Discussion UsefulNotes / TheKoreanWar

I agree with this 2-year-old sentiment. To that end, I've edited quite a bit, mostly based off of lecture notes from a course by Robert Citino as well as his book "Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm." More to come. Also, really cool stuff at that website - thanks for linking!

They pretty much were human zerg. They had plan A: to attack at short range with SM Gs, plan B was to just rush the place.

And like professional SC players using zerg, they did not rush blindly, but conducted attacks with a precise sense of timing—well, as precise as possible given the relative lack of radios. On the other hand, they were willing to accept greater casualty figures in order to achieve objectives, and did use full-on rushes as backup plans when infiltration tactics did not pan out.

And now we've gone so far to the other side that it's lost most semblance of balance and reality (especially since said things were in fact balanced towards the West) As shown by the fact that of the parties in the "Elite Army" segment, only *one* of them is not represented, and that was unarguably the most successful and powerful one, the combined Western Allied/United Nations Command.

The main reason for Chinese (and indeed a lot of other Communist losses) came from the fact that while they had developed a decent sense of coordination and organization in launching their attacks, they had royally miscalculated the extent to which it would be useful. They had gotten their spurs fighting against the Japanese military and the KMT, whose numerous problems have been discussed elsewhere but can basically be summed up into "Lack of quality training, lack of motivation, lack of equipment, and lack of supplies."

The problem with the Communist forces in this war was not that they were unsophisticated brutes, it was that the Western Allies were- after 1951- able to hit them with more than enough firepower to mash up said organization and huge portions of their strength and generally cause well-*planned* assaults and defenses to degenerate into a huge mass of dubiously armed and equipped infantry, who would then promptly be mauled to death by combined arms, especially the all around superior and still organizationally intact infantry. And even prior to 1951, the Western Allied defeats were really only grievious on the standards said Allies had gotten used to over the course of WWII and before, and were by and large far less severe than just about any comparable Nationalist defeat in the same situation.

Finally, the "source" presented is so utterly unreliable as to be unworthy of note. I don't want to spend an eternity debunking every single point in detail, even though from what I have seen I could do so *EASILY*, but to summarize this, Halberstam- who isn't exactly a rah-rahing Imperialist or chauvinist- notes things like the appearance of Chinese soldiers in Korea well before this point, the less that optimal Communist performances even in the early stages of the war with the KPA running over the South Korean and associated Western Allied troops, and numerous other problems.

I could go on, and on, and on, and on. But offhand, any and all citations and edits based off of this link should be *Blammed*, and kept off until substantiated by an actual, reliable source; any link that treats the (all too quantifiable) reports of Communist Chinese mistreatment of PO Ws as "Western Propaganda" is not worth the paper it is written on, and that's just one of the numerous offenses of a similar magnitude I could see in a brief overview of this thing. Just because it's worded in English and looks decently put together *does Not MEAN it is worth looking at.*

Fair points, fair edits of the page. Citino's book (and lecture) unfortunately didn't go into too much fine detail after the fighting stalemated (his work is obsessively focused on maneuver warfare and operational art), so his material speaks a lot more about the initial showing of North Korean / Chinese forces and MacArthur's use of X Corps, and a lot less about the combined-arms positional might of the US / UN forces. After 1951, the chapter pretty much says, "America got its s*** together and accepted a stalemate only due to political limitations," then wraps up and moves on to a huge section on the Arab-Israeli wars. Therefore, I'd be greatly interested in any further details you can chip in about the post-maneuver fighting.

Anyways. High five for wiki-magic.

Perhaps sadly true. There was a stronger social taboo against discussing things such as PTSD in the western nations at the time. On the other side, I'm not sure about North Korea, but while China may still remember the war, the government's treatment of veterans seems to be rather lacking.

Not just No_gun_Ri.

This wole list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_South_Korea should be mentioned. Moral Event Horizon applies to many of them.

Edit: As does What the Hell, Hero? as US and Western observers were present at several of them but nobody intervened