Lexington When America and China went to war

摘要

SEVENTY YEARS ago this month, Mao Zedong's peasant army inflicted one of the worst military defeats on America in the country's history. Over two weeks his "volunteer" fighters drove an army of 350,000 American soldiers and marines and their Korean allies the length of North Korea, from the Chinese border to hasty evacuations by land and sea. Though the Chinese suffered terrible casualties in the process and the war would continue for another three years (and technically has not ended), the American-led un force never again threatened to reunify the peninsula.This humiliation was made worse by the fact that General Douglas MacArthur, the force's megalomaniacal supremo, had only weeks before assured Harry Truman that the Chinese would not cross the Yalu river. His commanders duly denied that they had. When that became incredible, they claimed the cruelly ill-equipped Chinese-wearing cotton uniforms and canvas shoes for a high-altitude war fought at minus 30°C-were not a serious foe. An American general called them "a bunch of laundrymen".