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

by T.R. Fehrenbach

He went into a platoon CP, dug into a heated bunker, and found one enlisted man by the phone. “Phone your platoon leader,” Boatner barked. “Yes, sir—only the phone’s out of order, sir—” Boatner, mad as a snapping turtle, placed the platoon leader under arrest. That young man, as so many others, had not had the moral courage to force his men to stay alert and ready out in the snow on Christmas Day.

A continuing problem of this static war was that senior officers did not have enough to do to make them keep their hands off their junior’s affairs. Or they had time to think up new projects, from painting fire buckets red to promulgating the color of name tags on enlisted fatigues.

After Young hung up, Boatner thought, Well, hell. Here we are, fighting a war, and—now, maybe some auditor of General Motors would say I’m crooked, or a liar—but dammit, I’m not a liar about anything that amounts to anything.

But it was one way to satisfy a newly arrived corps commander who tried to get down and operate on tank-section level.

And in saving his platoon, he took heavy casualties. Boatner, Assistant Division CG, Rowny, the regimental commander, and the battalion commander saw the whole operation, watching in an agony of suspense. Not one of them jumped into the action, however—to do so would have been the best way in the world to destroy the confidence and command ability of the junior officers, who, like children, have to learn to make their own mistakes however desperately it pains their parents.

However painful it is to contemplate, officers have to learn in battle. There simply is no other feasible way to learn experience commanding men in battle, except in battle.

The whole trouble stemmed from one thing: in the year 1952 the division had got men killed, during offensive action, and in this year if anything was anathema to the men running the Republic it was that.

Now, Boatner told Young, who the hell was more interested in those young men—besides the parents—than their immediate officers, the officers who knew these kids, who lived and ate with them? Some staff officer, some corps or army commander, or the theater commander in Tokyo? “It’s simply goddam ridiculous and absurd for a combat man to be put in a position where his own subordinates that he’s known—youngsters that he’s eaten with—get killed or wounded, and someone thousands of miles back puts the bite on him, as though he were callous about it!”

Boatner wrote a formal report. He refused to hang anyone and he made his refusal strong—so strong the matter ended there.

And anyone who believed that American officers were callous underneath their hard exterior poses about the men who died in action under their command had simply never commanded a platoon or higher unit in action, or ever had to write a tragic letter home. But there is no such thing as war—even limited war—without losses.

And, caught in a Communist trap, the moral courage of some leaders grew less. The pressure on Tokyo to hold down the loss never ceased. In Korea, on tile ground, it intensified. It was no longer possible to permit juniors any latitude, or any possibility for error. What Boatner foresaw happened. Soon battalion commanders led platoons, and general officers directed company actions, for the loss of one patrol could ruin the career of a colonel. In one way, it was an efficient system. It worked, for the lines were stable, and no senior officer had enough to do. But the damage done to the Army command structure would be long in healing. If a new war came someday, there would be colonels and generals—who had been lieutenants and captains in Korea—who had their basic lessons still to learn.

The prose and plainly spoken insights of this book continue to awe me.

The United Nations Command, from Mark W. Clark on down, had had enough of lies, calumnies, sophistry, and flaming propaganda. The talks of Panmunjom recessed. They would not begin again, except for liaison meetings, until the following year.

The government, from failure to understand clearly that Communists negotiate fairly only when it is in their interest to do so, or when unbearable pressure is placed upon them, had clamped itself in a Communist trap.

most difficult thing for all Western statesmen to learn was that there never had been, and probably never would be, a permanent community of interest between themselves and the Communist bloc.

an opposition party—as each party discovers periodically in America—has certain shining advantages: it can carp and criticize all past and current mistakes without being too specific with its own remedies.

the Administration there had always been a reluctance to use the hard sell on its foreign policies; the government had preferred to act in secret where possible rather than submit delicate questions to public debate.

This is a carryover from FDR

Americans had always fought for moral issues since 1776, not for the balance of power, not to restore world order.

they had always struck hard for victory, not balance, even if such victory left the world in ruins.

They found, as would a new Democratic champion in the future, that despite the call for new looks, new solutions, such looks still revealed only the stone face of Communism and Soviet power; and new solutions, however appealing, remained too dangerous. And therein continued the tragedy of Americans

time, of itself, solves some problems, but not many.

But so long as he had no new policy, so long as he sought only to contain, the enemy without would always hold the initiative.

It did one thing good and one thing bad—it froze in men’s minds the political dangers of sending men to hold the far frontier, and every future government would be reluctant to order it, but it hastened the end of the Korean War.

One division commander in Korea recognized that the warfare resembled that of the Western Front, 1915-1918.

On White Horse, and on the central front, around the Iron Triangle, the ROK Army now proved it had come of age.

On Sniper Ridge, changing hands daily during November 1952, the ROK soldier proved he had lost all his superstitious horror of his ancient masters.

