The late 1940s were also very bad years for Koreans, and especially for Korean children. When Japan lost the War in 1945, Korea was freed from 35 years of brutal Japanese occupation, only to be summarily chopped in half at the 38th parallel and divided into opposing spheres of influence by the world's great powers. Korea's industrialized, resource-rich North was handed over to the control of the Soviet Union; the impoverished, underdeveloped South, to the United States.
Poverty in a cold climate is particularly cruel: Malnourished people, huddled in unheated, makeshift shacks and dressed in little more than rags, can mount little resistance to biting winter winds and snow. In Korea, many died, leaving their children to fend for themselves. Mothers who despaired of feeding yet another baby would abandon their infants in public places, hoping that someone would give their children a home.
Economic stagnation and political instability made life hard for everyone, particularly the hordes of refugees pouring south from the Communist-held North. It is estimated that six million people crossed into South Korea between 1945 and 1949, cramming two thirds of Korea's population into what was then the poorer section of the country. In Seoul, half the inhabitants were refugees, and starving, homeless children were dying of exposure, huddled in doorways all night long, trying to get away from the snow. Little girls became prostitutes in order to survive; little boys became skillful, practiced thieves. Gangs of filthy, emaciated children roamed the streets, dleeping in alleyways and preying on passersby.
The South Korean government, headed by Syngman Rhee, had other problems, other priorities, and in any case, was totally unequipped to deal with tens of thousands of uncared-for, parentless children. Foreign missionaries and concerned Koreans did what they could. The former took waifs into their homes by the score, while the latter set up orphanages in Buddhist temples and abandoned buildings, and even carved shelters into rocky hillsides. But the need far outstripped the means at hand. As word of the suffering got out, the crisis presented a compelling opportunity to Dr. Clarke and his willing sponsors. In the fall of 1948, Verent Mills was sent from his base in Shanghai, China, to Korea to take stock of the situation. On that first trip he signed up five orphanages for assistance by China's Children Fund.
**********
For the next three years, the Korean War swept back and forth, up and down across the midsection of the country like a square dance of death. In the three months between June and September 1950, Seoul was captured by the North, retaken by the South, and lost to the North again. On the South Korean side alone, nearly two million Koreans died in the conflict. As always, those who suffered most from battles and bombings, confusion and deprivation were children. Even the children in CCF-assisted orphanages were vulnerable. Homes in occupied territory were evacuated before the Communist advance. Their fleeing children once again joined the ragged ranks of frightened, hungry refugees. For a lucky few trekking through the devastated countryside, sustenance came in the unlikely form of K rations supplied by American GIs.
**********
During the confusion and terror of those days, word of CCF's stranded and endangered orphans reached American fighter pilot Colonel Dean Hess of the Fifth Air Force, originally from Marietta, Ohio, who flew more than 300 combat missions in World War II and the Korean War. He was also a Protestant clergyman who had joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941 because he felt that he could not exhort his parishioners to risk their lives for their country unless he was prepared to do the same. On hearing of the plight of the CCF orphans, Colonel Hess decided he would do whatever was necessary to save them.
Over several tense days in December, close to a thousand children were rounded up in a fleet of trucks and taken to the Seoul air base. They came from Mrs. Hill's Chongju Home for Blind Children and her Chongju Home for Boys, and from a U.S. Army camp where an assortment of homeless waifs had gathered. From there, they were flown in an airlift by U.S. and Korean fighter pilots under Hess's command to Cheju Island, about 60 miles off the south coast of Korea. The rescue came to be known as Operation Kiddie-Car and provided the story for a warm and gripping movie titled "Battle Hymn".
On Cheju Island, Mills was waiting for the unheated DC-3s and their cargoes of freezing, cold, frightened babies, children and teenagers to arrive. "When we lifted those babies off the planes, whew it was cold!" he says, recalling the tragicomedy of the moment. "The little kids had wet their pants. We were in a sea of cold, wet pants and crying babies."
The only available accommodation for the children on Cheju was an abandoned Japanese agricultural college without a single intact window. Mills and a group of GIs boarded up the windows against the icy wind. But for many of the youngest children, infants already weak from lack of milk, this was not enough. The cold and hunger were too much for them. Two hundred tiny, unmarked graves were dug in the frozen ground of Cheju. Word was sent to Dr. Clarke of the evacuation, and in a short time, sponsorship aid began pouring in for the survivors.
**********
CCF's experiences in Korea following the Second World War were harrowing indeed. Threats and circumstances changed daily. The numbers of homeless children could alter dramatically virtually from day to day. The challenges equaled and in many ways exceeded those faced in China. Yet, in retrospect, Korea was perhaps the place where CCF began to fashion an ability to deal with sudden disaster, to intervene in a timely way to save thousands at risk of exposure and death, and to make use of every available resource to rescue the children. These experiences with crisis would help to inform policies and practices that would enable CCF to intervene in dozens of countries and relieve hundreds of human disasters over the next half century.