Operation Paul Bunyan

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Welcome to Stuff You Should Know A production of iHeartRadio

0:15Hey and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us And that's okay because we can support one another and ourselves We're grown men and we feel good about things Especially us Well not especially but equally with us and this is stuff we should know. I mean, you told me, you sent me a text very early that said, put on your big boy pants today. Yeah, because Jerry's not showing up. Yeah, so I got him out, my breeches. Yeah? Are they green jeans? Oh, I've got on green cords. No. I do. Wee-doo, wee-doo, wee-doo. These are kind of my favorites, actually, these forest green cords.

0:56Great for this time of year. I don't remember those. I remember some, like, brownish taupey, kind of shiny taupe ones. Am I making that up? No, I have cords of many colors, much like Joseph. Are they the thick whales or the thin whales? The thins. I don't get into the thick stuff anymore. That was 90s Chuck probably. Yeah, but I'll bet they're going to make a comeback. I betcha. Okay, I think we should start talking about this because we probably have some non-regular listeners who have military backgrounds who are like, what the hell is this? We want to hear about Operation Paul Bunyan, which is the point of all this.

1:35And I'm guessing just from the title, there's probably a lot of people in the military who know what we're talking about already. It seems to be a fairly widespread, widely known incident that took place in 1976. We're just going to call it an incident at the DMV, DMZ. that was totally unintentional an incident at the DMZ that's where we're going to start out calling it we'll eventually maybe refine that over time but we should probably talk about what the DMZ is in the first place right yeah and by the way I'm looking real quick because I could have sworn this probably came from someone but I usually make a note and I'm not seeing that but I am seeing that pop tarts came from Nelson Reynolds so sorry for that Nelson sorry Nelson Ha ha.

2:49side, just the Republic of Korea. And if you've ever heard of the 38th parallel, that's the famous dividing line between these two. Yeah, North Korea and South Korea got divided after World War II because there was a power vacuum and the communists were fighting in the north and they were fighting the U.S.-friendly South Koreans. And the North Koreans were like, this can't stand. We want the whole peninsula. And they invaded. And the Korean War broke out, like you said, and it lasted for three years. I always thought it was Americans who were fighting in Korea, but it turns out there were plenty of American troops, mostly American troops, but they were part of a UN command that was actually fighting the North along with the South Koreans.

3:31Yeah, I think it was like 90 % American forces. And you said it lasted three years. I think the Korean War is one of those that technically never ended. True. Officially, because, I mean, that's kind of one of those nitpicky trivia questions. That's a good one. that, you know, there was never an official treaty ending the war. They came to a truce or an armistice because of a stalemate, basically, after three years. But I think, you know, on the books, the Korean War never technically ended. Yeah, that's my understanding, too. Well, good point. So one of the big things about this armistice agreement was that it was like, OK, you guys, we need some separation here.

4:09And they literally separated North Korea from South Korea. Like you said, the dividing line runs roughly along the 38th parallel. But on either side of that border of North and South Korea, there's a buffer zone, the demilitarized zone, the DMZ I was referring to before. I think it's 2.4 miles wide total, 1.2 miles on either side. And that is like effectively the de facto border between North and South. No one's supposed to come into that no man's zone, no man's land, the DMZ. but inside the DMZ there's a little tiny village called Panmoojom and I know of that from Billy Joel yeah I knew he was going to come up that was it and then some of the other Korean town names that came up like Kaesong and all this I'm like how do I know all these how do they sound familiar and then I realized watching MASH with my dad oh yeah and it's this little tiny militarized spot inside the demilitarized zone And it's where North Korea and South Korea actually come together, physically can come together in this what's called the JSA, the Joint Security Area.

5:20Yeah. So if they over the years have to meet to negotiate anything, that's where they meet. That's where the governments go. There's a very famous bridge there separating the two, the bridge of no return. It's very dramatic if you look at pictures of it. It's literally like, you know, on one side is one thing, on the other side is the other. And that's where they do prisoner exchanges and stuff like that. And these days, you know, it's, well, largely because of this incident, I think, it's not the same as it was back then. It's very separate. Back then, the Joint Security Area was, you know, it was jointly patrolled.

