Tr Fehrenbach This Kind Of War Quotes

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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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Americans should remember that while barbarians may be ignorant they are not always stupid.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Citizens fly to defend the homeland, or to crusade. But a frontier cannot be held by citizens, because citizens, in a republic, have better things to do.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Soviet strategy, like Soviet thinking, has always been devious where American has been direct.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
To make a war, sometimes it is necessary that everyone guess wrong.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
A war is made when a government believes that only through war, and at no serious risk to itself, it may gain its ends.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Revolution and terror are synonymous; only with the passage of time does any revolution become respectable.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
No matter how cultured or ancient the civilization, no average American is going to condone the absence of flush toilets. Not now, not ever.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness)
In addition to restraint of objective, the second necessary ingredient of limited war is a professional army large enough to handle any task.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
The vision of world government was, of course, a shining one. But what was tragic about all this was that nobody, not even liberal opinion, really wanted world government. What was wanted was a world without war.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This kind of peace)
Oddly, they were never sanguine about their own combat prowess. Most of them, officers and men, felt a deep respect for, and almost an inferiority before, the various professionals that comprised the other U.N. troops in Korea. Their praise of the allies—the French, Thais, Turks, and Abyssinians—was far removed from the grousing about allies that had marked most previous wars. Most Americans, privately, would admit the U.N. troops were better than they were.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
The last men of the division to come through, arriving within the British lines of the morning of 1 December, could remember very little of what they had experienced. There comes a time when the conscious mind accepts no more; as with women experiencing childbirth, even the memory of pain is blotted out.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Not until long afterward was it even dignified by the name of war—the governmental euphemism was Korean conflict—and it rapidly became the most forgotten war in American history. There was little in it, from near-disastrous beginning to honorable but frustrating end, that appealed to American sensibilities.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Just as the northern states of the American Union have overlooked and forgotten their occupation and reconstruction of the southern states, the West has dismissed the painful humiliations repeatedly visited upon the ancient Sinic culture in the past hundred years. Neither the South nor the Middle Kingdom has forgotten.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
It was not until the Korean War was many months old that new Army trainees began to live half their time in the field, and to undergo a third of their training by night. Slowly, commanders then began to restore the old hard slap and dash that had characterized Grant’s men in Virginia, Pershing’s AEF, and Patton’s armored columns.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
When the tide of combat turned against them or when small units were isolated and in danger of losing their POW’s, the vindictiveness of the North Korean soldier could not be restrained. Men accustomed to torture and summary execution all their lives, both from Japanese and Communist rulers, could not be expected to behave with nicety toward foreign captives. Nor did they.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Lin Piao’s forces had averaged twenty-four miles per day, on foot. In Shensi Province, far removed from the Nationalists and the eyes of the world, the Communist Chinese began to rebuild their base of power. They began to wage guerrilla warfare against the Nationalists. They were led by men who were now hardened soldiers, men who wanted above all else for China to be again a great power
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
During the early days of the war, the North Korean People’s Army never varied its tactics. It never had any need to do so. Its general maneuver was to press the ROK or American forces closely, engage with them by means of a frontal holding attack, while at the same time turning the enemy flank and infiltrating troops to the enemy rear. Against both ROK’s and United States troops, who were never able to establish a firm battle line, this tactic was ruinous.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
It seems likely the Russians never understood this inherent dichotomy in the American soul. They were genuinely irritated when the United States agreed to a world in which power ruled in 1944, then reneged and wanted some kind of parliamentary world democracy in 1945. This did seem double dealing, but it was hard for Russians to grasp the difficulties of the State Department, which, unlike the Soviet Foreign Office, could not wheel and deal with no regard to public consumption.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This kind of peace)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Americans - who were a real beneficiary of the British world stabilization, or empire - never quite understood its beneficial nature as far as the Atlantic world was concerned, at least not until it had begun to disappear. When British power cracked, the British Peace ended. Around the world, dozens of areas that had been ruled or overwhelmed by British power and influence would return to the instability, disruption, and petty wars they had known previously. Only now, this instability offered opportunities for Soviet influence.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This kind of peace)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Keiser, though not really understanding the seriousness of the situation, told him to use his own judgment. Peploe’s move, while it could not break the web of fate closing in about 2nd Division, diverted complete disaster. Rolling with the punch, fighting a battle royal, the men of the 38th pulled back astride the Ch’ongch’on during the night. As Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall put it, writing of this night of battle, “It is … a pity that young Americans have to die bravely but inconspicuously on a foreign hillside in a national cause and have no better words than these spoken of them.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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,
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Sitting in the lecture room, Sergeant Schlichter, like so many others, was taken sick. He was sent to the crude Chinese hospital with pneumonia. He almost died. But here, as he said, he saw the greatest example of faith he had ever seen, in the actions of Chaplain Emil Kapaun, who had been taken at Unsan. Father Kapaun, ill himself, stood in front of the POW’s, prayed, and stole food to share with other’s. By his example, he sometimes forced the little bit of good remaining in these starving men to the fore. But Chaplain Kapaun could not take command, and he soon grew deathly ill, probably as much from sorrow as from his own starvation.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
