Note: Has obtained the original author "learn to live simple" distribution authorization, reprint please indicate the source.
The Korean War, the largest local war that had a profound impact on our country and the world pattern after World War II, is still fresh in the minds of countless people. In this war, the blood of hundreds of thousands of our martyrs soaked this land, and a powerful great wall of steel was forged with the will of flesh and blood. The result was forcing the world's most powerful opponent to sit at the negotiating table and sign the first unwinned agreement.
The Korean War was a war of great scale, and since it was a war, it would be composed of one battle after another, one campaign after another, during which countless fierce and classic battles and battles broke out in the confrontation between the two sides, and what we want to talk about here today is the most tragic bloody battle on Chosin Lake.
There is a lot of information about this bloody war today, and friends may be very familiar with it, but most of them are understood from our point of view, however, human wars are cruel and realistic, and throughout the ages, it is inevitable that any side of the battle, whether for political or propaganda purposes, will inevitably have more or less exaggerated and demeaning elements. Today, let's change the perspective and interpret this battle from an objective and fair standpoint, which may give you a new perspective and may also give you some deeper understanding of this battle.
This is a series, and when it comes to this battle, we have to first introduce the background behind this war.
In fact, the Korean Peninsula has always been a place where lips and teeth are attached to the Chinese nation. As a vassal of the Chinese Empire in history for thousands of years, it is deeply influenced by Chinese culture. However, surprisingly, although this is a land of bullets, in the era of cold weapons, its national strength is weak, and it is not a place where soldiers must fight.
But this small peninsula has never caused trouble for the Central Plains Dynasty in history. The fall of the Sui Dynasty was caused by the failure of two expeditions to Goryeo, and our emperor of the ages, Tang Taizong, also suffered so much in the conquest of this land that he never dared to easily send troops to this land. From this, we can see the tough side of this small neighbor.
For modern Korea, with the beginning of the hot weapons occupying a major position, with the change of the international situation, the geographical location gradually began to highlight its importance, all of which are inseparable from the rise of a country. Let's start with the international background of this peninsula at that time.
After the Meiji Restoration, Japan began to adopt a strategy of external expansion with the strength of the country, and developed a strong interest in the Northeast Asian continent. And North Korea served as a springboard for Japan to ascend to Northeast Asia, and in this way, the Korean Peninsula suddenly became important to China, Japan, and Russia. It has become a place where soldiers must fight.
According to common sense, As a long-standing clan in China, Korea is of the same origin, if not the same ethnic group, in race. Logically, there should be an innate sense of closeness to China. However, due to the natural unruly character of the Koreans, coupled with the poverty and weakness of modern China, they cannot take care of themselves. Since the defeat to the Japanese in the Battle of Jiawu in the late Qing Dynasty, Korea has been basically abandoned. Caused a long period of alienation from us.
After the fall of Korea to Japan, the subsequent targets of Japanese aggression were directed at the neighboring northeast of China, and in the later Beiyang and Republic of China periods, in the face of the Japanese's step-by-step advance, these governments continued to retreat step by step, and eventually most of the cities in northeast China also became the Japanese sphere of influence before World War II. The importance of this major industrial base in the northeast to our country at that time was self-evident, which is also one of the important reasons why we must send troops.
After the surrender of Japan, with the defeat of Japan, the north of Korea was occupied by the Soviet Union, the south was occupied by the US army, and Korea was divided into two countries, after the surrender of Japan, North Korea was randomly divided into two Koreas with a pencil by an unknown employee of the US Department of Defense.
Lee Seung-yeung, a nationalist exiled overseas during Japanese rule in South Korea, supported by the U.S. military, took power at night. However, objectively speaking, in the early days of the partition of North Korea, the attention of the two superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union was in Europe, and neither of them had the will to provoke confrontation in North Korea.
Let's look at the military power comparison between the north and the south.
In North Korea, the Soviet army had been withdrawn, and at that time, North Korea had no regular army except for the 40,000 or 50,000 guerrillas left behind during the anti-Japanese war in the Soviet Union, China and other places. Although the Soviets left some units that could form several divisions, they lacked offensive heavy weapons such as tank cannons.
