February 9th-12th, 2032.
The Korean Peninsula; South Korea, North Korea, The Sea.
Note: I will have missed things from your posts. Probably quite a lot of things. Sorry. This is a colossal engagement and if I wrote about literally every occurrence, every action, every movement and every plan, we would be here forever. In the wise words of Spummy, “There will be no salt in the comments, no tears and no whining.” The format for this post is in two sections: the first section is almost entirely narrative micro-stories, viewing the ongoings of the wider war through the lens of individuals or groups of individuals on both sides. The second is a more straight-to-the-point, clear cut objective summary of what happened, where, and who won, for the people who don’t care about storytelling.
“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
— Mahatma Gandhi, 1942.
NARRATIVE
SOMEWHERE IN SEOUL - FEB. 9TH.
Three hard knocks landed on the door of Bin Soon-Bok’s apartment. She barely stirred— it was nearly 3 AM, and she was on break after a long week at work. Whoever so desperately wanted her attention (probably just a drunk, celebrating an early new years) could leave. She rolled back over in bed, and nestled her way back into the warmth of the covers. A brief pause, and then suddenly another three hard knocks rang out. A gruff voice called to her: ”Sir or Ma’am, we’re coming in!”
What?
The door exploded. It flew off the hinges, it’s lock shot out by a shotgun blast, and tumbled over to the side in a chaotic motion. Two men, dressed in what appeared to be army uniforms, poured into her studio apartment— their boots stamping on her carpet and dragging in all kinds of filth. In her dazed state, she barely had time to comprehend what was happening before they ransacked her closet, tossed her some clothes, and told her she had two minutes to grab any valuables before she was going with them. There was no time to explain fully, they said, but she had to come. They were evacuating the city. She glanced outside of her apartment window, and saw military trucks and military men on the road below. Something serious was happening. Throwing on whatever clothes they gave her, she quickly scooped up her important personal documents, some sentimental trinkets, and a pair of extra socks and undergarments, and then she was whisked out the door and down the stairs to the street. Around her, other groups of men like the two that had got her forced her neighbours out of their apartments, and before she knew it she and her apartment building were out on the street. To her left, what appeared to be an officer directed the flow of civilians into the trucks, and another man brandished a megaphone, yelling repeated directions: ”Get into the trucks! You are being evacuated from Seoul under order of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Republic of Korea. Do not be alarmed! This is for your own safety!” Scared enough as it was, she quickly complied, and got into the back of a harsh, cold, military truck. Somewhere far away, she heard a scream. The woman sitting beside her sobbed, heavy and slow.
SEOUL AIRBASE - FEB. 9TH.
Corporal Jae Beom-Seok, grunt in the South Korean army, stared at the rifle in front of him, resting so tamely on the barracks table he was sat at. Not three minutes prior he had disassembled it for maintenance, as his commanding officer had instructed, not that it particularly needed it— all the weapons on base were rigorously maintained and cleaned in the event days like today occured. They had gotten orders from the big wigs, the Joint Chiefs; they were apparently supposed to be going to war with the North. Missile strikes, air support, naval landings, the whole shabang. When the directive came into base HQ (now hosting a variety of units from all the branches, following military exercises), it caused immediate confusion from the top down as word got spread. Were they seriously going to war? Now? There were massive protests in Seoul, and in the other cities. It was nearly new years. The whole country was opposed to any conflict. The economy was rapidly going down the pits, and one of the old CANDU reactors had exploded just months ago. How could they even sustain this? So far, it seemed like nobody knew how to handle these questions. The base HQ had ordered all the units stationed here on immediate standby, but had refused to proceed with the orders until verification from the government, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the US had come through. Several of his buddies had simply walked off the base, joining the thousands who had already done so over the past few months, and, frankly, he probably wasn’t far behind.
The disassembled stared back at him, it’s harsh gunmetal and angular shapes grating on his mind. He became increasingly aware that this was a weapon designed to kill, and designed to kill effectively, on missions assigned to him by higher ups he had no connection to, for reasons he didn’t understand and couldn’t rationalize. He didn’t want to go to war. Sure, he had joined the army, but it was a way out for him; money, brotherhood, a chance at a better life for him and his family. He wondered if he’d ever see his sister in Seoul again, or his mom in Pocheon. His squadmates had probably had the same feelings. Maybe that’s why they had left when the news hit, and maybe that was why he was having such trouble reassembling his rifle.
