Hello and welcome to episode four of Battleground Career with me, Saul David and Roger

Morehouse. Well, Roger, we're getting to the heart of the action now,

aren't we? Last episode, we covered the famous Inshon landings by MacArthur, the breakout of the

Hussam perimeter, the recovery of Seoul and the advance all the way to the 38th parallel, which is where,

of course, the war could have stopped, because that

after all was where the UN had given their remit, which has basically kicked the North

Koreans out of South Korea. But as we also mentioned in last week's episode, MacArthur doesn't

decide to stop there. He's given a little bit of freedom of manoeuvre by those slightly

contradictory orders that the US Chiefs of Staff give him. But he decides to go north of the

38th colour and we're going to follow the story from that point onwards. An obvious mistake at the

time, do you think? Or was it vaguely acceptable that he might take the opportunity to do that?

Well, as we said before, Saul, you know, he was never a man for sort of limited warfare

and he was also never a man to sort of not believe his own hype and his own propaganda.

So I think that, you know, in that sort of combination of factors, plus of course the fact that

those North Korean forces had really been

at the end of their, not only at the end of their supply lines, but also at the end of their

tether collectively, and effectively had been crushed in that. The hammer and the anvil,

as we were describing it last time, it all looked set fair, really, didn't it? So I think you

can understand in retrospect

that he was willing to sort of push further than necessarily had previously been sanctioned

and pushed beyond the 38th parallel. So in a sense, I think if you look at it from the perspective

of then, which is after all what we have to have at least one eye on that as historians, is to

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