1975: Saigon surrenders

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Ned
The same thing would have worked with the Vietnam war. You intervene, you die.

So what's that with that MacArthur dude? Wasn't he supposed to overrun China?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Oerdin
I'd like to point out that U.S. forces frequently faced 20:1 odds agianst the Communist forces and routinely beat the snot out of them.

[Ned]

Also, who really is responsible for the "surprise" in the "surprise" attack by the Chinese that cost us more than 10,000 KIA? Was it MacArthur who asked to send reconnaisance across the border? Or, was it the person who said, "No."

[TCO]

My Dad had two cool korea stories. err...three actually.

[Q Classic]

my grandmother refuses to talk about anything before 1953.
grandfather pass away twelve years ago.
and my mom, eldest of her siblings, was born right at the start of the war.

she doesn't remember it.

i don't know how any of those stories can be "cool".

===

as for truman... i think it was a damn foolish thing for him to do, firing macarthur. then again, it was his advisors who decided where korea should be partitioned: the 38th parallel seemed nice, quoth acheson (sp?).
at least truman partially redeemed himself by committing us forces there, even if he didn't win the war.

by the way: china had always intended to take part in the korean war; between july and september, the chinese leadership had created an entire army, 260k strong, in manchuria ready to strike into korea. it would, of course, be used to drive back "imperialistic american aggression", and would serve as an example to taiwan (china had originally intended to focus on taiwan, but kim il sung decided to change that~). mao himself was in favor of intervention--and during that time, mao's word was, in effect, what went.
(source: Mao's China and the Cold War, Chen Jian (2001))

[TCO]

Recover the Peublo...

[Kramerman]

But in reality, there are dictators, there are bad people, there are brutal regimes. **** happens, deal with it.

hmm... this sound like something that could come back to haunt Sava...

Good Sig material perhaps???

[Ned]

Q Cubed, as I said, had we had air recon over the border, we would have know of the buildup. We probably would have known also about troop movements to the Yalu. I say probably, since only six years earlier, the Germans were able to pull off a similar surprise attack at the Battle of the Bulge.

Well, it looks like both Ike and MacArthur were sneak-attacked, with similar results.

But it also shows why Truman was so sensitive to the cross-border issue. He knew his orders had contributed to the "surprise" element and the loss of so many UN soldiers.

[gsmoove23]

He was sensitive to the cross border thing because he could foresee the results. Having reconaissance overflights of a sovereign nation are extremely provocative. If they had stopped significantly short of the chinese border there would have been little problem, the Korean war wasn't a civil war, we had no rights to invade the country, except to wring a peace deal out of the N. Koreans.

With all your provocation where do you see an end? You think all we had to do was rattle our sabers louder and the Chinese and Russians would simply clam up? Ridiculous.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Ned
See, I give some Democrats credit where credit is due. I simply believe that Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, (McGovern) and Carter were largely despicable in their conduct of foreign policy.

Ned: I'm surprised that you disagree with Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan and its foreign policy implication.

Nice to see that even you agree that a Democrat president did the right thing.

[Q Classic]

gsmoove, maybe technically the korean war wasn't a civil war-- but for all intents and purposes, it was.

just like how for all intents and purposes, vietnam was a civil war: one nation, artificially cleaved in two, trying to be one with each other again and then being pushed to fight against those that they love...

the way i see it, the nkoreans forfeited their right not to be invaded and overtaken the instant they invaded skorea. china --and mao-- should have kept the fvck out, and perhaps maybe some saber rattling on our side may have stopped them from interfering. i honestly doubt it, however, since mao's personality as such was to crusade and bring about more of his fvcked up revolution to asia.

[gsmoove23]

Q Cubed, the moralistic arguement of wiping out communism in N. Korea is useless for the time since the RoK was hardly a paragon of democracy. It was power gaming between capitalism and communism and nothing more. S korea may have had an arguement to invade and occupy N. Korea but the US and UN did not.

Furthermore, China and Russia had as good an arguement to interfere n N.Korea as we had to keep missiles out of Cuba. It was in the reasonable interests of their own security that a directly bordering country was not closely allied to a power hostile to them.

[Q Classic]

never have i said that skorea was a paragon of democracy. it still isn't, what with political enemies conveniently smeared with charges of having corrupt family members or communist links...

wait...

===

i'm well aware that skorea hasn't been the epitome of democracy. what are you expecting? the nation was barely third world in the aftermath of the war, constantly under the threat and pressure of more soviet/communist aggression, and conveniently ignored by pretty much everyone else in the world. the conditions were ripe for an authoritarian regime.

even so, how does that make the moralist argument useless?
had the un soundly defeated the inmungun and the pla, you wouldn't have the human rights violations on the scale you have today in nkorea. far fewer people would have suffered under the stalinist thuggery of the "great leader". quite possibly, no terrorist acts would have occured in skorea. families in korea wouldn't be split in two, with neither party being able to see each other.

i don't know about you, but between a stalinist state and an authoritarian regime that's ostensibly a democracy, i'd pick the latter. at least in the latter one the chances of human rights violations are several times smaller, and odds are slightly better that you'd be able to escape to a friendlier country.

in truth, when has an aggressor nation not been itself invaded, once it found itself on the losing side? you forfeit your right to not be invaded and occupied the instant you invade someone else, at least for the duration of that war--and that's what the korean war was. if you look at it as two separate nations, both of them lost their right to not be invaded and occupied; if you look at it as a civil war, it was one nation trying to solve an internal conflict, and both sides brought in outside assistance.
there's no "may have had an argument", skorea HAD an argument: fight and defeat the aggressor nation, and reunify all of korea under one banner (it is interesting to note that both governments declared themselves as the only official government of the entire peninsula). its allies, which pretty much boiled down to the UN, are therefore obliged to assist in obtaining those objectives--and that they tried to do.

as for the second part of your post... mao was going to invade/support nkorea anyway, security issue or not. your point?

[gsmoove23]

Whats happening now is kind of irrelevant, they could have hardly foreseen it in the 50s. Should we have helped our allies the S. Koreans take all of the peninsula? Not directly. It was more along the lines of a mutual defense pact and certainly not, we'll help you acheive all of your desires. We have our own concerns to worry about first.

As for Mao supporting N.Korea, he said if UNO forces passed the 38th he would support N.Korea, then if they get withing 20 miles of the border. He was willing to offer a good deal of leeway, and his entering the war was hardly certain.

[Q Classic]

gsmoove, that wasn't the case at all.

a) there was a mutual defense pact; however, the un was not bound by said mutual defense pact.
b) the countries that contributed did so on a voluntary basis. if they had their own concerns, perhaps they wouldn't have sent anyone.
c) mao's statement about the crossing was only political posturing. as i've referenced in a previous post, mao's actions prior to china's entry into the war were all about preparing for engagement. mao himself saw the korean conflict as a means by which the asian revolution could be used to beat back american "imperialism" and "arrogance"--and this was in july 1950, scarcely 1 month into the war (ch4, Mao's China and the Cold War; Chen Jian, 2001).
his entry into the war was all but certain.

besides, it's a moot point: i'll explain it to you very carefully now. there's no way you're ever going to get me to budge on this particular matter. why? because although my family comes from the south, i have never met, and probably will never meet, the thin branch of my family that got stuck in that godforsaken northern half. as far as i'm concerned, there is no way that the un destroying the communist north and unifying it under an authoritarian but ostensibly democratic korea couldn't be morally justified.