This Kind of War Quotes

“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.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“For his own sake and for that of those around him, a man must be prepared for the awful, shrieking moment of truth when he realizes he is all alone on a hill ten thousand miles from home, and that he may be killed in the next second.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“Americans have never admitted that guns may serve a moral purpose as well as votes.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“But while Americans are well conditioned to death on the highways, they are not ready to accept death on the battlefield for apparently futile reasons.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“None of them were equipped, trained, or mentally prepared for combat. 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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“War was to be entered upon with sadness, with regret, but also with ferocity.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“There was and is no danger of military domination of the nation. The Constitution gave Congress the power of life or death over the military, and they have always accepted the fact. The danger has been the other way around—the liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiesence of the military toward the liberal view of life.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“Americans should remember that while barbarians may be ignorant they are not always stupid.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“Soviet strategy, like Soviet thinking, has always been devious where American has been direct.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“There had been many brave men in the ranks, but they were learning that bravery of itself has little to do with success in battle.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“In 1950 a Marine Corps officer was still an officer, and a sergeant behaved the way good sergeants had behaved since the time of Caesar, expecting no nonsense, allowing none. And Marine leaders had never lost sight of their primary—their only—mission, which was to fight. The Marine Corps was not made pleasant for men who served in it. It remained the same hard, dirty, brutal way of life it had always been.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“Collective security had a fine sound, but it was still little more than a word; it would still be the United States, and the United States alone, that held the far frontier. No one else had the will or the power.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“A free press is equally free to print the truth or ignore it, as it chooses.”
― T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“Oddly, they were never sanguine about their own combat prowess. Most of them, officers and men, felt a deep respect for, and almost an inferiority before, the various professionals that comprised the other U.N. troops in Korea. Their praise of the allies—the French, Thais, Turks, and Abyssinians—was far removed from the grousing about allies that had marked most previous wars. Most Americans, privately, would admit the U.N. troops were better than they were.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“A war is made when a government believes that only through war, and at no serious risk to itself, it may gain its ends.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“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.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War