When did Australia join the Korean War?

Australia's entry into the Cold War came in 1950, when it rushed combat air and sea forces into the Korean War, two days after the Americans did. The Australian Prime Minister received a hero's welcome in Washington. The ANZUS military alliance with New Zealand and the United States was signed in July 1951; it was a plan for consultation and did not involve military planning like NATO. Public opinion in Australia was intensely hostile to Japan after its wartime atrocities, but Japan was now an ally in the Cold War, so Australia's accepted the very generous soft peace treaty with Japan in 1951. Instead of worrying about a resurgent Japan, Australia now worried more about a possible Chinese threat.

Origins of the Cold War

The Origins of the Cold War involved the breakdown of relations between the Soviet Union versus the United States, Great Britain and their allies in the years 1945–1949. From the American-British perspective, first came diplomatic confrontations stretching back decades, followed by the issue of political boundaries in Central Europe and political non-democratic control of the East by the Soviet Army. Then came economic issues (especially the Marshall Plan) and then the first major military confrontation, with a threat of a hot war, in the Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949. By 1949, the lines were sharply drawn and the Cold War was largely in place in Europe. Outside Europe, the starting points vary in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

Events preceding World War II and even the Russian Revolution of 1917, underlay older tensions between the Soviet Union, European countries and the United States. A series of events during and after World War II exacerbated tensions, including the Soviet–German pact in 1939, the Anglo-Americans repeated postponement of an amphibious invasion of German-occupied Europe, the Western allies' support of the Atlantic Charter, Soviet rejection of decisions about Eastern European democracy made in wartime conferences and the Kremlin's control of an Eastern Bloc of Soviet satellite states.

In World War I, Britain, France and Russia had been allies from the start in 1914, and the U.S. joined in April 1917. The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in November 1917 but German armies advanced rapidly deep into the country. The Allies responded with an economic blockade against all of Russia. In early March 1918, the Soviets followed through on the wave of popular disgust against the war and accepted harsh German peace terms at Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In the eyes of some Allies, Russia now was helping Germany win the war by freeing up a million German soldiers for the Western Front and by "relinquishing much of Russia's food supply, industrial base, fuel supplies, and communications with Western Europe." According to historian Spencer Tucker, the Allies felt, "The treaty was the ultimate betrayal of the Allied cause and sowed the seeds for the Cold War. With Brest-Litovsk the spectre of German domination in Eastern Europe threatened to become reality, and the Allies now began to think seriously about military intervention," and proceeded to step up their "economic warfare" against the Bolsheviks. Some Bolsheviks saw Russia as only the first step, planning to incite revolutions against capitalism in every western country, but the need for peace with Germany led Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin away from this position.

In 1918 Britain sent in money and some troops to support the anti-Bolshevik "White" counter-revolutionaries. This policy was spearheaded by Minister of War Winston Churchill, a virulent anti-communist. France, Japan and the United States also sent forces to help decide the Russian Civil War in the Whites favor. Lenin made peace overtures to Wilson, and the American leader responded by sending diplomat William Bullitt to Moscow. The Allies ultimately rejected the ceasefire terms which Bullitt negotiated, believing that a White victory was imminent.

However, the Bolsheviks, operating a unified command from a central location, defeated all the opposition one by one and took full control of Russia, as well as breakaway provinces such as Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Bainbridge Colby, the American Secretary of State, in 1920 announced an American policy of refusing to deal with the new regime.

Soviet Russia found itself isolated in international diplomacy. Dictator Vladimir Lenin stated that the Soviet Union was surrounded by a "hostile capitalist encirclement" and he viewed diplomacy as a weapon to keep Soviet enemies divided, beginning with the establishment of the Soviet Comintern, which called for revolutionary upheavals abroad. Communist revolutions failed in Germany, Bavaria, and Hungary, as the US poured billions of dollars of food relief into eastern Europe expressly to curb unrest.

Differences in the political and economic systems of Western democracies and the Soviet Union—--dictatorship by one party versus pluralistic competition among parties, mass arrests and execution of dissidents versus free press and independent courts, state ownership of all farms and businesses versus capitalism, economic autarky versus free trade, state planning versus private enterprise—became simplified and refined in national ideologies to represent two ways of life. Following the postwar Red Scare, many in the U.S. saw the Soviet system as a threat.

In 1933 the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt officially recognized the Soviet Union. The long delay was caused by Moscow's repudiation of Tsarist-era debts, the undemocratic nature of the Soviet government, and its threats to overthrow capitalism using local Communist Parties. By 1933 these issues had faded and the opportunity for greater trade appealed to Washington.

Moscow was angry with Western appeasement of Adolf Hitler after the signing of the Munich Pact in 1938 which gave Germany partial control of Czechoslovakia after conference in which the Soviet Union was not invited.

In 1939 after conducting negotiations with both the British and French group and Germany regarding potential military and political agreements, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a Commercial Agreement providing for the trade of certain German military and civilian equipment in exchange for Soviet raw materials and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, commonly named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries (Molotov–Ribbentrop), which included a secret agreement to split Poland and Eastern Europe between the two states.

One week after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's signing, the partition of Poland commenced with the German invasion of western Poland. Relations between the Soviet Union and the West further deteriorated when, two weeks after the German invasion, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland while coordinating with German forces. The Soviet Union then invaded Finland, which was also ceded to it under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocol, resulting in stiff losses and the entry of an interim peace treaty granting it parts of eastern Finland. In June, the Soviets issued an ultimatum demanding Bessarabia, Bukovina and the Hertza region from Romania, after which Romania caved to Soviet demands for occupation. That month, the Soviets also annexed the Baltic countries of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia

From August 1939 to June 1941 (when Germany broke the Pact and invaded the Soviet Union), relations between the West and the Soviets deteriorated further when the Soviet Union and Germany engaged in an extensive economic relationship by which the Soviet Union sent Germany vital oil, rubber, manganese and other material in exchange for German weapons, manufacturing machinery and technology. In late 1940, the Soviets also engaged in talks with Germany regarding potential membership in the Axis, culminating in the countries trading written proposals, though no agreement for Soviet Axis entry was ever reached.

On June 22, 1941, Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union through the territories that the two countries had previously divided. Stalin switched his cooperation from Hitler to Churchill. Britain and the Soviets signed a formal alliance, but the U.S. did not join until after the Attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Immediately, there was disagreement between Britain's ally Poland and the Soviet Union. The British and Poles strongly suspected that when Stalin was cooperating with Hitler, he ordered the execution of about 22,000 Polish officer POWs, at what was later to become known as the Katyn massacre. Still, the Soviets and the Western Allies were forced to cooperate, despite their tensions. The U.S. shipped vast quantities of Lend-Lease material to the Soviets.

During the war, both sides disagreed on military strategy, especially the question of the opening of a second front against Germany in Western Europe. As early as July 1941, Stalin asked Britain to invade northern France, but Britain was in no position to carry out such a request. Stalin had also requested that the Western Allies open a second front from the early months of the war—which finally occurred on D-Day, June 6, 1944. The US and Britain initially indicated that they would open the second front in 1942, and then in 1943, but it was postponed both times.

In early 1944 MI6 re-established Section IX, its prewar anti-Soviet section, and Philby took a position there. He was able to alert the NKVD about all British intelligence on the Soviets–including what the American OSS had shared with the British about the Soviets. Throughout World War II, the Soviet NKVD's mole Kim Philby had access to high-importance British MI6 intelligence, and passed it to the Soviets.

The Soviets believed at the time, and charged throughout the Cold War, that the British and Americans intentionally delayed the opening of a second front against Germany in order to intervene only at the last minute so as to influence the peace settlement and dominate Europe. Historians such as John Lewis Gaddis dispute this claim, citing other military and strategic calculations for the timing of the Normandy invasion. In the meantime, the Russians suffered heavy casualties, with as many as twenty million dead. Nevertheless, Soviet perceptions (or misconceptions) of the West and "vice versa" left a strong undercurrent of tension and hostility between the Allied powers.

In turn, in 1944, the Soviets appeared to the Allies to have deliberately delayed the relief of the Polish underground's Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis. The Soviets did not supply the Uprising from the air, and for a significant time also refused to allow British and American air drops. On at least one occasion, a Soviet fighter shot down an RAF plane supplying the Polish insurgents in Warsaw. George Orwell was moved to make a public warning about Soviet postwar intentions. A'secret war' also took place between the British SOE-backed AK and Soviet NKVD-backed partisans. British-trained Polish special forces agent Maciej Kalenkiewicz was killed by the Soviets at this time. The British and Soviets also sponsored competing factions of resistance fighters in Yugoslavia and Greece.

Both sides, moreover, held very dissimilar ideas regarding the establishment and maintenance of post-war security. The Americans tended to understand security in situational terms, assuming that, if US-style governments and markets were established as widely as possible, countries could resolve their differences peacefully, through international organizations. The key to the US vision of security was a post-war world shaped according to the principles laid out in the 1941 Atlantic Charter—in other words, a liberal international system based on free trade and open markets. This vision would require a rebuilt capitalist Europe, with a healthy Germany at its center, to serve once more as a hub in global affairs.

This would also require US economic and political leadership of the postwar world. Europe needed the USA's assistance if it was to rebuild its domestic production and finance its international trade. The USA was the only world power not economically devastated by the fighting. By the end of the war, it was producing around fifty percent of the world's industrial goods.

