The North Korean invaders were trapped between two UN forces and those not destroyed, retreated to North Korea.
The end of the war? Not so. UN forces drove to the border between North Korea and China at which point the Chinese Army attacked in October and drove UN troops back into South Korea. My father, Robert G. Matte, a career army officer who had fought in WWII, was one of thousands quickly dispatched to Korea. He was awarded the Air Medal and Bronze Star for flying in a storm, at night, in a small scout helicopter to reconnoiter the location of Chinese troops.
Eventually, there was a stalemate in the fighting back at the 38th parallel where the war had begun. Finally the fighting ended, and the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed on 27 July 1953. American forces have provided a protective buffer between the two countries ever since.
In this “forgotten war” nearly 40,000 Americans died in action in Korea, and more than 100,000 were wounded. They are now remembered at the Korean War Veterans Memorial near the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Hopefully, when folks hear about the Korean War they will understand that it was much more than a TV show called M*A*S*H with characters named Hawkeye, Trapper John, Radar, and Hot Lips Houlihan. The price for our freedoms is often steep, and those who fought at places such as Pusan, Incheon, Pork Chop Hill and the Chosin Resevoir, deserve all the honor we can give.