Max Hastings: Will World War III be between the US and China?

China's vast military machine grows day by day. America's sending troops to Australia in response. As tension between the two superpowers escalates, Max Hastings warns of a terrifying threat to world peace: On the evening of November 1, 1950, 22-year-old Private Carl Simon of the US 8th Cavalry lay shivering with his comrades in the icy mountains of North Korea. A patrol had just reported itself 'under attack from unidentified troops', which bemused and dismayed the Americans, because their campaign to occupy North Korea seemed all but complete. Suddenly, through the darkness came sounds of bugle calls, gunfire, shouts in a language that the 8th Cavalry's Korean interpreters could not understand. A few minutes later, waves of attackers charged into the American positions, screaming, firing and throwing grenades. 'There was just mass hysteria,' Simon told me long afterwards. 'It was every man for himself. I didn't know which way to go. In the end, I just ran with the crowd. We ran and ran until the bugles grew fainter.' This was the moment, of course, when the armies of Mao Tse-tung stunned the world by intervening in the Korean War. It had begun in June, when Communist North Korean forces invaded the South. US and British forces repelled the communists, fighting in the name of the United Nations, then pushed deep into North Korea. Seeing their ally on the brink of defeat, the Chinese determined to take a hand. In barren mountains just a few miles south of their own border, in the winter of 1950, their troops achieved a stunning surprise. The Chinese drove the American interlopers hundreds of miles south, before they themselves were pushed back. Eventually a front was stabilized and the situation sank into stalemate. Three years later, the United States was thankful to get out of its unwanted war with China by accepting a compromise peace, along the armistice line which still divides the two Koreas today.