This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

by T.R. Fehrenbach

A man who has seen and smelled his first corpse on the battlefield soon loses his preconceived notions of what the soldier’s trade is all about. He learns how it is in combat, and how it must always be. He becomes a soldier, or he dies.

There had been many brave men in the ranks, but they were learning that bravery of itself has little to do with success in battle.

It is probably no accident that no great American tacticians have evolved since the War Between the States, while at the same time American strategical thinking has been superb. Having been once in the forest, United States military men tended to see it rather clearly—they had trouble with the trees, but rarely got lost in them.

If war is to have any meaning at all, its purpose must be to establish control over peoples and territories, and ultimately, this can be done only as Alexander the Great did it, on the ground. But because after the Civil War America’s Allies again and again took the terrible losses required to bleed the enemy, Americans gradually developed a belief in cheap victory.

More Americans died in thirty minutes at Antietam than died in thirty days of the Normandy beachhead.

Thus, again, it cannot be considered accident that in 1950 the dominant power of the world was barely able to contain the ground attack of an almost illiterate nation of nine million—nor could it have done so without the enormous manpower sacrifices of its Korean ally.

The X U.S. Army Corps, 70,000 men, was at sea. It had been formed from scratch, operating against time, manpower, and every known logistic difficulty, and its very conception embodied the best of American military capability.

To a certain extent, Communist frightfulness was repaid in kind.

Peploe felt soldiers should train in peacetime exactly as they trained in wartime.

Peploe faced the basic problem all officers who thought his way faced in the postwar years—hard, realistic training was unpopular, and it sometimes resulted in injuries.

While everyone admitted realistic training resulted in fewer dead upon the field of battle, a man injured or killed by accident on the training field soon...

Many a general who would have walked up a hill blazing with enemy fire without thinking twice quailed in his polished boots on th...

The people must dictate its size, composition, and its use—above all, its use. But control does not imply petty interference.

While few men, legislators or otherwise, have felt down the years that they could command ships of the line or marshal air armies without specialized training, almost any fool has felt in his heart he could command a regiment.

Assembling to cross the river, Item had taken cover in an apple orchard. Mount, from his own experience, could have told them that apple trees splinter under shell fire. By the time he had dug out a few splinters, everyone in the company knew

sauve-qui-peut,

Stampede

the Irish of the Orient.

grimly, without exultation, American soldiers found the taste of revenge sweet and good.

And with victory, as it had always come to Americans after a war, came the determination to force their will on the enemy, to punish them for the crime of aggression, for starting the war.

War could never be part of a system of checks and balances; the view seemed immoral. War must always be for a cause, a transcendental purpose: it must not be to restore the Union, but to make men free; it must not be to save the balance of world power from falling into unfriendly hands, but to make the world safe for democracy; it must not be to rescue allies, but to destroy evil. Americans

Under Lieutenant Colonel John Growden, West Point 1937, who had been with Patton, the 6th Tank soon had its baptism of fire. To Growden came a radio flash from a leading tank: “We have sighted enemy. What are our orders?” Growden radioed back: “Are they definitely enemy?” “Affirmative!” “Then fire—that’s why the hell we’re here!” In each and every war, Americans must learn the hard way.

There was talk, high-level talk, at Wake Island, Sunday, 15 October, but there was not enough communication.

Communist ideology was far more than a tool to such expansion. It remained a taskmaster forcing the Soviets to it.

Just as the northern states of the American Union have overlooked and forgotten their occupation and reconstruction of the southern states, the West has dismissed the painful humiliations repeatedly visited upon the ancient Sinic culture in the past hundred years. Neither the South nor the Middle Kingdom has forgotten.

Evidence, however, signifies nothing unless evaluated, and evaluation is always more difficult than collection.

above all else, it was the terrain and a complete failure of Intelligence that brought disaster.

Marching north, the U.N. trumpeted to the world its composition, its battle plan, and even the hour of its execution.

Without effort, the enemy knew everything there was to know about the U.N. forces. The U.N., in turn, never knew the enemy ...

Lin Piao’s forces had averaged twenty-four miles per day, on foot. In Shensi Province, far removed from the Nationalists and the eyes of the world, the Communist Chinese began to rebuild their base of power. They began to wage guerrilla warfare against the Nationalists. They were led by men who were now hardened soldiers, men who wanted above all else for China to be again a great power,

The popular morality of what the Communist Chinese have done will probably be judged only in the light of whether or not they made China a great power, and only the future will tell that. If they fail, history will condemn them for the enormous suffering they inflicted upon their land; if they succeed, their own history will largely regard them as heroes,

By the middle of November, 1950, approximately 180,000 Chinese waited in front of the Eighth Army, while 120,000 lurked in the mountains surrounding Changjin Reservoir on X Corps’ flank.

