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Art Cornfield served 13 months in Korea, 11 months in combat
VIENNA
The Korean War — sandwiched between World War II, the United States’ biggest war, and the Vietnam War, the nation’s longest war — is often called “The Forgotten War.”
“There were parades for the men who came home from World War II. I felt sorry for the guys coming home from Vietnam because of the way they were greeted,” said Arthur “Art” S. Cornfield of Vienna.
“But when I came home from Korea, it didn’t seem like people even knew I’d been gone,” said the Army veteran who served in Korea from February 1952 until April 1953.
It may have been “forgotten” or relatively unknown by a public tired of war, but Cornfield, one of the men who fought in what also is referred to as “a nasty little war,” remembers it as a cold, barren deadly place without trees.
Cornfield, 83, said he watched “M*A*S*H*,” the television show about a mobile army surgical hospital set in the Korean War, and marveled at the trees.
“I’d like to know where the trees were. Where I was, I never saw any,” said Cornfield, a Niles native and 1948 graduate of McKinley High School there.
Cornfield was drafted into the Army in July 1951, and after training in the U.S. and Japan, landed in Korea on a little island south of the mainland to join the 5th Regimental Combat Team (RCT), which was guarding enemy prisoners while being resupplied with men and equipment.
The Korean War began June 25, 1950, when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south.
By July, American troops, under the auspices of the United Nations, had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf in what was initially referred to as a police action. With American help, South Korean forces pushed into North Korea, an action that caused communist China to enter the war in late 1950.
Finally, in July 1953, the Korean War came to an end. In all, an estimated 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives during the war, including some 36,516 American military personnel.
The two sides signed an armistice July 27, 1953, which allowed prisoners of war to stay where they liked; drew a new boundary near the 38th parallel that gave South Korea an extra 1,500 square miles of territory; and created a 2-mile-wide “demilitarized zone” that still exists.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense, during the three-year conflict, the U.S. suffered 33,686 battle deaths, along with 2,830 nonbattle deaths, and 8,176 missing in action.
Cornfield, a member of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 3521 in Vienna, where he lives with his wife, the former Eva Griffin of Fowler, said he first landed on the Korean mainland with the 5th RCT just south of the 38th Parallel and was sent to the Punchbowl soon after.
The Punchbowl was the name given to the bowl-shaped Haean-myon valley in Yanggu County, Gangwon Province, by U.N. forces. The Punchbowl lies several miles south of the Korean Demilitarized Zone and was the site of fierce fighting.
Cornfield, trained in Quad 50-caliber machine guns on a half-track and 90 mm anti-aircraft weapons, said he was converted to headquarters and worked in supply and grave registration.
After he had been at the Punchbowl about a month, he was sent back to the 25th Division, where he was trained as a truck driver and ended up in the 21st Special Purpose Artillery Anti-aircraft Battalion.
“I was assigned to a five-man squad. We were sitting on the front line much of the time. We were assigned to different infantry units, moving from one side of Korea to the other, providing support.
“We didn’t always know where we were. But we were in many major battles,” he said.
Cornfield was in Korea more than 13 months, 11 months in combat.
“The only break we had was about 11/2 miles behind the lines doing harassment fire. One night, we got a load of ammo, slapped it in ammo boxes and hit the trigger.”
“I said to my buddy, ‘Get off the half-track because we were firing all tracer rounds making a target of ourselves.’ To this day, I want to know how we got all tracers,” he said.
Normally, he said, every fifth round was a tracer.
Tracer ammunition are bullets or cannon rounds that glow when fired, making them visible to the naked eye, enabling the shooter to follow the projectile trajectory to make aiming corrections. It also allows the enemy to see where they are coming from.
“I was never wounded. I was lucky — I was lucky,” Cornfield nodded.
Amid the terror, danger and misery, Cornfield, who still has problems with his fingers from frostbite, had a couple of pleasant surprises in Korea.
Once in a rest area in a tent, he heard someone mention his name. It turned out to be one of his girlfriend Eva’s brothers, Robert. “We visited for about an hour.”
Eight of Eva’s 10 brothers served in the military in World War II and Korea.
Also, on Christmas Eve 1952, the man with whom Cornfield was on guard duty mentioned he was from a little town in Ohio — Vienna.
Niles and Vienna are about 5 miles apart.
“Our outfit moved on Christmas Day. I never saw him again. We just crossed paths, that’s all,” he said.
When asked what the Korean War was all about, he said: “When I saw kids rummaging through garbage cans at the mess hall, it made me wonder why does this have to be?”
“All I wanted to do was get out of there alive. When my replacement came, I said, ‘Bless you,’ but I still had to sit around for two weeks. I’d been packed for six months,” he said.
When he made it back to the United States, he went back to his job at Allied Metal Structural Steel in Niles and married Eva, a 1952 graduate of Fowler High School.
They have five children: Darald of Hubbard, Jeffrey of Champion, Michael of Vienna, Holly Cornfield of Akron, and Allison Hicks of Amelia, Ohio; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Cornfield also worked at J.A. McMahon, a structural steel fabricator in Niles, and retired in 1987 from Livi Steel in Warren. The Cornfields have been members of Tod Avenue United Methodist Church in Warren since 1970.
Cornfield said he has talked publicly only one other time about Korea: at a recent Memorial Day service at Mathews High School in Vienna.
“I have an opinion about how the Korean War ended. President Truman was all wet. He should have let Gen. McArthur and the boys put North and South Korea back together. People don’t realize that troops are still being killed in Korea,” Cornfield said.
The Korean War veteran said he has no desire to return to Korea.
“I was there. I saw it. I’m done,” he said.