Incheon landing was turning point for war, nation and world

The landing of over 75,000 UN troops at Incheon from Sept. 15 to 19 rewrote the fate of the fledgling South Korean republic. Today, near the same beachheads where the tide of the war was reversed, modern Incheon stands as a symbol of that success.

Military personnel from 22 countries who dispatched troops and medical assistance to South Korea during the 1950-53 Korean War hold their respective flags at a ceremony to mark the anniversary of Operation Chromite at the Memorial Hall for the Incheon Landing in Yeonsu District, Incheon, on Sept. 15, 2022. [YONHAP]

Few battles have single-handedly changed the course of a nation’s history as much as the Incheon landing of Sept. 15, 1950.

Code-named Operation Chromite, the landing took place four months after the beginning of the 1950-53 Korean War, which saw 22 countries send a total of 2.16 million military and medical personnel to South Korea’s aid, of whom over 40,000 were killed or went missing in action and 114,900 were wounded.

By successfully landing three amphibious assault groups almost twelve hours apart on the shores of Incheon, located 22 miles from North Korean-occupied Seoul, United Nations forces comprised mostly of U.S. and South Korean troops and 261 ships from seven navies, including Britain, Canada and France, were able to mount a surprise offensive that broke the back of the North Korean military.

“It was a historic incident, almost straight out of a drama, that drew a line through the record of the Korean War,” says Kim Yong-ho, a professor of politics and diplomacy at Yonsei University, who compared it to the Allies’ critical D-Day landings on the beaches of German-occupied Normandy during World War II.

The landing of over 75,000 UN troops at Incheon from Sept. 15 to 19 essentially rewrote the fate of the fledgling South Korean republic, which had been left fighting for survival within the southeastern Pusan Perimeter after losing most of its territory to North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s invasion.

Today, near the same beachheads where UN forces reversed the tide of the war, modern Incheon stands as a symbol of that success.

Since its designation in 2003, the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) has attracted a total of 428,066 residents, including 7,922 foreigners, and the city as a whole has drawn foreign direct investment of $30.4 billion.

To celebrate the city’s growth and the 73rd anniversary of Operation Chromite, the Incheon Metropolitan Government has spent 2.7 billion won to hold commemorations from Sept. 14 to 19, an almost 13-fold increase from previous events to mark the landing.

Likewise, the South Korean Naval Command plans to exhibit various modern amphibious operations equipment, including a K-1 tank, a Korean assault amphibious vehicle and the ROKS Cheon Wang Bong tank landing ship.

This year’s larger-than-usual commemorations come amid rapidly changing alignments surrounding the Korean Peninsula that recall the importance of international security cooperation in the face of escalating threats.

Treacherous waters

While Incheon today is closely linked to the most famous amphibious offensive since World War II, the landing almost didn’t happen at the eponymous port.

Apart from General Douglas MacArthur, few among the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff supported his choice of Incheon as the landing site, for several reasons.

“The tidal range at Incheon is the second highest in the world, and at the time there were only two days in September when the tide was high enough to allow access for large landing craft,” explained Lee Sang-ho, a research fellow at the South Korean Defense Ministry’s Institute of Military History.

On top of Incheon’s tremendous tides, which have an average range of 30 feet, suitable approaches to the harbor were limited to two restricted passages by expansive mud flats and underwater seamounts.

Then, there were also obstacles placed by man: Soviet-manufactured naval mines strewed across the passages by the North Koreans, as well as 20-foot-tall sea walls extending all the way to Wolmi Island, located to the east of Incheon’s harbor.

As United States Navy Commander Arlie G. Capps put it, Incheon possessed “every natural and geographic handicap.”

“There are some who estimated that the probability of the operation’s success was less than one out of 5,000,” Kim remarked.

Element of surprise

Yet these obstacles were precisely why MacArthur preferred to stage the landing behind North Korean lines at Incheon, rather than at more southern — and predictable — potential landing sites along Gunsan or Pyeongtaek, where he thought an attempt to envelop North Korean forces might fall short.

“MacArthur thought Incheon was where the North Koreans wouldn’t expect UN forces to attempt a landing due to the area’s geographic challenges,” Lee said, adding that the general wanted to sever supply lines for the North Korean forces, who were concentrated south of the capital region.

