Korean+War

Korean War
In the next year, 1950, nearly 600,000 North Korean soldiers, using equipment supplied by the Soviet Union, crossed the 38th parallel in an attempt by the Communist north to reunify the peninsula under Communist control. Coming so soon after the "fall" of China to communism, and the Soviet atomic bomb, the United States felt compelled to stand in the way. A lucky absence of the Soviet delegation at the United Nations Security Council deliberations (the Soviets were protesting events in the West by refusing to attend) allowed the United States to gain a unanimous approval from the Security Council for the use of UN troops to stop the North Korean invasion of the south. The majority of the soldiers used were from the United States, though there was significant participation from Australia, Great Britain, France, and even South Vietnam and Taiwan. By the time the nominally U.N. sponsored forces began to arrive, the South Korean army, with its American advisors, had been pushed back to the 140 mile-long "Pusan Perimeter" - a defensive line that for the most part followed the course of the Nakdong River, and surrounded and defended the city of Pusan, in the far Southeastern corner of the Korean Peninsula. This tiny remainder of South Korea was fighting to survive. Over the course of the summer of 1950, UN forces used a two-pronged strategy, fighting their way out of the Pusan perimeter with reinforcements brought in through the city of Pusan, and a daring beach landing leapfrogging the North Korean forces, and cutting their supply lines, at the central port city of Inchon. This strategy worked so well that by the fall and winter of 1950, the North Korean army was decimated and retreating, having been pushed back above the 38th parallel. However, flush with success, General Douglass MacArthur decided to attempt his own reunification of the Korean peninsula by trying to force the North Korean government to flee and destroy the North Korean army. The UN forces had clearly gone beyond their mandate at this point, and were fighting an aggressive war, rather than an action to reestablish the status quo of a division along the 38th parallel. Many policy analysts and historians see this as a turn toward US anti-communist policy, and an important turning point in the functions of the United Nations. That aside, though, MacArthur's armies were amazingly swift in driving the North Korean army out of Pyongyang (the North Korean capitol) and up to the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China. This drive, combined with big talk by MacArthur, unauthorized, but well-considered by high level policy makers and legislators in the United States, proposed the use of atomic weapons on Chinese military facilities in order to prevent their use by North Koreans, and even publicly mused on the possibility of reversing the 1949 Chinese Revolution. Although MacArthur's rash public words were probably not what drew the Chinese into the conflict, they certainly did not give China a reason to stay out of the war, either. As the UN forces reached the Yalu River, China began pouring soldiers across the Yalu and into North Korea to drive the UN forces back in late 1950. The eventual arrival of up to three million Chinese (the numbers of Chinese troops and casualties involved is still a matter of some dispute, though reputable historians including Jonathan Spence put casualties in the one million range, thus making a total commitment of three million not an unreasonable assumption). The Chinese onslaught caught the UN forces off guard, and drove them back, with a particularly disastrous few days at the Chosin Reservoir. UN forces, disorganized, fell back, and were nearly cut in two by the Chinese and North Koreans. The war continued in a back and forth over the 38th Parallel until 1953, when an armistice was signed. No peace treaty has ever been reached between North and South Korea, and they are still technically in a state of war with each other as of this writing.

Korean War and Cold War Policy
The Korean War had a major impact on US and Soviet policy. The United States, already in 1949 beginning to recognize the strategic importance of Japan as a wall against communist expansion in Asia, poured money in the the Japanese economy, making Japan its forward base for military operations, and a major point of acquisitions for military supply, even transferring technology and manufacturing processed. In this process, the Japanese economy, which was in the earlier occupation period to have evolved as an agrarian capitalist system of farmers and small businesses, had to be revamped to make more room for large corporations with the manufacturing capacity to supply the United Nations in the Korean War. The destruction of the //Zaibatsu// was halted, and in some cases reversed. more than 2 billion dollars (alot for that time) was spent in the Japanese economy to bring it up to speed, and the economic recovery - the so-called "economic miracle" was begun. At the same time, Japan had to be more self-sufficient, and ideologically, because the United States was using Japan as a forward base against communism, its population was perceived as needing innoculation against communist ideas. Right -wing politicians and businessmen, including a number of nationalist wartime politicians and bureaucrats, were freed from prison or rehabilitated, often given their old jobs back. Communist parties and labor unions got the sharp end of the whip, and were suppressed again, though with admittedly less brutality or finality than they had been before the war. This "reverse course" as it is called, changed the political and economic situation in postwar Asia dramatically after 1950, as Japan began the economic climb that would bring it to dominate Asia in terms of trade, and to become one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Eventually, Japan's economic direction would move toward exports, and the United States would become its biggest customer.