(U.S. Navy Photo)
In James Michener’s classic novel, The Bridges at Toko-ri, protagonist Harry Brubaker comes to Korea as a reluctant warrior, a reservist who wants nothing more than to get back to the good life he has left behind in Colorado. Yet, he flies against the dangerous bridges at Toko-ri with courage and determination that would make any Spartan warrior proud.
Although the Brubaker character is fictional, what he represents is not. History shows that Americans do not eagerly embrace war. Their reluctance often causes them to arrive on the battlefield dangerously unprepared. But the record also reveals that once committed to a fight, these hesitant warriors become tenacious combatants who are the equal of their fiercest enemies. Americans have proven time and again that they can leave the comforts of home and meet a rigorously trained and ideologically driven enemy. Korea was no exception. The “Brubakers” of the United States rose to the occasion, despite the ambiguities of carrying out a so-called police action and even though many of them had already cheated death in the world’s greatest war just a few years before. This is testimony to the mettle of the United States’ men and women in uniform.
But the Korean War also illustrates something equally important that is too often underappreciated. The great victory at sea in World War II, during which U.S. sailors fought and won many awe-inspiring battles—some of them gargantuan in scope—elevated the U.S. Navy’s status in the eyes of its citizens. That elevation was richly deserved and the reasons should never be forgotten, but it has had the converse effect of producing unrealistic public expectations for future naval operations.
One can look to the battles of Midway, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa and see the tangible results of sunken ships, captured islands, and a surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship. But the world changed after that surrender, and such momentous and decisive sea battles are unlikely to ever happen again. For average Americans who know little about what navies do or why, there comes the consequent temptation to question the importance of a navy. Such was the case at the end of World War II.
The need for a Navy has not diminished; in fact, it has grown in important ways. To understand why that is requires knowing the basics of sea power, which explain why navies have existed for millennia and why they evolve but never disappear. Study of the Korean War is an excellent catalyst to that understanding.
Why a Nation Needs a Navy
First and foremost, a navy must be able to defend a nation’s coastline and prevent hostile forces from attacking the homeland from the sea. Second, it must protect the nation’s sea trade by ensuring the sea lanes (technically, sea lines of communication) used by the nation are kept open. Homeland and maritime security are the basic reasons for any nation to invest in a navy. But in the case of a powerful nation, such as the United States, there are more complex reasons to have a navy that are at least as important.
The ancient philosopher Sun Tzu proffered the maxim that it is better to subdue your enemy without fighting, and a true understanding of naval strategy reveals that combat at sea is a last resort. When a navy is doing its best work, its dormant but extant power deters potential enemies from taking hostile action. The mere existence of a powerful navy, capable of inflicting serious harm defensively or offensively, can alter the decision-making of another nation. In the realm of grand strategy, naval power lurks in the background of international relations—and sometimes in the foreground—providing the “steel” that makes policy and diplomacy credible and ensures the preservation of economic vitality.
A strong navy exerts influence by its very existence, and that influence can be magnified by forward presence. Navies can show the flag in foreign ports as a gentle reminder of their capabilities. They can also be prepositioned close to enemy shores to show their strength less gently and, in the event of hostilities, to be already sitting within striking distance.
Once hostilities commence, navies must be able to project their power against rival fleets or enemy shores. Prerequisite to any effective naval action is the ability to establish and maintain sea control. This means ensuring the nation can operate in blue-water theaters and contested littorals and keep choke points open so combatants and logistical units can move freely to carry out their vital missions.
In the case of Korea, the enemy had no major fleet to engage, and the advent of nuclear weapons had changed the complexion of combat, circumscribing the degree of risk both sides were willing to embrace. But the importance of sea power was not diminished. The U.S. Navy’s contribution to the Korean War would prove essential, despite the unfamiliar and sometimes frustrating aspects of a new world order and a new kind of warfare that lacked hallmark battles and dramatic surrender ceremonies. The need for a navy was no less imperative in this struggle against the client state of yet another enemy bent on world domination.
Response Runs Into Crisis
When the Communist North Koreans poured over the 17th parallel into South Korea on 25 June 1950, the army of the Republic of Korea was forced into a headlong retreat. The South Korean capital at Seoul fell just three days after the war began, forcing the government to flee southward to Taejon. To make a bad situation worse, the Han River Bridge at Seoul was prematurely destroyed by the retreating army, trapping many South Korean soldiers and civilians north of the river.
U.S. President Harry Truman and his advisors responded to the rapidly deteriorating situation by making a series of decisions that committed armed forces to the emerging conflict. On Tuesday 27 June, the U.S. House of Representatives voted by a margin of 315 to 4 to extend the Selective Service Act, and the Senate followed suit unanimously. That same afternoon, U.S. military actions were sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council when it voted to assist the Republic of Korea in repelling the invasion, a move that would not have been possible had the Soviet Union not been boycotting the Council because of an earlier dispute.
