Sent to Korea in 1947, Aleckson served as part of the occupation force in Korea following World War II. He was assigned to the Judge Advocate General's Office which was stationed in Seoul. He was discharged in 1948.

I wanted to start talking about Korea in terms of how it became two countries.  Korea was occupied by Japan from the early nineteen hundreds; probably about nineteen o’ four.  Japan used it really as a place for their own military and occupied it for four years and took everything out of the country.  Everything. 

How was it divided?    
During World War II, toward the end of the European portion of the war, a conference was held in Potsdam, Germany.  President Truman was President of the United States at the time, and he met with Stalin, and I’m not sure who was there from Great Britain, and the United States wanted very badly to get Russia to declare war on Japan.  We were still fighting Japan in the Pacific, and thought we could use Russia’s help.  Russia really didn’t want to do that.  Part of the trade off was for the United States to suggest that Russia could come into Korea and occupy the north half, and the United States would come in and occupy the south half.  Remember that Korea was under the control of Japan and we of course didn’t know how many years that it was going to take to defeat Japan.  So that’s what was agreed to at the Potsdam Agreement- to divide that poor country in two.  It’s a little country.  A little peninsula that comes down off of Manchuria and the eastern end of Siberia.  It sits in there between Siberia and Japan.  The intent was not to permanently divide it, but to provide assistance for that country to get back a government of itself.  When the United States troops came into Korea at the end of the Japanese disarmament, when we got to the thirty-eighth parallel, there were the Russians.  Their army was already there; they’d come down from Manchuria.  They were standing there with their guns and they said ‘That’s it. You’re not coming any further.’  So the idea that had been hatched in Potsdam to do this together really wasn’t together, and if you studied anything about what happened in Germany after World War II, the same thing was happening over again.  Germany was divided into four sectors.  One was Russia, then the United States, France, and Great Britain.  For some reason we had the idea that we were going to partition these countries, so that’s what happened in Korea.  The United States troops were south of the thirty-eighth parallel, which is not too far from where we live here in Wisconsin.  That happened to be the dividing line.

I enlisted in the army in 1947.  June tenth: ten days after I graduated from High School.  I wanted to get in for two reasons.  There was the GI bill- which would pay your college tuition and we were poor people, and I didn’t know how else I could get to college, so I thought ‘well that’s going to work.’  I also had a lot of excitement and patriotism as most young men at that time did.  I was too young to get into World War II, but pretty close.  The war was over in ’45, so I was disappointed I didn’t get in.  Which sounds kind of silly, but that’s how I felt as a young man.  So I enlisted.  I took my training at Fort Knox, Kentucky: infantry training.  At that time, we were still training the same way they did for other GI’s for World War II; they hadn’t changed yet.  We were there for fifteen weeks.  The day we graduated from basic training, we all sat down on the company street (about 200 of us) and the company commander got up on a little stand, and the idea was that he was going to read off where everybody was to go.  We were all going to go somewhere; I thought I was going to go to paratrooper training.  I had signed up to be a paratrooper at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.  He got up and said ‘The following will go to code Korea.’  I sitting there thinking ‘I wonder where that is?’  I had never heard of it.  I had never heard of Korea.  The first named he called out was Dale Aleckson.  I got such a pain in my stomach because I didn’t know where that was.  He had ‘code Korea.’  So I was shipped to Korea and it was really a devastated country when we came in.  We replaced the first U.S. soldiers who had come in to occupy.   They were going back home, and we came in to continue the occupation.  We had a military government at that time for South Korea.  I was assigned to the 24^th Core Headquarters, with the Judge Advocate.  You may know it now as JAG.  That’s kind of a modern way.  We called it the Judge Advocate General’s office; it’s the legal system of the army.  I was one lucky guy to get assigned to work in the JA’s office.  That meant that I didn’t have to go out on the 38^th parallel where most of the troops were guarding the parallel.  So I spent my time in the capital city of Korea’s soul.