MacArthur believed his air cover could destroy the Chinese if they tried to intervene. This belief dominated his thinking; he expressed it many times. Upon this foundation he laid his whole campaign. Too late, he would find out what Lin Piao already knew—against a Communist army, in primitive terrain, air power could be important, but not decisive.

It was not only cunning and hardihood, but this perfect march and bivouac discipline that caused U.N. aircraft to fly over the CCF hundreds of times without ever once seeing anything suspicious. Even aerial photography revealed nothing. It was a feat that Xenophon’s hoplites, marching back from Persia to the sea, could have performed. Julius Caesar’s hard legions could have done it, and more—the Roman manuals stated that the usual day’s march for a legion was twenty miles, to be covered in five hours. It is extremely doubtful if any modern Western army, bred to wheels, could have matched it. It was almost impossible for Western generals, even those who knew of Xenophon and Caesar, to credit it.

They could move, in any direction, no faster than their legs might bear them. They could not shift rapidly to meet a changing situation, nor could they at once exploit a breakthrough. In open battle, openly arrived at, an American army might have slaughtered them. On the fields of Europe, or in the deserts of North Africa, they would have died under the machines and superior firepower of a mechanized host. But now, Lin Piao’s hosts were not going to engage in open battle, openly arrived at, with the West. They would fight, in their own way, in their own mountains, and they would inflict upon American arms the most decisive defeat they had suffered in the century.

They—those who lived—would have to learn again that discipline means keeping a full bandoleer of ammunition and a full canteen, despite their weight, and all the equipment men wiser than they had issued to them.

Keiser, though not really understanding the seriousness of the situation, told him to use his own judgment. Peploe’s move, while it could not break the web of fate closing in about 2nd Division, diverted complete disaster. Rolling with the punch, fighting a battle royal, the men of the 38th pulled back astride the Ch’ongch’on during the night. As Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall put it, writing of this night of battle, “It is … a pity that young Americans have to die bravely but inconspicuously on a foreign hillside in a national cause and have no better words than these spoken of them.”

Only later was the evidence to show that these moving men, many wearing captured ROK uniforms, must have been Chinese hastening to block the division’s withdrawal.

Mace’s tank, miraculously, had come through without loss among either crew or riders—the first and last vehicle to do so. Surprise, and their momentum, had served them well. And as they went through the British lines, these men knew the worst: that instead of holding only a small stretch of the road under light fire, a full Chinese division had locked itself over six miles of the route, covering it with small arms, mortars, and forty machine guns. Nor could Mace and party give warning; like those of the British, his radios wouldn’t carry over the pass.

It was not until the Korean War was many months old that new Army trainees began to live half their time in the field, and to undergo a third of their training by night. Slowly, commanders then began to restore the old hard slap and dash that had characterized Grant’s men in Virginia, Pershing’s AEF, and Patton’s armored columns.

along the Ch’ongch’on was that the men marching north had no more idea of what awaited them than had Lieutenant Colonel Custer riding toward the Valley of the Greasy Grass. There had been the same arrogance in the march north that had characterized Braddock’s movement against the French and Indians, Dade’s demonstration against the Seminoles, and Custer’s ride to the Little Big Horn. And it was the same conditions of terrain, low cunning, and barbarian hardihood that brought all these forces to defeat by an intrinsically inferior enemy.

But the most ironic thing, in those bitter days of December 1950, was that the commentators who cried havoc the loudest were the very men who had done most to change and destroy the old 1945 Army. These were the men who had shouted for the boys to be brought home, who had urged the troops to exert civil rights. They were the ones who had hinted that leaders trying to delay the frenetic demobilization, or the reform of the Army, were no better than the Fascists.

these were the men who screamed most shrilly when some young Americans on the field of battle behaved more like citizens than like soldiers.

in all battles, all that reflected good or bad for the race of man took place within the pass.

Ironically, the Chinese allowed those who ran toward the west to escape, and in many cases actually helped these men along by picking them up and carrying them until they were close to American lines. Those who stayed and fought were not seen again.

I'd Love tfo know more about this. Why? Doctrine ofr culture? Officers or enlisfed?

Ironically, the Chinese allowed those who ran toward the west to escape, and in many cases actually helped these men along by picking them up and carrying them until they were close to American lines. Those who stayed and fought were not seen again.

this is fascinating...why? how?

The last men of the division to come through, arriving within the British lines of the morning of 1 December, could remember very little of what they had experienced. There comes a time when the conscious mind accepts no more; as with women experiencing childbirth, even the memory of pain is blotted out.

most were neither heroes nor cowards. They were ordinary men, and they went with the tide, wherever it carried them.

Of the original thousand officers and men, less than two hundred returned. The others, killed, captured, or frozen, had been swallowed up in the frigid wastes.

the fact that most Marine officers had had experience with Oriental warfare, learning the importance of keeping tight, steelringed perimeters by night whatever happened in the rear, did much to save the division.

Ray Davis’