#132 – A LAND WAR IN ASIA
Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast
English - September 20, 2019 13:57 - 1 hour - 77.6 MB - ★★★★ - 137 ratingsHistory Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Kim's "invasion" of the South gave the US the pretext they needed to ramp up military spending via NSC-68 and to support Rhee directly and indirectly by committing one of the classic blunders: never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Admiral Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations, declared later: ‘I was fully aware of the hazards involved in fighting Asiatics on the Asiatic mainland, which is something that, as a naval officer, I have grown up to believe should be avoided if possible."
But they did it anyway.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 83 was pushed through - the Soviet Union did not veto it because it was still boycotting the Security Council - and Truman immediately decided to throw everything he had at Korea, shocking not just the Koreans, the Soviet and the Chinese, but also the British.
Truman call it a "police action", a phrase he would later regret.