When U.N. forces famously stormed ashore at Inchon on September 15, 1950, Normal Douglas MacArthur’s gamble set in movement a large battle to liberate the South Korean capital: Seoul. North Korean forces retreated from the southern half of the peninsula as UN troops raced to chop them off.
Confidence soared. “I’ve simply returned from visiting the Marines on the entrance, and there’s not a finer preventing group on this planet,” MacArthur declared a couple of days later.
The Battle of the Barricades
Whereas celebrations erupted again residence, what adopted contained in the South Korean capital was not a parade however a slog. The North Korean Individuals’s Army had turned Seoul’s grand boulevards into killing zones. Marine historians would later dub it “the battle of the barricades”: eight-foot partitions of rice and earth sack, laid throughout intersections each few hundred yards, laced with mines and coated by antitank weapons and machine weapons.
Taking every place required a fastidiously rehearsed tactic — air and artillery first, then mortars and engineers, Pershing tanks or flamethrower tanks, and at last riflemen with mounted bayonets. On common, one barricade took 45 to 60 minutes to destroy and value dozens of casualties.
For Marines who fought their manner up the town streets, the scene was apocalyptic. Personal First Class Morgan Brainard remembered “nice gaping skeletons of blackened buildings… phone wires hanging down… actually a city shot to hell.” Room-by-room preventing adopted, stairwells and balconies cleared below sniper fireplace, the tempo measured in blocks, not miles.
A number of the Marines had fought throughout the Pacific in World Conflict II and weren’t prepared to interact the enemy in alley-ways, streets, or in multi-stories authorities buildings. Most troops have been uncooked recruits with minimal coaching, liberating the town was their baptism of fireside.
Regardless of the hazards, UN management have been in a rush and determined to forego a cautious advance within the hopes of crushing enemy resistance as quickly as doable. The outcome: Marines have been blitzing by enemy-held buildings below fixed fireplace, ignoring casualties and even civilians within the cross-fire. The combat was arduous and chaotic.
The legendary Lieutenant Normal Lewis “Chesty” Puller led his troops from near the entrance; his longtime driver, Sgt. Orville Jones, recalled Marines yelling, “Holy Jeez—don’t let Chesty get forward of us—transfer it!”
MacArthur demanded a victory by September 25—the warfare’s three-month mark—and his corps commander, Maj. Gen. Edward Almond, introduced Seoul’s “liberation” on the night time of the twenty fifth even because the preventing continued. The following day, MacArthur issued United Nations Command Communiqué No. 9: “Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea, is once more in pleasant fingers,” he wrote, crediting parts of the ROK seventeenth Regiment and U.S. seventh Infantry and 1st Marine Divisions with the town’s “envelopment and seizure.”
The phrases hit papers worldwide whereas Marines have been nonetheless buying and selling fireplace on Seoul’s intersections.
The Liberation of Seoul: The Forgotten Price
The forgotten half of this victory is what the battlefield obscured. As the town modified fingers, South Korean authorities and auxiliaries started executing suspected “collaborators.”
A TIME report described firing squads as “busy liquidating ‘enemies of the state’—Korean civilians accused of sabotage or collaboration,” noting that U.S. and British troops “voiced their loathing” and that American officers lodged a proper protest.
Maj. Gen. Lee Ho, vice chief of South Korea’s Martial Regulation Headquarters, defended the killings: civilians “are purported to be hanged,” he mentioned, “however now we have discovered capturing by firing squad extra handy.” Tons of, maybe hundreds, of civilians have been massacred — many for nothing greater than having interacted with their occupiers in passing. Many have been falsely accused by their neighbors and even relations based mostly on previous grievances.
These weren’t remoted rumors. Declassified U.S. diplomatic stories documented mass executions carried out by ROK authorities in Seoul, some witnessed by British troopers. Many years later, South Korea’s Fact and Reconciliation Fee confirmed widespread wartime massacres of civilians accused of aiding the enemy. The findings don’t erase North Korea’s personal atrocities however complicate any clear narrative of “liberation.”
However, South Korean civilians tried to return to their regular lives, choosing up particles from the streets, tearing down the barricades, and rebuilding their war-torn properties.
Seoul’s Destiny Through the Korean Conflict
Seoul lastly fell between September 26 and 28, after days of block-by-block preventing that price dearly and demanded the complete Marine air-ground staff, plus U.S. Army and ROK models closing the escape routes. On September 29, bulldozers pushed apart rubble for MacArthur’s return ceremony, a photo-ready second that ignored the town’s smoldering intersections and crowded POW detention yards.
Though the town was liberated, the casualties have been staggering. Roughly 3,500 U.N. troops turned casualties within the Inchon-Seoul marketing campaign, the overwhelming majority from the first Marine Division. The North Korean Individuals’s Army misplaced greater than 14,000 males killed. An unknown variety of civilians — possible hundreds — have been killed within the crossfire. Some have been executed by retreating North Koreans, others by the very authorities who claimed to have freed them.
The ordeal didn’t finish with the victory. Seoul’s battered inhabitants endured malnutrition and fixed hazard for the remainder of the warfare. In January 1951, Chinese language forces seized the town in a brutal winter offensive. Solely months later, U.N. troops retook it once more. By warfare’s finish, Seoul had modified fingers 4 instances; the civilians endured terrifying hardships by every battle.
The primary recapture of Seoul marked a decisive flip within the Korean Conflict. North Korea’s invasion had been reversed, its momentum shattered, and the Republic of Korea authorities was restored. Politically, it was the triumph MacArthur wished.
However the victory carried deep scars. Town’s infrastructure was gutted, its individuals traumatized, and its streets full of reprisals and executions. Liberation got here with destruction, loss, and a reminder that in city warfare, civilians usually pay the very best worth.
The Marines did what was requested of them. They fought by barricades and sniper fireplace to lift the allied flag over Seoul. However for the town’s individuals, liberation was a much more sophisticated story. It was among the harshest city fight the Marines would witness till the Battle of Hue in the course of the Vietnam Conflict and Fallujah in Iraq.
