The Classic Military History of the Korean War

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	• This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History - Fiftieth Anniversary Edition T.R. Fehrenbach Potomac Books Inc., 2000 - 488 pages average customer review:based on 37 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Must-read for citizens

Fehrenbach's bang-up history of the Korean War is a terrific view of the conflict, written by one who was there. It is not, however, a matter of personal reminiscence.

Fehrenbach provides us both the high strategy of the war, the big picture, and the foxhole-to-foxhole fighting. He pays much more attention to other UN forces than later books.

But if it were only a great history of the war--including the years leading up to it--it would still be mandatory for a citizen.

However, Fehrenbach discusses the place of an army in a liberal society. The Korean War is his example, his subject matter. I would argue that the history of the war itself is secondary to its function as a source for his primary issue which seems to be war, violence, armies, in a liberal society which itself is in a world of nuclear catastrophe.

He makes the case that it is difficult to expect citizen-soldiers to fight and die to straighten out a bit of border here, or replace a government there. For that, we need legions who will fight for their colors, iron-hard and willing to die in the mud.
Citizen soldiers will fight when the trumpet calls jihad--an eerie use of the word forty years before the rest of us were interested--and want to see the victory.
The problem, Fehrenbach tells us, and we ought to know it, is that, if one side or the other is backed into a corner, nuclear war ensues.
The world could be considered, then, a chessboard, whose squares are not square and whose shape is irregular. If we let ourselves give up too many pawns, and too many squares ("what's an island in the middle of nowhere?), we would eventually find ourselves in check, with mate coming. Our only courses then would be complete surrender or to kick over the board with nuclear weapons.
No one square makes the difference, but after accumulating enough, the other side might decide to take their best shot. Whether they win or not will hardly be relevant. Better, TRF says, to make sure the other side never thinks it has a chance. And that requires policing the borders.

TRF calls for legions, and refers to Marines as opposed to the soft Army with which we began the Korean War. At one point, he refers to Marine units which, although drawn from garrison and reserves, were prepared because their officers were sufficiently hard-nosed. Sufficiently hard-nosed officers will, in peacetime, generate congressional inquiries. This, TRF more than implies, tells us about the forces in a liberal society which inevitably tend toward soft and unprepared forces. Legions, the legions of the damned, manned by expendable lower class men and officered by landless younger sons, succeeded for centuries, in part because society was tougher then. Just living as a civilian in England in, say, 1850 would be considered something like a refugee in extremis today. But primarily nobody particularly cared what went on in the regiments. So they were left alone to train as their officers thought they should be trained.

The performance of US troops in Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and in Iraq shows the mental and physical toughness, the discipline and the courage, the training and the equipment that TRF called for. Whether he would think of our forces today as the legions he envisioned is an interesting question.

I recall, as a grunt in the late Sixties, seeing others in my uniform in airports. I remarked not too long ago that they all looked as if they needed their hand patted. I suppose I did, too. I contrasted that with going through DFW in 2004, noticing the troops who all had their game faces on. I had no interest in patting anybody's hand, although buying a drink or two seemed reasonable.

Perhaps we've reached the equilibrium. The problem is to insist on staying there. The forces that would soften the military remain, uneducated by the blood they have shed so many times in the past. But, it was never their blood, anyway.

So, citizens need to read this book. And they need to pay attention to more than the history of the Korean War so ably presented.

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Superb History

This is probably the best book on the Korean war ever written.

Mr. Fehrenbach was a teacher of history when the war broke out. He was also in the Army's reserve component. When his unit was mobilized, he went with it. He served throughout the war in positions that gave him excellent, first hand, experience.

When the war ended and his unit was demobilized, he went back to his civilian profession of teaching history. He also started writing this book.

While I was attending the Infantry Officer Advance Course (IOAC) in '79-80, ever general officer who came to address the assembled classes at, what we affectionately called, Benning School for Boys told us READ THIS BOOK. And they were RIGHT!

It covers the gamet of aspects relating to modern warfare from the perspective of the simple soldier to the generals to the national leaders. From the poigant anecdotes of paratroopers gone AWOL so they could get to the fighting, to the making of disasters, e.g., Task Force SMITH and the retreat of the 2d Infantry Division during the Chinese Intervention.

It is a MUST read for everyone who is a military officer and anyone who has an abiding interest in military history.

Regards,

Chuck Pelto

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Still looking for Proud Legions

There aren't many "classics" of history or literature addressing the Korean War. T.R. Fehrenbach's "This Kind of War", first published in the early 1960s, is probably the closest thing we have to a Korean War history by an American that has endured.

Make no mistake, this book shows its age. To begin with, the Japanese are "Japs", Asians are "Orientals" and the African-American troops who served in Korea (often quite poorly, the author stresses) are "Colored." Beyond the superficial shock of the use of non-PC terms is the questionable legacy of Harry Truman, especially his commitment to achieving status quo ante bellum on the Korean peninsula from late 1951 onward in the face of North Korean and Chinese attack and weakness, are vigorously questioned. Heading into the US presidential election of 2008, TIME Magazine ran a cover story asking which candidate of either party had the mettle and virtues of Harry Truman. One gets the sense in reading "This Kind of War" that the 2008 TIME cover is like asking contemporary Americans to imagine a 2060 magazine cover asking "who has what it takes to be the next George W. Bush?"

