Military Misfortunes

by Eliot A Cohen

  One further point: marine logistics kept the Marine Division fully equipped with all of the necessities of warfare, from bullets to plasma, food to warming tents, winter weather gear to barbed wire and trip flares. Much of this had to do with the easy access the marines had to navy supply ships and an operating port nearby. Logistics in the Eighth Army were, as we have noted, much more uneven. Every active duty soldier in the Eighth Army (except some hapless replacements) got a Thanksgiving dinner of turkey and trimmings, but in order to achieve this result the logistical command suspended the airlift of winter field jackets from Japan to the Second and Twenty-fifth Infantry Divisions.77 Units found themselves running short of grenades and gasoline, barbed wire, trip flares, and antipersonnel mines—although, as Marshall noted, they rarely asked for these last three items, which would have proved useful indeed. Shortages did not lead to more careful measures of conservation at the front.

  That the kind of performance turned in by the Marines rested on no mysterious formula for victory became apparent once General Matthew Ridgway took command of the Eighth Army following General Walker’s death in December 1950. Ridgway immediately expressed outrage at the conditions in the Eighth Army. Finding on his initial inspection not only a lack of spirit and vigor but gross tactical deficiencies as well, he used, as he put it, “impolite language” with his subordinates.

  What I told the field commanders in essence was that their infantry ancestors would roll over in their graves could they see how roadbound this army was, how often it forgot to seize the high ground along its route, how it failed to seek and maintain contact in its front, how little it knew of the terrain and how seldom took advantage of it, how reluctant it was to get off its bloody wheels and put shoe leather to the earth, to get into the hills and among the scrub and meet the enemy where he lived. As for communications, I told them to go back to grandfather’s day if they had to—to use runners if the radio and phones were out, or smoke signals if they could devise no better way.78

  Although the official histories pass over it lightly, Ridgway purged the officer corps of the Eighth Army: “Selected superior officers took over command of regiments and battalions and soon corrected the basic weaknesses in our training.”79 He also took a ruthless attitude toward waste and tightened up the Eighth Army’s poor logistical discipline.

  With only marginally greater resources than had been available to Walker (some increases in replacements, and command of X Corps, which had hitherto operated independently) Ridgway turned the battle around. The Chinese New Year’s offensive, following a several weeks’ pause in which the Chinese resupplied themselves and replaced decimated units with fresh ones, failed to break the Eighth Army, although UN forces continued to fall back to the Han River. By May 1951, however, the Eighth Army (now under the leadership of James Van Fleet, who succeeded Ridgway after the latter became commander in chief, Far East, following MacArthur’s relief), was driving north against crumbling resistance. On a single day over 10,000 Chinese and NKPA troops surrendered to UN forces, and little could have stopped American, ROK, and Allied troops from retaking Pyongyang and indeed driving back to the Yalu.80 Within six months Ridgway had transformed a defeat that Omar Bradley described as worse than the Battle of the Bulge into a victory as remarkable as any gained by American forces half a decade before.

  THE MATRIX

  Our failure matrix in this case (Figure 7–1) looks rather different from earlier ones: The failures seem more widespread, particularly at the small-unit level. Indeed, there seem to be so many different kinds of shortcoming that one must make an effort to remember what UN forces in November 1950 had going for them. To make sense of the picture that emerges from the previous analysis, we have divided the failures into clusters, and the result is two broad pathways to misfortune. The first, emerging from boxes 2.3. and 2.4. involved the unquestioning faith in air power of Far East Command and its failure to understand that the enemy properly. This linked operational and intelligence failure led to intelligence failures at the Eighth Army level, which in turn fed into the tactical unreadiness for Chinese attacks mentioned in boxes 5.3. and 5.4. A secondary pathway to failure originated at the Eighth Army level and fed directly into similar failures at the corps and even battalion levels—namely, a failure to keep a grip on the whereabouts and situation of front-line units. In both pathways, our two types of failure—failure to learn and failure to anticipate—were intertwined. When confronted with such widespread misfortune, one must ask whether a single explanation can account for such a variety of failure.

  WHAT KIND OF WAR?

  In the first chapter of the first book of On War, Clausewitz declares:

  The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish . . . the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.81

  It is in the failure of all echelons of American command, including that in Washington, but chiefly those in Japan in Korea to address that question that we can explain the defeat that ensued. The titles or subtitles of books about Korea—The First War We Lost, War in Peacetime, The First Limited War—suggest the strangeness that Americans sensed in that war. The conventional wisdom has it that the peculiarity of the war stems from the fact that the United States fought for limited objectives, with limited means and limited effort. In large respect, the conventional wisdom is right. But the strangeness of the Korean War did not end here, for Korea was peculiar in the nature of the enemy and the operational and tactical patterns required to beat it. It was strange too in the flaws it revealed in the American methods and practices that had brought—or at least accompanied—victory only five years earlier. In fact, the more closely we study the failure of November-December 1950, the more it appears that it resulted from the greatest military success of American arms—the triumph of World War II. The failure of American leaders fully to understand that the enemy’s situation and their own bore little resemblance to those they bad faced less than a decade before best explains the debacle in North Korea.

