Korean War Lessons

From the Korean War we, the United States, should learn that Communism is spreading across Asia and we cannoth afford nor are prepared enough for a war against the Soviet Union and its allies. It is clear that communism is spreading because in 1949 China became a communist country. When the Japanese troops left North Korea the Soviet Union took control of it and turned the government into a "Soviet-style-one-party system"(3). North Korea became a one-party system because a Soviet leader was trained by USSR and controled what went on and etcetera in North Korea.

Our overall aims in Korea is to get communism out, or the least get the Soviet Union out. The Soviet Union is getting out of control as seen in eastern Europe where all the satellite-nations are controlled by the Soviet Union, this is going to happen to North Korea, which is why evasive action must be taken because the Soviet Union is getting too powerful. As said by Senator Tom Connally "If the UN is ever going to do anything, this is the time, and if the UN cannot bring the crisis in Korea to an end then we might as well just wash up the United Nations and forget it," which is true because if we don't stop the spread in communism and the control the Soviet Union could have, like in Korea, than they will become too powerful and we wont be able to stop them.

However, we cannot win this war without more allies, the leader of South Korea, Chiang, is not taking advantage of all of the citizens he has. Mao, on the other hand, is offering land benefits and more to the peasants making them want to go to North Korea, which they have done. Without the same amount of effort from Chiang as us we cannot completely take out communism because we will just simply be out-numbered.

Although, with the help of the other members of the United Nations, such as Britain, we have been able to push more communism out of North Korea. Britain and the other members have supplied a decent amount of soldiers to give us somewhat of an upper hand, but without the boycott by USSR in the United Nations we probably never would have been able to attack North Korea. If the USSR hadn't boycotted the UN than they most likely would have used their veto to not pass the petition to help out South Korea.

I believe we could have done more, but without the cooperation of Chiang and not losing as many south koreans we could not have done so. The United States partially achieved its goals because there is still communism in North Korea that is highly influenced, if not controled, by the Soviet Union. Also, North Korea has more land controlled by them than we do, we need to push them farther north. Though we must be extremely careful because if we were to go pass the Yalu River, as General Macarthur almost did, than we would also be in a war with China which would probably be followed by a declaration by the Soviet Union saying that they were going to war against us as well.

General Macarthur did help us to achieve some of our goals at one point, which were to drive the Soviets and communism out of North Korea. He had pushed the 'border' of South Korea almost to the Yalu River, where then we had faced problems with China. China is also a communist country, as declared in 1949, which made us predict that the Soviet Union would help their communistic allies in fighting a war against the United States. This would be terribly bad because we are not ready or prepared for a third world war. General Macarthur is doing his best to push communism and the Soviets out of North Korea.

Although Macarthur did help us achieve some of his goals his ideas would have lead us into trouble. China had declared that if we were to go over the Yalu River they would declare war on us, and we had predicted that USSR would help them. That would have been extremely bad because the United States is not ready for a third world war. Macarthur, however, wanted to use nuclear bombs on China and invade it, which would have caused a third world war possibly. We just couldn't have it, so President Truman fired him, and there is proof of his intentions in the war. Macarthur had said that "had they (the Chinese) intervened in the first or second months it would have been decisive, (but) we are no longer fearful of their intervention. Now that we have bases for our Air Force in Korea, there would be the greatest slaughter." So General Macarthur would have brought the United States into war with China and probably USSR too.

Overall, the casualties of the Korean War were great (a total of 1.4 billion), but most were on North Korea and China's side (780,000 soldiers and civilains were killed). Although the people that got the most casualties was all of Korea, with North Korea being the most and South Korea coming next with 570,000 civilians and soldiers killed. American and UN soldiers have lost the least amount of soldiers and civilians at 34,500 deaths.

As one can see, past president Truman's "containment" plan was somewhat successful. His plan allowed us to push communism and the Soviet Union somewhat out of North Korea, but it did allow us to stop the spread of communism and USSSR in becoming too powerful. However, communism did spread to China, stayed in North Korea, and almost got us into a third world war. We were not able to send military equipment and funds to China to stop communism or in North Korea, on the other hand we were able to do this in South Korea where it did not succumb to communistic ideologies. Although, the containment system almost got us into another major war by another communistic nation warning us of a war against us. The system calls us to help countries who are trying to rule out communisms by supplying them with funds and arms, but we went beyond in trying to cross the Korean border into China were they had already declared that they were communist and weren't rebelling. I believe that containment has served the United States well, but I think that we can make something better that will prevent us more from getting into war with other nations.