The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 27 Oct 2026After months of the people of the United States wondering what he would do about Korea if elected President, Republican Presidential Candidate Dwight Eisenhower this week announces that he will go to Korea in person to observe the situation first hand to see how best to settle it. In the field, Operation Showdown continues, and the Battle of Jackson Heights begins.
00:00 Intro
00:28 Recap
00:55 FLAK Suppression
02:16 The Hook
03:52 Jackson Heights
08:32 Operation Showdown
11:47 I Shall Go To Korea
15:11 Summary
15:21 Conclusion
15:55 Call to Arms
October 28, 2026
The Korean War Week 123 – I Shall Go To Korea!- October 27, 1952
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October 22, 2026
QotD: The “numbers fallacy” in World War II
Some historians, and many politicians, have simplified World War Two into a few stupid statements. “The war in the west was won on the Russian steppes” is one that springs to mind. They usually base such statements on traditional political incompetence — bad use of statistics. The truth is that numbers have rarely overthrown a technological edge (though the Americans under Custer and the British at Isandhlwana might have reservations on this), and World War Two is certainly not the best sample case to argue such a thing.
During the war the smaller campaigns tended to get less credit — though it is sometimes suspicious that numbers are valued in some circumstances, and area in others. The Mediterranean Front against the Axis was an extraordinarily long campaign over an extremely large area, yet many – particularly Americans who often fail to understand the Mediterranean’s importance to intercontinental strategy – discount its scale and significance. (A British general visiting the Soviets responded to toasts about the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow by offering a toast to El Alamein. The bemused Soviets asked how big the battle was, and then commented “we would call that a skirmish” – a point which emphasises the fact that the hundreds of Soviet divisions embraced by historians of the Eastern Front were rarely as big as a British brigade or American Regimental Combat Team. To get a real comparison western divisions should be compared to Soviet corps.)
Similarly the Burmese and New Guinea theatres are incredibly undervalued in their role against Japan. There were more Japanese divisions fighting longer and harder in either place than everywhere that American troops fought the Japanese put together. (The fact that in New Guinea it was Australians rather than Americans who did most of the successful fighting – the American troops first assigned disappointed their vainglorious Füaut;hrer MacArthur enormously at first – might have had an influence on this ranking.)
By contrast the Western Front against Germany in 1944 to 45 is overstated both in the area it covered, and in the number of troops involved (almost half the US troops listed for that campaign did not arrive until it was already almost over. A dozen divisions had barely landed in France before the Germans surrendered.) Which puts it in the same category as the Pacific campaign, which, if the allied troops are discounted – as they so often were by the Americans – rarely saw more than a couple of American divisions at a time engaged anywhere.
The confusion is added to by the enigma that remains China, which is simultaneously undervalued and overvalued. It is undervalued in that China and Manchuria occupied the attention of 80% of the Japanese army throughout the war. Which means that by the standards applied by some historians, China was the Soviet Union of the East, and deserves all the glory that was lavished on communist Russia by the trendy historians of the last generation. On the other hand it was overvalued, in that China achieved virtually nothing in the war against the Japanese apart from occupying large numbers of very low-grade garrison troops. In fact when the US Air Force in one of its fits of vainglory, attempted to bomb Japan into submission from bases in China: the Japanese garrison troops stirred themselves enough to sweep forward and conquer – without any trouble at all – the provinces being used as bases (Operation Ichi-Go).
Nigel Davies, “Oversimplification: The Numbers Fallacy in WWII”, rethinking history, 2009-03-08.
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October 21, 2026
The Korean War Week 122 – One Showdown Ends, Another Begins- October 20, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 20 Oct 2026One fight comes to an end as another gets going- the ROK forces are victorious and drive the Chinese completely off of White Horse Hill, but Operation Showdown, a larger battle involving a whole hill complex, is indecisive as the week ends despite a lot of brutal fighting. Away from the battlefield the question still remains — will the peace talks resume or is diplomacy at a dead end?
