The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [258]
Books and Resources:
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America’s Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World by Derek Leebaert, probably the best book on the subject of the Cold War and its impacts.
Legacy of Ashes: the History of the CIA by Tim Weiner, probably the best book on the failures of the American intelligence services and its costs.
At the Abyss, An Insider’s History of the Cold War, Thomas C. Reed, Ballantine Books, 2004.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War: excellent article and good overview of the Cold War.
Chapter 17
The Korean War
Figure 76 Map of Korean War
1950-1953
Background to Invasion
The Korean War is one of those almost-forgotten conflicts speckling the history of our planet. However, we need to remember Korea because it set the stage for the remainder of the twentieth century and established several foundational rules for the Cold War. America answered a direct challenge from the communist nations of China and the USSR while choosing to restrain the use of its available power. The Cold War had already started, tensions were soaring, and the stakes in Korea were high. The response of the United States of America, its allies, and the United Nations to this blunt challenge altered the course of history.
Before the invasion of South Korea, there were no negotiations, no demands, and no pre-war chest pounding—just pure aggression by way of an unannounced invasion. The United States could have ignored the plight of the small nation, but that would be an open invitation to more Hitler-like conquests. The experience of WWII filtered every decision of the Allies in the Korean conflict.
On June 25, 1950, the communist army of North Korea crossed the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea beginning its bid to conquer the south. Stalin and Mao endorsed this move.[346] Stalin (leader of the USSR) and Mao (leader of Red China), both brutal murdering dictators, decided to push Western ideas and control off mainland Asia. The communist leader Ho Chi Minh would push the French out of Vietnam and then extend the assault to the rest of Indochina[347] thereby driving all Western control off the Asian mainland. In Korea, Soviet-trained troops and massive amounts of Soviet equipment would drive the South Korean army into the sea uniting Korea under communism. Both communist leaders thought America would not interfere in the puny peninsula’s fall. Statements by the American Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1950 may have led the communist to this conclusion about Korea.[348] Even if America wanted to defend, the assault would overrun the peninsula in thirty days, before the United States could respond. The communist dictators further calculated that America would not use the atomic bomb because of moral impediments. No such moral impediments existed in the communist dictatorships.
The Red Empires Strike!
June 25, 1950
The attack on South Korea on June 25, 1950, was an unqualified surprise to American intelligence which had received but ignored information from Taiwan. Some additional clues about a massive buildup of arms and men reached MacArthur’s US Army staff, but it was thought to be unreliable. General MacArthur, who was running postwar Japan, did not even have his staff tell the South Koreans; thus, the Soviet buildup of North Korean forces went unnoticed. This kind of surprise would happen repeatedly over the years. The American intelligence services were nearly useless outside of aerial and satellite observation or electronic eavesdropping. Total defeats were imposed on the United States in the field of intelligence and counterintelligence decade after decade. For example, one man working for the US Navy in an extremely sensitive position was a Soviet