Did the Korean people want you to be there or not?  
From what I could determine, they did.  They were friendly.  We were, as young soldiers, not real nice to the Korean people.  I don’t know why.  We just thought we were better than them.  When I reflect on it now, I would like to have been a different person, but we kind of looked down at them.  They were so destitute and poor that they were begging for things. I didn’t smoke, but I could buy cigarettes for cheap.  Something like ninety cents a carton at that time.  And the Koreans wanted cigarettes and they wanted soap.  So I would trade that and I would buy nice leather boots and I would have my clothes all tailored and laundered and dry-cleaned and all those things I paid for out of cigarettes and soap.  But they did they like us?  I think overall yes, because we were trying to give them freedom to govern themselves, and we did.  This was not true, though, on the north side with the Russians.  The Russians came into Korea with the idea that they were going to make a military communist state out of them, and they did.  The first thing they did was to build a gigantic military machine.  We didn’t do that.  We went into South Korea to give them a chance.  Basically South Korea is agricultural and North Korea is more manufacturing.  The Russians had all the electrical power in North Korea and all the generation of the power.  Some of the worst fighting went on in the Chosin Reservoir, where the electricity was generated.  About three nights a week, we’d have the electricity shut off.  We’d be sitting around reading or talking, and all of a sudden it was dark.  The Russians were doing that in the north.  We had a real disadvantage; I don’t know how the United States government entered into the agreement, but we did.  Because we had the worst part of the country. 

What were the conditions like for you in Korea?
Well, my conditions were very good because it was before the war, and also I was assigned to Judge Advocate, which was the top of the pile in headquarters.  So those of us that were in headquarters got to live in a hotel. The hotels in Korea were pretty skimpy and not very fancy, but they had electricity and they had heat.  So my conditions were excellent. 

How did you get assigned to Judge Advocate?
I was just a High School graduate, but when I joined the army in 1947, it was surprising to me to find out that a good number of the other men that were in the same outfit that I was in did not finish High School.  A lot of them had dropped out of school before graduation and then somehow or another joined the army.  And some of them were drafted into the army.  So being a High School graduate, I had a whole step in education on a lot of the guys.  Then the army, when you come in, has a system of testing: you spend about a week taking written tests.  I tested fairly well.  So those grades and numbers went with you.  When I arrived in Korea, I went to place called a Replacement Depot (we called it a Ripple Dipple.)   That was a replacement depot.  In the army, they have a name for everything.  We were there for about a week.  It was a very meager place; it was an old Japanese army base.  It was a very small place with low ceilings because the Japanese people generally were a shorter.  Most of us had a hard time getting around in there.  So that condition was pretty bad, but then one day- in about a week- I was told to go to Seoul and show up at the Judge Advocate General’s office and I didn’t know what JA was.  The colonel, it was a “full bird” colonel, (that’s a colonel with a bird on his shoulder) was the Judge Advocate of Korea.  He also happened to be from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I was from St. Cloud, Minnesota.  I don’t think that hurt me when I interviewed with him. He kind of liked another person from the Midwest.  He asked me if I knew how to type.  I said “no.”  At our high school we didn’t have typing.  He said, “Do you think you could learn how?” I said, “Sir, yes, sir. I can learn how.”  So that’s why I got assigned.  But I originally was assigned there because I had fairly decent testing marks.

What was the hardest part of the war for you?
Well, I was not in the war.  But I’d like to talk a little about that era of 1947 and ’48 when I was in Korea.  We thought the war was going to start next week.  We had a saying that if you were going back to the states in ’48, the saying was: “Golden gate in Forty-Eight.”  If you were going back in ’49, we said “Salt mines in Forty-Nine.”  Salt mines were a reference to Siberia and Russia.  That was just an army saying if you were going back “shipping” in ’48 you were going to see the golden gate in San Francisco.  If you were going home in ’49, you were going to be in the salt mines because you were going to be in war.  We thought the war was going to start anytime.  Because I was JA, I stayed in a hotel room with a G2.  G2 in the army is the intelligence; the secret part of the army service.  So the guys that I was rooming with were in intelligence and some of them would infiltrate up to P'yongyang, which was the capital city of North Korea.  They’d come back and they would talk about how heavily the Russians had build up the North Korean army.  So we just knew there was going to be a war, but what really amazed me when I got out of the service (I was discharged in late 1948) in 1949, was that the Truman administration pulled most of the troops out of Korea and sent them to Japan.  I remember saying to people “I can’t understand this.  Why would we do that?  The only reason the Russians and the North Koreans haven’t come south is because the American army is there.”  Well, in 1950, it happened.  The North Koreans just came across the 38^th parallel. Our troops were in Japan, and the army we had built in South Korea was not a very good fighting group.  It had no chance at that time against the North Koreans.  Pusan is a port city in South Eastern Korea right toward the end of the peninsula.  The North Koreans had pushed the South Koreans all the way to Pusan.  I think there’s only about thirty miles of the country left: thirty miles wide and thirty miles long.  That’s when the United States Marine Corps came in from Guam on ships, and that’s when we started to fight.  This was a United Nations conflict.  They never called it a war.  The guys that went over there and died knew it was a war, but history records it as a Korean Conflict.  It was won through the United Nations, but there were very few other countries that had any soldiers in there like we had.  I can’t tell you about any fighting, although I have interviewed a classmate of mine who was with the Marines that landed at Pusan.  But that’s another story.

