r/Documentaries • u/pradeep23 • 2d ago
War The Battle of Chosin : American Experience (2016) [01:53:38] NSFW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nUf-pdDA6w•
u/pradeep23 2d ago
Submission Statement: On Thanksgiving Day, 1950, US Army troops pushed north through the Korean peninsula to drive North Korea's Communist army out of democratically-held South Korea. Within days, they were surrounded by more than 85,000 Chinese soldiers. View the intense battle in intimate detail in this vivid narrative of combat and survival in the first major military clash of the Cold War.
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u/Senshado 2d ago
In 1950 South Korea was a dictatorship under Syngman Rhee. He did make verbal claims to being a democracy, but that was a lie.
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u/haribobosses 2d ago
Worth remembering that American heroism obliterated korea. No place on earth was bombed as dramatically as Korea, year on year, in terms of area except Laos. It’s a small peninsula and was completely flattened by US bombs. As much as 1/5 of the population of the north was killed. US troops deliberately blew up dams, with thousands of people being washed away downstream. America occupies South Korea to this days with tens of thousands of troops and ultimate say over their own military in wartime.
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u/Mushroom_Tip 2d ago
America occupies South Korea to this days
Poll after poll shows South Koreans approve of US military bases. Probably because they remember when North Korea decided to invade their country and annex it under the Kim Il Sung regime. They occupied Seoul and executed thousands of people who they saw as enemies of communism.
Even after the war, North Korea continued to kidnap innocent people, commit acts of terror, hijack airplanes, and other acts of provocation, which only solidified South Korean opinion of US bases.
North Korea created this problem all for themselves.
US military presence in South Korea was minimal until they decided to invade.
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u/_xAdamsRLx_ 2d ago edited 2d ago
Mr history understander right here guys, the Koreans are actually the real invaders on the korean peninsula, and the US empire is there to save the Koreans from themselves (by non stop carpet bombing civilian populated areas)! Yippee!
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u/Mushroom_Tip 2d ago
Yeah, I'm sure South Koreans are very upset right now they didn't get absorbed into North Korea and aren't living under a songbun system where they are a hostile class one step away from starvation and a concentration camp.
Typical Redditor not caring what the people of the country actually want, instead talking down to them and lecturing them on what they need to feel and support.
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u/haribobosses 2d ago
Im sure the South Koreans wanted brutal dictatorships for the first 30 years of their country’s history. They chose that, right?
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u/Mushroom_Tip 2d ago
They did a great job of overthrowing it and continue to hold their politicians accountable when they start grasping for too much power to this day.
I wish for the North Koreans to do that one day. Do you also wish for that?
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u/haribobosses 2d ago
Obvi. All people. All over the world. Full political and economic and human rights and sovereignty.
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u/haribobosses 2d ago
Pretty sure North Korea didn’t divide or occupy Korea after WWII.
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u/Mushroom_Tip 2d ago
Pretty sure they asked Stalin for approval to invade and annex the South.
Both countries were still rebuilding from the brutal Japanese occupation before the North decided that more warfare and death is what is needed.
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u/haribobosses 2d ago
I think they wanted less foreign occupation and a unified peninsula. And also land reform, which the south’s western-titled leadership would never allow.
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u/carolinaindian02 2d ago edited 2d ago
South Korea implemented land reform starting in 1949.
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u/haribobosses 2d ago
Ok that’s true. A modest land reform done as a direct response to the north having done the same and as a way to temper pro-communist sentiment in the south.
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u/Mushroom_Tip 2d ago
A unified peninsula under Kim Il Sung, which is why it had to be done through force.
And now many decades later, South Koreans are living much butter than North Koreans.
What's interesting is that despite the North being the most industrialized and miniral rich part of the peninsula and the South being the rural agricultural area, South Korea is now the 5th largest economy in the world.
Turns out all those land reforms didn't do shit for North Korea.
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u/haribobosses 2d ago
I wonder what harmed North Korea’s economy.
Probably all internal problems and nothing to do with geopolitics, like Cuba.
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u/Mushroom_Tip 2d ago
North Korea was doing fine, even better than the South for most of its history. Then the USSR started giving less aid and then collapsed entirely and it turned out that for all the juche talk, it was completely reliant on the teet of the Soviet Union and didn't do all that much to have a good economy.
