Fehrenbach Quotes

Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.

America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.

Americans have never admitted that guns may serve a moral purpose as well as votes.

For his own sake and for that of those around him, a man must be prepared for the awful, shrieking moment of truth when he realizes he is all alone on a hill ten thousand miles from home, and that he may be killed in the next second.

A nation that does not prepare for all the forms of war should then renounce the use of war in national policy. A people that does not prepare to fight should then be morally prepared to surrender. To fail to prepare soldiers and citizens for limited, bloody ground action, and then to engage in it, is folly verging on the criminal.

War was to be entered upon with sadness, with regret, but also with ferocity.

Soviet strategy, like Soviet thinking, has always been devious where American has been direct.

A free press is equally free to print the truth or ignore it, as it chooses.

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.

Wars of containment, wars of policy, are not. They are hard to justify unless it is admitted that power, not idealism, is the dominant factor in the world, and that idealism must be backed by power.

Collective security had a fine sound, but it was still little more than a word; it would still be the United States, and the United States alone, that held the far frontier. No one else had the will or the power.

In July, 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were still getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What happened to the widely-heralded pushbutton warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen? In this unconsciously plaintive cry lies the buried a great deal of the truth why the United States was almost defeated. Nothing had happened to pushbutton warfare; its emergence was at hand. Horrible weapons that could destroy every city on Earth were at hand—at too many hands. But, pushbutton warfare meant Armageddon, and Armageddon, hopefully, will never be an end of national policy. Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud.

As a construct, history is too often revised to match contemporary views. It has been said that each generation must rewrite history in order to understand it. The opposite is true. Moderns revise history to make it palatable, not to understand it. Those who edit “history” to popular taste each decade will never understand the past—neither the horrors nor glories of which the human race is equally capable—and for that reason, they will fail to understand themselves.

None of them were equipped, trained, or mentally prepared for combat. For the first time in recent history, American ground units had been committed during the initial days of a war; there had been no allies to hold the line while America prepared. For the first time, many Americans could understand what had happened to Britain at Dunkirk.

liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiesence of the military toward the liberal view of life.

To continue to utilize the forces of our Air and Navy without an effective ground element cannot be decisive.

But so long as he had no new policy, so long as he sought only to contain, the enemy without would always hold the initiative.

History has shown very clearly that for democracy to continue, the people, and not the generals or even the executive authority, must have control over the military. The

But control does not imply petty interference.

And domestic leaders of the Democratic Party were totally unfit by training and inclination for playing roles in foreign affairs.

Fortunately, there was government by consent of the governed in America—but just as unfortunately, such governments dearly hate to admit a mistake.

Washington had not even one pipeline into official circles of enemy capitals; they could not even estimate what the potential aggressor was thinking or might do.

The problem is to see not what is desirable, or nice, or politically feasible, but what is necessary.

No matter how cultured or ancient the civilization, no average American is going to condone the absence of flush toilets. Not now, not ever.

Revolution and terror are synonymous; only with the passage of time does any revolution become respectable.

But while Americans are well conditioned to death on the highways, they are not ready to accept death on the battlefield for apparently futile reasons.

In addition to restraint of objective, the second necessary ingredient of limited war is a professional army large enough to handle any task.

Conquerors who question themselves or their values soon cease to be conquerors, whatever else they become.

Americans should remember that while barbarians may be ignorant they are not always stupid.

There had been many brave men in the ranks, but they were learning that bravery of itself has little to do with success in battle.

A war is made when a nation or group of nations is frustrated in political aims or when ends can be achieved in no other way.

A war is made when a government believes that only through war, and at no serious risk to itself, it may gain its ends.

But the abiding weakness of free peoples is that their governments can not or will not make them prepare or sacrifice before they are aroused.

Many a general who would have walked up a hill blazing with enemy fire without thinking twice quailed in his polished boots on the receipt of a congressional letter.

There was and is no danger of military domination of the nation. The Constitution gave Congress the power of life or death over the military, and they have always accepted the fact. The danger has been the other way around—the liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiesence of the military toward the liberal view of life.

The social problems, of course, were not solved. A solution to these can be anticipated only when all men look alike, hold the same views, or are so apathetic that it no longer matters.

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.

