Enter the Dragon: China's Undeclared War Against the U.S. in Korea, 1950-51 [Paperback]

Russell Spurr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 24, 1999

Drawn from firsthand recollections of observers and participants on both sides, this "outstanding military history" (Kirkus) depicts the Chinese and Allied advances and retreats in Korea from 1950 to 1951. 34 b/w photos, 6 maps, bibliography, index.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Spurr covered the last 14 months of the Korean War for the London Daily Express and later served as chief correspondent for the Far East Economic Review. Here he describes the first six months of the war from the Chinese political, diplomatic and military perspective, balanced against American and British views of events. There's a wealth of new material that will be of interest to students of the so-called Forgotten War, including revelations about Peng Dehuai, commander of Chinese forces and later the most prominent military victim of the Cultural Revolution, the motives behind the Chinese intervention, the Hate America campaign, tactics in the field. Unfortunately, the author provides vague information on sources, and there are no footnotes. This, along with his lavish use of popular-historical "atmospheric detail" calls into question the credibility of the text. Illustrations.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

$22.95. hist An expert on China and Korea, Spurr has written an account of the Korean War from the Communist viewpoint. His unique opportunity to use Chinese and North Korean archives and his interviews with many participants, from privates to generals, give the work a reality not found in comparable books. Like the United States, China was a reluctant participant in the Korean War: just recovering from an eight-year war against the Japanese and a brutal civil war, it faced an economy in ruins and an army in need of rest and re-equipping. Spurr offers an invaluable explanation of why China fought in Korea and why it fought as it did. Essential. Stanley Itkin, Hillside P.L., New Hyde Park, N.Y.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Newmarket Press (June 24, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557042497
• ISBN-13: 978-1557042491
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,306,229 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FRom my enemy's viewpoint., June 2, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Enter the Dragon: China's Undeclared War Against the U.S. in Korea, 1950-51 (Paperback)

I was a automatic rifleman (BAR) in the USMC during the 1st 4 months of the Korean War, wounded at the Chosin Reservoir. Enter the Dragon is a fascinating story told from the Chinese view. It is seldom that anyone in combat ever gets to see his theater of action reported on by his enemy. After 40 years I turned to the books on the war. This one is As Good As it Gets. Anyone interested in the Korean War from the enemy "grunt's" view, this is your book.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Early part of Korean War from Chinese perspective, July 22, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Enter The Dragon: China's Undeclared War Against The U.S. In Korea, 1950-51 (Hardcover)

Written by a British newspaper reporter who covered the latter stages of the war, this book contains narrative from extensive interviews with particpants in the Korean War, including many Chinese, which differentiates it from most other accounts. A portion of the book is devoted to the political underpinnings of Chinese intervention. The author provides supporting evidence for recent conclusions by figures such as U.S. General Matthew Ridgeway, that the intial N. Korean invasion was carried out without advance knowledge by China, which then hastily sent ill-equipped troops into battle after UN forces defeated North Korea. But most of the book is comprised of gripping individual experiences of the battlefield from the perspective of the Chinese foot solider. Whether it be destroying tanks by close assault, surviving the ever-present American airstrikes, or the amazing bluff of marching Chinese commandos masquerading as South Koreans directly into a US battalion headquarters, any reader with an interest in wartime accounts will be well rewarded by time spent with this book

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fast-reading narrative on the US and China fighting in Korea, 1950-51, July 4, 2006

By 

Gary J. Sampson "Sammy" (Denver, Colorado) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Enter the Dragon: China's Undeclared War Against the U.S. in Korea, 1950-51 (Paperback)

The majority of Western literature on the Korean War (1950-53) deals primarily with the Western experience; either that of the Americans, or, if you dig a little deeper, perhaps something on the British or another Commonwealth nation. Little attention is paid to the Koreans hailing from either side of the 38th Parallel, and even less to the hordes of Chinese, at least beyond a "faceless enemy conducting human wave attacks" standpoint. Russell Spurr breaks from that tradition in Enter the Dragon: China's Undeclared War Against the U.S. in Korea, 1950-51, bringing us an in-depth point-of-view from the Chinese and North Korean side of the fight at last.

Spurr does not make the mistake of limiting his coverage to one side of the fight, however. The Americans are (of course) also prominent players in the drama, supplemented by cameos of the supporting cast of UN forces, occasionally the South Koreans, and even some vignettes including the Soviets. What we end up with is a fairly comprehensive portrait of the battles as they raged (both on and off the battlefield; military maneuvers are supplemented by political developments and diplomatic intrigue) from August 1950 through January 1951. These are the key months, according to Spurr, that "changed the course of history." (p. 5) It's hard to argue with him: after those fateful months came the long period of competition and suspicion between the US and China in Asia and the Pacific that lasted well into the 1970's and beyond (albeit in a more limited fashion now).

The author states that the Chinese intervention need not have happened if only UN forces had been better aware of the goings-on in Peking; for those not in the business, this means intelligence! US intelligence evaluations of Chinese intentions should have included analysis of high-level political intelligence provided by the CIA, but they did not, largely because the Truman administration had been "blinkered" by General Douglas MacArthur's intelligence monopoly in Asia. By MacArthur's decree, the Central Intelligence Agency was not even allowed to operate in Japan (from where they would have been running source operations in Korea and elsewhere) until 1952! As if the lack of independent intelligence collection was not bad enough, MacArthur's G-2 (chief intelligence officer), Major General Charles A. Willoughby, was seemingly incapable of rendering an independent assessment of the intelligence picture; instead he "matched his master's judgment." (p. 161)

