This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Probably, both are wrong.

  The military have the prepondence of fact with them as far as Korea was concerned. Korea was the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals, by legions. It was fought by men who soon knew they had small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought by men whom the Army—at its own peril—had given neither training nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.

  The Army needed legions, but society didn't want them. It wanted citizen-soldiers.

  But the sociologists are right—absolutely right—in demanding that the centurion view of life not be imposed upon America. In a holy, patriotic war—like that fought by the French in 1793, or as a general war against Communism will be—America can get a lot more mileage out of citizen-soldiers than it can from legions.

  No one has suggested that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come aboard only when the ship is sinking.

  The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order—our own decent order—in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world.

  It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.

  In the first six months America suffered a near debacle because her Regular Army fighting men were the stuff of legions, but they had not been made into legionaries.

  America was not more soft or more decadent than it had been twenty years earlier. It was confused, badly, on its attitudes toward war. It was still bringing up its youth to think there were no tigers, and it was still reluctant to forge them guns to shoot tigers.

  Many of America's youth, in the Army, faced horror badly because they had never been told they would have to face horror, or that horror is very normal in our unsane world. It had not been ground into them that they would have to obey their officers, even if the orders got them killed.

  It has been a long, long time since American citizens have been able to take down the musket from the mantelpiece and go tiger hunting. But they still cling to the belief that they can do so, and do it well, without training.

  This is the error that leads some men to cry out that Americans are decadent.

  If Americans in 1950 were decadent, so were the rabble who streamed miserably into Valley Forge, where von Steuben made soldiers out of them. If American society had no will to defend itself, neither did it in 1861, at First Manassas, or later at Shiloh, when whole regiments of Americans turned tail and ran.

  The men who lay warm and happy in their blankets at Kasserine, as the panzers rolled toward them in the dawn, were decadent, by this reasoning.

  The problem is not that Americans are soft but that they simply will not face what war is all about until they have had their teeth kicked in. They will not face the fact that the military professionals, while some have ideas about society in general that are distorted and must be watched, still know better than anyone else how a war is won.

  Free society cannot be oriented toward the battlefield—Sparta knew that trap—but some adjustments must be made, as the squabbling Athenians learned to their sorrow.

  The sociologists and psychologists of Vienna had no answer to the Nazi bayonets, when they crashed against their doors. The soldiers of the democratic world did.

  More than once, as at Valley Forge, after Bull Run, and Kasserine, the world has seen an American army rise from its own ashes, reorient itself, grow hard and bitter, knowledgeable and disciplined and tough.

  In 1951, after six months of being battered, the Eighth Army in Korea rose from its own ashes of despair. No man who was there still believes Americans in the main are decadent, just as no man who saw Lieutenant General Matt Ridgway in operation doubts the sometime greatness of men.

  He who supposes all men to be brave at all times … does not realize that the courage of troops must be reborn daily, that nothing is so changeable, that the true skill of a general consists of knowing how to guarantee it by his positions, dispositions, and those traits of genius that characterize great captains.

  —From the French of Maurice de Saxe, REVERIES ON THE ART OF WAR.

  When Lieutenant General Ridgway left Tokyo to assume command of the Eighth Army on 26 December 1950, he asked MacArthur in parting, "General, if I get over there and find the situation warrants it, do I have your permission to attack?"

  MacArthur's aged face cracked wide in a grin.

  "Do whatever you think best, Matt. The Eighth Army is yours."

  These were, as Ridgway said later, the sort of orders to put heart in a soldier. And Ridgway's own first task was to put heart in the Eighth Army.

  Matt Ridgway came to Korea convinced that the United States Army could beat any Asiatic horde that lived to its knees. He quickly found that on this subject he was a majority of one.

  The Eighth Army was not only pulling south; it had no great desire to meet the Chinese. Contact over much of the front was broken. There was almost no patrolling.

  When Ridgway asked where the Chinese were, and in what strength, he was shown a vague goose egg on the map to the north of the Eighth Army in which was inscribed the figure 174,000. More than this no one knew, and no one was making concerted efforts to find out. The Eighth Army had had its fill of Chinese-hunting in the north.

  But if the Eighth Army expected General Matt Ridgway to be satisfied with that, they had another think coming.

  Ridgway began to hammer away. At first, realizing the problem, he talked of simple things: aggressive patrolling, maintaining contact at all costs, supply, and firepower. He talked of the most basic thing of all, leadership. He was as blunt or as gentle as the situation called for.

  He told his senior commanders the simple truth that America's power and prestige were at stake out here, and whether they believed in this war or not, they were going to have to fight it. He would help provide the tools, but they would have to provide their own guts.

  If the American Armed Forces could not beat the hordes of Red China in the field, then it made no difference how many new autos Detroit could produce.

  Everywhere Matt Ridgway went, however, he found the same question in men's minds: What the hell are we doing in this godforsaken place?

