Partly inspired by some potential changes in my own life and partly because this year marks the tenth anniversary since my grandfather passed away, I’ve found myself with a newfound interest in the Korean War. I’m resisting the urge to turn this into a research/game project of a similar scale to We Intend to Move on Your Works, but I intend to at least dip my toe in and I would like to have a little structure as I dive deeper. With that goal in mind, I recently read The Coldest Winter and I’ve a short reading list to tackle over the rest of this year. In terms of games, I’m focusing only on operational games that look at the whole Korean peninsula – nothing tactical for the moment. I don’t want this to balloon into a huge life consuming project, so I’m only planning to play at most a handful of games.
Before I get to the games, though, I wanted to outline a few notions I have about the Korean War and its key elements that I would be interested to see game designers tackle in one way or another. This is very much my impressions before I’ve played the games and while I’ve only done a very little bit of initial research, so these are my starting position not a final thesis on the Korean War as a subject. I may end up renouncing some or all of these at the end of this process, but I wanted to lay out where I’m starting from to provide some more structure to what will follow.
Underestimating of the Opposition
The Korean War was almost defined by an underestimating of one’s opponents. In the late 1940s MacArthur, and to an extent the American government, thought Korea was on the periphery of global politics. They did not believe that it would be the site of the next big conflagration and in fact their plans to reduce their presence on the peninsula may have helped trigger the North Korean invasion. MacArthur and his command didn’t think the North Koreans would attack and if they did they thought that they could be trivially driven back by a fraction of US troops.
On the other end, Kim Il Sung didn’t believe the Americans would bother to intervene in Korea when he crossed the 38th parallel. He was confident in his ability to defeat the South Koreans (largely correctly) and thought he could have the entire peninsula in a matter of weeks (less correctly). He didn’t expect the level of strategic investment that the Americans were prepared to commit. Kim Il Sung also refused to heed warnings about the potential for an amphibious landing at Incheon.
Then, once they had intervened in force, MacArthur and his Tokyo Command were convinced that the Chinese would not possibly intervene on behalf of the North Koreans. Again, even if they did MacArthur was convinced that they could be easily defeated – boasting that the US Airforce would turn the Yalu into a bloodbath should the Chinese try and cross. His command routinely denied evidence that China was in North Korea in force before they launched their offensive in late 1950. Once again, the side that was winning the war underestimated the risks they faced.
Finally, when Chinese forces crossed the 38th parallel heading south (the third crossing of the parallel in less than a year), Mao believed the UN forces were nearly defeated and did not give proper credence to reports from his generals in the field about the limits of Chinese supply lines and the exhaustion and starvation conditions his troops were under in South Korea. Once again, the side in the winning position underestimated the risk of their position and stretched themselves to the breaking point.
The endless quest to control the entire peninsula, and a lack of belief in the strength of their enemies, routinely caused both sides to overextend themselves and for this situation to be exploited by their enemies. Generally, this ignorance and over optimism came from the top of the command and was in defiance of the facts and expertise of the people on the ground.
I am curious to see how games can encourage players to engage in overly risky behavior and prevent their knowledge of the historical outcomes to create conservative play. To be a good counterfactual, games should probably allow you to play a little more conservatively to see what might have happened, but to really convey the history and help players understand why the war was the way it was I would like to see some encouragement for (and punishment of) reckless aggression.
Racism
We also cannot underestimate the role that racism played in the tendency for UN Commanders to underestimate the strength of their adversaries. Douglas MacArthur practically made a career of underestimating the fighting strength of Asian peoples and, even as they routinely made a fool of him, he continued to claim that he was an expert on “oriental psychology”. In his support staff he had General Ned Allmond, who frequently used disparaging language towards Asian people, calling them “laundrymen”, and was aggressively and vociferously against President Truman’s efforts to end segregation in the US Military. General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s head of intelligence, was a German born fascist – he maintained very close personal ties Franco, so much so that the dictator sent him gifts of wine and other Spanish goods, and after the war he would emerge as a member of the political far-right.
Willoughby was in charge of supplying MacArthur with intelligence, or more accurately with distorting all intelligence reports to fit the conclusions MacArthur had already made. Collectively, these men and the culture they created in the high command of the Pacific theater was one of intense racism and disrespect for the fighting capabilities of the Korean and Chinese soldiers the men under their command would be up against. This repeatedly led to strategic and operational mistakes and a refusal to engage with the war based on the facts, preferring instead their own misguided and backwards notions of what ought to be happening on the Korean peninsula.
Correctly capturing the psychology of historical actors is a huge ask for any game, but I will be very impressed if a Korean War game manages to convey some of the ways that racism overwhelmed good judgment and led to catastrophic miscalculations on the part of UN high command.
