Failure™ Magazine

The Darkest Summer

Pusan and Inchon 1950: The battles that saved South Korea—and the Marines—from extinction.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under History

Today virtually every American is aware of the tag line: The Few. The Proud. The Marines. In 1950 the emphasis would have been on “the few,” as the Marine Corps was just 74,000 men strong, less than ten percent of its World War II size, and well on its way to being reduced to a purely ceremonial role. But in the early months of the Korean War, a relatively small contingent of Marines brought South Korea back from the brink of Communist takeover and drove the invading North Korean army back into North Korea. In the process, those soldiers may have saved the service itself, proving that nuclear weapons had not made the Marine Corps obsolete.

In the new book “The Darkest Summer” (Simon & Schuster) author Bill Sloan tells the story of the dramatic first three months of the Korean War, including the reversals of fortune engineered by the Marines at the South Korean port cities of Pusan and Inchon. Knowing that failure at Pusan and Inchon would have spelled doom for South Korea—and the Marine Corps as we know it—Failure interviewed Sloan by phone to discuss why Washington left South Korea vulnerable to attack, and how the Marines turned the tide in what is now commonly referred to as America’s “forgotten war.”

Why did the U.S. government downsize the American military so dramatically after World War II?
It was perfectly logical and justifiable that it should be downsized to some extent, because we had over 12 million men in the armed forces at the end of the war, and in peacetime you don’t need anything like that large an army. But the Truman administration was a little overzealous in their budget cutting efforts and in addition to cutting the fat they started hacking into muscle and bone. It was a response, I think, to the phenomenal success of the atomic bombs in ending WWII. There was a lot of sentiment among military men and civilian politicians that since we had nuclear weapons we didn’t need a large, well-trained conventional force.

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