But what makes you think Kim Il Sung was any more credible or legitimate to take over the entire peninsula than Park Chung Hee?
Kim Il Sung was also a dictator installed into power by a big power that was looking for a puppet loyal to them.
There was no agreement of any kind that if the peninsula was to be unified that it would be the North that would have control of the whole thing.
Maybe it was needless war the North started and everyone would be better without it.
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u/haribobosses 2d ago
I compare Kim to Syngman Rhee not Park. Park was a Japanese collaborator tho. Rhee was an aristocrat and pretty much American-educated, so not someone I think represented Korea very well. Kim at least had fought the Japanese, fought for Korean independence.
But there was more pro communist sentiment in the country as a whole than pro-western, and the repression in the South was not matched in the north so Kim weirdly seems to represent the national will post war more than Rhee.
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u/Mushroom_Tip 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yet Kim was installed there by the Soviet Union and owed his new found power to them. It's much easier to just stay nobody had a mandate to unite the country through warfare and it should not have happened.
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u/AutoRedialer 2d ago
Completely devoid of context. Mass killings of who exactly? Just glossing over the conditions of post ww2 South Korea and the collaborationist regime with Japan.
Americans were bad here. Simple as. Citing polls that Koreans love their US occupation…the pro US propaganda smells like urine.
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u/Mushroom_Tip 2d ago
Who do you think deserved to be mass executed? What context do you need?
Americans didn't start the war. The North decided that after many torturous years of brutal Japanese occupation, that what the peninsula needed was more war when both sides could have just kept rebuilding.
The fact that you defend that is sickening.
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u/mrjosemeehan 2d ago
The government the US propped up was the one doing the pre-war mass killings. The government of the south was a brutal dictatorship holding on to power via widespread slaughter and repression. Tens of thousands died. That was the context in which the war started.
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u/Mushroom_Tip 2d ago
The Soviet installed dictator started his own purges, killings, and sent people to labor camps early on. Almost half a million Koreans fled to South Korea after Kim was put into power and started purges.
Both were ruthless dictators.
Implying the North invaded the South to "free" them from oppression is comical.
More like Kim saw the existence of South Korea as a threat to his absolute power.
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u/AutoRedialer 2d ago
Defending it is sickening? I want you to remember something: Imperial Japan in Korea was capital B Bad. I recommend refreshing yourself with Japanese occupation in Asia. You think you know bad, but you don’t understand how bad. So what you are inadvertently doing is telling Koreans who fought imperial Japan that they are sick.
So take a second and think of history as series of people responding to Bad things. Now ask: why did North Koreans kill so many people?
Collaborators with the Japanese. Gangsters. These are the people that were already being prosecuted before the North Koreans. When the collaborators were granted power by a leading United states general and prosecutions stopped, North Koreans identified US military occupation and intervention into the purging of Japanese collaborators as threatening to extend the long night of war and colonialism. Remember that the North is where the Japanese advanced halted. North Koreans were used to fighting and killing the enemy. This “peacetime” resurgence of the class of people who dominated Korea was a plain threat, made even more plain by the imperial power that was openly hostile to communism.
And for many decades after the Korean War, South Korea was a military dictatorship led from ww2 collaborators with the Japanese
So from North Koreas perspective, it makes a lot more sense, and their mobilization of troops looks a lot more like a reaction to the buildup of troops and unfriendly government than “starting the war”.
I think when we ignore this perspective and go “commies evil,” we lose track of how US interventionism props up a lot of strife unnecessarily.
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u/TakayamaYoshi 2d ago edited 2d ago
Anyone with slight knowledge of geopolitics knows that US occupies South Korea is NOT there to defend democracy, but rather to control/balance the eastern end of the eura-asia, aka the Soviet Union and China. South Korea could have been a dictatorship (in fact it was until 1987, nearly 40 years after the Korean War) and US would have done the same.
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u/Mushroom_Tip 2d ago
Nobody ever said anything about defending democracy. South Koreans are more than capable of defending their own democracy. Even now they hold their politicians' feet to the fire if they get too power hungry. They are also capable for making it very clear if someone overstays their welcome, like the US and its bases, for instance.
They tolerate US presence to deter North Korea.
