[Explosions]
-South Korean villages awoke to a world
suddenly filled with noise and flame.
The Communists had finally launched their undeclared,
all-out war of conquest.
In the summer of 1950,
the U.S. watched with alarm
as North Korean Communists invaded South Korea.
-Thousands of civilian refugees
clogged the roads, fleeing from the invading Reds!
The move seemed to confirm
what President Harry Truman had long feared:
Communism, already dominant in the Soviet Union
and China, might one day encircle the globe.
-We are united in detesting Communist slavery.
We know that the cost of freedom is high,
but we are determined to preserve our freedom,
no matter what the cost.
But Truman faced a problem
when he decided to rush U.S. troops
to stop the Communist advance in Korea:
according to the Constitution,
Congress was the only branch of government
with the power to declare war.
-The president isn't the king
who gets to decide to use force
without anyone having a check on his power
because the power to go to war is so destructive.
Having Congress debate whether
to declare war would take precious time though,
and there was no guarantee what they'd decide.
So Truman used a loophole
offered by the newly-formed United Nations.
-It just so happened that the United Nations was able
to authorize member states to go to the aid of South Korea.
The United States was going
under the authorization of the U.N.
to act essentially as a policeman.
Truman decided to take the gamble,
skipping over Congress and Constitutional principle.
-And he was pressed, you know, was this a war?
And Truman said no, it's a police action.
He wanted to not use the “war” word
because he hadn't asked
for a declaration of war from Congress.
But for U.S. troops landing in Korea,
who made up the vast majority of the U.N. force,
Truman's clever wording didn't change anything.
[Explosions]
[Gunshots]
-Somebody's shooting at you, you gotta shoot back.
It's war,
it's not a police action.
And as the already war-weary troops
pressed north, conditions became even more treacherous.
-Frozen, mountainous countryside
north of Seoul.
-This far north, winter comes early to Korea.
Marines are advancing over ground frozen harder every day.
Harry Heath and Jack Allen,
who had advanced near the border with China,
remember the unthinkable cold.
-It was 40 degrees below zero there.
And when you got pinned down,
your feet wouldn't be moving and they would freeze in there.
-We walk in this hospital.
There were bodies, people laying down.
Their hands were frozen.
You could take some people and snap their fingers off,
they were frozen so badly.
Some of these guys had lost arms and fingers and toes.
And despite the fact that Congress
hadn't declared it a war,
Truman worried that the fighting in Korea could explode
into a full-fledged World War III
when the Chinese invaded.
-Must have been around 9 or 10 o'clock at night.
We could hear whistles and bells and drums
and hollering and it was the Chinese.
And they came up and overran us.
-200,000 Red Chinese
swarmed across the Yalu River
and engaged the weary U.N. troops.
-All of a sudden, this small war
between two small countries on the Korean Peninsula,
South Korea and North Korea,
had become a big war involving the world's greatest power,
the United States, and Communist China,
which had the world's largest military.
Truman, at that point, realized that he had gone
farther than he wanted to go.
-The heavily outnumbered U.S. fighting men
were trapped in what looked like a hopeless situation.
-There was 15,000
Marines and Army and we were surrounded.
But our motto was,
we can't win, we can't lose, but we're not gonna give up.
-In the mountainous terrain of North Korea,
the breakout from their encircled position
was a battle unparalleled in American military history.
-These Chinese, there were about four of five machine guns
that would just cut them down.
You could look down that mountain and you could see
it looked like cord wood of bodies.
This guy threw a concussion grenade,
and it blew up.
It hit me in my knee and I couldn't walk.
The company commander said,
get all the guys that are wounded
and get them out of here.
That's the closest I ever came to not surviving.
After being pushed back by the Chinese
at the end of 1950,
U.N. and South Korean troops kept fighting
until a truce in 1953 ended three years of hostilities.
In the end, neither side gained significant territory.
Three to four million people had died,
including nearly 40,000 Americans
and an estimated two million civilians.
But troops coming home
discovered that their experience in Korea,
dubbed a mere "police action" by Truman,
hadn't truly captured the public's interest.
-One of my friends said, Harry, where you been,
I haven't seen you in a long time?
I said, I've been in Korea.
He said, well, where's Korea?
I feel that
the Korean War was an important war
because it stopped the spread of Communism.
And to forget it I think is wrong.
And in the decades since,
Truman's decision to send troops to Korea
without approval from Congress has had a lasting impact.
Presidents of both parties
have followed Truman's example,
from George H.W. Bush sending troops
into a civil war in Somalia,
to Barack Obama ordering airstrikes in Libya.
-Presidents after Truman realized
it's very convenient not to have to bring Congress aboard
because they asked difficult questions.
This is something that's lost,
when democracies go to war,
citizens need to be informed.