In 1950 a Marine Corps officer was still an officer, and a sergeant behaved the way good sergeants had behaved since the time of Caesar, expecting no nonsense, allowing none. And Marine leaders had never lost sight of their primary—their only—mission, which was to fight. The Marine Corps was not made pleasant for men who served in it. It remained the same hard, dirty, brutal way of life it had always been.

All of this gets to see, to feel—to memorize. With light now fading I begin my long slow walk home slow enough to notice golden grass bent in prayer slow enough to bend too—praying that I will never stop seeing praying that I will walk slow enough to fall in love again and again and again even if it makes me weep even it feels too much to handle praying that each step draws me close and closer still.

While few men, legislators or otherwise, have felt down the years that they could command ships of the line or marshal air armies without specialized training, almost any fool has felt in his heart he could command a regiment.

When Communists cannot win by force, they are prepared to negotiate. If, in 1951, they could stop the U.N. advance by talking, they would firm an increasingly fluid and dangerous situation and in effect achieve a tactical victory.

These men had not accepted the fact that culture and weaponry, or even culture and plumbing are not synonymous, and while a society may lag a hundred years behind in comforts and ethics, it may catch up in hardware in a human lifetime.

Most striking, however, was the position taken in the 1840s by William Lloyd Garrison and his wing of the abolitionist movement. The Garrisonians had come to agree completely with the southern view of the Constitution as a proslavery document.5°

The United States will be forced to fight wars of policy during the balance of the century. This is inevitable, since the world is seething with disaffection and revolt, which, however justified and merited, plays into Communist hands, and swings the world balance ever their way.

A continuing problem of this static war was that senior officers did not have enough to do to make them keep their hands off their junior’s affairs. Or they had time to think up new projects, from painting fire buckets red to promulgating the color of name tags on enlisted fatigues.

Soldiers are brought up to tell the truth, and to take positive action. Since politicians, in the main, regard neither of these with great affection—they must forever please the people, regardless of what is true or what needs to be done—soldiers and political men are often in conflict.

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.

An army in the field, in contact with the enemy, can remain idle only at its peril. Deterioration—of training, physical fitness, and morale—is immediate and progressive, despite the strongest command measures. The Frenchman who said that the one thing that cannot be done with bayonets is to sit on them spoke an eternal truth.

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.

Like the Indian Wars, it would leave a troubled feeling, a trauma, in its wake. Crusades, even when failures, are emotionally satisfying. Wars of containment, wars of policy, are not. They are hard to justify unless it is admitted that power, not idealism, is the dominant factor in the world, and that idealism must be backed by power.

Texas was where the action was. It became a lodestar, pulling an enormous number of the men—Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, James Bowie, and others—who were already in some way legends on the old frontier. As one historian wrote, Texas seemed to cast some sort of spell, to make men who were cold, pragmatic, and opportunist in the main, want to go and die.

Marine human material was not one whit better than that of the human society from which it came. But it had been hammered into form in a different forge, hardened with a different fire. The Marines were the closest thing to legions the nation had. They would follow their colors from the shores of home to the seacoast of Bohemia, and fight well either place.

If another war follows Korea, if American policy is threatened anywhere on the globe, it will not be years and months, as in the two world wars, or days, as in Korea, but only hours until American troops are committed. In battle, Americans learn fast—those who survive. The pity is, their society seems determined to make them wait until the shooting starts. The word should go out sooner.

It has been said that each generation must rewrite history in order to understand it. The opposite is true. Moderns revise history to make it palatable, not to understand it. Those who edit “history” to popular taste each decade will never understand the past—neither the horrors nor glories of which the human race is equally capable—and for that reason, they will fail to understand themselves.

From the first, the peasantry saw little to lose through Communist rule, and perhaps much to gain. Only much later, when the land is collectivized and the iron hand shows through the paternal glove, and when it is too late, does the peasant who has been Communized realize his loss. Communized, he ceases to be an individual man, losing an identity that even the most abject poverty could not take from his before.

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.

Yet every democratic government is reluctant to face the fact. Reservists and citizen-soldiers stand ready, in every free nation, to stand to the colors and die in holocaust, the big war. Reservists and citizen-soldiers remain utterly reluctant to stand and die in anything less. None want to serve on the far frontiers, or to maintain lonely, dangerous vigils on the periphery of Asia. There has been every indication that mass call-ups for cold war moves may result in mass disaffection.

