As Roanoke, Virginia and Wonju, South Korea approach their 45th anniversary of their Sister City connection, I decided to learn how Wonju gained prominence and how America helped in the liberty of at least part of the Korean people. My library research helped me see the sacrifices made by military units of the United Nations:
“Wonju was the southernmost part of what would become a brutally contested piece of central corridor terrain roughly in the shape of a triangle, with the villages of Hoengsong and Chipyongni serving as its second and third points. Wonju was the most important of the three — both as a railhead and road center. One veteran of Chipyongni noted that if the Chinese controlled this triangle area, they would gain a formidable base from which to strike at Taegu, about a hundred miles south. It would then be like a knife poised at Pusan on the coast, he said.”
The above excerpt from The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam on the Korean War puts Wonju on the map. As an American military history enthusiast, I saw how the importance of this battle was perhaps a key to Wonju and Roanoke later becoming linked as “sisters” in June of 1964. The invitation to Roanoke came via letter from a Wonju surgeon, Dr. Young U Kim who had been a resident surgeon in Roanoke in 1957-58. At the time Dr. Kim described Wonju then as a city of 77,000 and an important rail and communications center near mountains and coal fields. It was destroyed during the Korean War.
Most U.S. Sister City alliances were with European cities. The only American-Korean ones then were Burbank with Inchon; and Eugene, Oregon with Chinju. A recent description from a local newspaper article of 6/20/08 states that, “today Wonju is an industrial center of 340,000 and manufactures lacquer ware, paper, and medical instruments. In Wonju city hall sits on Roanoke Street. The last four Roanoke mayors starting with Taylor have travelled there. Now, after decades of international kinship, Wonju is the oldest of the seven sisters in the Roanoke sorority.”
In deepening my war research on Korea, I learned that four months after the Inchon landing in September 1950, the U.N. forces drove the N. Korean communists far north to the Manchurian Border at the Yalu River. One of the coldest central Asian winters on record began at this time, and Stalin and Mao Tse Tung, in collaboration, chose their moment to spring a giant trap. Between 30 and 40 Red Chinese army combat divisions struck all across this wide front sending the U.S. 8th Army / U.N. into confused flight. The Chinese were battle-hardened from their long, victorious civil war, and they changed the war’s entire picture and outcome. By early November temperatures were below zero and by late that month many days hit 40 degrees below with little let up all winter. In a frenzied, disorderly retreat, The American 2nd Infantry Army Division came close to annihilation via its only egress route south, through a long, rugged mountain pass route known as “The Guantlet.” Hundreds of pieces of our disabled equipment continually blocked their retreat turning it into a chaotic rush south. To the east the 1st Marine Division barely escaped similar fate at the Chosin Reservoir.
In December ’50 with the arrival of Gen. Ridgeway as the new field commander of the U.N. forces, order and consolidation slowly began to take place with our forces, but not before the brutal communist Chinese invasion continued to consume Seoul and considerable landscape south of the 38th parallel. Gen. Ridgeway’s defining moment came in late January ’51 as he attempted to stabilize a position in the narrow portion of the peninsula. Probably no other part of the war was more crucial than Gen. Ridgeway’s Battle of Twin Tunnels followed by the battle for Wonju & Chipyoungi in Feb – Mar ’51. A narrow victory allowed for a two year stalemate to begin between U.N. forces and the Red Chinese.
Perhaps Gen. Macarthur’s Asian concerns still apply to today: He wrote that the Philippine leader Manuel Quezon once said to him in the darkest days of Bataan [Japanese capture of the Philippines]:
“I have no fear that ultimately we will not defeat nor feel any dread from the Japanese conquest. My greatest fear is the Chinese. With their increasing militarism and aggressive tendency, they are the great Asiatic menace. They have no real ideology, and when they reach the fructification of their military potential, I dread to think what might happen.”
Douglas Phillips of Roanoke is 62, Environmental Engineer. He served in the U.S. Marines ’71-’75, including an amphibious military maneuver exercise at Pohang, S. Korea, on the southeast coast, north of Pusan.