Throughout the book Spurr shows us how poor American intelligence was and how easy it was for the enemy to collect on us. At the strategic level, US Far East Command (FECOM) was negligently dismissive of the North Korean troop and materiel build-up along the 38th Parallel before hostilities commenced. The entire American war effort in Korea was continually hampered by a "failure to gather or evaluate intelligence." (p. 27) US commanders suffered from "an almost complete lack of reliable intelligence about enemy movements and intentions." (p. 31) These are not laudatory remarks, by any means.
Further, instead of gathering intelligence by conducting reconnaissance patrols, as the Chinese did (producing detailed intelligence reports on US defensive schemes and lazy, lackadaisical troops), the Americans instead relied heavily on aerial reconnaissance assets (perhaps a dangerous foreshadowing of what in the US intelligence community today seems to be a "love affair" with high-tech collection assets). Full faith and confidence was placed in the "reconnaissance power of the U.S. Far East Air Force." (p. 158) If Chinese troops entered the conflict, the Americans thought, there was no way that the planes would miss them. More recently, Americans have certainly got the gathering part of the intelligence equation down, but some would argue that we still haven't learned the lesson about analysis. Even now, it is likely that much of the intelligence history of the Korean War remains classified, some 50-plus years on.

While the Americans floundered, the North Koreans used open-source intelligence (OSINT) to track troop movements from the US mainland, "reading all about it" in newspapers and magazines. Chinese signals intelligence (SIGINT) teams monitored American radio traffic and discovered that US forces mistakenly believed that the unexpected resistance they were meeting close to the Yalu River was from NKPA units, testimony to the effectiveness of Chinese deception measures, such as moving only at night and extensive use of camouflage. The Chinese easily determined the customary times of day when American recon flights passed above (in the mornings); they simply made sure to be in a covered position obscured from observation when that happened.

After the intelligence "backdrop" to the situation, the book starts out set in a North Korean command post outside the Pusan Perimeter. The Korean People's Army (KPA) is trying to close the deal on unifying the Korean peninsula after running roughshod over the hapless Republic of Korea (ROK) forces arrayed across from it on the 38th Parallel. Despite starting off with the North Koreans, most of the book is spent looking in on either the Americans or the Chinese. Indeed, when Koreans make an appearance in the book they are either inept (ROK Army forces) or only marginally important (like the North Koreans looking on from the sidelines as the Chinese do the vast majority of the heavy fighting). As the caricature goes, the South Koreans are American "puppets" and the North Koreans are propaganda-addicted Comrades.

It goes on to cover all the major events of the war from August 1950 to January 1951, the "meatiest" portion of the war in terms of fighting. MacArthur's risky Inchon amphibious assault by the 1st Marine Division and the 7th Infantry Division enables the breakout of UN forces from Pusan. As "victory disease" infects UN forces and "home by Christmas" becomes the de-facto motto of American troops, one American regimental commander is determined to urinate in the Yalu River. He did so on November 21, 1950.

As US troops begin to encounter sterner resistance closer to Manchuria, more and more Chinese troops were turning up as prisoners of war. Elements of the Chinese People's Volunteer Force (CPVF) were making their way into North Korea to fight the Americans as early as October, but US intelligence knew nothing of it. Soon, there was no way they could not know. Lead elements of the UN advance were crushed by enemy units of unimaginable strength. Before long the retreat south is on as the Chinese enter the fight en masse and push UN forces back well past Seoul before outrunning their supply lines and stalling their advance. This was the longest and most humiliating retreat in US military history. The US Marines appear again, too: their orderly withdrawal under fire from the frozen Changjin Reservoir in northeastern Korea is clearly contrasted with the haphazard, every-man-for-himself circus of a retreat that took place in the west.

The book ends as General Matthew Ridgway assumes command following MacArthur's relief by President Truman. UN forces are just starting to get back in the fight, applying Ridgway's "meatgrinder" combined-arms approach, trying to move beyond the road-bound, vehicle-borne myopia that passed for tactics to that point. "A line in the snow" is drawn south of Seoul and UN forces stiffen their resistance on the frozen terrain, at last beginning to push the Chinese back to the north.

The book reads very fast, like a Tom Clancy novel. It is written in a comfortable narrative style, taking you right into the action, be it on the battlefield alongside a Chinese commando squad infiltrating US defensive positions, inside the fantasy-land UN command center at Dai Ichi in Tokyo, or sitting in on the deliberations of the Chinese Revolutionary Council in Peking. In fact, the front matter of the book includes a list of "major narrative characters," which seemed a bit odd for a purported book of history. This approach to telling the story of history may not be entirely run-of-the-mill, but it works. Spurr is able to weave the tale, derived from interviews with survivors, in a convincing fashion. It is certainly an interesting way to present both sides of the conflict. The author, a Brit who served in the Royal Indian Navy and was a journalist (he died in 2002) also wrote several other books, one of which, A Glorious Way to Die: The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato, April 1945, was also written in the same narrative style as this book.

The book includes maps (absent is a scale to relate distances to the ground), a chronology of events from 1945 - 1953 (but it is only detailed during August 1950 - January 1951, the focus of the book), a bibliography, and an index, but no footnotes or endnotes, which is its biggest weakness as a work of historical value. The lack of citations has led to some criticism of the book, assessed to be valid by this reviewer, that it is largely based on hearsay. Absent documentation, there is little way to tell.

In the end, the book is worth reading if for no other reason than to put the reader in Korea, China, or Japan in 1950-51 as the events of the Korean War unfold, something that this work is able to do in a way that the majority of non-narrative history books are far less capable of. At least for this reviewer, it whets the appetite to learn more about this "forgotten war" and especially about the people who lost the most from it, namely the Koreans. After certain points in 1950 (June 25 for the South Koreans; October 14 for the North Koreans), the locals became only bit players in the whole tragic sequence of events. Once the Americans and the Chinese got involved, conduct of the war... Read more ›