The last war the United States actually won was World War II. We’ve fought plenty of wars since then, but they were both not officially wars, that is, they were not officially declared, and we didn’t win them. We didn’t lose them, either. In Vietnam, we abandoned a war that the opposition ended up winning because we gave up. Elsewhere, we have fought for years with no clear goal and no idea even of what winning the war would entail (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The fighting of these inconclusive wars began in 1950, with our incursion into Korea.
As Rating America’s Presidents explains, on August 10, 1945, with the Japanese on the verge of surrender, the U.S. divided Korea at the thirty-eighth parallel, into Soviet and American occupation zones. No one expected this arrangement to continue indefinitely, but the U.S. was entirely unprepared when, on June 25, 1950, the Communists of North Korea invaded the South. The United Nations condemned the invasion and sent troops to Korea to counter the invaders.
Most of the troops were American; General Douglas MacArthur, a World War II hero, commanded them. President Truman, however, did not ask Congress for a declaration of war; this was the first of a huge number of “police actions” that the U.S. military would pursue.
MacArthur achieved great early success, but then the Communist Chinese invaded in November 1950 and threw the UN forces back. MacArthur wanted to attack Chinese bases, which Truman would not allow, as he did not want to escalate the conflict. MacArthur began acting unilaterally until Truman summarily fired him. This was a tremendously unpopular move at the time, as the American people understood MacArthur as trying to win the war and liberate the Communist North, with Truman stymieing him.
Reality was more complicated: the Chinese forces were significantly stronger than the U.S. had anticipated, and Truman worried that getting involved in a direct conflict with them could provoke World War III. This undeclared war went on inconclusively until after Truman was out of the White House.
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Author: Ruth King
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