Re: 50 years ago today - 1 Aug 1950

[Ed Evanhoe <ede@oio.net>]

>Hi Ron,


Thanks for your opinion.  You are right about putting in small personal 
anecdotes
but "50 years ago today" is only intended to give an overview of what was
going on.  At that time, as most of us know, things were grim and lives, and
space, were being traded to buy time.

You can rest easy.  Korea was not practice game.  Based on a number of recently
documents from the Soviet archives that have come to light in the past few 
years,
it is pretty clear it was an all-out attempt by Kim Il Sung to take over 
the entire
Korean Peninsula and turn it into a communist state.  Both the Soviet Union and
PRC were not enthusiastic about the invasion/war but went along since they 
saw it
as a winning situation for them.  For the PRC a victory meant they would 
have friendly
communist country on their northeast flank and one which would give total 
freedom in
the Yellow Sea, thus allowing the PRC to concentrate on taking Taiwan.  For 
the Soviets,
a communist Korea meant the Sea of Japan would become a de facto Soviet 
lake, plus Korea would become a launching point for possible future 
operations against US forces
Japan should a war happen.  Unfortunately, US policy makers didn't see 
these objectives
at that time so had more or less written Korea off as "unimportant," that 
is, until the invasion actually happened and they suddenly realized what a 
communist Korea would mean to the Far East.  (My personal conclusions)

Ed

>





>    I'm not a big believer in conspiracy theory but I keep a nagging 
> suspicion
>of what the Korean War was all about.
>    When I went to "spy" school we learned Chinese and Russian and not one
>word of Korean. And throughout the war I had a lot of interplay with the
>Russians and Chinese and none with the Koreans.
>    A book was written after the war about the fact that the Korean war was
>actually about the upcoming and imminent war with USSR and that would be an
>atomic war. Korea was a warm-up game, a ruse.  Do you know the book? I can
>give you dozens of examples of this but you know them all.
>    It would make me sad to know we lost all those lives in a practise game.
>
>Ronald D. Schultz
>Moraga, CA
>
>

Ed Evanhoe, PO Box 916, Antlers, OK, 74523
Author: DARKMOON: Eighth Army Special Operations in the Korean War
Member: American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA)
Life Member:  Special Forces & Special Operations Associations
Co-list owner: KOREAN-WAR-L   Web site:  http://www.korean-war.com
PGP public key available on request