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

by T.R. Fehrenbach

The price of labor, food, and fibers rose, and America enjoyed a new flush of wartime prosperity. At home, things were suddenly better than they had been before. The people might have been content. The slack economy hummed, and all seemed well. But even in the middle of the twentieth century, men were still required for war. Guns, boots, and butter might be bought, but not men. Except for men, who had to suffer and die, all might have been well.

The early months of the war were fought under weird circumstances by the American fighter and bomber pilots. Based in Japan, which never changed from peacetime ways, many of them had wives and family stationed at their fields. Many a pilot flew out in the predawn darkness to strafe and rocket enemy troops all day across the burning hills of Korea, then returned to play cards with his wife at night. This was harder on both pilots and family than if the dependents had been an ocean away.

From the first, the peasantry saw little to lose through Communist rule, and perhaps much to gain. Only much later, when the land is collectivized and the iron hand shows through the paternal glove, and when it is too late, does the peasant who has been Communized realize his loss. Communized, he ceases to be an individual man, losing an identity that even the most abject poverty could not take from him before. Communism had really nothing to offer the peasant but propaganda—the Communist has no more use for the peasant in his scheme of things than does a purveyor of Rolls-Royces—but Asian Communism has always realized that the good will of the peasant was necessary above all else for its eventual success. Americans, in turn, have been slow to understand the peasant, let alone mix with him.

And these men walked with a certain confidence and swagger. They were only young men like those about them in Korea, but they were conscious of a standard to live up to, because they had had good training, and it had been impressed upon them that they were United States Marines. Except in holy wars, or in defense of their native soil, men fight well only because of pride and training—pride in themselves and their service, enough training to absorb the rough blows of war and to know what to do. Few men, of any breed, really prefer to kill or be killed. These Marines had pride in their service, which had been carefully instilled in them, and they had pride in themselves, because each man had made the grade in a hard occupation. They would not lightly let their comrades down. And they had discipline, which in essence is the ability not to question orders but to carry them out as intelligently as possible. Marine human material was not one whit better than that of the human society from which it came. But it had been hammered into form in a different forge, hardened with a different fire. The Marines were the closest thing to legions the nation had. They would follow their colors from the shores of home to the seacoast of Bohemia, and fight well either place.

This day and the next few were to test Walton Walker to the utmost. Walker was short and snappish, but under tremendous pressure he was a bulldog of a man. He was not demonstrative and had absolutely no flair for the dramatic, no personal traits that could make him beloved or admired as with a Patton or a Ridgway. He was facing a situation that no American high commander had faced for a long time. He was fighting a last-ditch defense, largely with troops who would have been glad to depart Korea, and with commanders under him who in many cases were profoundly defeatist.

The NKPA had made a dramatic breakthrough in the Bulge on 1 September—but now it had revealed what was to be a continuing weakness of the Communist armies in Asia. They could break through the U.N. lines, but they could not exploit their local successes. With poor communications and even poorer systems of supply, dependent solely upon manpower to move their resupply, the enemy could not move quickly enough to exploit, particularly in the teeth of superior airpower, armor, and artillery. To put it simply, faced with breakthrough, the U.N. forces could retreat, and counterattack faster than the Inmun Gun could press their advantage. Whenever the heavier-armed United States Army could form continuous battle lines and withhold a reserve, the Communist tactics were doomed to failure.

There was no place left to go, and all across the thin Perimeter Line American soldiers were stiffening. Hatred for the enemy was beginning to sear them, burning through their earlier indifference to the war. And everywhere, the first disastrous shock of combat was wearing off. Beaten down and bloody from the hard lessons of war, troops were beginning to listen to their officers, heed what their older sergeants told them. 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. The men of the 1st Cavalry, the 2nd, 24th, and 25th divisions in Korea were becoming soldiers. For underneath the misconceptions of their society, the softness and mawkishness, the human material was hard and good.

line, most normal men are afraid, have been afraid, or will be afraid. Only when disciplined to obey orders quickly and willingly, can such fear be controlled. Only when superbly trained and conditioned against the shattering experience of war, only knowing almost from rote what to do, can men carry out their tasks come what may. And knowing they are disciplined, trained, and conditioned brings pride to men—pride in their own toughness, their own ability; and this pride will hold them true when all else fails.

