Aside from the DMZ and the Imperial Palace, the War Memorial of Korea was the site I was most interested in visiting during my trip. It’s a three-story complex outlining the historical war technology of the Korean nation, the major battles of the Three Kingdoms era directly preceding the nation’s official unification, and the events of the Korean War. It’s an extremely affective memorial to Korea’s history.
The Memorial is pretty affective right from the outset. It’s an enormous building with a bright, sprawling set of shallow stone steps leading to the entrance. It takes a few minutes to get from the sidewalk to the Memorial, so visitors have ample time to take in the sweeping stone pathway and the ring of various nations’ flags that surround the memorial. It honestly looked more like how I imagine a UN building to look than a museum.
As mentioned, the memorial is comprised of three floors, and the military history of Korea is told chronologically from the bottom floor up. The first floor contains artifacts from ancient Korean armies and covers the Three Kingdoms period. It’s here that visitors are introduced to the Turtle Ship, one of Korea’s most impressive naval achievements. Despite the cute name it’s actually a fearsome warship. It was developed in the 15th century to fight the Japanese, who were apparently had a superior navy at that point. What’s more, Japanese soldiers were such skilled fighters in hand-to-hand combat that the Korean soldiers dreaded doing battle with them.
Their solution was the Geobukseon, a turtle-shaped warship sporting a carving of a fierce dragon’s head on the bow and huge metal spikes jutting out of the “shell”. Pretty much the entire surface of the ship’s deck was covered in spikes, meaning that the crew mostly had to remain below deck while sailing. Moreover, the ships themselves were quite small, and a good deal of space below deck was taken up by the cannons that lined the sides of every vessel, so the crews were also pretty limited in number.
As it turned out, the limited space and crews were small sacrifices to make considering the Turtle Ships’ success. The ships were faster and easier to maneuver than larger vessels, and when the Japanese tried to jump aboard to engage in hand-to-hand combat their feet would be skewered by the spikes on the ships’ decks. It was something like a naval version of the phalanx in ancient Greece. Needless to say (and no pun intended) the tides started turning in the Korean navy’s favor.
Another fairly impressive military innovation of the Koreans was the Hwa Cha. It’s described in the museum’s brochure as a “mobile rocket launcher”. Basically it was a wooden grid on wheels that could hold up to a hundred rocket-propelled arrows, and served as a damn effective siege weapon back in the day.
There are loads of other treasures on the bottom floor as well, including canons, war drums, armor and regalia, scale models, weaponry, and artwork. You could spend an entire just going through all of the displays concerning ancient Korea.
Significantly, the War Memorial has a somewhat global slant, as there are also displays depicting armor and weapons from Britain, Spain, France, Japan, and many other countries.
What surprised me most about the museum was how high-tech it is. This mostly came into play on the upper two floors, but there were some cool high-tech displays on the first floor, too. There are a few displays standing behind glass that are about the size of a small room and that contain model seascapes. If you press a button near the display, the area around you darkens and recordings of ocean sounds and soldiers doing battle, completely with cannons and screaming, plays loudly while the models move. Spotlights illume different areas on the model seascape, and when the ships are shot down they sink into the plastic tides. It’s pretty creative for a museum display!
It was pretty cool to see the history of ancient Korea before moving on to the more somber displays dedicated to the Korean and Vietnamese wars. Even if you can’t understand a lot of the Korean language that’s spoken in the audio parts of the displays or don’t know much about the Three Kingdoms period, you can still enjoy the sights and learn quite a bit about what led up to the more recent military history of the nation.
Nihonglish 