What if Anyone Won the Korean War?

0:00 Intro This video was sponsored by World of Tanks. Find out more about the special invite content for new players later on in the video. In the United States, the Korean War is often known as the Forgotten War, sandwiched between the monumental conflicts of World War 2 and Vietnam, starting five years after Hiroshima and ending 11 years prior to the Vietnam War. 0:24 It really gave this conflict Middle Child syndrome. So despite the importance of the conflict conflict, it tends to fade into the background of American and global consciousness, remembered mainly for the stalemate that left the Korean Peninsula divided forever. 0:40 After all, who wants to remember a war where there were no winners? However, in Korea, this war is anything but forgotten. Like, of course, you've probably heard this at some point. But yeah, the conflict never technically ended. Instead of concluding with a peace treaty, it just ground to a halt in 1953 with an Armistice, leaving the North and South in an unresolved stalemate that persists to this day. 1:06 So what if the Korean War had ended differently? What if, instead of a stalemate, one side actually won a. Speaking of mechanized warfare, how about today's sponsor, World of Tanks? What better way to breakthrough stalled enemy lines than in this bad boy? 1:22 You know, unless the enemy line has anti tank, which they usually do. Never played World of Tanks before. It's simple. World of Thanks is a PvP free to play combat game where you take control of your very own tank from various nations in World War 2 and face them off on massive maps with objective game mode. 1:41 Use your experience to get more advanced and bigger tanks or simply go through the tech tree of the nation of your choice to unlock them all. 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The outcome of the Korean War was shaped by the contributions of each side's allies. 3:04 The Contributions of Allies At the start of the war, the Northern forces heavily outmatched their Southern counterparts. While the South had a number of experienced commanders, most of whom had fought for the Japanese Imperial Army during World War 2, the bulk of their forces were I'll trained and I'll equipped. 3:21 North Korea, on the other hand, included not only people with experience fighting the Japanese, but also numerous veterans from the Chinese Civil War. When the Northern Korean People's Army, or KPA, invaded the South in June of 1950, the Southern response was a complete mess. 3:39 Most of the Southern line crumbled instantly. President Sigmund Re relocated the ROK army headquarters South of the capital of Seoul without notice, cutting off communications with the troops north of Seoul and sparking a panic among civilians. 3:55 Seoul was captured within a matter of days, prompting a mass exodus towards the South. The retreat was so chaotic, in the middle of it the southern forces killed hundreds of their own civilians by blowing up a major bridge across the Han river while people were still crossing the north. 4:14 Managed to pull off a blitzkrieg rush B quickly secure the capital with very little casualties. Probably what a certain Russian was hoping to achieve not too long ago. With poor discipline and equipment and limited faith in their superiors. 4:30 Many units mutinied or fled from their posts. By the end of June, around half of South Koreans forces were either dead, captured or missing, and so much equipment had been lost or abandoned during the retreat that only two divisions were still fully equipped. 4:46 In just a matter of weeks, the South Korean forces had been pushed to a tiny pocket in the southeastern corner of the peninsula. But that's when Big Daddy came in. With the arrival of Allied UN troops Kough Kough, the balance of power flipped on its head, allowing the South not only to reclaim all of their territory, but push all the way to China. 5:09 The Chinese in turn no, we didn't like that and jumped to the aid of their North Korean allies, pushing the South Korean forces and the Americans more or less to the initial border between the Koreas, where the two sides found themselves evenly matched, unable to make much progress in either direction. 3 years of fighting, 3,000,000 casualties and 20% of the Korean population later, they were back to square 1. 5:34 So how about we change that? Following the plan single handedly drafted by US Secretary of State Dean Atkinson, Truman committed the US to militarily support South Korea less than 72 hours after receiving the news of the northern invasion. 5:52 Did he wait for approval from the UN, Consult Congress or at least the Pentagon? Nope, he just sent in the Army, guns blazing. This lets us create an alternate timeline without making too many changes. All you have to do is take Atkinson out of the picture. 