When U.N. forces famously stormed ashore at Inchon on September 15, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur’s gamble set in motion a massive battle to liberate the South Korean capital: Seoul. North Korean forces retreated from the southern half of the peninsula as UN troops raced to cut them off.
Confidence soared. “I have just returned from visiting the Marines at the front, and there is not a finer fighting organization in the world,” MacArthur declared a few days later.
The Battle of the Barricades
While celebrations erupted back home, what followed inside the South Korean capital was not a parade but a slog. The North Korean People’s Army had turned Seoul’s grand boulevards into killing zones. Marine historians would later dub it “the battle of the barricades”: eight-foot walls of rice and earth sack, laid across intersections every few hundred yards, laced with mines and covered by antitank guns and machine guns.
Taking each position required a carefully rehearsed tactic — air and artillery first, then mortars and engineers, Pershing tanks or flamethrower tanks, and finally riflemen with fixed bayonets. On average, one barricade took 45 to 60 minutes to destroy and cost dozens of casualties.
For Marines who fought their way up the city streets, the scene was apocalyptic. Private First Class Morgan Brainard remembered “great gaping skeletons of blackened buildings… telephone wires hanging down… literally a town shot to hell.” Room-by-room fighting followed, stairwells and balconies cleared under sniper fire, the pace measured in blocks, not miles.
Some of the Marines had fought across the Pacific in World War II and were not ready to engage the enemy in alley-ways, streets, or in multi-stories government buildings. Most troops were raw recruits with minimal training, liberating the city was their baptism of fire.
Despite the dangers, UN leadership were in a rush and decided to forego a cautious advance in the hopes of crushing enemy resistance as soon as possible. The result: Marines were blitzing through enemy-held buildings under constant fire, ignoring casualties and even civilians in the cross-fire. The fight was arduous and chaotic.
The legendary Lieutenant General Lewis “Chesty” Puller led his troops from close to the front; his longtime driver, Sgt. Orville Jones, recalled Marines yelling, “Holy Jeez—don’t let Chesty get ahead of us—move it!”
MacArthur demanded a victory by September 25—the war’s three-month mark—and his corps commander, Maj. Gen. Edward Almond, announced Seoul’s “liberation” on the night of the 25th even as the fighting continued. The next day, MacArthur issued United Nations Command Communiqué No. 9: “Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea, is again in friendly hands,” he wrote, crediting elements of the ROK 17th Regiment and U.S. 7th Infantry and 1st Marine Divisions with the city’s “envelopment and seizure.”
The words hit papers worldwide while Marines were still trading fire on Seoul’s intersections.
The Liberation of Seoul: The Forgotten Cost
The forgotten half of this victory is what the battlefield obscured. As the city changed hands, South Korean authorities and auxiliaries began executing suspected “collaborators.”
A TIME report described firing squads as “busy liquidating ‘enemies of the state’—Korean civilians accused of sabotage or collaboration,” noting that U.S. and British troops “voiced their loathing” and that American officials lodged a formal protest.
Maj. Gen. Lee Ho, vice chief of South Korea’s Martial Law Headquarters, defended the killings: civilians “are supposed to be hanged,” he said, “but we have found shooting by firing squad more convenient.” Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians were massacred — many for nothing more than having interacted with their occupiers in passing. Many were falsely accused by their neighbors and even family members based on past grievances.
These weren’t isolated rumors. Declassified U.S. diplomatic reports documented mass executions carried out by ROK authorities in Seoul, some witnessed by British soldiers. Decades later, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission confirmed widespread wartime massacres of civilians accused of aiding the enemy. The findings don’t erase North Korea’s own atrocities but complicate any clean narrative of “liberation.”
Nevertheless, South Korean civilians attempted to return to their normal lives, picking up debris from the streets, tearing down the barricades, and rebuilding their war-torn homes.
Seoul’s Fate During the Korean War
Seoul finally fell between September 26 and 28, after days of block-by-block fighting that cost dearly and demanded the full Marine air-ground team, plus U.S. Army and ROK units closing the escape routes. On September 29, bulldozers pushed aside rubble for MacArthur’s return ceremony, a photo-ready moment that ignored the city’s smoldering intersections and crowded POW detention yards.
Although the city was liberated, the casualties were staggering. Roughly 3,500 U.N. troops became casualties in the Inchon-Seoul campaign, the vast majority from the 1st Marine Division. The North Korean People’s Army lost more than 14,000 men killed. An unknown number of civilians — likely thousands — were killed in the crossfire. Some were executed by retreating North Koreans, others by the very authorities who claimed to have freed them.
The ordeal didn’t end with the victory. Seoul’s battered population endured malnutrition and constant danger for the rest of the war. In January 1951, Chinese forces seized the city in a brutal winter offensive. Only months later, U.N. troops retook it again. By war’s end, Seoul had changed hands four times; the civilians endured terrifying hardships through each battle.
The first recapture of Seoul marked a decisive turn in the Korean War. North Korea’s invasion had been reversed, its momentum shattered, and the Republic of Korea government was restored. Politically, it was the triumph MacArthur wanted.
But the victory carried deep scars. The city’s infrastructure was gutted, its people traumatized, and its streets filled with reprisals and executions. Liberation came with destruction, loss, and a reminder that in urban warfare, civilians often pay the highest price.
The Marines did what was asked of them. They fought through barricades and sniper fire to raise the allied flag over Seoul. But for the city’s people, liberation was a far more complicated story. It was some of the harshest urban combat the Marines would witness until the Battle of Hue during the Vietnam War and Fallujah in Iraq.
