Isegoria

It was the boast of the great Frederick, T. R. Fehrenbach reminds us (in This Kind of War), that when he went to war neither the peasants of the fields nor the tradesmen of his towns should know or care:

Because Frederick involved his small state of Prussia in wars too big for even his iron grenadiers, he was not quite able to live up to his boast — but it is an accurate statement of the conditions of warfare in the Age of Reason.

In the eighteenth century, men and rulers were sick to death of unlimited war. For almost two centuries jihad had been preached; armies had crossed Europe like ravening locusts; millions had died; and at the end of the savagery nothing had been accomplished. The survivors still insisted on being Calvinists, Catholics, or Lutherans, short of extermination.

In Frederick’s time men were still men, and they must compete — but they no longer trusted the angel’s trumpet, or would have heeded had it blown. Wars there still were, but they developed in a new, a limited, fashion: to snatch a province here, to defend one there, to place a friendly head upon some throne, or to remove an unfriendly one from it.

The statesmen of Europe, even though they fought, wanted a certain order to the world. They called it the balance of power. It was a desperately fragile system, but it was the best they could design.

After two hundred years, and after a new resort to savagery in the period of the “nations in arms,” men had still evolved nothing with any more promise. There was a new hope of an eventual world order through the uniting of all nations in peace, but the hope was still only that, and no more. Power remained the fulcrum of world action. And unless some sort of balance could be maintained, the world would once again erupt in perhaps the last of all “holy” wars.

When the Soviet bloc pushed at the balance of world order in 1950, the men in the United States Government reacted the best way they knew how. So far as they would be able, they would reject resort to cataclysmic war. They felt, in their hearts, that a final test of strength between Communist and non-Communist would in the end decide nothing, except who remained alive in a shattered world. They would accept such a test only as a last resort.

They accepted, tacitly, to play the Communist game of limited war, for limited ends. It must never be forgotten that the game was pushed upon them — they did not precipitate it. Their cruel choice was that of cataclysm, humiliation, or surrender.

A great and continuing weakness of the United States Army fighting in Asia, T. R. Fehrenbach argues (in This Kind of War), 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. Relatively small numbers of enemy flowed around the high ground held by American troops, went behind them, and interdicted their supply roads.

Road-bound, the American commanders became understandably nervous. Invariably, both men and leaders began to think of retreat, falling back to form a new line. This was in many respects a frame of mind. The North Korean forces in the American rear were small, ill supplied, and in effect often cut off from contact with their own bases.

Able to live on three rice balls a day, capable of carrying guns and ammunition over the steepest slopes on foot, this isolation bothered the Communists not at all.

It drove the Americans, hating isolated action, dependent upon wheels, to desperation. Ironically, the Indian-fighting army of seventy-five years earlier would have understood the new form of warfare perfectly. On the plains and mountains of the American West, the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare. It had learned to ride hard and march hard, live light, and to operate in isolated columns, giving the enemy no rest.

But even hard lessons can be soon forgotten.

The last unit to flee across the Naktong river had a problem, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War):

As the rear guard came across the bridge to the east side, throngs of Koreans followed them, filling the bridge with jostling bodies. General Hobart Gay, who had ordered the bridge to be sent up only at his express command, instructed them to go back to the far side, and clear the bridge.

This they did, as dusk approached. Then, with the refugees pushed back onto the west shore, the rear guard turned and pelted across to the friendly bank — but the second they turned, the Koreans dashed madly for the bridge and soon filled it, even before the cavalrymen were across.

Three times, at Gay’s order, they repeated the maneuver, without success. Short of shooting them there was no way to keep the Koreans from using the bridge. Even telling them it would be blown did no good.

Now it was growing dark, and the Inmun Gun was closing. As the rear guard recrossed to the east side for the third time, with the mass of Koreans close behind them, Hobart Gay, his face pale, said, “Blow it.” He had no other choice.

Several hundred Koreans went into the river with the bridge.

