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February 1 - April 9, 2018
the Marines came out, for three reasons:
One, Davis’ and Taplett’s men were able to climb the encircling mountains, knock the enemy off the ridges, drive them across the high timber.
In the face of incredible hardship, the Marines were able to mount offensive action—and
Barber’s Fox Company, 7th Marines, had been able to hold off two enemy regiments for six days, preventing the Chinese from closing their ring. If Barber had not held, the way would have been much more difficult.
I think this is a story that needs to be told in detail. A modern, more successful 300.
Two, Marine air from the 1st Air Wing
Now it was downhill all the way. Brushing aside roadblocks, snipers, and attempted ambushes, the two regiments crashed down toward Hagaru. Coming toward the friendly lines, some of the Marines tried to sing. Others marched in, erect, in column, picking up a cadence without order. Men so tired they could hardly stand, who had fouled themselves repeatedly from raging dysentery, who had frostbitten faces and fingers, and who were weak from hunger, made one final effort—and marched in like Marines.
States. Men in government met, while newspapers and periodicals spread a finely distilled gloom across the land. From their arrogance of October most media came full circle; now the action on the Ch’ongch’on and at the reservoir was described as the greatest defeat in American history; even as the Marines marched out, heads up, and the Eighth Army, once more in order, pulled back from P’yongyang, newsman and analyst cried disaster, and that the troops were lost.
There was still no problem of money or machines, guns or butter, despite the increased effort Chinese intervention now required.
But over a defeated—even though not shattered—army lies a grayness of spirit. A retreat, once started, is the most difficult of all human actions to reverse. Most of the thousands who had come to Korea had never been interested in the action; now, most of them would have willingly departed the peninsula forever. The grayness spread upward, to staffs and even to commanders. Men who had burned their fingers were now wary of the flame.
Pritchard had learned a lesson earlier in the campaign. At first, every man had been issued a sleeping bag—and this had proved a mistake, fatal for a lot of Americans who could not resist the temptation to crawl in the bag, even on guard, and fall asleep.
The Chinese had learned the expensiveness of bugling and tootling their way into American lines. Now they came quietly, padding on rubber-soled feet. The only way for the outposts to have a chance was to issue only one arctic sleeping bag to each two men.
immediately the regiment was hard hit by Chinese. Neither air nor artillery could completely stop them from scrambling over the ridges, dropping down into the valleys. Mount saw that some attacking Chinese had no rifles; as they advanced, they waited until a companion was hit, then took his weapon.
History has tended to prove that, like bishops, generals need a certain flamboyance for public success. Walker had none; he could never have been a public figure, win or lose.
Flamboyance in itself is worth nothing, but when it is coupled with genuine ability, history records the passage of a great leader across the lives of men. It is no accident that the names of Clausewitz, Jomini, von Franqois, or Gruenther—brilliant minds all—are known only to students of warfare, while all the world remembers Ney and his grenadiers, Patton’s pearl-handled pistols, and Matt Ridgway’s taped grenades.
The problem, as well as the tragedy of the United Nations organization, was that it had never been anticipated that the great powers at the end of World War II would have no community of interest.
Douglas MacArthur, one of the most brilliant military minds America has yet produced, graduated from West Point at the turn of the century. He stemmed from a distinguished military family; his father was a lieutenant general and proconsul—of the Philippines—in his own right.
MacArthur was a product of the old, alienated American officer caste, but, like Dwight Eisenhower, he was never typical of that group.
War was to be entered upon with sadness, with regret, but also with ferocity.
War was horrible, and whoever unleashed it must be smitten and destroyed, unto the last generation, so that war should arise no more.
It was ironic—and again no accident—that a generation unborn when MacArthur won every significant decoration on the field of battle that could be given by a grateful Republic should come to call him “Dugout Doug.”
“(j) To alert the peoples behind the Iron Curtain that their masters are bent upon wars of aggression and that this crime will organization but is also the nations whom we would desperately need to count on as allies in be resisted by the free world.
??? Is there a typo here ???
The Truman Announcement was the product of a new group of men in the American Government, whose like had not been in government since the War Between the States. These: men had no hope of, nor interest in, making the world safe for democracy, or of destroying evil. They were vitally concerned with the continued good of the United States, and with preserving some semblance of order in the world, if not democracy.
only to prove a point to the enemy.
Never do anything only to prove a point. It is the folly of the weak or the wicked.
Soldiers are brought up to tell the truth, and to take positive action. Since politicians, in the main, regard neither of these with great affection—they must forever please the people, regardless of what is true or what needs to be done—soldiers and political men are often in conflict.
History, unfortunately, is never concerned too much with where morality lies. Wherever it lay, whoever was right, and who was wrong, MacArthur’s letter to Joe Martin was insubordination.
