These are not the lads of 1950

Seventy-four years ago, a North Korean army drove the South Koreans and a scratch force of Americans almost to the sea, capturing the whole of South Korea except the "Pusan Perimeter" in the far southeast. It took the genius of Douglas MacArthur and the guts of the US Marines to turn the war around.

The 10,000 North Koreans sent to Russia to expel the Ukrainians from their lodgement in Kursk province don't seem to have the fighting spirit of their grandfathers. For one thing, they try to advance in mass rather than in handfuls as the Russians have learned to do. For another, they apparently have trouble distinguishing Russians from Ukrainians, having reportedly killed eight men of a Chechen unit in a "friendly fire" incident.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press quoted a "senior [US] military offical" as saying that "a couple hundred" Koreans had been killed or wounded in their first few days of combat. And the Ukrainians intercepted a phone call yesterday from a Moscow nurse to her soldier husband in Kursk province, reporting that two trainloads of wounded Koreans had been brought to her hospital. "Yesterday there was a train with about 100 people," she told him. "Today there are 120."

Well, at least they're probably better fed than their families back home in North Korea....