At the start of the Korean War, the American troops were driven back, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), but they weren’t at all prepared to retreat:

Gay, who had been Patton’s chief of staff in Europe, admitted he did not know how to conduct a retreat — thus far in his military experience he had never been involved in one.

[...]

The land viewed from afar is beautiful, rolling terraces and rice paddies, each a subtly different shade of green. But each paddy is a humid, stinking oven, and the bare hills are like broiler plates.

When they left their trucks and moved up onto the hills and ridges, American soldiers, as one officer put it, “dropped like flies.” Their legs, unused to hard pulls, gave out. The heat and exertion gave them throbbing headaches. During these weeks exhaustion and heat knocked out more men than NKPA bullets.

Short of water, lacking water discipline, they drank from ditches and paddies, developed searing dysentery.

They sweated until their shirts and belts rotted, and their bellies turned shark-white. Salt tablets became such an item of priority that they had to be air-dropped on units, along with vital ammunition.

Korea is a land cut by multiple hills and valleys, lacking roads. It is no terrain for a mechanized army. The principal — and sometimes only — means of getting from one place to another through the hills is shank’s mare. But American troops, physically unhardened for foot marches, were road-bound. They defended on roads, attacked on roads, retreated on roads. If their vehicles couldn’t go, they did not go either.

FEAF soon made the roads unpopular with the Inmun Gun. On the roads, tactical air strafed them, rocketed them, burned them. The Inmun Gun left the roads and went over the ridges, and it seemed to bother them not at all. They went stolidly up the slopes with the patient, sideways, Korean peasant tread, and they carried their machine guns, mortars, and mountains of ammunition with them.

They set their guns up on the high ground behind the Americans, interdicting their supply roads. Americans had trouble attacking up the hills to knock them off. And when their roads were blocked, Americans could hardly drag themselves over the hills to safety, let alone their heavy equipment. Second to the Soviets, the American Army became the principal supplier to the Inmun Gun of guns and ammunition.

The great problem was that in 1950, an infantryman in Korea was called on to do almost the same things Caesar’s legions had done, and to suffer the same hardships. In twenty centuries, infantry warfare has changed but little in the burdens it puts on the men in the mud. But in 1950, while ground warfare had changed little, the American society and the American soldier had.

T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War) the American retreat at the start of the Korean War:

But most of the heroic actions had been those of individuals, of single officers or men who fought bravely and well. Because without tight discipline their bravery could not be coordinated into a team effort, many of these men died in vain.

[...]

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.

[...]

Once aroused, a democracy can match a totalitarian state in every facet of strength — it can be stronger, for totalitarianism has built-in bureaucratic weaknesses. A Hitler can command, and men march — but a Hitler can go mad — and there is no one to say him nay.

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.

[...]

Soldiers fight from discipline and training, citizens from motivation and ideals. Lacking both, it is amazing that the American troops did even as well as they did.

[...]

In actuality, the NKPA held a slight superiority in men on 20 July. By 22 July, U.N. and North Korean forces were on a par, and by the end of July United Nations forces actually outnumbered the Inmun Gun, an advantage they never again lost.

[...]

But men are not ciphers, nor do the battles always go to the big battalions.

[...]

But few correspondents saw that officers, giving crucial commands, could never be sure if their orders would be obeyed. A colonel who sends men to hold a vital hill, and who sees them again and again “take a vote on it with their feet” by marching to the rear, is soon apt to be a straitjacket case.

Major General Dean found himself trying to hold back the North Koreans at Taejon, but, as T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), he had almost no communications:

If he wanted to know what was happening to the front-line troops, he had to be on the front lines. He had found, sadly, that it was much easier to get a message to the rear than it was to get one carried forward.

[...]

He had three basic reasons for remaining inside the beleaguered city; one, to keep up the crumbling morale of the 34th Infantry and the other defenders by the sight of their commander moving shoulder to shoulder with them; two, to set an example for the ROK officers and staffs fighting alongside the Americans, who by now had all virtually climbed on the Pusan Express; and three, Bill Dean wanted to see close up just what kind of fighting cat the North Korean was.