6:07 Maybe he who has never made the Secretary of State, maybe he dies early, or maybe he's stuck in history's worst traffic jam. All that's important is that he isn't there to drive the US response in Korea without his influence. Truman might have listened to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were hesitant to send troops to South Korea's aid, fearing it would pull US attention away from the more significant threat posed by Moscow. 6:31 Even if Truman still ultimately decided to send troops into Korea, given how quick things progressed in our timeline, a few days without U.S. troops to slow them down? What if, given the KPA enough of a head start to capture the whole peninsula before UN reinforcements reached a critical mass by early August, the DPRK could have reunited the entire peninsula under their regime and high-ranking R OK officials would be evacuated, US would have to give up on any chance of regaining foothold in Korea, and Singman Ree lives out the rest of his days exiled in Hawaii. 7:09 Ironically the same fate he'd face a decade later in our timeline after being overthrown by a student uprising. So either way, he's going to Hawaii. Looking at our timelines version of the DPRK, you might assume that this would be a much darker scenario for Korea, a dystopian hell, But that wouldn't necessarily be the case. 7:29 The Korean War broke North Korea You see, the Korean War kind of broke North Korea. Before the war, the DPRK was, by all accounts, one of the less crazy dictatorships in the Soviet sphere. But after being pelted with enough bombs in napalm to flatten every city in the country and kill on average at least one member of every family, North Korea was rebuilt from the ground up on a foundation of horrific trauma. 7:55 Kim Illinois Sung came out to be seen as the savior of his people from the evil US, and the nation doubled down and created a bunker mentality. It's from the ashes of that destruction that the North Korea we know today came to be. In this alternate timeline. 8:11 However, with a quick victory and no bombings, the DPRK is decidedly more normal. Kim Illinois Sung is quick to blame all southern atrocities on the US or Japanese collaborators, allowing average ROK soldiers to avoid avoid harsh retribution. 8:28 Although any high-ranking officials or former Japanese collaborators would be condemned to death or the Gulag, many lower ranking officials and soldiers are instead sent to reeducation camps. It's there where they're taught to blame the US for brainwashing them and to betraying their country before being allowed to rejoin Korean society for the rest of the 20th century. 8:51 There are basically 2 paths the newly united Korean Republic might go down. One student protests against the regime breakout in the 1960s, just as they did in South Korea in our timeline. While Kim is unlikely to step down like Reed did, there's a good chance this kind of uprising does prompt some reforms. 9:11 Korea likely follows a similar economic path to China, potentially leading to a fairly wealthy unified Korea, maybe even on par with South Korea of our timeline. Alternatively, the DPRK might follow a similar economic path as in our timeline, resulting in stagnation within the 1960s. 9:31 In either case though, the unification of the agricultural S with the industrial N makes for a more stable and self-sufficient economy on all ends, allowing the DPRK to avoid the massive famines that followed the fall of the USSR. 9:46 But a North Korean victory doesn't just have implications for Korea in the US. 9:51 The Impact of a North Korean Victory on the US Truman was blamed for losing China after the CC PS victory in the Civil War, and with another communist victory in Asia, his reputation would be gutted. In the remaining two years of his presidency, Truman would be desperate to make up for this failure. 10:08 Rather than just providing funds and training to French colonial forces in the First Indochina War, Truman goes the extra mile this time, sending a considerable Expeditionary force to Vietnam in the early 50s. 10:23 You see, Vietnam would not be lost like Korea and China before. It's possible because of those past failures, Washington would be a lot more eager to go further. A strong U.S. military presence deployed a decade earlier to help out the French. 10:39 Not simply military aid, not just advisors, actual American troops on the ground. A force meant to crush the Viet men and their allies. Just the South Korea had crushed rebels with US assistance in the previous years. A conflict that roots out rebels before a situation like the Battle of DNBN Phu can even happen. 11:00 As synonymous Vietnam is today with an unwinnable fight. There is a possibility the conflict could have been won if it was just stamped out while the French were still there. At least the conflict with the Viet Minh and that chapter of Vietnamese resistance. 