Soviet leaders, however, tended to understand security in terms of space. This reasoning was conditioned by Russia's historical experiences, given the frequency with which the country had been invaded over the preceding 150 years. The Second World War experience was particularly dramatic for the Russians: the Soviet Union suffered unprecedented devastation as a result of the Nazi onslaught, and over 20 million Soviet citizens died during the war; tens of thousands of Soviet cities, towns, and villages were leveled; and 30,100 Soviet factories were destroyed. In order to prevent a similar assault in the future, Stalin was determined to use the Red Army to gain control of Poland, to dominate the Balkans and to destroy utterly Germany's capacity to engage in another war. The problem was that Stalin's strategy risked confrontation with the equally powerful United States, who viewed Stalin's actions as a flagrant violation of the Yalta agreement.

At the end of the war in Europe, in May 1945, the Soviets insisted on occupying the Danish island of Bornholm, due to its strategic position at the entrance to the Baltic. When the local German commander insisted on surrendering to the Western Allies, as did German forces in the rest of Denmark, the Soviets bombed the island, causing heavy casualties and damage among a civilian population which was only lightly touched throughout the war, and then invaded the island and occupied it until mid-1946 - all of which can be considered as initial moves in the Cold War.

Even before the war came to an end, it seemed highly likely that cooperation between the Western powers and the USSR would give way to intense rivalry or conflict. This was due primarily to the starkly contrasting economic ideologies of the two superpowers, now quite easily the strongest in the world. Whereas the USA was a liberal, two-party democracy with an advanced capitalist economy, based on free enterprise and profit-making, the USSR was a one-party Marxist–Leninist State with a state-controlled economy where private wealth was all but outlawed.

In 1945, the Soviet Union conducted a show trial of 16 Polish resistance leaders who had spent the War fighting against the Nazis with British and American help. Within six years, 14 of them were dead.

At the Nuremberg Trials, the chief Soviet prosecutor submitted false documentation in an attempt to indict German defendants for the murder of around 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. However, suspecting Soviet culpability, the other Allied prosecutors refused to support the indictment and German lawyers promised to mount an embarrassing defense. No one was charged or found guilty at Nuremberg for the Katyn Forest massacre. In 1990, the Soviet government acknowledged that the Katyn massacre was carried out, not by the Germans, but by the Soviet secret police.

From September 1945, Polish resistance fighter and Righteous Witold Pilecki was sent by General Anders to spy against the communists in Poland. In 1948, he was executed on charges of spying and'serving the interests of foreign imperialism'.

Several postwar disagreements between western and Soviet leaders were related to their differing interpretations of wartime and immediate post-war conferences.

The Tehran Conference in late 1943 was the first Allied conference in which Stalin was present. At the conference the Soviets expressed frustration that the Western Allies had not yet opened a second front against Germany in Western Europe. In Tehran, the Allies also considered the political status of Iran. At the time, the British had occupied southern Iran, while the Soviets had occupied an area of northern Iran bordering the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, at the end of the war, tensions emerged over the timing of the pull out of both sides from the oil-rich region.

At the February 1945 Yalta Conference, the Allies attempted to define the framework for a postwar settlement in Europe. The Allies could not reach firm agreements on the crucial questions: the occupation of Germany, postwar reparations from Germany, and the fate of Poland. No final consensus was reached on Germany, other than to agree to a Soviet request for reparations totaling $10 billion "as a basis for negotiations." Debates over the composition of Poland's postwar government were also acrimonious. The Yalta Conference ended with "a declaration on liberated Europe pledging respect for democratic forms and providing a diplomatic mechanism for constituting a generally acceptable Polish government".

Following the Allied victory in May, the Soviets effectively occupied Eastern Europe, while the US had much of Western Europe. In occupied Germany, the US and the Soviet Union established zones of occupation and a loose framework for four-power control with the ailing French and British.

At the Potsdam Conference starting in late July 1945, the Allies met to decide how to administer the defeated Nazi Germany, which had agreed to unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier on May 7 and May 8, 1945, VE day. Serious differences emerged over the future development of Germany and Eastern Europe. At Potsdam, the US was represented by a new president, Harry S. Truman, who on April 12 succeeded to the office upon Roosevelt's death. Truman was unaware of Roosevelt's plans for post-war engagement with the Soviet Union, and more generally uninformed about foreign policy and military matters. The new president, therefore, was initially reliant on a set of advisers (including Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal). This group tended to take a harder line towards Moscow than Roosevelt had done. Administration officials favoring cooperation with the Soviet Union and the incorporation of socialist economies into a world trade system were marginalized. The UK was represented by a new prime minister, Clement Attlee, who had replaced Churchill after the Labour Party's defeat of the Conservatives in the 1945 general election.

One week after the Potsdam Conference ended, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki added to Soviet distrust of the United States, when shortly after the attacks, Stalin protested to U.S. officials when Truman offered the Soviets little real influence in occupied Japan.

The immediate end of war material shipments from America to the USSR after the surrender of Germany also upset some politicians in Moscow, who believed this showed the U.S. had no intentions to support the USSR any more than they had to.

After the war, Stalin sought to secure the Soviet Union's western border by installing communist-dominated regimes under Soviet influence in bordering countries. During and in the years immediately after the war, the Soviet Union annexed several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Many of these were originally countries effectively ceded to it by Nazi Germany in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. These later annexed territories include Eastern Poland (incorporated into two different SSRs), Latvia (became Latvia SSR), Estonia (became Estonian SSR), Lithuania (became Lithuania SSR), part of eastern Finland (Karelo-Finnish SSR and annexed into the Russian SFSR) and northern Romania (became the Moldavian SSR).

Other states were converted into Soviet Satellite states, such as East Germany, the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Hungary, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the People's Republic of Romania and the People's Republic of Albania, which aligned itself in the 1960s away from the Soviet Union and towards the People's Republic of China.

The defining characteristic of the Stalinist communism implemented in Eastern Bloc states was the unique symbiosis of the state with society and the economy, resulting in politics and economics losing their distinctive features as autonomous and distinguishable spheres. Initially, Stalin directed systems that rejected Western institutional characteristics of market economies, democratic governance (dubbed "bourgeois democracy" in Soviet parlance) and the rule of law subduing discretional intervention by the state. They were economically communist and depended upon the Soviet Union for significant amounts of materials. While in the first five years following World War II, massive emigration from these states to the West occurred, restrictions implemented thereafter stopped most East-West migration, except that under limited bilateral and other agreements.

In February 1946, George F. Kennan's Long Telegram from Moscow helped articulate the growing hard line against the Soviets. The telegram argued that the Soviet Union was motivated by both traditional Russian imperialism and by Marxist ideology; Soviet behavior was inherently expansionist and paranoid, posing a threat to the United States and its allies. Later writing as "Mr. X" in his article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in "Foreign Affairs" (July 1947), Kennan drafted the classic argument for adopting a policy of "containment" toward the Soviet Union.

On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, while at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, gave his speech "The Sinews of Peace," declaring that an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe. From the standpoint of the Soviets, the speech was an incitement for the West to begin a war with the USSR, as it called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets "

Having lost 20 million people in the war, suffered German invasion twice in 30 years, and suffered tens of millions of casualties from onslaughts from the West three times in the preceding 150 years, the Soviet Union was determined to destroy Germany's capacity for another war. This was in alignment with the U.S. policy which had foreseen returning Germany to a pastoral state without heavy industry (the Morgenthau Plan). On September 6, 1946, James F. Byrnes made a speech in Germany, repudiating the Morgenthau Plan and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely. ("see" Restatement of Policy on Germany) As Byrnes admitted one month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people [...] it was a battle between us and Russia over minds [...]" Because of the increasing costs of food imports to avoid mass-starvation in Germany, and with the danger of losing the entire nation to communism, the U.S. government abandoned the Morgenthau plan in September 1946 with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes' speech Restatement of Policy on Germany.

In January 1947, Truman appointed General George Marshall as Secretary of State, scrapped Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) directive 1067, which embodied the Morgenthau Plan and supplanted it with JCS 1779, which decreed that an orderly and prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany.". Administration officials met with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and others to press for an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, good and infrastructure already removed by the Soviets. After six weeks of negotiations, Molotov refused the demands and the talks were adjourned. Marshall was particularly discouraged after personally meeting with Stalin, who expressed little interest in a solution to German economic problems. The United States concluded that a solution could not wait any longer. In a June 5, 1947 speech, Comporting with the Truman Doctrine, Marshall announced a comprehensive program of American assistance to all European countries wanting to participate, including the Soviet Union and those of Eastern Europe, called the Marshall Plan.

With the initial planning for the Marshall plan in mid 1947, a plan which depended on a reactivated German economy, restrictions placed on German production were lessened. The roof for permitted steel production was for example raised from 25% of pre-war production levels to 50% of pre-war levels. The scrapping of JCS 1067 paved the way for the 1948 currency reform which halted rampant inflation.

Stalin opposed the Marshall Plan. He had built up the Eastern Bloc protective belt of Soviet controlled nations on his Western border, and wanted to maintain this buffer zone of states combined with a weakened Germany under Soviet control. Fearing American political, cultural and economic penetration, Stalin eventually forbade Soviet Eastern bloc countries of the newly formed Cominform from accepting Marshall Plan aid. In Czechoslovakia, that required a Soviet-backed Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the brutality of which shocked Western powers more than any event so far and set in a motion a brief scare that war would occur and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress. In September, 1947 the Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov declared that the Truman Doctrine "intended for accordance of the American help to all reactionary regimes, that actively oppose to democratic people, bears an undisguised aggressive character."

