By Tom Dare
A FASCINATING United States Army video from the Korean War showing US artillery pounding North Korean positions has resurfaced this week as America begins its annual joint military operations with South Korea despite stern warnings from Kim Jung Un.
Footage demonstrated American force with soldiers firing huge rounds of artillery toward the North during the three-year-long conflict, which lasted from 1950 to 1953 and pitted the American-backed South against the Soviet and Chinese-backed North.
And in a bizarre propaganda stunt, the American voiceover-actor continually refers to the artillery gun, a 105mm Howitzer, as his friend Joe, sent over to help fight the forces of communism.
“Joe and I were in the shipping business. Shipping high explosives to communist Korea,” he says.
“This was a little service we supplied the infantry. When they got stopped, we got started.
“When Joe and I got to Korea, everybody was mighty glad to see us. They needed us bad. Back at the beginning of the war, when the reds had things all their way, our side had few men and even less equipment.”
The video was produced in 1952, two years into the conflict that started when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel and attempted to take the South Korean capital of Seoul.
After intervention by the USSR, the United States and China, an armistice was eventually signed on July 27 1953, the terms of which stated that North and South Korea were to remain separated by the 38th parallel.
However, tensions have been high in the region ever since, with the recent pursuit of a nuclear weapons programme by the North causing a long-running war of words between the Kim family in North Korea and the American government.
The most recent instalment of this has been the back and forth between current North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and American President Donald Trump.
Both have made threats to the other, with Kim Jong Un even threatening to fire a missile into the sea off the U.S. Pacific island of Guam, a threat he later decided against carrying out.
And on Monday relations between the two worsened once again, with America beginning a series of military exercises in South Korea alongside South Korean forces.
Though an annual occurrence and not one which is a direct threat to them, the North Korean leadership has long taken exception to this practice, with Kim Jong Un this year saying that the exercises were “throwing fuel onto fire,” and that they would “worsen the situation.”
“No one can guarantee that this will not escalate into a real war,” North Korea’s state-run newspapers announced, calling the annual drills a “rehearsal for nuclear war” and the “most naked expression of hostility” toward the North.