5:56Like, you know, North Koreans and South Korean soldiers and American soldiers were patrolling the area at the same time. There was face-to-face contact. They would try to intimidate one another. They would curse at one another, maybe spit at one another. The Americans would play hopscotch on the bridge. The North Koreans would drive a truck really fast toward them and slam on the brakes. They would sneak up and bang on their checkpoint barracks at night and stuff like that. It was crazy to think that these kind of shenanigans were going on without any further, you know, sort of war breaking out.

6:34They all kind of seemingly took it in stride. Well, that's what their orders were. The U.N. command troops and the Americans in particular had specific orders to, like, if you had to defend yourself physically because you were getting beat up, okay. But you did not shoot. You had to be shot at to draw your sidearm. And that was the most powerful weapon that anyone patrolling the joint security area had. They were often outfitted with axe handles, maybe batons, and that was about it. So the Americans had strict orders not to take the bait, and North Korean troops had essentially strict orders to provoke the Americans into attacking so that they could start a war again, and it would be the Americans' fault.

7:19Exactly. And this came largely from the guy in charge. I mean, you know, it came from on high, I'm sure, but it was filtered down through Captain Arthur Boniface. He was a Vietnam vet. He was the JSA company commander. He was 33 years old. He was a big dude. He was 6 '3", apparently super popular, like a five-year figure as far as his command went. And the camp there at JSA is named Camp Boniface after him. So you may see where this is headed. but he believed in standing your ground but not taking the bait like you said. He wanted big guys down there. He wanted to kind of intimidate but the orders were always to back off if it came to blows and sometimes it would.

8:07You could get beat up or something and it would not escalate further which is just crazy to think about. It is. It's hard to imagine. You said that Boniface was into intimidating without, you know, doing it, like just being physically intimidating. Yeah. If you were assigned to patrol JSA, this was a really, really high stakes area. Still is today. Bill Clinton toured it in the 90s and went as far as out under the bridge of no return. And he said later that that Pamu Jam is the scariest place on earth. That's a president saying that he's probably been to some scary places and at least knows about them.

8:50So that really says quite a bit. So if you're assigned to this area, it's a big deal. And so you had to be over six feet tall, but you also had to be laid back by nature and rather cool-headed, like even when provoked. Like they really tested the people who were assigned there. Yeah, they'd walk up and they'd slap you and see what you did. They would apparently, while they were interviewing you, that you'd have no idea. they just start shouting at you out of nowhere to see how you responded. Were they really? Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a great chance to shout out. There's an Atavist article called Axes of Evil written by Josh Dean, and it's a really great detailed look at this whole thing that we're talking about today.

9:33That would be A-X-E-S in this case, right? Yep. Very clever. Hmm. Bit of a, what do you call it? We're recording early, so I can't think of the word. A foreshadowing? Yeah, maybe that's it. A play on words, a pun? No, foreshadowing is probably it. Okay. I think people are probably concerned because I couldn't think of foreshadowing. I couldn't think of chemistry the other day, and it drove me crazy. Oh, man. Yeah. Aging is real. Yeah. And a privilege, as they say. So before this incident that we're about to talk about, there was one example we should mention. when North Korean troops were kind of muscing the hair of a soldier named William Henderson, and he did not take it well.

10:18I guess he was into his hair or something. He got mad, took a swing, and got, I guess, a throat chop or something, and got a busted larynx such that Boniface wrote his wife and said, our mission here is to take the verbal abuse, the kicking, the shoving, but to not let it go any further. Major Henderson lost his cool and blew it. It's a natural reaction, but he should have known better. Yeah, and it was a big deal. So I also saw that Henderson was provoked by a journalist who spat at him. When Henderson stood up, the journalist hit him, and then finally Henderson hit him back, and all of a sudden a bunch of North Korean troops jumped on him.

10:53But the fact that he took the bait was a big deal because he was a major. That means you're a big deal at a camp already. Like, you're fairly high up. So him fighting back was, yeah, that was a big deal. So maybe an early-ish break here. It seems like a good dividing line. I think we should. We'll take a break and we'll come back and talk about the tree that started the whole thing. All right.