In Greece, during a civil war involving the communist-led partisan movement ELAS-EAM, British Special Forces terminated arms supplies to the ELA-ELAM, pro-monarchist armed forces were strengthened. On the political front, Americans, with British encouragement, attempted to dismantle ELAS-EAM socialist structures in the countryside, and an anti-communist swing gradually occurred.

Western Allies conducted meetings in Italy in March 1945 with German representatives to forestall a takeover by Italian communist resistance forces in northern Italy and to hinder the potential there for post-war influence of the civilian communist party. The affair caused a major rift between Stalin and Churchill, and in a letter to Roosevelt on 3 April Stalin complained that the secret negotiations did not serve to "preserve and promote trust between our countries."

Relations further deteriorated when, in January 1948, the U.S. State Department also published a collection of documents titled "Nazi–Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of The German Foreign Office", which contained documents recovered from the Foreign Office of Nazi Germany revealing Soviet conversations with Germany regarding the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, including its secret protocol dividing eastern Europe, the 1939 German–Soviet Commercial Agreement, and discussions of the Soviet Union potentially becoming the fourth Axis Power. In response, one month later, the Soviet Union published "Falsifiers of History", this book, edited and partially re-written by Stalin, attacked the West.

The first major crisis in the emerging Cold War was the Berlin Blockade of 1948–49. Historian Carol K. Fink argues that this crisis, "occupies a special place in Cold War historiography, as an emblem of Soviet aggressiveness and Anglo-American resistance." After setbacks to Soviet plans through the Marshall Plan, the successful introduction of a new currency to West Germany, and massive electoral losses for Communist parties, Moscow decided to cut off land access to West Berlin by rail and highway, thereby initiating the Berlin Blockade.Because Berlin was located within the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, the only available methods of supplying the city were three limited air corridors.

By February 1948, because of massive post-war military cuts, the entire United States army had been reduced to 552,000 men. Military forces in non-Soviet Berlin sectors totaled only 8,973 Americans, 7,606 British and 6,100 French. Soviet military forces in the Soviet sector that surrounded Berlin totaled one and a half million men. The two United States regiments in Berlin would have provided little resistance against a Soviet attack. Therefore, a massive aerial supply campaign was initiated by the United States, Britain, France and other countries, the success of which caused Stalin to lift their blockade in May 1949. At no time did the Soviet military or the Politburo contemplate a military escalation of the Berlin crisis.

The United States, the Berlin crisis underscored the need to reverse the demobilization of the Army. On July 20, 1948, President Truman reopened the military draft. He called for nearly 10 million men to register for military service within the next two months.

The dispute over Germany escalated after Truman refused to give the Soviet Union reparations from West Germany's industrial plants because he believed it would hamper Germany's economic recovery further. Stalin responded by splitting off the Soviet sector of Germany as a communist state. The dismantling of West German industry was finally halted in 1951, when Germany agreed to place its heavy industry under the control of the European Coal and Steel Community, which in 1952 took over the role of the International Authority for the Ruhr.

At other times there were signs of caution. Stalin observed his 1944 agreement with Churchill and did not aid the communists in the struggle against the British-supported anti-communist regime in Greece. In Finland he accepted a friendly, non-communist government; and Russian troops were withdrawn from Austria by the end of 1955.

The Soviet military was focused on its main mission, the defense of the Soviet Union. From that perspective, the formation of NATO in 1949 was the decisive threat, and became its starting point for the Cold War. Historian David Glantz argues that:

The Cold War took place worldwide, but it had a somewhat different timing and trajectory outside Europe. In Africa, decolonization took place first; it was largely accomplished in the 1950s. The main rivals then sought bases of support in the new national political alignments.

During World War II, the United States military operations had widespread support across Latin America, except for Argentina. After 1947, with the Cold War emerging in Europe, Washington made repeated efforts to encourage all the Latin American countries to take a Cold War anti-Communist position. They were reluctant to do so – for example, only Colombia sent soldiers to the United Nations contingent in the Korean War. The Soviet Union was quite weak across Latin America. Not until the late 1950s did Moscow achieve diplomatic or commercial relationships with most Latin American countries., Before then it had only two trade agreements (with Argentina and Mexico.) The communist movements that had existed in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930s had been disbanded or outlawed. Washington exaggerated the dangers, and decided on a preemptive attack against a possible communist threat. It sought anti-communist resolutions at the annual meetings of the Pan American Union (renamed the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1948) and paid special attention to the growth of left-wing forces in Guatemala. A compromise was reached whereby the Latin American states agreed on vague statements of support for the American Cold War position, and the United States provided expanded financial grants and loans to stimulate economic growth. In 1954, at the 10th Inter-American Conference in Caracas, Washington demanded a resolution that the establishment of a communist government in any American state was a threat to the peace of the hemisphere. Guatemala cast the only negative vote. Guatemala's military, with CIA encouragement, overthrew its left-wing government later that year. Fidel Castro engineered his revolutionary takeover of Cuba in 1957–58 with very little Soviet support. The United States and the smaller Latin countries, outvoted the larger powers by the required two-thirds majority in 1962 to identify Cuba as a communist regime and suspend it from the OAS.

After the war ended, Malaya was plunged into a state of emergency as British and Commonwealth forces fought a protracted counter-insurgency war against their former communist-led MPAJA ally, who had fought the Japanese and now demanded independence from Britain. In British Hong Kong, which had surrendered to Japan in December 1941, civil unrest occurred after Britain rapidly re-established rule at the end of the war.

Following decades of struggle, in 1949 the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong defeated Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist armies and took control of the mainland. The Nationalist leaders and much of China's upper class fled to Taiwan where they had American protection. Stalin had long supported Chiang Kai-shek, while also giving some help to the Communists. The United States had tried in 1945–1948 to bring the Nationalists and Communists together in a coalition, but had no success. The conflict was not therefore part of the Cold War until 1949–1959. By the late 1950s, however, China and the USSR were at sword's point, and became bitter enemies over ideological control of the Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy. The two set up rival communist organizations in countries across the world. The Cold War then became a three-way conflict.

France for many years had been dealing with a nationalist insurgency in Vietnam in which communists, led by Ho Chi Minh, played a prominent leadership role. In 1949, Mao's Communists took control of the north side of the China-Vietnam border, and began supporting the insurgents, especially by providing sanctuary from French attacks. Mark Lawrence and Frederik Logevall point out that "resurgent French colonialism became inextricably intertwined with Cold War tensions, especially in the years after 1949." American pressure on France after 1949 tried to force France to give priority to fighting communism, rather than fighting Vietnamese nationalism.

The political situation in Iran was a flashpoint between the major players in 1945–46, with the Soviet Union sponsoring two breakaway provinces in northern Iran, adjacent to the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Soviet troops were stationed in northwestern Iran during the war. They not only refused to withdraw in 1945 but backed revolts that established short-lived, pro-Soviet separatist national states called the Azerbaijan People's Government and the Republic of Kurdistan. The issue was debated at the United Nations, and in 1946 Moscow abandoned its position, and the conflict was permanently resolved peacefully, with a pro-western government resuming control. Iran did not become a major battlefield of the Cold War, but it had its own history of confrontation with Britain and the United States.

The long-standing conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Mandatory Palestine region continued after 1945, with Britain and in an increasingly impossible situation as the mandate holder. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 calling for a homeland for the Jews was supported in 1947 by both the Soviet Union and the United States. Both countries promptly Recognize the independent state of Israel in 1948. The Soviet Union later broke with Israel to support its Arab enemies. The region was more of an independent trouble zone rather than a playing field of the Cold War, and was not a precipitating factor in the Cold War.

By 1953, Arab nationalism based in Egypt was a neutralizing force. The Soviet Union leaned increasingly toward Egypt. Ehe United States based its Cold War coalition primarily on the Baghdad Pact of 1955 which formed Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), that included Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

While most historians trace its origins to the period immediately following World War II, others argue that it began with the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 when the Bolsheviks took power. In 1919 Lenin stated that his new state was surrounded by a "hostile capitalist encirclement", and he viewed diplomacy as a weapon that should be used in order to keep the Soviet Union's enemies divided. He began with a new Communist International ("Comintern"), based in Moscow, which was designed to plan for revolutionary upheavals abroad. It was ineffective—Communist uprisings all failed in Germany, Hungary and elsewhere. Historian Max Beloff argues that the Soviets saw "no prospect of permanent peace", with the 1922 Soviet Constitution proclaiming:

According to British historian Christopher Sutton:

The idea of long-term continuity is a minority scholarly view that has been challenged. Frank Ninkovich writes:

The usage of the term "cold war" to describe the postwar tensions between the U.S.- and Soviet-led blocs was popularized by Bernard Baruch, a U.S. financier and an adviser to Harry Truman, who used the term during a speech before the South Carolina state legislature on April 16, 1947.

Since the term "Cold War" was popularized in 1947, there has been extensive disagreement in many political and scholarly discourses on what exactly were the sources of postwar tensions. In the American historiography, there has been disagreement as to who was responsible for the quick unraveling of the wartime alliance between 1945 and 1947, and on whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable or could have been avoided. Discussion of these questions has centered in large part on the works of William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, and John Lewis Gaddis.

