Jump to content

Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Battle of Pusan Perimeter

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Article promoted Hawkeye7 (talk) 20:42, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Battle of Pusan Perimeter

[edit]
Nominator(s): —Ed!(talk)


At long last, the greater part of my work for the past few years is ready for A-class review. I apologize for its length (I've started doing more reviews to make up for it) but it encompasses 18 or so other articles, a lot of which have already passed A-class. —Ed!(talk) 03:28, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support Comments: I've had a look at this. Most of my comments are mainly style/presentation things. After initially writing comments on typos/grammar errors, I opted to correct the obvious ones myself. Anyway, here goes:

Okay, I've done my dash here. Hope it is useful. Zawed (talk) 11:02, 20 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've responded to all of your comments. Thank you for such a comprehensive review. —Ed!(talk) 04:02, 31 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Looks all good to me :) Zawed (talk) 22:42, 1 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Support Comments -- Christ this is a big article, but you told us that up front... ;-)

  • Copyedited pretty extensively so pls check I didn't alter any meaning by accident. Further prose/content points:
    • "Troop numbers at the beginning of the battle were initially difficult to estimate for US and North Korean forces." -- Can I just make sure I understand what you're saying here, that it was difficult for US and NK forces at the time to estimate their own numbers at the start of the engagement? Or did you mean it's difficult for historians now to estimate what the numbers were at the start of the action?
    • I wonder if the Logistics section needs to be quite so detailed given there's a dedicated article on it. Specifically I found the first para of UN Logistics, revolving around the Eighth Army's role(s), to be heavy going and perhaps not that vital to this article as a whole.
    • "strategic North Korean logistics targets behind the front lines" -- Pretty sure "strategic" targets are, by definition, "behind the front lines", so I think you can do without one of those terms.
    • "The North Koreans were also not able to effectively use sea transport to their advantage" -- Likewise, if someone uses something "effectively", it's bound to be "to their advantage", so should be able to drop one term or the other.
    • "The Perimeter was the last stand for the UN forces that had seen successive defeats during the first month of the war" -- From memory, "successive" generally refers to two things one after the other. Do you mean the UN had had two defeats, or was it more? If the latter, suggest "continued" or "regular" or some such.
    • Under Taegu: "In the meantime, Walker had established Taegu as the Eighth Army's headquarters" -- In the meantime of what exactly? While all the fighting in the Eastern Corridor was going on, or just in the meantime of what was described in the last sentence or two of the preceding subsection? We need a bit more context to open this subsection...
    • "Trapped between the two fires they started to vacate their positions" -- Sorry, what are "the two fires" exactly?
    • You include a paragraph on Medals of Honor awarded to US personnel. Do we assume that no ROK or other UN troops received their nation's highest awards for conduct during the battle? What about the top North Korean medal for gallantry? Any of those handed out?
      • I mentioned one British soldier who was awarded a VC shortly after. I know for other UN nations the answer's no because few to none of them saw a lot of combat. The South Koreans didn't establish their highest medal until mid-October, and as for North Korea, it's next to impossible to tell, as only a few Hero of the Republic of North Korea awards are known, mostly for relatively high ranking generals like Lee Kwon Mu. —Ed!(talk) 19:50, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Further, although one-paragraph (sub)sections are generally discouraged, I don't think awards belong under Casualties and probably should have their own heading.
    • Nothing more to say about Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, and New Zealand in this battle except that they provided ships? I ask out of genuine curiousity, not a loaded question... ;-)
  • Structure looks fine (except perhaps including awards in Casualties, as noted above).
  • Supporting materials look okay, all images and the map are US govt as far as I could see.
  • References look reliable. Haven't spotchecked as I've done so before on at least one of Ed's articles and was satisfied.
