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US Bombing of North Korea: The Korean War Statistics, Checked (Cold Files 008)
Updated: Sep 27
On 3 November 1950, in Tokyo, Lieutenant General George Stratemeyer asked Douglas MacArthur for permission to burn North Korean towns. MacArthur had turned such requests down twice, in July and again five days earlier. This time he said yes.
"Burn it if you so desire," MacArthur told him, as recorded in Stratemeyer's diary. "Not only that, Strat, but burn and destroy as a lesson any other of those towns that you consider of military value to the enemy."
Two days later Stratemeyer wrote down what the new instructions meant. "Every installation, facility, and village in North Korea now becomes a military and tactical target."
That sentence was written by the American air commander in the Far East, in his own diary. It remains the most accurate one-line description of the next thirty-three months anyone produced at the time.
This file is about the campaign that followed, and about the position it occupies now: overstated by those who condemn it, and barely present in the American memory of a war already agreed to be forgotten. Most of the statistics in circulation are wrong. The documents are worse.
The rules they started with
The restraint came first, and it was real.
On 29 June 1950, four days into the war, the Joint Chiefs instructed MacArthur to attack only "air bases, depots, tank farms, troop columns and other such purely military targets." Truman personally insisted on the limits.
Stratemeyer's standing orders that July forbade attacks on urban areas as such, while permitting strikes on specific military targets inside them. His director of operations wrote that "reasonable care" should be taken to avoid providing "a basis for claims of 'illegal' attack against population centers."
In early July, Major General Emmett O'Donnell, commanding the B-29 force, proposed incinerating five North Korean industrial cities. MacArthur refused. "No, Rosy, I'm not prepared to go that far yet." He was refusing the firebombing, not the cities: he had "no compunction whatever" about bombing military objectives inside them, and if bombs missed and killed people, "I accept that as a part of war."
On 29 October, Stratemeyer asked to burn Sinuiju "over the widest area of the city, without warning." MacArthur's headquarters refused again: "The general policy enunciated from Washington negates such an attack unless the military situation clearly requires it."
Ten days later Sinuiju was on fire. What changed in between was China.
The reversal
Chinese forces entered the war at the end of October. The American position collapsed, and the prohibition collapsed with it.
MacArthur did not simply approve the burning. When Stratemeyer's implementing orders came up for review, justifying language was added: "Under present circumstances all such have marked military potential and can only be regarded as military installations." The clause that made it read as lawful went in at theatre headquarters.
On 5 November, twenty-one B-29s dropped 170 tons of incendiaries on Kanggye. Stratemeyer explained it to the Air Force chief of staff that day: the "entire city of Kanggye was virtual arsenal and tremendously important communications center, hence decision to employ incendiaries for first time in Korea."
For the first time in Korea. He dated the campaign himself.
On 8 November, seventy Superfortresses dropped some 580 tons of fire bombs on Sinuiju, in what the Air Force Historical Research Agency calls the largest incendiary raid of the war. Bruce Cumings puts it slightly lower, at 550.
Two things were exempted in Stratemeyer's 5 November entry: hydroelectric plants, and the town of Rashin near the Soviet border. Remember that second one.
The number everybody quotes
Here is the sentence you have read: the United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, against 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific theatre of the Second World War.
It is usually quoted as though it came from the Air Force. Nobody in the visible chain is the Air Force. It runs from Wikipedia to Kiernan and Owen, to Cumings and Armstrong, to Rosemary Foot's 1990 study.
Nor does the comparison hold. Nobody in that chain says what the 503,000 counts: which services, which theatres, bombs or all ordnance. The US Strategic Bombing Survey's own Pacific summary of 1946 states: "The total tonnage of bombs dropped by Allied planes in the Pacific war was 656,400." Two numbers of unknown scope are not a comparison.
One comparison does survive, and it is harsher. The Survey put 160,800 tons on the Japanese home islands, an area roughly three times the size of North Korea. Whatever the Korean total counts, it is several times larger.
