Kim Jong-il links

Yes, I was taking a cheap shot. Actually, the intelligent reports were decent al the way to the White House. Keeping Lee Seung-man on a leash, by no giving him heavy weapons, also played a part in the invasion. I wonder if the Obama administration worries about 2MB the same way.

Everybody *knew*, rightly or not, that Li Chengwan would invade North Korea if given the equipment to do so. Washington thought that the Soviets would keep Jin Richeng on a leash and figured they’d reciprocate by doing the same with Li Chengwan. Too bad all the analysts were wrong. (Given the extent to which Federal agencies were penetrated by Soviet agents-in-place and sympathizers, it wouldn’t be surprising if some of them had fed disinformation to the responsible decision makers). The Korean War made clear to American liberals and conservatives alike that Communist expansionism wasn’t just an idea cooked up by paranoid kooks.

People who doubt South Korea’s ability to stand against Chinese troops need to realize that the Korean War involved the cream of Chiang Kai-shek’s surrendered troops against South Korean troops who were either completely green or had spent time during the Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars doing menial work for the Imperial Japanese Army. In no respect were the South Korean troops remotely as well-trained as the politically-suspect ex-Nationalist Chinese troops Mao sent to Korea for liquidation by combat.

The Chinese were the best infantry in the Korean War, with the possible exception of the Turks. They fought without artillery and air support, with substandard equipment, unable to travel by day, with broken supply lines, and with hardly anything to eat (most of them got by on one frozen potato per day). And they still drove US, UN and ROK troops from the Yalu back past the DMZ.

They did not control the air, but they had artillery, as any account of the Korean War will confirm. They also had the advantage of numbers and experience, whereas US and ROK forces were mainly green conscripts, until the US started re-drafting WWII vets (who were resentful at what they considered double jeopardy and vocal about it). Political battalions charged with killing Chinese stragglers were at least partly responsible for their high morale in combat, but these also contributed to appalling losses – almost a million PVA dead in just under three years of war. The Chinese also did well initially in large part because they did a Pearl Harbor-style surprise attack, against expeditionary forces that weren’t expecting a Chinese attack and were strung out along the route of march, rather than massed along a defensive line. Once the lines stabilized and UN logistics caught up, the Chinese died by the hundreds of thousands.

Note that China’s month-long invasion of Vietnam in 1979 reputedly resulted in 20,000 dead PLA troops, fighting against Vietnamese militia. While the Chinese are said to have inflicted almost equivalent casualties against the Vietnamese, those casualties were said to consist mainly of Chinese massacres of Vietnamese civilians.

Bottom line is that the Korean War featured surrendered Chinese Nationalist troops (many with experience from both the Sino-Japanese and Chinese Civil Wars) whom Mao had decided to liquidate in battle with UN Forces, against mostly green UN troops. Any new conflict in Korea would feature Chinese troops with no experience in battle against troops trained to NATO standards.

Having said that, I think infantry quality isn’t anywhere as important as it used to be, because the advent of precision bombing means that whatever country sweeps the other side’s skies free of aircraft will annihilate their ground forces. Aerial interdiction of enemy supplies has reached a whole new level of effectiveness, as Desert Storm’s Highway of Death affirmed. The Northern Alliance, which never won a battle before American intervention in Afghanistan, never lost a battle to the Taliban after the combined NATO air forces started hammering the Taliban from the air. Heck – the disorganized rabble mustered by the Libyan rebels managed to topple Gaddafi on the strength of a desultory air campaign, despite the fact that Gaddafi had the trained infantry on his side.

They fought without artillery and air support, with substandard equipment

By the way, the Chinese infantry were armed with burp guns, which were judged superior to the semi-automatic Garand for small unit engagements. From Wikipedia:

The North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) and the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) fighting in Korea received massive numbers of the PPSh-41, in addition to the North Korean Type 49 and the Chinese Type 50, which were licensed copies of the PPSh-41 with small mechanical revisions. The weapon was widely used during the entirety of the Korean War. Though relatively inaccurate, with a high rate of fire, the PPSh-41 was well-suited to the close-range firefights that typically occurred in that conflict, especially at night.[8] U.N. forces in defensive outposts or on patrol often had trouble returning a sufficient volume of fire when attacked by companies of communist infantry armed with the PPSh-41. Some U.S. infantry officers ranked the PPSh-41 the best combat weapon of the war; while lacking the accuracy of the U.S. M1 Garand or carbine, it provided more firepower at short distances.[8] As one infantry captain stated: “on full automatic it sprayed a lot of bullets and most of the killing in Korea was done at very close ranges and it was done quickly – a matter of who responded faster. In situations like that it outclassed and outgunned what we had. A close-in patrol fight was over very quickly and usually we lost because of it.”[8]