If another war follows Korea, if American policy is threatened anywhere on the globe, it will not be years and months, as in the two world wars, or days, as in Korea, but only hours until American troops are committed. In battle, Americans learn fast—those who survive. The pity is, their society seems determined to make them wait until the shooting starts. The word should go out sooner.

The Korean War poured billions of American dollars into the Japanese economy.

Insult to injury

In retrospect, it seems beyond question that because the West brought naïveté concerning Communist motives and methods to the conference table thousands more men than necessary were maimed and killed.

Few men wrote of the orphanages supported by battalions, or the schools donated by divisions. Few people, perhaps not even the Koreans, will remember them. For there was never enough.

Neither an evaluative nor a collective agency, even when it feels it is being taken, dares ignore evidence.

It was only later, much after 26 April, when the exchanges ended, that Americans learned that the enemy had not played fair—many of the men exchanged on Little Switch were not hardship cases but those amenable to the Chinese, the “collaborators,” whom the Communists expected to give a favorable picture of their captivity on return.

During June, and later in July, the heaviest attacks and fire the enemy had launched in two years crashed against the front, and American opinion was divided.

However painful, Korea, a helpless nation, had to accept the fact that it was to be the principal loser of the Korean War. But in return Rhee got the promise of a U.S.-ROK Mutual Security Treaty, agreement to expand the ROK Army to twenty divisions, at American expense, and long-term economic aid, with a down payment of $200,000,000 and 10,000,000 pounds of food, worth $9,500,000, at once. In exchange for peace along the parallel, the United States agreed to accept the Republic of Korea as its ward, perhaps forever. For without the United States the Taehan Minkuk could not exist.

But the talking was done. Each side had accepted a situation that was virtually unchanged from what it had been on 11 July 1951, a truce line upon which they had agreed 27 November 1951, and a POW question that they had settled on 4 June 1953, after each of which dates thousands of men, on either side, had continued to be maimed and killed.

Each side had, perhaps, learned something: the Communists, that the will of free men is not easily broken, even when they are of peaceful intent; the West, that the Communist world holds human life cheaply, if there is aught to be gained. For that knowledge, and little else, many men, of all nations, had died.

There was no more war—but there was no peace. There was no victory. It was called cease-fire.

Sergeant Charles Schlichtef

Schlichter could not know that in California an officer had called on his wife to offer her Schlichter’s GI insurance benefit, and his death gratuities. Schlichter had been listed as missing in action for two years, and the government was willing to pay. In tears, Elizabeth Schlichter refused. She told the officer that her husband had told her to stay where he had left her, that no matter what, he would come back. In the absence of everything else, she had only this to cling to. Somehow, alone of all those who had known him, she would not believe him dead.

The whistles blew, and the band whumped and boomed, and on the dock he saw Elizabeth. Some men, no matter how fate deals with them, are fortunate.

Of the 132,000 Korean and Chinese military POW’s taken by the U.N. fewer than 90,000 chose to return home. The Koreans were settled in the Tae-han Minkuk, and some 13,000 Chinese went singing and chanting to Taiwan.

Watching the Communist tactics, the Indian Army became decidedly anti-Communist, whatever the notions of its government.

No monuments would mark them, and no pilgrims would visit their rubbled graveyards.

To the north of these hills the truce, hardly signed, had already been violated. New men, new arms, new modern aircraft poured across the Yalu, to new fortified bases deep within the mountains. No man knew when they might be used.

A nation that does not prepare for all the forms of war should then renounce the use of war in national policy. A people that does not prepare to fight should then be morally prepared to surrender. To fail to prepare soldiers and citizens for limited, bloody ground action, and then to engage in it, is folly verging on the criminal.

Because the Korean War was not, as most large wars were, the end of an era, but only a bloody skirmish in the middle of the post-World War II age, no definitive history can yet be written. The principal figures of the Korean War are still living, and many are still in power. The game still goes on. Yet Korea set certain patterns for the future.

However repugnant the idea is to liberal societies, the man who will willingly defend the free world in the fringe areas is not the responsible citizen-soldier. The man who will go where his colors go, without asking, who will fight a phantom foe in jungle and mountain range, without counting, and who will suffer and die in the midst of incredible hardship, without complaint, is still what he has always been, from Imperial Rome to sceptered Britain to democratic America. He is the stuff of which legions are made.

Much of mankind, of course, abhors competition, and these remain the acted upon, not the actors. Anyone who says there will be no competition in the future simply does not understand the nature of man.

Korea showed that a free government must be prepared to do the unpopular thing, even if it destroys itself. Governments are not important; nations and peoples and what they stand for, are.

“modern” infantry may ride sky vehicles into combat, fire and sense its weapons through instrumentation, employ devices of frightening lethality in the future—but it must also be old-fashioned enough to be iron-hard, poised for instant obedience, and prepared to die in the mud. If liberal, decent societies cannot discipline themselves to do all these things, they may have nothing to offer the world. They may not last long enough. Aristotle wrote, Almost all things have been found out, but some have been forgotten.

is while men talk blithely of the lessons of history that they ignore them. The lesson of Korea is that it happened.