Talk:Korean War

I am sorry if this sounds childish. Professer Jensen may go stark raving mad if he reads this. But it's a start, right?Jeffrey Scott Bernstein 20:57, 9 October 2007 (CDT)

Okay, now don't forget to add your checklist to let the History and Military workgroups know that this article is here. They will find you, or you can ask them to take a look when you are ready. Matt Innis (Talk) 21:04, 9 October 2007 (CDT)

cold war

well I went raving mad some time ago. I revised the Cold War section because the domino model was not in use at the time (it was used for the Vietnam war later). Just containment.

NO! Do whatever you like! I am aware that my article sounded like a High School essay, haha. It may be rewritten totally someday . . . not by me . . . Be my guest!Jeffrey Scott Bernstein 01:34, 12 November 2007 (CST)

Adding and revising

Increasingly, I find that sane editing is done in the manner of eating an elephant: one bite at a time. Since I think elephants are very nice people, I can speak to editing, but not pachydermophagy, from personal experience. Incidentally, I'm doing this under my hat as a Military Workgroup editor, but can someone tell me how I might ask to be added as a History editor when I already have a CZ account?

I had a reasonable amount of information on hand regarding the intelligence, and to some extent special operations, activity leading up to the outbreak of the war, and the combination of MacArthur's supreme confidence and the hesitancy of the nascent intelligence community that led him to discount the possibility of Chinese intervention.

Perhaps the interested parties can split up the work to improve the overall article. Unfortunately, most of my library is in storage for a while, so I'm more dependent on online things that need detailed sourcing. On the other hand, I have a good deal of material, and the general source, in my head.

As far as books, I do recommend T.R. Fehrenbach's This Kind of War as an outstanding source. James Brady's The Coldest War is especially good for the retreat from the Changjin Reservoir. My feelings are mixed about S.L.A. Marshall's The River and the Gauntlet; I'd make sure to verify anything that seemed controversial.

There is a fair bit of decent official military history online.

In general, we need people to work on:

• The immediate response: TF Smith, the Bugout, capture of MG Dean, and the early air war (more about that later)
• Diplomacy and the UN resolution. US-ROK relations and command structures.
• Walker's tactical improvisations, Effects of the death of Walker and his replacement by Ridgway; Stabilization at the Pusan Perimeter. Walker sometimes doesn't get credit.
• Inchon (probably a whole sub-article) and the pursuit north
• the air war
• Chinese intervention and both the Marine retreat from Changjin Reservoir, and the destruction of TF Faith and other Army units, which many forget protected a Marine flank. Definitely cover Marine MG O.P. Smith's caution in preparing for a possible retrograde move; Smith may have been the only one to have been ready for the Chinese.

... and so forth.

Somewhere, there is probably a need for an article on war crimes. A relative was a young Navy fighter pilot during the Bugout; no one recognized the PTSD caused by his being in an impossible situation: the NKPA was using refugee columns for cover, attacking out of them, and the aviators were eventually ordered to strafe columns, regardless of apparent composition, from which they took fire. This was one of those situations where the pilots saw the effects. That situation had no good answers.

I can help out technically on the biological warfare accusations, especially since the U.S. capability at the time has been declassified in all relevant details. Howard C. Berkowitz 23:07, 12 May 2008 (CDT)

Some structural references

There's an interesting presentation at http://www.archives.gov/research/cold-war/conference/stueck.html, which suggests that Rees' classic structure of the war:

• "...origins of the war from World War II to the end of June 1950, when the United States committed ground forces to repulse the North Korean military offensive across the 38th parallel.
• ...Fall of 1950 and the decision of the United States to alter its objective from the containment of North Korea to its liberation from Communist rule, the subsequent decision by the People's Republic of China to intervene, and the resulting development of "an entirely new war" by the end of November.
• winter of 1950-51 through to the early summer of 1951, during which time the conflict shifted from a dangerous struggle that at any moment could have expanded into a regional or even a global war to a relatively static struggle characterized at the top level on both sides by a willingness to end the fighting short of clear-cut victory.
• armistice negotiations, from their beginning in July 1951 through to their stalemate over the prisoner-of-war issue in the spring of 1952 and their suspension by the United States in the following autumn.
• factors leading up to the resumption of negotiations in April 1953 through to the actual signing of an armistice three months later."

I don't think this is a bad outline. Where William Stueck, in the analysis at the link I gave, seems to suggest problems with Rees' analysis is not so much the timing of the phases of the war, but the significant insights that declassifications in the 1993-1998 period gave into the different thinking of Kim, Stalin, and Mao. Stueck also feels that most histoies give insufficient coverage to the U.S. side in the development of policy, especially the 1947-1950 battles between State and Defense.

Nevertheless, I'm going to try to see how well these five phases will work,and I think they do work well in describing the battlefield, if not the governmental thinking.Howard C. Berkowitz 22:14, 13 May 2008 (CDT)