11:37All right. Josh didn't pick up on my bad pun of the dividing line. What was it? I said it's a dividing line, like, you know, the 38th parallel. It just is so natural that I totally missed it. It's also early for me, too. I couldn't tell, by the way, that short stuff that you sent that we're going to record later had a bunch of puns in it, and I didn't know if that was intentional or not. I can think of one, and it was intentional. There were a couple. Okay. You got to point them out. Yeah. Boy, what a little tease of a whole different episode. You're such a tease. So, all right. Now we get to the Paul Bunyan, what instigated the Paul Bunyan incident or operation.

12:18Right. Which was this tree that you mentioned. There was a tree. It was a poplar tree near the Bridge of No Return. And the thing you need to know about this tree, well, there's a few things. But one is that it blocked the view of the line of sight between these two UN command checkpoints. And that was a big deal because you needed an open line of sight between these checkpoints because, you know, there were incidents of like kidnapping and stuff like that and other shenanigans. And you just you had to have that line of sight open. Yeah. So they said the UNC was like, we got to get rid of this tree.

12:52So they sent a couple of unarmed South Korean workers down there to just sort of figure out the best way to remove it. And the first sort of reaction was the North Korean guards chased them away. So that was sort of the line in the sand was get out of here, get away from that tree. Yeah. Apparently they tried again a couple of days later and got rained out. And then finally, on August 18th, they were like, OK, we're just going to go ahead and do this. those first guys got chased off. So we're going to essentially assign a few men to escort them. I think a 15-man team went over on August 18th, led by Captain Boniface.

13:30And they started pruning the tree. Yeah, just to prune at this point. Yeah, they're just pruning it back. They just want to make sure that even during summer, they can see checkpoint three, the loneliest outpost in the world. Because like you said, it's very dangerous to man that. So they're just pruning it, right? And very quickly, the North Koreans came over the bridge of no return. Because remember, mind-bogglingly, the joint security area was open. Like the border didn't exist in the joint security area. So North Koreans and UN command could just go wherever they want. So the North Koreans show up at this site, at the poplar tree, while it's being pruned.

14:08And they're led by Lieutenant Pak Chul. He was known as Lieutenant Bulldog by the UN command troops because he was very confrontational. had provoked confrontation in the past plenty of times. And so he showed up, so you just immediately knew that this could go south pretty quickly. Yeah, and apparently he said, you know, they wanted to keep that tree pristine because Kim Il-sung personally planted it and nourished it, and it's growing under his supervision. So apparently, or at least they said it was a special tree, and to stand down. Yes, because Kim Il-sung was the, he was the first deer leader.

14:48Kim Jong-un is his grandson. Yeah. Yeah. And so the idea that Dear Leader planted that tree, I don't know if that's true. I never saw that. I just saw it like stated here or there. But at the very least, Park Chul said that, right? Yeah. I'm not sure if I buy that given what we now have sort of suspected about this being a provocation, which we'll get to. But that sounds to me like, hey, let's tell them that, you know, it's a special tree. Yeah, like Pak Chul seemed like the kind who would just load you up on BS just to mess with you. Yeah, so he called for even more reinforcements. I think about 30 more North Korean guards showed up.

15:31He ordered Captain Boniface to stop, but he turned his back on him, which I think was a pretty big insult on top of everything else. And as the story goes, one of the American soldiers saw Pak take off his wristwatch and put it in his pocket, which is, I guess, akin to, like, Fonzie taking off his leather jacket. Like, it's about to happen. Right. And tried to warn Boniface, but it was too late by that point, and Pac ordered the attack, basically, by saying, like, I think he said, kill the bastards, right? Yeah, I saw a 1977 Army War College report on the incident, and that's what they said, so I'm prone to believe them.

16:10Yeah. But he said it in Korean, obviously. Right. But right after that, the men attacked, And actually, I saw Lieutenant Pak Chul assaulted Captain Boniface, who had, again, his back to Pak Chul. He hit him with the karate chop in the back of his neck and dropped Captain Boniface. And very, very sadly, Captain Boniface never got to his feet again. Like immediately, he was set upon by, I saw five to six North Korean troops just started being beaten by them. And I guess the people who were cutting the tree had a couple of axes. these civilians, and they dropped their axes and ran. And the North Korean troops picked up the axes.

