Planting the Stars and Stripes in Asia--The Korean War They Didn't Teach You

 

A Korean map of the Hermit Kingdom.  The Han is the second major river from the south pictured on the map, the water way to the capital Hanyang (modern Seoul.)

A fat book could be made of forgotten and neglected American foreign wars or interventions. Take the war in Korea, for instance.  No, not the one when Harry Truman sent American forces to try to repel an invasion of the South by the Communist North in 1950, although I know veterans of that conflict have taken to calling it a forgotten war.  No, I have in mind an action nearly 80 years earlier.  Never heard of it?  Well pull up a stool and I will tell you all about it.

In American military and naval annals, it is listed, mostly as a footnote, as the United States Expedition to Korea of 1871.  It is best remembered as the first foreign conflict in which Medals of Honor were awarded.  The Koreans, who have a keener memory of such things, call it the Shinmiyangyo.

Korea in the late 19th Century was one of the most isolated nations on earth.  The history of this peninsular nation in northern Asia was a tragic one of repeated invasions or attempted invasions by neighboring China, Japan, and Manchuria.  The response of the ruling Joseon Dynasty which came to power in 1392 and had ruled and shaped the nation as a Confusion culture and state, was extreme isolationism—a virtual exclusion of all contact and trade with the rest of the world.  That policy was being tested again by pressure from Japan, the introduction of Catholicism by missionaries in the late 18th Century, and demands of European powers for concessions and trade privileges.  

In 1866 after eight fruitless week of battle a French expeditionary force failed to capture the citadel of Gsnghwua and was forced into a humiliating withdrawal.

In 1866 the French launched a punitive expedition against Korea in retaliation for a massacre of Catholics that included French Priests and to demand trade concessions.  A sizable French force landed on the fortress island of Ganghwa which guarded the approach to the capital of Hanyang, modern day Seoul.  After six weeks of fighting, the French were ignominiously forced to withdraw.  The ruling Joseon Dynasty, previously weakened by internal dissent was strengthened and but also deluded about its military capacity.  It re-affirmed its isolation and in the West became known as the Hermit Kingdom.

As for the United States, having spanned its own continent and emerged united from the Civil War, the country continued to look westward to the Pacific all the way to the shores of Asia to expand its influence and to secure free and equal access to the trade of all Asian ports.  Spurred on by the Navy, a force in search of a mission to keep it afloat in peace time, the government followed a policy to open trade relations with all nations and to check the growing power of its greatest rival the British Empire with its strong presence in China and naval superiority.

The first catalyst of the U.S action against Korea was the fate of the General Sherman, an American side wheel commercial steamer that was hired by an English firm in China to try to open trade with Korea in 1866, the same year as the French adventure.  The belligerent American captain of the ship would not take a refusal to allow it to dock and captured Korean officials sent to inform him of the government policy.  He then tried to move upriver firing cannons as he went.  The Koreans rallied and after several days of fighting and the loss of several junks, the General Sherman was destroyed and her surviving crew taken captive—and were likely executed.

Also of official concern was the possible fate of Americans who were shipwrecked in Korean waters, although in the one confirmed case, the survivors were well treated and sent to China from where they could be repatriated.  Finally, the U.S. sought to open Korean ports and sign a trade agreement.

The iron hulled and screw propelled steam frigate the USS Colorado was the flagship of the American squadron on the 1871 Korean expedition.

Early April 1871 what might be called a heavily muscular diplomatic mission set sail for Korea.  In Command was Rear Admiral John Rogers on board the USS Colorado, the flagship of the Navy’s Asiatic Squadron.  It was an iron-hulled three masted steam screw frigate which had seen service in the Civil War.  On board to handle negotiations was Frederick F. Low, the United States Ambassador to China.  Also in the squadron were four other warships—the sloop of war USS Alaska, the armed tug USS Palos, the side-wheel gunboat USS Monocacy, and the screw sloop USS Benicia. 

Admiral Rogers might be forgiven if he envisioned having the success and glory the Commodore Mathew Perry found in opening trade with Japan in 1854.

