This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

But no one either polled the troops for their opinion or said openly that a man who was old enough to kill and be killed was also old enough to have a beer if he wanted it.

Unable to shake the habit of acquiescence, the Army leaders bowed to the storm of public wrath. On 12 September the day the 3rd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, lost half its strength securing Hill 314, Far East Command cut off its beer ration. The troops could still buy beer, but only when and if the PX caught up with them.

One soldier, asked his opinion of the move, said, 'Let them people come over here and do the fighting if they don't like it.'

A high-ranking officer cautiously said that in his opinion 'one can of beer never hurt anyone.'

The other remarks that have survived are not printable.

Through the middle of September, U.N. and North Korean forces were still locked in close combat all around the Perimeter. But the tempo of fighting was gradually easing; both sides were showing signs of exhaustion. Neither combatant had sufficient men to pass troops in reserve for any length of time.

By 14 September the issue had still not been decided. The NKPA had over run all South Korea except one tiny toehold in the southeast corner—but this toehold had given it unexpected trouble. Its timetable calling for the Communization of all Korea by 15 August had been wrecked. Worse, the Inmun Gun, the People's Army, had left the bones of its best men scattered along the Naktong River, and the survivors were rapidly bleeding themselves to death against American guns on the broiling hills and in the fetid valleys.

The People's Army had almost shot its bolt. Less than 30 percent of the old China veterans remained, and these were dirty, tired, hungry, and in rags. Now only frequent summary executions and the threat of death could hold the newly drafted trainees in line. Now it was not American officers, but men like Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku, who had come down from II Corps to serve as the 13th Division's chief of staff, who began to wonder how it all would end.

The Inmun Gun had made its supreme effort, and failed—and the Americans were just beginning to fight.

By the middle of September, a decision could not be long delayed.

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15

Seoul Recaptured

Few operations in military history can match … the brilliant maneuver which has now resulted in the liberation of Seoul.

— President Truman to General MacArthur, September 1950.

AS AMERICANS discovered during 1861-1865, sustained land warfare is extremely costly in blood, and there has been a pronounced American distaste for such since. It is probably no accident that no great American tacticians have evolved since the War Between the States, while at the same time American strategical thinking has been superb. Having been once in the forest, United States military men tended to see it rather clearly—they had trouble with the trees, but rarely got lost in them.

During 1941-1945, on the whole, German tactical execution of battle was superior to American; German officers and N.C.O.'s on unit level exhibited particular excellence in fighting. But throughout the war, American strategical planning remained first rate. While the Wehrmacht, under Hitler, floundered about from one crisis to another, American strategists never lost sight of their ultimate goal of destruction of the enemy.

Because Germans considered battle itself important, their technique was bound to be good, but they became lost in the trees, winning battles, losing the war. After the fall of France, Germany's rulers never gave the Wehrmacht a clear, concise, strategical goal, because German planning never went beyond winning the West.

In the East, German planners again and again wasted their substance on transitory gains, while the Red Army never lost sight of its ultimate aim, which was to win the war politically as well as militarily. Significantly, while in 1942 Hitler struck deep in the Caucasus for oil, Russian military men always planned offensives for political effect, and for the control of populations. And while the Wehrmacht won many a tactical victory on the 1,800-mile Russian front, by 1942 it had no hope of controlling the Russian people, or of ultimate triumph.

Since the end of the Civil War, the United States has never been a massive land power. The ninety-two divisions raised in World War II never came close to matching either the almost four hundred of the Wehrmacht or the truly enormous field forces of the Soviets. But because the United States had Allies, such as Russians and Chinese, to keep the enemy heavily engaged on the ground, it was able to keep its commitment on land to a minimum.

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. But because after the Civil War America's Allies again and again took the terrible losses required to bleed the enemy, Americans gradually developed a belief in cheap victory.

In World I, after Britain had suffered over 900,000 dead, and France more than 1,000,000, the United States threw her forces into the fray, to tip the scales at a loss of 50,000 killed in action.

In World War II, Russia lost more than 20,000,000 both military and civilian. Even agonized, stumbling France, in six weeks of 1940, lost more combat dead upon the field of battle—almost 500,000—than did America during the entire war.

Without this sacrifice of our Allies all over the world, World War II could not have ended as it did, with the United States relatively unscathed.

More Americans died in thirty minutes at Antietam than died in thirty days of the Normandy beachhead.

But by concentrating to a large degree on sea and air power, the United States was able to add the strategic punch that knocked the Axis out of the war. Japan, particularly, as an island empire was peculiarly vulnerable to air and sea attack. And the main body of the Imperial Japanese Army, on guard against the Soviets in Manchuria, was never engaged by the United States.

It must never be forgotten that without the enormous holding power of American Allies, American industrial capacity of itself would not have been a determining factor. Even in 1944-1945, when the United States Army engaged an already strategically defeated Wehrmacht upon the ground of Europe, the effort strained the relatively small land combat power of America to the limit.

By early 1945, men were being diverted in large numbers from the air forces and services into the infantry. No one had anticipated the replacements necessary once the Wehrmacht had been engaged.

Thus, again, it cannot be considered accident that in 1950 the dominant power of the world was barely able to contain the ground attack of an almost illiterate nation of nine million—nor could it have done so without the enormous manpower sacrifices of its Korean ally.

And thus, in the summer of 1950, General MacArthur, possessed of limited tactical ability on the ground, but with wonderful mobility of air and sea forces, instantly began to think in terms of strategic goals and sweeping maneuver rather than grinding infantry warfare across the face of Korea.

As early as the first week of July, MacArthur instructed his chief of staff, General Almond, to begin planning for an amphibious operation against the west coast of Korea. MacArthur planned to use his preponderance of air and naval forces, plus the unique ability of the United States Marines to go ashore against a hostile beach, to take the enemy in the rear and, by cutting his lines of communications, destroy him.

On joint Army, Navy, and Air Force levels, under the code name Bluehearts, work began immediately for this operation. Almond initially scheduled Bluehearts for 22 July. But the continuing collapse of the Korean front, requiring that virtually all available troops be committed to save the diminishing Perimeter, rendered Bluehearts impossible by 10 July.