Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
pushing them back to north of the 38th parallel. In historical hindsight,
this retreat of North Korean forces probably should have been the end
of UN involvement in the war. But it did not end there, and by late
October the UN forces had advanced far into North Korean territory
and occupied Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. MacArthur con-
tinued to drive northward and to make reckless statements about
pushing on to the Yalu River (the boundary between China and Korea)
and even beyond it into China. The war in Korea was now suffering
from “mission creep” and was turning into an entirely new war.
Washington and the United Nations ignored repeated warnings from
China that it would not stand idly by if MacArthur continued in this
reckless plan. Finally, on November 26, 1950, millions of Chinese Com-
munist “volunteers” (many armed only with clubs or spears) who had
been massed at the Yalu River invaded Korea and swarmed southward
in overwhelming numbers, driving the UN forces southward to the 38th
parallel and beyond. The withdrawal in the face of Chinese human-
wave tactics was the longest retreat in the history of the U.S. Army. On
January 4, 1951, Chinese Communist troops captured Seoul, the capital
of South Korea. By April 1951, however, UN forces had once again
driven the Chinese and their North Korean allies back north of the
38th parallel. After this, MacArthur began talking again about advanc-
ing to the Yalu River. This was too much for President Truman, who
fired and recalled MacArthur on April 11. After this the war degener-
ated into a protracted conflict of attrition and stalemate. The Chinese
abandoned their earlier human-wave tactics and practiced classical
guerrilla warfare, resulting in thousands of UN casualties. The war
dragged on inconclusively until July 1953, when a cease-fire was
reached that essentially reestablished the prewar boundaries in Korea.
The Korean War was technically a UN action, but the United States
assumed a disproportionate amount of the war burden: 54,000 of the
57,000 non-Korean UN troops who died in combat were Americans.
China today regards the Korean War as an American operation and
seems to forget that the war was sanctioned by a vote at the United
Nations. Today, many patriotic mainland Chinese are fond of imagin-
ing that China “taught the United States a lesson” in the Korean War
by fighting the most powerful military machine in the world to a
standstill. Thus, in this view, China was announcing to the world that
the People's Republic was here to stay and that the Chinese military
was no longer the ragtag collection of listless and ineptly led ragamuf-
fins against whom Japanese forces had prevailed so easily during the
1930s in Manchuria. China's “victory” over U.S.-dominated forces in
Korea is, indeed, part of the national patriotic mythology in China. In