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.

Peploe felt soldiers should train in peacetime exactly as they trained in wartime. For an army has only two functions, to fight, or to prepare to fight. But 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 had Congress down about an officer’s ears. And the people up above showed no willingness to back their juniors up. Many a general who would have walked up a hill blazing with enemy fire without thinking twice quailed in his polished boots on the receipt of a congressional letter.

The problem seems to fall eternally upon the ground forces. 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. And throughout history, the men in the ranks have been the ultimate victims of such philosophy.

Now, in late September, it was North Koreans instead of Americans who straggled through the hills, broken, demoralized, shoeless, and hungry. And 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. If the fighting, with its resultant death and destruction, its loss of American lives, resulted only in the return of the status quo, then almost all Americans would feel cheated. 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 have always accepted checks and balances within their own system of government, but never without, in the world. Because in the world such checks have never been achieved with votes or constitutions but with guns, and Americans have never admitted that guns may serve a moral purpose as well as votes. They have never failed to resort to guns, however, when other means fail.

In each and every war, Americans must learn the hard way.

At this time, the majority of the United Nations were either Western nations or pro-Western; only a handful of the so-called neutrals had been admitted to membership. And, shocked by the overt Communist action, these nations realized that only the United States was capable of effectual opposition to Communist power. When the Inmun Gun collapsed, the U.N. was prepared to continue its backing of United States policy. The United States was riding a crest of success, and in October 1950 Americans were happily discovering that world opinion, for whatever it is worth, tends to follow power and success. Later, after Hungary and Tibet, they would again rediscover the fact, this time less happily.

Equally important, Red China was ready and spoiling for war. The Chinese Communists, newly come to power, were driven by that dynamic puritanism that accompanies all great revolutions. Like the French in 1793, they not only desired conflict with the “evil” surrounding them; they needed it. Their hold on the millions of the sprawling Middle Kingdom was far from consolidated, and a controlled, limited war would consolidate it as nothing else could do.

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. The Chinese, a proud and very ancient people, never willingly accepted their domination by foreign powers. They never accepted the extraterritoriality, the quartering of foreign troops on their soil, the control of their commerce. Unable to fight the gunboats the foreign powers sent to quell their resentment, they could only smolder, and await the day when the Middle Kingdom was again a world power.

There was a great deal of evidence—pointing either way. Evidence, however, signifies nothing unless evaluated, and evaluation is always more difficult than collection.

Charles Willoughby, while devoted to MacArthur, had always been personally unpopular in the American Army. The time would come when the storm would break over his head—because General Willoughby, in truth, was wrong. But it should never be overlooked that FECOM’s views, as stated by Willoughby, were never contested by Washington. The decision, if any, is beyond the purview of collective intelligence. FECOM was at best a collective agency, not an evaluative one for matters of international policy; if Washington permitted FECOM both to collect and to make decisions, then whatever happened the fault was Washington’s.

Yet throughout the whole uneasy fall of 1950, Washington kept relaying information to Tokyo. And Tokyo, very early, had made up its mind, as expressed by MacArthur: The Chinese would not dare to intervene. Because Washington permitted soldiers to make and to act on decisions that were beyond the purview of the military, because it forced them to bring purely military thinking into matters that remained in essence political—in short, because Washington still sometimes acted as if there could be a separation between war and politics, the United States, intoxicated with the heady taste of triumph, was heading for disaster.

The vast areas of China were still feudal; there had never been any true capitalism except that administered by foreigners in the coastal cities. And the pattern of Sinic culture had frozen five thousand years earlier. The new Communist military leaders understood clearly that the pattern of Chinese culture must be thoroughly broken before China could again assume authority in the world. With cunning, courage, and great skill, aided by a centuries-old tradition of corruption that lay across China like a gray shadow, they began to break it.

