Defining moment

'As darkness fell, blazing hangars lit up the sky': How the fall of Pyongyang brought the world to the brink of crisis

Myles Burke

In December 1950, a BBC cameraman captured the fall of Pyongyang, a defining moment in the Korean War. In History examines how the conflict ravaged the land and its people, defined the future of the peninsula, and pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.

"All roads leading out of the city were crowded with refugees. Few knew where they were going," reported the BBC as it broadcast images of desperate North Koreans trying to flee the burning city of Pyongyang on 5 December 1950. 

The footage had been captured by BBC cameraman Cyril Page during his last hours in the North Korean capital. Upon hearing that occupying UN troops were pulling out, Page had taken to the streets to document the chaos and fear as the news spread that the Chinese troops were coming. In the harsh winter conditions, he filmed the frightened refugees carrying whatever they could as smoke bellowed out from the burning buildings behind them.

The panicked evacuation was emblematic of the dramatic reversal of fortunes experienced by the UN forces led by General Douglas MacArthur. Just weeks before, the general had promised US President Harry S Truman that he was poised to unify Korea. The fall of the city of Pyongyang and complete collapse of his military offensive into North Korea would trigger MacArthur to threaten an all-out nuclear war. 

The havoc and bloodshed caused by the Korean War had begun six months earlier. In the years leading up to the end of World War Two, Korea had suffered under a brutal Japanese occupation. The US proposed to its wartime ally, the Soviet Union, that following Japan's surrender, they should temporarily divide control of Korea between them. The thought was that it would help them manage the removal of the Japanese forces. In 1945, the superpowers split the country in two along an arbitrary demarcation line, the 38th parallel. The Soviets supported Kim Il-sung in the north's Democratic People's Republic of Korea while the US backed Syngman Rhee in the Republic of Korea in the south.

From the outset, neither of the newly-created Korean governments accepted the other's legitimacy or the demarcation line. "It was never considered in any sense by Koreans to be legitimate or meaningful. It was completely meaningless to them," Dr Owen Miller of the Centre of Korean Studies at SOAS, University of London, told the BBC History Magazine podcast in 2024. Both leaders wanted to reunify the country by force. By 1949, the two superpowers had withdrawn most of their occupying troops from Korea, but it did little to ease the simmering tensions. Increasingly bloody clashes regularly broke out along the de facto border. 

On 25 June 1950, North Korea's communist leader Kim Il-sung made his move. In the early hours of morning, he launched a surprise attack with a well-trained fighting force across the 38th parallel. The North Korean troops, equipped with Soviet weapons, quickly overwhelmed the Republic of Korea's army. Within days they had captured the south's capital Seoul, forcing many of its residents to swear allegiance to the Communist Party or face imprisonment or execution. 

In the US, President Truman was caught off guard by the speed and success of North Korea's assault. A believer in the "Domino theory" – that if one country fell to communism others would follow – he appealed to the newly-formed UN to defend South Korea. The Soviet Union could have vetoed this vote. But at the time, it was boycotting the UN Security Council because of its refusal to admit the People's Republic of China. And so, on 28 June 1950, a resolution was passed calling on all UN member states to help repel the invasion. MacArthur, the US general who had accepted Japan's surrender at the end of World War Two, was named commander of the combined UN force.

Turning the tide

The US was the first to respond, hurriedly sending its soldiers stationed in Japan. But these troops were ill-prepared to contend with the superior North Korean forces that swept rapidly down the country, pushing them back. As the battles raged, thousands of ordinary Korean civilians caught up in the conflict were killed. By September, the South Korean and UN forces were pinned down, defending a small enclave around the port of Busan on the southern tip. North Korea looked to be on the brink of reuniting the entire Korean peninsula.

In an ambitious gamble, MacArthur decided to attempt a risky, sea-borne assault on Inchon, a port deep behind the North Korean lines. Under a heavy bombardment, UN forces landed on 15 September 1950, capturing the port and then quickly moving on to recapture Seoul. After they retook the capital, tens of thousands of its residents who had sworn allegiance to the city's previous occupiers were shot as collaborators by the South Korean forces. It was just one of a series of indiscriminate horrific mass killings of civilians that would take place over the course of the war. "There were a lot of massacres during the war, not at the frontline, away from the frontline, where people were rounded up because they were thought to be disloyal," said Dr Miller.

The Inchon operation managed to sever the North Korean army's supply lines and communication, and UN forces were able to break out of Busan and mount a fierce counteroffensive. This turned the tide of the conflict, forcing the North Koreans soldiers to retreat northwards and back across the 38th parallel.

But having achieved the UN resolution, MacArthur was determined to destroy the communist forces completely, and he ordered his troops to pursue the North Koreans across the border. By 19 October 1950, UN forces had captured Pyongyang and were advancing towards the Yalu River on the Chinese border. The situation that had been so dire for South Korea just a few months earlier now appeared to be reversed.

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Truman was hesitant to expand a conflict that could pull not just China and also Russia, which by this time had developed its own atomic bomb, into another world war. But MacArthur was convinced he was on the verge of a swift, decisive victory that would reunify the country under pro-Western South Korean leadership. He assured the president that the war would be over by Christmas.

But the UN's rapid advance towards its border had unnerved China's communist leader Mao Zedong. Fearing a hostile Western military power on the country's doorstep, he ordered the Chinese army to gather secretly at its border to meet MacArthur's onrushing armies. In late November, with devastating suddenness, China changed the trajectory of the Korean War again.

