Ep 11 "Armed Truce" (ENGLISH SUBTITLES)

Korean War
Eisenhower becomes president, and as the truce talks go on, the president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee becomes unhappy that the UN is giving up on liberating the north. The point of the war, for both Koreas, was to unite the peninsula; they just disagreed about who should be in charge. The USA and Great Britain make contingency plans to remove Rhee from office. The war is coming close to an end. Close to 5 million refugees live in the South. Millions of children were abandoned. The vast disparity between the relative wealth of the foreigners in South Korea and the great poverty of the Korean population, in their own country, stands out. The atomic bomb is still used as a threat against the opposition. US and Soviet pilots engage in aerial battles over North Korea. Henry Kissinger, a Defense analyst at the time, shared the erroneous view that the Soviets forced a North Korean attack to deflect US and UN attention away from Europe. The Chinese, like the USA, are getting tired of fighting this costly war, and start to work in earnest with the UN side to end it. President Syngman Rhee (Yi Seung-man) releases North Korean POWs to derail the armistice talks (6:25). The Armistice talks go into the final phases. Operation "Little Switch," the first big exchange of prisoners, takes place. In the meantime, the war goes on. The Spring 1953 Chinese offensives cause huge casualties on both sides, with little gained. The Chinese hit the South Korean part of the line hard to force Syngman Rhee to sign an armistice. The South Korean government did not want to sign the armistice. (They never did, and this is why a peace treaty was later never signed, and that is why the Republic of Korea and the DPRK are still, technically, at war). Syngman Rhee, angered by the inevitable signing of an armistice, released thousands of North Korean POWs into the South Korean countryside in order to cause trouble for the truce talks, and to spite the USA for abandoning a liberation of North Korea.