  If men had been told, Destroy the evil of Bolshevism, they might have understood. But they did not understand why the line must be held or why the Taehan Minkuk—that miserable, stinking, undemocratic country—must be protected.

  The question itself never concerned Matt Ridgway. At the age of fifty-six, more than thirty years a centurion, to him the answer was simple. The loyalty he gave, and expected, precluded the slightest questioning of orders. This he said.

  But to a generation brought up to hold some loyalties lightly, and to question many things, this was not enough. To these men Ridgway said:

  The real issues are whether the power of Western Civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism; whether the rule of men who shoot their prisoners, enslave their citizens, and deride the dignity of man, shall displace the rule of those to whom the individual and his individual rights are sacred; whether we are to survive with God's hand to guide and lead us, or to perish in the dead existence of a Godless world.

  Under General Ridgway's hammering, the Eighth Army took the offensive within thirty days. After 25 January it never really again lost the initiative. At Chipyong-ni, the battle that presaged what was to come all spring, it was the Chinese who melted away into the snow-draped hills, leaving their dead behind.

  Under a new, firm hand, and with the taste of Ch
inese blood, the Eighth Army found itself. Ridgway made legions.

  The ranks were salted now with veterans, men wounded and returned to duty, and were led by men like Ridgway, Captain Muñoz, and Lieutenant Long, who had been through the drill before, who had been from the Naktong to the Yalu, and had learned, as Americans had always had to learn, how to fight this new-old war.

  They had learned the Chinese could be cunning, but also stupid. Failing to meet quick success, he could not change his plan. Often he continued an operation long after it had turned into disaster, wasting thousands of his troops. Lacking air cover, artillery, and armor, his hordes of riflemen could be—and were—slaughtered, as the Eighth Army learned to roll with the punches and to strike back hard.

  Again and again, with the prodigal use of men, he could crack the U.N. line at a given point. But the men at the point had learned to hold, inflicting terrible losses, and even if the line gave, the Chinese could not exploit, while U.N. reinforcements, mechanized, rushed to deploy in front of them and to their flanks.

  In the terrain of South Korea, battle was more open, and in open battle no amount of savage cunning could substitute for firepower. The Chinese could not even apply superior combat power to the 135-mile line. The truth, that a backward nation can never put as many well-armed men into the field and support them as can even a small-sized industrial country, became apparent. Chinese replacements, even with Russian aid, were often ill equipped and ill trained.

  The press still reported human seas and overwhelming hordes, but except where they massed for a breakthrough, the Chinese remained apart and in moderate numbers on the line. Front-line soldiers began to joke: "Say, Joe, how many hordes are there in a Chink platoon?" Or, "We were attacked by two hordes last night. We killed both of them."

  But the Chinese retained the will to fight.

  The drive northward was not easy.

  As many years earlier, when the cavalry fighting on the Plains had developed leaders such as Miles, Crook, and Ranald Mackenzie, men who rode hard, made cold camps, threw away their sabers, and moved without bugle calls, putting aside all the things they had learned in the War Between the States—but who had driven the Indians without surcease, hammering them across the snows and mountains until their women sickened and their infants died and they lost their heart for war, so the Army developed men who learned to fight in Asia.

  Soldiers learned to travel light, but with full canteen and bandoleer, and to climb the endless hills. They learned to hold fast when the enemy flowed at them, because it was the safest thing to do. They learned to displace in good order when they had to. They learned to listen and obey. They learned all the things Americans have always learned from Appomattox to Berlin.

  Above all, they learned to kill.

  On the frontier, there is rarely gallantry or glamour to wars, whether they are against red Indians or Red Chinese. There is only killing.

  Men of a tank battalion set spikes on the forward sponsons of their tanks, and to these affixed Chinese skulls. This battalion had come back from Kuniri, and the display matched their mood. They were ordered to remove the skulls, but the mood remained.

  In Medic James Mount's company, there was a platoon sergeant named "Gypsy" Martin. Martin carried a full canteen and bandoleer, but he also wore a bandanna and earring, and he had tiny bells on his boots. Gypsy Martin hated Chinese; he hated gooks, and he didn't care who knew it.

  In anything but war, Martin was the kind of man who is useless.

  In combat, as the 24th Division drove north, men could hear Gypsy yell his hatred, as they heard his M-1 bark death. When Gypsy yelled, his men went forward; he was worth a dozen rational, decent men in those bloody valleys. His men followed him, to the death.

  When Gypsy Martin finally bought it, they found him lying among a dozen "gooks," his rifle empty, its stock broken. Other than in battle, Sergeant Martin was no good. To Jim Mount's knowledge, he got no medals, for medals depend more on who writes for them than what was done.

  It made Jim Mount think.

  The values composing civilization and the values required to protect it are normally at war. Civilization values sophistication, but in an armed force sophistication is a millstone.

