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28:37Robert Lyman:I mean, I might add also, he made lots of operational mistakes, so I called it a blitz well, it was a blitzkrieg in the sense that the invasion was undertaken from Sunday the 25th of June 1950, on the basis of fast-moving columns along the few Korean roads that led south. And Kim Il-sung had started advantage. But after they had passed Seoul, they captured Seoul very quickly. Seoul was very close to the 38th parallel. They crossed the Han River underneath the 38th parallel. And they started making the south. Their operational plans began to unravel. because they didn't go for a core or a single objective.

29:27Robert Lyman:And the core objective should have been the port of Busan. Instead, Kim Il-sung spread his army out to attack the entirety of the peninsula with the crazy idea that if you captured all the territory, you would win. But we know that that's nonsense. And that's like creating a linear concept where the idea is maybe if you capture every ounce of ground, you will win the country. He would have won the country had he put all his effort into focusing a schwerpunkt at Poussaint, and he would have got there before the Americans had a chance to reinforce it in July and August.

30:08Richard Dannatt:yeah no indeed indeed i mean how did the north korean and south korean forces stack up against each other at the start of the war well the first thing to say is the republican korea

30:20Robert Lyman:soldiers uh were most of them were trained by the japanese there's a very interesting dynamic here which is that between 1945 and 1950 uh the the the rhetoric in the north is that everyone left in the south, everyone serving the Republic of Korea and serving in their army is a Japanese stooge. Now, the Japanese took Korea as a colony in 1910, very rapidly imposed its own culture on Korea, made the speaking and teaching of Korean illegal, appointed its own apparatchiks to the civil service and military and so on. So that by the 1920s and 30s, everyone who ran anything in Korea was effectively Japanese or considered themselves part of Japan, and they naturally looked not to Seoul or Pyongyang but to Tokyo.

31:19Robert Lyman:Now, when that all ended in 1945, the reality is everyone serving in your army had been trained by the Japanese, had been part of the Japanese Kwantong Army. And the point here is that in the North, they used this as a stick to hit the Republic of Korea with as being puppets of the Japanese. They were simply Stockholm Syndrome puppets of the Japanese. So there was that very, very considerable criticism of the Republic of Korea. In practical terms and in terms of capability, the North Koreans were much, much more capable than the South Koreans. South Koreans couldn't understand why they would need military forces except for invading the North.

32:12Robert Lyman:The idea of defending themselves from the North themselves didn't really occur to them. That's what the Americans were for. But of course, once the Americans left, they left a little bit of equipment, they left some training advisors. But they didn't leave them with armor, and they didn't leave them with heavy artillery because they were afraid that the South Koreans themselves, under a return to exile, Syngman Rhee, would use them to attack the North, which is bizarre when you consider it today. but they were concerned that Syngman Rhee would try and do his own invasion of the north in order to unite the south under the polity of Seoul.

32:50Robert Lyman:In terms of military capabilities, I said, the north really very significantly outstripped the south. The south, some very, very good men in the Republican career army, and throughout the war, the ROK army fought as well as it could be expected, in fact, better in many cases. And some of its officers, senior commanders, some were rubbish, but some were very, very good. And I have to say, you just need to look at the process of battle through the Korean War to realize how good some of the ROK commanders and their soldiers were. But in the early days, as I said earlier, the North had starters' advantage a little bit like the germans in poland the germans in um plan yellow in uh may 1940 they had started a bit like the japanese in malaya in 1941 the headstones advantage if you have status advantage you've got the advantage of surprise you've got the advantage of pace you've got uh all advantage over the inertia of the defenders who aren't expecting you and haven't prepared fully for you.

33:56Robert Lyman:And that's the case in 1950. The only reason why the Republic of Korea wasn't overwhelmed, I mean, Seoul fell within a few days, the Han River was crossed within a few weeks, and by the end of the month, pressure was mounting on Pusan, around which a perimeter began to build. And in all the battles that led to the Pusan perimeter in August, September 1950, the ROK and its American and British allies came off worse. But as I said a while ago, some very significant operational mistakes were made, and instead of creating a pointed spear at Poussin, and doing what Rommel always told his soldiers to do, which is boot them, don't spatter them, Kimmelsung's army spread out to occupy all the ground going down the peninsula, and it slowed them down.

