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The North Koreans had nearly pushed the 8th Army into the sea.The author was highly critical of Washington politicians to allow our Armed Services to deteriorate while the Cold War was escalating. Our army was green and poorly trained. Truman and SecDef had penny pinched the army to near collapse. This book was my first encounter with the Korean War and it inspired me to read a dozen other books on the war. His book was a warning for change.This book is very engaging and I would suggest anybody interested in the Korean War to read this book. In many ways the book is a 5 star effort but since its not a complete story of the war like Clay Blair's book, a 4 star rating was given. The author has such an engaging style; it pulled me into the battle with his powerful passages. The author covers only a select number of engagements, some we won, others we lost.With the outbreak of war only 5 years after the end of WWII, I expected our troops would be in peak condition but that couldn't have been farther from the truth.
It is written in short, declarative sentences, not unlike something Hemingway might have written.The author moves seamlessly from the foxholes in Korea to the highest offices of power in Washington. .well, you know the rest. Perhaps the best chapter is "Proud Allegiances" in which Fehrenbach discusses the nation's failures coming after World War II which led to the debacle in Korea.As bad as things were, there were some shining stars, and again, the US Marines come off looking pretty good, but then they never fell prey to societal political correctness that began during World War II and have only gotten worse.Highly recommended for all senior officers headed for senior service schools, preferably before they get there. The chapters are essentially short essays, and can be read as stand-alone pieces. And the rest was exemplified by the Korean War.This classic will never go out of currency, though occasionally it might go out of print. This is written in a completely different style than I am used to coming from Fehrenbach.
Wonderful book. The insights and sensitivities of the author are amazing. I am a 70 year old bookworm. I have never read a better book.
Once Stalin made it clear he was not going to invest good rubels after bad the Chinese, technically neutral in the conflict, sent hundreds of thousands of volunteer forces across the Yalu. For the Chinese the concern was one of the United Nations forces crossing the Yalu and taking possession of industrial Manchuria. Certainly the Soviet Union bankrolled the North Korean army, but quickly abandoned its support after the Inchon landing.
I discovered the book in a box of paperbacks shipped to 3rd Phantom Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) in Iraq immediately following the OPERATION DESERT STORM cease fire. Worse yet was that the initially deployed US forces fought against advancing North Korean T-34/85 tanks with anti-tank weapons and ammunition that were long since proven ineffective against post 1940 armor. THIS KIND OF WAR was the first book I undertook to read about the Korean War.
It was not until the North Koreans had almost overrun all of South Korea did the "Empire strike back" and temporarily push the enemy back to the Yalu.One of the single greatest American political misunderstandings was that the Soviets and Chinese initiated the conflict as a proxy war. Thus began two years of additional see-saw battles ending up back near the 38th parallel.Overall THIS KIND OF WAR describes how quickly a superpower forgets the lessons learned from the last great war, and just as quickly adapts under pressure to a new kind of limited conflict. Even though my father was a 7th Infantry veteran of that war I knew very little about the conflict.In the first few chapters I was enlightened to the fact that the United States, one of the great military powers after World War Two, had seemingly forgotten the lessons so painfully learned five years earlier.
Although the North Korean army was amply supplied and trained by the Soviets, the southern Republic of Korea forces were woefully equipped by United States.
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. 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. 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. The most spectacular and decisive actions by the enemy occurred in near pitch darkness and the US forces clearly feared the night. There aren't many "classics" of history or literature addressing the Korean War.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
T.R. Bush."Signs of age aside, Fehrenbach pays special attention to two issues that are essentially tangential to the main story of the Korean War. It was surprising to read how the communist forces "owned the night" during the entire conflict. 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. 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. 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.
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. First, the author is clearly disgusted at what happened to the US Army in the years after the Second World War.
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