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To: mkjessup
During the Korean War, General Curtis LeMay ran the bombing campaign over NK. Nearly ever city in NK was flattened.
21 posted on 04/24/2012 1:28:34 PM PDT by Eric in the Ozarks
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To: Eric in the Ozarks
You are correct, I stand corrected. In fact, General Curtis LeMay (one of my heroes in fact) said "We burned down every town in North Korea, we grounded our bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel!"

(my memory of LeMay's actions in Korea were clearly faulty)

I was thinking of General MacArthur's push to use nukes against both North Korea and Red China, which in fact led to his sacking by Truman, what Mac did not know (and Truman as Commander-in-Chief DID know) is that at the time of the Korean War, the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal consisted of 13 and ONLY 13 'Fat Man' style atomic bombs which had to be hand assembled and transported to the theatre of operations where they were to be used against whatever enemy was unlucky enough to draw the short straw.

Truman knew that we did not want to get bogged down in a land war in Asia when our small nuclear arsenal was the only thing preventing a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

In retrospect, one of those 13 atomic bombs should have been dropped on Pyongyang, the residents of South Korea should have been told to stay under cover for a few weeks, and the political landscape would possibly look vastly different today.
22 posted on 04/24/2012 2:06:35 PM PDT by mkjessup (Finley Peter Dunne- "Politics ain't beanbag")
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