337. Battleground Korea: Episode II - The Brink and the Breaking Point

Battleground

Goalhanger

History

4.6 • 703 Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The lightning war begins. Following the invasion, the North Korean military executes a devastating blitzkrieg attack, sweeping through South Korea and shattering all initial resistance. Saul and Roger are joined by experts Robert Lyman and David Allison, who help dive into the details of the chaotic early stages of the Korean War. First we look at the desperate retreat of the overwhelmed South Korean and early US forces as they are pushed towards Pusan. Then we look at the crucial global response: the newly formed UN Security Council, seizing a rare opportunity, debates and authorises a multinational intervention. Can a global force be assembled in time to halt the seemingly unstoppable North Korean war machine? The episode climaxes at the Pusan Perimeter. Battered, exhausted, and pushed to the absolute limit of the peninsula, UN and South Korean forces make a final, desperate stand. This is North Korea's furthest advance. Outnumbered, outgunned, and with their backs literally against the sea. The fate of South Korea hangs by a thread. Next time: The Tide Turns. If you have any thoughts or questions, you can send them to - [email protected] Producer: James Hodgson X (Twitter): @PodBattleground Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak.
0:17.6	Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese
0:22.4	had acted 10, 15 and 20 years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall,
0:28.9	communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores.
0:35.1	And that was a quote by President Harry S. Truman. Welcome to Battleground. This is
0:39.9	the second of our six episodes on the Korean War. The title of this one is the brink and the
0:45.9	breaking point. We're going to be covering the surprise invasion, the world's reaction, the desperate
0:51.1	retreat and the Pusan stand.
0:59.2	So, you'll recall our previous episode, we talked about the sort of long tale of this conflict, the long years of Japanese occupation of the peninsula of Korea, and how the
1:05.1	circumstances of the end of World War II brought about this rather arbitrary division of the
1:10.3	peninsula between the forces of the peninsula between the
1:12.3	forces of the US in the South and the Soviets in the North. And then the sort of two characters
1:18.1	that emerge in that period as the respective leaders of those two areas, Kimmel Sung in the
1:24.1	north, communist had been working the underground during the Japanese occupation,
1:29.9	and Singman Rie in the South, who had spent most of that period in exile in the US.
1:35.5	In the lead-up, of course, we talked about the unrest, how much unrest there was in the South.
1:40.5	They've got essentially an ongoing civil war going on on that peninsula of Korea,
1:45.8	with a sort of curious myopia, particularly from the Americans, that Americans essentially
1:50.0	don't necessarily appear to see the strategic significance of Korea to their own interests
1:56.7	in the gathering gloom of the Cold War in the late 1940s. So it's all set, effectively, for
2:03.7	the events of the summer of 1950. That's exactly right, Roger. We're also going to be
2:09.8	joined throughout the rest of the series by Friend of the Podcast and our resident expert on the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Goalhanger, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Goalhanger and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.