Thousands of Chinese troops launched a series of devastating attacks on the advancing UN forces. Suffering heavy losses and struggling under the freezing winter conditions, MacArthur's troops were unable to hold the large swaths of territory that they had captured just weeks before. At the Battle of the Ch'ongch'on River, Chinese troops inflicted a catastrophic defeat on UN forces, causing one of the greatest and bloodiest retreats in US Marine Corps history. 

The nuclear threat

As the Chinese offensive gathered momentum, the citizens of Pyongyang, which had been taken by UN forces less than two months before, again found themselves in the eye of the storm. Unable to halt the relentless Chinese advance, MacArthur made the decision to abandon the city. UN troops started preparing to evacuate and were ordered to burn any supplies and equipment that might aid the approaching soldiers, causing many of the buildings in the city to go up in flames. Aware that the North Korean and Chinese armies were threatening to purge anyone suspected of having helped the UN forces, thousands of terrified and exhausted Pyongyang residents fled the city.

In freezing weather, Page filmed these Koreans, under the supervision of the British army, desperately trying to make it across the Taedong river to avoid being trapped when the troops left. "Because of priority for military vehicles, the refugees were not permitted to cross the bridges over the Taedong river to the south of Pyongyang," the BBC reported. US engineers were rigging these bridges to blow after the last military vehicles had crossed them in an effort to slow the North Korean advance. "Yet, obsessed by the fear of being left in the city, thousands made their way to the river's edge," continued the report. "There, all kinds of craft were being prepared to take them across."

Page himself was ordered to leave from an airfield before dusk. When he reached the airfield, he discovered that much of it, too, was ablaze, with UN troops busy destroying any material they thought the North Koreans could use. "As darkness fell, blazing hangars and workshops lit up the night sky," said the BBC. "By midnight, hundreds of private dwellings near the airfield were in flames, too."

As Page's plane left, he captured his final shots of Pyongyang, which was once a site of triumph for MacArthur, but which now seem to symbolise the failure of his military strategy. "It was almost dawn when our cameraman left Pyongyang airfield," the BBC reported, "and as his plane, one of the last to leave, flew him out he saw far below the UN retreat, with the route to the south lying under a cloud of dust from the seemingly never-ending line of vehicles." 

On 6 December 1950, as Chinese and North Korean forces re-entered Pyongyang, the US strategy to end the war began to edge towards a much more dangerous idea. Truman had always had a difficult relationship with MacArthur due to the general's tendency to overstep his authority and ignore direct orders. Now in the face of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Korea, the two men found themselves clashing repeatedly over the conduct of the war. 

MacArthur, who had downplayed Truman's fears that Mao Zedong might intervene, now began to advocate publicly for escalating the conflict. He argued that the US should threaten the use of nuclear weapons and bomb China itself unless the Communist forces in Korea laid down their arms. MacArthur was not alone in this: Curtis LeMay, head of the US Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, was also in favour of a pre-emptive strike. LeMay, who believed that a nuclear war was enviable, would later try to persuade President John F Kennedy that he should be allowed to bomb nuclear missile sites during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This insistence of the viability of using atomic weapons deeply alarmed other UN countries caught up in the Korean conflict, including the UK Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who flew to Washington, DC to object to the idea. But MacArthur was adamant that his plan would work, believing the Russians would be intimidated and not do anything about the US striking China.

'Back to where they started'

On 9 December 1950, MacArthur formally requested the authority to have the discretion to use atomic weapons. Truman refused. Two weeks later, MacArthur submitted a list of targets for strikes, including ones within China, and listed the number of atomic bombs he would require. He continued to push for the Pentagon to grant him a field commander's discretion to employ nuclear weapons as necessary. By late December 1950, the UN forces had been pushed back across the 38th parallel, with Chinese and North Korean troops recapturing the beleaguered and bombed-out city of Seoul in January 1951.

"Possibly if some of the commanders like Curtis LeMay had had the ear of the president more, they might have used nuclear weapons because those commanders like LeMay and MacArthur did want to use them," said Dr Miller. "They thought, 'What's the point of having nuclear weapons if we don't use them?'" With Truman unsure if he could control MacArthur, and fears mounting that the general's aggressive posturing might ignite World War Three, the president fired him for insubordination in April 1951. 

The Korean War would grind on for another two years, with Seoul changing hands again for a fourth time. With neither side able to score a decisive victory, it descended into a prolonged, bloody war of attrition. "One of the great ironies of the war is that, at that point in the spring of 1951, where the front line of the two forces is, is not that far from the partition line, the 38th parallel," said Dr Miller. "All of these great losses on both sides, the absolute civilian devastation that had occurred, but they were more or less back to where they started."

The two countries eventually ended the fighting with an uneasy truce in 1953, but they did not sign a peace treaty – meaning that technically they are still at war. The conflict was ruinous to the peninsula. Estimates vary, but it is believed that some four million people died during the Korean War, half of whom were civilians. Many more were displaced or left hungry. The aerial carpet bombing devastated the country, destroying whole towns and cities. Families separated by the partition have never been reunited.

Decades later, the two countries remain stuck in a frozen conflict, kept apart by a 250km (160 mile) demilitarised zone covered with land mines and guarded by hundreds of soldiers. The legacy of a war that never ended.