In the free chancelleries of Europe there was joy. As an indication of how deeply and consistently almost all of America’s allies felt on the subject of MacArthur, at the front in Korea British battalions staged an impromptu celebration, and other U.N. units fired their guns in the air.
China would not be punished for its transgression. Evil would continue to exist; it would even be allowed to prosper, if it could. Peace, if and when it came, would not be moral but pragmatic.
MacArthur was not God. He was not even Caesar, as Truman had half feared. Caesar, recalled, brought his army back to Rome; MacArthur, an erect, brilliant, but an old, old man, returned across the lonely Pacific almost alone.
Sometimes it is necessary for men to scream against a world they never made, and cannot control.
tocsin
It was ironic that those who screamed the loudest on MacArthur’s relief were the former isolationists, and those who had consistently voted down or pared every military budget.
The people of the West had changed, too. They forgot that the West had dominated not only by arms, but by superior force of will.
Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.
Americans, denying from moral grounds that war can ever be a part of politics, inevitably tend to think in terms of holy war—against militarism, against fascism, against bolshevism. In the postwar age, uneasy, disliking and fearing the unholiness of Communism, they have prepared for jihad. If their leaders blow the trumpet, or if their homeland is attacked, their millions are agreed to be better dead than Red. Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. Because such wars are fought with legions, and Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like
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Even a rich society cannot afford nuclear bombs, supercarriers, foreign aid, five million new cars a year, long-range bombers, the highest standard of living in the world, and a million new rifles. Admittedly, somewhere you have to cut and choose.
But guns are hardware, and man, not hardware, is the ultimate weapon. In 1950 there were not enough men, either—less than 600,000 to carry worldwide responsibilities, including recruiting; for service in the ranks has never been on the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s preferred list of occupations. And in these 600,000 men themselves the trouble lay.
Before 1939 the United States Army was small, but it was professional. Its tiny officers corps was parochial, but true. Its members devoted their time to the study of war, caring little what went on in the larger society around them. They were centurions, and the society around them not their concern.
Domination and control society should have. The record of military rule, from the burnished and lazy Praetorians to the juntas of Latin America, to the attempted fiasco of the Légion Étrangére, are pages of history singularly foul in odor. But acquiesence society may not have, if it wants an army worth a damn. By the very nature of its mission, the military must maintain a hard and illiberal view of life and the world. Society’s purpose is to live; the military’s is to stand ready, if need be, to die. Soldiers are rarely fit to rule—but they must be fit to fight.
Humanly, the generals liked the acclaim. Humanly, they wanted it to continue. And when, as usual after all our wars, there came a great civilian clamor to change all the things in the army the civilians hadn’t liked, humanly, the generals could not find it in their hearts to tell the public to go to hell.
In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society. The generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could alter the nature of the State Department.
And since some officers and noncoms had abused their powers, rather than make sure officers and noncoms were better than ever, it would be simpler and more expedient—and popular—to reduce those powers.
it is the nature of young men to get away with anything they can, and soon these young men found they could get away with plenty.
the Canadian Army—which oddly enough no American liberals have found fascistic or bestial—he would have been marched in front of his company commander, had his pay reduced, perhaps even been confined for thirty days, with no damaging mark on his record. He would have learned, instantly, that orders are to be obeyed. But in the new American Army, the sergeant reported such a case to his C.O. But the C.O. couldn’t do anything drastic or educational to the man; for any real action, he had to pass the case up higher. And nobody wanted to court-martial the man, to put a permanent damaging mark on
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What they lacked couldn’t be seen, not until the guns sounded. There is much to military training that seems childish, stultifying, and even brutal. But one essential part of breaking men into military life is the removal of misfits—and in the service a man is a misfit who cannot obey orders, any orders, and who cannot stand immense and searing mental and physical pressure.
But ground battle is a series of platoon actions. No longer can a field commander stand on a hill, like Lee or Grant, and oversee his formations. Orders in combat—the orders that kill men or get them killed, are not given by generals, or even by majors. They are given by lieutenants and sergeants, and sometimes by PFC’s.
When a sergeant gives a soldier an order in battle, it must have the same weight as that of a four-star general.
Men willingly take orders to die only from those they are trained to regard as superior beings.
No one has suggested that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come aboard only when the ship is sinking.
Many of America’s youth, in the Army, faced horror badly because they had never been told they would have to face horror, or that horror is very normal in our unsane world. It had not been ground into them that they would have to obey their officers, even if the orders got them killed.
The problem is not that Americans are soft but that they simply will not face what war is all about until they have had their teeth kicked in. They will not face the fact that the military professionals, while some have ideas about society in general that are distorted and must be watched, still know better than anyone else how a war is won.
