The Korean War Week 003 - Never Fear, MacArthur's Here! - July 9, 1950

Things were fricked up because in the late 1940s everyone was thinking about nuclear weapons and how they would change everything. A common problem: They were planning to fight the next war when really they should have been planning how to fight the last war but better. So the Air Force was in relatively good shape but the Army was neglected as they wouldn't have much use in a nuclear war.

There was all the normal confusion of suffering a huge surprise attack and not knowing wtf is going on. But beyond that, there were very few people in the world who spoke both Korean and English. So if the Americans wanted to talk to the South Korean troops or civilians they had to have a Japanese-American talk to them in Japanese. Everything had to be translated twice and the Americans and Koreans probably weren't completely fluent in Japanese to begin with.