In their initial drive to Pusan, North Korea's Soviet armed forces inflicted 30 per cent casualties on the UN sanctioned coalition. "By God, I am going to let them have it," Truman exclaimed after news of the North's aggression reached him, bypassing Congress in his rush to arms. 

Both incipient Korean states — and there was not much to choose between them in terms of illegality and violence — also illustrate how the tails could wag the superpower dogs, with the South's Syngman Rhee needlessly probing the 38th parallel and Kim Il Sung touring Moscow and Beijing in search of support. Kathryn Weathersby, a visiting scholar at the US Korea Institute at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, has used Soviet archives made available in the 1990s to reveal the extreme cynicism of Stalin's diplomacy. Believing that offence was the best defence, Stalin encouraged Mao to despatch Chinese "volunteers" — after the initial Soviet-devised North Korean war plan went awry — and then dragged his feet in providing this force with Soviet air cover. As for Mao, his intervention in Korea was both a classic "social imperialist" means of remobilising the Chinese Communist Party through external aggression, and an early case of his seeking to lead the nascent Third World through revolutionary example. Mao also used former Nationalist troops as his "expendables" — two-thirds of the Chinese PoWs elected to go to Taiwan. 

It has taken 60 years for the Chinese communists to indicate that the "war to resist US aggression and aid Korea" may have actually been started when North Korean troops crashed across the 38th Parallel in June 1950, though this shift is so sudden that Chinese historians are nervous about confirming it. How unfortunate that the war we now understand so much about has been almost entirely neglected in British official memory — the redoubtable Lord Maginnis apart.