There was serious concern that the North Koreans might be victorious before any significant military assistance could reach the Korean battlefield. With less than 250 miles of land lying between the 38th parallel and the southern tip of the narrow peninsula, it was only a matter of time before the South Koreans would run out of room to retreat. Nearly 5,000 miles of water lay between Korea and the West Coast of the United States, from which most of the supplies and reinforcements that could turn the tide would come.
On 1 July, the U.S. Army sent to Korea a hastily assembled task force of just more than 500 soldiers that had been stationed in Japan on post-war occupation duty. Named Task Force Smith, they landed at Pusan and then moved north, intending to link up with retreating Republic of Korea forces. Instead, they encountered elements of the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) and were soundly defeated at Osan, losing 150 soldiers—a 40 percent casualty rate. Task Force Smith’s survivors fell back in stages, fighting and retreating through multiple defensive lines, until they arrived back at the Pusan area weeks later.
More Army units were cobbled together and sent to Korea, allowing U.S. and ROK forces to establish a defensive perimeter around Pusan. Their precarious toehold at the southern tip of the peninsula was surrounded by enemy forces and left them with their backs to the sea. So perilous was their situation that the U.S. Army commander told his staff: “There will be no Dunkirk; there will be no Bataan. We’ll fight here, and if we can’t stay here alive, then we’ll stay here dead.”
In less than five years after the final shots of World War II were fired, the world’s decision-makers had made Korea the focal point of a major ideological struggle and turned the Cold War hot. The United States retained one trump card that first would prevent complete disaster, and later would prove an existential component of the outcome. That trump card was the U.S. Navy.
The Navy Was Almost Gutted
It might have seemed almost a miracle that the U.S. Navy was able to do much at all in Korea. The Navy suffered huge cuts after World War II. Weary of war and wanting their sailors home, there were few Americans who objected to the reduction of naval personnel from 3.4 million to less than 500,000, and few understood the ramifications of cutting the Navy’s combatant ships by more than 90 percent. But more insidious was the misguided thinking of too many government officials who were questioning the need for a navy altogether, or advocating drastic curtailment of the Navy’s capabilities. In a shocking move that was more partisan than strategic, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson cancelled the building of the next-generation carrier USS United States and redirected the funding to the Air Force’s controversial B-36 strategic bomber. Johnson later justified the move by declaring, “The Navy is on its way out. There’s no reason for having a Navy and a Marine Corps. . . . The Air Force can do anything the Navy can do.”
In that same year, esteemed General of the Army Omar Bradley, holding the newly created office of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee, “I predict that large-scale amphibious operations will never occur again.”
Other draconian moves—including a plan to place all the Navy’s carriers into mothballs—were under consideration but were thwarted by the outbreak of war in Korea. Had the war started much later than it did, the Navy might well have been unable to respond.
Fortunately, despite the huge reductions it had suffered, the U.S. Navy remained the most powerful navy in the world in 1950. The Imperial Japanese Navy—once one of the most powerful navies in the world—had been destroyed in the Pacific War. Britain’s Royal Navy after World War II suffered from financial exhaustion and lagged in important areas of technology—in many ways it was a mere shadow of the navy that had been foremost for many decades. The Soviet Navy was little more than a coastal defense force, with numerous submarines but no blue-water fleet, aircraft carriers, or logistics bases comparable to America’s.
When the North Korean invasion began, the Commander Naval Forces Far East, Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy—headquartered in Japan—began immediately dispatching his available ships to carry out several urgent missions. He designated the cruiser Juneau (CL-119) and four destroyers as Task Group 96.5 (the South Korea Support Group). All were in Japanese waters, and Admiral Joy ordered them to head for Korea. Their task was to oppose any attempted landings by hostile forces, provide fire support to friendly forces, engage any enemy vessels encountered, and escort friendly shipping involved in evacuation, reinforcement, and resupply operations.
How the Navy Won the War
Task Group 96.5 ships were the first U.S. warships to enter Korean waters after the invasion. They immediately helped evacuate U.S. Embassy personnel, civilians, and missionaries from Inchon, the seaport for Seoul, as well as from Chumonchin and Pusan. The destroyer USS Mansfield (DD-728) landed small arms and ammunition at Pusan for Republic of Korea troops and fired the first U.S. naval gunfire of the war on 28 June near Mukho, engaging a North Korean supply convoy. On 2 July, a task element that included the Juneau, the Mansfield and fellow destroyer USS DeHaven (DD-727), and the ROKS Baekdusan (a former U.S. submarine chaser) encountered a North Korean group of four torpedo boats and two gunboats. A melee followed—the first surface naval engagement of the war—that ended with three of the enemy torpedo boats and both gunboats sunk. TG 96.5 ships conducted additional shore bombardment missions in the days that followed, slowing the advance of the NKPA as it pushed southward.