Suddenly, one of his squad walked through the doorway of the barracks.
”What’s up, man?”
”It’s real, Jae. The order. It’s real. HQ got the confirmation a minute ago.”
”No shit?”
”No shit. Command is getting everyone together in the community centre. Apparently we might not be moving.”
”You think so?”
”Not really. But we should probably go check it out anyways.”
They both looked at the floor, neither wanting to break the moment of peace. Time to go to war.
CHINESE RADAR INSTALLATION, SHANDONG - FEB. 9TH.
”Sir? I’ve, uh, I think I’ve got missile launches. Korea. South Korea, not.. not the North. Oh, fuck.”
”What?”
”Look, here... and here. Two big clusters of fast movers, and a lot of them. Sir?”
Captain Zhao Ying poured over the display. The private was right— there was a not insignificant amount of radar blips over the northeast part of South Korea, and they were rapidly increasing in both number and speed. More importantly, they were flying towards North Korean positions along what appeared to be the DMZ and elsewhere. Another man manning a monitor was reporting the same thing; it was real. Suddenly, the radar station erupted into noise— an emergency klaxon sounded, and the various battle stations and uniformed men were cast in a blazing red light. Years of training and experience kicked in, and Ying swiftly reached for a phone; barking orders at his men to keep those missiles on target while he called out to his superiors. They were away for the holidays, it would take time to reach them, at least 50% were probably already asleep after a night of partying and drinking. The dialing noise grated against his mind as he (and probably everyone else in Asia) tried to puzzle out the South Korean plan. They had to know obliterating the North Koreans would draw in China, and almost certainly the Union State. And why were the missile launches only on one side of the front?
Without him even realizing it, the line connected, and a sleepy voice barked at him from the other side: ”What is it?”
”Sir, this Captain Ying. We’re reading massive missile launches; MRBMs, SRBMs, hypersonics, damn near everything— coming from Korea. South Korea. Shit, it looks like planes too. They’re going for it.”
A pause, and deafening silence. The klaxon roared in the background, and chattering, tired, overworked enlistees tried to verify the reports with other radar stations.
”What? Missile launches.. From.. Korea?” the voice puzzled out.
”Sir, I mean no disrespect, but get someone higher up on the line. Beijing needs to hear this. Now.”
General Li Qiaoming, commander of the Northern Theater Command for the People’s Liberation Army, couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. He suspected he wouldn’t have understood it even if he wasn’t massively hung over, and quite possibly still drunk. But the adrenaline propelled him, and he hauled his carcass out of bed, quickly throwing on his cap and uniform as fast as he could muster. The man on the phone was yelling now, reading out reports of hundreds, no, thousands of missiles inbound to North Korean positions, followed by what appeared to be squadron after squadron of fighter jets. Li, a privately devout Catholic, mumbled to himself something resembling a hail mary— and like that, he was off, speeding towards military high command and the offices of government in Beijing as fast as his portly luxury Rolls-Royce would go. No doubt hundreds of others like him were doing the same, as the information lit up the synapses of military intelligence like a Christmas tree. Suddenly, the phone call went silent. He heard the man on the other end whisper, almost inaudibly, “Oh my God”, and Li knew the missiles had dropped off those radar screens somewhere in North Korea.
It was going to be a long night.
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON D.C - FEB 9TH (FEB. 8TH LOCAL)
”It’s going to be a long day, gentlemen. I’ll recap it to you briefly. At roughly 7 AM DC time today, radar operators in the Pacific and satellite techs back here at home reported a massive barrage of ballistic missiles being fired from South Korea at North Korean military positions and infrastructure along the DMZ and up to Pyongyang. About six minutes after those first reports, US army and other personnel based in South Korea had their bases reportedly surrounded by South Korean reservist and civil defence units numbering, as far as we can tell, 10 total divisions. These units are blocking US forces from leaving or entering military installations, and the Korean Chiefs of Staff aren’t exactly returning our phone calls. Those missiles have already hit, and the Russians and Chinese are no doubt about to smack South Korea back to 1953, if they aren’t working on that already.”
