Roughstuff's Korean War Archive
book reviews and summaries, comments, analysis
Ridgway Duels for Korea, by Roy Appleman
You don't have to say much about this book or any Appleman book, for that matter. It is excellent: topnotch, engaging, informative. Appleman is the best writer about the Korean War, and readers of my reviews on this site are already familiar with the 'pre-quels' to this text...Escaping the Trap, and The Chinese Confront McArthur.
Besides...you have to like a book about Korea which mentions Dean Acheson exactly once and only once, and doesn't mention Maggie Higgins at all! This comes not only from Appleman's focus on the conduct of the war-- the entire book is reports from the battlefront. It also comes from Appleman's sense of perspective. To Acheson, the war was nothing more than a chess game where he could aggrandize his foreign policy skills, deftly covering the blunders in Truman's policy that led to the war in the first place. To Maggie Higgins it was nothing more than her chance to be a debutante feminoid journalist. Neither Ridgway nor Appleman had time for either. There was a war to be won and lives to be saved. Ridgway's task was to make it clear that the US forces--and the US Army in particular--could stand, fight, and defeat the Chinese and NKPA without the crutch of road-bound heavy armor.
Appleman's task was to make this story readable and comprehensible. He succeeds admirably. It took a sustained, patient but firm effort by Ridgway to get US troops to have the confidence and poise to resume the offense northward. To do this, Ridgway needed to realistically assess his command's chances of standing against the Chinese 4th offensive. The chances were not good. Seoul changed hands for a 3rd time, the ROK forces in the central mountains collapsed exposing 8th Army to the possibility of total collapse. As the lines fall back and situation reports come in from the various locations, Appleman makes you feel like you are Ridgway himself, deciding when to counterattack; when to withdraw, when to despair at lack of initiative, when to rejoice at gallantry. The UN advance resumed with operation Thunderbolt, slowly and cautiously over terrain Ridgway himself had surveyed from the air. The crucial role of the Chipyong-ni battle (including task force Crombez), and the struggle for Wonju in central Korea, consume the author and enthrall the reader. Appleman makes it look easy to mold 60 pages of footnotes and regimental reports into a coherent whole. It is not. To do it in 'real time'; so that the reader shares the fear of collapse in late January thaw into the cautious optimism of later that spring of 1951, is not easy either. After all...you and I KNOW what's going to happen...its been history for fifty years. But Appleman's style sucks the reader into the text. You feel like you are a staff officer preparing a summary of the field reports before they are placed on Ridgways desk.
Several specific incidents are of note.
- The success of the French with 'fixing bayonets' lead to widespread adoption of this desparate infantry technique across the peninsula in early 1951. The panicked flight it caused among the NKPA and Chinese was an eerie riposte to the panic that engripped the ROKs when they faced NKPA tanks north of Seoul 9 months earlier.
- The tragedy of the Glosters and Ridgway's anguish about whether 'adequate action had been taken' to extricate the unit, trapped north of Seoul in the Chinese 5th offensive's first impulse.
- The use of Korean porters to carry food and ammunition to American regiments now deployed in the lofty, trackless mountains of Korea. So appreciated and vital were these porters to unit success that regiments often asked their porters to be moved with them when they were shifted to new locations on the front.
I have one bone to pick with the author. Ridgway 'redeemed the honor of the US military in the eyes of the world', says Appleman in his final sentence. I beg to differ. The air force swept the skies clean within weeks of their arrival on the peninsula. The Navy controlled the Yellow and Japan seas. The Marines went on the offensive within days of their arrival, months earlier at Masan. Only the army needed to be 'redeemed.' It is not fair to tag the entire US military with the brush of incompetence and lack of training that characterized the early regiments, fat and sassy, ferried over from Japan.
I still recommend to readers that Appleman's books not be the first ones you read about Korea. They are too detailed and analytical to be appreciated until you have a good grasp of the war the general tone of the battles, as well as its international context. Knox's book, Pusan to Chosin, remains my favorite debut to this tragedy in northeast Asia.
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