After 3 years of fighting the Korean War, how many soldiers did the United States lose? The statistical gap between China and the United States is too large (Part 2)
Why is there such a big difference?
In fact, the data of both sides are not too big a problem, the reason for so many differences, in addition to the different standards of statistics, the objects of statistics are also different, this difference is the main reason for the data gap between the two parties.
In the process of statistics, the US side only calculates the Americans, while the Chinese side calculates the "US military" when it comes to statistics.
In the U.S. military, there were a large number of Koreans, especially after the U.S. commander was replaced by MacArthur to Clark, and a large number of Koreans were introduced into the U.S. army.
In the U.S. army, the infantry and vanguard are mainly Koreans, so the Koreans suffered extremely high casualties in the war, and because these Koreans belonged to the U.S. army, the Chinese also counted the Killed Koreans among the American soldiers killed.
If the casualties of the United States and South Korea are compared with the data of the killed personnel released by our side, the data difference is within an acceptable range, that is to say, the data given by both sides of the casualty are basically equal.
From this point of view, the data of both sides is actually correct.
Why did the United States change its own data later
Strictly speaking, due to the rigor of U.S. statistics, the data in U.S. statistics will be less than the real data. Moreover, at that time, the Soviet Union and the United States were in a period of competition for hegemony, and in order to improve its international image, the United States would also deliberately improve the strictness of data statistics.
And according to the U.S. military pension policy, reducing the number of war deaths means reducing the pension of soldiers, so U.S. officials are willing to use strict criteria to count the number of casualties.
Obviously, this practice will make some soldiers less than they deserve to be evaluated, and it will also make the families of the corresponding soldiers not get the compensation they deserve, and the American people will begin to demonstrate and resist this matter.
In order to quell these increasingly fierce resistance, the United States had to recalculate the casualties of U.S. troops in the Korean War after the war. But in July 1973, a fire broke out at the Military Personnel Documentation Center in St. Louis, Missouri, and it took the United States 22 hours to extinguish the fire.
The fire took place on the sixth floor, which happened to be the place where the Korean War archives were managed, and the files of military personnel involved in the Korean War were severely damaged. Subsequently, the United States announced that the Korean War data was lost, and it was no longer possible to accurately identify the relevant data.
Since 1992, the American nation has spontaneously established the Korean War Memorial, which was completed in 1995, which counted 54,000 soldiers who died through the collection of Korean War data. Subsequently, the United States also generally acknowledged this figure, but they still insisted that 33,000 casualties were in the Korean War battlefield, and the additional casualties occurred outside the Korean War battlefield.
epilogue
Judging from the casualties of one battle after another, the death data released by the United States is basically correct, and the American casualty data released by China is also correct, one side's statistics are only American casualties in the war, while the Chinese statistics are the entire American army including South Koreans. It's just that the United States' approach to data and South Koreans has been strongly opposed by South Koreans.