16:50And here is where the reason that this is called the DMZ axe incident begins. That's right. So Boniface was bludgeoned to death by these guys attacking him. And you can watch this. Like, it was caught on film. It's very chaotic. You can't really get, I mean, it's kind of from far away, so you can't get a lot of detail. Right. But, you know, there are still shots and film of this stuff going on. So he was bludgeoned. First Lieutenant Mark Barrett was also beaten to death. He was chased down over a retaining wall. And, you know, sort of the, I mean, it's sad enough as it is, but Boniface was due to go home to his wife and three kids in three days.

17:30So it was made it, you know, sort of especially brutal. Yeah, and not like for a visit. Like this was his last three days in Korea where he was murdered by an axe by North Korean troops. It's almost like a parody. Like, it's almost too crazy to believe that that's how close he was to leaving Korea. He was also going to be promoted to major, too. Like, he was, his life was, like, looking up when he was murdered. Yeah, really sad. So, this was a really, really big deal, as you can imagine. This was the first time that any UN command troops and any Americans had been killed in Korea since the end of the Korean War.

18:11It was a huge provocation. And there was a big question now on the table. What is the United States military going to do now that two of its officers were murdered by acts by North Korean troops totally unprovoked? This was 100 percent the North Koreans doing this, so much their fault that, like you said, it almost seems like it was possibly set up. We'll talk about that a little bit later. And so there was a big question that needed to be answered and answered really fast. And that was, how are we going to respond to this? Yeah. So on the U.S. side at the time, we had Henry Kissinger as the secretary of state under President Gerald Ford.

18:56Like we mentioned, it was 76. So it was the election year between Ford and Jimmy Carter. And Ford learned about the incident when he was at the Republican National Convention. and obviously as Secretary of State, Kissinger was kind of in charge of figuring out what to do, calls together the Washington Special Action Group, which was a task force that was formed in 69 out of Vietnam to deal with like sort of any emergencies like this that came up. And it's Henry Kissinger, so he's like, we should bomb the barracks. Like he wants to flatten the barracks of the guards that attack them and react really strongly and send a big message that this will not stand.

19:37Yeah. I mean, I can kind of understand that impulse. He was apparently the only one in the special action group that wanted to respond with a violent action. And the reason why was because this is such a flashpoint. Still today, but at this time, I mean, it was like we were still in the middle of the Cold War. So to us, not only was this North Korea, this is also China and the USSR right behind them, right? Oh, yeah. So if you sent a missile into the JSA against the North Koreans, there was a better than even chance probably that you might spark a nuclear war, World War III. And luckily, cooler heads prevailed.

20:19But Kissinger had a, I think he was probably a little paranoid, I would guess. He was, he's very widely reviled, including by me. So I'm pretty sure he was at least a little paranoid. You know, I mean, he started out in the Nixon administration, for goodness sake. But he was also, his position was also that this was a provocation by the North to test America's resolve because it was an election year. They were trying to interfere with the election to make the point of Gerald Ford's opponent, Jimmy Carter, who was saying, we need to get troops out of Korea. We don't have any business being there anymore.

20:55So Kissinger thought this was North Korea doing this to basically show that the Americans didn't belong here anymore and just to get out wasn't worth it, basically. Yeah, and I get the idea. I mean, I was but five at the time. Not super into politics yet. But I get the idea that getting American troops out of Korea was probably a pretty popular idea that Carter was laying out. Yeah, especially after Vietnam. Yeah, well, and Kissinger was still ticked off about Vietnam. So he was like, if we don't do this, it's going to send a message that to other Asian countries and the USSR and China that we have no resolve and that we're going to stand down.

21:32And, you know, he wanted his guy Ford back in there, obviously. So he was outvoted, like he said, thankfully. But he was like, all right, we still need a show of force like we need to do something. and the one thing that everybody in the room agreed on, even if it was, I mean, I know it was somewhat strategical, but it was also symbolic. They were like, we're cutting that GD tree down. No matter what anyone else says, we're going to cut that thing down. And they were all like, harumph, harumph. So, yeah, they decided, okay, we're not going to actually destroy anything. We're not going to fire any missiles.

