TV REVIEW : PBS Revives the Nightmare of America’s Forgotten War

Panmunjom, Inchon, the Yalu River. The names hover in a mist. Who remembers them? What did it all mean? Those raised in the Depression and who fought in Korea remember. But from the time that the “police action” ended roughly where the fighting began (claiming 54,246 American lives), Korea became our forgotten war.

Now, beginning tonight on PBS, the origins, agonies and legacies of that war will be exhumed with archival footage and firsthand accounts of those who lived through it--generals, brainwashed pilots, traumatized soldiers, diplomats, newspaper correspondents, Russians, Turks, POWs, North Korean privates, Australians, communists, South Koreans, even a Chinese grunt who recalls being told that he would fight “soft, wealthy-boy” Americans.

“Korea: The Unknown War” is strikingly similar in style and format to PBS’ recent “Civil War” series, without, of course, the cachet that accompanied that public broadcasting epic. The Korean nightmare is divided among six one-hour programs, produced by Thames Television, and will air two at a time for the next three evenings (9-11 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15, 8-10 p.m. on Channel 24, 10-12 p.m. on Channel 50).

One caution: The opening hour, “Many Roads to War,” deals with Japanese colonial rule and the division of Korea by Soviet and American troops after 1945, and it is scholarly and rather stodgy. Don’t be misled by the specter of talking heads. The military and international drama that swallows up the next five hours, with the imperious, goggled MacArthur and scrappy Truman waging their own incredible battle, is vivid and sometimes controversial.

Two incendiary issues (seen Tuesday night) will provoke viewers into reliving the Cold War. One deals with pro-communist charges at the time, buttressed by hokey-looking film documentation, that Americans used germ warfare. The other claims that President Truman, as described by University of Chicago Prof. Bruce Cumings, had a plan to use atomic bombs to prevent the Chinese from pushing United Nations forces off the peninsula. The United States, Cumings says, “had built sand pits for the bombs on Okinawa.” A U.S. official rejoins that it was a bluff by Truman to scare the Chinese.

And this is the unknown war?

The six hours are historically shattering and politically revealing. On the one hand are the commentaries and banter from the players. We hear from a forthright Dean Rusk, who was in the State Department and talks about sitting alongside Truman when he met with MacArthur on Wake Island. In another moment, we hear from a decorated black U.S. soldier who describes fighting “as a second-class citizen” in Army units still segregated.

Another U.S. soldier (one of a documented 21 turncoats captured on film in the so-called “Battle for Minds”) remarks today from a chop suey joint he runs in Memphis that he opted for China after the war because he figured a black man would get a better deal there (he claims he did: an education, a job and a Chinese wife). He returned to the United States after 12 years, he says with a grin, when he found his career opportunities limited in China.

Underlying the production is Korea as a precursor to our involvement in Vietnam. That’s implicit in the material. More potently, the unstated Persian Gulf crisis echoes and lingers in the shadows of this documentary.

The only war that the United Nations ever fought (June, 1950, to July, 1953) was not a TV war like Vietnam, and the quality of the early ‘50s news film tends to be blotchy and gray. But the trove of horror revives dead memories.

Inchon and Pusan and Seoul were more than a bridge to Vietnam, as the images make clear: soldiers’ stacked bodies frozen in garish forms, Gen. Matthew Ridgway’s “meat grinder” strategy, our devastating air power that wasted civilians (driving the “enemy” into underground cities), the atrocities committed by all sides (footage, for example, of the aftermath of a massacre of 102 North Korean children).

Domestically, there’s Truman’s sack of the godlike MacArthur (praised by one guest as “the most courageous achievement of Truman’s administration”), MacArthur’s heroic welcome home, Ike’s election.

The bizarre parade is all here and invested with clarity in Jon Halliday’s script and executive producer Phillip Whitehead’s direction.

Sure, much of the archival footage from both sides is propaganda. But we learn from it. We watch communist film of dogged North Korean women taking over for the men in the paddie fields and doing manual labor. Propaganda? Probably. But, as someone says on the show, perceptions are reality.

Meanwhile, as the show reminds us: Before Vietnam, there was a bloody warm-up in Korea. We got nothing out of it. If no one else does, Koreans remember the war. The 38th Parallel still stands.