34:52Robert Lyman:And it gave the Americans time to reinforce the Pusan parameter and for the first British troops to come in from Hong Kong. Two battalions of the 27th Brigade arrived in their summer uniforms, not really knowing what was going on, a political commitment to the United States and the United Nations war of it by Britain from the Hong Kong garrison. It itself was a worry because they were there because They had arrived in Hong Kong to reinforce it, given Britain's fears about the new communist regime in China, which, of course, was a new threat against Hong Kong. There are all these dynamics swirling around that need to be taken into account.

35:36Robert Lyman:And by some considerable fighting, dogged fighting, dogged defensive fighting, the Americans and the Republic of Koreans managed to hold the Poussin perimeter. It wouldn't have been held forever. I mean, the fighting went on until early October 1950, and large numbers of Americans started flowing in. But this itself really brings to the fore the reality of what happens in battle when you're not prepared for war. And the Americans in 1950 were not prepared for war in any shape or form. And the Korean War took them massively by surprise. all their many of the vast majority of their experienced soldiers from the signal of war of course had gone back and gone back home and had reintegrated themselves into american society and culture and the the economy uh and were very reluctant to be called recalled to the colors uh as many of them were uh the army after 1945 and 46 was populated in the american army was populated by men who were joining in order to get an education and this is um it was by no means unique in armies but people didn't join the army because they wanted to go to war they wanted to prepare for war because the war was by this stage a an aspect of history it wasn't something that people took seriously and so we had a whole bunch of soldiers who were there because uh because the United States Army gave them university credits.

37:09Robert Lyman:And some of the early accounts of the fighting which we describe in the book, and the first prologue, for instance, really demonstrate some really shocking examples of failure in battle. And it's very interesting, you know, when we were writing this book, looking at 1950, Richard and I looked at each other and said, this is very, very similar, of course, to 1940 in um in france where we were fighting uh an army with one hand behind their back that hand behind their back was our failure to understand how the germans in that case were fighting their war we had not followed um we had not developed between the wars the doctrine necessary to refight a peer adversary in an intensive way as we had done at the end of 1918.

38:04Robert Lyman:And so when it was done to us again in 1940, we were shocked. We had no idea what was coming our way and we couldn't interpret it. We had what we describe in the book as a lack of imagination. Now that's precisely what happened to the Americans in 1950, but that's not the whole story. Fortunately, because one of the extraordinary things about the American involvement in 1950 was just how quickly they were able to turn things around. And in 1950, things were turned around in two ways. One is the troops started getting better, more artillery started coming in, troops started learning from their mistakes.

38:40Robert Lyman:But actually, it was the big operational success of the Incheon offensive that decapitated the North Koreans and should have brought the war to a close, frankly. That's our conclusion. We thought most of the Korean War was entirely unnecessary. The first war, and we actually break in our book, this is where we diverge from a number of other historians, we describe the war as not being in two phases, but actually being two distinct wars. And the first war was that war which Kim Il-sung had initiated in June 1950, and which ended at the Incheon landings in October 1950, when the North Korean army was comprehensively defeated by MacArthur's brilliant operational move, by landing troops behind the North Koreans at Incheon near Seoul and forcing battle in the North Korean rear.

39:35Robert Lyman:Really quite a spectacularly, a really gutsy move, dramatically successful, and a really good example of how battle at the operational level was, at a campaign level can often lead to strategic victory. That was all thrown away when the Americans then decided, without much thought, to invade North Korea and to do something that the North Koreans themselves had been trying to do to the South, which is to unite the two countries in the peninsula under one polity.

40:09Richard Dannatt:How did the UN and the UK feel about invading North Korea?

