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Cutesy Stratofortress Mascots

Great men behind great men inside turtles

B R

B R

— 5 min read

4 May, 2023 | Seoul, South Korea

I’ve referenced the War Memorial of Korea before a couple of times, but little can prepare you for the sheer scale of the thing. This might be the biggest museum I have ever been in, apart from perhaps the totality of the Smithsonian.

While panoramas introduce a considerable distortion, it’s difficult to otherwise understand the size here. Note the entire ass PT boat on the right.
The iron rule of east Asia appears to be “you must have a cutesy mascot/set of mascots for everything. Yes even the strategic atomic bomber.”
Crawl around inside these vintage, extremely uncomfortable armored personnel carriers and be thankful you (probably) were never in the mechanized infantry.

As mentioned previously, about half the memorial exhibits are about the Korean War (1950-1953) and the other half encompasses every other war fought in Korea. Which means we literally start with human evolution.

Lucy (on the left) has never looked so good/goofy. The Sahelanthropus on the right, playing the virgin in this virgin/chad combo, represents a hominid species that lived 7 million years ago. Pretty wild, considering we don’t have any evidence of early hominids on the Korean peninsula until maybe 300,000 BCE. But archeology is turning up new cool stuff all the time.

There is little hope of my including everything I saw here. I’ll run through some highlights

There are some fascinating differences in defensive construction between east and west. The outer crescent curtain wall protecting the gatehouse is distinct and I’d be curious how effective it was. The walls are low and squat atop raised angled earthworks - at this point, early cannon fire had become the principal tool of attackers.

Beyond a series of warring states periods (Three Kingdoms, North-South States period), Korea has been a target of invasions from various Chinese dynasties, the Mongol hordes, Russia, briefly by France, and of course repeatedly by Japan. Mountain fortresses like the one modeled above dot the entire peninsula. There is even a large, half-scale model you can walk around on of one of these things:

But one of the more major wars Korea fought was decided on the ocean:

There’s a type of guy in world history that I can best describe as “the great man behind the great man”1; loyal dude who wins some or all of the most important fights but stays loyal to their leader, even if their guy doesn’t necessarily trust them and often ultimately fucks them over. Some of the biggest names in world history would probably be footnotes without this kind of guy - Caesar Augustus had Marcus Agrippa, Simón Bolívar had Antonio Sucre, and Admiral Yi Sun-sin is one of those.

Yi is a hero in Korea. He developed the turtle ship around 1590 - one of the first armored naval vessels in the world and inspiration for much later ironclads in the 1850s. He used these, and a keen strategic mind, to blunt repeated Japanese invasions during the 1590s after the unification of that country by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (mentioned previously here).

The reason you probably don’t know about Yi Sun-sin is for the same reason you probably don’t know the name Belisarius2, one of the greatest generals in Roman history - he was attached to an idiot, paranoid ruler that feared the acclaim their military subordinate was receiving and hobbled them in various ways.

You get this impression from movies the Japanese armies in the samurai era principally fought with katana, but after a generation of civil wars their army had been honed into probably the most powerful in the world at the time - they had a considerable number of advanced matchlock firearms and trained in multi-line volley fire.

Once finally getting to the section on the Korean War, I was mostly startled by the exceedingly high production value put into the exhibits. Video and diorama with mannequins blended together almost seamlessly:

This post is already long enough without doing some play-by-play of the Korean War, but I’ll note a couple of things:

  1. As mentioned above, Korea had been divided in north-south lines before (for like 200 years) and I get the impression everyone still considers the current situation temporary.

  2. China’s contributions to stabilizing the north and forcing a stalemate was depicted in a recent Chinese film which, though you probably haven’t heard of it,

    was the highest grossing film of 2021.3

  3. Economic sanctions are about as effective a means of producing a political outcome to a conflict as indiscriminate strategic bombing and has some of the same morons defending it.

  4. To my surprise, I only encountered one really obvious lie while walking though the exhibits:

I cannot stress enough how little Syngman Rhee gave a shit about democratic principles the moment he was installed in power in 1948. Between political assassinations, the massacres of political dissidents, and rigged elections, there is little evidence Rhee was anything but a brutal dictator. Which is why he was thrown out of the office in a revolution.

  1. I don’t ascribe to the “great man” theory of history but I am warming up to the “dipshit in the wrong place” theory - shoutout Andrew Johnson, potentially America’s worst president. ↩

  2. Okay yeah, you’ve probably never heard of this guy. Everyone has a pet theory why the Roman Empire collapsed, but fewer people ask why no one put it back together again. I think it’s a more important question; China collapsed plenty of times but someone always managed to eventually cobble it back together. Anyway, a decent argument could be made that the Roman Empire stayed broken because Justinian I didn’t trust Belisarius enough to give him sufficient resources to reunite it. ↩

  3. Given the extensive state funding, it’s hard to argue this movie isn’t a form of propaganda. But if we want to be fair here, the nature and in-kind support given to stuff like Top Gun by the US military probably qualifies it under that definition as well. ↩

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