 "Men in white" were encountered by Admiral Roger's crew.  These Korean officials later taken captive were photographed on the deck of the Colorado in their traditional attire.

On June 1st Rogers arrived in Korean waters and successfully put men ashore to attempt to contact authorities.  The crew reported encountering “men in white” who were reluctant to talk to him or take any message to the Emperor in his capital of Hanyang.  Rogers’s men ashore reportedly politely told the Koreans that they would be exploring the area and “meant no harm.”

The Admiral then led his ships to the entry of the Han River leading to the capital—where foreign ships were explicitly forbidden to go.  The flotilla came under ineffective cannon fire from fortresses on Ganghwa.  The ships were not badly damaged, due “to the bad gunnery of the Coreans, whose fire, although very hot for the fifteen minutes in which they maintained it, was ill-directed, and consequently without effect.”

Rogers hotly demanded an official apology for the “unprovoked attack” and gave the Koreans a ten-day deadline to reply.  When those days lapsed, he quickly swung into action with a punitive raid on Ganghwa Island.

A council of war on board the USS Colorado.  Admiral John Rodgers is the one leaning over the chart.

On June 10 hostilities began with an attack on the lightly defended Choji Garrison on the Salee River.  The Koreans, members of the Tiger Hunters led by General Eo Jae-yeon were crudely armed with matchlock muskets which had been obsolete for nearly a hundred years in the West.

A force of 546 sailors and 105 Marines were put ashore to move on other objectives supported by 12-pound howitzers and guns from the flotilla.  They quickly moved on and captured Deokjin Garrison, and Deokjin Fort, which they found abandoned.  The Koreans fell back and regrouped at the well-fortified citadel of the Gwangseong Garrison.  As the Americans advanced on the fort an attempt to flank it was repulsed.

American forces established strong artillery batteries on two hills overlooking the fort which was pounded by extensive shelling abetted by fire from the USS Monocacy operating close to shore in shallow Han River waters.  

U.S. Sailors stormed the citadel of Gwangseong in heavy hand to hand fighting.

Navy Lt. Hugh McKee led a charge on the damaged fort.  The Korean defenders with their slow loading matchlocks were hardly able to get off a single volley of fire before McKee reached the top of the wall leading his troops. He was felled by a ball immediately.  Right behind him Commander Winfield Scott Schley personally shot the Korean who had wounded McKee.  Several seamen rushed to the aid of McKee, fatally wounded in the groin.  Meanwhile two Marines, Corporal Charles Brown of the USS Colorado’s guard and Private Hugh Purvis of the USS Alaska’s guard captured the personal flag of Eo Jae-yŏn and Private James Dougherty shot and killed the General.  Carpenter Cyrus Hayden, a sailor from the USS Colorado planted the American Flag on the ramparts under heavy fire.

Korean dead in the breached citadel.

The whole battle for the fortress lasted 15 minutes from the breach of the walls.  The surviving garrison, including the deputy commander, was taken prisoner.  In all of the action that day the Koreans lost 243 dead and 20 captured, most of them wounded.  American losses were three dead, including McKee, and ten wounded.

It was a brilliant military victory, especially considering that the Americans accomplished in a single day what the French had failed to do in six weeks.

Despite the military glory, the diplomatic mission ended in abject failure.  Rogers tried to use his prisoners as bargaining chips to demand negotiations with the Koreans.  The Koreans, for their part, flatly refused to negotiate, or even to take back the prisoners, who they considered traitors for surrendering.  The squadron stood off Korean waters until July 1 fruitlessly waiting to begin talks.  Frustrated and with fuel for his ships running low, Rogers had to break off contact and return with his primary objectives unmet.  In the end Rogers left as empty handed as the French.

Korean Headquarters Flag captured  by Marines Private Hugh Purvis, Corporal Charles Brown, and Captain McLain Tilton on board the USS Colorado after the battle.

The U.S. was unable to establish relations with Korea until 1886, after the Japanese forcibly opened trade there and the British had extracted concessions.

