book reviews and summaries, comments, analysis
Fehrenbach's central thesis is that "these kinds of wars": Korea, Vietnam, wars on the distant borders... need to be fought by Legions, not citizen soldiers. Citizen soldiers are great for the wars where the people here the 'trumpet call of total war': such as WWI, WWII, or our Civil war. But the citizens remain steadfastly uninterested, and often opposed, to skirmishes on the perimeters of national interest such as Korea, and later Vietnam.
Even without the use of maps (my favorite pet peeve among Korean War authors) Fehrenbach does a good job in describing the war and a carefully selected assortment of battles. One would never know, from reading THIS book, that it was the Marines at Masan-ni who prevented the Pusan Perimeter from being flanked at its southernmost point. One would never know, from reading this book, about the 'criminal neglect'(not Fehrenbachs words) that led to the collapse of Task Force Faith. Yet, unless one reads this book, one would never know that NKPA Colonel Chang Ky Dok had a captured US radio tuned to Marine frequencies when he staged his last, desparate attack against the Naktong Bulge in early September.
Coverage of the five basic phases of the Korean War is good here. Phase one, the panic and collapse of Seoul, is well described. His rendition of the collapse of the city has an almost Tolkienish feel to it, if you have ever read the latter authors' description of the fall of Gondolin. It is so clear that no one back in Washington really cared about Korea: a few antitank mines would have worked wonders in those early hours, but the ROKs had none. The fat and sassy US embassy personnel shagged their ass out in the early hours, leaving behind an intact motor pool and an entire file of South Korean employee rosters; the former was used by the NKPA in its rush southward; the latter used to kill off USA sympathizers. If you think the new Seoul city set has any more backbone, check the recent news on demonstrations against US presence in Korea.
Phase two, the collapsing front lines of Task force smith, to Taejon, and finally to the Naktong, are also well covered. Phase three, the Naktong perimeter and its battles, concentrates to much on the Naktong bulge and not enough on Marine efforts in the south and ROK efforts in the Pohang region. This is not that serious a critique, however, since the primary threat to the perimeter was at obong-ni, and the battles around cloverleaf showed the strengths and weaknesses of both armies.
Phase three, the In'chon landing, subsequent collapse and rush to the Yalu, was a breathtaking shift of momentum in the West and Communist circles, and I think Fehrenbach does a good job here. Yet he falls into the trap, as so many authors do, of placing UN decision to cross the parallel on the same moral ground as the NKPA decision a few months before. How he can possibly quote Kim Il Sung saying we never expected the UN would not move north is beyond me. If so, why did they move POWs all the way up the Yalu? The UN's folly in going to the Yalu was not a political error..it was a military one. Placing US armies in the narrow valleys near the Chosin in the east, and in the coastal plains of the northwest (flanked by weak ROK regiments in the mountains), was absolutely ridiculous. Commanders on the ground knew it; these concerns never reached the upper echelons in Tokyo, and was brushed aside by McArthur's toadies when it finally did. China's intervention in the trackless wastes of North Korea was a classic success; its continued push south into unfavorable terrain (for them) was a classic failure. Phase 4, Ridgways duel for the hearts, minds, and firepower of 8th army, is well done. So is his rendition of Glocester hill.
The final phase--stalemate--is especially well covered. You must understand that a unique--sometimes frustrating, sometimes enlightening, always informative--feature of Fehrenbach's writing are his asides woven into the text. Sometimes these asides are just a few words: "except in this world, there are tigers." Other times: the Doolittle commission, perfomance of US Armies at Bull Run, Kasserine, Valley forge, etc., they can run for pages and be repeated throughout the text. These asides make this book not only a history of the Korean War but a tome on the lessons that we must learn from it. I'd say there are really only two of these.
Second, wars like Korea and Vietnam need to be fought with a standing army of professional soldiers ('legions', he calls them) not by a drafted body of citizen soldiers traitionally called to fight when national interests are in peril. I understand this viewpoint quite well: growing up in the Vietnam era, we always argued there was not compelling threat to the US, capitalism, apple pie, the american way, elvis, or whatever. Yet the 'frontiers' were threatened, as Fehrenbach would say... and much akin to the Legions who held the far away passes in Afghanistan during the Great Game, legions were needed to fight this war--this GAME--in those distant lands. But America has always hated legions; retorts Fehrenbach.
Perhaps. Perhaps we revolt at the idea that war is a game. Perhaps, to trump Fehrenbach, we learned more about how this game is played. Russias game was to spill american blood by waging proxy wars against us. Ronald Reagan wised up to this technique, fighting them with locals in distant lands (Central America comes to mind) and with natives on their own borders (Afghanistan comes to mind). Even Eisenhower, as Fehrenbach muses in his own final pages, saw that the Communist world had numerous vulnerable areas that could be pressured. Reagan challenged them on the ground with proxy soldiers, in the air with threat of satellite based defenses, in the markets with technology and capital mobility: the communist world collapsed within a decade. I agree wars like Korea need to be fought with Legions: but they needn't be American legions; and even if they are, they can be legions of minds and ideas; not just those of soldiers.
As I write this review we contemplate war with Iraq: we prepare to fight that war with citizen soldiers, many of whom hear the trumpet. Not only are American interests threatened, but a whole panoply of western values: decency, democracy, liberty, freedom from fear; lie in peril. Even reluctant allies in Europe seem willing to join us in the breach. Yet it is the legion of ideas and western technology: drugs and immunizations against potential bioterror threats, for example, that enable us to fight this war with a reasonable certainty of victory. And again, we may find the Legions against Saddam are on the streets of Basra and Baghdad, not just the streets of lower Manhattan and Georgetown.