Fifty years to the day before Madeleine Albright toasted what appears to be the end of communism in North Korea, the People's Liberation Army was pouring into Korea to rescue communism from military defeat at the hands of the USled forces of the United Nations. The Korean War is one of the most forgotten wars of the past century. From it emerged two different Koreas, one bound for the darkness, poverty and oppression which communism has invariably brought in its wake; the other was destined to become one of the great economic powerhouses of the world. The fortunes of South Korea reveal the paucity of the aid-fixation which besets so many African countries and their sympathisers in the West.
Japenese rule
Korea was one of the poorest places on earth when the Northern leader Kim Il Sung began his mad adventure against the South. Few brands of colonialism were as brutal and ruthless as Japan's rule of Korea had been from 1910 to 1945. All higher education, law, commerce and administration were conducted in Japanese. Place-names were changed into Japanese, and all symptoms of Korean identity were ruthlessly repressed. The administrative class consisted entirely of imported Japanese. There was no native middle class, no professional class, no native capital-owning class. Illiteracy might have been as high as 75 per cent.
Thousands of Korean women were used as sex-slaves in Japanese army brothels, and many more men were conscripted as forced labourers in conquered territories. The Japanese spent as little as they possibly could on this colony: what is now South Korea had just 100 miles of metalled road in 1945.
The two Koreas began their separate journeys after the second World War, with North Korea being ruled by the insane Kim Il Sung (real name Kim Sung-ju), and the South by the almost equally vile Syngman Rhee (real name Yi Sung-nam).
There is a lesson here: beware men who change their names. Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky - name-changers, and killers all.
Kim Il Sung began the war, but US forces, vast in material and numbers, forced the North Koreans back, and Rhee's secret police imposed a truly horrifying regime on conquered areas of North Korea. One Japanese source claimed that as many as 150,000 "communists" were murdered by South Korean forces during their brief tenure in the North, and when North Korean forces with Chinese assistance retook Pyongyang, they found 2,000 prisoners had been executed in the main jail.
The success of the UN operation against North Korea triggered Communist Chinese intervention in the war; as hundreds of thousands of soldiers of the People's Liberation Army poured across the border half-a-century ago this week, among the first UN troops to feel their weight were the Royal Irish Hussars and the Royal Ulster Rifles. The Hussars, freshly arrived in their brand new, highly secret Centurion tanks, received an insight into the harshness of Korean life when one of their vehicles ran over a Korean soldier, breaking his leg.
Seized revolver
The officer in charge, Lieut Cooke, dismounted to see what he could do for the injured man, but a Korean platoon commander pushed him aside, seizing Cooke's revolver as he did so. He did not shoot Cooke, as the latter might have feared, but turned and shot the crippled man writhing on the ground as a vet might a horse, before giving the gun back to an astonished young tank-commander.
Both the Irish Hussars and the Ulster Rifles, fighting and dying alongside each other, were hammered by the Chinese army. Scores of men were killed, including the Ulster's CO, Major Blake, and hundreds passed into a truly dreadful captivity in which many died of privation and hardship, or were casually murdered. It was a common fate. In one North Korean camp, 1,500 prisoners of war - mostly Americans - died within eight months. Major Ryan of the Ulsters - who later became a priest - consoled himself by carving a patten for Holy Communion, a piety which earned him a long spell in solitary confinement.
The Irish of the Korean War are not alone in being forgotten. Amnesia has drawn a veil over this dreadful chapter in which there was barbarism on an almost medieval scale, even amid the technology of the 20th century. Two million North Korean civilians were killed, most of them slaughtered in US air force incendiary raids on defenceless and highly combustible bamboo cities. Nearly half-a-million Chinese soldiers were killed, including Mao's eldest son. Perhaps a quarter-of-a-million North Korean soldiers were killed. British (and Irish) deaths totalled over 1,000 dead, nearly 3,000 injured, and over 1,000 captured or missing.
US casualties
Considering the number of US troops deployed - nearly six million - US casualties were relatively low. The official number of 54,000 dead was revised downward last year to 37,000: a bureaucratic slip-up had added 17,000 to the death toll, which represented 0.6 per cent of the US forces in the field. No doubt the Chinese and the Koreans would have envied such figures.
Few people remember the Korean War today, as the insane, isolationist regime it helped secure in the North finally admits failure and seeks re-admission to the world community. South Korea, meanwhile, which had been more devastated by war than virtually any African country today, in peace embraced the free enterprise system with enthusiasm, and transformed itself into one of the most vibrant economies in the world. It is proof of what can be achieved by hard work and political will. They, not the paralysingly addictive drug known as aid, are the key to economic success anywhere.