“Practically every U.S. fighter plane that has flown into Korean air carried at least two napalm bombs,” chemical officer Townsend wrote in January 1951. About 21,000 gallons of napalm hit Korea every day in 1950. As combat intensified after China’s intervention, that number more than tripled (...) a total of 32,357 tons of napalm fell on Korea, about double that dropped on Japan in 1945. Not only did the allies drop more bombs on Korea than in the Pacific theater during World War II— 635,000 tons, versus 503,000 tons— more of what fell was napalm, in both absolute and relative terms.
Biblical devastation resulted. In May 1951, after President Truman relieved him from command, MacArthur testified to Congress that “The war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20,000,000 people. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach, the last time I was there. After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited.” The former supreme commander continued, “If you go on indefinitely, you are perpetuating a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind.” War leveled at least half of eighteen of the North’s twenty- two major cities. Pyongyang, a city of half a million people before 1950, was said to have had only two buildings left intact. LeMay, who went on to head the Strategic Air Command and became the youngest U.S. four-star general since Ulysses Grant, wrote “We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea both... we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes, with the inevitable additional tragedies bound to ensue.” As O’Donnell, who had advocated early area attacks, told Congress on June 25, 1951, “Oh, yes: we did it all later anyhow... I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing left standing worthy of the name.”