40:15Robert Lyman:This was why it was important for the United Nations to determine what their strategy was, and they didn't do it. It was all done on the hoof. It was done very, very quickly. It was done in an absence of thinking, as we describe it in the book, a lack of thinking. And here we follow a well-trodden path in terms of strategic thinking. And the strategic thinking I'm referring to is that which says you must always set out your strategy and your path to that strategy. And that was not done for operations in North Korea, the race to the Yalu, from October to December 1950. And because it wasn't done, no thinking was applied to what might happen if the Chinese became involved.

41:08Robert Lyman:So the law of unintended consequences, the bane of all strategists, came fully to the fore in October, November, December 1950. The reality is that when the decision was made, and it wasn't by MacArthur, MacArthur was strongly supportive of it, but the decision to advance into North Korea and advance towards the Yalu River and to bring North Korea and South Korea together was made on the assumption in Washington that the North Korean army was dead, that the Chinese wouldn't come in to support the North Koreans and attempt to reverse the situation, and the war was going to be over soon. And all that North Korea, all the Americans needed to do was to occupy North Korea, get up to the Yalu, stick their flag in the river or on the riverbank, and it would all be hunky-dory, and And this would be done before Christmas, 1950.

42:09Robert Lyman:And thereafter, all the United Nations needed to do was perhaps patrol the Yalu River and protect North Korea or Korea from the Chinese and let Kim Il-sung just get on with it. But these were all massive and ultimately horrendously mistaken assumptions. throughout all this period Mao Zedong had been telling the United States through the good officers of India that if an American boot set foot in North Korea it would be forced to enter North Korea in support of its ally North Korea I see you

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43:50Robert Lyman:Those warnings were entirely discounted in Washington. And if they were really considered at all in London, discounted there at all, but there was very little consideration in London of the consequence. I think everyone felt that because China was just recovering from the war, their own war, their own civil war, what could they do in North Korea? But it was a fundamentally profound mistake of huge proportions. Just going back to what should have happened, what should have happened? And what should have happened is that this war that the United Nations had entered into in support of the victim, South Korea, in June 1950, was a righteous war.

44:35Robert Lyman:It was a war to right a wrong. It was legal. It was proportionate. And ultimately, in October 1950, it was dramatically successful. Thank you very much. The troops should have then gone home, reinforced the 38th parallel and gone home, because war in those circumstances, and also today, can't achieve, unless you're very lucky. You know, this is the important thing. Unless you're very, very lucky, you shouldn't set out to use war to achieve your political goals. This is the whole point that Clausewitz is dead. But the United States, in particular, reverted to this Clausewitzian idea that actually we've got a way of achieving the political unification of Korea.

45:21Robert Lyman:let's just use the army. We won't need to advance operationally into North Korea. We just need to get in our vehicles and drive to the Yalu because the North Koreans are dead. There's no one else around. The Chinese certainly won't invade. They were proven completely wrong because within a matter of weeks, upwards of a million Chinese were flooding into North Korea. And you will know the story. The Chinese pushed the Americans and the British back down, back beyond Seoul. Seoul was recaptured again over the Han River, over the 38th parallel, and started pressing the United Nations troops in February and March 1951 into the center of the country.

46:06Robert Lyman:And all the gains that had been achieved the previous year looked likely to be lost because of this fundamental strategic error, not considering the possibility that China would enter and enter in vast numbers, not considering the law of unintended consequences. And as a strategy, you've just got to sit there and say, is it worth it? Just at this point, worth saying that when this same point or challenge or problem was posed to George Bush in Kuwait in 1990, he said, we're not going to have another Korea. We are going to go to the Iraqi border and stop there. And that's the lesson he learned from Korea.

46:51Don't push your luck.

46:53Robert Lyman:Your strategy is to throw the Iraqis out of Kuwait, reinforce the Kuwaiti defenses, achieve the status quo ante balance, achieve the point at which existed when war began, and go no further, because you have no remit to do anything other. And as a consequence, we then had a second war, a very different war, a war not between the United States and its allies and the North Koreans, but a war between the United States and its allies, and the Chinese. So this is why this is a second war. It's not a second phase of a war, it's a new war the north koreans are out of it now they're only involved in so far as the negotiations with the united nations at pyongyang um to uh to bring the war to an end and even then they were puppets of the chinese this was a war between the united states and china and that's why it's it's fundamentally a different war and also a war supported very strongly by joe stalin until he died in March 1953.