It was the Army that knew the worst frustration, from July 1951 to the end of the war. The mission of the Army is to meet the enemy in sustained ground combat, and capture or destroy him. The Army was indoctrinated that strength lay not in defense but in attack, and that the offensive, as Clausewitz wrote, always wins. The Army not only could not win; it could not even work at the task. Yet it was locked in a wrestler’s grip with the enemy, suffering hardship, taking losses, even after the peace talks began.

The ranks of the Marines were now diluted with reservists, at least 50 percent. Few of them were mentally prepared to fight, or physically hardened to war. Inch’on, luckily, had been easy. But now, on the frozen hills above Yudam-ni, the Marines, regular and reservist alike, faced reality. Because their officers were tough-minded, because their discipline was tight, and because their esprit—that indefinable emotion of a fighting man for his standard, his regiment, and the men around him, was unbroken—weak and strong alike, they would face it well.

Mace’s tank, miraculously, had come through without loss among either crew or riders—the first and last vehicle to do so. Surprise, and their momentum, had served them well. And as they went through the British lines, these men knew the worst: that instead of holding only a small stretch of the road under light fire, a full Chinese division had locked itself over six miles of the route, covering it with small arms, mortars, and forty machine guns. Nor could Mace and party give warning; like those of the British, his radios wouldn’t carry over the pass.

But the most ironic thing, in those bitter days of December 1950, was that the commentators who cried havoc the loudest were the very men who had done most to change and destroy the old 1945 Army. These were the men who had shouted for the boys to be brought home, who had urged the troops to exert civil rights. They were the ones who had hinted that leaders trying to delay the frenetic demobilization, or the reform of the Army, were no better than the Fascists. And these were the men who screamed most shrilly when some young Americans on the field of battle behaved more like citizens than like soldiers.

And, caught in a Communist trap, the moral courage of some leaders grew less. The pressure on Tokyo to hold down the loss never ceased. In Korea, on tile ground, it intensified. It was no longer possible to permit juniors any latitude, or any possibility for error. What Boatner foresaw happened. Soon battalion commanders led platoons, and general officers directed company actions, for the loss of one patrol could ruin the career of a colonel. In one way, it was an efficient system. It worked, for the lines were stable, and no senior officer had enough to do. But the damage done to the Army command structure would be long in healing. If a new war came someday, there would be colonels and generals—who had been lieutenants and captains in Korea—who had their basic lessons still to learn.

And while the most desperate hours of the men within the Perimeter were passing, a second battle had been raging in their rear, back in the continental United States. When American soldiers went into action, it had become customary to provide them with a free issue of candy, cigarettes—and beer. In the places American troops fought, there were rarely any handy taverns or supermarkets. Reported to the home front, the “beer issue” rapidly became a national controversy. Temperance, church, and various civic groups bombarded the Pentagon and Congress with howls of protest against the corruption of American youth. One legislator, himself a man who took a brew now and then, tried a flanking attack against the complainers, saying on the floor of the House, “Water in Korea is more deadly than bullets!” 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.

Conventional air action, in Korea, could be decisive only when coupled with decisive ground action.

The time would come when every leader in the world would read the writings of the Chinese Communists—for it was barely possible that the war they waged was not so anachronistic as Americans believed. Quite possibly, it was the pattern of all future land wars.

But the damage done to the Army command structure would be long in healing. If a new war came someday, there would be colonels and generals—who had been lieutenants and captains in Korea—who had their basic lessons still to learn.

They have never failed to resort to guns, however, when other means fail.

In effect, Truman had engaged the nation in war by executive action.

The United States was unwilling to accept the losses required in putting new pressure—other than air bombardment—on the enemy,

is desperately hard for men to accept that there is a direct path from the highest ideals to the torture chamber—for

These: men had no hope of, nor interest in, making the world safe for democracy, or of destroying evil. They were vitally concerned with the continued good of the United States, and with preserving some semblance of order in the world, if not democracy.

was significant that every historic decision of the Truman Cabinet was debated by Congress only after it had been made irreversible.

A diplomat’s words must have no relation to actions—otherwise what kind of diplomacy is it? Words are one thing, actions another. Good words are a concealment of bad deeds. Sincere diplomacy is no more possible than drywater or iron wood.

