DBWI - 'Home By Christmas Offensive' a failure

The 'Home-By-Christmas' offensive is still celebrated in the United States and in the Republic of Korea as being the last nail in the coffin of the Communist Kim regime and the beginning of the end of the Korean War, with Korea finally being 'officially' reunited under Seoul a year later (even though China sheltered a Korean Communist 'government-in-exile' for years...)

However: the offensive could so easily have failed. Faulty intelligence grossly underestimated the number of Chinese soldiers actually present in Korea, it was only the fact that American troops were better armed and equipped than their Chinese counterparts that let them win through in the end.

With that in mind... What would the world look like if MacArthur's gambit had failed? Would the war in Korea have dragged on longer? Could we see it still divided between North and South (or united under the North :eek: ) Could the Chinese intervention have escalated, or could the Soviets have joined in openly?
 
Mmhm not sure, We don't really know what 'North Korea' would have looked like since it pretty much died before it could have any real impact, in any case it was largely an extension of the Soviets I mean the Kim's weren't really communists in the exacting definition of the word and there wasn't much to base 'Korean Communism' on. So most likely it's just an East Asian GDR, a little state, rich in resources but utterly screwed as to how to make money off of it, if it were to survive it would probably just be an extension of China.
 
The idea of a North and South Korea is weird even to a Korean. Any Korean could tell you that the geographic division in Korea has always been East-West, with East Korea gravitating toward Japan and West Korea toward China. Granted, that's something of an anachronism today given that Korea is fiercely independent and has kind of a love-hate relationship with both of its larger neighbors, but the notion that the peninsula could have been split between north and south is just crazy over there.

I can't even fathom what a communist Korea would look like. Probably a lot like China, where it goes balls-out wacko Communist for a couple of decades and then turns into more of a budding industrial center. Worst case it goes the way of Cambodia, since it may end up being more of a rural nation anyway, and after a short while and pissing off the wrong neighbor, it ends up being remembered as a "glad we don't have THOSE assholes around anymore" as soon as 1960. And given how batshit crazy Kim Il-Sung was, that could have been North Korea. And it probably would have been returned to the Republic of Korea after that time, with the northern area largely an agrarian, rural land while the south is more urban and technological.
 
Good points, guys.

I think we can agree that Korea would be a fair bit worse off than it was... how do we think it'd slot into the geopolitics of the region divided? And what would its neighbours look like?
 
Well, obviously you'd have the North baying for the South's throat - South Korea would be even more dependent on foreign aid than the Republic of Korea was, and doubtless this South Korea would be more closely intertwined with the US economy. It is quite possible that we wouldn't have seen the Korean Miracle. Who knows how prosperous this "South Korea" could be?
 
The only wait to that offensive to fail is not to be made(macarthur got sacked or sideline) after they were driven out of seoul and their lines were collapsing the ambush was the coup de grace to kim and capturing Pyoang proved it, we got memories of Colombian Batallion in the march to Ppyoang(aka the ambush o persecucion in spanish)
 
Once Kim Il-Sung was killed, the Korean Communists split, and Mao Zedong--not exactly happy with the dissent among the Korean Communists--pulled the plug on supporting them. That's why the American troops were able to push all the way to the Yalu River and an intense air bombardment of everything just north of the Yalu River (the town of Dandong on the Chinese side of the Yalu was pretty much flattened) kind of discouraged further Chinese intervention. Indeed, the Korea/China border for many years was one of the most fortified borders in the world, until the Kyoto Treaty of 1985 finally revived relations between Korea and China and most of those fortifications were dismantled (though there's still a small stretch of those fortifications left just east of the modern Dandong preserved as a historical park).

Mind you, Korea wasn't going to be left behind economically given the rapid economic growth of Japan by the early 1960's. By 1970, Korea decided on a very ambitious plan to modernize its economy. In 2017, Korean cars from Hyundai and Samsung are sold worldwide (even Hyundai and Samsung have assembly lines in the USA now!) and the Korean Train Express (KTX)--using technology licensed from Siemens in Germany--is the equal of the Japanese Shinkansen.

In the end, it shows that Communist regimes are WAY too dependent on a charismatic leader. Look at the Soviet Union after Lenin and Stalin passed on--it took three to four years for a new leader to emerge, and China took three years after Mao Zedong's passing for Deng Xiaopeng to consolidate power. The loss of Kim Il-Sung during the short Korean War proved devastating to the Korean Communists, because it split that Party into multiple parts.
 
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