If they did not act upon the field of battle as Western generals did, it was because they did not command a Western army

Saturday, October 17th, 2020

This Kind of War by T.R. FehrenbachBy the middle of November, 1950, approximately 180,000 Chinese waited in front of the Eighth Army, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), while 120,000 lurked in the mountains surrounding Changjin Reservoir on X Corps’ flank:

While China broadcast to the world that Chinese “volunteers” would enter the Korean fighting, under Kim Il Sung, the leaders of the CCF never relinquished control of their forces.

And it would have been considerable news to the 300,000 Chinese soldiers massed in the cold valleys of Korea to learn that they had volunteered. Many of them did not even know in what part of the world they waited.

Lin Piao, and the major leaders of the Chinese Communist Forces, were not simple peasant leaders. The vast majority of the CCF generals were graduates of Whampoa Military Academy or of Russian schools. They had studied Clausewitz and Jomini and the battles of Cannae and Tannenberg as thoroughly as any West Pointer, and they had been engaged in war for all their adult lives. But if they did not act upon the field of battle as Western generals did, it was because they did not command a Western army.

The hordes of the Red Army were tough and battle-hardened, but they could not read or write. They had no radios, nor did they have much telephone equipment. They had no air force, or any massive artillery. They were weak in motor transport. Their arms were a miscellany of United States, Japanese, and Russian equipment. They had very few of the things a European or Western army required for war.

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They had three immense advantages: their own minds, trained to war in the vast reaches of the Middle Kingdom, which instinctively thought in terms of fluid maneuver, without regard to battle lines: the hardihood and sturdy legs of their peasant troops, who could travel long miles on very little; and the enemy’s complete lack of belief in their own existence.

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Americans believed it incredible that any army of significant size could cross the Yalu and deploy in Korea without observation by their air forces. Daily American aircraft flew over all North Korea; and no armies were ever sighted.

Each night, between nine and three, the Chinese troops covered eighteen miles:

When light came, every man, every gun, every animal, was hidden from sight. In the deep valleys, in the thick forests, in the miserable villages huddled on the forlorn plateaus, the Chinese rested by day.

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It was not only cunning and hardihood, but this perfect march and bivouac discipline that caused U.N. aircraft to fly over the CCF hundreds of times without ever once seeing anything suspicious. Even aerial photography revealed nothing.

It was a feat that Xenophon’s hoplites, marching back from Persia to the sea, could have performed. Julius Caesar’s hard legions could have done it, and more — the Roman manuals stated that the usual day’s march for a legion was twenty miles, to be covered in five hours.

It is extremely doubtful if any modern Western army, bred to wheels, could have matched it. It was almost impossible for Western generals, even those who knew of Xenophon and Caesar, to credit it.

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