  The Athenian commanders before Salamis, it is reported, talked of art and of the Acropolis, in sight of the Persian fleet. Beside their own campfires, the Greek hoplites chewed garlic and joked about girls.

  Without its tough spearmen, Hellenic culture would have had nothing to give the world. It would not have lasted long enough. When Greek culture became so sophisticated that its common men would no longer fight to the death, as at Thermopylae, but became devious and clever, a horde of Roman farm boys overran them.

  The time came when the descendants of Macedonians who had slaughtered Asians till they could no longer lift their arms went pale and sick at the sight of the havoc wrought by the Roman gladius Hispanicus as it carved its way toward Hellas.

  The Eighth Army, put to the fire and blooded, rose from its own ashes in a killing mood. They went north, and as they went they destroyed Chinese and what was left of the towns and cities of Korea. They did not grow sick at the sight of blood.

  By 7 March they stood on the Han. They went through Seoul, and reduced it block by block. When they were finished, the massive railway station had no roof, and thousands of buildings were pocked by tank fire. Of Seoul's original more than a million souls, less than two hundred thousand still lived in the ruins. In many of the lesser cities of Korea, built of wood and wattle, only the foundation, and the vault, of the old Japanese bank remained.

  The people of Chosun, not Americans or Chinese, continued to lose the war.

  At the end of March the Eighth Army was across the parallel.

  General Ridgway wrote, "The American flag never flew over a prouder, tougher, more spirited and more competent fighting force than was Eighth Army as it drove north.…"

  Ridgway had no great interest in real estate. He did not strike for cities and towns, but to kill Chinese. The Eighth Army killed them, by the thousands, as its infantry drove them from the hills and as its air caught them fleeing in the valleys.

  By April 1951, the Eighth Army had again proved Erwin Rommel's assertion that American troops knew less but learned faster than any fighting men he had opposed. The Chinese seemed not to learn at all, as they repeated Chipyong-ni again and again.

  Americans had learned, and learned well. The tragedy of American arms, however, is that having an imperfect sense of history Americans sometimes forget as quickly as they learn.

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  26

  Gloster Hill

  They will remember for a little while in England. The soldier does have his day. I want to remind you this afternoon that it is not enough to remember now. We've got to show what we think of their sacrifice in the way we conduct ourselves in the days ahead.

  — The chaplain of the 1st Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment, at a memorial service in Korea, April 1951.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1914 the nations of Europe sprang to arms in an uproar of popular hysteria. The French Republic raised a hundred divisions in ninety days. The German Empire had its reservists in Belgium within weeks, and the United Kingdom soon sent millions of men onto the battlefields of Flanders, where nine hundred thousand of them lie buried beside more than a million French comrades-in-arms.

  In 1940, with less enthusiasm but with equal will, Europe again waged internecine war. The Third Republic lost half a million dead, and went down to humiliating defeat and captivity. The British Empire lived its finest hour, but put its manpower and resources to such strain that they would not soon recover.

  Victory, each time, was a will-o'-the-wisp.

  Americans, who were largely spared these bloodbaths, often cannot understand why, when the jaws of hell yawned once more in 1950, few Europeans showed much inclination to rush into them.

  Twice in a generation Europeans had "defended themselves," and now
, while America blew an urgent trumpet, urging them to prepare to defend themselves once more against the Bear, response was slower and much more uncertain than Americans desired.

  The famous British Navy was a shell in 1950. France, which had levied a hundred divisions in a matter of days, could not raise twenty-five given a decade. It was as much as an alarmed United States could do to persuade these nations, with their smaller allies, partially to rearm in defense of their own homelands, under NATO.

  Slowly, painfully, under the menace of overt Communist aggression, the armed forces of NATO became reality, but America's North Atlantic allies were not willing to fight in remote Korea. They were, actually, already fighting part of that struggle in other places.

  The British had troubles in Malaya, and other areas.

  In Vietnam, De Vigny's centurions, hamstrung by a weak and hesitant government that had neither the courage to support nor to withdraw them, were fighting the Communist Vietminh to the death.

  Inevitably, illuminating the woes that America had fallen heir to, the burden of the fighting in Korea fell upon the United States and the Taehan Minkuk.

  The maximum military support rendered by members of the United Nations to the Republic of Korea was as follows:

  Nation

  Armed Forces Committed

  United States of America

  7 Army divisions; 1 Marine division army and corps HQ's, almost all logistical and support forces.

  1 tactical air force and supporting elements; 1 combat cargo command, air; 2 medium bombardment wings.

  1 complete naval fleet, including a fast carrier task group, blockade and escort forces, reconnaissance and antisubmarine units,supply and repair units; military sea transport services.

  United Kingdom

  2 army brigades of 5 infantry battalions; 2 field artillery regiments; 1 armored regiment. 1 aircraft carrier, 2 cruisers, 8 destroyers, with Marine and support units.

  Canada