Curtis LeMay is quoted more than anyone here, and usually wrongly. The circulating version has him saying the Americans killed off over a million civilian Koreans. That comes from a 1973 memoir by Anthony Herbert, not a transcript, and Herbert's account of his own service was publicly contested for years afterwards. What LeMay actually said, in an interview published by the Office of Air Force History in 1988, was that "we eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway." He then asked, and it is a question: "we killed off, what, twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?"
The accurate version is bad enough.
The number the Americans kept
The strongest evidence against the campaign is not any figure above. It is the US Air Force's own final damage assessment, reproduced by Conrad Crane, a historian at the US Army War College, in a book from an American university press.
Sinanju and Kunu-ri, 100 percent destroyed. Hwangju, 97. Sariwon, 95. Sunan, 90. Hungnam, 85. Chinnampo, Hamhung and Wonsan, 80 each. Pyongyang, 75.
Then three entries near the bottom. Musan, 5 percent. Unggi, 5 percent. Rashin, 5 percent.
All three sit in the far northeast corner. Unggi and Rashin are on the Soviet frontier, and Rashin was the town Stratemeyer wrote into his exemption list on 5 November 1950. The table is not only a record of what was destroyed. It is a record of what could be spared, whenever Washington decided that sparing it mattered.
Nobody can tell you how many died
Most accounts get this wrong in both directions.
There is no reliable count of North Korean civilians killed from the air. The only contemporary figure from someone positioned to know comes from Lieutenant General Vladimir Razuvaev, the Soviet ambassador and chief military adviser in Pyongyang, who reported roughly 282,000 killed by bombing within about 1.2 million civilian casualties. It reaches us at third hand.
The Cold War International History Project obtained DPRK census figures from Russian archives showing the population falling from 9,368,592 in 1948 to 7,425,939 in 1953. That is a drop of about 1.94 million, close to 21 percent. It is not a death toll. It folds in the refugee flow south and the births that never happened. Treating population decline as casualties is the error that produces the inflated numbers. It is also why LeMay's offhand twenty percent still gets repeated, though he was speaking of the whole peninsula and the census figure is North Korea alone.
The claim that twelve to fifteen percent of North Koreans were killed comes from Charles Armstrong, citing a 1981 essay by Jon Halliday. Columbia University concluded in 2019 that Armstrong had plagiarised in a later book, and other scholars documented citations to archival documents that do not exist. He returned the Fairbank Prize in 2017. The figure is not independently established.
Serious estimates of North Korean civilians killed from the air run from roughly a quarter of a million to well over a million. Nobody can narrow it. Any writer offering one confident number is selling something.
The dams
In May 1953, with the armistice talks in their final weeks, the Air Force attacked North Korea's irrigation dams.
The clearest account is not a critic's. It is the official history of the United States Army, written by Walter Hermes for the Center of Military History in 1966:
"Air Force planners had long realized that destruction of irrigation dams would have a serious effect upon the rice crop of North Korea, but humanitarian considerations had argued against the bombing of such targets."
Then: "As the war progressed, however, more and more of the rice crop found its way into military and international barter channels and this knowledge decreased the objections against destroying the dams."
The Army's own historian records that the effect on the food supply was understood in advance, and that the objection was set aside once the rice could be classed as a military commodity.
Toksan was hit on 13 May by F-84 Thunderjets, fifty-nine of them by Hermes's count. He describes the result: "Floodwaters poured forth and left a trail of havoc. Buildings, crops, and irrigation canals were all swept away." Over six miles of rail line, five rail bridges and five highway bridges were damaged or destroyed. Chasan followed on 15 and 16 May, Kuwonga on 21 and 22 May.
Then it failed. After Kuwonga the North Koreans dropped the water level twelve feet to cut the pressure, and by June were draining reservoirs ahead of the aircraft. Two dams were effectively breached, not the five usually claimed.
