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

by T.R. Fehrenbach

It was a minor collision, a skirmish—but the fact that such a skirmish between the earth’s two power blocs cost more than two million human lives showed clearly the extent of the chasm beside which men walked.

But because Americans for the first time lived in a world in which they could not truly win, whatever the effort, and from which they could not withdraw, without disaster, for millions the result was trauma. During the Korean War, the United States found that it could not enforce international morality and that its people had to live and continue to fight in a basically amoral world. They could oppose that which they regarded as evil, but they could not destroy it without risking their own destruction.

The civilian liberal and the soldier, unfortunately, are eyeing different things: the civilian sociologists are concerned with men living together in peace and amiability and justice; the soldier’s task is to teach them to suffer and fight, kill and die. Ironically, even in the twentieth century American society demands both of its citizenry.

Perhaps, also, at the beginning a word must be said concerning discipline. “Discipline,” like the terms “work” and “fatherland”—among the greatest of human values—has been given an almost repugnant connotation from its use by Fascist ideologies. But the term “discipline” as used in these pages does not refer to the mindless, robot-like obedience and self-abasement of a Prussian grenadier. Both American sociologists and soldiers agree that it means, basically, self-restraint—the self-restraint required not to break the sensible laws whether they be imposed against speeding or against removing an uncomfortably heavy steel helmet, the fear not to spend more money than one earns, not to drink from a canteen in combat before it is absolutely necessary, and to obey both parent and teacher and officer in certain situations, even when the orders are acutely unpleasant. Only those who have never learned self-restraint fear reasonable discipline.

The orders had gone out, and he knew they would be obeyed. Aside from its fanatical core of Russian-and Chinese-trained veterans, there were many conscripts, rice Communists, in the ranks of the Inmun Gun. But even these men would obey. Hesitancy, in the Inmun Gun, was cured neatly, efficiently, and permanently by the application of a pistol to the back of the head.

Time had quoted him correctly: “The South Koreans have the best damn army outside the United States!” The ROK’s had eight divisions. Except those fighting guerrillas in the South, they were armed with American M-1 rifles. The guerrilla fighters had to make do with old Jap Model 99’s. The ROK’s had machine guns, of course, and some mortars, mostly small. They had five battalions of field artillery to back up the infantry divisions, all with the old, short-range Model M-3 105mm howitzer, which the United States had junked. The best damn army outside the United States had no tanks, no medium artillery, no 4.2-inch mortars, no recoilless rifles. They had no spare parts for their transport. They had not even one combat aircraft. They didn’t have any of those things because the American Embassy didn’t want them to have them. KMAG was not under the United States Army, or even responsible to the aloof and powerful satrap in Tokyo, MacArthur. Because the United States was determined to show the world that its intentions in Korea were nonaggressive, KMAG was under the State Department.

The newly awakened Empire of Japan began to put fingers of economic penetration through Chosun, inching toward Manchuria. In 1894 Japan and the Empire of China went to war, in Korea. Near P’yongyang, the Japanese met the Chinese hordes, and defeated them. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed 17 April 1895, the Manchu Empire renounced all influence in Chosun, and ceded to Japan the Island of Taiwan. The weakness of China was revealed, and the Western powers, unconcerned with the Rising Sun, gathered for what loot could be had.

But the Marquis Ito understood the people of Chosun. He knew they were a peaceful race, puritan in habit, whose highest caste were not samurai, as in Europe or Japan, but scholars. He knew that Chosun had no army, and he knew, moreover, that the Koreans were the Irish of the Orient, changeable, mercurial. And he knew that a mercurial race, with its moods of alternate elation and despondency, may often be manipulated.

One day Mr. Twing saw a group of Korean girls of school age shout “Manzai!”—which means merely “Hoorah!”—at passing Japanese soldiers. The Japanese immediately opened fire on them. Another group of schoolgirls walking down the road, not even shouting, were set upon by the angry troops. The Japanese beat them with rifle butts, knocked them down, tore away their clothing. Then, as Mr. Twing related back in Boston, “the soldiers treated them in a most shameful fashion.” The Koreans had to be taught that they were inseparably citizens of the empire, whatever the class rating of their citizenship might be. They were taught so well that, during three months of 1919, more than fifty thousand of them were killed or at least hospitalized by the lesson.