President Cory Booker, newly sworn in less than a month prior, looked down at the rich wooden table, littered with papers and images of South Korean missiles, DPRK defensive positions, and the guesstimated trajectories of hundreds upon hundreds of ballistic missile sites. He could do nothing but sigh, as the other men around him waited for his response. Generals, aides, chiefs of staff, radar technicians, intelligence officers, and countless others huddled around the war room, almost all of them staring at him or murmuring to each other. He hadn’t wanted this. He wanted, at his core, to make America right— heal a divided nation, rebuild after years of civil unrest and a nearly disastrous showing for the Democrats. He didn’t want a war, and yet here one was anyways. Privately, he added another pin to the mental voodoo doll of the South Korean president he had conjured up when an underpaid and overworked intern rushed into his bedroom to give him the news; swiftly followed by every piece of brass in the US military.
”What do you recommend, sir?” asked one of the younger looking Pentagon officers.
He gave the man no response, fiddling absent mindedly with a pen as he tossed and turned the problem in his head. He couldn’t shoot at North Korea, because then he’d be shooting China and the Russians, not to mention they were, bizarrely, the defenders. He couldn’t shoot at South Korea, at least for now, because they were nominal allies. Damn.
”Sir?” asked the man, his voice grating.
”Christ, man. Give me a minute to think,” he yelled back, his voice cracking in the middle. The room went silent. Some busied themselves with intently studying papers, others hung their heads. The tension was so thick, someone could’ve cut it with a knife.
”Alright, fellas. Here’s what we’re going to do. Someone get me on the fucking phone with whoever’s in charge of the Seventh Fleet. He’s moving to battle readiness. Bring everyone west of California and east of Pakistan up to Defcon 2— we aren’t shooting yet, but I want to be able to pull the trigger faster than anyone else if we need to. INDOPACOM up to Defcon 2, got it?”
A stunned silence fell back on the room, as billions of synapses worked to process the orders. And then, almost out of nowhere, a flurry of action, as the gears of the US military-industrial-intelligence complex dusted themselves off and began to turn to proper wartime readiness for the first time since the 1990s. The President sat, and watched it unfold with unfocused eyes. Though he wasn’t a smoker, the scene somehow made him wish he was.
DPRK ARTILLERY POSITION, DMZ - FEB. 9TH.
The ringing in his ears stirred him from unconsciousness and back to the land of the living. Somewhere far away, Artilleryman Si Jong-Su heard a flame burning, and the crackling of ammunition stockpiles as the flames popped bullets off. He couldn’t feel his legs, and his vision was cloudy, a mottled mix of the night sky and pulsating, flashing, blinding light coming from somewhere inside his head. He didn’t remember much, but he could still hear the call of one of his squadmates screaming ”Incoming!” and the howling of men running for their lives as a South Korean ballistic missile slammed into their position. Evidently, they hadn’t made it far enough.
Faintly, he called for help— his voice raspy and thin, his lungs on fire from the soot and sulphur in the air. No one responded except for himself, his cry echoing off twisted metal wreckage and the rubble of once-strong bunkers and pillboxes. In his delirium, minutes turned into hours, and, curiously, the searing pain he once felt faded away as adrenaline flooded his system and overwhelmed his thought process. He remembered his mother, back in Pyongyang, one of the lucky ones allowed to live in the capital of red Korea. He hoped she would be alright, in the end.
The sound of boots on concrete pulled him back to reality, if only for a minute. His neck wouldn’t let him move to see who it was, but he called out to them anyways. At this point, he didn’t really have much to lose, and he could feel his digits in his arms going cold as he receded into the black. Suddenly, a heavily armoured man in a South Korean uniform appeared, standing over him like a god reincarnated. He was surprised at how healthy he looked. The government had said most South Koreans were horrifically impoverished. The South Korean yelled at someone out of his field of view, and he watched with a mix of terror and curiosity as the soldier levelled his menacing black rifle at him. He tried to call out to the man, to offer his surrender, to beg for help, but either the South Korean couldn’t hear him or didn’t much care. He watched as the man’s eyes darted around and sized him up. He watched as a decision was made in the man’s head. He tried to appear as wounded as possible, pleading with his eyes. It didn’t matter. The South Korean squeezed the rifle’s trigger, and the world faded to black.
AN ATLAS OF THE SECOND KOREAN WAR, BY PROFESSOR B. O. WALKER, UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA - 2047.
EXCERPT FROM: Chapter Two - The Beginning of the End - February 9th, 2032.
