Yet the Americans set off for Korea astonishingly confident of an easy victory. Almost everyone, from top to bottom, seemed to share the view that the moment the North Korean soldiers saw they were fighting Americans rather than ROKs, they would cut and run. It was arrogance born of racial prejudice. One colonel in the 34th Infantry, Harold Ayres, told his troops as they were arriving in Korea, “There are supposed to be North Korean soldiers north of us. These men are poorly trained. Only about half of them have weapons and we’ll have no difficulty stopping them.”
