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February 1 - April 9, 2018
The United States could not be bought, or even intimidated, but it had a long history of looking the other way if not immediately threatened.
Chae was certain that something had to be done very quickly, or it would be too late. In that surmise he was correct—but what he would do was wrong. It would lose the war.
Soviet strategy, like Soviet thinking, has always been devious where American has been direct.
There was nothing wrong with either the stamina or courage of the ROK soldier. Too many thousands of them died above Seoul proving otherwise.
The ghastly mistake made during the early hours of 27 June was that the personnel records of more than five thousand Korean employees of the embassy were left in their files. While the
These files would fall into the hands of the Inmun Gun, and none of the employees who remained at their homes in Seoul would survive the Communist occupation.
44,000 men of the divisions north of the river would die or disappear. Their vital artillery and equipment would be lost with them.
The ROK Army Command could account for only 22,000 men of the 98,000 its rolls had carried out on the 25th.
The single greatest weakness of a free people is always their moral doubts.
Citizens, unless they hear the clarion call, or the angel’s trumpet, are apt to be a rabble in arms.
the real function of an army is to fight and that a soldier’s destiny—which few escape—is to suffer, and if need be, to die.
The rash and the brave die early in a war.
gooks,
I HATE this word.
if they wanted to live, they would have to fight.
in this world are tigers.
they represented exactly the kind of pampered, undisciplined, egalitarian army their society had long desired and had at last achieved.
They had been raised to believe the world was without tigers, then sent to face those tigers with a stick. On their society must fall the blame.
it was no way to run a war.
The Army schools, assuming that before being committed to action the Army would get its “fat” restored, had developed no new and startling ways of making do with too little, too late.
a group of ROK horse cavalry, who had ridden out of nowhere to attack the enemy,
!!!
The volume of fire was as great as anything Stan Meloy had seen in Europe—and
Because without tight discipline their bravery could not be coordinated into a team effort, many of these men died in vain.
“There but for the grace of God
But the abiding weakness of free peoples is that their governments can not or will not make them prepare or sacrifice before they are aroused.
They had no real antagonism for the enemy system, nor any desire to oppose it. They had no understanding of their nation’s position in the world, or of the course their government must take. And their government was slow to waken to what its supposed legions had become.
This could be today
Soldiers fight from discipline and training, citizens from motivation and ideals.
Since the occupation divisions had been at full peacetime stance, a certain number of officers with no aptitude for leading men in combat had been assigned to them,
Gay, who had been Patton’s chief of staff in Europe, admitted he did not know how to conduct a retreat—thus far in this military experience he had never been involved in one.
The great problem was that in 1950, an infantryman in Korea was called on to do almost the same things Caesar’s legions had done, and to suffer the same hardships. In twenty centuries, infantry warfare has changed but little in the burdens it puts on the men in the mud. But in 1950, while ground warfare had changed little, the American society and the American soldier had.
A great and continuing weakness of the United States Army fighting in Asia was its tactical and psychological dependence on continuous battle lines, such as had been known in Europe. In Asia, terrain and Communist tactics made such lines rare—Communist armies tended to flow like the sea, washing around strong points, breaking through places where the dams were weak. The “human sea” analogy picked up and headlined by the press was very real—except that the press always gave a misleading indication of the numbers of enemy involved.
This bears reading and knowing...and seems strangely tangible these days.
Ironically, the Indian-fighting army of seventy-five years earlier would have understood the new form of warfare perfectly.
the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare. It had learned to ride hard and march hard, live light, and to operate in isolated columns, giving the enemy no rest.
And no free-born American can or could advocate surrender.
In addition to restraint of objective, the second necessary ingredient of limited war is a professional army large enough to handle any task.
The government could handle the problems of butter and bayonets, but it could never solve the problem of men.
American newspapers never again devoted much attention to the exploits or condition of the ROK Army. Consequently, few Americans have understood the ROK contribution to the Korean War, and most have tended to deprecate it.
ROK units, in dying, destroyed North Korean regiments and even divisions; although until NKPA records were captured later the fact was unknown.
Men are not ciphers, and hearts, even Communist hearts, are not potatoes, and Americans would do well to remember it.
This ability to resupply itself over the broken terrain of Korea without transport and in the teeth of air power was one of the minor miracles achieved by the Inmun Gun.
The fact that the United States was not seriously challenged in the air, or at sea, where it was strong, indicates that had the nation been equally prepared on the ground, the war would not have occurred, or having begun, could have been quickly contained.
True today Cyber too
In a hideously practical way the Communists knew what they were doing.
From the first, the peasantry saw little to lose through Communist rule, and perhaps much to gain. Only much later, when the land is collectivized and the iron hand shows through the paternal glove, and when it is too late, does the peasant who has been Communized realize his loss. Communized, he ceases to be an individual man, losing an identity that even the most abject poverty could not take from his before.
When the Korean War broke, somewhat less than 10 percent of the small United States Marine Corps had seen combat. But fortunately for the Corps, the percentage was highly concentrated within officer and key NCO grades; most of the Marine troop leaders knew what war was like.
Marine leaders had never lost sight of their primary—their only—mission, which was to fight.
The Marines may take little credit, either for courage or foresight, in remaining the way they were. The public pressure simply never developed against them in the years after the war, pushing their commanders into acquiescence
after an unfortunate incident one night at a place called Ribbon Creek, the commandant of the Corps showed no more ability to stand up for his rights in front of a congressional committee than had the generals of the Army.
In 1950 the Marines, both active and reserve, were better prepared to die on the field of battle than the Army.
And they had discipline, which in essence is the ability not to question orders but to carry them out as intelligently as possible.
When the tide of combat turned against them or when small units were isolated and in danger of losing their POW’s, the vindictiveness of the North Korean soldier could not be restrained. Men accustomed to torture and summary execution all their lives, both from Japanese and Communist rulers, could not be expected to behave with nicety toward foreign captives. Nor did they.
During the early days of the war, the North Korean People’s Army never varied its tactics. It never had any need to do so. Its general maneuver was to press the ROK or American forces closely, engage with them by means of a frontal holding attack, while at the same time turning the enemy flank and infiltrating troops to the enemy rear. Against both ROK’s and United States troops, who were never able to establish a firm battle line, this tactic was ruinous.