11:15 I can imagine even if the Viet Minh are defeated there would always be be some anti colonial resistance in its place. The French were trying to keep their empire after all, and while there were some Vietnamese that sided with the French, there are also Vietnamese that didn't. 11:31 In this alternate timeline the French successfully win and Southeast Asia is reorganized into a bunch of puppet western based monarchies. There may be uprisings from here and now, but that's kind of just colonial politics in general. 11:47 It's likely that this alternate First Indochem China War, as it would be called, would be a far wider conflict than it was in our history, thanks to the Americans and Chinese being able to actually pay attention to it. But it also wouldn't be as big and chaotic as the Vietnam War got in the 60s because there would never be any peace agreements that split the nation into North and South. 12:10 The NVA never would have been established, and the Viet Minh, eventually Viet Cong wouldn't have gotten a breather. Now saying that this wouldn't be some simple for the US. This would be a legitimate conflict, just not as big as Korea. 12:25 It would probably be the most action the Americans had seen since World War 2, and it'd be a conflict that would transcend presidents going from Truman to Eisenhower. Now in our timeline, while the French were failing, Eisenhower refused to send men to bail them out. 12:40 He understood correctly that it would just drain US resources. But here Eisenhower is inheriting Truman's war. American soldiers would already be in Vietnam and they already lost. Men pulling out would just be a political disaster, at least for the politicians and opponents that cared. 13:00 Because here's the thing, in the 1950's the American public, your average Joe schmo, really wouldn't like the Korean War. A conflict that resulted in the deaths of millions of Koreans and 40,000 Americans and it was just barely talked about by people at the time. 13:17 It was called the Forgotten War for a reason. After for World War Two, who cares? And that was a conflict, unofficially at least, against China, a conventional conflict. If your average American in the 1950s didn't care about Korea, how would they react to American troops in Vietnam? 13:34 A guerrilla war? In this alternate world, the United States would get involved in a conflict France was going to lose, win it, defeat the Viet men before they became big, and it'd never be known by your average American, atrocities included. Oops. If this sounds far fetched, it really shouldn't. 13:51 Just one example, in 1965 the US sent 20,000 troops to crush a communist uprising in the Dominican Republic, and you're probably just hearing about it now. The Cold War was full of military operations that stamped out fires before they became raging infernos, most of which from the American public's point of view, was so out of mind it was never given attention. 14:12 This kind of just spins out into a scenario of its own if we're being honest. Like we're talking about an alternate timeline where the political ramifications of the Vietnam War war just don't happen. The post war disillusion, a large part of the 1960s chaos, the anti war movement really just wouldn't exist unless the US got a chance to go into another quagmire. 14:32 Because no failure of Vietnam also means that the lessons kind of have to be learned elsewhere. Perhaps without Vietnam, America gets more involved in post colonial Africa, even more in Latin America, perhaps also Southeast Asia, gradually escalating involvement until there is a conflict they can't control and it becomes just like, well, Vietnam. 14:53 South Korea vs North Korea Wait, this isn't a video about Vietnam. This was a video about Korea. How do we get off topic? Yeah, so this was a scenario where North Korea won. I know we kind of forgot about that. So what if we flipped this scenario? What if the South had complete in total victory instead? 15:10 It really wasn't easy to find a way to turn the tide for the US since in our timeline Truman just went let's throw everything at the commies, but he didn't throw everything when going up against China. There really is nothing militarily the UN and American forces could have done differently to stop that from pushing them back to the border, except for, well, today. 15:34 When we think about atomic warfare, we automatically think of mutually assured destruction. 15:40 Nuclear Warfare But this was a time before mutually assured destruction. This was a time before there was even a precedent about what a nuclear power should even act like. This was before the Soviets could even compete with the Americans on a nuclear level. They had nukes, sure, about 10 to 20 of them, while the Americans had 300 to 500. 