Reading the history of the Korean war is a gutwrenching experience . The sheer scale of violence subjected to those people is hard to comprehend by people like me. From a point onwards you just look at the numbers and descriptions and all that register is a deep deep sadness and anger . Just the bombing campaign numbers are mind boggling

The US airforce dropped 625 tons of bombs over North Korea on August 12, a tonnage that would have required a fleet of 250 B-17s in the Second World War. By late August, B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North. Much of the tonnage was pure napalm. From June to late October 1950, B-29s unloaded 866,914 gallons of napalm.

The Air Force on December 14–15 hit Pyongyang with seven hundred 500-pound bombs, napalm dropped from Mustang fighters, and 175 tons of delayed-fuse demolition bombs, which land with a thud and then blow up at odd moments, when people are trying to rescue the dead from the napalm fires. At the beginning of January, Ridgway again ordered the Air Force to hit the capital, Pyongyang, “with the goal of burning the city to the ground with incendiary bombs” (this occurred in two strikes on January 3 and 5). As Americans retreated below the parallel, the scorched-earth policy of “torching” continued, burning Ŭijŏngbu, Wŏnju, and other small cities in the South as the enemy drew near them.

By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea was completely leveled. What was left of the population survived in caves. The North Koreans created an entire life underground, in complexes of dwellings, schools, hospitals, and factories.

In the final act of this barbaric air war, the airforce hit huge irrigation dams that provided water for 75 percent of the North’s food production.

It was flowering and budding Communist movement with optimism which then had their country cut in half by the imperialist bastards and 20 percent of the population killed in the North. For example read Anna Louise Strongs report from DPRK in 1949 on how optimistic the Koreans were , how all the landlords and reactionaries fled south to find haven under Sygman Rhees (a Korean-American flown in to run the puppet) dictatorship and how they had to suppress Communism in the South through mass executions but still had no legitimacy and were ready to crumble like paper without US assistance

Can you personally imagine a life where 1 in 5 people you know is murdered by imperialists and the effects this would have on your society. Where you begin to decolonize, liberate and unite your people into building a free and communist future ( a movement that would have easily succeeded without foreign imperalist invasion ) but in the span of a couple of years end up looking around and seeing literal hell on earth. Seeing not a single building standing. And seeing the monsters that did it occupying the other half of your country and people ?