40 Years After Peace, ‘Forgotten’ Korean War Is Remembered : Asia: It is called a lesson for military preparedness, a bedrock chapter in the Cold War. And President Clinton, who was just 6 years old at the time, has underscored its lessons.

They call it the Forgotten War--a nasty conflict swept under the rug of history, a postscript to the total victory of World War II and a precursor to the anguish of Vietnam.

But finally, 40 years after a July 27, 1953, armistice brought the fighting to an ambiguous end, the Korean War is being remembered.

U.S. commanders cite it as an example of the need for military preparedness. Historians point to it as a bedrock chapter in winning the Cold War. And a President who was just 6 years old when the fighting ended has underscored the war’s lessons.

“Vulnerability invites aggression, peace depends upon deterrence. We cannot forget those lessons again,” said President Clinton, who early this month became the first President to visit the demilitarized zone--a 155-mile-long no man’s land that endures as the world’s most fortified border.

When Harry S. Truman ordered U.S. ground troops to Korea without obtaining congressional authorization, he called it a police action and told his closest advisers: “We’ve got to stop the sons of bitches no matter what.”

But demobilization had made the Army a hollow shell of the war machine built during World War II.

In the first U.S. battle, 540 ill-trained and ill-equipped troops under Lt. Col. Brad Smith dug in against the Soviet-made tanks of the 90,000-man North Korean army. Without tanks, mines, armor-piercing artillery shells or effective bazookas, the task force was overwhelmed by the invaders.

The soldiers who followed in their tracks were drawn from a U.S.-led coalition of 16 nations--the first time the fledgling United Nations sent an army into the field to combat aggression.

The defenders were nearly pushed off the Korean peninsula, then turned the tide with a Marine landing at Inchon, history’s last great amphibious assault. The allies then decided to cross the 38th Parallel and unify the country under one flag.

Pyongyang was taken--the only Communist capital ever to be liberated by the West. And elements of the U.S. 7th Division even made it to the Yalu River.

But Communist China entered the war, driving the U.S. Army back on a 275-mile retreat, the longest in its history. The 1st Marine Division fought its way out of a trap at the Chosin Reservoir, where temperatures were 30 degrees below zero.

Ultimately, the Americans rallied and drove the communists out of South Korea again before peace talks began.

Despite U.S. air and naval superiority, it took two years of stubborn talks before the bloody fighting stopped at outposts named Heartbreak Ridge, Pork Chop Hill and other hilltops that recalled the trench warfare of World War I.

The final line was essentially the same point where the war began. But by that time, more than 50,000 American lives had been lost.

That the military has learned from Korea was apparent in the Persian Gulf, when a U.S.-led coalition under the U.N. flag ejected the Iraqi army from Kuwait, concentrating its muscle instead of committing units piecemeal.

“We’ve learned to go in with overwhelming power and a game plan that’s winnable,” said retired Col. David Hackworth, a military analyst who saw combat in Korea and Vietnam.

“Korea was a sideshow of what became Vietnam. Every mistake there was made in spades in Vietnam. The objective was never clear. The strategy changed from general to general,” Hackworth said.

The military also learned that it must always be prepared.

“There will be no more Task Force Smiths,” said Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, the U.S. Army chief of staff, who is directly responsible for having today’s Army prepared to fight. “Many young soldiers died needlessly at the hands of a third-rate power.”

Korea was the first time the Army stopped assigning troops to units by the color of their skin, desegregating what it called Negro units well before the civil rights movement achieved progress at home.

It added words to the vocabulary: gook, a corruption of “han’guk saram,” which means Korean; hooch, a village or hut; and MASH, which stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, where the wounded were ferried aboard the first helicopters used in war.

The war boosted Japan’s recovery from World War II defeat--Nissan, Toyota and Isuzu factories repaired U.S. trucks and vehicles. South Korea also was transformed. A maker of wheat and sugar products called Samsung is now an electronics giant.

A hair-trigger truce separates North and South Korea. The two nations have never signed a peace treaty, so a state of war still technically exists. The United States never left Korea. About 36,000 Americans, including the 2nd Infantry Division, serve as a tripwire against a North Korean attack.

North Korea blares propaganda over loudspeakers toward the South. In Seoul, the South Korean capital that changed hands four times in the war, an air raid siren wails once a month in a drill. What look like flower boxes along streets and highways are actually gun placements camouflaged with blossoms. And armed patrols have discovered tunnels dug by North Koreans across the DMZ.

The armistice was accepted as a stalemate, the first war America did not win. U.S. commander Mark Clark signed the truce and later lamented that he “had gained the unenviable distinction of being the first United States Army commander in history to sign an armistice without victory.”

Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.), the communist-hater who waged a discredited purge against suspected spies, called it “a great defeat.”

But the Korean War has been re-evaluated since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

“The foundation for winning the Cold War was laid in Korea. Even the bungling way we fought it, we absolutely won the Korean War,” historian Clay Blair said.

The most enduring legacy of Korea was the decision to draw the line against communism and embark on a course of defense spending that built up the military and sparked the nuclear arms race.

“The Korean War showed the Soviet Union it could not expand its empire by force of arms,” said retired Col. Harry Summers, a Korean veteran and a military analyst.

“Wars are defined by the realization of goals set out to achieve,” Summers said. “By any legitimate definition of the word, Korea was a victory. We realized the goals we set out to achieve. We saved South Korea.”