Officials in the Truman administration placed responsibility for postwar tensions on the Soviets, claiming that Stalin had violated promises made at Yalta, pursued a policy of expansionism in Eastern Europe, and conspired to spread communism throughout the world. Historians associated with the "Wisconsin School" of diplomatic history such as Williams, however, placed responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace mostly on the U.S., citing a range of U.S. efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II. According to Williams and later writers influenced by his work—such as LaFeber, author of the popular survey text "America, Russia, and the Cold War" (published in ten editions between 1967 and 2006)—U.S. policymakers shared an overarching concern with maintaining capitalism domestically. In order to ensure this goal, they pursued a policy of ensuring an "Open Door" to foreign markets for U.S. business and agriculture across the world. From this perspective, a growing economy domestically went hand-in-hand with the consolidation of U.S. power internationally.

Williams and LaFeber also dismissed the assumption that Soviet leaders were committed to postwar "expansionism." They cited evidence that Soviet Union's occupation of Eastern Europe had a defensive rationale, and Soviet leaders saw themselves as attempting to avoid encirclement by the United States and its allies. From this view, the Soviet Union was so weak and devastated after the end of the Second World War as to be unable to pose any serious threat to the U.S., which emerged after 1945 as the sole world power not economically devastated by the war, and also as the sole possessor of the atomic bomb until 1949.

Gaddis, however, argues that the conflict was less the lone fault of one side or the other and more the result of a plethora of conflicting interests and misperceptions between the two superpowers, propelled by domestic politics and bureaucratic inertia. While Gaddis does not hold either side as entirely responsible for the onset of the conflict, he argues that the Soviets should be held at least slightly more accountable for the problems. According to Gaddis, Stalin was in a much better position to compromise than his Western counterparts, given his much broader power within his own regime than Truman, who had to contend with Congress and was often undermined by vociferous political opposition at home. Asking if it were possible to predict if the wartime alliance would fall apart within a matter of months, leaving in its place nearly a half century of cold war, Gaddis wrote in a 1997 essay, "Geography, demography, and tradition contributed to this outcome but did not determine it. It took men, responding unpredictably to circumstances, to forge the chain of causation; and it took [Stalin] in particular, responding predictably to his own authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic predisposition, to lock it into place."

Global historian Prasenjit Duara has placed the issue in a global context:

Australia in the Korean War 1950–53 is the official history of Australia's involvement in the Korean War. The series consists of two volumes covering Australia's strategy and diplomacy in the war and the Australian military's combat operations respectively. Both volumes were written by Robert O'Neill, and they were published in 1981 and 1985.

Australia in the Korean War 1950–53

In 1970 Robert O'Neill was selected by the Australian Government as the official historian of the Korean War. O'Neill had served as the 5th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment's intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, and had later become an academic. At the time of his appointment he was head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.

While the official histories of Australia in the First World War and Second World War had been written by teams of historians, O'Neill wrote the history of the Korean War with only a single research assistant based at the Australian War Memorial. The Australian Government maintained its tradition of granting independence to the official historian, though the Attorney-General's Department attempted to influence the series' treatment of the journalist and alleged traitor Wilfred Burchett. While the official history was originally planned as a single volume, O'Neill received permission to expand it to two volumes after discovering large amounts of material on the strategy and diplomacy behind Australia's involvement in the war. In contrast with the official Australian histories of the world wars, O'Neill included footnotes and bibliographies to identify his sources.

The first volume of the series, "Strategy and Diplomacy", was published in 1981. It provided a detailed account of Australia's foreign and defence policies before and during the war, including in-depth discussion of the evolution of the ANZUS Treaty.

The series' second volume, entitled "Combat Operations", was published in 1985. The book's account of the Australian Army, Royal Australian Navy and Royal Australian Air Force's operations in Korea is highly detailed. Because the three services rarely operated together O'Neill was able to treat their operations separately when writing the book.

"Australia in the Korean War 1950–53" was generally well received by critics, though some argued that it was overly detailed. The "Oxford Companion to Australian Military History" states that the series is "scholarly and meticulous". Historian Jeffrey Grey writes that the second volume is "essential reading, although the level of detail is not necessary for the general reader". Peter Edwards, the editor of "The Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975", states that the first volume in the series has been of most importance to Australian historiography due to its "detailed and authoritative" coverage of the ANZUS treaty. There was little public interest in the books after they were released, however, and sales of both volumes were slow.

No. 77 Squadron converted to P-51D Mustang fighters before arriving in Japan in February 1946 to participate in the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. Occupation duties proved uneventful, and No. 77 Squadron was preparing to leave Japan for Australia when the Korean War broke out in June 1950. 77 Sqn was immediately dispatched to Korea, where they became the first UN air unit to enter the war, primarily in ground support, combat air patrol, and escort missions.

Australia in the Korean War

The military history of Australia during the Korean War was very eventful. Japan's defeat in World War II heralded the end to 35 years of Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula. The surrender of Japan to the Allied forces on 2 September 1945 led to the peninsula being subsequently divided into North and South Koreas, with the North being occupied by troops from the Soviet Union, and the South, below the 38th parallel, being occupied by troops from the United States.

The Soviet forces entered the Korean peninsula on 10 August 1945, followed a few weeks later by the American forces who entered through Incheon. US Army Lieutenant General John R. Hodge formally accepted the surrender of Japanese forces south of the 38th Parallel on 9 September 1945 at the Government House in Seoul.

Although both rival factions tried initially to diplomatically reunite the divided nation, it was the Northern faction that eventually decided to try and do so with military force. Troops from the Soviet backed North Korean Army crossed the 38th parallel on 25 June 1950 beginning a civil war.

The invasion of South Korea came as a surprise to the United Nations. The same day the war had officially begun (25 June), the United Nations immediately drafted UNSC Resolution 82, which called for:The Liberal government of Australia, led by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, immediately responded to the UN resolution by offering military assistance. 17,000 Australians served in the Korean War between 1950 and 1953, and they suffered 339 dead, and 1200 wounded.

With the commitment of Australian forces to the Korean War, the Australian government called for 1000 men who had prior military experience in World War II to enlist in the army for three years, with one year of overseas service in Korea. They were called Korean Force or K-Force. A portion of the force were recruited in Great Britain. At the end of their enlistment, personnel recruited from the United Kingdom could elect to be discharged in Australia, or returned to the UK. Their previous military experience would facilitate rapid deployment to Korea.

When the North Korean Army crossed into South Korea on 25 June 1950, they advanced for the capital Seoul, which fell in less than a week.

North Korea's forces continued toward the port of Pusan, a strategic goal. In two days, the United States offered assistance and the United Nations Security Council asked its members to help repel the North Korean attack. Australia immediately contributed No. 77 Squadron RAAF and the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (3 RAR), both of which were stationed in Japan under the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF).

3 RAR was rapidly committed as Australia's main land force contribution to the United Nations forces in the Korean War. After a period of intensive training and reinforcement in Japan, the battalion arrived in South Korea in late September 1950.

The battalion formed part of the 27th Commonwealth Brigade and took part in the United Nations offensive into North Korea and the subsequent retreat into South Korea following the Chinese offensive in the winter of 1950–51. It was one of three units to receive the Presidential Unit Citation (US) after the Battle of Kapyong.

In addition to combat personnel, the Australian military provided the majority of supply and support personnel to BCOF, which was superseded in 1952 by British Commonwealth Forces Korea (BCFK). Australian, British, Canadian, Indian and New Zealand units were part of BCFK.

By the time 3 RAR arrived in Pusan on 28 September, the North Korean army was in retreat. As a part of the invasion force under the UN Supreme Commander, General Douglas MacArthur, 3 RAR moved north and was involved in its first major action near Pyongyang.

By 21 October, the United States 24th Infantry Division, with the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade leading, crossed the Taedong River at Pyongyang and headed north. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were in the van, and by nightfall the Brigade halted on the outskirts of Yongyu, 21 miles (34 km) north of Pyongyang. A patrol from the Argylls entered the town and made contact with elements of the US 3rd Battalion, 187th Regimental Combat Team.
239 North Koreans' midnight attack on Yongyu came from the general direction of the road running southwest of the town. The Argylls met the fringe of the attack and beat it off. The attack on 3/187 RCT was stronger, and the North Koreans succeeded in entering the town before breaking off and moving away at 03:00.

Next day the Australians of 3 RAR were to take the lead in the advance, and C Company was to be the leading company. The orders given in the early evening stressed the urgency to link up with the US Airborne. The company was not to be distracted at Yongyu, they were to press as quickly as possible as the Argylls continued to clear the town. The noises of the Airborne battles to the north were very close and could be heard clearly throughout the night.

C Company 3RAR was the only company to remain largely intact as the battalion hastily absorbed reinforcements from the rest of the regiment and K Force and came to strength. This, the newest 3 RAR company had been formed in late 1949 and early 1950 from the young men who joined the Regular Army after World War II. By the standards of the other companies C Company was very young and untested. Much of the banter within the battalion was directed at them. Good humoured as it was, when it continued once the battalion commenced operations the young regulars became all the more determined to show their mettle. C Company was a well trained sub unit and, unlike the other sub units still shaking down, was a cohesive team.