00:00 Cold Call
00:58 Recap
01:13 White Horse Hill
04:47 Operation Showdown
08:46 1st Battalion
11:59 Pike’s Peak
14:24 Peace Talks End
16:25 Summary
16:36 Conclusion
17:50 A Call to Arms
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October 14, 2026
The Korean War Week 121 – America Has Had Enough! – October 13, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 13 Oct 2026The UN delegation walks out of the Panmunjom Peace Talks this week, after the Communist side refuses all of their proposals to solve the POW repatriation issue. A major naval training exercise off the coast comes to its end, with disappointing results, and in the field the Battle of White Horse Hill, the deadliest battle so far this year, rages all week long.
00:34 Recap
00:57 Naval Training Exercise
04:31 Harrison Walks Out
06:41 White Horse Hill
13:47 Operation Showdown
14:34 Summary
14:50 Conclusion
16:39 Memorial
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October 12, 2026
The Great Game for Asia 1894-1905
Real Time History
Published 15 May 2026The 19th century is a time of violent global imperial competition. The Scramble for Africa and the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires over influence in Central Asia are among the best-known examples. But the 2nd half of the century also involved another Great Game – the Great Game for Asia.
00:00 Intro
05:35 1st Sino-Japanese War 1894-95
30:02 Boxer War 1900-01
55:40 Russo-Japanese War 1904-05
01:22:14 Conclusion
(more…)
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October 7, 2026
The Korean War Week 120 – The Battle of White Horse Hill begins – October 6, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 6 Oct 2026The Chinese are busy this week; they open the floodgates of a reservoir and attack Arrowhead Hill, but it turns out these are diversions from their main attack, which begins the Battle of White Horse Hill. It does not at all begin well for the Chinese, although the ROK take pretty heavy casualties too. There are also plans afoot for a new UN offensive operation, and a naval exercise begins off the east coast.
00:00 Phone Call
00:50 Recap
01:21 Reinforcing ROK 9th Division
03:01 Diversions
07:02 Operation Showdown
08:47 Naval Exercise
10:38 Increasing the ROK
13:17 Commonwealth Division
15:43 Warsaw and Seattle
17:29 Summary
17:45 Conclusion
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October 5, 2026
Communism and the DSA
The fortunes of America’s self-described socialists are clearly on the rise, as DSA-backed candidates gain more media attention and come closer to being elected to office. The DSA really could rename itself the DCA without much pushback, as communism has lost a lot of its massive historical baggage in the minds of average American voters.
Photo via Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
Communism is on the rise in America. More than that: It is being celebrated.
With the midterm elections just over one month away, at least eight congressional candidates with avowedly socialist perspectives are poised to take office, polling well ahead of their opponents in states from New York to Colorado.
Think there’s no connection between socialism and communism? Think again. Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of America‘s (DSA) leadership body identify as communists. As Stu Smith reported earlier this summer, “Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership”. In their December 2025 newsletter, members of the DSA’s Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday.
All of which raises some natural questions: Where is this revolutionary romance coming from? And as it steadily seeps into our leadership class, where will it lead?
The best guide to understanding these questions is a book published more than 50 years ago under a pseudonym — because the author feared what pro-Maoist intellectuals would do to him if they discovered who wrote it.
Simon Leys, whose real name was Pierre Ryckmans, was a Belgian-Australian scholar of Chinese art and literature. In 1974, he published Chinese Shadows, a record of the cultural and political destruction he saw in China in the years just after the Cultural Revolution. The book is full of eerily relevant observations. One of them, which I will get to, is the most haunting thing I’ve read about what political terror does to the human soul. And nearly all of them describe habits of mind that didn’t die with Mao. In fact, they are now alive in America.
First, some background. In The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976, the historian Frank Dikötter explains how it began. Mao Zedong wanted to purge rivals at the top of the Communist Party. So he turned to radical students, giving them permission to denounce every authority except his own. Party officials egged on these young militants as they raided the homes of “class enemies” and turned them into social outcasts. What followed was violence, looting, the legitimization of hatred, and the denunciation of family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.