Nine sailors and six Marines including McKee, Brown, Purvis, Dougherty, Hayden, and three sailors who came to the aid of McKee were awarded the Medal of Honor.  Admiral Rogers never found the fame and glory of Commodore Perry and faded into historical obscurity.

North Koreans re-enact the Shinmiyangyo annually and celebrate the defenders as national martyrs and heroes.

For the Koreans, especially, in the Communist North, which now so closely resembles the Hermit Kingdom, the whole experience of 19th Century contact with the Americans is celebrated.  A story was invented making an ancestor of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the People’s Republic of Korea and of the dynasty that has ruled ever since, the local commander who sank the General Sherman.  The American spy ship the USS Pueblo which was captured by the North Koreans in 1968 is now anchored at the site of the destruction of the General Sherman.  And the fallen garrison of Gwangseong are celebrated as martyr/heroes like the Texicans at the Alamo.

Which is why you probably never heard of America’s first Korean War.

 

Other Takes on the Stuff That Dreams are Made of

     

The movie version we all remember and treasure.

More than a decade ago ago, I was getting ready for bed.  It was late.  I was idly flipping through channels while finishing a late-night snack.  Then there it was.  On Turner Classic Movies (TCM)—The Maltese Falcon.  And I caught it only minutes after the opening credits rolled.  I was hooked.  John Huston’s 1941 directorial debut is one of those films you can watch over and over and it is fresh every time.  So, I watched.  Who needs sleep?

Then in the wee small hours, after Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade delivers the classic closing line to Ward Bond’s befuddled detective, “That’s the stuff that dreams are made of,” before I can finally pack it in I discover that next up was the odd Warner Bros. 1936 remake of a still earlier version, Satan Met a Lady.  I had never seen it.  Well, I wanted to see the sun rise anyway.

The Maltese Falcon originated as a serial in the pulp pages of a lurid magazine—The Black Mask.  It was penned by their most noted writer, Dashiell Hammett, a hard drinking former Pinkerton agent who had made a name for himself creating a nameless detective known as The Continental Op.  In the process he was re-inventing the mystery story into something much grittier.  Eventually it would be called the hard-boiled detective genre.  Out with the drawing rooms and genteel murders and in with the gritty streets, betrayal, flawed heroes, and brassy dames.

                                       

                                                        The pulp serial was issued as a novel in 1930.

In 1930 the serial was issued as a stand-alone novel.  It immediately elevated Hammett to the topflight of popular novelists, even though he would be moldering in his gin-soaked grave before it would be acknowledged as an American literary classic.

His character, Sam Spade, was a departure from the faceless operative of a giant corporation.  He was, like Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective.  But unlike Holmes his motives were purely pecuniary, his ethics iffy, and his methods by turns trading in betrayal and brutality.  In an uneasy partnership with Miles Archer, he operates a shady agency in a seedy part of town specializing in divorce, scandal, and perhaps a tad of strong-arm enforcement on the side.  His relationship with the police and authorities is  strained at best, although he has allies—most likely drinking buddies or former associates from an implied past.  Despite his general amorality Spade does have a rough personal and professional code which compels him to solve the murder of a feckless partner who he mistrusted and whose wife he was poking on the side despite any risks or temptations

The character and the lurid story, swirling madly around a McGuffin—in this case a fabulous gold and jeweled statuette known as the Maltese Falcon—were a natural for the new sound movies which could make the most out of tough, snappy dialog which Hammett delivered in, you should pardon the expression, spades.  Warner Bros., which was already distinguishing itself from other studios by its willingness to exploit crime and a little sex, gobbled up the rights.

By the way, there really was a Maltese Falcon, as described in the book and ’41 movie.  There really was an annual tribute of “one falcon” paid by the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V for bestowing the fiefdoms of Malta, Tripoli, and Gozo on them.  Known as the Maltese Tribute it was paid annually to Charles and his heirs for centuries—always as an actual bird, however.  No golden, jewel encrusted bird was ever sent and then lost to antiquity.

Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Danniels  as Sam Spade and Ruth Wonderley in in the 1931 Warner Bros. version.  The pre-code film was racy and a scene where Spade strip searches Wonderley made the Production Code Hayes office block a re-release.

Warners’s first stab at a movie looks like a dud when viewed today.  The camera work, dictated by the cumbersome and noisy Vidaphone process camera which had to be encased in a booth, is static.  The pacing drags.  The acting will win no awards.  Bebe Danniels as the temptress Ruth Wonderly gets top billing.  But the action and most of the dialog revolve around Ricardo Cortez as Spade.  Despite the Latin name, Cortez was a handsome, fast-talking New York Jew who was a hold-over silent leading man.  After early success in talkies, his career faded and he was relegated to playing mostly heavies in B movies.  The ubiquitous Una Merkel enlivened the proceedings as Spades loyal secretary and implied plaything.

Whatever its deficiencies to modern viewers, the film was a hit with audiences.  A few years later when Hammet was even a bigger name and rival MGM began producing the Thin Man movies, Warner’s tried to re-release The Maltese Falcon.  But the Motion Picture Code had come into play since the earlier release.  Code authorities refused to allow the release citing several sexually suggestive sequences—including a strip search of Wonderly by Spade and an acknowledgement of a homosexual relationship between villain Casper Gutman and his youthful stooge Wilmer Cook.

Instead, the studio settled on a remake.  But they felt that they had to even change the title to avoid a preemptive block by the Code Authority.  Thus, Satan Met a Lady was born.

The plot and much of the dialog remain, but the names of all of the characters are changed and the McGuffin this time is the supposedly jewel filled Horn of Roland based on a reference in the Medieval French epic the Song of Roland.  But for those of us steeped in the Bogart classic this is Bizzaro World.  To begin with, it’s a comedy.  Let that sink in.

Bette Davis got top billing but Warren William did most of the heavy lifting in a thinly veiled re-make.  To cash in on the popularity of MGM's Thin Man series, also based on work by Dashiell Hammet, the oddly cast film was played for comedy.

Warner’s reigning queen Bette Davis gets top billing.  But she has remarkably little to do but bat those famous eyes and play the temptress.  She is on screen for less than a quarter of the film.  This was just the kind of throwaway role that had her at constant odds with Jack Warner.  The real star is Warren William as detective Ted Shane. 

William was another Warner’s pre-code leading man.  Tall, handsome, glib and middle aged, he specialized in playing amoral businessmen and bosses in films like Skyscraper Souls, The Match King, and Employees Entrance.  He played the sort of a cad that women adored anyway.  His most memorable turn for modern audiences was as the prudish older brother of Dick Powell in Golddiggers of 1933.  By the time this movie was made he had carved out a reliable niche as the fast talking, close-to-the-line super-lawyer Perry Mason in a series of Warner’s programmers.  By the way, for those who grew up on Raymond Burr’s sort of stuffy and stodgy TV version, William is a revelation.

William’s Shane is basically Mason on steroids.  Glib and without an apparent ethical bone in his body, William plays it to the hilt while wearing, for some unknown reason, a black Stetson cowboy hat instead of a private eye snap-brim fedora.

But what really gives the film a house of mirrors feeling is the casting of supporting characters.  Villain #1, Joel Cairo as played by diminutive Peter Lorre five years later, here is lanky Englishman Arthur Treacher of all people as Anthony Travers.  Villain #2 vividly remembered for the film debut of Sydney Greenstreet as Casper Gutman is here grandmotherly Alison Skipworth as Madame Barabas.  And the teenage gunsel played by Elijah Cook Jr.  here is an over-sized oaf in a beret played by Maynard Holmes.  A very young Marie Wilson doing her best Gracie Allen cum Jean Harlow ditzy blonde is a delight as Miss Murgatroyd, Shane’s semi-loyal secretary.

Lanky Englishman Arthur Treacher took time off from playing butlers to play a heavy, the film's equivalent of Peter Lorre's Joel Cairo three years later.  William sported a black Stetson for reason's never made clear.