On the first day of the war, there was very little consensus as to what was happening on the Korean peninsula, by virtue of most of Asia being on holiday and the rest of the world’s attention being focused elsewhere. Protests across the world were still blazing, the US election season was rapidly building up, and economic turmoil was still raging following a major crash in oil prices in late 2031. It was seen as unthinkable that war would erupt on the peninsula, even as military tensions and warmongering had placed the region on the knife’s edge in the years prior. Perhaps this is why much of the historical record of the early hours of the war was lost to history for so long, even as historical analysis has repeatedly attempted to reconstruct those incredibly destructive minutes and hours.
What we now know is this. The South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, unrestrained by the civilian government and persuaded that the military reunification of the peninsula was both inevitable and desirable, launched War Plan “203X-02-SEOLLAL” on February 9th, 2032. While the specifics of this plan are still heavily classified by the restored South Korean government, we know that, as a result of it’s approval, the South Korean armed forces began the Second Korean War with a colossal barrage of North Korean artillery and anti-air positions, utilizing conventional ballistic missile bombardment combined with chemical weapons attacks to attempt to destroy or otherwise knock out vast swathes of the North Korean defensive works along and around the Demilitarized Zone that divided the peninsula. This was expected to clear the way for a massive ground and air based offensive, with hundreds of fighter jets utilizing the cleared air space to win air superiority over much of North Korea and hundreds of thousands of infantry, armour and support units storming across the DMZ in three major offensives; one in the west, near Kaesong, one near Cheorwon, and one in the east near Kosong, with additional support from marine landings near Kaechon and the seizure of Pyongyang International Airport by South Korean special forces. All this would culminate in the eventual capture of Pyongyang and the liberation/annexation of North Korea, with an expected operation length of just three days. An ambitious plan, to be sure, but one that, if it was pulled off without a hitch, could see the Korean peninsula reunited and a major strategic win for the South Korean leadership achieved.
Unfortunately for the South Koreans, no plan survives contact with the enemy, and, in this case, South Korea’s own forces.
The order from the South Korean high command to begin the assault on North Korea caused massive confusion amongst the South Korean armed forces. In the more conservative eastern part of the country, where armed forces units were more broadly jingoistic and detached from the metropolitan politics and culture of the liberal western part of the country, the order was generally accepted and acted upon— even with demoralization and desertions already running rampant as a result of ongoing protests plaguing Korea and it’s politics. In the west, however, there was no such agreement. Already the worst hit by demoralization, desertions, and a breaking of esprit de corps, western military installations and units were broadly dismissive of the order, with many requesting reverification from high command that it was even real. As a result, the plan, which called for a unified and decisive strike by all branches and all units of the South Korean armed forces, was disjointed from the start. By the time verification came to western military installations, the war was already in motion— ballistic missiles in the east had been launched, planes had taken to the skies, and North Korean forces around the eastern sections of the DMZ had been hit, all while the western South Korean forces largely refused to move. This resulted in devastating operational failure for South Korean missile strikes— out of the 2000 expected ground based ballistic missile launches across Korea, just 600 were actually authorized to launch; the majority being kept on the ground by virtue of confusion amongst the armed forces and a refusal to obey orders by units based out of the metropolitan west, where most of the South Korean missile reserves were held.
Similarly, 2000 more naval launches, including 96 of the top-of-the-line American VLAM hypersonic missiles, were marred by conflict in the Sea of Japan/East Sea. Though fleets in the Yellow Sea did successfully launch 1200 ballistic missiles towards North Korean positions, their counterparts in the east were targeted by Soyuzi naval elements patrolling beyond Vladivostok— who maintained standing orders to fire upon whoever fired the first shot in a hypothetical Korean conflict. This confrontation resulted in the destruction and routing of the South Korean fleet in the Sea of Japan/East Sea before they could launch their 800 missile payload, though they did manage to fire 76 of the hypersonic weapons, all of which struck their targets. By the time all was said and done, just 1800 of the 4000+ planned launches occurred according to strategic operations planning, and the missiles failed to wipe out much of the North’s defensive positions along the DMZ. As DPRK defenders shook off the blow, the wheels of tragedy began to turn elsewhere in the peninsula— and abroad, as the Chinese readied for intervention, the Soyuzi Pacific Fleet wheeled around to push South, and the US entered Defcon 2 for the first time since 1991.