47:59Robert Lyman:And that's really why we get to this situation, why we get to the overreach of American power in Korea, because it is an absence of thinking. No one's actually thinking that this is going to be anything other than a Saturday and Sunday job, a walk in the park, and so on. But it leads to some very, very interesting behaviours. And I think for us, the most significant behaviour was that, exhibited by our friend Douglas MacArthur, who was the supremo in Tokyo. And he, when he was given the orders from Washington to advance into North Korea, didn't apply a tactical plan for the occupation of North Korea or for the drive to the Yalo.

48:43Robert Lyman:It was basically that the army split into two parts. One part went on the left-hand side, one part went on the eastern side. are not in the tactical formation at all. When what appeared to be Chinese troops appeared out of the mists on occasions in mid to late October 1950, they were dismissed. Those sightings were dismissed out of hand as being wrong. No one in MacArthur's headquarters would actually accept reality for what it was. And there was a fundamental problem for MacArthur because in the months that followed, MacArthur lost confidence in his army. He lost confidence in his army to stop the Japanese coming over in very large numbers.

49:32And as a consequence of losing

49:35Robert Lyman:confidence in his army, he began to aggressively assert the need for escalation. Now, in the context of 1950, what does escalation mean? Well, it means two things. First of all, it means massive aerial bombardment of North Korean and Chinese targets by American air power, B-29s, with conventional weapons. But it also meant a second thing, which was the use of atomic bombs. America by this time, 1951, had 369 bombs that had been assiduously manufacturing them since 1945 and using them against China. Now, there's a real problem here, isn't there? You either use your conventional forces to control the battle and to own the battle and to prevent escalation and create, therefore, a limited war, context in which we've always subsequently regarded the Korean War, or you escalate to atomic war.

50:40Robert Lyman:And the reality is that in early 1951, as Richard and I were shocked to discover, the world came very, very close to nuclear Armageddon as a consequence of this race to escalation. And of course, if the United States, fighting on behalf of the United nations had used nuclear bombs against Peking, only 500 miles from the Yalu, then the USSR, of course, which exploded as first device the previous year, would also have then started almost certainly getting involved. And we wouldn't be having this podcast today, Ian. And that's how close we came to nuclear war in 1950. And it's been forgotten. So when Richard and I were talking about this being a forgotten war.

51:27Robert Lyman:It's forgotten, yes, in terms of its actuality. It's also forgotten in terms of its consequence and how close we came to Armageddon. But it also, it's covered up a lie. It's covered up the lie that Korea was a deliberately limited war. Korea was a limited war by accident. So how did the West get out of this escalatory challenge? Very simply, MacArthur was sacked and he was replaced by General Matthew B. Ridgway. Now, Matthew B. Ridgway was a brilliant soldier. I've always described him as the American Slim, Bill Slim. He was a very smart, intelligent man. And because of time, I'd just simply say that he very, very quickly recovered the United Nations armies, recovered the situation on the battlefield.

52:26Robert Lyman:Effectively, by this stage, the Chinese Sixth Offensive had run out of steam. uh uh matthew b ridgeway counter-attacked pushed the chinese back across the han river to the point of the 38th parallel and then sat on the parallel to re-establish the status quo antebellum either point at which the war had started so we're now two years in actually no we're not we're this is july 1951 so we're we're just over a year in uh it's been a bit of a seesaw experience so far but we are finally back on the line that we were in October 1950, and the Chinese have been stopped. That's really, really important.

