Battle of Inchon (1950s): Han and Seoul · 465

The 15 September 1950 UN amphibious landing that cut KPA supply to the Pusan Perimeter and retook Seoul -- a tide-table gamble, not the end of the Korean War. Operation Chromite put X Corps ashore at Inchon on 15 September 1950, far behind the Korean People's Army fighting on the Pusan Perimeter. MacArthur had forced the plan through sceptical JCS and Navy voices: the harbour's tidal range (among the world's largest), mudflats, and seawalls made it a bad textbook beach -- and therefore, he argued, lightly held.

Wolmi-do fell in the morning; the evening tide put Marines and soldiers onto the city. Kimpo airfield and the Han crossings opened the fight for Seoul, declared recaptured on 28 September. UN and ROK dead in the Inchon-Seoul operation are usually given in the hundreds; KPA losses in dead and captured were much higher. The landing wrecked KPA logistics in the south.

Chromite did not end the war. The UN drive across the 38th parallel and toward the Yalu invited Chinese intervention. For Korean readers this is a national-capital story as much as a MacArthur story: Seoul's second liberation in three months, and a reminder that operational brilliance can widen a war. Anglophone memory treats Inchon as the "clever landing" between two world-war amphibious myths (Overlord, Pacific islands).