After a winter of positional warfare, the Marines could recall with better understanding the tales their fathers had told them about France in World War I. For history was staging one of its repetitions; and, allowing for improvements in weapons, the trenches of Korea in 1951–1952 differed but slightly from the trenches of the Western Front in 1917–1918. CHAPTER XII The Move to West Korea _Truce Talks--Tactical Innovations--The Marines in Operation_ MIXMASTER--_Operations of Fifteen Months in Retrospect_ No chronicle of activities in Korea would be complete without a discussion of the truce talks which began in the summer of 1951. When the Communists proposed these meetings early in June, their motives were transparent; they were hurt, staggering, and badly in need of a breathing spell. Pretending a sudden interest in peace, the hard-pressed enemy requested talks at Kaesong for the purposes of recuperation. The enemy would never admit the real damage he suffered. A typical excuse for the smashing CCF defeat was given in a book by Wilford G. Burchett, an Australian Communist who was a press correspondent behind the Chinese lines. “Immediately prior to the beginning of the talks,” he explained, “the Korean-Chinese troops had withdrawn extensively along the East Coast, hoping to entice the Americans as deep as possible into a trap which would be sprung and would cut them off by an encircling move. The Americans were seriously nibbling at the bait when the proposal for cease-fire talks was made. The line was immediately frozen and Korean-Chinese troops started to dig in.”[359] [359] Wilford G. Burchett: _This Monstrous War_ (Melbourne, 1953): J. Waters, 121–122. Burchett was a Communist free lance correspondent for left-wing newspapers. He wrote several books and articles lauding the Communist cause in the Korean War. This beginning of static warfare was unquestionably the great turning point of a war whose course from that time on was to be decided at the conference table of Kaesong and later Panmunjom. Any doubts as to the actual motives of the Communists might have been dispelled upon reading in Burchett’s book this naive boast of the advantage taken of the truce talks by the Reds: