43 years ago: NKoreans murder Bonifas and Bennett in DMZ attack

Unto the Breach ^ | 19 August 2019 | Chris Carter

[fugazi]

On 18 August 1976, a team of U.S. Army and South Korean soldiers headed out to trim a tree on the South Korean side of the De-militarized Zone. The men were unarmed, only carrying axes they would use to trim a tree that obstructed their view. Soon, they were confronted by a belligerent North Korean officer they had nicknamed Lt. “Bulldog” who advised them that N. Korean dictator Kim Il Sung had personally planted the tree and cared for it. Capt. Arthur G. Bonifas ignored the officer’s protests, which sent the offended officer back across the Bridge of No Return for reinforcements.

In moments, Lt. Bulldog was back, this time on a truck loaded with communist soldiers armed with crowbars and clubs. When Bonifas again ignored the demands to stop, the North Koreans pounced on the Americans and South Korean soldiers, savagely beating and hacking them with axes. All but one of the outnumbered crew were wounded, and Bonifas lay dead. 1st Lt. Mark Barrett died of his wounds while enroute to the hospital.

For the next several days, the Gerald Ford Administration weighed their response to the most recent North Korean act of war. Three days later, a convoy of U.S and S. Korean vehicles drove up to the tree. This time, they wouldn’t be stopped. Kim Il Sung’s beloved tree was going down.

In addition to engineers armed with chain saws, a company of S. Korean special forces commandos were on hand, ready to ambush any communist soldiers that dared to cross the bridge. 60 U.S. soldiers armed with pistols and axe handles guarded the tree trimmers. Cobra attack helicopters and Huey helicopters bearing an infantry company orbited to the rear of the task

[fugazi]

What do you do when your opponent is a tyrannical regime that couldn't care less about sacrificing millions of their people? Sure, taking out those responsible for the brutal attack would have given the families of these soldiers some comfort and maybe prevented future incidents, but it's quite likely that retaliation would spark a war with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of casualties.

This is just one of dozens of unprovoked attacks by the communists, and they continue to occasionally probe the defenses. You could make the case that resuming the war (the Korean War has technically never ended) would have been a necessary evil. But who knows?

Either way, I can appreciate that the Ford Administration permitted the military to return to the tree and cut it down with an astonishing show of force. There have been a few presidents before and after that wouldn't have had the guts to do even that.

[raygunfan]

yet another war that we went into without the actual will to win....(macarthur was the only one who wanted to win), and we paid for it back then and right down thru vietnam, another easily winnable war, but we played games and listed to the agit prop here at home and from walter commie cronkite.....same as the middle east wars.....we should have wiped out all of it from top to bottom.....

you noticed we havent heard a beliggerent peep from germany or japan since we utterly destroyed them...

you have to do that in war...you cant drag crap out...

war is to kill people and break things...

if you dont do both, you get bogged down...

[Rockingham]

As the US Joint Chiefs and Stalin saw the Korean War as a sideshow distraction to the defense of Europe. Expanding the Korean conflict into full and direct war with China could have easily led to Stalin taking over Western Europe, a far greater loss than any gains the US might accrue by conquering both Korea and China. Indeed, the casualties and demands for such a war would have been so great as to virtually guarantee that the US would have had to use nuclear weapons against China.

On the other hand, even though Korea remains divided, we kept Europe, and South Korea today is free and is a strong and prosperous ally. I call that victory, even if not the three scoops of victory that MacArthur fantasied about.

[Fiji Hill]

MacArthur was right. There is no substitute for victory.

[Roccus]

Either way, I can appreciate that the Ford Administration permitted the military to return to the tree and cut it down with an astonishing show of force.

Same thing when Mayaguez was taken.
The mission did NOT go as smoothly (due to poor intelligence) but it was swift and certain and it ended the Khmer Rouge pirate attacks cold.

The crew of Mayaguez presented President Ford with the ship's wheel which he proudly kept in the Oval Office.

[rjsimmon]

The axe carried by Capt. Bonifas is on display at the flight ops center in Osan. I read about this event when I was there in ‘95.

[ASOC]

I was stationed at Taegu (K2) air base at the time of the “Tree Day War”

Pretty scare, had been up on the DMZ just a couple of day before the attack.

I remember that Little Jimmy Carter has promised to have the US military out of RoK within a year of being elected.

Still waiting....

[fugazi]

“MacArthur was right. There is no substitute for victory.”

To be sure. But is victory still a legitimate concept today? The Allies simultaneously smashed not only the German and Japanese military, but also the ideologies that spawned World War II. Clearly a good example of victory.

With wars shifting from conventional to unconventional, or state-vs.-state to non-state-actor insurgencies like the War on Terror, things are much different now than in MacArthur’s age. With industrialization and the advance in military technology over the last couple centuries, we reached the point that humans could wipe themselves out of existence. Plus, after world wars that gutted two generations of Europeans, people are far less likely to support wars in Western civilization.

I would love for someone to prove me wrong, but I think that (apart from those that serve) we no longer believe in anything strongly enough, and oppose anything strongly enough, to fight a war where victory is possible. We look at American military superiority as if it were a birthright and have no concept of a world where another nation can take away the freedoms and safety we take for granted.

I love my country and its Constitution, but I don’t know that when you consider us as a whole that there is enough willpower to win a war the old-fashioned way. Take Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, etc. for example: After 40 years of fighting Islamic supremacists (or Islamic supremacist groups fighting us at least) our government and the Pentagon still refuses to identify who our enemy is, what they want, and what motivates them. Nearly two decades after 9/11 and we have Muslim Brotherhood involved in our counterterrorism efforts. Our military brothers and sisters have killed a lot of terrorists, but to fully do the job, we have to identify the ideology that spawns them, much like we destroyed national socialism in Germany.

I just don’t think our society is in a spot where victory is possible.

[Rockingham]

The Korean War and Cold War both ended in victory for the US, notwithstanding that we never took up MacArthur’s projected full-scale war with China. Today, the descendants of the Chinese whom we fought in Korea openly admire the US and look to it as a great beacon of freedom. It is difficult to imagine that would be so if the US had nuked the Chinese homeland as MacArthur proposed.

[kiryandil]

There have been a few presidents before and after that wouldn't have had the guts to do even that.

The Halfrican would have indignantly soiled himself...

[Fiji Hill]

For years after the fighting stopped in Korea, many thought that the Korean War was an American defeat. If Truman didn’t want to win the war, he should at least have ordered General Ridgway to push the Communists out of the suburbs of Seoul. The North Korean threat to shell Seoul remains their biggest trump card to this day.

[Rockingham]

You have a point about Seoul’s vulnerability, but the concentration and balance of forces was such that forcing the Chinese back would have been costly.