Human wave tactics were already something the West had learned to deal with... half a century before. If air power hadent worked, I think the most likely responce would have been a fighting retreat while rear line forced worked overtime to dig a WWI style trench complex. That's more then enough to turn the red wave from a figurative to a literal one, if you catch my meaning.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, not this again. The Chinese were
not using human wave tactics! They were using quite sophisticated light infantry infiltration tactics, and quite skillfully, too. Human wave attacks don’t have troops hiding under cover or supporting their attacks with
mortars.
Anyway, count me in as one of the people who think it’ll be a divided Korea. Even if the Chinese break through, I doubt their supply lines could stretch far enough to overrun the entire peninsula.
To be fair to Macarther he worked hard to get the civil rights act of 64 through which fixed a whole lot of problems.
That said what people hate him for was vietnam, and the fact that his so called compromise with people who were against the law was to insitute a cowards clause.
(For non american posters it really was called that....sigh)
The cowards claus allowed people to avoid the draft by giving up their right to vote, their right to hold office, being banned from having any government job Federal, State, county and local. Being forbidden from being allowed to get welfare of any kind, and oh yes your also not allowed to have any teaching positions. Then he made the draft more broad to allow women to serve in support positions which also angered people.
But when you remove vietnam, the cowards clause (Which is still being used to this day), fervent and paranoid anti communism, and his lousy handling of the economy he was actually a semi decent president who did a lot to help forward the civil rights movement.
This is like saying that when you remove the massive death tolls, massive corruption, inefficient bureaucracy, and general shortages, Communism isn’t a bad system. I don’t care about MacArthur’s civil rights record. That’s good and all, but he got us into a mess of a war that killed over 50,000 American troops and millions of Vietnamese for no real purpose. He sent the economy into a tailspin it only just recovered from in time for the oil shock to hit. His anti-communist paranoia... yeah, there’s a reason far too many American universities don’t accept federal scholarships or grant money.
And don’t even get me
started on the Coward’s Clause! That’s a disaster we
still haven’t recovered from, and I’m still astounded it required Nixon browbeating Congress into repealing it rather than get struck down by the Supreme Court. The
only good thing it did was allow women to serve in non-combat positions.
And this is why Richard Nixon is the best president since WWII. He inherited MacArthur’s mess and did a damn good job cleaning it up, this on top of his detente with China and a great many other accomplishments. The only thing that defeated him was stagflation, but nobody knew how to handle that.