Those damn Commies! One can almost feel the irritation of General James Van Fleet, the commander of the US and UN forces in the Korean War, as he describes the way that the North Koreans managed to keep their railways operating despite two periods of intense bombardment by the Americans aimed at destroying their railway supply lines. His account is a blend of exasperation tinged with begrudging admiration and respect for the enemy: ‘How could the Chinese Communist armies in Korea supply themselves in hostile territory 200 miles from their Manchurian base in the face of the terrific interdiction program of the USAF and Naval Air?… We knew they were getting the bulk of their supplies by rail. We knew the location of all rail lines. We had air and naval supremacy. But in spite of all our air and naval interdiction attacks, their railroads continued to keep them supplied, even to the point of building up reserves for offensive actions. How could they do it?’
As the general suggests, the railways played a key role in the Korean War, which may have been the first war of the Cold War era but in most respects was an old-fashioned conflict fought through infantry attacks backed by air cover and even, at times, involving troops dug into trenches. Korea was divided, without reference to the Korean people, in the aftermath of the Second World War and it was the China-supported Communist North’s attempt to invade the South which triggered the war in June 1950. In the first phase, the Communists took over nearly all the Korean peninsula. Over the next three years, they would be gradually forced back to a dividing line along the 38th Parallel by United Nations forces which mainly consisted of South Korean and US troops, though they included a sizeable contingent of nearly 100,000 soldiers from Britain and Australia, as well as men from more than a dozen other nations. Although the Americans and South Koreans had blown up railway bridges as they retreated southward in the face of the North Korean onslaught, it did not take long for the invaders to have supply trains up and running on those lines. The North Koreans were supplied from Manchuria, part of China, which under the rules of engagement was out of bounds to United Nations bombers and consequently the railways were vital in bringing supplies down south.
The key to the strategy of pushing the Communists back north towards China was to destroy their supply lines from their base in Manchuria and this led the Americans to launch two massive aerial attacks targeted at the railways, called, hubristically, Operation Strangle and Operation Saturate. In fact, they managed neither. Despite being supplemented by a naval blockade and long-range gunfire from ships, the bombing campaigns proved ineffectual. The lessons of the Second World War had not been learnt. According to an examination of the operation by a military analyst, ‘the planners simply asserted that air attacks could make sufficient cuts in rail lines to stem the flow of supplies. This assumption ignored the recent experiences of… rail interdiction efforts in World War II, which showed that cutting rail lines was extremely difficult and that, until a new munition was developed, this was not a particularly effective technique when compared with the effort involved in achieving those cuts.’ As the British and Americans had discovered when attacking Germany at the end of the war, railway lines were difficult to destroy solely from the air. And so it proved again.
The US military had originally intended to target roads but then realized that the railways were far more important in the line of communication. If the railways were blocked they calculated that a fleet of 6,000 trucks would be needed to replace the 120 freight wagons carrying the 2,400 tons of supplies needed daily. And the North Koreans simply did not have that number of trucks, and, as ever, the roads were in a poor condition. Consequently, the first bombing operation aimed at destroying these lines, Strangle, was launched in August 1951. For the first three months it seemed to go well but that was mainly because supporting ground forces followed up the aerial attacks, and the seasonal rains added to the difficulties of operating the railway. Once the ground forces withdrew, however, the effectiveness of the air attacks greatly diminished. Only one in four sorties resulted in any damage to the railways and only an eighth of the 500lb bombs fell anywhere near the tracks. Moreover, more than one aircraft per day was being lost in the raids. As Operation Strangle entered the Korean winter, the results were even worse because the bombs simply skidded along the frozen ground and exploded harmlessly, littering the countryside with shrapnel but leaving the rail lines untouched.
Even worse for the American attackers was the speed with which any damage they did cause was quickly reinstated. Or appeared to be. Wrecked bridges were replaced or, if that proved too difficult, a new line was built to by-pass the wreckage. With an almost infinite amount of Korean and Chinese manpower to call on, supplies were simply manhandled past any obstruction in the line and transferred from one set of wagons to another. Van Fleet, however, kept on being informed by his aides, who, like all staff officers before them, had over-optimism in their DNA, of the good news that the railway had been put out of commission for a long time: ‘Repeatedly I was assured by my own staff and by the Air Force and Naval Air, often supported by photographs, that “a mile or more of rails at critical points” or “the bridges at Sinanju” were “out for good”. But always a few days later, locomotives pulling trains were operating at these very locations. In short, we were witnessing this time to our own military disadvantage and frustration, another demonstration of the capacity, the durability, and the flexibility of railroads under war conditions.’
Partly this was because the Communists proved very clever at fooling the US forces into thinking that the bombing was more effective than it was. Bridges were made to look wrecked by having removable spans taken out during the day and replaced at night; by-pass crossings over rivers were hidden with camouflage and trains sheltered in tunnels at night. The deception worked. The post-war reports later criticized the military commanders for failing to spot that much of the photographic evidence of destruction was nothing of the sort, rather reminiscent of the famous Iraq weapons of mass destruction dossier.
Operation Strangle had been intended to last only a month and a half, and after four months, at the end of 1951, there were calls within the military leadership to stop the waste of resources and wind it up. Instead, a new programme, Saturate, was launched. It was a more comprehensive attempt to bomb the supply lines out of existence by operating at night when the trains ran, as well as during the day. However, there were only the resources to attack a limited number of targets, and most of the railway lines were left intact. Again, any damage was repaired quickly and Saturate was deemed another failure. In total, the Americans flew a staggering 172,000 missions of reconnaissance and bombing, and fired 230,000 rounds of ammunition on ‘interdiction’ flights aimed at disrupting the Communists’ supply lines. Van Fleet, still exasperated half a decade later when writing his report on the performance of the air force in the Korean War, recalled how ‘we dive bombed and skip-bombed, we shelled with heavy naval guns, we cannonaded with ground artillery, we strafed with rockets and machine guns, we organized sabotage and guerrilla attacks. But we never stopped the Red railroads from delivering ammunition and supplies… At no time, except locally and temporarily, did the enemy limit his combat effort because of supply considerations. By every index, the Communists were able to steadily increase their flow of supplies to the front lines.’ As John Westwood, the author of Railways at War, put it: ‘In this contest, in which the latest air and naval weapons were deployed against the railway system of North Korea, the railways emerged a clear winner.’ The Americans had, too, probably overestimated the level of supplies needed for a lightly armed Asian army, which meant that the enemy’s troops could survive with far fewer trains than had been estimated.
The United Nations forces themselves made heavy use of the railways remaining in their hands during the conflict. The reinforcements and supplies which were landed at Inchon on the west coast were all immediately transferred by rail to the front lines and bases on railway wagons pulled by locomotives brought over on the ships. It was, by all accounts, an incredibly efficient operation, unhampered by bombing raids since the United Nations forces dominated the air.