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But the greatest weakness of the American Army was not in its numbers or its weapons, pitiful as they were. The United States Army, since 1945, had, at the demand of the public, been civilianized. The men in the ranks were enlistees, but these were the new breed of American regular, who, when they took up the soldier, had not even tried to put aside the citizen. They were normal American youth, no better, no worse than the norm, who though they wore the uniform were mentally, morally, and physically unfit for combat, for orders to go out and die.

To make a war, sometimes it is necessary that everyone guess wrong.

If the United States ground forces had not eventually held in Korea, Americans would have been faced with two choices: holocaust or humiliation. General, atomic war, in a last desperate attempt to save the game, would have gained Americans none of the things they seek in this world; humiliating defeat and withdrawal from Korea would have inevitably surrendered Asia to a Communist surge, destroying forever American hopes for a free and ordered society across the world.

He had some new officers, some of them recallees. These men were not eager. They were patriotic men, with good records. But listening for the trumpet, they had received instead orders to Korea, telling them to go and serve, not saying why. They had little interest in holding the far frontier. They were citizens, and each of them had better things to do.

Travis no longer expected rescue. He wrote, apparently, to stir his countrymen into action, that the country might be saved:   . . . I shall have to fight the enemy on his own terms. I will . . . do the best I can . . . the victory will cost the enemy so dear, that it will be worse for him than defeat. I hope your honorable body will hasten reinforcements. . . . Our supply of ammunition is limited. . . . God and Texas. Victory or Death.

important. The enemy, already in Korea, never utilized it in his plan of action, because the terrain was virtually impassable. More important than the gap separating Eighth Army and X Corps were the maneuver formations of the armies

The Texan entrepreneur rarely owned credentials; some could hardly read or write. But they were dynamic; they were self-reliant, free men with no real use for either gentlemen or beggars, free as few men in a compressing society could still be. They did not work inside companies or with companies; they bought companies and piled them one atop the other, like the old cattle baron had once built up his range piece by piece.

The problem was caused by rice. The prisoners ate rice as if they had never eaten before, and kept the new toilets busy. And rice feces, among the various kinds, are unique. They come out as small hard balls, tough as cement, insoluble in water. They will not float, nor will they wash away. They lay by the hundreds of millions on the beach, like dark, ugly snails.

Every age has a people or a culture that believes the shortest distance between dreams and goals is a bomb, a bullet, a gas oven, or a keen Toledo sword and burning stake. Because

The Frenchman who said that the one thing that cannot be done with bayonets is to sit on them spoke an eternal truth.

the knowledge in men's minds had far more meaning for the future than whatever blood coursed in their veins.

Another expedition journeyed far to the east, across the Panhandle of Texas, and contacted a party of Caddoan Indians. These were Hasinai, but the Spaniards called them Tejas, from the Caddoan Teychas, meaning “allies” or “friends.” This word was spelled “Texas” frequently in old Spanish, in which the “x” was substituted for a “j” sound, and from this mistaken tribal name the land derived its name.

No matter how cultured or ancient the civilization, no average American is going to condone the absence of flush toilets. Not now, not ever. The United States Government and international planners may as well face that simple fact.

And it was no accident, in the late forties, that the makers of American policy, unwilling to backtrack with the public, began to try to isolate foreign policy decisions from public and Congressional control. The great decisions—the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine—that gave the earth a hope of eventual order were not instantly popular with the American people. There was no great attempt to sell them—it was significant that every historic decision of the Truman Cabinet was debated by Congress only after it had been made irreversible. The makers of foreign policy, not by accident, universally held Lockean notions of federal executive power; and, not by accident, they escaped the popular will.

At the end of World War II, American military policy, digesting the Japanese lessons in China, was to control air and sea lanes throughout the East but never to engage in ground hostilities on the Asian mainland. As one spokesman put it, “There was no point to mucking about through Manchuria.

Half contemptuously, American military men spoke of “elusive” Lin Piao, and of the “poet” Mao Tse-tung. Mao Tse-tung, Premier of China, had already revealed to the world how his Communist armies operated—how they flowed from place to place, fighting when fighting was profitable, biding their time when it was not. What Mao Tse-tung had written was instructive, and intensely practical for a war in Asia—but because the Chinese wrote in poetic language, not in the military terminology popular in the West, no ambitious second-year ROTC cadet would have dared quote him seriously.

