Destroyed all usual strategic targets in North

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The Korean war, which almost resulted in an American defeat in Korea, shattered a half-century of conventional wisdom and raised a critical dilemma. It immediately proved the limits of existing military strategy and technology against decentralised, non-industrial nations. Apart from political or humanitarian considerations, there were no decisive targets against which to employ the atomic military technology on which the U.S. had pinned the bulk of its hopes and money. After weakening its power everywhere else in the world, and embarking on what was to become the second most expensive war in its history, the United States.


Waged the Korean war with "conventional"


Arms intended for combat between industrial nations. Fought against comparatively poorly armed peasants, it was a war unlike any in modern history, and the Korean precedent reveals the principles and tactics whatsapp number database to emerge in Vietnam in a more intensive form. Within three months the U.S. Korea and over the last two years of the war it dropped about six times the tonnage used during the first year. Camps for non-combatants contained over 400,000 persons under guard, one-eighth of whom died of disease and starvation. Half the South Korean population was homeless or refugees by early 1951, 2.5 million were refugees at war's end, twice that number were on relief, over one million South Korean civilians died, and estimates of North Korea's losses are greater yet.



As Major General Emmett O'Donnell


Jr., head of the Far Eastern Bomber Command, reported to the Senate in mid-1951: "I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is just a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed. There is nothing standing worthy of the name." The Korean war, in brief, became a war against an entire nation, civilians and soldiers, Communists and anti-Communists alike, with everything regarded as a legitimate target for attack. By 1953, when the U.S. was farther from military victory or mastery than in the fall of 1950, the most important undamaged targets were the twenty irrigation dams so vital to the rice crop and civilian population of the North.