[Vandenberg] said: "I do not know why we must be the only silent partner in this Grand Alliance. There seems to be no fear of disunity, no hesitation in Moscow, when Moscow wants to assert unilateral war and peace aims which collide with ours. There seems to be no fear of disunity, no hesitation in London, when Mr. Churchill proceeds upon his unilateral way to make decisions often repugnant to our ideas and ideals.... "Honest candor compels us to reassert in high places our American faith in the Atlantic Charter. These basic pledges cannot now be dismissed as a mere nautical nimbus. They march with our armies. They sail with our fleets...they sleep with our martyred dead. The first requisite of honest candor...is to relight this torch. "I am not prepared to guarantee permanently the spoils of an unjust peace. It will not work. I am prepared by effective international cooperation to do our full part in charting happier and safer tomorrows.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This kind of peace)
oddly, it was with the Okies, Catholics, and Negroes that the Communists, on the whole, had small success. Many of the disadvantaged understood the dream of America better than those who had enjoyed its benefits. Sitting in the lecture room, Sergeant Schlichter, like so many others, was taken sick. He was sent to the crude Chinese hospital with pneumonia. He almost died. But here, as he said, he saw the greatest example of faith he had ever seen, in the actions of Chaplain Emil Kapaun, who had been taken at Unsan. Father Kapaun, ill himself, stood in front of the POW’s, prayed, and stole food to share with other’s. By his example, he sometimes forced the little bit of good remaining in these starving men to the fore. But Chaplain Kapaun could not take command, and he soon grew deathly ill, probably as much from sorrow as from his own starvation. Schlichter saw him put in a room, without food or medicine. No other American was allowed to treat the priest, and he soon died. He was not alone. Schlichter heard that no other chaplain survived the prison camps of Korea, the only class or group to be wiped out.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
it was the very antithesis of the American tradition of generalship, cutting across everything it had been taught to believe and do. Their new orders seemed to read: Fight on, but don’t fight too hard. Don’t lose—but don’t win, either. Hold the line, while the diplomats muddle through.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
No man likes to give up his life for an inconsequential reason, and there is no honor—only irony—to being the last man killed in a war.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
It is this final, basic pride—what will my buddies think?—that keeps most soldiers carrying on, beyond the dictates of good sense, which screams at them to run, to continue living, and to hell with war.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
However painful it is to contemplate, officers have to learn in battle. There simply is no other feasible way to learn experience commanding men in battle, except in battle.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
A man who has seen and smelled his first corpse on the battlefield soon loses his preconceived notions of what the soldier’s trade is all about. He learns how it is in combat, and how it must always be. He becomes a soldier, or he dies.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
There was talk, high-level talk, at Wake Island, Sunday, 15 October, but there was not enough communication.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Without effort, the enemy knew everything there was to know about the U.N. forces. The U.N., in turn, never knew the enemy existed—until it was much too late.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
The popular morality of what the Communist Chinese have done will probably be judged only in the light of whether or not they made China a great power, and only the future will tell that. If they fail, history will condemn them for the enormous suffering they inflicted upon their land; if they succeed, their own history will largely regard them as heroes,
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
They—those who lived—would have to learn again that discipline means keeping a full bandoleer of ammunition and a full canteen, despite their weight, and all the equipment men wiser than they had issued to them.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
General Hodge was criticized for this inflexible attitude; the world had not yet learned that it is completely impossible to do business with Russians except from either a position of power or upon Russian terms.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
problem was that America had fought the war—as she had most of her wars—as a crusade, while Russia had fought first for survival, then for power. Crusades are usually inconclusive; it was no accident that Russia won the peace. 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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Citizens, unless they hear the clarion call, or the angel’s trumpet, are apt to be a rabble in arms.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
But because Americans for the first time lived in a world in which they could not truly win, whatever the effort, and from which they could not withdraw, without disaster, for millions the result was trauma.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
But an opposition party—as each party discovers periodically in America—has certain shining advantages: it can carp and criticize all past and current mistakes without being too specific with its own remedies.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
The Frenchman who said that the one thing that cannot be done with bayonets is to sit on them spoke an eternal truth.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
The Security Council, the peace-keeping arm of the UN, emerged designed for only two functions: to prevent wars between small powers, and to crush any renewed threat from the old Axis enemy.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This kind of peace)
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,
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Ironically, the Chinese allowed those who ran toward the west to escape, and in many cases actually helped these men along by picking them up and carrying them until they were close to American lines. Those who stayed and fought were not seen again.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
most were neither heroes nor cowards. They were ordinary men, and they went with the tide, wherever it carried them.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Men are not ciphers, and hearts, even Communist hearts, are not potatoes, and Americans would do well to remember it.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
The balance of power can be maintained short of holocaust, but only if the trumpet is not sounded. The world of 1914 learned that lesson much too well.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
Winter came, and Charles Fletcher had to wear overcoat and gloves at his desk. Once, as an experiment, he put a glass of water on his space heater. The water turned to ice. Two weeks later, checking, he found it was still ice.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
No one will ever know how many soldiers and civilians died in the explosion or were hurled screaming into the Han to drown. The best estimates indicate the number was near one thousand.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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 acquiescence of the military toward the liberal view of life.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)