SDonell73@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 12/20/02 11:28:26 AM Pacific Standard Time, Home@DanSources.com writes:
Again we were caught in Korea.....BLINDLY unprepared.... and held to a draw.
IMO there was no way that we could have won the war for the entire peninsula, but we could have won the war, if we'd stopped at the shortest waist of Korea, from Wonsan to Pyongyang. There would have been plenty of time to build up defenses to brace against any possible Chinese attack. But hindsight is 20-20.The success of the Marine Corps, especially at Inchon, and the combined X Corps and 8th Army thrust to push the North Koreans out of South Korea led to "victory disease," in which all of the UN forces in Korea thought that they couldn't be stopped regardless of the situation, in their quest to reunite the entire peninsula as a non-Communist country.
It was short sighted at best, to ignore China's repeated warnings that they would attack if certain lines were crossed and a gross intelligence failure to anticipate what the Chinese, and possibly the Soviets, would do when approaching their borders.
Sandy