Supply Lines of the Korean War
Throughout the war, both sides suffered from the problem of how to keep their troops supplied the further down (or up) the peninsula they went. Korea in 1950 didn’t have a particularly robust road or train network and certainly once the war got going what it did have was battered by use and combat. The North Koreans and Chinese forces had no air power and so their supply lines were susceptible to bombardment by air, which meant that what trucks they had usually drove by night (a risky business) and large amounts of supplies were carried overland on the backs of porters. These were huge logistical problems for them and created the kind of supply networks that would become strained very quickly.
The UN Forces had better supply options – they had air drops and could move their supplies by road and rail with relative impunity – but even then, the further they traveled up the more problems they faced getting supplies to units in need. They also struggled, at least during the first year or so of the war, to move their supplies from the existing road and rail network and to fight in the more rural areas of the peninsula.
A game should ideally reflect the greater supply capacity of the UN Forces but also represent how they were not without their own struggles, and they had to routinely come up with solutions for delivering key supplies to embattled units in difficult circumstances. Korean and especially Chinese forces had far more limited supply, but they also drew some benefits from the fact that they often carried their supplies by human labor overland and were thus not as dependent on the limited road and rail networks. The geography of the Korean peninsula, both its length and how it widens out as it approaches the mainland, naturally made the shipping of ammunition, food, and even winter clothing (for the brutal Korean winter) a key aspect of the war.
Destruction of Korea
The Korean war was highly destructive and wreaked massive devastation on the landscape of the peninsula. The city of Seoul changed hands three times in approximately six months, and in the process was virtually levelled. It was obviously a time of great suffering for the Korean people. I think it is far too easy for wargames to lose sight of the tragedy of war by obsessing over details of battlefield maneuver and strategic positioning of soldiers. I want games to remind players that people were suffering and more than just soldiers died in these wars.
The devastation also had significant impacts on the waging of the war, because it meant that there was often little to no food in the Korean countryside. The posed a problem especially for the Chinese forces as they moved further south into Korea and further from their supply bases. UN Troops could fly in food and other supplies from Japan, but the Chinese military had far less logistical support and so would have benefited greatly from being able to forage off the land, something that the total devastation of the war prevented. It also meant that there were refugees and people fleeing from battles – a fact that the North Koreans and Chinese sometimes used as a means of infiltrating UN positions and gathering intelligence before they attacked.
Night Attacks and Ambush Tactics
This one may be a challenge for the operational scale games I’m interested in playing, but I would love to see if they could capture the different tactics used by the two sides. For most of the first year of the war, the UN forces traveled by road and used the main arteries of travel on the peninsula to drive their attacks. Meanwhile, the Chinese forces often preferred to move past a UN position to set up an ambush, and then when they attacked drive them back into the trap, they had already set for them – often along the same roads the UN had used to get to that position in the first place. Until the UN forces learned to stand and fight, setting up stronger defensive positions that they could hold out against sustained assaults, this proved devastating.
This tactic combined well with the chaos created by the fact that the North Koreans and Chinese almost always attacked at night. The soldiers would virtually disappear during the day, limiting the practical usefulness of UN air superiority and making counteroffensives very challenging. The preference for night attacks meant that UN soldiers might have no idea how many Chinese soldiers were in the nearby area or where they were, greatly limiting their capacity to fight back. It also meant that UN forces were usually exhausted, having to move all day and then fight all night. It kept the initiative out of the UN’s hands for most of the first year of the war.
Who do you play as?
A key question for any wargame is who the players represent. Are you a specific historical individual or more of a zeitgeist or virtual deity manipulating the levers of history? This matters especially in something like the Korean War where there was such a massive disconnect between the levels of command.
For the UN side you have at least three potential historical avatars with three very different experiences of the war. As MacArthur you can be the overly ambitious and obscenely reckless commander in chief – although his firing near the end of the first year makes this a challenging position to represent. Even more difficult is that of Harry Truman, the president a continent away who cannot control MacArthur or his command and is faced with significant political pressure which makes controlling his reckless commander even harder.
Take for example the march to Yalu – no gamer with the knowledge of the history is going to see Yalu as a good idea. It was obviously going to be a disaster. So, most UN players would presumably take the more logical choice of trying to set up a perimeter from Pyongyang to Wusan. However, that was not the orders given to the men in the field. If the player is MacArthur, how do you encourage them to make such irrational choices and can you convey MacArthur’s refusal to recognize the reality of what was happening on the peninsula?
