Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

""The 38th parallel was recommended by Colonel Charles Bonesteel and Colonel Dean Rusk, two Americans who were given only thirty minutes to devise a plan for dividing the Korean peninsula between the United States and the Soviets. Moreover, the only map available to the Colonels was a 1942 National Geographic map of Asia that did not illustrate provinces, only latitude and longitude. Although the men had seriously considered drawing the line at the operationally significant narrowest waist of Korea, their map’s limitations precluded doing so with accuracy. Rusk would later say “the choice of the thirty-eighth parallel, recommended by two tired colonels working late at night, proved fateful.""