1949–1953: Thunder out of China

Abstract

As we have seen, throughout the 1945–9 period it was in Europe and the Middle East where, in Marxist jargon, ‘the struggle on the main front’ was waged. Underlying all the American counter-measures against Stalin’s forward policy was the fear that a third world war might develop out of the unprecedented peace-time tensions raised by the cold war. At the same time it was expected that if the worst came, it would begin with a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a move which would be answered by an annihilating atomic counter-blow against Russian cities and industrial centres by the Us Strategic Air Command. Barely a year after the formation of NATO Stalin did attempt to extend his empire by military means, but the blow fell not in the West, but in remote Korea. Moreover, the war which went on in Korea for three years, after the invasion of South Korea by the northern régime in June 1950, did not develop into the total war that had been foreseen by Western strategists; instead, a limited war, a conflict for which the Western allies were both militarily and politically ill-prepared, dragged on until it had changed the entire defence posture of the United States and its allies.