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

by T.R. Fehrenbach

The sociologists and psychologists of Vienna had no answer to the Nazi bayonets, when they crashed against their doors. The soldiers of the democratic world did.

If the American Armed Forces could not beat the hordes of Red China in the field, then it made no difference how many new autos Detroit could produce.

Everywhere Matt Ridgway went, however, he found the same question in men’s minds: What the hell are we doing in this godforsaken place? If men had been told, Destroy the evil of Bolshevism, they might have understood. But they did not understand why the line must be held or why the Taehan Minkuk—that miserable, stinking, undemocratic country—must be protected. The question itself never concerned Matt Ridgway. At the age of fifty-six, more than thirty years a centurion, to him the answer was simple. The loyalty he gave, and expected, precluded the slightest questioning of orders. This he said. But to a generation brought up to hold some loyalties lightly, and to question many things, this was not enough. To these men Ridgway said: The real issues are whether the power of Western Civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism; whether the rule of men who shoot their prisoners, enslave their citizens, and deride the dignity of man, shall displace the rule of those to whom the individual and his individual rights are sacred; whether we are to survive with God’s hand to guide and lead us, or to perish in the dead existence of a Godless world.

These themes echo even today with similar generational questions.

In the terrain of South Korea, battle was more open, and in open battle no amount of savage cunning could substitute for firepower.

Soldiers learned to travel light, but with full canteen and bandoleer, and to climb the endless hills. They learned to hold fast when the enemy flowed at them, because it was the safest thing to do. They learned to displace in good order when they had to. They learned to listen and obey. They learned all the things Americans have always learned from Appomattox to Berlin. Above all, they learned to kill.

In anything but war, Martin was the kind of man who is useless. In combat, as the 24th Division drove north, men could hear Gypsy yell his hatred, as they heard his M-1 bark death. When Gypsy yelled, his men went forward; he was worth a dozen rational, decent men in those bloody valleys. His men followed him, to the death. When Gypsy Martin finally bought it, they found him lying among a dozen “gooks,” his rifle empty, its stock broken. Other than in battle, Sergeant Martin was no good. To Jim Mount’s knowledge, he got no medals, for medals depend more on who writes for them than what was done.

The values composing civilization and the values required to protect it are normally at war. Civilization values sophistication, but in an armed force sophistication is a millstone.

Ridgway had no great interest in real estate. He did not strike for cities and towns, but to kill Chinese. The Eighth Army killed them, by the thousands, as its infantry drove them from the hills and as its air caught them fleeing in the valleys. By April 1951, the Eighth Army had again proved Erwin Rommel’s assertion that American troops knew less but learned faster than any fighting men he had opposed. The Chinese seemed not to learn at all, as they repeated Chipyong-ni again and again.

The United States 3rd Infantry Division struck toward Ch’orwon, up the road running from Seoul, and on 21 April was some ten miles below the city, and ten miles north of the Imjin River.

Uncle Bob was likely with them (3ID) by this time.

On 22 April the Chinese struck the 17,000-yard front of the British Brigade with six divisions, more than fifty thousand men.

4000 Brits + ROK DIV against 50,000 Chinese

Each year, for the decade following the Korean conflict, on St. George’s Day units of the British and Australian armies have sent telegrams of thanks and appreciation to certain units of the United States Army.

The United States does not claim to have the key to human wisdom or success. But we do claim the right to be judged on facts and not on fiction. — General of the Army George Catlett Marshall.

Americans treated their own POW’s, Japanese, Italian, and German, as they vainly hoped they themselves would be treated.

The Soviets treated the Nazis and Japanese in kind. Most of the men who were taken in Russia disappeared behind the iron curtain and were never heard from again. Survivors have written of the wholesale degradation and death in Communist prison camps.

A human being in a prison camp, in the hands of his enemies, is flesh, and shudderingly vulnerable. On the battlefield, even surrounded, he still has a gun in his hand, his comrades about him, and, perhaps the most important thing of all, leadership.

In Charles Schlichter grew a feeling, which he never lost, that some American mothers had given their sons everything in the world, except a belief in themselves, their culture, and their manhood. They had, some of them, sent their sons out into a world with tigers without telling them that there were tigers, and with no moral armament.

Colonel Fitzgerald, the MP commander, took charge at once. He called all officers on the island to a staff meeting. “These people are our equals,” he said, strongly. “Our job is to teach them democracy.” However dimly, someone in the States had recognized the essentially ideological nature of the conflict with Communism. “We’re going to treat these people as human beings. I want you to understand that if a POW is abused, or refuses to work, and a U.S. guard strikes him, the guard will be court-martialed. We are here to teach these people democracy, and we can’t do it by being a bunch of bullies.”

It was not enough to stress that the POW’s were human beings, to which there could be no argument; it must be brought out that they were fully equal human beings, which was debatable.

the screening did have one result. The worst Communists, officers and men alike, were segregated into compounds like the soon-to-be-notorious 76. The segregation did not have the desired result; instead, it concentrated Communist talent.

Conventional air action, in Korea, could be decisive only when coupled with decisive ground action. It is impossible to interdict the battlefront, in mountains, of an army that eats only a handful of rice and soya beans and carries its ammunition forward piggyback.

Against the 2nd Division had been committed at one time or another ten CCF divisions, and during the month of May an estimated 65,000 Chinese and North Koreans had died under its guns.

At the end of the May Massacre, the Eighth Army again moved north. When it stopped, it would not be stopped with guns, but with words.

On 26 May, Lester Pearson of Canada, President of the U.N. General Assembly, stated that surrender of the aggressors might not be required to end the war; the U.N. would be satisfied if the aggression could be brought to an end.