According to the historian, MacArthur convinced the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff during a 45-minute meeting in Tokyo on Aug. 23, 1950, to approve his choice of Incheon by citing the example of British General James Wolfe, who captured Quebec in 1759 by ordering his army to scale 170-foot cliffs behind the city that the French had only lightly garrisoned.

“Like Wolfe, I could take them by surprise,” MacArthur said in the meeting.

According to Kim, U.S. forces kept up the ruse by bombarding other areas along the Yellow Sea, including Gunsan and Wonsan, thus confusing the North Koreans as to where the amphibious landing might take place.

By all accounts, the diversions worked.

“North Korean forces were dispersed throughout the western coast of the peninsula because they didn’t know where the landing might take place,” Kim said.

Meanwhile, a UN reconnaissance team made up of both South Korean and U.S. intelligence officers landed at nearby Yongheung Island and obtained information about local tide conditions and mud flats, laying the groundwork for the landing.

Forgotten vanguard

But before he could carry out his ambitious plan to storm Incheon, MacArthur had to first rebuild the U.S. Army’s 7th Infantry Division, his last remaining reserve unit in Japan.

The division was tasked with following the marines after the landing to retake Incheon and Seoul but had been depleted from sending men to defend the Pusan Perimeter.

To fill its ranks, South Korean soldiers were crucial.

“While most coverage of the Incheon landing focuses on the role of the U.S. military, we ought to remember the almost equally important part played by the South Korean Marines and the Korean Attachment to the U.S. Army (Katusa),” Lee said, drawing attention to the fact that up to a third of the 7th Division, or almost 9,000 soldiers, were Koreans.

Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez of the Marine Corps scales a seawall after landing on Red Beach Point on Sept. 15, 1950. Lopez was killed covering a live grenade with his body minutes after the photo was taken. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. [U.S. NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND]

Historian Sheila Miyoshi Jager, a professor of East Asian studies at Oberlin College and author of “Brothers at War,” noted that South Korean recruits for the U.S. military “had less than a month to become soldiers and get ready for an amphibious landing, one of the most complex and riskiest military operations.”

According to Jager, the lead-up to the operation entailed “pairing individual Koreans with an American” for “assimilation, training and control.”

The Incheon landing thus also represented a trial-by-fire for cooperation between the two countries’ militaries and Katusa integration into U.S. forces, which has lasted to the present day.

The preinvasion joint reconnaissance operation by South Korean and U.S. intelligence also proved key to the UN forces’ success at Incheon.

At 12:50 a.m. on Sept. 15, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Eugene Clark and his South Korean squad lit the beacon on Palmi Island, signaling conditions were ripe for the beginning of the operation less than six hours later.

South Korean soldiers would soon go on to prove their mettle at Red Beach Point, north of the initial morning landing spot at Green Beach Point on Wolmi Island.

“Troops from not only the U.S. 5th Marine Regiment’s 1st and 2nd Battalions, but also from the 3rd Battalion of the South Korean Marine Corps, scaled the massive sea walls at the beachhead by setting up aluminum ladders that had been hastily manufactured in Japan just weeks before the operation,” Lee explained.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army’s 7th Infantry Division, now comprised of 16,000 Americans and 8,600 South Koreans, landed at Blue Beach Point — which had been stormed in the early evening of Sept. 15 by the U.S. 1st Marine Regiment — and almost immediately entered the fray.

According to Lee, Korean troops “played a key role in guarding the rear of the 7th Division and making sure enemy soldiers could not hide and harass UN forces as they advanced toward Seoul.”

Kim highlighted the fact that “unlike the Normandy landings, where extended supply lines impeded the Allies’ advance toward Paris, UN forces at Incheon made sure to secure facilities like Gimpo airfield on their way to Seoul.”

By Sept. 22, UN forces had unloaded over 6,600 vehicles and 53,800 troops, along with more than 25,500 tons of supplies. Six days later, UN forces recaptured Seoul.

In Kim’s words, the operation “decisively sliced through the waist of the North Korean military,” forcing its retreat from South Korea.

Bittersweet triumph

In her comments, Jager called Operation Chromite a “triumph of operational brilliance” with “few comparables in military history.”

But by bringing about such an “utter reversal of fortunes,” Jager noted that the Incheon landing also “emboldened U.S. President Harry Truman and MacArthur, making them and other senior officials and the United Nations susceptible to ‘mission creep,’” or the gradual expansion of the UN mission in Korea beyond its original scope of restoring peace on the peninsula.