Now they began to war in earnest, fighting not only the Nationalists but also for the peasants’ minds. From the first, the Communists understood that in a nation almost wholly peasant, only peasants have any political importance. Within two years, they won not only the war but the peasants’ minds. For the peasants would not understand, until too late, that the Communists wanted not justice for them, but to overthrow the entire fabric of Chinese life.

Then the pamphlet, entitled “Primary Conclusions of Battle Experience at Unsan,” talked of the men behind the machines: “… Cut off from the rear, they abandon all their heavy weapons…. Their infantrymen are weak, afraid to die, and have no courage to attack or defend. They depend always on their planes, tanks, artillery…. They specialize in day fighting. They are not familiar with night fighting or hand-to-hand combat. If defeated, they have no orderly formation. Without the use of their mortars, they become completely lost…. They become dazed and completely demoralized. They are afraid when the rear is cut off. When transportation comes to a standstill, the infantry loses the will to fight.”

Because most men equated discipline with the infrequent nonsense of digging six-by-six trenches to bury cigarettes, or scrubbing coal bins white, practices the Army had wisely discarded, many men had discarded discipline, too. 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.

There was massive American weapon power among these hills. There were regiments, battalions, a whole division. But only companies fought, and each company fought alone, out of sight, often out of knowledge of any other American unit. The battle boiled down into how long individual companies, singled out and enveloped on all sides by overwhelming numbers, could hold out.

The detail of what happened will probably never be reported; the essence has been: The Turkish Brigade was destroyed. Tall, pale-eyed men with dark faces, in heavy greatcoats, wielding long bayonets, the Turks refused to fall back. There were observers who said some officers threw their hats to the ground, marking a spot beyond which they would not retreat, and, surrounded by the enemy, died “upon their fur.” There were others, all else failing, who threw cold steel at the enemy in bayonet charges. Rarely has a small action, dimly seen, sketchily reported, sent such intimations of glory flashing across the world. But the Turks died.

It was deeply ironic later, when the American Government, badly concerned with Turkish public opinion concerning their losses, sent quiet apologies to Turkish authorities. The Turks hardly knew what the Americans were talking about. The Turks, however badly used, had come to fight, and above all else Turks were proud of what their men had done.

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

A force might have been put together from the men who had first cleared the pass, and such force might have gone back and swept its sides of enemy guns—but the men who reached British lines had been fighting their own separate Little Big Horns for five days and nights. As an observer remarked, these survivors were men, not gods. No relieving force was ever organized from the south.

One of the persistent myths of American arms in the middle of this century is that technicians somehow are not and should not be soldiers. But when a man dons the uniform whether he wears crossed muskets, the wheel, or the caduceus, events are apt to prove the falseness of such belief. For any man who wears his country’s uniform, of whatever service, should be prepared to suffer, and if need be, to fight.

There was still no problem of money or machines, guns or butter, despite the increased effort Chinese intervention now required. But the problem of the men—never solved—remained. President Truman called the militia of Minnesota and Mississippi, the Viking and Dixie divisions, into Federal service, and induction calls soared. Thousands more reservists were ordered to the colors, of all services. Still the clarion call to arms was not sounded to the people, who waited in confusion. Men were again taken from each city, town, and village, but the bugles did not blow, the drums did not resound, for there is no glory to a war on the far frontier. This kind of war, however necessary, is dirty business, first to last. It took, perhaps, more courage for Harry Truman not to sound the angel’s trumpet than to mobilize the nation, for the people would never understand.

The evidence is very strong that the continually gloomy reports that MacArthur regularly sent from this time forward were written with the motive of influencing United States policy. MacArthur wanted “political decisions and strategic plans” that would permit him fully to engage the Chinese enemy, and he continued to hint and ask for them. His own feelings on what should be done were closer to those of the publisher of Time than to those of the United States Government—but the President of the United States, and neither Time nor public opinion, was General MacArthur’s boss.

