III. MINE WARFARE IN KOREA

The North Korean army swept across the frontier with South Korea in June 1950, triggering the Korean War that would continue for three years. "At first both sides made only limited use of landmines," wrote EARI senior analyst Herbert L. Smith in Landmine and Countermine Warfare, Korea, 1950-54 (1972). "The North Koreans apparently had not planned to use them extensively, and the South Koreans were handicapped by shortages of all types which required improvisation, much of it ineffective."9

This relatively mine-free environment drastically changed when the U.S. entered the war in 1950 as the leading member of a United Nations coalition mandated to defend the South. "The United States was the primary source of supply for mines for the U.N. forces in the Korean War," wrote Smith. 10 When General Douglas MacArthur struck at Inchon in September 1950, the North Koreans slowed the U.S. advance by sowing captured U.S. mines. This was the first of several examples where U.S. mines actually frustrated its U.N. coalition field commanders and unintentionally aided their enemy.

China entered the war on the side of North Korea in November 1950. On New Year's Day 1951, the U.S. reported that its defensive minefields were folding under an onslaught of human wave assaults. The historian of the Eighth Engineers recalled: "Although the U.N forces had not been surprised this time, they were hard-pressed by the `human sea' tactics of an enemy who was capable of clearing minefields by the simple expedient of sending men ahead to be sacrificed."11

U.S. defensive minefields folded like a latter-day Maginot Line. The decision was made to abandon Seoul, and the U.S. suffered one of its worst military defeats. The retreat led to the capture by the North of even larger stockpiles of antipersonnel mines: "When the Chinese entered the Korean War, they apparently did not anticipate fighting defensive-type warfare, for they seem to have brought no mines with them. By the spring of 1951 they were using large quantities of mines in their withdrawal, most of them captured or improvised."12

An officer who served in an Engineer Combat Battalion in Korea in 1951-52 reported his observations about how North Koreans obtained huge amounts of antipersonnel mines: "The enemy found it easy to pick up [U.S] mines in unguarded fields and lay them behind our own lines.... A second method of losing mines was abandonment. Too many mines were moved forward. A change in the tide of battle resulted in the loss of large quantities of mines. Under pressure of hasty withdrawal, mine-laying sometimes degenerated to pitching armed mines from the back of a moving truck.... After the Eighth Army had shipped 120,000 mines to units, only 20,000 were recorded or on hand. The remaining 100,000 were either abandoned or unrecorded!"13

Many of the same mines caused casualties among U.N. troops when they regrouped and marched on Seoul in the spring of 1951. "Along the front our own mines had caused an appalling number of casualties," recalled Captain Edward R. Hindman, who described an antipersonnel mine as "a killer without a brain. It is unable to distinguish between friend and foe."14 In one incident, he said, "a divisional unit of company size was moving into [an] area when one man tripped a Bouncing Betty [antipersonnel mine]. Immediately two other men rushed to his aid, and one of them tripped another mine, killing himself and wounding the other. Other personnel tried to get to the wounded men, and more mines were set off. In a ghastly debacle that lasted only a few short minutes, a total of sixteen men were killed and wounded by our own mines.... How many other incidents, possibly not as serious as this one, have occurred among our units in Korea?"15

U.S. military doctrine allowed for the laying of mines in so-called "nuisance minefields." In the Department of the Army's 1952 Training Circular entitled Landmine Warfare, a nuisance minefield is described as "one laid to impose delay and disorganization on the enemy and to hinder his use of an area or route which may or may not be covered by supporting ground fire." Furthermore, the document notes that in a nuisance minefield "all types of mines, booby traps, dirty trick devices, and firing devices are used. The desired effects of demoralization, confusion, and fear are quickly gained by such use of mines." In fact, nuisance minefields "may be laid to standard patterns or may be scattered. Scattered mining is preferable because of added difficulty in removal by the enemy. Marking a nuisance minefield is not required unless the minefield will endanger friendly troops before it falls into enemy hands."16

At the same time, field commanders anticipated that their nuisance minefields would cause casualties among their own men. Department of the Army Field Manual 5-32 candidly assesses the cost-benefit calculation that officers had to make before ordering the laying of unmarked mines: "They are not used unless the ground is to beabandoned to the enemy or the unit can sustain the losses involved in returning to an area containing nuisance minefields."17

Army engineers puzzled over how best to clear antipersonnel mines. The Korean landscape and climate presented serious challenges for mine clearance crews. Snow and freezing temperatures caused "erratic mine performance" in the winter. In the summer, rain and fog turned roads into muddy slush and visually impeded both mine laying and detection.18 The engineers tried everything from running tanks through suspected mined areas19 to turning flamethrowers on minefields.20 They also urged that more resources be spent on mine detection and removal technologies, mine awareness, and safety in mine laying.21 Korea also presented the Pentagon with the opportunity to manufacture new types of mines. The 534th Engineer Technical Intelligence Teams experimented with what was described as a fifty-five gallon napalm mine.22

There is some dispute about the number of U.S. troops killed and injured in mine blasts in Korea. In May 1969 the Medical Statistics Agency of the Department of the Army ruled that mine casualties in Korea were considerably less in number than casualties caused by shells and bullets. The Office of the Army Surgeon General reported that 305 men were killed in action by mines out of 18,498 killed, while 2,401 were wounded in action by mines out of 72,343 wounded in total.23 Perhaps mindful that "fragmentation casualties" may have been excluded from the official count, as they were in Vietnam,24 EARI senior analyst Herbert Smith commented: "Casualty figures alone, however, do not reflect the impact of mines as a weapon. The psychological effect of mines and minefields goes beyond the recording of numbers in operations delayed, plans disarranged, and objectives unachieved. These factors create an intangibility difficult to record statistically."25

Smith also drew from the Surgeon General's statistics the conclusion that more U.S. mine casualties were caused by U.S. defensive minefields than were caused by mines encountered in offensive operations and pursuitoperations against the enemy.26 The obvious conclusion is that U.S. defensive minefields regularly ensnared their own men.