Deliberate inundation of farmland was charged at Nuremberg, under the wanton destruction count, over the flooding of the Netherlands. No conviction is recorded as resting on it, and no American officer was ever charged over the Korean dams.
What the law actually said
The claim that the bombing was illegal, and the retort that the United States had not yet ratified the Geneva Conventions, are both wrong.
No treaty governed aerial bombardment in 1950. The 1923 Hague Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare were never adopted by any state. The applicable instruments were the 1907 Hague Conventions, applied to aircraft only by analogy. As W. Hays Parks, the law of war specialist in the Army Judge Advocate General's office, put it in 1982, "the law of war as it related to bombing had failed to advance since its most recent codification in 1907."
The 1949 Geneva Conventions did not regulate the bombing of enemy cities, so American ratification in 1955 rather than 1950 changes nothing. The first modern codification of distinction, proportionality and protection for irrigation works and dams is Additional Protocol I of 1977. The United States has never ratified it.
The defence deserves stating at full strength. Crane argues that American air power in Korea was held under real and continuous political restraint, against an enemy that began the war by invading. Parks adds that no treaty then in force regulated the bombardment of cities at all, and that the 1953 dams were struck on an interdiction rationale, General Otto Weyland having refused targets whose only effect would have been on the rice crop. A later Nuremberg tribunal also acquitted a German general of wanton destruction where his judgment of necessity was honest but mistaken.
A serious argument. It is not a complete answer to Hermes.
The forgetting
The phrase arrived while the shooting was still going on. US News and World Report ran a piece titled "Korea: The 'Forgotten War'" by 1952, and Clay Blair's 1987 history fixed the label permanently.
The Korean War Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington on 27 July 1995, forty-two years to the day after the armistice. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in 1982, seven years after that war ended. Korea's veterans waited forty-two.
In North Korea the memory is not optional. Kenneth Quinones, a former State Department desk officer who travelled there repeatedly in the 1990s, wrote that the country's military leaders, "recalling the intense bombing by the United States during the Korean War, are trying to hide and to protect its most important facilities from possible aerial bombardment." Many factories and most military installations went underground. "There is nothing secret about this," he wrote.
A country that spent three years underground built a state that stayed there.
What is left
Strip out the broken tonnage comparison, the spliced LeMay quote and the unsourced casualty percentages, and the case does not weaken. It gets harder to answer, because what remains is entirely American and entirely official.
An air commander's diary recording that every village in a country had become a target. Justifying language added to the order at theatre headquarters. An Army official history explaining, without embarrassment, why the objection to destroying a food supply was dropped. An Air Force damage assessment showing two cities at one hundred percent and three at five, the difference being who lived next door.
None of it required a hostile source. All of it was written down by the people doing it. Some sat in print for fifty years. The diary took until 1999.
That is the scandal in this file. Not that the record was sealed. That so much of it was open, and nobody went to look.
Sources consulted
Walter G. Hermes, Truce Tent and Fighting Front, US Army Center of Military History, 1966
The Three Wars of Lt. Gen. George E. Stratemeyer, ed. W. T. Y'Blood, 1999
Sahr Conway-Lanz, "The Ethics of Bombing Civilians After World War II," 2014
Conrad C. Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 2000
W. Hays Parks, "Conventional Aerial Bombing and the Law of War," 1982
US Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific War), 1946
Kohn and Harahan, eds., Strategic Air Warfare, 1988
The U.S. Air Force's First War: Korea, AFHRA
Cold War International History Project, Wilson Center, 2001
Rosemary Foot, A Substitute for Victory, 1990
Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History, 2010
Nuremberg Indictment, Count Three, Avalon Project
Next file: Vukovar, 1991. Eighty-seven days, a town of 45,000 reduced to rubble, and what happened at the Ovcara farm after the hospital surrendered.
Cold Files runs twice a week. For the daily brief and the full archive, follow Project Leaflet on Telegram at t.me/TheLeaflet.
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