16:02 And they were advanced too. Uncle Sam had hundreds of more bombs, superior bombers, and just developed the first ballistic missiles. If you think about it, for at least a few years, the United States had a total monopoly on the fate of their enemies. The only thing that really held them back from using the bomb was morality, ethics, and worrying that the Soviets would steamroll Europe, as well as Truman's promise to the world to never use the bomb after Japan. 16:30 This was also that brief moment after World War 2 where the US and its allies didn't really face any major threats. That was until North Korea invaded. For the first time in human history, there was the question of whether a country should hold itself back. 16:47 If the US has nuclear weapons, should it use them? Could nukes be used as tactical weapons against an aggressor? The answer in our timeline was debated throughout the whole war. Like, you probably know about MacArthur wanting to turn a chunk of Manchuria into a sea of radioactive cobalt, and yeah, he was fired for that. 17:06 But this wasn't the only time nukes were considered. Truman had 20 nuclear capable bombers stationed in Guam in 1950, with the only thing missing for a nuclear strike being the plutonium core of the bombs. In 1951 there were even orders in place to launch immediate nuclear strikes on Soviet bases and Manchuria in response to any airstrikes on American targets or major troop movements into Korea. the US also dropped dummy bombs and TNT across North Korea to test the viability of using nuclear weapons. 17:40 While in our timeline this never came to be, there were a lot of factors that stopped the use of nukes. Like how would America's allies react if nukes were just used indiscriminately? How would America's enemies respond when they eventually get the same weapons? 17:56 Going off the precedent, the US just said no matter what it was, nukes weren't used. Of course, but it wouldn't really take a huge change for nukes to fly. Like the bombers in Guam or using nuclear strikes on Soviet bases were things already considered while the war was evenly in EU s s favor. 18:15 So what if the war wasn't in America's favor? The North Koreans have slightly more insight and decide to place naval mines at Inchon. Say they defend the beaches even a little bit better than they did in our timeline. Say the US is attempted landings fail miserably or go horrendously wrong, leaving the southern forces defending the Pusan perimeter with no end insight. 18:40 Not only that, a failed invasion at Inchon is an embarrassing moment for the Americans as a whole, a symbol that they can't defend their capitalist allies. Inchon makes this bad situation fatal. It's not likely that this would happen, like Inchon was a very successful invasion, but this would be the only thing that would make the US desperate enough to think about crossing the line. 19:04 Employ nuclear weapons as a show of force, selecting a single strategic target in North Korea to vaporize no city or anything. Pyongyang wasn't going to get naked like Hiroshima, but this would be something to display America's real nuclear power. 19:20 A military target meant to crush their resolve. Kind of the world's biggest. Remember who you're dealing with. And while that probably wouldn't rattle the North Koreans, it would rattle their allies, especially Stalin. While the USSR had conducted its first nuclear test the year prior, the first AirDrop wouldn't come until 1951 like in our timeline. 19:42 He would have abandoned North Korea if the Americans had involved nukes. He would be more than willing to just salute Korea, press F in the chat, and leave. USSR had committed air pilots to fight in Korea under the markings of the Chinese Air Force, as well as trained Chinese pilots in Manchuria. 20:00 Hundreds of Soviet Air Force officers and thousands of other personnel would participate in the war in some capacity. In this alternate timeline, if Stalin pulled the support, the North Koreans would be left at a significant disadvantage, allowing the Americans to break the line at the Pusan perimeter and push north. 20:18 Now the Chinese. Would still commit troops to Korea as the southern forces reached the Yalu River and they would still push the Americans back from their border, but without significant air support, their advance would stall before they ever reached the 38th parallel. 20:34 The southern forces could perhaps push N to the Yalu River and become entrenched at the Chinese border. The fate of Kim Illinois Sung would kind of be up in the air. There's a chance he could be caught by South Korean forces and on site, or he would just flee into China. 