For the uninitiated, the USS Pueblo was a Navy Signals Intelligence ship which was attacked and boarded by North Koreans in international waters in 1968. The crew didn’t just give up; they deftly maneuvered away from the attackers. It took two North Korean
It took two North Korean subchasers, four torpedo boats, and two MiG fighters to stop Pueblo, even allowing for the fact that the crew didn’t man the ship’s guns due to restrictive Navy regulations. The crew destroyed all the classified material they could, but they were simply outgunned and outnumbered. One sailor was killed and eighty-three others were held by North Korea for 335 days before being returned to the U.S.
The Pueblo is still commissioned in the U.S. Navy and is the only ship to be held by an enemy country. For decades, the ship was moored on the Taedong River in the capital of Pyongyang. After a restoration begun in 2013, the ship is now a part of the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in keeping with the North Korean label for the war.
Related: I went to North Korea and saw the US Navy ship still being held captive after 47 years
The Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum was founded right after the 1953 armistice was signed. (Note: The U.S. is still technically at war with North Korea as the armistice ended the conflict but not the Korean War.) As Communists often do, the North Koreans wanted to put their spin on the war immediately, and thus the museum was born.
Ten years later, it was moved to a building built just to house the museum’s collection, a massive trove of North Korean tanks, weapons, and aircraft, along with captured American equipment, jeeps, and downed planes, all supporting the North’s consensus that they actually won.
Of course, with the Pueblo comes the newest exhibit in the Museum, the Pueblo section.
If you’re wondering how the war became a “liberation“ war to the North, young North Koreans are taught that a joint South Korean-U.S. army started the war, and not that it was started by a North Korean sneak attack.
The North is not likely to return the ship, considering how immensely proud they are of having captured it.