When the resulting catastrophe became impossible to deny, Mao and the regime’s officials disavowed their own shock troops, claiming that an “extreme left” had been responsible for the atrocities.
Sound familiar? Americans witnessed a milder version of this in the summer of 2020. Rioting and looting that year caused between $1 billion and $2 billion in damages. As this transpired, prominent voices in politics and media minimized the destruction. And some leading officials quickly insisted that the destruction was not the work of their own residents. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, later the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, estimated that 80 percent of those causing damage came from out of state, while Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey declared that “the people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents”. Jail records showed the opposite.
If the scale is different, the pattern is the same: indulgence first, followed by disingenuous disavowal after the damage is done.
QotD: Socialism and the world wars
The tragedy was that those who promised utopia generally delivered hell on earth. According to the estimates in the Black Book of Communism, the “grand total of victims of Communism was between 85 and 100 million” for the twentieth century as a whole. The lowest estimate for the total number of Soviet citizens who lost their lives as a direct result of Stalin’s policies was more than 20 million, a quarter of them in the years after World War II. Mao alone, as Frank Dikötter has shown, accounted for tens of millions: two million between 1949 and 1951, another three million by the end of the 1950s, a staggering 45 million in the man-made famine known as the Great Leap Forward, yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. Even the less bloodthirsty regimes of Eastern Europe killed and imprisoned their citizens on a shocking scale. In the Soviet Union, 2.75 million people were in the Gulag at Stalin’s death. The numbers were greatly reduced thereafter, but until the very end of the Soviet system its inhabitants lived in the knowledge that there was nothing but their own guile to protect them from an arbitrary and corrupt state. Other communist regimes around the world, including the very durable dictatorships in North Korea and Cuba, were strikingly similar in the miseries they inflicted on their own citizens.
The various socialist regimes could not even justify their murderous behavior by providing those they spared with higher living standards than their counterparts living under capitalism. On the contrary, they were economically disastrous. The collectivization of agriculture invariably reduced farming productivity. A substantial proportion of the victims of communism lost their lives because of the famines that resulted from collectivization in the Soviet Union and China. North Korea had a similarly disastrous experience. Central planning was a miserable failure for reasons long ago identified by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Janos Kornai, amongst others. Indeed, the economic performance of strictly socialist countries got worse over time because of rigidities and perverse incentives institutionalized by planning.
Moreover, the evidence is clear that, as countries moved away from socialist policies of state ownership and toward a greater reliance on market forces, they did better economically. The most striking example — but one of many — is that of China, which achieved a true great leap forward in economic output after beginning to dismantle restrictions on private initiative in 1978. After the collapse of “real existing socialism” in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was widespread recognition (the “Washington consensus”) that all countries would benefit from reducing state ownership of the economy through privatization and from lowering marginal tax rates. […] the highest marginal personal income tax rate was reduced in nearly all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s.
Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.
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September 30, 2026
The Korean War Week 119 – Americans Troops Can’t Understand Each Other – September 29, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 29 Sept 2026At the Panmunjom Truce Table, the UN presents three different plans to solve the POW issue, the only one standing in the way of an armistice. All three are rejected by the Communist delegation, but US President Harry Truman is not going to make any concessions, and have an armistice just “for the sake of having one”. In the field, the fight for Outpost Kelly flares up again, but the UN forces are unable to retake the position.
00:00 Intro
00:48 Recap
01:12 The POW Deadlock
04:12 Dean Acheson
06:54 Plans Being Made
08:53 Outpost Kelly
14:32 Summary
14:48 Conclusion
15:26 Call to Action
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September 23, 2026
The Korean War Week 118 – The Outpost Armor – September 22, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 22 Sep 2026This week we take a look at the hilltop armor used by the UN for the outpost war — the pros and cons. There’s still plenty of fighting this week, for Old Baldy, for Outpost Kelly, and behind the scenes a whole lot of South Korean POWs held by the UN may be soon going home.
