In June 1950, the United States and its allies were locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union and its satellite countries.
The Korean peninsula, a former Japanese colony, had been divided into zones of occupation after World War II.
The war’s two major victors, the United States, and the Soviet Union accepted the surrender of Japanese forces in southern and northern Korea.
The U.S. supported South Korea with military and financial resources. The Soviet Union established the communist country of North Korea. South Korean and North Korean troops engaged in skirmishes along the border.
Korea was engulfed in a hot war when Communist North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950.
The North Korean army, supported by Soviet tanks, smashed through the South Korean army and a small force of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea.
On June 30, 1950, U.S. President Harry Truman decided to send American reinforcements to South Korea.
The war became known as the “Forgotten War,” sandwiched between World War II and the Vietnam War. But Korea took its toll.
The United States reported 33,741 military personnel killed and another 103,284 wounded during the conflict, according to the U.S. Department of Defense’s website. The remains of about 7,600 Americans have yet to be recovered.
About 187,000 South Korean soldiers were killed, about 429,000 wounded, and 30,000 are missing, the Defense Department says. Estimates of dead and missing South Korean civilians range from 500,000 to 1 million.
About 1.5 million North Korean soldiers and civilians died in the war. Estimates for dead and missing Chinese soldiers range from 600,000 to 800,000, according to the Defense Department.
For local men and women who served, forgotten is the least accurate way to describe the war.
Otis “Shorty” Clay Blackburn, 91, of Clemmons was working as an assistant golf professional at Reynolds Golf Course on that Sunday when the Korean War began.
“The day the war started, I was caddying on the 12th hole,” Blackburn said.
Blackburn was drafted into the U.S. Army in February 1951, and was trained as a combat medic. He arrived in South Korea as a member of the U.S. Army Third Infantry Division on Sept. 1, 1951. After the war ended in July 1953, Blackburn was discharged as a corporal.
Service
Korea was the first foreign war in which the United States deployed a fully integrated military force to the combat zone. In World War II, the military was segregated, but some Hispanics and American Indians served with whites in the armed forces. Black soldiers served in separate units.
Jim Crow was a way of life throughout the South, but the first signs of integration had happened. Truman desegregated in the U.S. military in 1948.
Truman took that action following several incidents in the South in which white mobs attacked Black soldiers, and many Blacks were still being lynched, according to a recent report by The Washington Post.
Ray “RayLeo” Leonard of Winston-Salem said he was a 17-year-old senior at Dorsey High School in Miami when he learned the war had begun. He and his high school friends registered for the draft.
After he returned home in Miami in August 1951 from attending a summer session at Florida A&M College in Tallahassee, Fla., his father handed him a big white envelope, Leonard said. That envelope contained his draft notice from the Army.
“That’s when the Korean War came home to me,” said Leonard, who is African American. “I started paying attention to the news about how the Chinese had pushed the Americans out of North Korea.”
Rather than being drafted into the Army, Leonard decided to join the U.S. Army Air Corps, which later became known as the U.S. Air Force.
“If I volunteered, I didn’t think I would have to go into combat,” Leonard said. “I also thought I would get stationed close to home.”
After he completed basic training at Fort Campbell, Ky., Leonard was sent to Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo. From there, the was deployed in May 1953 to Kimpo Air Base in South Korea.
He served there as a private first class, manning the base’s 500-kilowatt generator that provided emergency electricity to the base’s communications center, Leonard said. He and other airmen also guarded the base.
Leonard said many white airman didn’t express publicly any opposition to the integrated military.
“You ate together. You trained together. You fought together,” Leonard said of the military members of all races and ethnicities that he encountered during his service. “That was the way of the military.”
Leonard served 21 years in the Air Force before being discharged as a technical sergeant at the Pentagon in 1971.
Edward Galaviz, 88, of Greensboro was a senior at Saint Anthony’s Seminary in Santa Barbara, Calif. when the war started. Galaviz, who was 18 at the time and a native of Capistrano Beach, Calif., left the seminary and joined the Navy.
