the peninsula. Working around the clock, transportation and technical-service people poured in ton after ton of supplies to replenish those the divisions lost. More important, men began to arrive in a continual stream. In Japan, Operation Flushout had separated thousands of American troops from their desks and other jobs, and thrown them into the fighting. Replacements were beginning to arrive from the States. All over the world, the Army had turned the vacuum cleaner on, and at its apex was Pusan.
Help was on the way.
And here, behind the Naktong, the tenor of the war began to change.
Within the box, from north to south, Walton Walker had eight divisions: the ROK 3rd, Capital, 8th, 6th, and 1st, plus ROK manpower to assimilate within the weakened American units; the 1st Cavalry, the 24th, and 25th infantry divisions, and 5th Regimental Combat Team from Hawaii.
Now, behind barriers, with a definite piece of ground to defend, Walker could form for the first time a continuous battle line. Eighth Army was spread margarine-thin across the land—but at last it had anchored flanks, refused to the enemy. There were great gaps in the line, but at least it was a line.
And slowly, painfully, reaching eagerly for every man, Walker was putting together a reserve. Each morning he demanded of his chief of staff, 'How many reserves have you got me?'
For the first time, American commanders could plan for combat as they had been trained for it—with known friendly forces on either flank, and with help in the form of a reserve to their rear.
A great and continuing weakness of the United States Army fighting in Asia was its tactical and psychological dependence on continuous battle lines, such as had been known in Europe. In Asia, terrain and Communist tactics made such lines rare—Communist armies tended to flow like the sea, washing around strong points, breaking through places where the dams were weak. The 'human sea' analogy picked up and headlined by the press was very real—except that the press always gave a misleading indication of the numbers of enemy involved.
Relatively small numbers of enemy flowed around the high ground held by American troops, went behind them, and interdicted their supply roads. Roadbound, the American commanders became understandably nervous. Invariably, both men and leaders began to think of retreat, falling back to form a new line. This was in many respects a frame of mind. The North Korean forces in the American rear were small, ill supplied, and in effect often cut off from contact with their own bases.
Able to live on three rice balls a day, capable of carrying guns and ammunition over the steepest slopes on foot, this isolation bothered the Communists not at all.
It drove the Americans, hating isolated action, dependent upon wheels, to desperation. Ironically, the Indian-fighting army of seventy-five years earlier would have understood the new form of warfare perfectly. On the plains and mountains of the American West, the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare. It had learned to ride hard and march hard, live light, and to operate in isolated columns, giving the enemy no rest.
But even hard lessons can be soon forgotten.
In August, however, within a tight little box, the United States Army could at last fight the way it had been trained, and it could finally bring its inherently superior firepower to bear. And its mechanization, a handicap when scattered over long supply lines vulnerable to interdiction, became an asset, since troops could be rushed within the interior lines from one spot to another as needed, faster than the foot-bound enemy could exploit a breakthrough.
Within the perimeter, the American soldier began to put up a better fight, a fight he could hardly have been expected to wage when committed a battalion or a regiment at a time, with no friends to right or left, and his rear vulnerable.
And in August 1950, other factors took effect. After a month and more of battle, the first sense of incredible shock had worn off the green United States troops. They had now learned what to do the hard way.
They had also learned that they would not be withdrawn. Walton Walker told them, 'A retreat to Pusan would be one of the greatest butcheries in history.' If they did not hold along the Naktong, they stood to be slaughtered. There was, to say the least, an incentive to hold.
And finally, while most Americans can be pushed around a great deal, there comes a time when they will be pushed no more.
They had not been told why they were in Korea of why they must fight and die, but in many men a certain pride took hold. The 'gooks' had pushed them around long enough.
Undisciplined, untrained, unhating, they had come to battle. They had been clobbered, as American citizen- soldiers had usually been clobbered in their first battles, from Bull Run to Kasserine. Only gradually did men understand the nature of the job they had to do.
Once they did, they would begin to do it.
It was the boast of the great Frederick that when he went to war neither the peasants of the fields nor the tradesmen of his towns should know or care. Because Frederick involved his small state of Prussia in wars too big for even his iron grenadiers, he was not quite able to live up to his boast—but it is an accurate statement of the conditions of warfare in the Age of Reason.
In the eighteenth century, men and rulers were sick to death of unlimited war. For almost two centuries jihad had been preached; armies had crossed Europe like ravening locusts; millions had died; and at the end of the savagery nothing had been accomplished. The survivors still insisted on being Calvinists, Catholics, or Lutherans, short of extermination.
In Frederick's time men were still men, and they must compete—but they no longer trusted the angel's trumpet, or would have heeded had it blown. Wars there still were, but they developed in a new, a limited, fashion: to snatch a province here, to defend one there, to place a friendly head upon some throne, or to remove an unfriendly one from it.
The statesmen of Europe, even though they fought, wanted a certain order to the world. They called it the balance of power. It was a desperately fragile system, but it was the best they could design.
After two hundred years, and after a new resort to savagery in the period of the 'nations in arms,' men had still evolved nothing with any more promise. There was a new hope of an eventual world order through the uniting of all nations in peace, but the hope was still only that, and no more. Power remained the fulcrum of world action. And unless some sort of balance could be maintained, the world would once again erupt in perhaps the last of all 'holy' wars.
When the Soviet bloc pushed at the balance of world order in 1950, the men in the United States Government reacted the best way they knew how. So far as they would be able, they would reject resort to cataclysmic war. They felt, in their hearts, that a final test of strength between Communist and non-Communist would in the end decide nothing, except who remained alive in a shattered world. They would accept such a test only as a last resort.
They accepted, tacitly, to play the Communist game of limited war, for limited ends. It must never be forgotten that the game was pushed upon them—they did not precipitate it. Their cruel choice was that of cataclysm, humiliation, or surrender.
On 16 July 1950 the New York Times in a superbly worded editorial said:
The millions who still mutter that they should have chosen cataclysm forget that while civilizations live, they may still aspire, and hope—as long as their legions can hold the far frontier.
And no free-born American can or could advocate surrender.
The Truman Administration accepted the limitation of the war to Korea, and its decision was never altered. But that Administration must have wished for Frederick's legions, his forty thousand iron grenadiers—for there was never any hope that the men of the fields and the merchants of America could continue undisturbed.
In addition to restraint of objective, the second necessary ingredient of limited war is a professional army large enough to handle any task.
In 1950, even to fight an underdeveloped nation in Asia, America had to fall back upon her citizens. And in
