6/25/2008:
It was 58 years ago today that Russian-backed North Korea invaded South Korea. It was the first armed conflict fought by the United Nations to contain the spread of Communism.
A Bismarck Tribune editorial offers a picture of American sentiments in the summer of 1952:
“Soon the Korean war will be two years old,” the editor wrote. “Since the truce talks began about two weeks after the first anniversary, it is fair to say the second year has largely added up to stalemate.
“Yet there is something terribly cruel in such a view of this strangest of all wars. It seems to imply that nothing is happening, that no blood is being shed. Still we all know this is not so, that casualty lists continue to be issued, that the total of men killed or wounded rises weekly by blocks of a hundred or more.
“. . .this war is no stalemate to the families of men whose names appear on those lists. It is bitter combat, with the full horror that surrounds any other war we have ever fought.”
The editor went on to state the sacrifices being made on the home front were trivial compared to the suffering of service men and women in Korea.
“This is all-out war for a few,” he wrote, “and booming peacetime, marred only by the nervous tensions of the Cold War, for the many. This is death and horror for some, and no pain at all for most others.
“Perhaps it is humanly impossible for people living in a state of half war-half peace to acquire a full consciousness of the gravity of the times unless the war strikes directly at them. Most people do not easily conjure up the troubles of another. They are absorbed in their own, however small they may seem to the man who is fighting for his life at the front.”
The sentiments of that editor in 1952 still hold true today. Most of us remain oblivious to the sacrifices and suffering endured by the one and a half million Americans who served in the three years of the Korean War. Few have thanked them for successfully halting the Communist aggressors they were sent to fight.
The United States averaged almost a thousand combat-related deaths per month. One hundred seventy-two of them were from North Dakota. They deserve to be remembered.
By Merry Helm
Source: The Bismarck Tribune. Uncredited editorial. 18 June 1952.