BrotherofSnake said:
Does China still use the "human wave" tactic they used in Korea?
Human wave attack is a military term describing a type of assault performed by infantry units, in which soldiers attack in successive line formations.
Such attacks are common in all poorly equipped armies, or where the objective is of strategic importance. It is a tactic that developed out of trench warfare, where artillery or aerial attack often proved ineffective at dislodging the enemy from a firmly held defensive position.
The casualty rate is generally enormous, yet such attacks are often successful and therefore remain an accepted combat technique.
When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviets fought back with human waves of Red Army troops against both advancing and entrenched enemy soldiers. Usually the Red Army soldiers were told to charge directly in a wide berth to strike every possible point in the German lines. In some battles the Soviets defeated the Germans after sustaining battle losses equal to or more than the German losses. However, in the Winter War, the Soviets found out the hard way that the attack coupled with a "no retreat" policy is highly vulnerable to the motti countertactic, where the attacking party is surrounded and sieged.
There is also the myth that it was a tactic that was employed widely and successfully by the North Korean and Chinese armies during the Korean War, because to the UN troops, the enemy seemed to be everywhere. However, what the communist forces actually used is more aptly described as inflitration assault, since it is necessary to sneak past the enemy and complete the encirclement before heavy fighting begins.
During the 1950s, the Viet Minh, under the command of General Giap, successfully used the human wave attack method against the entrenched French garrison at Dien Bien Phu (Vietnam), shocking the French government into seeking an end to the conflict in Indochina.
Human waves were also rampant in the Iran-Iraq War. Iran was the primary user of these tactics, as it had the less technologically advanced army. Iraq responded with biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction.
Countermeasures to such attacks may also involve extreme firepower superiority, generally of a technologically or organizationally superior nature; for example, the British army used machine guns and organized rifle volleys to great effect against opposing forces armed only with primitive weapons and a few guns.