On the 70th anniversary of the armistice that halted the Korean War, one American received a special honor in South Korea: former President Harry S. Truman, in whose memory a new, nearly 14-foot-tall statue was unveiled on Thursday.
Although not all South Koreans were happy to see another monument for the war or a new edifice to an American leader built on their soil, conservatives wanted to celebrate Truman, who perhaps affected the fate of South Korea more than any other U.S. president. When North Korea invaded the South in 1950, Truman sent American troops and engineered a United Nations resolution to support the South with Allied forces.
South Korea celebrates the armistice anniversary as a victory for the free world that helped the nation become one of Asia’s richest economies, while North Korea remains a hunger-stricken, nuclear-armed international pariah.
“The Americans’ choice to have such a decisive leader as President Truman in the White House when North Korea invaded saved South Korea and the free world,” said Cho Gab-je, a prominent conservative journalist and publisher who led the campaign to build a Truman statue.
The statue was dedicated at a government-run memorial park at Dabu-dong, a famous Korean War battle site near Daegu in southeast South Korea. It was made by the sculptor Kim Young-won, best known for making the statue of King Sejong in central Seoul.
The Truman statue was installed as part of conservative activists’ broader effort to celebrate Washington’s decision to intervene in the Korean War as well as the resulting alliance between the United States and South Korea, which still underpins the South’s defense against North Korea even today.
When North Korea launched a surprise attack on South Korea on June 25, 1950, Truman was spending the weekend at home with his family in Independence, Mo.
“Korea is a small country, thousands of miles away, but what is happening there is important to every American,” he said in a radio and television address. “We know that it will take a hard, tough fight to halt the invasion and to drive the Communists back.”
He would later say that his hardest decision as president was opting to enter the Korean War. The invaders he initially called “a bunch of bandits” swept down the Korean Peninsula, pinning American and South Korean forces into its southeastern corner, known as the “Pusan Perimeter.” At Dabu-dong, the Allied forces repelled the North Koreans trying to break through the perimeter.
Then, General Douglas MacArthur’s troops outflanked them by storming Incheon, a port city west of Seoul, in an amphibious landing in September 1950 that turned the tide of the war.
The three-year war, which cost the lives of 36,500 American soldiers and millions of Koreans, ended in a truce.
Addressing the U.S. Congress in 1954, President Syngman Rhee of South Korea thanked Truman for saving South Koreans “from being driven into the sea.” When he spoke to Congress this April,…
2023-07-27 02:17:23
Link from www.nytimes.com
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