Compared with North Korea's military equipment, South Korea is even more pitiful. At least the North Korean army is highly organized and disciplined. The South Korean army, on the other hand, consisted mainly of puppet armies and police during the Japanese occupation, scattered and scattered. The weapons were also mainly obsolete equipment left behind by Japan's surrender.
Rhee also hoped that the U.S. military would provide heavy weapons into the formation, but the Americans feared that Rhee had an attempt to move north, even though thousands of U.S. military weapons in the country were piled up in warehouses. However, the purchase list of aircraft tanks and cannons listed by Syngman Rhee has been ignored. Therefore, although the US military did not completely withdraw from South Korea in 1949 and 1950, it was impossible for the South Korean army to take the initiative to attack North Korea from the perspective of the equipment and combat effectiveness of Syngman Rhee's army.
With neither the two great powers behind the United States and the Soviet Union having the will to fight, war could not have been fought despite the fierce quarrel between North and South Korea in the first half of 1950. But history is always evolving. The following factors contributed to the outbreak of the final war.
1． Changes in U.S. policy. After the Truman administration came to power, it publicly stated that the Far East, Taiwan, and North Korea were not in the defense circle of the free world. This has led the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea to misjudge whether the United States will intervene in the event of war on the Korean Peninsula.
2． Kim Il Sung's determination to unify the Korean Peninsula. After kim Il-sung became the de facto ruler of North Korea, he made the unification of the Korean Peninsula a top priority. Therefore, in dealing with China and the Soviet Union, all diplomatic means were exhausted, in order to obtain the manpower and material resources to attack Korea. So when Rhee was just scolding the street every day, Kim Il Sung not only scolded back, but also sharpened his knife at Ho Ho.
Kim Il Sung of that year
3． After the end of the Chinese Liberation War, a large number of Ethnic Korean troops returned to North Korea. According to research, about forty percent of the Troops in the North Korean Offensive phase were from returning chinese troops. At the time of the war, North Korea had about 7 divisions and about 100,000 troops. The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Divisions were from Kim Il Sung's guerrillas, while the others, the 4th, 6th, and 7th Divisions were from Korean soldiers in Our Army's Shiye.
Unlike Kim Il Sung's guerrilla unit, the unit composed of four field soldiers, after three years of baptism in the Chinese Liberation War, has gone through dozens of regular battles and battles, large and small, with superb strategy and tactics and first-class quality of officers and men. In the later stages of the Liberation War, the four fields were basically pointed out by the soldiers, invincible and invincible. For example, the Sixth Division's initial collision with the US 24th Division was basically a crushing victory.
The Fourth Division and the Sixth Division, on the other hand, were both fully armored divisions from Shino, and the fusion of officers and soldiers was already pure. In fact, even in divisions made up of Korean guerrillas, most of the middle and senior officers were from Shino. Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to say that the troops returning from The Four Fields were the main force of Kim Il Sung's attack on South Korea, and it was also kim Il Sung's courage to launch a war.
4. Stalin provided Kim Il-sung with heavy offensive weapons for his southward advance. After Stalin confirmed that the United States would not interfere with Kim Il-sung's plan to unify Korea by force, he accepted the North Korean gold mortgage and provided a loan of $40 million to the North. Kim Il Sung used this money to buy a large number of T-34 tanks, Yak aircraft, and a large number of Soviet weapons and equipment from the Soviet Union.
In this way, the outbreak of this war has all the necessary elements, and the outbreak of war is inevitable.
After the general background is finished, there will be no more talk about the battles before the Second Campaign. There is a lot of information on the Internet. In a few words, it was Kim Il Sung who launched the war to unify the Korean Peninsula, and at first, it was so overwhelming that it almost drove the Americans out of the sea. However, by the time of the fifth campaign of the Korean People's Army, because the US army had decided not to abandon the peninsula at all, it began to increase its troops in large quantities, and the Korean People's Army had suffered a huge attrition after the previous battles, and it was the end of the crossbow, and MacArthur's Inchon landing was a fatal blow, which finally caused Kim Il Sung's troops to be defeated.