After completing boot camp at the San Diego Naval Station, Galaviz, a Hispanic man, was sent to Yeoman School, where he finished first in his class in late 1952. He was eventually assigned to the USS Queenfish, a diesel-powered submarine based at Yokosuka, Japan.
The first weeks were hard, he remembers.
“I was pretty green on that submarine,” Galaviz said.
The Queenfish was on war patrol in the western Pacific Ocean for two months before the war ended on July 23, 1950, Galaviz said. He served in the Navy until 1956, when he was discharged as a yeoman first class.
Aboard Galaviz’s submarine, the crew was mostly white, but there were three Filipino stewards, Galaviz said. He remembered that there were eight African American men at his boot camp in San Diego.
“I really didn’t experience any discrimination when I was growing up,” Galaviz said. “I was a Californian. I really didn’t know what was going in the South until the 1960s.”
David Cone, 89, of Winston-Salem was at a Reserve Officer Training Corps’ summer camp at Fort Benning, Ga., when the Korean War began, he said. Cone had completed his junior year at the Citadel in Charleston, S.C.
Once the U.S. military engaged the North Korean forces, “we thought the war would be over in six weeks,” Cone said of his fellow cadets at The Citadel.
However, they quickly realized that the U.S. armed forces had been reduced from its strength and combat readiness after World War II ended, he said.
Cone, who was wounded in the Korean War, retired from the Army in 1971 as a lieutenant colonel. As a retired officer, he is still a member of the U.S. Army reserves, he said.
Even though the Army was desegregated, Blackburn’s unit wasn’t fully integrated, he said. Blackburn remembers seeing all-Black army regiments during the war.
The Army was integrated in 1950, but most colleges and universities were not at that time, said Cone, who is white.
“I grew up in Charleston, S.C., in a segregated society,” Cone said.
Many white officers accepted an integrated Army as a way of life, Cone said.
“We didn’t give it much thought,” Cone said.
However, during his training, he encountered Black officers at Fort Benning and at Fort Jackson, S.C., Cone said. Many of those Black men had been enrolled in the ROTC program at South Carolina State University in Spartanburg, S.C.
“We were all lieutenants going through the same course,” Cone said. “We learned exactly the same things.”
During the war, he became friends with several young Black officers as well, he said.
‘Load up and move out’
Dale Patterson, 91, who lives in eastern Davie County, had spent two years in the Navy when he heard the news of the start of the Korean War. At that time, he was training recruits aboard the USS Pomfret, a World War II-era submarine.
Patterson, who was a radio operator, said his submarine got the news about the war directly in a radio message.
“They told us to load up and move out,” said Patterson.
The submarine with 65 enlisted men and 10 officers first traveled to its base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was later deployed to the western Pacific Ocean near the Soviet Union coastline.
The American submarine monitored the activity of Soviet naval ships who sent military supplies to North Korea during the war, Patterson said.
Neither North Korea nor China had much of a naval force during the conflict, Patterson said.
“They (China) just had a lot of men,” he said. “I never set foot ashore on Korea, neither North or South Korea.”
Patterson served 21 years in the Navy, and he was discharged in 1968 as a master chief petty officer.
During the war, North Korean forces eventually pushed South Korean and U.S. troops back into a perimeter surrounding Pusan, South Korea.
The United Nations’ security council also agreed to send military assistance to South Korea, and 16 countries responded by sending troops. However, the U.S. deployed 90% of the ground forces during the war that lasted three years, according to military historians.
United Nations’ troops eventually drove out North Korean forces from South Korea. U.N. forces then moved into areas in North Korea near the Yalu River and the Chinese border.
Chinese troops then helped North Korea drive out U.S.-led U.N. forces. The war was fought around the 38th Parallel, which separated North and South Korea for the next two years until the armistice on July 27, 1953.