The only U.S. aircraft carrier west of Pearl Harbor at the time was the USS Valley Forge (CV-45), an Essex-class carrier with Carrier Air Group Five embarked. The air group consisted of five squadrons flying Panther jet fighters, Corsair fighter-bombers, and Skyraider attack aircraft. The Valley Forge was anchored at Hong Kong for a routine port visit when the crisis began. She immediately got underway and, transiting the Taiwan Strait at high speed, arrived at Subic Bay in the Philippines on 30 June for a rapid replenishment. Underway again on 1 July with her screening escort of the heavy cruiser USS Rochester (CA-124) and eight destroyers, she rendezvoused with the Royal Navy carrier HMS Triumph to form carrier Task Force 77.
On 3 July, the Valley Forge and Triumph launched the first carrier air strikes of the war, targeting airfields and railroad facilities near the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and the port city of Haeju, a naval and logistics hub on the west coast of North Korea. F4U Corsairs and AD Skyraiders from the Valley Forge, and Seafires and Fireflies from the Triumph conducted bombing and strafing runs, destroying enemy aircraft on the ground, igniting several fuel storage depots, and damaging numerous rail facilities. These early strikes marked the beginning of sustained carrier strike operations that continued for the next three years.
Surface and air naval units took advantage of Korean geography to inflict harm on advancing enemy forces. Because Korea is a peninsula with a backbone of substantial mountains, the invading NKPA divisions could never get very far from the sea. This left their flanks and supply lines vulnerable to attack from the Sea of Japan on the east side of the peninsula and the Yellow Sea on the west. Even a considerably wider peninsula would have left forces vulnerable to carriers, but with highway and rail systems hugging the coasts for many miles, naval gunfire from cruisers, destroyers, and eventually battleships could be brought to bear as well. Small-scale commando raids launched from cruisers and destroyers also played a significant disruptive role.
As the war accelerated, the President also ordered the Seventh Fleet to position combat elements between the Communist Chinese mainland and the Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan to ensure that the aggression in Korea was not merely the opening shot of a widening war.
Shield of the Republic
These operations in the early days of the Communist aggression proved the importance of the Navy beyond a shadow of a doubt. Without the surface and air interdictions on enemy supply lines and—most important—the attacks against advancing enemy forces, it is highly doubtful that the beleaguered toehold at Pusan could have held. These early naval operations gave planners the time needed to plan and carry out a counterstrike.
That counterstrike was an amphibious landing—a classic example of naval power projection—conducted barely four months after Bradley predicted that “large-scale amphibious operations will never occur again.” Landing behind enemy lines at Inchon was a strategic and tactical masterstroke envisioned and carried out by another five-star Army general—Douglas MacArthur—who throughout his long career had understood the importance of sea power. Conducted under very difficult circumstances, the successful operation reversed the tide of battle by taking pressure off the Pusan perimeter and sending North Korean forces reeling back up the peninsula in full retreat.
For the rest of the war, the Navy remained an essential player, deploying 1,261 ships and flying more than 275,000 combat sorties while maintaining a strangling blockade, supporting several amphibious operations and evacuations, conducting minesweeping operations, and firing countless shore bombardments. Most important of all, the Navy maintained sea control; troops could come and go as necessary, and massive quantities of cargo, fuel, and ammunition could be brought to the battle theater. Admiral Arleigh Burke, revered by many as one of the finest naval officers this nation has ever produced, made the point well when he said:
There’s [a] simple point here that is so obvious that people have forgotten it. We had absolute control of the sea around there. It was never contested in Korea. If our control of the sea had been contested just a little bit . . . Korea would have been lost very fast.
In his 1976 book The Sea Power of the State, Soviet Admiral of the Fleet Sergei Gorshkov echoed Admiral Burke’s assessment. Discussing the role of the U.S. Navy in the Korean War, Gorshkov accurately assessed the importance of sea power when he observed that “without wide, active use of the fleet, the interventionists could hardly have escaped military defeat in Korea. The fleet was the force which materially influenced the course of the war as a whole.”
Perhaps the most eloquent quote regarding the importance of a navy and the sea power it delivers comes from Douglas MacArthur, whose storied career of successes and failures gave him profound insight. In 1962, speaking at the U.S. Naval Academy, General MacArthur told the Brigade of Midshipmen:
The Navy has never failed the nation. It is the shield and guardian of our freedom, the watchful sentinel of our interests throughout the world. Upon its strength, the freedom of our commerce and the security of our borders depend. It is the embodiment of that sea power which has historically been the shield of our Republic.
Thomas Cutler
Thomas J. Cutler is a retired lieutenant commander and former gunner’s mate second class who served in patrol craft, cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft carriers. His varied assignments included an in-country Vietnam tour, small-craft command, and nine years at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he served as Executive Assistant to the Chairman of the Seamanship & Navigation Department and Associate Chairman of the History Department. Winner of the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for Naval Literature, the U.S. Naval Institute Press Author of the Year, and the Commodore Dudley W. Knox Naval History Lifetime Achievement Award, his published works include The Battle of Leyte Gulf and Brown Water, Black Berets: Coastal & Riverine Warfare in Vietnam.