Inchon landing
After Kim Il Sung's attempt to unify the Korean Peninsula was completely unsuccessful, the U.S. military gradually burned the flames of war to the Yalu River, and under such circumstances, China was judged by international and domestic geopolitics and out of precautions against future threats to the northeast. After much deliberation, it was decided to go to war. The chairman persuaded most of the people who opposed the dispatch of troops at that time, resolutely and resolutely raised the banner of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, and hundreds of thousands of troops crossed the Yalu River to challenge the world's number one power.
In the first campaign, because the US-ROK coalition army did not expect our army to participate in the war, our army fought several small-scale encounters and ambush battles, won victories, and curbed the offensive momentum of the US army. By the time of the second campaign, the proud MacArthur still did not realize that our army was the strength of the country, so he still divided his troops into two fronts, hoping to end the war as soon as possible before Christmas 1950.
In the early stage of the war, our army actually sent the thirteenth and ninth combat corps, the most elite combat corps of our army, plus 9 corps such as the 50th Army and the 66th Army, as well as a small number of other branches of the army, totaling more than 400,000 people to participate in the war. In the first three battles of the war, Peng Dehuai, commander-in-chief of the Volunteer Army, made full use of the enemy's mentality of taking the enemy's light advance and rushing to end the war, and adopted tactics such as our army to lure the enemy deeper, concealed sneak attacks, and melee night combat to deal a heavy blow to the United Nations Army headed by the Eighth Army.
In the second campaign, the distribution of our army was the Ninth Corps of our Army against the US Tenth Army on the eastern front, and 4 corps of our 13th Corps on the Western Front, plus the 50th Army and the 66th Army, against the US Eighth Army. The six armies of our Thirteenth Corps on the Western Front, mainly the Third Army, achieved a complete defeat of the US Eighth Army, causing the enemy to lose a large amount of heavy equipment, and severely damaging the US Second Division and making it lose its combat effectiveness, and the complete victory of our army in the Second Campaign on the Western Front also indirectly led to the retreat of the Chinese and American armies in the Third Campaign.
On the Eastern Front, our Ninth Elite Reinforced Corps and the U.S. Tenth Army, led by the U.S. First Marine Division, also ushered in a real large-scale and fierce clash between the two armies in a place called Chosin Lake or Chosin Reservoir. This is the bloody battle of Chosin Lake that we are going to talk about today.
Map of Chosin Lake
Since the end of this battle to today's sixty years, there have been many differences in the observations and conclusions of each person from different angles and positions. Therefore, the summary of this battle is also a variety of opinions and opinions. Let's take a look.
From the perspective of our army, the Ninth Corps successfully forced back the US Tenth Army, allowed the US offensive to be contained, and withdrew from the eastern and western fronts to the 38th line. However, from the perspective of the battle itself, the final result was that in addition to the loss of nearly one regiment of the Seventh Division, the First Marine Division, except for a large number of frostbite, almost completely retreated, and its combat effectiveness was basically unaffected, and it could fight again at any time.
And my Ninth Reinforcement Corps, all of which are four or four systems, and have experienced hundreds of battles, are all elite soldiers. Such superior forces completely lost the combat effectiveness of the entire corps due to combat casualties and frostbite and frostbite. In the summary report of General Manager Peng afterwards, he said that the entire Ninth Corps could only be reorganized from nearly forty reorganized regiments at the beginning of the campaign to the end of the campaign, and the heavy casualties were shocking.
Battle of Chosin Lake
Such losses are indeed enormous, so now there is a saying that the US army won the Battle of Chosin Lake, and it is not unreasonable for our army to win face. But to be honest, there were many factors that affected such a major loss as the Battle of Chosin Lake. Some information you may already be familiar with, and some information you may not know yet. This article only objectively describes the process of the entire campaign, and I believe that readers will have their own judgment after reading it.
Because the victory over the five levels is certainly very exciting, but the summary of the lessons of Maicheng may be more meaningful to our strength!