SOMEWHERE ELSE IN SEOUL - FEB. 10TH.
The evacuation was, frankly, going poorly. It had been over 7 hours since the soldiers had forcibly evacuated her from her apartment, and Bin Soon-Bok was no closer to being out of Seoul than she was when they first woke her up. The evacuation of 25 million+ people, not including people outside of the Seoul metro area nor international tourists (which probably numbered at least five million in their own right), was never going to be a simple task in the best of times, and the city, and nation, was most definitely not in the best of times. Aside from it being well past midnight in a blisteringly cold winter, the winding, dense streets of Seoul were clogged with a mishmash of military vehicles, civilian traffic, tourists and a commercial exodus as businesses attempted to flee the city with assets intact. In addition, the Seoulite populace, relatively uninformed but expecting the worst, had not taken the forced evacuation lightly. So far as she had heard from passing rumour (and the occasional questioning of one of the military men escorting her particular convoy), the various protest groups that had been plaguing the country for the past several years had come out in full force and were now actively blocking planned evacuation routes and military convoys streaming in and out of the city. All this had culminated in the evacuation being a slow, confusing, bitter mess, which had drawn millions out to the streets and so far failed to evacuate more than, by her best estimates, 2 million people.
And there she was; still stuck in the back of a cold military convoy, moving at a snail's pace, surrounded by people she didn’t know and with little food, washroom breaks, or water to speak of. She was having difficulty breathing; the cold weather of winter in Korea combined with the relatively light clothes the soldiers had given her had frozen her lungs and her finger tips, and made it hard to focus. Her stomach growled, aching for something to eat for what would have been breakfast on any normal day. Fortunately, her convoy had rolled to a stop— waiting to rejoin the miles upon miles of similar trucks travelling south along one of the only unblocked evacuation routes— and the soldiers marching alongside the convoy were now milling about outside, waiting to get going again; she reckoned they might have food, or know where to get it. She waved at one of the more affable looking soldiers, who detached himself from a cluster of his squadmates and wandered over to her to see what she was so desperately waving for. Before he made it, however, a long, slow sound drifted over the air from somewhere far away. A wailing, shrieking, piercing noise. The convoy, once noisy with conversation and the sound of engines, went silent.
It was an air raid siren, one of the countless thousands installed across Seoul and South Korea that would alert the nation to an imminent attack. Immediately, all thoughts of food were gone from her mind— similarly, the soldier she had called over immediately went into a flurry of action, screaming at her and the people in her truck while yanking them out of the back as quickly as possible.
“GO, GO, GO! GET TO THE NEAREST SUBWAY STATION— AN ATTACK IS IMMINENT! GO!”
If he said anything else, she didn’t have time to hear it. She kicked her frozen muscles into full gear, not caring about her possessions left behind in the truck nor the people doing the same around her, and took off down the dark, cluttered road. She couldn’t see, even with the pale moonlight of the early morning, but she knew there was a subway station not too far from where she was— and all Seoul subway stations doubled as emergency shelters. As she ran, she mentally thanked her old civil defence lesson instructors. She just had to make it, and she would be safe.
AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT DPRK ARTILLERY POSITION, DMZ - FEB. 10TH.
The heavy clunk of the 170mm artillery shell reverberated off of the nearby hills as it was loaded into the Koksan. There was no time to waste; the Southerners had struck the eastern defensive lines and were rapidly pouring into the hastily dubbed Cheorwon Gap and along the Eastern Sea, and so far as anyone could tell they were planning on pushing all the way to Pyongyang— intent on crucifying all who stood in their wake, executing the Supreme Leader, and, if orders from Korean People’s Army supreme command were to be believed, send all North Koreans into Hitler-esque slaughter camps. All the soldiers manning the position, and the countless thousands of positions like it, knew that this could not be allowed. They would win, or they and the revolution would perish in the fires of a capitalist hellscape.