Captain Frank Muñoz and his company reached Seoul. He realized the Chinese had not been supermen; in many instances they hadn’t even been good. Frank Muñoz would always believe that if the division could have maintained battalion integrity, set up mutually supporting strongpoints, and held on to them until hell froze over, the Chinese would have been beaten. But what was done was done.

The reverse of the coin that nothing succeeds like success is that in battle there is no prize for second place.

Ridgway, a well-built, bald soldier with the look of eagles about his strong-nosed face, was the kind of leader the Eighth Army needed. For as the commandos say, “It is all in the mind and in the heart,” and battles, more often, are won not on the drawing boards but in the hearts of men. Ridgway was a strong man, and an articulate one. He could think, and he could put his thoughts across with pen and tongue. He was possessed of such personal courage that, caught in artillery shellfire, he was always the first man out of the ditch—a habit that caused his aide, a Medal of Honor winner, once to remark, “Oh, Jesus, I wish the Old Man would wait a little longer!” Ridgway came to an army gray with the habit of defeat, strong but no longer sure of itself. He said to his staff, who had caught enough brickbats to last them a lifetime in the past weeks, and had grown cautious: “There will be no more discussion of retreat. We’re going back!” But habits are hard to break. Shortly after this, Ridgway’s G-3, Dabney, said, “Here, General, are our contingency plans for retreat—” Ridgway relieved him upon the spot.

The French nation, already heavily engaged in war with the Communists in Vietnam, had supplied only one battalion of infantry to the Korean effort. But throughout the conflict the battalion was a good one. Professionals all, the unit contained many half-wild Algerians, to whom no war was complete unless a little fun could be had out of it, too. As the first platoon of Chinese rushed them, a Frenchman cranked a hand siren, setting up an ungodly screech. A single squad fixed bayonets, grabbed up hand grenades, and when the enemy was twenty yards away, came out of their holes and charged. Four times their number of CCF stopped, turned, and ran into the night. The Frenchmen went back to smoking and telling jokes.

And the heartbreaking effort to spring George Company had left the Chinese spent, too. Their ammunitions was low, and their supply center far behind. Their communications—horns and bugles—could not pass the word fast enough, coherently enough, that the bung had been started and that the Chinese wave might now flow through into the hollow of Chipyong-ni. The Chinese now demonstrated what would be proved again and again upon the Korean Field of battle: they could crack a line, but a force lacking mechanization, air power, and rapid communications could not exploit against a force possessing all three.

DURING THE FIRST MONTHS of American intervention in Korea, reports from the front burst upon an America and world stunned beyond belief. Day after day, the forces of the admitted first power of the earth reeled backward under the blows of the army of a nation of nine million largely illiterate peasants, the product of the kind of culture advanced nations once overawed with gunboats. Then, after fleeting victory, Americans fell back once more before an army of equally illiterate, lightly armed Chinese. The people of Asia had changed, true. The day of the gunboat and a few Marines would never return. But that was not the whole story. 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. During the summer of 1950, and later, Asians would watch. Some, friends of the West, would even smile. And none of them would ever forget.

American units were outnumbered. They were outgunned. They were given an impossible task at the outset. But they were also outfought. In July, 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What had happened to the widely heralded push-button warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who had never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen?

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. The object of warfare is to dominate a portion of the earth, with its peoples, for causes either just or unjust. It is not to destroy the land and people, unless you have gone wholly mad.

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 their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even to allow them to be what they must. For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions—as its prophets have long proclaimed. Except that in this world are tigers.

But since the Civil War, the Army had neither the esteem nor the favor of public or government. Liberal opinion, whether business-liberal or labor-liberal, dominated the United States after the destruction of the South, and the illiberal Army grew constantly more alienated from its own society. In a truly liberal society, centurions have no place. For centurions, when they put on the soldier, do not retain the citizen. They are never citizens to begin with.