I think the most interesting role for an operational game of the Korean War is to be the commander in the field: historically General Walker and then later General Ridgway. These generals are in charge of the war on the ground but faced with constant pressure from both MacArthur and Washington, which may force them into making strategically unsound decisions because the choice is out of their hands. This does have the slight problem that it is hard to capture MacArthur’s baffling decision to split the command in Korea by placing Ned Allmond in command of the Incheon landing and freeing him from having to answer to Walker during the push to the Yalu. However, if a game can convey this frustration and idiocy to the player I will be thoroughly impressed.
On the other side are you Kim Il Sung, Stalin, Mao, or Peng Dehuai? Kim Il Sung and the North Koreans were the driving force behind the opening of the war, but once the Chinese intervened, they were largely sidelined. Stalin lurked in the background, giving his permission for Kim to invade but offering little in the way of actual support. Once the Chinese did intervene, General Peng was in charge of the actual military operations but faced increasing political pressure from Mao which led to a reckless overextension of the Chinese position. The easiest solution is probably to simply have a Communist player and let the role bleed fluidly between the various players within that faction, but that does mean committing to a bit of a Red Scare view of the communist powers. One communist leader was not interchangeable with another, they all had separate goals for and perspectives on the war. I would like it if games took a specific stance – maybe even one that changes during the game or between scenarios – about which communists exactly the player represents.
Both sides frequently faced the problem of a disconnect between political goals, the goals of the overall commanders, and the goals of the commanders in the field. This tension between elements within each side is difficult to replicate within a two-player game but is crucial to understanding why the Korean War happened as it did. Players should ideally feel both their bosses and the wider political pressures breathing down their neck as they try to do their best on the game board. This is not just a war of operational and supply challenges (what war is?) but rather one with a significant and impactful political component.
Incheon landing
The amphibious landing at Incheon was the operational high point of the war, probably its most famous single moment and the event that made MacArthur’s foolish push to the Yalu possible. No one wanted to contradict the Great General after so masterful a stroke as Incheon and it thus paved the way for his downfall. This presents a challenge for game designers, though, because if there is one thing players know about the Korean War it is the famous amphibious landing at Incheon. The thing is, that landing was incredibly risky and was only the stunning success that it was because the harbor at Incheon had not been mined and Kim Il Sung did basically nothing (despite warnings from the Chinese) to oppose any possible landing there. The Incheon landing was hardly the secret that Operation Overlord had been in 1944, so it stands to reason that any player recreating the Korean War could adequately prepare for and prevent a successful landing like Incheon. But would a Korean War game where Incheon doesn’t happen be satisfying? I think any game that can capture the decision space that made an amphibious landing so effective and that offers up the option for alternative landings (many alternate sites were suggested and rejected by MacArthur) could effectively be evoking the idea of Incheon without guaranteeing that it always happens. This is a tricky balance and I’m keen to see how various designers have decided to tackle it.
From Mobile war to less mobile war
I know going into this project that many games on the Korean War are only really interested in the Mobile War phase – roughly the first year from June 1950 until mid-1951, a period that also roughly aligns with the part of the war that Douglas MacArthur was in command for. This was the phase with the most dramatic troop movements and set piece battles before the war settled into a more grinding form of almost trench warfare from late 1951 until the truce in 1953. I don’t believe any of the games I intend to play continue past mid-1951 but I am curious to see if they offer the possibility of the war changing from mobile war to the more grueling combat of the war’s second and third years. After all, it was not predetermined that the war would change shape in the middle of 1951. It could have been done sooner, and along a different parallel. I would also really like to play a game that covers the years 1952 and 1953, possibly including the peace process as part of it, but I am not aware of any such game. This period of the war, while it has not captured the same attention was nevertheless incredibly bloody and important for the history of the region and the peace that followed. I have the low expectations that any game will address this latter phase of the war, but I am curious to see if any of them handle the transition from mobile to more static warfare.
What Next?
Those are my initial hopes and expectations, now what remains is to see is how they compare to the games and books I have ahead of me. For the first game on the docket, I decided to start at the very beginning with Jim Dunnigan’s 1971 game Korea: The Mobile War 1950-1. This game doesn’t have the same glowing reputation as some of the later titles I have planned, but it is a very early SPI game and was released less than 20 years after the war ended so I have hopes that it will have something interesting to say even if the gameplay doesn’t hold up.
If you think this project sounds interesting, you could really help me out by making a donation to my Ko-Fi. Sadly, researching, playing, and writing about historical wargames is not that lucrative a business and some of these games can be pretty expensive so any assistance is greatly appreciated. If enough people support the project, it is far more likely that I will expand it to include even more games as well, so if you want that please consider donating via the link below. Thanks!