Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Wyoming and the Korean War

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Wyoming and the Korean War:

Sidebar: Wyoming and the Korean War

The Korean War is something that most Wyomingites don't particularly associate with our state, but the war did have a noticeable impact on the state, and Korea has been in the news a lot recently, so now might be a good time to take a look at it.

 Official painting of the Wyoming Army National Guard depicting Wyoming's 300th AFA in action.

Part of the reason that we don't think much of the Korean War and Wyoming, is that we don't think much about the Korean War at all.  The Korean War is one of several wars that have been tagged "forgotten wars" and, in the case of Korea, it's really true.  Perhaps that was inevitable, coming between World War Two and the Vietnam War, as it did.

Wyoming's role in the Korean War is tied closely to the the decline in the Army's conventional war fighting abilities that followed World War Two.  The largest war ever fought, World War Two was the largest conventional conflict of all time but it ended with the use of two nuclear weapons.  Given that, the immediate assumption by the American military was that the age of conventional warfare had ended and that any future war, of any kind, would be a nuclear war.  The Army was allowed to atrophy as a result.  Between 1945, when World War Two ended, and 1950, when the Korean War started, the Army's training in conventional warfare dramatically declined.

An end to conventional warfare turned out to be a massively erroneous assumption, and the place we learned that was in Korea.

That the US would fight a war in Korea was something that, moreover, seemed an impossibility in 1945, when events took us there for the first time in the 20th Century.  The US had actually fought in Korea once before, but in the 19th Century, oddly enough, when the Marine Corps landed briefly in Korean in an obscure punitive expedition.  It was World War Two, however that brought the US back onto the Korean Peninsula, but only due to the end of the war.

Korea itself had been a Japanese possession since 1910, when the Japanese simply made a fact out of what had been the case following the Russo Japanese War.  Korea had been more or less independent prior to that, but heavily influenced by its much more powerful neighbors.  The Russo Japanese War effectively ended Korean independence in favor of the Japanese.  The Japanese dominance was not a happy thing for the Koreans.  Korea remained a Japanese possession up until after World War Two, when it was jointly occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union, splitting the country in half.  The US had no intention to remain there but the original concept of uniting the country in a democratic process fell apart, and the Soviets and the US left with the country divided.  The US had weakly armed the South and failed to provide it with heavy weapons. The North, on the other hand, was heavily armed and trained by the Soviets, who left the North with the means, and likely the plan, on how to unite the peninsula by force.  In 1950, North Korea invaded the South with a well equipped and well trained Army.  They faced a poorly trained South Korean Army.

Soon after that they, quite frankly, faced a poorly trained American Army.  The US hadn't really given much thought to South Korea after leaving it, but the fall of China, followed by the Berlin Blockade, followed by shocking early revelations about Soviet espionage inside the US, followed by the development of the Soviet bomb, suddenly refocused attention on a country that now seemed to be a dagger aimed at Japan.  President Truman made the immediate decision to send the U.S. Army into South Korea to turn the North Koreans back.

That Army, however, wasn't the same Army the US had in 1945 after the defeat of Germany and Japan.  After VJ Day the U.S. had rapidly demobilized.  Moreover, convinced that all future wars would be nuclear in nature, the U.S. had let the Army deteriorate markedly.  It was poorly trained and not all that well equipped in some ways.

The intervention in South Korea required the call up of numerous Army National Guard units, and Wyoming's 300th Armored Field Artillery was one of them. Deployed in February 1951, the unit made up of young recruits from northern Wyoming and World War Two veterans proved to be a very effective one.  It achieved a fairly unique status in May 1951 at Soyang with the unit directly engaged advancing enemy infantry, a very rare event in modern combat and a risky one at any time.  The unit came out of the Korean War with Presidential and Congressional Unit Citations in honor of its fine performance in the war.  The individual Guardsmen of the 300th AFA largely came home after completing a combat tour, at a little over a year, but the called up unit remained in service throughout the war.  Other Wyoming Army National Guard units were also called up in this time, but only the 300th AFA was sent to the Korean War.

The Air National Guard's 187th Fighter Bomber Squadron from Wyoming was called up. The new Air Guard saw combat service for the first time in the Korean War.  Nine Wyoming F51 pilots were lost serving in the unit during the war.

Of course, many Wyomingites served in the war by volunteering for military service, or by being conscripted during the war.  Like earlier wars, Wyomingites volunteered in high numbers.

The Air National Guard and other comments in the context of the classified leak

As the fairly rapid investigation has revealed that the disgrace brought upon the United States by the leak of confidential information regarding the Russo Ukrainian War was committed by one Airman 1st Class Jack Douglas Teixeira, and as this will inevitably lead to all sorts of inaccurate commentary on the National Guard among other things, a few things to keep in mind.

The Air National Guard is not like the Army National Guard in that the Air Guard is pretty much a 24 hour a day, seven days a week, military establishment.