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u/ZamboniJ 2d ago
Typical leftist revisionist history in the above here
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u/_noho 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yeah, if we’re going by terms of area which I believe is what their talking about it goes Vietnam->Laos->Germany->Malta
Could be wrong, it was a quick search without any real research, I think Malta is on the list just because of how the size of its territory and sheer number of bombs dropped on it
Edit* nevermind, after a bit of actually researching it North Korea was bombed to all hell and may rank number 1 like op said. God damn, it’s crazy. Not to say that South Korea shouldn’t have been protected, especially when considering its recent history(to the time) of being invaded and utterly fucked, they deserved some help
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u/PrecedentialAssassin 2d ago
Which part do you think is revisionist? Because we did obliterate North Korea with bombing. We dropped more bombs on them than we did Germany or Japan. Most of the bombing was indiscriminate bombing of Korean cities. We did target and bomb dams resulting in catastrophic losses from flooding. And Curtis Lemay himself assessed that 20% of the North Korean population died during the war.
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u/scottrycroft 2d ago
"America occupies South Korea to this day"
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u/haribobosses 2d ago
You think if public sentiment shifted and they voted out American bases the Americans would just leave?
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u/scottrycroft 2d ago
So you think having some military bases in another country is an occupation?
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u/haribobosses 2d ago
It depends how the bases got there in the first place, right?
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u/MunkSWE94 2d ago
So then Russia and China still occupy North Korea.
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u/haribobosses 2d ago
How so?
North Korea has no foreign troops stationed in the country. No foreign bases, zero.
South Korea hosts Americas largest overseas base, Camp Humphries, and has nearly 30,000 soldiers in the country at all times.
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u/scottrycroft 1d ago
So it's not military bases by itself that determines whether it's an occupation, which was the point.
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u/haribobosses 1d ago
I thought the point was Korea.
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u/scottrycroft 1d ago
Yeah, the point is Korea is NOT occupied by the US in any common usage of the word.
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u/AutoRedialer 1d ago
This is so crazily American to believe that having a military base in another country is normal and not Empire from Star Wars level crazy.
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u/scottrycroft 1d ago
Do you think embassies are an occupation?
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u/AutoRedialer 1d ago
Im sorry but being dense isn’t a right. Military bases. We’re talking military bases as a component of occupation and you’re talking about embassies. I’m done here.
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u/scottrycroft 1d ago
You have no definition of what an occupation is that makes any sense
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u/howardhughesbrain 19h ago
It took the cia a lot of work for your factual comment to be downvoted like that by a public that thinks they’re educated.
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u/CzarDale04 2d ago
My stepfather was there. He passed away in 1994. He was a retired Marine Gunnery Sergeant who served for 22 years.
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u/bald_and_nerdy 1d ago
My grandfather met one of the survivors. He referred to them as the Chosin Few. Tough all around.
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u/CzarDale04 1d ago
My Stepfather told us about the retreat across the frozen reservoir. How they would walk so long and then change their socks with another pair that they kept inside their shirt over and over. It was shorter to walk across then to go around. He also served in Vietnam, by then he was a utilities sergeant and mostly worked on bases. But there was a few stories from then too.
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u/AutoRedialer 2d ago
It is important to cover the US occupation of the southern Korean Peninsula post WW2, which included “gangsterismo,” a tactic to crack down on socialist doing land reform in South Korea. Before the war, the US worked with the existing South Korean power base (aka the people who collaborated with the Japanese) to do many awful things to the people of Korea. The North was popular all over the peninsula for actually fighting the Japanese, yet the US and UN made deals with the collaborationist South. Given these tensions, it is understandable why the North might see US military buildup in the southern peninsula as a threat.
And they were right. More ordinance was dropped on North Korea then was used in all of WW2, a foreshadowing of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. All so that South Korea could be a military dictatorship for another 35 years. The US then bankrolled the Korean (and Japanese) economies to create Samsung, LG, etc while the North struggled to rebuild. Democracy in the Korea? Only if you include the silencing of half the people by arbitrarily drawing a border and overwhelming murdering the other population first.
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u/ChuckMoore89 1d ago
Sucking down propaganda slop gets you updoots but people pointing out the US' flagrant and widespread war crimes against the Korean people gets mass downvoted
Lol this sub sucks
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