00:00 Intro
00:48 Old Baldy
02:50 Outpost Kelly
06:42 The Tanks
09:26 Korean Guerrillas
12:00 Civilian Internees?
15:10 Summary
15:22 Conclusion
15:58 Mobilisation
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September 16, 2026
The Korean War Week 117 – The Cost of Rotation – September 15, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 15 Sep 2026UN Commander Mark Clark is putting together five possible scenarios for hopefully solving the POW issue and getting an armistice, but who knows if the Communists will accept any of them? The war in the skies heats up, though it’s a quiet week on the ground, and we take a look at the pros and cons of the troops rotation system.
00:00 Intro
00:25 Recap
00:48 The Active War
01:23 The POW Issue
04:31 Five Plans
07:46 ROK Increases
08:58 Troop Rotation
11:05 Downsides
13:54 War in the Skies
15:06 Summary
15:13 Conclusion
16:01 Call to Action
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September 13, 2026
QotD: Naming “Cathay”
You may think you’ve never heard of the Khitans (Chinese: 契丹 or “qidan“), but you probably have, albeit indirectly. “Khitan” is their ethnonym within their own proto-Mongolic branch of the Altaic languages. In the Turkic languages a little further West, the same people are called “Khitai“. A splinter group of the Khitans who settled in Dzhungaria and Transoxiana called themselves the “Kara-Khitai” (Black Khitans), a name that should be instantly recognizable to anybody who played Age of Empires II. If you prefer Paradox map-painting games to more traditional RTS, they do also show up in the Crusader Kings series, resulting in memes like this one. Oh dear, where was I? Right, the Khitans. The word “Khitai“, via a continent-wide game of Chinese whispers (get it?), became “Cathay”, which the confused Europeans took as the name of the Middle Kingdom itself, finally resulting in the birth of a wonderful airline.
Right, the Khitans. There they were, grazing their flocks on the Greater Khingan Mountains, just bein’ a horde, doing horde stuff. Suddenly, opportunity fell into their laps: the Tang empire was unravelling. The bustling cities and ports of Northeastern China were sitting right there, defenseless, full of gold, and skilled craftsmen, and all the soft and delicate sensuality of settled life. It was about to happen again, right? The nomadic horsemen riding in from the wild steppe, pillaging the effete townspeople and becoming their masters, only to succumb to pleasure and become effete in turn, the endless cycle of history? How could it be avoided? Here is how Mote (yes, we’ve finally gotten to the book) describes their Catch-22:
… the Khitans probably saw quite clearly that when a steppe people by degrees gave up its nomadic mobility in exchange for the more comfortable sedentary life, it ran great risks of having to compete with the Chinese on their ground. Losing in that way their comparative advantage inevitably cost the nomads their cultural integrity; they slowly became just “little Chinese” … no steppe people on China’s borders could become sinified and survive, except by migrating into China and being absorbed — another form of extinction … the warning to nomadic peoples was clear: they must master the art of drawing resources from China without sacrificing their steppe integrity … The wealth that could be wrung from it could give mastery over all Inner Asia.
The Khitan response to this pickle was unlike any I’ve ever heard. Roughly half of the Khitan aristocracy, including the royal clan, immediately adopted Chinese customs,1 moved to the city, and began building a bureaucracy. The other half, including the clan that Khitan kings traditionally picked their wives from, stayed in the steppe and had nothing to do with any of this. They then established two governments, two sets of laws,2 two taxation regimes, two writing systems, two of everything. One was civilized, the other was barbarian. Two completely incompatible social structures living side-by-side, passing through each other, but never interacting. Like dark matter, or like life-forms with mirror chirality. As a Khitan subject, you belonged to just one of these systems (if you were low class, you were sometimes allowed to pick!), and only that system had any authority over you.