It was inevitable that the United States should take the position that the North Korean Communist State must now be destroyed for its lawlessness and that all Korea should be united under the government of the Taehan Minkuk. Actually, the Communist world had not broken the law, for one of the continuing tragedies of mankind is that there is no international law. The Communist world had tried to probe, a gambit, and had been strongly checked. And the Communists would regard an American move to punish the “law-breaker” not so much as justice but as a United States gambit of its own.

The surprise pointed up a continuing of American Intelligence. The various intelligence agencies poured a vast amount of information into Washington; they knew the numbers of divisions, guns, tanks, and naval craft of potential enemies. But this intelligence could not be evaluated because Washington had not even one pipeline into official circles of enemy capitals; they could not even estimate what the potential aggressor was thinking or might do. This was no change from the past. In December 1941, American Intelligence knew that strong carrier task forces of the Imperial Japanese Navy had left port. But not understanding official Japanese thinking, the fact had meant nothing to Washington. The situation in 1950 was no change from the past, and there would be little change in the future. Now, Sunday morning 25 June, there were observers in Washington who recalled a similar shock on another Sunday eight and one half years before.

Americans who felt, and still feel, that their soldiers taken by a power of different culture and lesser standards of humanity should be, or will be, treated in accordance with decent Western standards are naïve.

Something new had happened. The United States had gone to war, not under enemy attack, nor to protect the lives or property of American citizens. Nor was the action taken in crusading spirit, as in World Wars I and II, to save the world. The American people had entered a war, not by the roaring demand of Congress—which alone could constitutionally declare a state of war—or the public, but by executive action, at the urging of an American proconsul across the sea, to maintain the balance of power across the sea. Many Americans, who had never adjusted to their country’s changed position in the world,

To remain a great power, the United States had to provide the best in nuclear delivery systems. But to properly exercise that power with any effect in the world—short of blowing it up—the United States had also to provide the bread-and-butter weapons that would permit her ground troops to live in battle.

The U.N. air interdiction against North Korea went on, destroying what little was left of its economy, making life utterly miserable for its people, but affecting the dug-in Chinese and North Korean armies, supplied from privileged sanctuary across the Yalu, hardly at all.

In Nevada, at Frenchman’s Flat, a bright flash and ugly mushroom cloud had signified a gigantic change in the tactical battlefield—a change that had not come about at Hiroshima, despite statements to the contrary. In its early years the atomic device had remained a strategic weapon, suitable for delivery against cities and industries, suitable to obliterate civilians, men, women, and children by the millions, but of no practical use on a limited battlefield—until it was fired from a field gun. Until this time, 1953, the armies of the world, including that of the United States, had hardly taken the advent of fissionable material into account. The 280mm gun, an interim weapon that would remain in use only a few years, changed all that, forever. With an atomic cannon that could deliver tactical fires in the low-kiloton range, with great selectivity, ground warfare stood on the brink of its greatest change since the advent of firepower. The atomic cannon could blow any existing fortification, even one twenty thousand yards in depth, out of existence neatly and selectively, along with the battalions that manned it. Any concentration of manpower, also, was its meat. It spelled the doom of Communist massed armies, which opposed superior firepower with numbers, and which had in 1953 no tactical nuclear weapons of their own. The 280mm gun was shipped to the Far East. Then, in great secrecy, atomic warheads—it could fire either nuclear or conventional rounds—followed, not to Korea, but to storage close by. And with even greater secrecy, word of this shipment was allowed to fall into Communist hands. At the same time, into Communist hands wafted a pervasive rumor, one they could neither completely verify nor scotch: that the United States would not accept a stalemate beyond the end of summer. The psychological pressures on Chinese Intelligence became enormous. Neither an evaluative nor a collective agency, even when it feels it is being taken, dares ignore evidence.

Emotionally and politically, Syngman Rhee could not accept the armistice terms. They left his nation and people divided; they left a million South Koreans dead seemingly in vain. Americans who grew bitter at old Syngman Rhee during these days, when it seemed he might wreck the peace, should have been able to imagine what Abraham Lincoln would have felt, or done, had Britain and France imposed an armistice upon the United States in 1863, leaving it forcibly divided, perhaps forever.

from failure to understand clearly that Communists negotiate fairly only when it is in their interest to do so, or when unbearable pressure is placed upon them,

American newspapers never again devoted much attention to the exploits or condition of the ROK Army. Consequently, few Americans have understood the ROK contribution to the Korean War, and most have tended to deprecate it.