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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Film Review: The Battle of Lake Changjin |
| 2024-03-15 |
| [YouTube] I think that it can be fairly stated that the book The Forgotten War by Clay Blair is a gold standard for military histories of virtually any period. For 37 years, the book has stood the test of time for both it's comprehensiveness and it's detail of the US involvement in the Korean War. In 2021, the Chinese released the first of two of what would turn out to be film blockbusters, chronicling their side of at least the first six months of the Korean war. Recently, The Battle at Lake Changjin could be found online on YouTube. This film was actually one of several films released by both Chinese and Taiwanese filmmakers about World War II and the Korean War, among them, The 800, the two Lake Changjin films, The Sacrifice, and others. Technically, the film is as good as it gets as far as accuracy for military equipment at the time for both sides, with the slapdash nature of the Chinese forces, using a wide variety of battlefield pickups. As well, the sound and visual effects were quite stunning, as were the stunts. Storyline as filmed did show some accuracies lining up with what we know about what took place between 1949 and 1950, including President Harry Truman's decision to move the US 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Straits as a warning to communist China. At the time, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had deployed a large number of forces to the area near Taiwan in preparation for a final assault on the island, which prompted Truman to take his action. The storyline centers around a PLA rifle company commander, Wu Qianli, having just been demobilized following the civil war, and returning to his ancestral home to announce to his parents and to his brother that the Chinese communists had allotted 1/3 of an acre to his family, and that they would build their new family house as soon as he returned from the war. The screenwriters at this point had accidentally showed one of my main thesis of the Chinese involvement in the Korean War: that the Chinese communists sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese to die needlessly unprepared for what they were about to face. The main character's younger brother, Wu Wanli, being young and dumb, joins the People's Volunteers, and is sent in the main character's unit. It was the Chinese ancient military philosopher Sun Tzu, who warned about sending an unprepared people to war, that they were being sent to slaughter. But even the bookworm Mao Zedong, for all his education as a librarian, disregarded that lesson, choosing hubris over history and reality, for the bases of his military decisions. The film proceeds about how one would expect a film to proceed, clumsily infused with the Chinese communist agenda, without trying to appear it is so infused. For one example, we see Mao trying to hold back his son, Mao Anying, from going to war. Mao Anying would wind up being killed in a US airstrike. The film accurately portrays US forces commanders, in the early going, supremely confident about overrunning the Korean peninsula following the Inchon amphibious operation. The film also to a lesser extent, portrays the logistical problems the PLA had in their initial contact, with US air power constantly attacking their forces, and not realizing that they were bombing Chinese forces and not North Korean forces. From that point of the film, the screenplay begins to depart from reality. The Chinese communists were surely aware about the immense difficulties they had in securing their costly tactical victories in the early going. Instead the screenwriters chose to write in sentimentality over historical reality in describing the characters in dealing with US forces. For a more objective treatment of the subject you would have to go to the writings of Xiaobing Li, who published several books about the PLA and the Korean War, Attack at Chosin: The Chinese Second Offensive in Korea, China's Battle for Korea: The 1951 Spring Offensive, and the more generalized A History of the Modern Chinese Army. In the first book, going by interviews with actual PLA field commanders of the period, Li details the PLA's second attack at Chosin. In describing that attack the reader will find that the PLA suffered 90 to 95% casualties. Mao, as with all communist leaders, pressed his forces into combat, without regard or training in dealing with the immense firepower that US Army and USMC forces can deliver, especially in defensive combat. You can add to that my second theses: that even if PLA recon units were invited to dinner with US field commanders prior to their attack, they still would not have been able to comprehend what they saw, what they were told, nor what they were about to do. The film should have displayed Mao's utter disregard for how his forces were being chewed up by the US military, but fails. Instead it shows a PLA having won a tremendous victory at Lake Changjin, without showing the cost. All that aside, I highly recommend the film. The Youtube version is dubbed, and some descriptions are subtitled. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 For the Chinese side of the event, try Enter the Dragon by Russell Spurr. When they moved the units from the Taiwan front to Korea they didn't get winter uniforms or gear. Many perished in the elements. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2024-03-15 19:00 |