The Non-Commissioned Officers and senior soldiers were experienced, competent leaders who had raised and trained the Company. As an unexpected luxury, a handful of K Force reinforcements joined the C Company during the advance and took it over strength; a state never to be attained again by any unit in the campaign. The platoon commanders were young and inexperienced, all from the 1948 graduating class from Royal Military College, Duntroon, the Company Commander, who arrived only weeks before the battalion sailed, was an experienced battle leader.

At 07:00 on 22 October 1950, C Company 3RAR advanced with 7 Platoon leading mounted on tanks of D Company, US 89th Tank Battalion followed by the rest of the company in US troop carrying vehicles. At 09:00 and a mile north of Yongyu, C Company came under fire from the apple orchard on the slopes of Hill 163 in YD 2354 (map grid location). It became apparent that C Company had driven into the North Koreans who were in the process of forming up to attack the Americans. At 09:30, 7 and 8 Platoons attacked the high ground east of the road, with 9 Platoon in reserve holding the road and northern flank.

The attacking platoons went in hard, uphill through the apple trees. Although outnumbered, the Australians pressed their attack fiercely. The platoons pushed on and in a stride were through to the vital ground. Even a bunker which threatened 8 Platoon provided only a momentary delay as the young men grenaded it and pressed forward. C Company's sudden arrival, even though it must have been expected to some extent, and the speed with which the North Korean outposts were brushed aside, had completely surprised the enemy. They were caught with all their attention directed north to a final frenzied effort to break out past the American forces. Thereafter the North Koreans were incapable of presenting organised resistance to the vigorous thrust from the south.

The Australians reported approximately 150 enemy had been killed, 239 wounded and 200 captured as a result of its action at a cost of seven wounded. The operations in Sunchon had achieved much more. The American 187 RCT claimed, 3818 North Korean prisoners, 805 enemy killed and 681 wounded for the loss of 46 jump casualties and 65 battle casualties. Despite heavy casualties several hundred North Koreans remained in and around the battlefield. However, with the link up complete, re-deployment for the continuation of the advance commenced. Within the British Commonwealth Brigade, 1st Battalion of the British Middlesex Regiment passed through and assumed the lead in the drive towards the Yalu River. The Americans reassembled and drove north to rejoin their regiment which returned to Pyongyang by the other route.

With the United Nations success at Inchon, they began to advance against the North Korean Army. Lacking the logistical support, and the naval and air superiority of the UN forces the North Koreans were pushed back beyond the 38th parallel, and despite having achieved their goal of saving the South Korean government, the UN forces continued the pursuit into North Korean territory. The American government had decided to adopt a policy of not just containment of the perceived communist threat, but the overall goal of the destruction of the communist regime.

The UN forces crossed into North Korea in early October 1950. The US X Corps made amphibious landings at Wonsan and Riwon, which had already been captured by South Korean forces advancing by land. The rest of the US Army, along with the South Koreans, and supported by the Commonwealth forces including 3RAR, drove up the western side of Korea and captured Pyongyang on 19 October 1950. By the end of October, the North Korean Army was rapidly disintegrating, and the UN had taken 135,000 prisoners.

The UN offensive greatly concerned the Chinese, who worried that the UN forces would not stop at the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China, and extend their rollback policy into China. Many in the West, including General MacArthur, thought that spreading the war to China would be necessary and that since North Korean troops were being supplied by bases in China, those supply depots should be bombed. However, Truman and the other leaders disagreed, and MacArthur was ordered to be very cautious when approaching the Chinese border. Except on some rare occasions, UN bombers remained out of Manchuria during the war.

China warned American leaders through neutral diplomats that it would intervene to protect its national security, however the American hierarchy felt these to be empty threats.

Despite this, on 8 October 1950, the day after American troops crossed the 38th parallel, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered the People's Liberation Army's North East Frontier Force to be reorganised into the Chinese People's Volunteer Army. Mao ordered the army to move to the Yalu River, ready to cross. Mao sought Soviet aid and saw intervention as essentially defensive: "If we allow the U.S. to occupy all of Korea... we must be prepared for the U.S. to declare... war with China," he told Joseph Stalin. Premier Zhou Enlai was sent to Moscow to add force to Mao's cabled arguments. Mao delayed while waiting for substantial Soviet help, postponing the planned attack from 13 to 19 October. However, Soviet assistance was limited to providing air support no nearer than from the battlefront. The Chinese were angered by the Soviets not offering more support, but Soviet MiG-15s provided many problems for UN forces. The Soviet role was known to the US, but it was kept quiet so as to avoid the possibility of escalating the conflict into nuclear war.

The Chinese made contact with American troops on 25 October 1950, with 270,000 PVA troops under the command of General Peng Dehuai, much to the surprise of the UN, which had disregarded evidence of such a massive force.

After the Chinese government moved 18 divisions into North Korea, the UN forces were defeated at Chosin Reservoir and withdrew their forces, but by 1 November, they had been forced to retreat back to the 38th parallel. The Chinese pressed their offensive, but stalwart defending and the harsh winter stalled their thrust. The Chinese offensive was halted in January 1951.

The Chinese began a new Spring Offensive in April 1951 as the weather improved, also referred to as the Fifth Phase Offensive, with the intention of recapturing Seoul. The Chinese launched a major assault between 22 and 25 April that resulted in a victory in the Battle of the Imjin River. At the same time, the UN repelled Chinese forces at Kapyong.

Chinese forces of the 118th Division attacked the Kapyong Valley in force, and pushed South Korean and New Zealand troops into retreat. Under heavy pressure, the Korean 6th Division broke, and the line collapsed. American and South Korean men poured through a gap under protective covering fire from Australians who were holding their section of the line despite heavy pressure.

Australian troops from 3 RAR, and Canadian troops from Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry were ordered to halt this Chinese advance. The mission of the men of the 27th Commonwealth Brigade was to block the two approaches to Kapyong. In only a few hours, they managed to prepare defensive positions.

The Chinese 118th Division engaged their two forward battalions on 23 April. In the early part of the battle the 1st Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment and the 16th Field Regiment of the Royal New Zealand Artillery were all but cut off. The resistance of forward positions, held by the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry (2 PPCLI), and 3RAR, permitted the 1st Battalion, Middlesex Regiment to withdraw. It moved into place to provide a reserve.

The initial Chinese attack at Kapyong engaged 3 RAR on Hill 504. The Chinese then struck at the Canadian front. Wave after wave of massed Chinese troops kept up the attack throughout the night of 23 April. After a night of fierce fighting Major Bernard O'Dowd, Officer Commanding, A Company, 3 RAR, managed to get through on a radio phone to a general of the 1st US Marine Division. The general was incredulous, thinking it was an enemy agent speaking. He told O'Dowd that the unit no longer existed, that it had been wiped out the night before.

The Chinese had managed to infiltrate the brigade position by the morning of 23 April. The Australians and Canadians were facing the whole of the Chinese 118th Division. Throughout 24 April the battle was unrelenting. It devolved, on both fronts, into hand-to-hand combat with bayonet charges. The Australians, facing encirclement, were ordered to make an orderly fall back to new defensive positions late in the day of 24 April.

2 PPCLI was completely surrounded. Captain Mills, in command of D Company, 2 PPCLI, was forced to call down artillery fire on his own positions on Hill 677 several times during the early morning hours of 25 April to avoid being overrun. It had to be resupplied by air drops during this desperate time. By dawn the Chinese attack on the Canadian position had abated, and in the afternoon of 25 April the road through to the Canadians had been cleared of Chinese, at which time the 2nd Battalion was relieved.

The 16th Field Regiment, Royal New Zealand Artillery, also managed to withdraw and link up with the US Army's 72nd Heavy Tank Battalion. These units provided close heavy gun support.

Also, during the withdrawal of the Australians, 4 men from B Company, 3RAR, formed a rearguard to hold off any flanking attacks. The four Australians held off three waves of Chinese soldiers, killing at least 25 and wounding many more. After two days and two nights of fighting, the Australians had recaptured their positions, at the cost of 32 men killed and 53 wounded. For this contribution of stalling the Chinese advance, 3 RAR received a United States Distinguished Unit Citation.

Despite their enormous advantage in numbers the Chinese troops had been badly outgunned. Their courage and tenacity could not overcome the well-trained, well-disciplined and well-armed Australians and Canadians. The battlefield was littered with the corpses of Chinese soldiers, a testament to the discipline and firepower of the defenders.

For their brilliant conduct of this engagement, Lieutenant-Colonel Bruce Ferguson of Australia, and Lieutenant-Colonel James R. Stone of Canada were each awarded the Distinguished Service Order. For Stone, it was the second bar to the DSO he had first won during Operation Olive in Italy in 1944.

The second major battle the Australians fought in 1951 was Operation Commando. Operation Commando was the last major UN offensive thrust of the Korean War. It was an attack on a Chinese salient in a bend of the Imjin River, designed to prevent the Communist forces from interdicting the UN supply lines near Seoul.

By July 1951, 3RAR had come under the control of the 1st Commonwealth Division. Objectives of the 1st Commonwealth Division during Operation Commando, including the Australians, were Hill 355 and Hill 317.

