GIs and Missionaries in the Land of Orphans

The American soldiers' love for Korean children was very impressive. They did everything to take care of us. You were like a father to us.

—Yang Yun-hak, evacuated from Seoul to Chejudo in 1950 by American forces

The Korean War (1950–1953) devastated and divided a country that was in the initial stages of recovering from thirty-five years of brutal Japanese colonial occupation and the destruction of World War II. The children of that war—orphans who lost their parents and the newly created mixed-race "GI babies"—could find little assistance from any quarter. The government of the new Republic of Korea (ROK) had neither the money nor the resources to assist any of its citizens, young or old. In the absence of government welfare, American servicemen and missionaries, along with a host of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), provided what little social welfare was available. Together, these groups built and supported orphanages and stimulated massive donations of food, clothing, and money from Americans at home by raising awareness of the plight of Korean children. Additionally, servicemen cared for Korean boys under a semiformal "mascot" system.

Child sponsorship programs such as Foster Parents' Plan, Christian Children's Fund, and World Vision provided a way for Americans to virtually "adopt" Korean children. Those virtual adoptions quickly became real: as servicemen began returning to the United States with their adopted Korean children, such adoptions entered the realm of possibility for ordinary Americans. This chapter surveys the Korean orphan problem and some of the ways that American servicemen and missionaries cared for Korea's children. It also examines how these servicemen and missionaries created the institutional and imaginative preconditions for the establishment of Korean adoption in the second half of the 1950s.

War Orphans and GI Babies

At eighty-five thousand square miles, the Korean Peninsula is roughly the same size as Utah. Unified as one kingdom since the seventh century, Korea's isolationism and hostility to outsiders had earned it the nickname "Hermit Kingdom." It remained fiercely independent until Japanese annexation in 1910, which ended with Japan's defeat at the end of World War II. Following Japan's withdrawal, returned Korean exiles, landlords, collaborators, and freedom fighters struggled to gain control of their newly liberated country. Instead, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel. The Soviet Union took stewardship of North Korea while the United States established a military government in the south. This division prompted an influx of refugees from the north, foreshadowing the enormous population movements that would occur during the Korean War. South Korea experienced economic, political, and social disorder: increased crime, political and labor violence, leftist uprisings, and retaliatory rightist purges. This chaos resulted in part in "heavy dependence" on the United States, which would have important consequences for Korea's future development. As a result of developing Cold War politics and a US-Soviet deadlock, separate governments were established on the peninsula in 1948. In the south, the Republic of Korea was declared, with US-educated Syngman Rhee as its president; in the north, Kim Il Sung proclaimed authority over the new Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The United States withdrew its forces by mid-1949, leaving behind about 2,500 personnel, including five hundred soldiers to train the ROK Army.

On 25 June 1950, the Korean War started when North Korean forces launched a surprise invasion of the south. They quickly pushed southward, overwhelming unprepared ROK troops, and by early August had gained control of at least 90 percent of the peninsula. The next month, American and ROK troops, led by General Douglas MacArthur, made their celebrated amphibious landing at Inch'on, dramatically reversing the course of the war. By late November UN, Korean, and American forces had advanced almost to the Yalu River that formed most of the North Korean border, and they talked of being home for Christmas. Those hopes were thwarted by China's entry into the war; its troops joined with the North Koreans and, in another dramatic reversal, drove UN forces back south of Seoul. By March 1951, the two sides found themselves facing off at the 38th parallel— essentially the same point at which they had begun—marking the start of a two-year period of stalemate during which truce negotiations dragged on against a backdrop of limited ground and air wars. In July 1953, North and South Korea signed an armistice that remains in effect today.

Fleeing the fighting, approximately 5.8 million Koreans (one out of every five) became a refugee. The port city of Pusan, on the southeast tip of the Korean Peninsula, was never taken by North Korean forces. Consequently, it and the area around it—the thinly held defensive line known as the Pusan perimeter—became the de facto seat of the South Korean government. Pusan also housed hundreds of thousands of refugees, who built shelters from the discarded materials of warfare—corrugated metal sheets, flattened tin cans, and US Army C-ration boxes—and did what they could to stay alive. Huddled there, they endured hunger, disease, pestilence, power outages, fires, and water shortages for the duration of the war and long after it ended.