What was the weather like in Korea?
Actually, it turned out to be quite a bit like Minnesota and Wisconsin, although in the winters, we didn’t have a lot of snow, but it was a damp, penetrating cold.  If you can just envision this country of- I don’t know how wide it is, but it’s pretty wide- 2-300 miles maybe.  It was probably from here to Green Bay or something with water on both sides. To the north was Siberia, and when those north winds would come out of Siberia, it was really cold.  I grew up in Minnesota, and I thought it was kind of a raw, cold place.  Our soldiers that eventually got trapped up in the Chosin Reservoir; knew how cold it was.

What were your experiences of being discharged?
Well, my story is a little different because I had chosen to go to West Point.  I had wanted to stay in the military and be an officer.  I was accepted into West Point and failed my physical examination because they’d learned that I had diabetes.  So my discharge came out of the hospital.  So that was a little different.

What were your expectations of the war/were you expecting to be out where the soldiers were?
Well, as I said earlier, we thought war was eminent and near, and it used to bother me because after being in Korea for about a year, I was really not ready.  I used to think, “Well gee, if the Russians come across the 38^th parallel, and that’ s 40 or 50 miles from Seoul, that’s not very far.”  I always thought that we weren’t really ready to fight; I didn’t even have a gun.  So I don’t know what would have happened had the North Koreans and the Russians started when we were there.  My expectation was that we were going to be in a fight, but I was happy to get shipped out before it started at that point.

What is your opinion of the outcome of the Korean conflict?
Well, I think it was a tragedy to divide the country to start with.  That’s not quite what you asked me, but the governments, ours included (the Truman administration at that time), I think made a terrible error in dividing this little country.  And the outcome of the conflict was no resolution at all.  The so-called DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone, there’s a stretch of land now where there’s no military in, and we still have troops over there south of that line and I don’t know who’s north of there anymore because the Chinese came in into that war/conflict.  Nothing was resolved, but I don’t know how many thousands of American boys and innocent women too, there weren’t that many women in the fighting force when I was in, died over there.  And we resolved nothing.  It’s still there.  In fact, we have a problem I think our President right now has correctly identified; North Korea as an “Axis of evil.”  They have now developed nuclear possibilities.  There’s still a dictatorship, a communist country. I think if we were out of there, they’d overrun the south.  So when you think about it, we fought a war over there in 1950, that’s forty some years ago.  And things are just like they were.  So my opinion is that it was a tragedy to support it, it was a tragedy to pull our troops out, which, in effect, invited the north to come down and start the whole conflict.  I’m not happy with what happened there.

Do you think eventually that the conflict will be resolved and we’ll be able to take our troops out of there?
I wish I had an answer for you.  I don’t know.  There was some sign here about a year or two ago that the north and the south had an interest in trying to build a single country, but when you have leaders in one part of the country that are dictators and military despots, they are not going to agree with a democratic society of South Korea.  Now South Korea has done very well.  A lot of American manufacturing and industry have gone over there and helped those people and they’ve done well.  In fact, not too many years ago, we had an international Olympics in Seoul. When I was in Seoul in 1947, it was nothing but a dump.  It was terrible; there were two or three million people living there, but we used to stand on top of our hotel which was about six stories high, and as far as you could see were little shacks that were all tied together with tin roofs and stuff.  And that’s what people lived in there.  They had no plumbing or anything. They had to dig a hole in the corner of their house.  That’s where the bathroom was.  It’d freeze in the winter, and in the summer, they’d shovel it out.  It was not good.