Yes, this remake was an odd film.  It makes nobody’s list of classics and Davis considered it the nadir of her career at Warners.  But I have to admit, it was kind of fun.  I bet if I had watched it with the aid of a little pot, like I used to watch late-late movies on my little black-and-white portable TV years ago, I bet it would have been hilarious.

But it won’t make me forget the delicious perfection of watching Bogie tell Mary Astor that he is “sending her over” because he “won’t play sap for you like those other guys did.”

Warning--1984 Wasn’t Meant to be an Instruction Manual

                                 

                                                        The suitably lurid American mass market paperback edition.

On June 8, 1949 George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel of totalitarianism triumphant Nineteen Eighty-—usually called simply 1984— was published in London.

Eric Arthur Blair a/k/a Orwell was at the time a 45 year old English writer who was born to a civil servant in India.  After a largely unhappy public school education back home—a private, residential academy to Americans—he returned to the orient as a policeman in Burma.  He was an outsider among his British colleagues there, preferring to explore the country, learn the language and culture.  He was soon sympathetic to the colonial people and alienated from his own Empire and career.

In the mid 1920’s Blare left the service and moved to Paris, the scene of a well-known expatriate community of writers and artists.  Even there, he spent more time with the French working class than with the self-exiled intellectuals. After returning to England, he based himself mostly at his parent’s comfortable suburban home while making frequent forays into the poverty-stricken London East End.  He tried to live the life of the poor at intervals, for instance as a Kentish hops picker.

Blare began to write about his experiences while teaching school.  His first book Down and Out in Paris and London an account of his life as a self-described tramp was published in 1933 under the nom de plume Orwell to avoid embarrassment to his family.

                                

                                                Eric Blair a/k/a George Orwell as a young man.

He published a novel and then a memoir of his Burma years in America but was only slowly establishing himself as a writer.  He knocked around London working part time in a bookstore, rooming with old friends, and then taking a walking tour of the industrial north, then in the depths of the Depression.  He attended meetings of both Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirt fascists who deeply offended him and of the Communists whose cause appealed to him even as their authoritarian methods left him queasy.  The result of that trip was The Road to Wigan Pier, published by the Left Book Club in 1937.  It contained a frank avowal and defense of Socialism while describing his journey from a middle class upbringing to it.  But he was not uncritical of the left and raised questions about barriers to a truly egalitarian society.  His publisher was so afraid that those critiques would not be met well by the left, that he inserted his own apologetic forward in the printed edition.

By the time the book came out Orwell had traveled to Spain to fight fascism.  Arriving in Catalonia he enlisted in the militia of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista—POUM, a Trotskyist Communist Party that was then in coalition with the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, a wing of the Spanish Communist Party, which was backed by Soviet Union.  All were fighting Federico Franco’s Falange forces under a supposedly united Republican banner.

Orwell is the tall man in the back row of this group of international volunteers in the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War.

Catalonia and its capital Barcelona were the most secure ground of the Republic.  The coalition, largely led by the CNT was firmly in control, well-armed, and the economy, including a vigorous industrial sector and agriculture had been re-organized in worker and peasant co-operatives.  The province was able to send troops to other fronts and provide arms and food to the cause.  It was the heart of the Republic, operating along non-authoritarian communal lines.

Orwell’s experiences in Spain would forever change the idealistic young man.  In his first winter there, he was posted to a quiet sector and experienced mostly discomfort and boredom.  He yearned to get into the fight.  Returning to Barcelona he decided to ask for a transfer to the International Brigade so that he could get to the front around Madrid.  But in May of 1937, street fighting broke out in the city as the Communists attacked POUM, who it labeled as “objectively fascist” for supporting revolutionary reform of society even as the war was pursued.  In this they were allied with the CNT.  But on other issues they clashed with the Anarchists.  Orwell laid low during the fighting, aghast at the breach of solidarity as the war against fascism still raged at the front.