It is difficult to overstate the deprivation, poverty, and destruction wrought by the Korean War. Regarded by the rest of the world as a geographically limited civil war—a UN "police action"—it was a total war for Koreans. At its close in 1953, the peninsula "was a smoldering ruin." North and South Korea each reported roughly US$2 billion in property damage, the equivalent of South Korea's gross national product in 1949. South Korea's capital city, Seoul, which had changed hands four times in less than a year, saw the majority of its office space, homes, and industrial capacity destroyed. North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, was similarly shattered. By the July 1953 armistice, "most of South Korea was a wasteland of burned villages, bombed out towns and cities, roadsides littered with the rusted hulks of trucks and tanks, bridges down, rail lines severed, factories and schools flattened." In this land of farmers and fishermen, half of the livestock and all of the fishing fleet had been wiped out. Measured in terms of "human lives lost," the Korean War was the third "most costly war of the twentieth century." Yet the civilian death toll has never been accurately assessed, partly because the North Korean government has never released official casualty statistics. Most sources agree that the war left between three and four million Koreans dead, missing and wounded—North and South, civilian and military—amounting to roughly 10 percent of the prewar population. Another ten million Koreans saw their families permanently divided. Troop deaths were just as appalling: 33,600 US troops were killed, 103,200 wounded, and more than 7,000 taken prisoner by North Korean and Chinese forces. Of the ROK troops, 70,000 were killed, 150,000 wounded, and 80,000 captured, of which the majority died from malnutrition or mistreatment. In addition, 3,063 non-US, non-Korean UN forces were also killed.

Korean orphans captured the American imagination from the moment the Korean War erupted. Photographs and articles in mass-market magazines like Life, Collier's, and Look roused sympathy and loosed a flood of donations from Americans. In particular, Life—the most widely read general magazine of the 1945–1960 period—was deeply influential in structuring Americans' understanding of the world around them, including the war in Korea. In magazines and newspapers, on newsreels and radio programs, Americans saw, heard, and read descriptions of a ruined Korea. The media painted a vivid portrait of a land of suffering and poverty. Smoke rose from deserted villages, ancient city gates towered over smashed buildings, and lines of laden refugees wove their way through driving snow. Feature stories offered a montage of heartbreaking sketches: widows, lepers, a family sleeping on a single straw mat, bodies sprawled on the side of a road, an open-air school tucked away in the hills, a farmer whose entire family and only ox had died digging his fields by hand. Juxtaposed to the devastation were the faces of orphaned Korean children. Crying babies sat next to the bodies of their dead mothers. Gangs of children roamed the streets, foraging for food and sleeping in the rubble. Little girls with their baby brothers or sisters tied to their backs walked from Seoul to Pusan and back again. In almost every human-interest story about the Korean War, these "waifs," "urchins," and "moppets" figured prominently. Korea was, one mission group intoned, "a land of orphans."

Nobody knows for sure how many children were orphaned during the war, but one hundred thousand was the figure most frequently cited. This orphan population comprised two groups: children of full-Korean parentage and mixed-race GI babies. "Full-Korean" children were children of Korean parentage who had become lost, abandoned, or orphaned during the war and its aftermath. Many found their way to institutions, whereas others became street urchins, running in gangs and finding food through pick-pocketing, begging, shining shoes, or pimping. Still others lived on American military bases as houseboys and mascots, a phenomenon addressed later in this chapter. Far more troubling to the war-strained social fabric of the country were the mixed-race GI babies, an unwelcome novelty in a country that prided itself on its racial purity. Although Americans did not father all of these children, Koreans and Americans alike persisted in calling them GI babies, which reflected both the dominance of Americans in the Korean imagination and the fact that Americans were the majority of the foreign troop presence in Korea. These GI babies constituted a tiny portion of the postwar orphan population—of an estimated 100,000 orphans, approximately 1,500 were of mixed race—but they suffered a disproportionate amount of hostility and abuse on the basis of their illegitimacy, racial mixture, and assumptions that their mothers were prostitutes.

GI Humanitarianism

Even before the war was over, observers reported an explosion in the number of homeless Korean and mixed-race orphans throughout the country. These children touched the hearts of American servicemen, who cared for them in a multitude of formal and informal ways. The US military funded child-rescue activities through official programs such as the Korean Civil Assistance Command (KCAC) and Armed Forces Assistance to Korea. Their work included establishing and supporting orphanages, and they coordinated with missionaries and voluntary agencies to distribute clothing, food, and medicine. It was no exaggeration to say, as one observer did, "There is hardly a military unit in Korea that has not adopted a hospital, orphanage or participated in some social welfare project."