The attack began on 3 October 1951 with the US I Corps (including four US Divisions, the 1st Commonwealth Division and the 1st South Korean Division) seized the Jamestown Line destroying elements of the 42nd Army, 47th Army, 64th Army and 65th Army, and after five days of intense combat, eventually forcing the Chinese into retreat.
The operation was a success, and ended on 15 October, with a few hills south of the line still in Communist hands, requiring a follow-up operation (Operation Polecharge).
The official historian for the Korean War, Robert O'Neill, wrote of this battle: "In this action 3RAR had won one of the most impressive victories achieved by any Australian battalion. In five days of heavy fighting 3RAR dislodged a numerically superior enemy from a position of great strength. The Australians were successful in achieving surprise on 3 and 5 October, the company and platoon showed high courage, tenacity and morale despite some very difficult situations, such as that of D company when the mist rose on 5 October and those of B and C Companies when the weight of enemy fire threatened their isolation of Hill 317 on 7 October... The victory of Maryang San is probably the greatest single feat of the Australian Army during the Korean War".

Australian casualties during Operation Commando were 20 dead and 89 wounded.

After 1951, both sides were in a type of combat comparable to the Western Front in World War I in which men lived in tunnels, redoubts, and sandbagged forts behind barbed wire defences. From 1951 to the end of the war, 3 RAR held trenches on the eastern side of the Commonwealth Division's positions in the hills northeast of the Imjin River. Across from them were heavily fortified Chinese positions.

As the war continued, several other nations grew less willing to contribute more ground troops. Australia, however, increased its troop strength in Korea, by sending 1 RAR. This battalion arrived in Korea on 6 April 1952 and experienced its first major combat during Operation Blaze on 2 July. In March 1953, they were replaced by 2 RAR.

Royal Australian Navy vessels had been stationed in Japan following the Japanese surrender ending World War II. Following North Korea's invasion of the South, RAN vessels stationed in Japan were put on immediate alert.

On 29 June Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced that the frigate HMAS "Shoalhaven", stationed in Japan, and the destroyer HMAS "Bataan", in Hong Kong would be placed under UN command in Korea. On 1 July, one day after President Truman committed American ground forces to Korea, the first Australian operation in Korea took place; HMAS "Shoalhaven" moved from Japan to Pusan escorting an American ammunition ship. On 27 July 1950, the destroyer HMAS "Warramunga" was also deployed.

During the Landing at Wonsan in October 1950, HMAS "Warramunga" provided gunfire support during the landing of US X Corps. During the mass evacuation of troops and refugees in the city of Hungnam in December 1950, HMA Ships "Bataan" and "Warramunga" assisted in the evacuation. In October 1951, "Sydney" arrived in Korean waters to replace for a three-month tour. Sydney carried two squadrons of Sea Furies – 805 Squadron RAN and 808 Squadron RAN, and 817 Squadron RAN equipped with Fireflies. "Sydney" returned to Japan having lost only 9 aircraft, with 3 pilots killed, and having launched over 2,700 missions from her flight deck. Later in the war, 9 ships of the RAN participated in the naval blockade of North Korea.

The Royal Australian Air Force was heavily involved in the Pacific War during World War II. Following the Japanese surrender, No. 77 Squadron was selected as part of Australia's contribution to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force and, after converting to P-51D Mustang fighters, arrived in Japan in February 1946. Occupation duties proved uneventful, and No. 77 Squadron was preparing to leave Japan for Australia when the Korean War broke out in June 1950.

No. 77 Squadron was committed to action over Korea as part of the United Nations forces, and flew its first ground attack sorties on 2 July 1950, making it the first UN unit to see action.

No. 30 Communications Flight, No. 491 (Maintenance) Squadron, and No. 391 (Base) Squadron were attached to the United Nations Command in Korea and grouped into No. 91 (Composite) Wing in October 1950. No. 91 Wing was based in Iwakuni, Japan.

No. 77 Squadron fully deployed to Korea in October to support the UN advance into North Korea but was withdrawn to Pusan in November in response to the Communist forces' counter-attack.

The Squadron was withdrawn to Japan in April 1951 to re-equip with Gloster Meteor jet fighters and returned to action with these new aircraft in July, where they met with greater success against the Soviet MiG pilots. However, the MiGs were still far superior to the Meteor.

Following heavy losses from MiG-15 fighters, No. 77 Squadron operated in the ground attack role from December 1951 until the end of the war; it remained in South Korea on garrison duties until returning to Australia in November 1954.

The Battle of Sunchon was an air battle fought near the city of Sunchon on 1 December 1951, 12 Gloster Meteor jets of the RAAF's No. 77 Squadron were attacked by 40–50 Chinese MiG-15s. Despite their Meteors having inferior manoeuvrability to the Soviet-built MiGs, the Australian pilots managed to score their first victories of the Korean War, for the loss of three aircraft. Accounts vary, with the Australians claiming at least 10 MiGs shot down, but Chinese and North Korean sources stated it was only one.On 29 November 1952, US President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower fulfilled a campaign promise by going to Korea to find out what could be done to end the conflict. With the UN's acceptance of India's proposal for a Korean armistice, a cease-fire was established on 27 July 1953, by which time the front line was back around the proximity of the 38th parallel, and so a demilitarised zone (DMZ) was established around it, presently defended by North Korean troops on one side and by South Korean, American and UN troops on the other. The DMZ runs north of the parallel towards the east, and to the south as it travels west. The site of the peace talks, Kaesong, the old capital of Korea, was part of the South before hostilities broke out but is currently a special city of the North. North Korea and the United States signed the, with Syngman Rhee refusing to sign.

After the war ended, Australians remained in Korea for four years as military observers. Australia gained political and security benefits, the most important being the signing of the ANZUS Treaty with the United States and New Zealand.

After two years and 17 days of fighting the UN and North Korea had finally negotiated an agreement to suspend hostilities on 27 July 1953. Out of 17,000 Australians who served in Korea, casualties numbered more than 1,500, of whom 339 were killed.


Is the original Marshall Field's building in Chicago still standing?

The former flagship Marshall Field and Company Building location on State Street in the Loop of downtown Chicago was officially renamed "Macy's on State Street" in 2006 and is now one of four Macy's flagship stores.

Marshall Field's

Marshall Field's (officially Marshall Field & Company) was a department store in Chicago, Illinois, that grew to become a chain before being acquired by Federated Department Stores in 2005.

Marshall Field & Company traces its antecedents to a dry goods store opened at 137 Lake Street in Chicago, Illinois in 1852 by Potter Palmer, (1826–1902), eponymously named P. Palmer & Company. In 1856, 21-year-old Marshall Field (1834–1906) moved to the booming midwestern city of Chicago on the southwest shores of Lake Michigan from Pittsfield, Massachusetts and found work at the city's then-largest dry goods firm – Cooley, Wadsworth & Company. Just prior to the American Civil War, in 1860, Field and bookkeeper Levi Z. Leiter, (1834–1904), became junior partners in the firm, then known as Cooley, Farwell & Company. In 1864, the firm, then led by senior partner John V. Farwell, Sr., (1825–1908), was renamed Farwell, Field & Company. only for Field and Leiter to soon withdraw from the partnership with Farwell when presented with the opportunity of a lifetime.

Potter Palmer, plagued by ailing health, was looking to dispose of his thriving business, so on January 4, 1865, Field and Leiter entered into partnership with him and his brother Milton Palmer. So the firm of P. Palmer & Company became Field, Palmer, Leiter & Company, with Palmer financing much of their initial capital as well as his own contribution. After Field and Leiter's immediate success enabled them to pay him back, Palmer withdrew two years later from the partnership in 1867 to focus on his own growing real-estate interests on one of the burgeoning city's important thoroughfares, State Street. His brother, Milton Palmer, left at this time as well. The store was renamed Field, Leiter & Company, sometimes referred to as "Field & Leiter".

The buyout, however, did not bring an end to Potter Palmer's association with the firm. In 1868, Palmer convinced Field and Leiter to lease a new, six-story edifice he had just built at the northeast corner of State and Washington Streets. The store was soon referred to as the "Marble Palace" owing to its costly marble stone face.

When the Great Chicago Fire broke out on October 8, 1871, news of this, one of the worst conflagrations to ever strike an American city, reached company officials Henry Willing and Levi Leiter, who decided to load as much of their expensive merchandise as possible onto wagons and take it to Leiter's home, which was out of the path of the fire. The Company's drivers and teams were ordered out of the barns. Horace B. Parker, a young salesman, rushed to the store's basement, broke up boxes, and built a fire in the furnace boiler so that the steam-powered elevators could be operated. These employees worked feverishly through the night to remove vital records and valuable goods to safety.

At one point, the gas tank exploded, which put out the store's gaslights. The men worked on by candlelight and the glow from the approaching flames. The employees got enough steam up to operate the store's powerful pumps in the basement, and volunteers went to the roof and used the store's fire hoses to wet down the roof and the wall on the side of the oncoming fire. Early in the following morning however, the city's waterworks burned, thus ending the water supply and making further efforts useless. The last employee had scarcely exited the building when it burst into flames, shooting fire from every window.

The store burned to the ground. However, as a result of the employees' herculean efforts, so much merchandise was saved that the store was able to reopen in only a few weeks (the Wholesale Department on Oct. 28th, and the Retail Department on Nov. 6th) in a temporary location (a horse-streetcar barn of the Chicago City Railway Co. at State & 20th Streets). Six months later, in April 1872, Field & Leiter reopened in an unburned building at Madison and Market Streets (today's West Wacker Drive). Salesman Parker stayed on with the Company for 45 more years, rising to the level of General Sales Manager.

