“The story dates to the early 1950s, when the U.S. Air Force, in
response to the North Korean invasion that started the Korean War, bombed and
napalmed cities, towns and villages across the North. It was mostly easy
pickings for the Air Force, whose B-29s faced little or no opposition on many
missions.The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment
of Americaâs own leaders. âOver a period of three years or so, we killed off â
what â 20 percent of the population,â Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the
Strategic Air Command âeverything that moved in North Korea, every brick
standing on top of another.â After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers
destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war,
flooding farmland and destroying crops.”
response to the North Korean invasion that started the Korean War, bombed and
napalmed cities, towns and villages across the North. It was mostly easy
pickings for the Air Force, whose B-29s faced little or no opposition on many
missions.The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment
of Americaâs own leaders. âOver a period of three years or so, we killed off â
what â 20 percent of the population,â Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the
Strategic Air Command âeverything that moved in North Korea, every brick
standing on top of another.â After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers
destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war,
flooding farmland and destroying crops.”
âAs if the flyers were playing in a bowling alley, with villages for pins:â The US Air War in Korea
âwe killed civilians, friendly civilians, and bombed their homes, fired on whole villages with occupants â women and children, and ten times as many hidden communist soldiers â under showers of napalm, and the pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do.â
“Now, maybe Americans donât remember very well, but North Koreans have a memory of not too long ago, when North Korea was absolutely flattened, literally, by American bombing. There wasâthere was literally no targets left. And I really urge people who havenât done it to read the official American military histories, the Air Quarterly Review, the military histories describing this.” – Noam Chomsky