Mr. Twing let no one mistake that he found this highly distressing. Years later, survivors of Nanking, Malaya, and the Bataan Death March—not the travelers who stopped at the Imperial Hotel and were charmed by gentle smiles and ritual deference—would have understood what Mr. Twing was talking about. In 1919 nobody much cared. After all, the Koreans were Asiatics, and someone had to keep them in hand.

The Japanese had reformed the ancient tongue of Chosun, Mr. Twing said, by abolishing it. Korean archives and treasures of literature were purified by burning, since there was no place in the bright new twentieth century for a separate Korean culture. Not only was Japanese the language of Korean courts; it was the only one allowed in the schools. Beyond literacy, Koreans were to receive no education. No Koreans were allowed abroad to study, except a few trusted ones who were permitted to enter Japan. Even here they might not study religion, history, economics, politics, or law. Koreans were to be hewers of wood and haulers of water; Japan had already more scholars and subversives than the samurai could stomach.

Koreans had learned the hard way that imperialism comes in many forms, and it can be black or brown or yellow, as well as white. Koreans would never afterward feel any sentimental racial cohesiveness with the rest of Asia. The Japanese occupation and policy of extirpation took care of that.

the Russians had already crossed the Yalu. And a man from State wanted it understood that if the military were going to view the Russians with suspicion, it would thoroughly louse up the bright new world everyone had fought for. As a matter of courtesy, the Soviets could not be asked to retreat from territory they had already captured.

Fortunately for Jones, the Jap soldiers in Korea waiting to be sent home were willing workers. Both Koreans, drunk with new liberation, and Americans, already mentally wearing civilian clothes, grew sullen at the idea of labor. The Japs, now that the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was gone, were affable, smiling, professional, and entirely helpful. Jones put them to work. Somebody had to get the job done. Eventually, though, all the Japs had to be repatriated. They took with them, when they left, every military officer, every professional man, every engineer, bank teller, and executive in the Pusan area. They left behind a hell of a mess. Like most Americans, Colonel Jones was not prepared to take Chosun. The appalling poverty, the dust, dirt, filth, and eternal clamor of Pusan repelled any man accustomed to the West. Orphan children, with running sores, lay in the streets. Society, with the iron Japanese hand gone, was in dissolution. Money was worthless, since the Japanese had printed billions of yen prior to the surrender and passed it out to all who wanted it. Almost all responsible Koreans, particularly the educated were—rightly—tarred with the collaborationist brush.

Inside the city, the odors were of decaying fish, woodsmoke, garbage, and unwashed humanity. Outside, the fresh air was worse. Koreans, like most Orientals, use human fertilizer. Their fields and paddies, their whole country smells somewhat like the bathroom of a fraternity house on Sunday morning. Clothing washed in their rivers turns a sickly brown.

Basically, there were two ways to reduce abuses of power in the service. One was to overhaul the officer procurement system, make damned certain that no merely average man could ever be commissioned, and have fewer officers, but better ones. The other way was to reduce the power to abuse anybody. The Doolittle Board, probably thinking of a long period of pleasant peacetime coming up, in early 1946 chose to recommend the second.

The company commanders in Korea watched the girls run in and out of the barracks, had men talk back to them, and didn’t know what to do about it. In fact, they weren’t sure but what the American thing to do was to ignore it, and get a girl of their own. Which many did. What the hell, the war was over. Anybody who said a new one was brewing was definitely a goddam Fascist, or something. Besides, contracting a venereal disease was no longer a court-martial offense. That kind of thinking had gone out with the horse, with saluting except on duty, with the idea that you should respect a sergeant.

A hundred years before, Americans might have gone to Korea and taken it in stride, but no longer. America had changed, both materially and subtly over the decades, and now in the Orient American soldiers could not live without insulating themselves from the life around them. It was not that Americans came with arrogance or with a feeling of insurmountable superiority. They simply would not—could not—accept the way the people of Chosun lived. No matter how cultured or ancient the civilization, no average American is going to condone the absence of flush toilets. Not now, not ever.

Charles Fletcher had become aware that few Americans, forced to live for an extended period in a land without safe drinking water or plumbing, can keep both equilibrium and an open mind.

Their thinking, on the whole, was concise and clear, but it was unfortunately thinking isolated and often opposed to the thinking of the bulk of the American people. During the war, some members of the government had made an incalculable mistake: they had propagandized the Russians as heroic brothers-in-arms, indicated to the public that Stalin and associates were democrats at heart, and led the people to believe that Russia had fought the war from motives as pure as America’s own. All of which, even as early as December 1945, had been proved nonsense—but many people still believed it.