The situation of homeless Korean children—malnourished, alone, wearing inadequate shoes and clothes—provoked a profound emotional response in American servicemen. A marine reported from Korea that "the most pathetic victims are children—the almond-eyed, pickaback babies; the toddlers with hunger-defined, radiatorlike ribs; and the swarms of grinning, half-starved 'shoeshine boys' always on the prowl for a job, a C-ration, or a stick of gum." A soldier wrote to his parents, "At night time you can walk down any alley and find kids [age seven] and younger sleeping in big pipes and in holes in the sides of hills. All they get to eat is what they can steal or bum." Long after they left Korea, veterans remembered the children. A US Navy Seabee recalled, "A lot of times you would see 20 or 30 abandoned children, all looking for something to eat and crying." American GIs demonstrated an inclination to "give the little dudes most anything they wanted."

Koreans of all ages foraged through the garbage dumps around military encampments, and homeless children clustered around US military bases and posts, knowing that they would be rich sources for handouts. "Children in Chunchon were living like animals under trains and in box cars," said a sergeant with the Fourth Fighter Interceptor Wing. "I'd shine my flashlight at the fence and regardless if it was hot or cold outside, there would be about 10 kids waiting there. I would take them candy bars, cheese, popcorn, whatever I had." The military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported, "It's seldom that hard-bitten, dirty-faced soldiers pass the kids on the road without digging through a pocket and coming up with a bite to eat." Korean children quickly learned the English they needed to wheedle gifts from American GIs, shouting "Hello!," "chewing gum," and "chocolate" as they passed.

It seemed as if every serviceman who encountered a homeless child felt moved to action. There are countless stories about how servicemen encountered starving children in terrible conditions and banded together with voluntary agency workers and missionaries to provide food and shelter. Colonel Russell L. Blaisdell, an air force chaplain, arrived in Seoul in August 1950 to find the streets "full of babies and children shivering from the cold." With the help of both Korean and American volunteers—health-care workers, military men, and civilians—Blaisdell began moving the children into shelters. "We'd go out at dawn and pick up these tiny bodies, limp as sacks of rice, and pile them in an old flat bed truck, 10 or 20 at a time.... [T]hey were sick and weak and seemed to have cried themselves out.... We brought them in, scrubbed them up, and dropped them off at the local orphanage. Then we'd go back out and do it again."

During the war, American forces participated in dramatic actions to evacuate children out of harm's way. Operation Kiddy Car, Operation Kid-Lift, and Operation Orphan Annie were just three of these undertakings. In Operation Kiddy Car, which was organized by US Air Force colonel and minister Dean Hess, the US Fifth Air Force airlifted thousands of Korean orphans to Cheju Island, out of the way of an impending invasion by North Korean forces. This dramatic accomplishment became memorialized as the 1957 Hollywood film Battle Cry, starring Rock Hudson and twenty-five Korean orphans who were specially flown to the United States for filming. In Operation Orphan Annie, the Air Force Cargo Command moved 964 orphans from Inch'on to Cheju Island in a mass airlift. The next year, they returned with gifts: "lollypops, rice bowls, and Christmas trees," as well as notebooks, toothbrushes, and sewing machines.

A Christian Children's Fund employee remembered fleeing to Pusan in June 1950, in the first days of the Korean War. There, he noticed "more than 2,000 homeless children" who were living on a mountain slope outside the city:

These tiny innocents had their own special benefactors—grimy, dog-tired American soldiers. Using their entrenching tools, the GIs had dug foxholes on the mountainside for these homeless Korean kids. At night the little ones would slide into foxholes—each big enough for just one child—and cover themselves with a piece of cardboard made from a U.S. Army C-Ration carton.

As long as I live, I shall never forget mornings on that Pusan mountainside when those of us caring for the children would call to them to wake up. As we passed each covered foxhole, up would pop the cardboard lid and then the dirty but smiling face of one of the Korean children to begin another day. Those little faces popping up from the child-sized foxholes made me think what it's going to be like on Resurrection Morning.

In the midst of the fighting, however, GIs could not always stop to help the children. A veteran remembered "seeing little kids laying in ditches, starving. We'd be on trucks moving through. Nobody stopping. Kids laying in ditches with mud all over them and dirt. Nothing but bones. It was tough ... tough."