Signs of age aside, Fehrenbach pays special attention to two issues that are essentially tangential to the main story of the Korean War. First, the author is clearly disgusted at what happened to the US Army in the years after the Second World War. He sees an army that had gone soft and pours forth bile at the post-war Doolittle Commission that smoothed out the rough edges of the Army and strove to make the Army a more livable occupation for the typical American. Fehrenbach addresses the issue specifically in chapter 25, titled "Proud Legions." He argues that the US needs a tough core of professional soldiers if it is to play a leading role in the world, not an Army of citizen-soldiers who are apt to complain, not take orders and to look longingly to their return home.

This quote captures Fehrenbach's sentiment and his central argument in the book: "...some American mothers had given their sons everything in the world, except a belief in themselves, their culture, and their manhood. They had, some of them, sent their sons out into a world with tigers without telling them that there were tigers, and with no moral armament."

Second, and somewhat related, is the issue of American performance and treatment in the prisoner war camps of the north. Fehrenbach frequently comments on the fragility of US servicemen in northern POW camps and how quickly and easily they broke compared to other Allied POWs, such as the Turks, none of whom died or collaborated while in captivity. Meanwhile, the author argues, the US was pushed around by a sorry collection of communist POWs on Koje-do Island in the south.

Some final comments are worthwhile. It was surprising to read how the communist forces "owned the night" during the entire conflict. The most spectacular and decisive actions by the enemy occurred in near pitch darkness and the US forces clearly feared the night. Today, and really since the 1960s, US forces rely heavily on their technical superiority in night-vision and infra-red and have thus successfully taken back the night.

Next, the author argues that the typical reference to Chinese hordes by American press was a propaganda tool, pure-and-simple, to make Americans back home feel better about the horrendous defeats suffered by their sons and husbands in Korea against an ethnic group many saw as mere "laundry men." Fehrenbach stresses continually that the UN forces actually held a numerical edge for most of the war - at least from the time of the Pusan perimeter in early 1950. Reference to communist "hordes" was really a fabrication meant to make Americans feel better about the unprecedented defeats of the US Army.

A final point - the US administration of Harry Truman, today seen as a paragon of sage statesmanship, was willing to endure upwards of 30,000 casualties a year to convince the communists that it was committed to maintain the status quo ante bellum on the Korean Peninsula. How many American casualties will the next US president endure to establish Western commitment to not see Iraq descend into genocidal civil war or come under the grips of an intractable Sunni or Shiite government?

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An Insightful Study

This excellent book provides a view of the "forgotten" Korean War. It goes into the background and into the causes of the total lack of readiness exhibited by the US. This insight is particularly useful in that it shows a direct path to actions in the recent past such as Bill Clinton wasting large numbers of expensive cruise missiles blowing up insignificant targets but studiously avoiding putting in ground troops.

The Classic Military History of the Korean War

T.R. Fehrenbach's "This Kind of War" is the classic military history of the Korean War. Fehrenbach addresses the strategic and operational aspects of the conflict, but much of his focus is on the tactical experience of U.S. units. His book is a searing indictment of the U.S. military and of the United States for having failed to maintain combat-ready forces less than five years removed from the end of the Second World War.

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps elements thrust into sudden conflict in June 1950 following the communust invasion of the Republic of Korea had to relearn, the hard way, all the old and hard lessons of warfare. Young soldiers who had been coddled by peacetime occupation duty in Japan found the battlefield to be a merciless place of death for those who were unprepared. In Fehrenbach's words "They were learning, in the hardest school there was, that it is a soldier's lot to suffer and that his destiny may be to die."

Fehrenbach's prose is blunt and straightforward; the narrative sketches the ancient truths of combat and their modern realities and pulls no punches with respect to the shortcomings of both the military and the political leadership. Aging General Douglas McArthur ran great risks during the Battle of the Pusan Perimeter in August 1950 to husband forces for the spectacular September counterstroke at Inchon that turned the tide of combat, only to underestimate the risk of Chinese intervention and suffer an humiliating defeat inside North Korea in November. In parallel manner, the Truman Administration made the hard political decision to intervene in June 1950, then failed to think through the likely implications of going north to the Chinese border in October 1950.

Fehrenbach dispenses credit where due. The U.S. Eighth Army pulled itself together after its initial defeats to successfully defend South Korea, then reconstituted itself a second time after its defeat by the Chinese near the Yalu River. It would persevere to the armistice in 1953. Thousands of individual soldiers, NCO's, and officers overcame the shock of combat to become highly effective fighters, ultimately fighting far larger formations of Chinese and North Korean communists to a bloody standstill in the nation's first modern and rather unhappy experience with limited war.

This book is highly recommended to the student of the military art and of the Korean War. Fehrenback's narrative provides a vivid reminder that we live in a world of tigers.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Updated with maps, photographs, and battlefield diagrams, this special fiftieth anniversary edition of the classic history of the Korean War is a dramatic and hard-hitting account of the conflict written from the perspective of those who fought it. Partly drawn from official records, operations journals, and histories, it is based largely on the compelling personal narratives of the small-unit commanders and their troops. Unlike any other work on the Korean War, it provides both a clear panoramic overview and a sharply drawn "you were there" account of American troops in fierce combat against the North Korean and Chinese communist invaders. As Americans and North Koreans continue to face each other across the 38th Parallel, This Kind of War commemorates the past and offers vital lessons for the future.

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