Two years later, in October 1873, Field and Leiter returned to State Street at Washington, opening in a new five-story store at their old location they now leased from the Singer Sewing Machine Company, Palmer having sold the land site to finance his own rebuilding activities. This store was expanded in 1876, only to be destroyed by fire again in November 1877. Ever tenacious, Field and Leiter had a new temporary store opened by the end of the month at a lakefront exposition hall they leased temporarily from the city, located at what is now the site of the present Art Institute of Chicago. Meanwhile, the Singer company had speculatively built a new, even larger, six-story building on the ruins of their old 1873 store, which, after some contention, was personally bought by Field and Leiter. Field, Leiter & Company now reclaimed their traditional location at the northeast corner of State and Washington for the last time in April 1879.

In January 1881, Field, with the support of his junior partners, bought out Levi Z. Leiter, renaming the business "Marshall Field & Company". As Palmer had before, Leiter retired to tend his significant real estate investments, which included commissioning a department store, Second Leiter Building in 1891 at State Street and Van Buren to house Siegel, Cooper & Company. In 1932, this building (known as one of the earliest steel-framed commercial buildings built and still standing in the U.S. along with the Equitable Building in Baltimore) was leased to the later famous nationwide mail-order firm Sears, Roebuck & Company.

In 1887, the landmark seven-story Henry Hobson Richardson-designed, (1838–1886), Romanesque-styled, Marshall Field's Wholesale Store opened on Franklin Street between Quincy and Adams (razed c.1930). Though little remembered today, the wholesale division sold merchandise in bulk to smaller merchants throughout the central and western United States and at that time did six times the sales volume of the local retail store. Chicago's location at the nexus of the country's railroads and Great Lakes shipping made it the center of the dry goods wholesaling business by the 1870s, with Field's former partner from before the war, John V. Farwell, Sr., (1825–1908), being his largest rival. It was the scale of the profits generated by the John G. Shedd-led wholesale division during this time that made Marshall Field the richest man in Chicago and one of the richest in the country.

Following the departure of Leiter, the retail store grew in importance. Though it remained a fraction of the size of the wholesale division, its opulent building and luxurious merchandise differentiated Marshall Field's from the other wholesale dry goods merchants in town. In 1887, Harry Gordon Selfridge, (1858–1947), was appointed to lead the retail store and headed it as it evolved into a modern department store. That same year, Field personally obtained Leiter's remaining interest in the 1879 Singer building and in 1888 started buying the buildings adjoining his for additional floor space.
Marshall Field also had a child at this time.

In 1892, the structures between the 1879 building on State Street and Wabash Avenue to the east were demolished and the famous influential architect Daniel H. Burnham, (1846–1912), and his firm D.H. Burnham & Company was commissioned to erect a new building in anticipation of the influx of visitors from the World's Columbian Exposition scheduled for 1893. The nine-story "Annex" at the northwest corner of Wabash and Washington Streets was opened under the direction of Burnham associate Charles B. Atwood, (1849–1895), in August 1893, towards the end of the Exposition. In 1897, the old 1879 store was rebuilt and had two additional floors added, while the first of Marshall Field's iconic landmark Great Clocks was installed at the corner of State and Washington Streets on November 26.

In 1901, Marshall Field & Company, previously a private partnership, was incorporated. Spurred on by Selfridge, Marshall Field razed the three buildings north of it, which had been occupied since 1888, as well as the Dankmar Adler, (1844–1900), and Louis Sullivan, (1856–1924),-designed 1879 Central Music Hall at the southeast corner of State and Randolph Streets in 1901. In their place rose a massive, twelve-story building fronting on State Street in 1902, including a grand new entrance. In 1906, a third new building opened on Wabash Avenue north of the 1893 structure, which was then the oldest part of the store.

In the midst of the construction, Selfridge abruptly resigned from the company in 1904, buying rival store Schlesinger & Mayer, but sold it only three months later. Schlesinger & Mayer in 1899 had commissioned the Louis Sullivan-designed building now known as the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building, which is the firm to which Selfridge sold the business. After trying retirement, he went on to establish Selfridges in London.

Marshall Field died on January 16, 1906 in New York City. On the day of his funeral, all the stores along State Street, big and small, closed and the Chicago Board of Trade suspended afternoon trading in his honor. The board of Marshall Field and Company appointed John G. Shedd, (1850–1926), whom Field had once called "the greatest merchant in the United States", to serve as the company's new president. Shedd became head of a company that employed 12,000 people in Chicago (two-thirds of them in retail) and was doing about $25 million in yearly retail sales in addition to nearly $50 million in wholesale.

Under Shedd's leadership for the next 16 years, Marshall Field & Co. continued to rebuild its store, fulfilling plans approved by Field himself to pull down the 1879 structure later in 1906. In its stead rose a new south State Street building with a continuation of the 1902 street façade. Opened in September 1907, it included a Louis Comfort Tiffany- decorated ceiling that is both the first and largest ceiling ever built in favrile glass, containing over 1.6 million pieces. With completion of the 1907 building, Marshall Field's momentarily possessed the title of "world's largest department store" over John Wanamaker & Co. in Philadelphia and R.H. Macy & Co. in New York.

In 1912, the 16-story Trude Building at the southwest corner of Wabash and Randolph was acquired and demolished, an act that was considered to be one of the first, if not the first, demolition of a high-rise skyscraper of those just recently being built. In its place rose the 1914 building by designed by the Graham, Burnham & Company architectural firm, completing the present-day store and now encompassing the entire square city block, bounded by Washington, State, Wabash, and Randolph Streets.

Also in 1914, the same Graham, Burnham & Company supervised the opening of a new twenty-story Marshall Field Annex across the street at 25 East Washington, which housed "Marshall Field's Store for Men" on its first six floors. These buildings recaptured its status as the world's largest department store, its many restaurants and separate men's and women's lounges becoming an important social destination for upscale Chicago.

Shedd continued to expand Field's wholesale business and grew its manufacturing business, buying textile mills in the South in 1911 (see Cannon Mills Company) as well as overseeing the purchase of the Marshall Field Trust's interest in the business in 1917. The Field Family eventually retained only a ten percent stake. Second company president, John G. Shedd retired in late 1922.

In 1913, representatives of Carson Pirie Scott and Marshall Field's were called to the state capital of Illinois at Springfield for the Illinois State Senate's investigation of the low wages of the female employees of the major department stores. At Marshall Field's, women were not only typists or other types of clerical workers, they also had a major role in the sales department. Women sales clerks were trained in etiquette and acquired a thorough understanding of the merchandise. The presence of saleswomen was a crucial part of the success of Marshall Field's, as they made female customers more comfortable and therefore made shopping at Marshall Field's fun.

The opportunities available for women at Marshall Field's created a subculture of working women. During the early and middle decades of the 20th century, many women migrated into the labor force often becoming adrift in a new city with new opportunities. Many of these women lived apart from family and relatives, were young and single and came from varied backgrounds and ethnicities. This subculture of women was greatly affected by wages and opportunities offered through Marshall Field's.

However, the wages of the female employees were not representative of their role in the company and, therefore, became the subject of the 1913 Illinois Senate Investigation. Women were paid very low wages, the average being $5 to $8 per week. The "testimony at an Illinois Senate investigation in 1913 from spokesmen for the Illinois Manufacturers' Association; banks; Sears; Roebuck; and Marshall Field's revealed that most major employers paid women workers as low as $2.75." Even in 1913, that was not a living wage. During the hearing, Marshall Field's revealed that it could double the women's salaries but refused to do so. Furthermore, women faced more mistreatment within the company such as sex segregation, which limited their mobility within the company.

James Simpson was appointed president following Shedd's retirement. Though considered to have favored the declining wholesale division, he did expand its retail operations, first buying A. M. Rothschild & Co. at State Street and Jackson Boulevard in December 1923, which Field's operated as a discount store called "The Davis Store." In 1924, the 1893–1914 buildings that the store occupied were acquired from the Marshall Field Trust.

The first branch of Marshall Field's itself opened at Market Square in Lake Forest, Illinois in May 1928. In September 1928, its first branch in Evanston, Illinois followed, later relocating to a French Renaissance-style building at Sherman Avenue and Church Street in November 1929. The Oak Park, Illinois store opened in September 1929 in a building similar to the Evanston store.
Frederick & Nelson, a Seattle, Washington-based department store founded in 1890, was also acquired in 1929, with its own 1914 downtown Seattle building at Pine Street and Fifth Avenue. Frederick & Nelson retained its name, though its logo was soon rewritten in Field's iconic script. But more important for Field's history, Frederick & Nelson created Frango mints, a Seattle tradition then and now, that later became identified with Marshall Field's and the city of Chicago. The candy kitchen at the State Street flagship store soon began producing the confections.

