The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [259]
Communist success during the first days of the North Korean attack was so complete it appeared they would conquer the rocky peninsula in mere weeks. Truman moved at once and without a declaration of war from Congress to help the South Koreans. Untried American garrison units from Japan arrived to help stop the communist advance. Task Force Smith, one of the garrison units encountering the daunting communist attack, was shattered on first contact. Both American Army and South Korean infantry units were overwhelmed by North Korean human wave assaults supported by Russian T-34/84 style tanks that shrugged off American antitank weapons. Massive barrages from Soviet-supplied artillery swept the battlefield as the North Koreans tore through Allied defense lines scattering the defenders to the four winds.
Exhausted and battered, South Korean and Allied forces were brushed back to their last stronghold at the port city of Pusan. Within the tight perimeter, South Korean and American forces rallied to withstand communist attacks. Amid the rain of artillery, thunder of tanks, and crashing waves of screaming communist troops ripping at the defenders of Pusan, there was hope. From the sea came US Navy aircraft smearing the attackers with napalm. Tons of exploding steel flung from the guns of US warships cleaved enemy attacks, and reinforcements moved in to stitch tears in the Allied line. Japan’s airfields disgorged a mass of US Air Force bombers regurgitating death upon the brazen enemy. Far to the north, behind the Pusan perimeter, roads and bridges melted away under US bombardment, multiplying North Korean supply problems. The Soviet trained and supplied troops were not prepared for a US aerial armada projecting carnage and devastation deep behind their lines. Massive numbers of troops need massive amounts of supplies, and as the supplies dwindled so did the combat power of North Korea’s army (logistics . . . again). The Soviet preparation of their partners failed to include the impact of naval gunfire which dismayed and splintered the communist troops. North Korea’s leaders began to ponder the possible consequences of failure in the South.
The United Nations entered the war on a fluke. Normally, the Security Council of the United Nations must act before intervention in a war, and any member of the Security Council could veto such an intervention. The Soviet Union was a member of the Security Council and would have vetoed any action aimed at North Korea, but they were absent. The Soviets walked out of the United Nations in protest of another problem and were unavailable to file their veto when the war broke out. Thus, the United Nations could, and did, vote to intervene in Korea in accordance with the UN Charter to protect a nation from invasion. This was the first time the United Nations had acted with significant armed force to protect a nation invaded for the purpose of conquest. It was the best of “collective security” dreamed about by President Wilson after WWI. Unfortunately, it would also be the last until 1990.[350] For the most part, the responders were the Western Democracies. The United States of America, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom sent the most troops, but numerous other nations helped as well. Once again, even though it looked like the world was responding, it was the Western Democracies against the totalitarians of the East. So it had been since Marathon, so it was again.
The US Military was a shadow of its World War II self. The Truman administration had dismantled the world’s best invasion forces after the war. Ships were decommissioned