When Communists cannot win by force, they are prepared to negotiate. If, in 1951, they could stop the U.N. advance by talking, they would firm an increasingly fluid and dangerous situation and in effect achieve a tactical victory.

The capture of this hill is worth ten thousand men!

Having eschewed the goal of victory, the United States had nothing further to gain from continued fighting.

An army in the field, in contact with the enemy, can remain idle only at its peril. Deterioration—of training, physical fitness, and morale—is immediate and progressive, despite the strongest command measures. The Frenchman who said that the one thing that cannot be done with bayonets is to sit on them spoke an eternal truth.

it was the very antithesis of the American tradition of generalship, cutting across everything it had been taught to believe and do. Their new orders seemed to read: Fight on, but don’t fight too hard. Don’t lose—but don’t win, either. Hold the line, while the diplomats muddle through.

No man likes to give up his life for an inconsequential reason, and there is no honor—only irony—to being the last man killed in a war.

What neither Korea nor America could furnish was leadership. A nation that for forty years had been made into hewers of wood and haulers of water could not put forth competent, educated officer material overnight. What little the Tachan Minkuk had enjoyed had mostly died north of the Han in 1950.

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It is this final, basic pride—what will my buddies think?—that keeps most soldiers carrying on, beyond the dictates of good sense, which screams at them to run, to continue living, and to hell with war.

There are times, not only in the Army, but in Washington and General Motors, when somebody, somewhere, simply has to go, to take off the heat.

Brave enough himself, eager to advance his career, this officer was a moral coward. He could not be tough enough on his men.

The solution to success on Heartbreak, as later on Baldy, Pork Chop, Arrowhead, T-Bone, and a dozen others, would have been to hit the enemy elsewhere, knock him off balance in a dozen places, punch through.

the United Nations did not want military victory; they wanted truce.

What the enemy wanted was to fix the armistice line irrevocably before the remainder of the agenda was solved. This, of course, would effectively relieve the Communist powers of any further military pressure while the negotiations continued; the United Nations Command could hardly launch an offensive for ground it had already agreed to relinquish.

Now there was no offensive action taken against the enemy—but an army could not sit still. It had to patrol, even as the enemy had to patrol, to keep contact, to see what the other side was doing, and to attempt to keep the other side honest.

The majority of men, however, will do unpleasant duties only if their society makes them, whether it is the study of English as children or service with the colors as men.

Busbey’s two men received ten-year sentences—in itself unfair, since equally guilty men got off—but the matter did not rest there. For the father of one of these men was a man of some political influence in an Eastern state. Learning that some got off, while his son did not, this gentleman understandably raised hell. The papers picked up the case, from Newark to Dallas. An INS man came down to 32nd Infantry from Tokyo, looking for a story. He interviewed the men of B Company, still licking wounds from the night attack. Every man he talked to told him, “Those men didn’t get half what they deserved.” B Company had learned its lesson. The INS man went back to Tokyo and phoned his chief. But he didn’t have the kind of story his chief wanted. Many editorials were taking the tack that ten years for sleeping on sentry go was rather rough, even barbaric. One year later, the son of the Eastern man was granted a new trial. The Civil Court of Military Appeals had discovered a flaw in the original proceedings. The president of that court had asked the law officer, present at all general courts-martial, “What is the maximum sentence that can be given?” while neither the accused or counsel was present, a violation. The new trial was held in Fort Meade, Maryland. The witnesses were now the other enlisted men who had been in the hole with the accused. Jack Sadler, at this time in Baltimore, was not called, then or later. The verdict, understandably, and to everyone except Captain Busbey’s...

and N.C.O. ranks were separated from the others, and a physical count revealed 3,200 POW’s of all grades present. Between March and October that number was reduced by 50 percent.

But to expect an Asian nation accustomed to famine to feed its prisoners of war better than its own half-starved peasantry was and remains wishful thinking on Americans’ part.

Chemistry and culture killed the Americans.

The disciplines, attitudes, and organization that Americans brought into captivity killed many of them. Only an extremely cohesive group, with tight leadership and great spiritual strengths, coupled with inner toughness and concern for one another, could have survived the shocks visited upon their minds and bodies.

Americans should remember that while barbarians may be ignorant they are not always stupid.

Sitting in the lecture room, Sergeant Schlichter, like so many others, was taken sick. He was sent to the crude Chinese hospital with pneumonia. He almost died. But here, as he said, he saw the greatest example of faith he had ever seen, in the actions of Chaplain Emil Kapaun, who had been taken at Unsan. Father Kapaun, ill himself, stood in front of the POW’s, prayed, and stole food to share with other’s. By his example, he sometimes forced the little bit of good remaining in these starving men to the fore. But Chaplain Kapaun could not take command, and he soon grew deathly ill, probably as much from sorrow as from his own starvation.

It was not allowed to blockade the real enemies, nor had it any enemy fleet to engage.

Because of that radar sight, as the Air Force admitted, American pilots destroyed enemy jet aircraft at a ratio of 11 to 1. At sonic speeds the human eye and hand were simply not fast enough—but more than 800 MIG-15’s were sent spinning down, to crash and burn over North Korea.

It was the Army that knew the worst frustration, from July 1951 to the end of the war. The mission of the Army is to meet the enemy in sustained ground combat, and capture or destroy him. The Army was indoctrinated that strength lay not in defense but in attack, and that the offensive, as Clausewitz wrote, always wins. The Army not only could not win; it could not even work at the task. Yet it was locked in a wrestler’s grip with the enemy, suffering hardship, taking losses, even after the peace talks began.

General Boatner and the new division commander, Major General Robert N. Young, knew these things, just as the company and battalion commanders knew them; but there are some things, like this and one’s relations with one’s wife, that gentlemen do not discuss.