Marshall Field & Company became a public company in 1930, early in the "Great Depression". The retailer needed capital due to the expense of opening the massive new Merchandise Mart to house its flagging wholesale division. Ground was broken in 1927 during the boom years of the "Roaring 20s"; when the Mart opened in 1930, it was the largest building in the world. The 1887 Wholesale Store designed by Richardson at Franklin between Quincy and Adams Streets was closed and demolished at this time. But the new building, faced with a change in retail distribution and wholesale patterns in addition to the deepening "Great Depression", could not save Field's wholesale division. Simpson left the Company, and James O. McKinsey, a University of Chicago professor and founder of the McKinsey and Company consulting firm, was hired to reform the Company. The wholesale division, once the core of the Company, was liquidated by 1936. The Davis Store was closed in 1936 as well, and its building was sold to Goldblatts. In 1939, the land underlying the main State Street store was acquired from the Marshall Field Trust. Meanwhile, McKinsey also reorganized the Company's vertically integrated operations, notably by merging the Company's varied textile operations under the Fieldcrest name.

Following World War II, the Merchandise Mart building was sold in 1945 to Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., (1888–1969), significantly improving the Field Company's finances and enabling the store to cope with the post-war suburban residential and commercial boom. Marshall Field's presciently followed its customers to their new homes outwards to the suburbs, including opening a store in 1950 in partnership with pioneering suburban developer Philip M. Klutznick (a famous Jewish leader and later U.S. Secretary of Commerce) at his new Park Forest Plaza, which utilized revolutionary new concepts in land use and architecture.

In 1956, Klutznick and Field's jointly opened Old Orchard Shopping Center in Skokie, Illinois, a center Klutznick developed on land that Field's already owned; the development included a new Field's store. This was followed by the 1959 opening of a Field's store in the Mayfair Mall in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin to the northwest, and stores at later Klutznick-led shopping centers opened at Oakbrook Center in Oak Brook, Illinois in 1962 and River Oaks Center in Calumet City, Illinois in 1966.

Marshall Field's even expanded further in the Pacific Northwest, acquiring The Crescent department store in Spokane, Washington in 1962 and in 1970, moved east with the purchase of Halle Brothers Co., a leading department store in Cleveland, Ohio. Field's also continued to expand its hometown base in Illinois, opening a store at Woodfield Center in Schaumburg in 1971.

CherryVale Mall in Rockford and Hawthorn Center in Vernon Hills followed in 1973, and stores at Water Tower Place in Chicago and Fox Valley Center in Aurora opened in 1975. The suburban expansion continued in 1976 with a location at Orland Square in Orland Park, followed by the Louis Joliet Mall store in Joliet in 1978. In 1979, Marshall Field's expanded south into Texas with a store at The Galleria in Houston.

The year 1980 saw the rapid acquisition of J.B. Ivey Co., a department store chain with roots in Charlotte, North Carolina and Jacksonville, Florida; The Union Co. in Columbus, Ohio; the Lipman's stores in Portland, Oregon; and several Liberty House stores in Washington state. Field's existing Frederick & Nelson unit in Seattle absorbed the Lipman's and Liberty House stores under its name, but after initially merging The Union of Columbus, Ohio with its earlier Halle's stores from Cleveland, Field's decided to sell the combined chain in November 1981; the new owners quickly liquidated it.

The early 1980s saw slower expansion, with just two store locations in Illinois added, one in October 1980 at Spring Hill Mall in West Dundee, and one in 1981 at Stratford Square Mall in Bloomingdale. Another Texas store opened at the Dallas Galleria, in Dallas, Texas in 1982.

In 1982, Marshall Field & Co. ceased to be a public company, being acquired by B.A.T. British-American Tobacco. As part of BATUS Retail Group, the American retailing arm of B.A.T., Field's and its Frederick & Nelson, Ivey's and The Crescent department stores and the John Brueners home furnishings stores joined retailers Gimbels, Saks Fifth Avenue and Kohl's. Field's continued to expand under BATUS, adding stores at Houston's Town & Country Mall in 1983 and at the North Star Mall in San Antonio in 1986.

Only four years after buying Marshall Field's, however, BATUS scaled back its retail operations in 1986, selling Field's former subsidiaries Frederick & Nelson and The Crescent to a local investor group. Frederick & Nelson quickly deteriorated and became defunct in 1992. Its 1914 building, the one acquired by Field's in 1929, was eventually bought by Nordstrom; the structure was renovated and reopened in 1998 as a replacement for Nordstrom's own Seattle parent store.

BATUS closed its Gimbels division in 1986 and transferred five former Gimbels locations in Wisconsin to its Marshall Field's division: downtown Milwaukee, Northridge Mall and Southridge Mall in suburban Milwaukee, Hilldale Shopping Center in Madison and in downtown Appleton. The former Gimbels Northridge and Southridge locations were retained by Field's for only three years; due to poor performance, they were sold in 1989 to H.C. Prange Co. of Sheboygan.

The Evanston and Oak Park stores were closed in 1986, their 1929 buildings deemed out of date and too costly to operate. A major restoration and renovation of the State Street flagship store led by Director of Construction and Maintenance Bill Allen commenced in 1987.

BATUS initially kept Saks Fifth Avenue, Marshall Field's, and Ivey's; however, it sold all its remaining U.S. retail assets in 1990, with Saks going to Bahrain-based Investcorp, Ivey's sold to Dillard's, and Marshall Field's sold to then Dayton-Hudson Corporation (now Target Corporation).

Dayton-Hudson Corporation renamed itself Target Corporation in 2000 and renamed its Dayton's and Hudson's department stores Marshall Field's in 2001. These stores were outside of Field's existing markets. Target Corporation introduced some of the brands carried there to the Marshall Field's stores, displacing some of Field's more expensive merchandise.

In 2004 Target Corporation sold the Marshall Field's chain to May Co., thereby exiting the department store business entirely. It was hoped that aligning with the May Company instead of the discounter Target would "let Field's be Field's" and allow it to recapture its former cachet and upper-class customer base. However, Federated Department Stores, Inc. acquired the May Company in 2005.

After the Federated purchase, Marshall Field's stores joined L. S. Ayres and existing Macy's stores in the new Macy's North Division. During 2006, all Marshall Field's stores, most Filene's and all the stores of nine other May-owned chains were renamed Macy's, the conversion officially occurred on September 9, 2006. Many Chicagoans resented the New York City brand replacing their local brand. Hundreds of protesters gathered under Marshall Field's famous clock that day, and returned on the one-year anniversary, September 9, 2007. Dozens attended "Field's Fans" rallies each anniversary from 2008 to 2012.

Many Chicagoans felt betrayed by Macy's takeover of Marshall Fields when the company began to change its aesthetics, customer service standards, and demoted many Chicago-based brands. In December 2006, Macy's reported 30% slower sales in former Marshall Field's stores; the focus shifted to promoting the State Street location in 2007.

The Marshall Field and Company Building at State and Washington Streets in Chicago was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and is part of the Loop Retail National Historic District. The building was designated a Chicago Landmark on November 1, 2005. With approximately two million square feet of available floor space, the building is the second-largest department store in the United States.

In 1987, while under BATUS ownership, Field's State Street store underwent significant restoration. In 2004, while Field's was still owned by Dayton Hudson/Target, another extensive restoration of the landmark State Street store, costing $115 million, was begun; the last of the renovation was completed after the May acquisition. The 2004 renovations included the installation of new lower-level shops, removal of steel grates from the upper portions of the store's historic light wells, and the addition of an eleven-story atrium in what had been an alley and mid-store light shaft.

In 2004, Field's also introduced significant upgrades to merchandise and the introduction of luxury vendor relationships, in which 10% of the floor space was leased to outside vendors in a manner similar to Selfridge's in London (Selfridge's was founded by former Field's executive Harry Selfridge, who based his business model on Marshall Field's; likewise, the Selfridge's building in London was based on the architecture of the Marshall Field's store).

Among the "firsts" by Marshall Field's was the concept of the department store tea room. In the 19th century, ladies shopping downtown returned home for lunch; having lunch at a downtown restaurant unescorted by a gentleman was not considered ladylike. But after a Marshall Field's clerk shared her lunch (a chicken pot pie) with a tired shopper, Field's hit on the idea of opening a department store tea room, so that women shoppers would not feel the need to make two trips to complete their shopping. To this day, the Walnut Room serves the traditional Mrs. Herring's chicken pot pie.

Marshall Field's had the first European buying office, which was located in Manchester, England, and the first bridal registry. The company was the first to introduce the concept of the personal shopper, and that service was provided without charge in every Field's store, right up to the chain's last days under the Marshall Field's name. It was the first store to offer revolving credit and the first department store to use escalators. Marshall Field's book department in the State Street store was legendary; it pioneered the concept of the "book signing." Moreover, every year at Christmas, Marshall Field's downtown store windows were filled with animated displays as part of the downtown shopping district display; the "theme" window displays became famous for their ingenuity and beauty, and visiting the Marshall Field's windows at Christmas became a tradition for Chicagoans and visitors alike, as popular a local practice as visiting the Walnut Room with its equally famous Christmas tree or meeting "under the clock" on State Street.

Marshall Field was famous for his slogan "Give the lady what she wants." He was also famous for his integrity, character, and community philanthropy and leadership. After his death, the company remained to the very end a major philanthropic contributor to its Chicago-area community.

Field, the store he created and his successor John G. Shedd, helped establish Chicago's prominence throughout the world in business, art, culture, and education. The Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History (as renamed in 1905 for its first major benefactor), the Museum of Science and Industry, the John G. Shedd Aquarium and the University of Chicago have all been aided by the philanthropy of Marshall Field's. Marshall Field was also a major sponsor of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.