The problem was that America had fought the war—as she had most of her wars—as a crusade, while Russia had fought first for survival, then for power. Crusades are usually inconclusive; it was no accident that Russia won the peace.

it was significant that every historic decision of the Truman Cabinet was debated by Congress only after it had been made irreversible.

Like the Indian Wars, it would leave a troubled feeling, a trauma, in its wake. Crusades, even when failures, are emotionally satisfying. Wars of containment, wars of policy, are not. They are hard to justify unless it is admitted that power, not idealism, is the dominant factor in the world, and that idealism must be backed by power.

The only war that military planners could envision was a big one between the United States and the Soviet Union. They assumed that in the future, as historically, America would never fight for limited goals; in the event of actual war, an all-out effort would be made to break or destroy the Soviet homeland. This was neither faulty thinking nor planning. The military men were following what had been American experience in the twentieth century. Many of the military planners themselves were not aware of the change to conservative, pragmatic thinking in certain quarters of Washington—thinking that was never explained to the public or to the military. The military continued to plan for the only kind of war they had been told to plan for: worldwide, atomic holocaust.

There were only two centers of power in the world, and the United Nations was neither of them. Stalin, who had asked how many divisions the Pope had, knew exactly how many divisions the U.N. maintained: none.

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.

As word of the Communist attack spread, the people rose in a spasm of patriotic fury. There was relief in their fervor, too—all Koreans had considered the division of their country unbearable; from cranky old Syngman Rhee in the government palace to the landless peasant in the south ran strong agreement on that issue.

On the 28th of June, only a rabble held the south shores of the Han. The ROK Army Command could account for only 22,000 men of the 98,000 its rolls had carried out on the 25th. The Army of the Taehan Minkuk, which had been called “the best damn army outside the United States,” had not merely been defeated. It had been destroyed.

A body like the U.N. had been formed to keep the peace of the world—perhaps a hopelessly ambitious gesture—and each breach of peace inevitably carried it to the edge of the abyss. If the U.N. succeeded, it merely bought a little more time. But if it failed completely, then it was dead in the hearts of men, and its formal death, like that of the League of Nations, was only a matter of time.

If Andrei Gromyko or his ilk had been in New York on Sunday afternoon, the U.N. would not have taken action on the Korean question. And the U.N. might not have enjoyed another dozen years of life.

Yugoslavia, which hated Americans because they were capitalists and Russians because they were Russians

the U.N.—which ironically held the emotional support of the very elements who opposed containment of Communism on moral grounds—had provided a legal and moral cloak under which the U.S. might act,

Something new had happened. The United States had gone to war, not under enemy attack, nor to protect the lives or property of American citizens. Nor was the action taken in crusading spirit, as in World Wars I and II, to save the world. The American people had entered a war, not by the roaring demand of Congress—which alone could constitutionally declare a state of war—or the public, but by executive action, at the urging of an American proconsul across the sea, to maintain the balance of power across the sea. Many Americans, who had never adjusted to their country’s changed position in the world, would never understand. Harry Truman had ordered troops into action on the far frontier. This was the kind of order Disraeli might have given, sending Her Majesty’s regiments against the disturbers of Her Majesty’s peace. Or the emperor in Rome might have given such a command to the legions when his governor in Britain sent word the Picts were over the border. This was the kind of war that had bleached the bones of countless legionnaires on the marches of the empire, and had dug the graves of numberless Britons, wherever the sun shone. In 1950 there was only one power and one people in the world who could prevent chaos and a new, barbarian tyranny from sweeping the earth. The United States had become a vast world power, like it or not. And liking it or not, Americans would find that if a nation desires to remain a great and moral power there is a game it must play, and some of i...

for whether the American people have accepted it or not, there have always been tigers in the world, which can be contained only by force. But Truman and the American Republic had no legions.

The ancient legions, and the proud old British regiments, had been filled with taverns’ scum, starvelings, and poor farm boys seeking change. They had been inducted, knocked about, ruled with a rod of iron, made into men of iron, with iron discipline. They were officered by men wholly professional, to whom dying was only a part of their way of life. To these men the service was home, and war—any war—their profession. These legions of old, like the sword itself, were neither moral nor immoral. Morality depended upon the use to which their government put them. But when put to use, they did not question, did not fail. They marched. In 1950 America, imperfectly understanding her position in this new world, had no legions. She had even no men in “dirty-shirt blue,” such as had policed the Indian frontier. She had an army of sorts of citizens, who were as conscious of their rights and privileges as of their duties. And she had only a reserve of more citizens to fall back upon. Citizens fly to defend the homeland, or to crusade. But a frontier cannot be held by citizens, because citizens, in a republic, have better things to do.

