Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10)

by James T. Patterson

This they used to full advantage, raising havoc with North Korean supply lines. UN air superiority remained vital throughout the war, enabling the dropping of 635,000 tons of bombs (and 32,557 tons of napalm)—more than the 503,000 tons dropped in the Pacific theater during all of World War II.21 The bombing followed a consciously devised "scorched earth" policy that wiped out thousands of villages and deliberately destroyed irrigation necessary for the all-important rice economy of the peninsula. Thousands of Koreans suffered from starvation and slow death; many survivors cowered in caves. The number of civilian deaths—estimated at around 2 million—approximated 10 percent of the prewar population of the peninsula. The ratio of civilian deaths to total deaths in the Korean conflict was considerably higher than in World War II or Vietnam.22