He decided to return to the with the Aragon front with the POUM militia rather than wait for the call from the Communists, who he now deeply mistrusted.  There he was wounded in the throat by sniper fire.  After nearly bleeding to death.  He was evacuated back to Barcelona where his wife managed to join him from England.  There the situation deteriorated even further.  The Communists had the upper hand and outlawed POUM.  They were rousting and imprisoning members, especially international volunteers like Orwell.  He had to go into hiding. 

In July Orwell and his wife managed to escape across the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean village of Banyuls sur Mer, France and from there to England.  He escaped just in time.  On July 15 he was charged in abstencia by the Communist Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason along with POUM leaders with “rabid Trotskyism.”  His trial was held in October.  Had he been in attendance he would have been found guilty and executed.  Orwell was recovering in French Morocco at the time and noted that the trials were “only a by-product of the Russian Trotskyist trials and from the start every kind of lie, including flagrant absurdities, has been circulated in the Communist press.”

Orwell’s health was nearly broken by his experience, as he was nursed back to health he processed his experience in writing.  He concluded that authoritarianism of the left and right were mirrors of each other and equally evil. 

Homage to Catalonia was published in 1939 and was immediately attacked by the British Communist press and much of the left that was still sympathetic to them.  The opinion at home was the Communists were the heroes of the Spanish Civil War and that POUM and the CNT sabotaged the war effort by demanding immediate revolutionary reform instead of concentrating on the war effort.  In fact, as Orwell recognized the Communists concluded that it was better to lose the war in Spain than allow a successful alternative revolutionary system to arise.  The book sold poorly.  It is now considered a classic by the libertarian left.

With Britain’s entry into World War II, Orwell struggled to join the effort.  He was rejected by the military and for most active work because he contracted tuberculosis in Spain.  It took until 1942 to get a post with the BCC in charge of cultural programing to be aired in India to counter Japanese propaganda there.  He was not comfortable as a bureaucrat and left the service after two years to concentrate on writing his parable of fascism, Animal Farm.

                                         

                                                      Orlwell's barn yard fable of fascism was his fist critical and popular success.

Animal Farm was Orwell’s first commercial success and sales helped make him financially secure for the first time since his youth.  But his health continued to deteriorate.  He worked desperately on the manuscript for Nineteen Eighty-four. 

In this future world Britain was just part of one of three warring totalitarian regimes that between them control the world.  England is now Airstrip One of Oceania which is at war with Eurasia and Eastasia.  Oceania is supposedly led by Big Brother, the hero of the revolution which followed an earlier worldwide war whose image is everywhere along with the admonition that “Big Brother is Watching.”  But Big Brother may not even exist—he may just be a figurehead.   The official ideology of Oceania is EnglishSocialism or IngSoc in the official language New Speak.  But the system is socialism in no recognizable way.  Instead, it is a total surrender of the individual to the state enforced by constant surveillance.

Big Brother from the 1954 film version staring Edmund O'Brien.

Protagonist—hero is too strong a word—Winston Smith is a minor functionary in the Ministry of Truth whose growing doubts about the system make him yearn for rebellion.  As Animal Farm was about fascism, Nineteen Eighty-four was clearly an extrapolation of Stalinism.  The book was a success.  In some ways it stoked the Anti-Communism that was sweeping the West, particularly America.

                                 

                                                 New Speak--a perfect model for Trump Speak.

But the real enemy was totalitarianism of any sort.  In America anti-Communism was veering dangerously close to totalitarianism itself.  Enforced conformity and the unchecked power of the security establishment were the hallmarks of post-war America.

Orwell, his health finally collapsing entirely, only tasted the beginning of the influence his novel would have.  He died on January 21, 1950 in London.

77 years after the fact, the technology of the surveillance state described by Orwell has become a reality.  A new hobgoblin—terrorism—is now the excuse to unleash that technology on the citizenry.  Surveillance cameras are everywhere, the cell phones in everyone’s pockets become personal tracking devices, the National Security Agency seems to have the power and the capability to monitor all Americans’ phone usage, e-mail, and web surfing habits. 

Now in the era of alternative facts and Trumpian double talk, New Speak is fast becoming reality as well.

As a popular Facebook meme has it, “1984 was meant to be a warning, not a blueprint.”