This tends to go really under the wire in the U.S., which tends to think that the Guard is active, other than for monthly drills, when it's called up in an emergency. Not so. The Guard in general is much more active than supposed.  I was an Army National Guardsman, as has been noted here in the past, and I worked full time status periodically.  Indeed, if I add up all my full time status, and my time in the Army for training, I have as much or more time in day to day uniform as many of the soldiers in my era who did two years in the Regular Army.  

And that's the Army Guard.

The Air Guard flies 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and for some of its pilots, that's their full time job.  If you have an establishment flying that often, that means that it has ground crews working that often as well.  Air Guardsmen that I have known not only have done weekend drills, but week day stints of duty, and the like, even if they're ground crews. Air crews obviously have the same schedules as their aircraft.

Teixer was a member of Massachusetts Air National Guard's 102nd Intelligence Wing, which is probably now reeling in shame.

What's it do?

Well, it doesn't fly anything.

According to its website:

Our mission is to provide worldwide precision intelligence and command and control along with trained and experienced Airmen for expeditionary combat support and homeland security.

That doesn't really tell you much, but what we can piece together is that it's been quietly put on a sort of active duty status at some point to support the U.S.'s mission to Ukraine.

Truly, most of the stuff that was leaked has been interesting, particularly if you are a military geek, but not hugely secret.  What is embarrassing, however, is that this is further proof that the U.S. can't keep anything secret.

What's also of interest is this.

The leaker is an AIC.

That's an Air Force two striper, but that's deceptive.

In the Army, two stripes is the rank of Corporal, and at one time it kind of was the same thing in the Air Force.  Corporals have always been sort of a big deal in the Army. As late as World War Two, corporals fulfilled a role that was later filled by sergeants.  In the Army, a corporal is a Non Commissioned Officer and holds the grade of E-4.

An Army E-3 is a Private First Class.

In the Air Force, an E-4 is a Sergeant.  In the Army, a "buck" sergeant is an E-5. An Army Sergeant outranks an Air Force One, in other words.

Most E-4s in the Army are Specialists, a post World War Two rank that is not a NCO.  Corporals are rare.

E-3s aren't rare, but this guy has been in the service since 2019.  I don't know about the Air Force, but at the time I was in the Army National Guard, a soldier who was an E-3 after four years in the service would have been slated to go right out the door.  I frankly doubt he would have been eligible for reenlistment. That's a shocking lack of progress, at least it would have been, but maybe things are different now, or different in the Air Force establishment.

It's rally dangerous to psychoanalyze with; 1) no real patient, 2) remotely, and 3) without a license, but most psychology is flaming BS anyhow, so why not. That leads to this.

This stuff was all leaked, apparently, on a Discord.  I'm not familiar with Discord, but from what I understand of this story, this guy was pretty aggressive and got huffy when people weren't reacting with Cyber Joy in his small community over his leaks.  This leads to this.

Being an E3 at the end of four years and acting that way seems to put this guy in the oddball status to me.  He sure wasn't making grade in the Guard, so why not be a big deal on one of those stupid internet societies.

This is the second time in recent years where leaks were made by somebody pretty clearly psychologically disturbed, the other time being by Army Specialist Bradley Manning.  Manning figured in the Wikileaks matter, and there were clear signs that he wasn't right.  I don't know about Teixeira, but I note this as the service seems to have at least a semi poor record for screening folks with problems out, even in this era in which its difficult, to some degree, to get into the service.  Manning shouldn't have had access to classified documents, and it'll be interesting to see what was known about Teixeira.

What this does reveal, which should have already been known, that not everyone in the service is a hero or even normal.  Most people in the service are normal, but in recent years it's gotten so that whatever you did in the service affords you with Audi Murphy like status, which is just nuts.

There are a lot of predictions now that Teixeira can look forward to hard time at Leavenworth for eons.  Maybe. That has happened in some prior instances.  But my guess it that Manning's story is probably more illustrative.  He did seven years in prison, during which time he decided that he was a girl and underwent some sort of process to artificially attempt to affect that appearance, and then was pardoned by President Obama.  American justice at work.

That does raise this question, although it probably answers itself.  Given as the Russians were seriously wondering, and openly, if this was a disinformation campaign, why not build on that?  A more cynical nation might have simply had a couple of guys from intelligence stop by the Teixeira apartment in the middle of the night and give him an option he practically couldn't have refused and turned him into an asset.  Indeed, why not?  He could have been used to leak disinformation for the rest of the war, or as long as useful.  After that, well, he could have been given the choice of being discharged at the E1 grade with the condition he shut up, or assigned to something really unpleasant for a freaking long time.

But we don't do things like that, apparently.

So now we have this drama, which will play out with the drama of the war.

One person trying to make hay from the drama is Marjorie Taylor Greene, the overgrown toddler from Georgia who pretty clearly just uses stuff to draw attention to herself.  She's not a serious person, and has suggested that the Airman is a Christian antiwar hero.

Seriously?

Tucker Carlson jumped on the bandwagon a bit too.  Carlson shouldn't be taken seriously, but all of this goes to show how far gone the far right really is.