20:52 Either way, the DPRK kind of wouldn't exist anymore. The South and not the North would have reunified Korea. The R OK is victorious. Singman Rhee quite openly talked about his intention to bring in bulldozers to dig mass graves for suspected communists. 21:13 So if he got his way, we can expect an incredibly brutal occupation. However, Rhee likely wouldn't be left in charge of the North at all. Seeing the atrocities carried out by Southern forces during both their retreat and advance northward, the American Military Advisory group in Korea contemplated making the North just off limits to ROK authorities and some countries in the UN questioned whether a regime as corrupt, brutal and inept as Reese should even be allowed to retake control of South Korea. 21:45 Yeah, the US State Department planned for the occupation of the North to be under the supreme authority of the UN or failing that, AUS backed puppet. An idea that was sure to excite the newly formed CIA, although their vision still involved in incredibly authoritarian set of policies, including around 14% of North Korea's population being sent to RE education camps put on a blacklist, but at least it avoided the mass murder that Ree had in mind and our timeline. 22:16 Sigmund Ree ruled as a dictator until 1960 when he was overthrown by a student uprising known as the April Revolution, with South Korea becoming a parliamentary Republic for like less than a year before the military stepped in to restore order. 22:31 This instituted Ayuta with Park Jung he in charge. His 16 years of power saw South Korea flip from military rule to civilian government to one party dictatorship. In that time Park oversaw plenty of repression, but he also introduced economic policies that turned South Korea from a poor country reliant on American aid to an export driven industrial powerhouse. 22:54 South Korea transitioned back to democracy in 1987, which has lasted till today. In a South Korean victory scenario, I can see two main paths Korea might have gone down. In one scenario, with North Korea eliminated as a threat, the US and UN pressure Sigmund Reid to step down, no longer seeing him as a useful ally against communism after his inept response to the Northern offensive. 23:18 Just as in our timeline, his regime is replaced by a parliamentary Republic. But nearly a decade earlier. And it wasn't really Korean students that did it. The state's earlier transition to democracy eliminates the causes of the April Revolution and in turn, it also prevents Park Chun He's coup. 23:36 The UN administration of North Korea applies a Marshall Plan like set of policies to rebuild the region after the war. The largely agricultural country gets a bit of an economic boost. However, without the kinds of economic policies introduced specifically by Park Chun Hee, it's debatable whether Korea ever reaches the levels of wealth that it reached in our timeline. 23:59 So it could be a more united but slightly poorer country. I'm not going to open that can of worms on South Korean economic policy, though, so we're just moving on. The other option is that Ree is allowed to remain in place, and after three or four years of UN administration, the North is turned over to his government. 24:18 Although it's unlikely he would carry out the same reign of terror he had planned during the war, he still makes use of EU s s blacklist to make a lot of people in the north disappear, taking revenge on anyone he associates too strongly with the DPRK. 24:33 If his administration of rebellious regions in South Korea is anything to go off of, free speech would be heavily curtailed with any open mention of southern atrocities during the war not met. Well, we can say that just like in our timeline. 24:49 However, Ree's authoritarianism would ultimately bring about the same student protests intense enough to oust him from the presidency and force him to flee to Hawaii. Yet the student protest would probably include to a generation of North Korean kids those who had grown up with some anti capitalist sympathies and also had faced anti communist repression. 25:13 So there's potentially a communist element into these protests. In his youth Park Tune, he had briefly been a member of the Korean Workers Party and after seizing control he made sure to demonstrate his opposition to communism whenever possible to relieve any suspicion the US had towards him in this scenario. 25:32 This which would mean continued repression of the North throughout decades of his reign. I mean, really, if there's anything to take away from this whole video, it's that it would just be a blended version of the North and the South. It is kind of funny though, whether communist or capitalist, Korea's just kind of a dystopia. 25:52 And in different ways, it's actually fascinating. Special thanks once again to World of Tanks for sponsoring this video. 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