[...]

The North Korean assault on Taejon was like all other North Korean attacks — they crashed into the defenders head on pinning them down, forcing them back, while at the same time they flanked or infiltrated to the rear and blocked the defenders’ retreat. At any given moment, it was impossible for Dean or any other commander to know what the situation was to his rear; this was a kind of tactic that the Europe-trained American officers, who liked to keep tidy lines, could not grasp until too late.

As it developed, Dean kept what he wanted of the 34th in the city, and sent other elements of the division, including his own HQ, to the east. As he would say much later, what he did afterward could have been done by any competent sergeant — but in saying this, Dean was thinking of the old Army, not the forces of 1950.

[...]

He decided to go tank hunting. He did not know it, but Colonel Beauchamp, to whom he had just given command of the 34th, was doing the same. Like Colonel Martin, Beauchamp had found everyone deathly sick of the T-34’s, but now things were just a bit better, for a few of the new 3.5-inch bazookas, designed to stop any known armor, had been flown in from the States.

With Beauchamp guiding and directing a team, the 3.5’s knocked out one tank west of Taejon.

[...]

Meanwhile, hundreds of North Korean soldiers, disguised in the white robes of farmers, were infiltrating into the city. Once inside, they threw off the misleading civilian attire and opened fire on American troops. Soon snipers were everywhere.

Using HQ and service personnel, American officers were having very poor success in rooting them out. Most American boys no longer knew how to play cowboys and Indians, particularly with live ammunition.

By afternoon, Dean had located another bazooka man, this time with an ammo bearer.

Dodging sniper fire, shooting a few snipers on the way, his party hunted up another tank. But this target was covered by North Korean infantry, and rifle fire kept them from getting close. Dean and the bazooka men sneaked back through a Korean courtyard, and climbed up to the second story of a house facing the street.

Here, cautiously looking out the street window, Dean saw the muzzle of the tank’s 85mm gun pointed at him, not more than a dozen feet away.

The bazooka man aimed where Dean pointed, and fired. The blowback from the rocket shook the whole room. The shaped charge burned into the tank at the juncture of turret and body

From the tank came a shrill, horrible ululation.

“Hit ’em again!” Dean said.

After the third round, the screaming ended abruptly, and the T-34 began to smoke.

[...]

Because he took the wrong turn, Bill Dean would not rejoin the American Army until September, 1953. Thirty-five days later, after wandering lost in the hills, after making heroic attempts to reach his own lines, Bill Dean was betrayed to the Inmun Gun by Koreans. When they jumped him, he tried to make them kill him, but they put ropes around his wrists and dragged him to a police station. There they threw him in a cage, the sort reserved for the town drunk.

Only much later did the Inmun Gun realize that the old-looking, filthy, 130-pound emaciated soldier they had captured was an American general.

General Dean once said that he wouldn’t award himself a wooden star for what he did as a commander. His country saw more clearly.

It gave him the Medal of Honor.

At the start of the Korean War, casualties among officers of high rank in the United States Army were greater in proportion to those of any fighting since the Civil War, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War):

They had to be. There were few operable radios with the regiments in Korea, and almost no communication from command posts down to the front positions.

If commanders wanted to know what was happening, or make their orders known, they had to be on the ground.

And the troops themselves, who had never developed any respect for N.C.O.’s or junior officers, often would ignore their orders — particularly if the order involved something unpleasant or unpopular.

Understandably, the junior leaders soon became defeatist. A great many of them died, recklessly, but it was not enough.

It was not because the colonels and generals had lost their minds that so many of them began to stand with bazooka teams or to direct rifle fire. There was no other way. So it was that men like Bob Martin were blown apart doing a rifleman’s job, or battalion commanders like Smith of the 3rd, 34th Infantry, collapsed and had to be evacuated, and men like Major Dunn, marching ahead of a rifle company, were lost.

The high-priced help was expendable, true. They too were paid to die. But it was no way to run a war.