22:08We're not going to kill anybody. But that doesn't mean we're not going to show them that we could do that if we wanted to. Right. And what they came up with was known as Operation Paul Bunyan, which is one of the better names of any operation I've ever heard. Yeah, totally. It was under command of General Richard Stilwell. He was the commander in chief of the U.N. command there. And the message, like you said, was to sort of intimidate, show that we could do something if we wanted to. They had 40 ,000 troops over there that were, I mean, Dave says here it was raised to DEFCON 3, which is somewhat counterintuitive because it's raising a number even though it's being lowered, right?

22:51Yeah. Yeah, right in the middle between 1 and 5 and 1's the highest. It is very confusing. Yeah. So you're raising DEFCON, but the number goes lower. It took me a second to figure that out. But I have seen War Games, so I know how it works. Mm-hmm. And I did just see that House of Dynamite. Have you seen that yet? The new Catherine Bigelow movie? No. It's, I think it's on, I think it's a Netflix movie about sort of a modern, you know, what would happen if nuclear arms were launched? Like, what would we do? So it's a very tense thing, and there's lots of DEF CON talk. And I liked a lot of it. Yeah, I mean.

23:26I'll just say that. I can get that. I think she's directly funded by the CIA. Catherine Bigelow? Yeah. She definitely has her niche, you know? Yeah, for sure. I would recommend it. I didn't care for the third act that much. House of Dynamite? I think that's what it's called. It's a great name. Yeah. I mean, you get Idris Elba as the president, so that's always a good move. I'll say that. Wait, you're talking about that. He's in it with John Cena. John Cena's the American president, and Idris Elba's the prime minister, and they actually end up being like action heroes? No. Idris Elba's the American president.

24:01Oh, gotcha. John Cena, he's nowhere to be found. I'm thinking of something else now. You're thinking of something else. Anyway, Operation Paul Bunyan is set up for, I know I'm saying Bunyan, but that's just because of my weird accent. It's Bunyan. August 21st, this is three days after the axe attack. And what they were going to do was mobilize sort of the largest mobilization of our forces and defenses on the Korean Peninsula since that 53 armistice with some pretty heavy artillery and airships and sea ships. Yeah. I mean, remember when Captain Boniface went to escort the tree trimmers, there were 15 people.

24:40Now there's 800 men involved in this tree trimming. And it's not even a tree trimming at this point, right? Now they're aiming to, like, cut the tree down? Yeah, they hate this tree at this point. Right. They want that tree dead. Especially if they think that Dear Leader planted it, right? This tree has now become super symbolic. Blood has been shed to prune this tree. And you said that there was a ton of artillery and armaments as part of the show of force. And boy, you got it right. Yeah. I mean, they had flying overhead in clear view so everyone could see, you know, what was going on. They had 20 Huey helicopters.

25:16They had 12 Cobra gunships, B-52 bombers, Tank Buster F-4, Phantom fighter jets, F-111 strategic bombs. I mean, they're pulling out all the stops. And off the coast, they had the USS Midway, four frigates and a cruiser, and aircraft taking off, flying overhead. I mean, it was a real show of intimidation. Yeah. Those B-52s that take the intimidation even further were flying inside North Korean airspace, not too far from Pyongyang. They were also strapped with nukes. There were nuclear missiles in this theater now. Not just the B-52s carrying them, but those F-111s were also carrying nuclear warheads as missiles.

26:09So the idea is here, as part of Operation Paul Bunyan, is to trim the tree or cut the tree down now. And to also show North Korea, like, you do not want to mess with us. Do not ever do anything like that again. and to be prepared that if North Korea did do something, if they were provoked by this tree cutting down, that they would just be essentially wiped off the map as a nation. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, after I was studying all this, right in the middle of it, I got weirdly very sad for this tree. Yeah, I saw that tree. This tree in the middle of all of it. I've seen other people refer to it as the poor tree.

26:46I know, because in the middle of all this stuff, I mean, these, you know, bombers are flying overhead and these troops are amassing this heavy artillery on each side of the bridge. And I just picture that, you know, I know I'm anthropomorphizing. I always say that wrong. Say it for me. Anthropomorphizing. You said it. You just said it slowly. That's right. This tree. But I just picture this poor tree sitting there like, man, I just I just want to be a tree. I wish I were a shrub. I don't want to start World War III or be cut down. I know. Wow. That tree did not get their wish. I'll grow slower, I promise.