  • To summarise, a mammoth effort and one I think I'll be able to support once the above are acknowledged. I suppose my only caveat is that having gone to considerable lengths to correct or improve prose, I may have missed issues with the overall flow. Hopefully such things would've been apparent to other reviewers though... Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 13:36, 11 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments: The August Push section could use a rewrite to accommodate the narrative/logic flow of September Push section (or vise versa). I have been following Ed's development on the article ever since his first edit, and I have noticed that the August Push section and the September Push section were put together by two completely different approaches. The August Push section were put together by summarizing all the battle sub-articles, while the bigger pictures were only invoked to link those summaries together. The September Push section, on the other hand, were put together by writing about the bigger picture first, then the battle sub-articles were developed once the bigger pictures were explained. Because of the narrative differences between those two sections, this entire article feels poorly structured, if not unfinished. On one hand, the command decisions and strategies of opposing forces were never examined in detail in the August Push section because it was never discussed outside the context of the individual battles. On the other hand, the September Push section feels empty because Ed did a such good job in describing all the sub-battles in the previous section. By my own personal experience I would fix this problem by rewriting the entire August Push section using the top-down approach employed in the September Push section, but I believe other writing approaches could also be used to make the two sections flow better. Anyway, the remedy for this problem is too big for a patch job fix so I will not hold it against this article in this review, but I would deem it a top priority task if Ed intended to take this article to FAC. Jim101 (talk) 02:27, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Jim, thanks for your comments and all your help on this page. I followed along with Appleman's narrative of the battle as the starting point for the content, and I did a lot of considering the options when forming the August and September subsections. Let me know what you think of my rationales:
  1. The biggest issue is the nature of the two rounds of attacks was very different. In August it seems more like there wasn't a coordinating offensive for all of the battles, more of a "division vs division" series of simultaneous duels more like four independent little wars than a unified offensive. In comparing the two, it seems like a summary of the September offensive as a single fight is easier, while each August fight requires context.
  2. I feel like The Great Naktong Offensive covers the September battles, which are somewhat more complex (eight battles along five corridors) and they're hard to sum up. Adding them here would both make that article redundant and add another 100K to this article. —Ed!(talk) 22:32, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Well, given the NK never released any battle records like the Chinese, this does seem to be a research problem than a writing problem. I can only suggest that a detailed study of NK invasion into SK before the battle should be invoked in the context of August Push section...if sources are available. I can think of few things that can provide more contexts in the "division on division" battles:
  • Before the invasion, did NK ever released a timetable for reaching Pusan, or timetables for reaching each sites of the August battles? Did any battle happened before Pusan battle significantly altered those timetables? Did NK forces took the timing of UN reinforcements into their timetable?
  • Naktong River and Taebeak Mountains are two dominating terrain features in South Korea, so did NK ever considered those terrain obstacles in their invasion planning?
  • Did NK assumed that the UN forces is already disintegrated before the battle? If not, what weak points in UN defense did NK forces identified before the battle?
  • Did the UN interdiction campaigns affected the NK forces before the battle?
Those are some of the ideas I can think of to provide more context in the August Push section. My overall suggestion is to provide more context in the August Push section while trimming down the details of the individual battles, and this will help readers to better understand the battle as a whole while cutting down on the article size. Jim101 (talk) 19:15, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Of your first note, I have been considering expanding Operation Pokpoong into a large campaign article to cover the beginning of the war to the end of this battle. (Similar to how UN Offensive, 1950 will in theory cover the war from Inchon to the Ch'ongch'on River) As to the rest, I mention in "September Push" that Kim Il-Sung ordered victory by September 1 and seems to have left it up to Choi Yong-kun, Kim Chaek, and their Corps commanders to make it happen. I believe they just sought to attack the four main inroads to the Perimeter (Masan, Taegu, the Naktong River and P'ohang-dong) and hope one would break, essentially a less coordinated lead-up to the Great Naktong Offensive. I've tried to include all of this in the article, where appropriate. —Ed!(talk) 22:22, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Military_history/Assessment/Battle_of_Pusan_Perimeter&oldid=1136064808"