  Arrows indicate causal links. Circled items and arrows indicate primary pathways: dashed line, secondary pathways.

  FIGURE 7–1. Matrix Of Failure

  This is most clear when we look at the application of air power against the North Koreans and the Chinese. As we have pointed out, close air support and interdiction of the roads and rail lines did indeed have the same effect on the North Koreans that it did on, let us say, the Germans in Italy in 1943. Constant air activity saved embattled ground units, paralyzed daytime enemy maneuvers, and inflicted steady losses on enemy vehicles and personnel. A close look at the United States Air Force in Korea reveals an extraordinary attempt to duplicate the ferocious and highly successful “strategic” and “tactical” bombing campaigns waged against Japan and Germany in 1942–45. The Joint Chiefs, and above all air force headquarters in Washington, continually urged World War II-style campaigns against North Korean industry, oil refineries, and the like.82 By early August of 1950 Major General Emmett O’Donnell had presented to the commander of Far East Air Forces a plan prepared by Strategic Air Command that called for the air force to “go to work burning five major cities in North Korea to the ground, and to destroy completely every one of about eighteen major strategic targets.”83 And despite ROK criticism (which the official historian terms “jaundiced”) the air force set about doing just that, particularly after MacArthur had ordered it on November 5, 1950, “to destroy every means of communication and every installation, factory, city and village,” between advancing U.S. troops and the Yalu.84 It was precisely this faith in air power, we have argued, which misled MacArthur and his subordinates into a drastic discounting of the Chinese threat.

  This overvaluation, however, did not stem from fantasy but from experience in World War II, confirmed by recent operations against th
e North Koreans. In both the Atlantic and the Pacific, American air power, no matter which service administered it, did have an enormous impact on operations. It never “isolated the battlefield,” as some hoped it would, but it did paralyze the movements of opponents who were conventionally armed and equipped. MacArthur in particular relied heavily on his air forces in the South Pacific campaigns he conducted so brilliantly, and air power served him very well indeed.85 MacArthur demonstrated in his Pacific campaigns a rare ability to integrate land, air and naval forces, and like virtually all senior American commanders emerged from World War II dedicated to “triphibious” warfare. As Ridgway demonstrated, however, mastery of the narrower but essential basics of ground warfare would determine the outcome in Korea.

  In other respects as well Far East Command and the Eighth Army labored under the incubus of a different war. It is noteworthy, for example, that many of the commanders in Korea were armor officers who had made their names in the European war. At the very highest level, General Walker, commander of the Eighth Army, had led XX Corps under George Patton: at the middle levels, hundreds of armored officers were made instant infantrymen and assigned positions in infantry battalions and regiments.86 Relatively few army officers had fought the kind of infantry war in 1942–45 that fell to their lot in Korea during the winter of 1950–51, and it is no accident that it took one of the best infantrymen in the United States Army to turn the Eighth Army around.

  It is again striking how different the marine experience had been. The marines—all marines—had trained for the basic infantry tasks that would be so essential for survival in the retreat from Chosin. Many had had experience in China as garrison troops in the last chaotic days of the Chinese Civil War, or in some cases as observers with Chinese forces. Indeed, the important tactical-organizational concept of dividing an infantry squad of a dozen men into three fire teams came into the Marine Corps from observers attached to Mao Zedong’s Eighth Route Army in the 1930s.87 By virtue of their organizational experience, in other words, as well as basic professionalism, the marines were far more likely than the army to assess their war correctly.

  The logistical precariousness of the Eighth Army’s position in November 1950 contributed to its defeat, if by no other way than undermining the self-confidence of an army used to material profligacy. Here too we see shades of World War II, in which American forces rarely, if ever, paid a severe penalty for shipping ice cream factories and PXs as well as bombs and bullets into a war zone.88 Yet an army used to ample quantities of not only material comforts but relatively high technology found itself unprepared for the peculiar conditions of late winter 1950. Marshall’s tale of the infantry company that ran out of field telephone wire and therefore failed to establish contact with the counterparts on its flanks is a symbolic one. A runner could have done the same job, but it did not occur to the commander to find a substitute for technology.

  UN forces, and American units in particular, need not have suffered so severely in Korea. Despite their weaknesses and deficiencies a defensive line could have held the Chinese north of Seoul: Even a cautious probe north should not have led to the crumpling of a full infantry division and a number of lesser units. Granted the number of factors beyond their control—particularly the replacement problem and some (not all) of the logistical shortages—one can still plausibly imagine a Chinese intervention that pushed UN forces back to the 38th Parallel, perhaps, but no farther. Tightly knit divisions that followed the basic precepts on which Ridgway later insisted (and that the First Marine Division followed) would have had to yield far less to an enemy who could only fight for a week or two at a time before outrunning supplies.