According to Jager, UN forces “could have taken a few more weeks, largely at leisure since the North Korean forces were smashed and in precipitous retreat, to select and establish a desirable defensive line and new border,” but instead decided to invade the North with an “almost giddy sense of optimism that pervaded the UN Command in Tokyo and the leadership in Washington” after the landing succeeded.

The rapidity and scope of the triumph at Incheon, in Jager’s opinion, “led to one of the most significant strategic miscalculations in modern history,” whose consequences reverberate to the present day.

“Ignoring the repeated Chinese warnings against invading and conquering North Korea can perhaps be understood as cultural arrogance and monstrous strategic miscalculation,” Jager argued, adding that MacArthur’s very success at Incheon and decision to press north “may have prolonged the Korean War and turned it into a much larger and unnecessary tragedy.”

By contrast, Lee emphasized that the success of the landing and the subsequent UN offensive beyond the 38th parallel exposed the North Korean military’s tactical mediocrity.

“After the war, Pyongyang’s official state narrative has repeatedly claimed without evidence that its military foresaw the Incheon landing but was betrayed by the officer in charge of the Gyeonggi region,” Lee said, adding that this claim was likely fabricated to cover up the fact that the North Koreans “allowed themselves to be taken by surprise.”

But both Lee and Jager, who have examined wartime communications between Kim Il Sung, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Chinese leader Mao Zedong, also remarked that the subsequent UN offensive into the North led to lasting strain on communist solidarity between Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing.

“Soviet leader Joseph Stalin didn’t want to intervene militarily to save North Korea. In his letter to Kim Il Sung after the UN offensive began, Stalin said that Pyongyang’s leadership should go into exile in Manchuria,” Lee said, explaining that Kim felt “betrayed and abandoned” by the Soviet leader.

After the war, Kim promulgated his new ideology for the North Korean regime, called juche or self-reliance, purged pro-Moscow and pro-Beijing factions from the ruling Workers’ Party and increased his regime’s isolation from foreigners and foreign influences.

Lee noted that Mao “spent sleepless nights in October arguing alone in favor of intervention in Korea against the rest of Beijing’s leadership” before acceding to Stalin’s request for Chinese military intervention.

But he, too, ended up feeling betrayed by the Soviet leader before the war had ended.

“Stalin reneged on his promise to provide crucial air support at the start of China’s entry into the Korean War, leaving Mao’s forces to face the Americans alone,” Jager said.

Stalin’s inaction was something Mao “never forgot,” imbuing Beijing with self-confidence after it successfully fought UN forces to a stalemate and a belief that it owed Moscow little, sowing the seeds for the Sino-Soviet split of 1960.

Incheon’s legacy

While the Korean War dragged on for almost three years after the Incheon landing, the operation’s impact on South Korea reflects its initial mission: the reclamation of the young republic’s territory and capital and the preservation of its future in the face of aggression.

According to Lee, South Koreans should take pride in the Incheon landing for this legacy.

“There are some who argue that the landing at Incheon wasn’t as significant as claimed, or even that the North chose retreat, but the historical record shows this isn’t the case,” Lee said.

“By any measure, the Incheon landing are a feat of military genius that saved this country and ensured its future prosperity.”

The South Korean government has made its gratitude known in various ways to UN member states that came to its aid in its darkest hour.

In 2014, South Korea donated the ROKS Anyang, a retired Donghae-class corvette, to Colombia, followed by the Pohang-class ROKS Iksan in 2020.

South Korea also gifted a Pohang-class corvette to the Philippines in 2019, which was later christened the BRP Conrado Yap, as well as two retired patrol vessels to Ecuador in 2020.

But perhaps nowhere is the lasting legacy of the operation more evident than in the Incheon itself.

Not far from the same shores where UN forces landed, the city’s high-rise skyline serves as a reminder of the success of the landing.

Little more than a port town of 160,000 people at the time of the war, Incheon’s population surpassed 3 million as of this year and includes 134,000 foreign nationals, making it the most diverse city in the country after the capital.

The city’s modern gross regional domestic product of 98 trillion won ($74.4 billion) is far higher than South Korea’s entire GDP of 47 billion won in 1950.

Today, the city hosts a gleaming international airport and Songdo International Business District, cementing its reputation as the world’s gateway to Korea.

BY MICHAEL LEE,CHO JUNG-WOO [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]