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.
Because the American people have traditionally taken a warlike, but not military, attitude to battle, and because they have always coupled a certain belligerence—no American likes being pushed around—with a complete unwillingness to prepare for combat, the Korean War was difficult, perhaps the most difficult in their history.
In Korea, Americans had to fight, not a popular, righteous war, but to send men to die on a bloody checkerboard, with hard heads and without exalted motivations, in the hope of preserving the kind of world order Americans desired.
Tragically, they were not ready, either in body or in spirit.
They had not really realized the kind of world they lived in, or the tests of wills they might face, or the disciplines that would be required to win them.
Yet when America committed its ground troops into Korea, the American people committed their entire prestige, and put the failure or success of their foreign policy on the line.
The purpose of this book is to detail the events of that action, and what led to it, and not to explore controversy. It does not seek to exalt the military nor to deride the traditionally liberal American view toward life. There is no desire to add fuel to the increasingly bitter dialogue between traditionalists, military officers, and 'liberals' that has resulted from those events—a dialogue brought about more by the fact that the liberals would feel safer if the military would feel emotionally more at home in a society that was a bit more spartan, than by a clear assessment of the needs of the country.
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 the values that comprise a decent civilization and those needed to defend it abroad will always be at odds. A complete triumph for either faction would probably result in disaster.
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, robotlike 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.
Americans fully understand the requirements of the football field or the baseball diamond. They discipline themselves and suffer by the thousands to prepare for these rigors. A coach or manager who is too permissive soon seeks a new job; his teams fail against those who are tougher and harder. Yet undoubtedly any American officer, in peacetime, who worked his men as hard, or ruled them as severely as a college football coach does, would be removed.
But the shocks of the battlefield are a hundred times those of the playing field, and the outcome infinitely more important to the nation.
The problem is to understand the battlefield as well as the game of football. The problem is to see not what is desirable, or nice, or politically feasible, but what is necessary.
T.R.F.
JULY 4, 1962
SAN ANTONIO,TEXAS
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Part I
Beginning
1
Seoul Saturday Night
— From the Latin of Vegetius, MILITARY INSTITUTUIONS OF THE ROMANS
ON 8 JUNE 1950 newspapers of the city of P'yongyang, capital of
No mention was made of the
The manifesto was picked up by
This manifesto made interesting reading. It was a storm signal. It seems a pity no one in the West bothered to read it.
But then, if it had been read, it would have been ignored. Storm signals had been flying for more than four years. In Asia, Nationalist China had fallen. There was Communist-directed war in Indo-China. World Communism, from its power base in Soviet Russia, undeterred by the nuclear bomb, continued its aggressive course, causing misgivings in the West, making its nations sign defensive alliances.
But the West did not prepare for trouble. It did not make ready, because its peoples, in their heart of hearts, did not want to be prepared.
It would not have mattered if anyone had read the P'yongyang Manifesto.
Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku, thirty years old, was Operations Officer, II Corps, of the
Only now, as darkness fell on Saturday, 24 June, could Lee Hak Ku allow the hard lines of his square young face to relax, and to permit himself leisurely to enjoy a cigarette. In a people's republic Saturday night meant nothing, but every unit of the Inmun Gun had been in position since midnight 23 June, and for a few hours there was really nothing more to do.
And that was good staff work.
Standing relaxed in his somewhat shoddy Russian-style blue uniform with its flaring breeches and polished high boots, Senior Colonel Lee could review the turmoil and ferment of the last few days. Eighty thousand men had been moved, some divisions coming down from the high and distant Yalu, and it had all been done smoothly.