  Finally, at the strategic level as well, American leaders appear to have seen the Chinese onslaught in terms of World War II. The Joint Strategic Plans Committee of the JCS, for example, had concluded in August 1950 that “It is not probable that the attempts [to aid the North Koreans] will include overt Soviet or Chinese Communist aggression until the Kremlin is ready to precipitate global war.”89 The JCS found this conflict difficult to conceive of as anything but a first step toward global war, hence their willingness to consider the evacuation of the Korean Peninsula in late December 1950, in the interests of conserving forces for this larger conflict.90

  “War has a way of masking the stage with scenery crudely daubed with fearsome apparitions.”91 When American forces confronted an enemy whose method of war differed so radically from their own, and when this enemy seemed impervious to their own way of war, fear replaced recklessness. MacArthur made, and the JCS supported, plans to liquidate the Korean commitment. By the spring of 1951, however, some of China’s weaknesses—including the vulnerability of its field forces to American firepower—had become clear. American forces did indeed inflict enormous casualties on the Chinese and effectively break the forces opposing them.

  Yet a crude mental picture of the enemy continued to enfeeble American strategy again. The image of an unlimited supply of trained Chinese manpower, and of unalterable will to throw it into the fray did not match the reality of the crumbling front. The “fighting hordes” had replaced the “second-rate North Koreans,” in the minds of American leaders; both were caricatures. The June 1951 decision to stop at the 38th Parallel—a decision dictated not by battlefield considerations but by calculations in Washington and Tokyo—at the same time peace talks began misjudged again the character of the opponent. No longer pressed by UN forces, the Chinese dug in swiftly and took advantage of their talent for fortification and camouflage. Having nothing to gain at the negotiating table (UN forces had not occupied large chunks of North Korea with which to bargain) they settled in for a protracted war.

  Wars, Michael Howard once remarked, resemble each other more than they do anything else.92 The dangerous implication of this truth lies in the proclivity of large and successful military organizations to see all wars as pretty much the same. They are not, and what Clausewitz called “the first of all strategic tasks” requires careful consideration of the uniqueness of the individual conflict. To do so means beginning with what S. L. A. Marshall described as “the basic study in all warfare,”

  the mind and nature of the probable enemy, compared to which a technical competence in the handling of weapons and engines of destruction is of minor importance. Failing in the first, one will most likely fail in everything.93

  One can only add that to make full use of such understanding military organizations must seek out the most difficult kind of intelligence—knowledge of themselves.

  Catastrophic Failure

  The French Army and Air Force,

  May–June 1940

  A GREEK TRAGEDY

  WHEN HITLER LAUNCHED THE WEHRMACHT against the West on May 10, 1940, many of his senior commanders doubted whether they could repeat their Polish triumph and win another rapid victory against the much larger and better equipped French army. Their feeling that this was likely to be a long and hard campaign was shared by their opponents. Winston Churchill, who had become British prime minister on the day the German attack commenced, told Franklin D. Roosevelt on May 15, “I think myself the battle on land has only just begun.”1 Allied expectations were quickly confounded. After a mere six weeks’ fighting the armies of France, Belgium, Holland, and Great Britain had been defeated and the French were suing for peace. A French defeat was entirely unexpected and the rapidity of the collapse was a shock of traumatic proportions. An impression was formed that what had occurred was a surprising failure by one side rather than a dazzling success by the other. The guns had scarcely ceased their fire before contemporaries began to try to explain the tragic puzzle.

  So great were the consequences of defeat for France that it is tempting to try to find a single general cause to explain it.2 As we have seen, this is a false lure that will easily lead us astray. Great events may have a single striking outcome—the fall of France swept away the Third Republic, which had existed ever since 1871—-but their causes are generally very complex
.

  The speed with which France’s soldiers sought to distance themselves from any responsibility for their terrible defeat did much to help to create a sense of inevitability about the fate that overwhelmed France in May and June 1940. General Maxime Weygand, who had succeeded General Maurice-Gustave Gamelin as commander-in-chief ten days after the campaign began, blamed the politicians: “We are paying for twenty years of lying and of demagoguery,” he complained.3 Marshal Henri Pétain, the aging hero of Verdun who would clamber onto the ruins of the Third Republic to hoist the flag of the Vichy regime, warned the government after only sixteen days of fighting that at no cost was the army to be blamed for whatever might go wrong as this would be “treason against the country.”4 The army’s supporters claimed that it had quickly run out of men and munitions, without which it could do nothing: Even a critical soldier, while acknowledging the army’s faults, felt that by 1940 there was nothing to be done since “fate had stacked the cards too heavily against us.”5

  Conservative Frenchmen who had opposed the leftward leanings of the Third Republic during the 1930s were inclined to explain the disaster as chiefly due to a moral collapse. They believed that France lacked not only material means but also “soul.” Materialism and the search for the easy life had rotted the nation’s moral fiber, and the decline in French patriotism meant that Frenchmen “were no longer taught the ideas for which they were to lay down their lives.”6 Even neutral observers were not immune from these ideas. After a brief tour of the battlefield William Shirer, an American radio correspondent in Berlin in 1940, concluded that France had not fought—or if it had, there was little evidence of it: “The French, as though drugged, had no will to fight, even when their soil was invaded by their most hated enemy. There was a complete collapse of French society and of the French soul.”7 France’s moral and spiritual weakness, upon which the supposed activities of fifth columnists and Communist propaganda had skillfully played, appeared to be the mirror image of Germany’s strength.8