War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history

through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. host, James Early. Hello, and welcome back to Key Battles of the Korean War, our 10,000-foot survey of the

first major conflict of the Cold War.

I'm your host, James Early, as always, and I am joined by my co-host, Army veteran, and

military historian Evan Muxon. Well, gee whiz, Evan, things didn't really go very well for the

UN forces in North Korea last time, did they? And I have a feeling they're not going to get any

better. Yeah, it's, well, maybe, maybe not.

Let's leave the listeners in suspense for a little bit. It's certainly not out of the realm of

possibility, but let's just go ahead and get started. And we'll, as we always do recap the last

episode, if you're forgetful like me, you may not remember all that happens, so we'll

give you a quick cliff notes overview, and then we'll jump into the new things that are

going to be happening. So in our last episode, we saw that by November 17, 1950, 3,000 or maybe more

Chinese soldiers had crossed the Yalu River and had taken up positions in the

mountains of Northern Korea, preparing a trap for the northward advancing UN soldiers.

We then saw how the Chinese launched surprise attacks on the Allied Eighth Army in the West

and the Tenth Corps in the East. We saw that the Chinese overwhelmingly defeated the 8th Army at the

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