(See Cover)
In a refugee camp a few miles outside Seoul last week, Ahn Nam-chang and her family were getting ready to go home. Nam-chang's husband was one of at least a million South Korean civilian casualties in the early days of the war, but she has a hunch that her old father is still living on his two-acre farm near Munsan. Nam-chang has three children. As if that were not enough, she has adopted a little girl—one of Korea's 100,000 war orphans—who would most likely have died if Mrs. Ahn had not taken her in. The U.N. Civil Assistance Command has been looking after the Ahns for a couple of years; the kids are outfitted in olive-drab pants. Mrs. Ahn wears a dogskin neckpiece, a relic of the old days, of which she is very fond; at 31, a widow in a country where widows are unwanted, Mrs. Ahn has not much to look forward to, but if she can find her father, they will make a home.
On the roads that wind from Seoul to Munsan, to Uijongbu and farther east, in central and eastern Korea, many families like the Ahns were on the move last week. In a thousand hamlets and settlements, some within sound of artillery on the stalemated battlefront, the blue-grey ashes of prewar villages were being raked aside, raw pine uprights were being planted, and women & children were combing through the rice straw for thatching for new roofs. Of the 22 million people in South Korea, about a fourth are homeless. No matter how hard and hopefully they work they cannot soon replace their 600,000 destroyed homes, nor provide the 250,000 new dwellings necessary to shelter the refugees from the north.
North & South. After nearly three years of war, there is not much left of Korea. North of the 38th parallel the devastation is immense. U.N. intelligence estimates that bombing and strafing have destroyed 40% of all habitations of any kind; U.N. bombers no longer have profitable targets. The civilian population has diminished from 8,000,000 to perhaps 4,000,000—killed in the bombing, dead from malnutrition or cold, fled to the South for freedom, or carried off by the Communist occupiers. The North Korean army is a shadow: perhaps only 50,000 soldiers remain of their once formidable corps. The North Koreans have been beaten; it is their occupiers, the Chinese Communists, that U.N. armies now face.
In South Korea, the military picture is better, thanks to the might & main of the U.S., to the lesser but nonetheless real help of 14 other U.N. nations, to the tenacity of the South Koreans themselves, and to the singular dedication of Korea's first & only President, Syngman Rhee. A 400,000-man ROK army, including twelve fully equipped divisions in the line, guards the young republic from further invasion and is building so fast that it may soon be strong enough to take over the whole front. It already holds more than half.
But back of that line, shadows gather in the picture. Destruction is widespread.