During the Korean War the American Armed Forces saved the lives of thousands upon thousands of Korean children. Besides the physical intervention of a single GI (all branches of service, men and women) to rescue a child as portrayed in the first article below the GIs often rescued hundreds of children at one time in various rescue operations such as the Kiddy Car Airlift organized by the 5th Air Force where almost a thousand children were saved (place a link here) or the rescue of over 200 children by the US Marines in the Kanung operation (place a link here).
When orphanage administrators report that upwards of 90% of all their aid comes from the American servicemen and that the children would have died without this help we must recognize that the donation of over two million dollars for orphanage aid by GIs during the war years from a pay usually less than one hundred dollars a month also helped save the lives of thousands of children.
The stories posted below and on other pages are those that were recorded somewhere and which we were able to locate. Daily, though, we are hearing about particular units who rescued 14 children hiding in a ditch near the Chosin Reservoir or a GI who goes out of his way to locate abandoned or lost children and get them to an orphanage. I am sure these stories, never before put in print, would account for many more thousands of children whose lives were saved by the US forces. We will add them to the collection as we find them.
To get an idea of the social, physical and cultural context within which the American GIs were operating in their attempts to rescue the children we present a page of photographs illustrating the situation faced by the civilian population of Korea during the war years. Link...
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