The single greatest weakness of a free people is always their moral doubts. Fortunately for the world, in 1950 the men in the United States Government overcame theirs. Harry Truman, President, ordered the legions to the frontier. He prepared to back them up with the civilian might of the nation. He sent them not to destroy the unholy, but merely to hold the line.

life in Japan was very good. Almost every man had his own shoeshine boy and his own musume; in a country where an American lieutenant made as much as a cabinet minister, even a PFC could make out. And the training wasn’t bad. There were no real training areas in crowded Nippon, so there wasn’t much even General Walker of Eighth Army could do about that, though he made noises. The young men of Task Force Smith carried Regular Army serial numbers, but they were the new breed of American regular, who, not liking the service, had insisted, with public support, that the Army be made as much like civilian life and home as possible. Discipline had galled them, and their congressmen had seen to it that it did not become too onerous. They had grown fat.

The American Army had developed improved 3.5-inch rocket launchers, which would penetrate the T-34. But happy with having designed them, it hadn’t thought to place them in the hands of the troops, or of its allies. There just hadn’t been enough money for long-range bombers, nuclear bombs, aircraft carriers, and bazookas too.

To remain a great power, the United States had to provide the best in nuclear delivery systems. But to properly exercise that power with any effect in the world—short of blowing it up—the United States had also to provide the bread-and-butter weapons that would permit her ground troops to live in battle. If it did not want to do so, it had no moral right to send its troops into battle.

Task Force Smith, designed to be an arrogant display of strength to bluff the enemy into halting his advance, had delayed the Inmun Gun exactly seven hours.

These companies and platoons were manned by men like those of A Company, young Americans, no better, no worse, than the society from which they sprang. Some would do better than A Company, some less well. No matter how they did, there would not be enough of them. No American may sneer at them, or at what they did. What happened to them might have happened to any American in the summer of 1950. For 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.

There had been hundreds of acts of heroism in the 24th, as well as acts that reflected no credit on the service. But most of the heroic actions had been those of individuals, of single officers or men who fought bravely and well. Because without tight discipline their bravery could not be coordinated into a team effort, many of these men died in vain.

For the first time in recent history, American ground units had been committed during the initial days of a war; there had been no allies to hold the line while America prepared. For the first time, many Americans could understand what had happened to Britain at Dunkirk. Almost subconsciously, Americans had come to believe there would always be someone else to hold the line at first. Once aroused, a democracy can match a totalitarian state in every facet of strength—it can be stronger, for totalitarianism has built-in bureaucratic weaknesses. A Hitler can command, and men march—but a Hitler can go mad—and there is no one to say him nay. 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.

Soldiers fight from discipline and training, citizens from motivation and ideals. Lacking both, it is amazing that the American troops did even as well as they did.

But men are not ciphers, nor do the battles always go to the big battalions.

The Inmun Gun left the roads and went over the ridges, and it seemed to bother them not at all. They went stolidly up the slopes with the patient, sideways, Korean peasant tread, and they carried their machine guns, mortars, and mountains of ammunition with them.

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.

Undisciplined, untrained, unhating, they had come to battle. They had been clobbered, as American citizen-soldiers had usually been clobbered in their first battles, from Bull Run to Kasserine. Only gradually did men understand the nature of the job they had to do. Once they did, they would begin to do

In 1950, even to fight an underdeveloped nation in Asia, America had to fall back upon her citizens. And in this, above all else, lies the resulting trauma of the Korean War. The far frontier is not defended with citizens, for citizens have better things to do than to die on some forsaken hill, in some forsaken country, for what seems to be the sake of that country.

A modern democracy was not semifeudal Prussia, or Bourbon France, or Whig England, where soldiers could be swept from taverns, pressed from the ranks of the unskilled and unemployed, the disadvantaged put under the rod of iron, to be broken into grenadiers, to voyage and die for the realm, while the stable and fortunate citizenry said good riddance. The war would touch every metropolis, every town, almost every field. It would touch many hearts, for sons and fathers would suffer mutilation and death. And many, not hearing the angel’s trumpet that they had come to associate with the grandeur and horror of war, would never understand.