53:05Robert Lyman:The next two years was effectively a process of persuading the Chinese that they could not unify Korea, they could not beat the United Nations forces in battle. And that required a soldier like Matthew B. Ridgway and his successors to win the war on the 38th parallel. So Matthew B. Ridgway, let's just go back to the start. Douglas MacArthur had lost confidence in his army and therefore began to talk about escalation and to advocate escalation. Matthew B. Ridgway demonstrated that the army could do what was necessary to stop the Chinese on the 38th parallel, and therefore escalation was not required.

53:48Robert Lyman:So the whole need for massive aerial bombardment of China was no longer on the agenda. The use of atomic weapons against China was no longer on the agenda. Actually, the use of B-29s against North Korea was still on the agenda, and it was carried out. Devastating effect, unnecessary effect, in Richard and my view. We don't believe most of the B-29 destruction of North Korea was necessary or wise. That's another subject. We deal with that in the book. But Matthew B. Ridgway's demonstration of the power of battle to achieve a strategic effect is really, really important for us. And it's a useful reminder that deterrence is not just something we need to consider in terms of nuclear weapons.

54:36Robert Lyman:Deterrence is something we need to consider in terms of having effective conventional forces that can prevent the need to escalate. If you don't have those conventional forces available to win your battles, like that battle, that long battle between July 1951 and July 1953, you're forced to consider escalation. And if you've got nuclear weapons, the ladder to escalation to nuclear weapons is a very easy one. So they're only a couple of steps, and that's very, very dangerous. One of the things that we sort of came to the conclusion about, it does build on the work that Richard and I did for victory to defeat, is the idea that we are incredibly naive in our country and in the West generally.

55:24Robert Lyman:If we think we can deter an aggressor, a potential aggressor, on the basis of the continuous at-sea deterrent, CASD, or the fact that we have nuclear weapons, because it means that if we have to respond, we've only got them to use. What we need to have is deterrence on a conventional basis. And that means having strong conventional forces to demonstrate our willingness to preserve the status quo antebellum against any future aggressors. So, I mean, the whole process of the second Korean War is really, really helpful to us in terms of understanding Ukraine, which is where I started. And the lessons for us today are we cannot rely on, we in the West cannot rely on, and NATO can't rely on the fact that we've got nuclear weapons to deter Russia because he's operating under the nuclear threshold.

56:21Robert Lyman:We can only deter him by working in a united fashion with strong conventional forces and the conviction and the commitment to use them, if necessary, as the sub-threshold beneath tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. A lesson we learned in Korea. But it was men like Matthew B. Ridgway who taught us that lesson. and the best thing Truman ever did, frankly, the worst thing he did was to allow American forces to cross into North Korea in October 1950. The best thing he did was to sack MacArthur. MacArthur had been a brilliant commander in the Second World War, and his island-hopping campaign, the Americans shared the Pacific Theater, they divided them two.

57:12Robert Lyman:MacArthur had basically the southwest uh up to the northwest on a triangular basis and admiral nemritz had uh everything uh above that uh and he launched his uh his sea campaign uh accordingly and macarthur was a fabulous um supremo in japan after the war and operationally the opera the uh the attack on and Sean was brilliant, quite extraordinary. But he had significant strategic limitations. And that's where he had, that was his Achilles heel. Everyone's got one. And 1951, we discovered what MacArthur's Achilles heel was, which was strategic hubris.

57:58Richard Dannatt:Absolutely. Absolutely. I think it's worth noting that you've got quite a number of personal accounts interspersed between what I would call the grand strategy narrative in there. And I particularly enjoyed the one with the lieutenant at the Battle of the Imjin River, which reminded me of the episode that I've got with Tommy Clough, who was at the same battle and was captured by the Chinese. It's episode 174. I'll add that to the episode notes.

58:27Robert Lyman:Oh, yes, you mentioned that. Well, do you know what? This is really interesting. We, as I said at the start, we didn't know what we were going to write. and we but we we then very after three months we then realized what we want to do is write a book about how wars start how wars are prosecuted and how well they're prosecuted and then how they end but of course you've got a ground war and not on a grand strategic narrative but in what happens on the ground and so what we did is we've created we divided the book into three parts there's a prologue which describes american um actions with american troops on the ground in the very early days of the war and demonstrates, we think pretty well, how inadequately prepared the Americans were for the modern war.