The only point of official contact between the two worlds was at the top, where the Khitan king spent half the year reigning as a Chinese-style emperor, and half of it touring around his nomadic subjects as Great Khan in a mobile court. The Khitans recognized that although the king was theoretically 50-50, extended exposure to civilization would tend to Sinify him over time, and his descendants even more so. This is why they mandated that every empress was a pure-strain barbarian from a wild clan. They expected these formidable women to wield influence over their sons and to ensure that as the years rolled past and the royal clan grew more and more Chinese, they would be replenished each generation with the barbarian perspective of their mothers. This totally worked, but also resulted in no end of conflict between the empresses and their palace retainers, who exemplified different worlds.3
Sometimes you read about a social or legal system, and you are just certain that it could not be stable. I had this reaction reading about the Spartan diarchy as a kid, and I had it again reading about the Khitans last year. But their system not only endured, it flourished, and eventually turned into the Liao Dynasty which ruled China for centuries. And it functioned basically as it said it would on the tin — the civilized parts of their empire keeping things efficient and organized, supporting craftsmen and tradespeople; while the Strategic Nomad Reserve was always there ready to be called on in times of war, and prevented the administration from getting too soft and decadent.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Imperial China, by F.W. Mote”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-02-24.
- The decisive thing they actually did was to adopt surnames, which as James C. Scott will tell you is about the most forceful possible way to reject your barbarian heritage.
- The differences in laws could be extreme. For instance, under Chinese law, as in most “civilized” places, treason was punished with ultimate severity and brutality. But in many “barbarian” cultures, treason isn’t actually a huge deal (almost akin to a playground fight) and defeated rebels are customarily forgiven. The Khitans, again, simply did both. Traitors were executed if they lived under city law, and received amnesty if they were under tribal law.
- One such an empress, upon the death of her husband, was asked by a Chinese courtier if she would follow ancient custom and be buried alongside him. She responded: “I of course do not refuse to join the Emperor underground, but my children are young and the country has no leader, so I am not free to do that”. Then she ordered that her right hand be severed at the wrist to represent her within her husband’s tomb.
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September 9, 2026
The Korean War Week 116 – Marines Fight to Hold the Line – September 8, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 8 Sep 2026The “Outpost War” is in full swing this week as the fight rages for posts known simply by names like Bruce, Felix, and Gary, which are still worth dying over to both sides. Also, this week we take a look at something we haven’t covered before — the dental care of the troops.
00:00 Intro
00:55 Recap
01:57 Outpost Bruce
05:02 Bunker Hill
07:21 Relief
09:56 The War in the Skies
11:05 Dental Care
13:49 Summary
14:28 Conclusion
15:00 Call to Action
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September 2, 2026
The Korean War Week 115 – What About Japan? – September 1, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 1 Sep 2026The aftershocks of Typhoon Karen have dumped so much rain on Korea that it’s quiet in the field this week, so I turn my attention to Japan. Japan’s situation with regard to Korea is very important, but is in a state of flux after the occupation of Japan officially ended and the UN troops there went from occupiers to guests. It’s very interesting.
00:00 Hook
00:52 Recap
01:14 Typhoon Karen
02:42 National Police Reserve Japan
07:55 Expanding Forces
10:28 US Military Status
12:38 The Joint Committee
15:04 Summary
15:15 Mobilisation
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August 26, 2026
The Korean War Week 114 – Stalin’s Secret Plan – August 25, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 25 Aug 2026Heavy rains prevent action in the field in Korea this week, so the big story worldwide is talks in Moscow between Josef Stalin and Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai. They talk about Five Year Defense Plans, artillery production, Soviet aid for the Chinese, and exactly how they see the war in Korea and what they think of the American forces.
00:00 Intro
01:09 Bunker Hill
01:51 South Korean Prisoners of War
02:44 Chinese Soviet Talks
05:06 Five Year Defense Plan
07:26 Artillery Production
11:23 Stalin and the USA …
12:52 Eisenhower and the War
16:05 Summary
16:18 Conclusion
18:29 Sign Up
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