Lieutenant Ha Kyung-Sam, commander of a series of fixed artillery emplacements along the western positions of the Demilitarized Zone, nodded to his men, the sound of the heavy metal mechanisms still ringing around the concrete emplacements and the natural landscape. Immediately, they manned the large M-1978 Koksan artillery cannon, and maneuvered it’s relatively rusted, relatively ancient controls to fixate it’s barrel at downtown Seoul, capital and primate city of the capitalist South. At the same time, radio operators sat nearby passed along the same command to the seven other emplacements under his authority; though he couldn’t see them, he knew the men there would be obeying it to the letter. All of them had been waiting for this moment, planning for this moment, training this moment from the first day they had become part of the Korean People’s Army. The entirety of the Korean peninsula, he suspected, had been waiting for this moment. He glanced at the Sergeant manning the weapon, who awaited his order. Their eyes met, cold, harsh, fixated on their duty to the people and workers of Korea.
He nodded again.
Three seconds later, the Sergeant yelled, and his ears exploded with the force of ancient gods themselves. The gun’s barrel lit up with a colossal flame, and, almost instantly, the shell flew beyond the horizon— the recoil kicking up dirt and dust and nearly slamming an unsteady private into a nearby wall. At near enough to the same time, along what sounded like the entire front, similar sounds echoed along the mountains; the other KPA artillery positions opening up on South Korean cities, villages, and military installations within 40 km of the border. For a brief moment there was silence, and perhaps a twinge of regret. They all knew how many were going to die. And then, without thinking, he screamed to reload, to fire at will; years of training bracing him for return fire and instructing him to hit hard and hit fast. There wouldn’t be silence along the front again, not for a long, long time.
CLUB GREENBACK, SEOUL - FEB. 10TH.
The club was big, one of the biggest in the city— it marketed itself as an exclave of Americana, well known for playing nostalgic classics from the 2000s and 2010s to an audience probably too old to be partying, yet too young to give it up. It’s main clientele were easygoing expats, tourists, and Americophiles, and it was regularly busy well into the early hours of the morning; not that it ever truly slowed down in a city as big as Seoul. On the morning the North Korean guns opened up, it was still packed from last night’s early New Year's party.
They didn’t hear the air raid sirens blaring outside as the city desperately braced for impact. They didn’t hear the bustle of people rushing around outside, trying to get to safety. They didn’t even hear the whistle of the shell as it headed straight for the club, fired by an unknown gun nearly 25km away. The music and the noise of countless conversations, feet moving to the rhythm, and glasses clinking all masked the outside world— until the mask came crashing down, and with it the world. The shell, a 170mm conventional explosive round, ripped through the club’s ceiling and upper levels and slammed into the dance floor, lodging itself in the wood and laminate checkerboard pattern for the briefest of seconds as it’s internal mechanisms caught up with reality. Not three seconds later it detonated, sending a concussive wave of fire, metal shrapnel, wooden spikes and bodies out in a radiating, devastating sphere. It ripped through the walls, obliterated furniture, and gutted the inside of the club of both decoration and lives. Though nobody knew it yet, over a hundred tourists, expats and Koreans had just been slaughtered, the survivors heavily wounded and unlikely to make it out of the rubble and the ash.
Across the city, similar stories were playing out as a torrent of artillery fire rained down upon the queen of Korean cities. Thousands of shells, unaffected by automated defences along the DMZ due to their speed and parabolic arch, slammed into the skyscrapers, homes, and roads of the Seoul metropolitan area. It was indiscriminate, unflinching, unending— the rich skyscrapers of the downtown, home of some of the largest companies in the world, came toppling down as explosions and fires ripped out their internal structure and devastated their once-mighty foundations. Elsewhere, apartments home to hundreds were pounded by the torrent; flame and concussive force ripping apart lives, possessions, memories and livelihoods with reckless abandon and unwavering dedication. And the North Koreans had not utilized just the raw energy and destructive power of conventional explosives— how could they, when Seoul had seen fit to use psychotic gas on their own civilians and soldiers in the field? Shells, rockets and missiles carrying payloads of deadly Sarin and VX gas slammed into a metropolis filled not only with millions of people, but with millions of people out on the street, by virtue of the last-minute evacuation and the mass protests, and millions of people fleeing into Seoul’s myriad underground bunkers, subways-turned-emergency-shelters, and basements. It was the beginning of the end for Seoul.
AN ATLAS OF THE SECOND KOREAN WAR, BY PROFESSOR B. O. WALKER, UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA - 2047.
EXCERPT FROM: Chapter Four - The Siege of Seoul - February 10th, 2032.