59:14Robert Lyman:And then we had a second prologue, which does the same for the middle of the battle, middle of the war. And then we had Dennis Watmore, lovely Dennis Watmore, a National Service Lieutenant, who was at the Battle of the Imjin River. And the Imjin River, I mean, it's very interesting to challenge my own prejudices because for many years in the British Army, you know, when I was a young officer and so on, when I taught things like the Imjin River, I was a little bit suspicious that this was just a little bit of British military hubris and regimental fluffing because the Imjin River really wasn't a strategic battle at all.

59:54Robert Lyman:And yet I was absolutely wrong. The Indian River Battle, in which the Gloucesters played a glorious part, was a very significant element in stopping the Chinese fifth offensive and beginning the sixth offensive and slowing them down and preventing them from getting to Seoul. Another evidence that battles can have strategic consequences. And we didn't go into it in huge detail, but what we want to do is to demonstrate actually how well British soldiers fought. Now, these are British conscripts, effectively, national servicemen. There were lots of regular soldiers, of course, serving as well. In the Middlesex Regiment, there were men serving in the 1st Brigade, the 27th Brigade that went out there with the Argyles.

1:00:47Robert Lyman:There were men who had been captured in Hong Kong in 1941 by the Japanese, had spent three and a half, four years as prisoners of the Japanese, gone back to the Colors, served in North Korea, and were captured by the North Koreans as well. I mean, that's quite extraordinary, isn't it? But the 27th Brigade, and then they were converted into the 29th Division, fought brilliantly well, along with their Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian colleagues. And these were men who didn't really want to be there, but once they got there, they fought like, tigers and dennis watmore's account is quite an extraordinary account and i was i was actually on holiday with my family and i had this challenge by richard so we divvy the book up and my challenge was to go away at this stage in the writing and write about the indian river and to pull it all together which is quite a challenge uh i had lots of help from um people at alan mallinson and so on but i found dennis watmore's account i think alan might have sent it to me and i read it i was mesmerized.

1:01:47Robert Lyman:I thought, this captures in totality what I'm trying to explain. I wrote to his family, Dame Sarah Watmore, a very distinguished academic in Oxford, immediately wrote back and said, Rob, of course you can. We'd be absolutely delighted. It's quite a chunk of the prologue, but it tells the story brilliantly. Again, as I said, it anchors what we're describing as grand strategy, operational planning in the reality of the hard fighting that actually war is all about. It's about the man on the ground and the woman on the ground actually fighting in the mud, the blood, and the gore for their lives and for the tasks that have been set them.

1:02:25So we didn't want to move away from that.

1:02:29Robert Lyman:We wanted to make sure that people walked away from the book with a good sense of how desperate on occasions this war was for the fighting soldier, how tough it was i mean climatically uh topographically uh korea offered quite considerable challenges to soldiering uh i've spent a lot of my career studying the war in burma and burma is not a place anyone would volunteer to fight a war uh and korea is the same if you go to korea it's you know it's mountain i mean the spine of mountains running down korean peninsula is quite extraordinary uh it's the last thing you want to do is to is to fight but they did so and they did so brilliantly and that's actually part of the exciting an exciting part of my discovery my journey as a soldier was uh to uh reverse my earlier prejudices against the engine river and the stories i've been told about the engine river because it's even bigger and more brilliant than i'd ever anticipated i see you avatar fire and

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1:03:57Robert Lyman:Really exciting story.

1:03:58Richard Dannatt:I think having those personal accounts in there just gives a nice bit of balance to the book. Are there any accounts by Korean veterans in English on either side or even Chinese veterans?

1:04:14Robert Lyman:yes uh to both camps not north koreans that i know of but there are certainly quite a few south korean very good south korean memoirs in fact this was not a problem for us there's there's quite a lot of really good stuff in fact the real problem was the fact it was too much too much stuff to um research we could have been doing this for years and years and years and years um in terms of research, NARA and the United States and Washington and the Truman Museum, much of the archive is now online. It was absolutely fantastically helpful. But there are some very good South Korean memoirs in English.

