With the encouragement of the United States the South held elections in the spring of 1948. To avoid conflict between the two wartime allies, they agreed to a temporary division of the country along the 38th Parallel-with Soviet forces in the North, and American troops occupying the South. (Containment and the Truman Doctrine are covered in the EDSITEment lesson plan " The Strategy of Containment," lesson #2 in the curriculum unit entitled " Origins of the Cold War".Įver since the late 19th century Korea had been under Japanese rule, but was liberated by U.S. Korea would be the first place where American troops would fight and die for that principle. In that speech Truman committed the country-at least on paper-to the defense of "free peoples" everywhere against communist aggression. But there was a moral dimension to this as well, which the president put forward in the so-called "Truman Doctrine" speech of 1947. In 1947 the administration committed the country to a policy of "containment," in which communism would be allowed to remain where it already existed, but the Soviet Union and its allies would not be allowed to gain control of any new areas deemed important to America's national security. That the president acted as he did-and Americans (at least initially) supported that decision-reflects a new understanding of the role of the United States in world affairs. foreign policy after all, the notion that the country had a vital stake in the outcome of a war on the Asian mainland would never have been taken seriously before World War II. Truman's decision to intervene in the Korean War represents a serious departure from previous U.S. Specifically it will address four major issues: 1) Truman's decision to send troops to Korea 2) The decision to cross the 38th Parallel into North Korea, at the risk of a wider war with China 3) Truman's decision to fire MacArthur and 4) the war's growing unpopularity in the United States. This lesson will introduce students to the conflict by having them read the most important administration documents related to it. Ultimately it would contribute to Dwight Eisenhower's election as president in 1952, and it would be the Eisenhower administration that brought an end to the conflict through a compromise peace. Differences between Truman and MacArthur led to the latter's firing in early 1951, and as the war ground on it grew more and more unpopular in the United States. But while MacArthur was able to prevent the North Koreans from overrunning the South, an unexpected intervention by China soon turned the "police action" (as Truman called it) into a bloody stalemate. Within the next couple of days the Truman administration and the United Nations had decided to aid in the defense of South Korea, and soon a multinational army had arrived under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. In 1950, North Korean forces, armed mainly with Soviet weapons, invaded South Korea in an effort to reunite the peninsula under communist rule. In Europe, East and West eyed each other anxiously across the Iron Curtain.
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