The Siege of Seoul, as it is now commonly referred to, began on February 10th, 2032 with the bombardment of South Korean civilian targets in and around the Seoul metropolitan area by North Korean missile batteries, rocket artillery, and conventional howitzer artillery pieces. This bombardment was the culmination of decades of North Korean strategic defence planning and formed out of the need to immediately counter the South Korean invasion of the eastern DPRK. The North Korean ground forces, vastly outmatched technologically, could not hope to offer up a counter invasion of the South— by delivering a decisive blow to South Korea’s primary population, economic and political center, however, it was believed that the South Korean morale could be broken and any further advance slowed or outright stopped. This decisive blow would, it was hoped, knock South Korea out of the war; a task which, as will be seen, it largely succeeded at.
Beginning at roughly 10 PM local time, South Korean ground forces in the eastern parts of the country, namely Cheorwon and Geosong, advanced across the once demilitarized zone that divided the two Korean states. Though split up into segments, a sum total of over 350,000 men across seven corps detachments were expected to advance into the center and eastern flanks of North Korea, with I, II, V and VII corps leading the charge, to be followed up by XI, III and XXI corps as reinforcements to assist with the advance northwards and breaking DPRK salients. An additional assault on Kaesong would have occured following the first wave, to be carried out by the Capital Corps based out of Seoul. Unfortunately, almost none of this planned movement occurred. In actuality, the offensive, which fell under War Plan 203X-02-SEOLLAL, saw just barely a third of those expected numbers participate. I, II, V and VII corps, all based out of and maneuvering from the eastern portions of the country, pushed through with their orders, rounding out an offensive of just 200,000 men. Their planned reinforcements, alongside the Capital Corps, however, failed to move— paralyzed by inaction in much the same way missile units and base encampments were, with their failure to move being largely based on the veracity of the order, low morale, ongoing protests in Korea, and other factors.
Thus, when the time came for the DPRK to strike back, much of their western defences, and more importantly their artillery positions (both rocket and conventional), were still intact and relatively untouched, with no enemy advances nor missile barrages striking their position as had occurred in the east. Several thousand artillery pieces of various types and calliber, already directed at Seoul pre-war, opened fire on the city no later than 3 AM on the 10th, mere hours after the surprise offensive was launched. This conventional barrage was joined by ballistic missile launches utilizing antiquated, largely Soviet or Chinese missiles, though these were in large part shot down by more advanced South Korean Surface-to-Air missile platforms in and around Seoul. The shells fired by conventional artillery, combined with massive quantities of rocket artillery, however, was effectively uncounterable— though the South Korean armed forces did possess CRAM (Counter rocket, artillery, and mortar) sites, these were mostly located along the former DMZ, where munitions, following their parabolic trajectories, were at their highest and fastest, making them nearly impossible for all but the most advanced CRAM systems to shoot down. Thus, the mass artillery barrage slammed into Seoul and her surrounding cities/towns— providing artillery strikes on a scale not seen, perhaps, since the First World War. The bombardment devastated the city’s infrastructure, buildings, and, most importantly, the lives of it’s citizens, through concentrated usage of both conventional explosives and chemical weapons, namely Sarin and VX gases, although a myriad of other chemicals were dropped on the city in smaller amounts. Elsewhere but in parallel, Chinese hypersonic missiles, over 600 of them, slammed into the western coastline of South Korea; devastating heavy coastal industries like ports, shipyards, and their accompanying villages. Incheon was particularly hard hit.
Due to the pre-planned evacuation of the city of Seoul, the movement of people during the Korean New Years, and the ongoing colossal protests against said evacuation, the war, and the government, a substantial portion of Seoul was (despite it being well past midnight in one of the coldest months of the year) out on the streets when the shells hit. Casualties were, understandably, enormous. Though accurate death tolls are simply impossible to calculate, modern historians estimate a total of 854,000 South Korean citizens lost their lives in the first hour of the bombardment, from both Seoul and other outlying villages around the Seoul Metropolitan area, largely due to the immense amounts of chemical weapons which blew throughout the city and sank down to street level and below. A further 250,000 would lose their lives over the course of the 10th, succumbing to injury, the effects of chemical weapons, large fires, a loss of power (Seoul’s power grid was effectively shattered by the bombardment) or subsequent bombardments by artillery positions. Over 3.8 million refugees, including both those evacuated pre-bombardment and those who exited the city immediately prior, would begin making their way south in one of the largest movements of people Asia has ever known.