1:04:54Robert Lyman:And there are a few Chinese ones. There are quite a few Chinese ones in Chinese, one or two now translated into English. The big challenge, of course, we have with the Chinese is there is actually a lot of material in Chinese that has never made it into English, not just for the Korean War, but for all the wars that followed it, including the Second World War. I went to a symposium on the Chinese army in Taipei in 2015 and was absolutely amazed to discover how much written material in Mandarin and Cantonese was available from veterans of the Second World War, but academics like me, I'd never ever accessed them, nor had the means to access them either.

1:05:40Robert Lyman:And I think that's the big opportunity for historians of the Second World War in the Far East. And people like a friend of mine, Rana Mitter, for instance, who's written China's War, able to speak and read Mandarin, has access to that material and has been able to build his narrative of the war in China, rather. Well, that's what I would encourage historians of the Korean War to do the same in terms of the repository of Chinese material. But there's lots of South Korean stuff. Just get back to the point. Actually, right at the beginning, you said, you know, is the war forgotten? Well, it's not forgotten.

1:06:19Robert Lyman:It's a lived daily experience in South Korea. It's not so much a lived experience in China, although China have not forgotten. There are some wars the Chinese have forgotten. They've forgotten their invasion of Vietnam in 1979, but they have not forgotten Korea. It's a very important part of the narrative they preach about their war against the capitalistic West, and this fits very nicely into that. But in South Korea, no, they are armed and ready. They have not forgotten the war. A very interesting little segue here. When we were writing the book, we approached the South Korean embassy in London, who were delighted that we were writing it and gave us lots of help.

1:07:04Robert Lyman:And we had a conversation with them about the fact that the war's forgotten here. and they told us that in 2014 because Britain had long rebuffed any requests by a number of requests by the South Koreans to set up a memorial to the British soldiers who had served in Korea and the South Koreans in 2014 said oh blast we'll just give you the money so they they paid for the memorial in the Emody and Bankman Gardens and had it put up a lovely memorial to the Korean veterans that was put up by the government of the republic of korea not by the british government

1:07:41Richard Dannatt:wow post 1945 it's one of the highest number of casualties the uk's had in any war the casualties

1:07:51Robert Lyman:in the war are just worth just touching on i mean i mentioned the point that richard and i were horrified about the use of the the b-29 bombing campaign against north korea if i was to tell you that the population of Korea reduced by between 18 and 20 percent, largely as a consequence of aerial bombing. The Curtis LeMay policy of aerial bombing from March 1945 towards 1945 Japanese cities was adopted, lifted lock, stock and smoking barrel and applied to Korea, again by Curtis LeMay, who is in command, without much thinking. The idea was that this was a war of people, this was a war against North Korea.

1:08:31Robert Lyman:North Korea needed to be obliterated in the same way that the Japanese economic complex had also been destroyed. Remember that in Japan and North Korea, the war economy was not based around large factories. It was based around home production. And so if you destroy home production, you actually remove the factories. And this was applied to North Korea, but it was done in a devastatingly and disproportionate way. The extent that about 3 million people lost their lives as a consequence, as I said, nearly 20 % of the whole of the North Korean population. At any one stage in this war, there were six million men and women fighting on both sides, six million.

1:09:18Robert Lyman:This was a very big war, which again raises the question why it's been forgotten. And I don't really have the answer to that.

1:09:28Richard Dannatt:You have been listening to Robert Lyman, who co-wrote Korea, War Without End, with Richard Dannett, published by Osprey. there'll be links in the episode information showing you how to buy the book and support the podcast the episode extras such as videos photos and other content are available via a link in the episode information the podcast wouldn't exist without the generous efforts of our financial supporters and i'd like to thank one and all of them for keeping the podcast on the road the cold war conversation continues in our facebook discussion group just search for cold war conversations in facebook thanks very much for listening and look forward to seeing you next week

1:10:44Robert Lyman:I see you.

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