This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History Read online

  This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

  T.R. Fehrenbach

  This special fiftieth anniversary edition of the classic history of the Korean War is a dramatic and hard-hitting account of the conflict written from the perspective of those who fought it. Partly drawn from official records, operations journals, and histories, it is based largely on the compelling personal narratives of the small-unit commanders and their troops. Unlike any other work on the Korean War, it provides both a clear panoramic overview and a sharply drawn "you were there" account of American troops in fierce combat against the North Korean and Chinese communist invaders. As Americans and North Koreans continue to face each other across the 38th Parallel, This Kind of War commemorates the past and offers vital lessons for the future.

  This Kind of War

  Author Biography

  During World War II, T.R. Fehrenbach served with the U.S. Infantry and Engineers as Platoon Sergeant with the 3189th Engineer Battalion. He continued his military career in the Korean War, rising from Platoon Leader to Company Commander and then to Battalion Staff Officer of the 72nd Tank battalion, 2nd Infantry Division. He is currently a Major, Armor USAR.

  Previous to his military involvement, a young T.R. Fehrenbach, born in San Benito Texas, worked as a farmer and was the owner of an insurance company. He now devotes his time to free-lance writing. He has sold numerous pieces to publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Argosy. He is the author of several books, including U.S. MARINES IN ACTION, THE BATTLE OF ANZIO, and THIS KIND OF WAR. Mr. Fehrenbach still lives in Texas.

  This Kind of War

  The Classic Korean War History

  T. R. Fehrenbach

  An [ 1873 Press ] Book

  For Lillian

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK is compiled from many sources, official records, operations, journals, histories, memoirs, and newspapers; the greater portion, however, is culled from the personal narratives of men who served in Korea. In this sense, portions of the book may be more hearsay than history—and a sense of personal outlook must color each narrative.

  There may be errors in these narratives, for memory is often a fragile thing. Wherever possible, all statements have been checked against official sources, to verify dates, unit designations, and names of personnel or commanders.

  To a very great extent not high commanders but the men who stood around them were sought out. It is often painful for generals and commanders to talk, and besides, they tend to write their own memoirs. This is very much a platoon leaders' book based on the actions of men who led small units across the bloody face of Korea from June 1950 until July 1953. The majority of the men in these pages were professional soldiers, and therefore the outlook is not warlike, but military. Men who did not lead troops in combat in Korea may disagree with them—but are in no valid position to contradict.

  In many cases the names of the men through whose eyes the action was seen are not reported, for various reasons. In any case the names are not important. What happened is.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the hundreds of individuals, in service or out, who contributed to this book, and to George C. Lambkin, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, who knows what a Public Information Officer should be. Without each of these, there might have been no book.

  Foreword

  Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even into death.

  If, however, you are indulgent, but unable to make your authority felt, kind-hearted but unable to enforce your commands; and incapable, moreover, of quelling disorder, then your soldiers must be likened to spoiled children; they are useless for any practical purpose.

  — From the Chinese of Sun Tzu, THE ART OF WAR

  Ten years after the guns fell into uneasy silence along the 38th parallel, it is still impossible to write a definitive history of the Korean War. For that war did not write the end to an era, but merely marked a fork on a road the world is still traveling. It was a minor collision, a skirmish—but the fact that such a skirmish between the earth's two power blocs cost more than two million human lives showed clearly the extent of the chasm beside which men walked.

  More than anything else, the Korean War was not a test of power — because neither antagonist used full powers—but of wills. The war showed that the West had misjudged the ambition and intent of the Communist leadership, and clearly revealed that leadership's intense hostility to the West; it also proved that Communism erred badly in assessing the response its aggression would call forth.

  The men who sent their divisions crashing across the 38th parallel on 25 June 1950 hardly dreamed that the world would rally against them, or that the United States — which had repeatedly professed its reluctance to do so—would commit ground forces onto the mainland of Asia.

  From the fighting, however inconclusive the end, each side could take home valuable lessons. The Communists would understand that the free world—in particular the United States—had the will to react quickly and practically and without panic in a new situation. The American public, and that of Europe, learned that the postwar world was not the pleasant place they hoped it would be, that it could not be neatly policed by bombers and carrier aircraft and nuclear warheads, and that the Communist menace could be disregarded only at extreme peril.

  The war, on either side, brought no one satisfaction. It did, hopefully, teach a general lesson of caution.

  The great test placed upon the United States was not whether it had the power to devastate the Soviet Union—this it had—but whether the American leadership had the will to continue to fight for an orderly world rather than to succumb to hysteric violence. Twice in the century uncontrolled violence had swept the world, and after untold bloodshed and destruction nothing was accomplished. Americans had come to hate war, but in 1950 were no nearer to abolishing it than they had been a century before.

  But two great bloodlettings, and the advent of the Atomic Age with its capability of fantastic destruction, taught Americans that their traditional attitudes toward war—to regard war as an unholy thing, but once involved, however reluctantly, to strike those who unleashed it with holy wrath—must be altered. In the Korean War, Americans adopted a course not new to the world, but new to them. They accepted limitations on warfare, and accepted controlled violence as the means to an end. Their policy—for the first time in the century—succeeded. The Korean War was not followed by the tragic disillusionment of World War I, or the unbelieving bitterness of 1946 toward the fact that nothing had been settled. But because Americans for the first time lived in a world in which they could not truly win, whatever the effort, and from which they could not withdraw, without disaster, for millions the result was trauma.

  During the Korean War, the United States found that it could not enforce international morality and that its people had to live and continue to fight in a basically amoral world. They could oppose that which they regarded as evil, but they could not destroy it without risking their own destruction.

  Because the American people have traditionally taken a warlike, but not military, attitude to battle, and because they have always coupled a certain belligerence—no American likes being pushed around—with a complete unwillingness to prepare for combat, the Korean War was difficult, perhaps the most difficult in their history.

  In Korea, Americans had to fight, not a popular, righteous war, but to send men to die on a bloody checkerboard, with hard heads and without exalted motivations, in the hope of preserving the kind of world order Americans desired.

&
nbsp; Tragically, they were not ready, either in body or in spirit.

  They had not really realized the kind of world they lived in, or the tests of wills they might face, or the disciplines that would be required to win them.

  Yet when America committed its ground troops into Korea, the American people committed their entire prestige, and put the failure or success of their foreign policy on the line.

  The purpose of this book is to detail the events of that action, and what led to it, and not to explore controversy. It does not seek to exalt the military nor to deride the traditionally liberal American view toward life. There is no desire to add fuel to the increasingly bitter dialogue between traditionalists, military officers, and "liberals" that has resulted from those events—a dialogue brought about more by the fact that the liberals would feel safer if the military would feel emotionally more at home in a society that was a bit more spartan, than by a clear assessment of the needs of the country.

  The civilian liberal and the soldier, unfortunately, are eyeing different things: the civilian sociologists are concerned with men living together in peace and amiability and justice; the soldier's task is to teach them to suffer and fight, kill and die. Ironically, even in the twentieth century American society demands both of its citizenry.

  Perhaps the values that comprise a decent civilization and those needed to defend it abroad will always be at odds. A complete triumph for either faction would probably result in disaster.

  Perhaps, also, at the beginning a word must be said concerning discipline. "Discipline," like the terms "work" and "fatherland"—among the greatest of human values—has been given an almost repugnant connotation from its use by Fascist ideologies. But the term "discipline" as used in these pages does not refer to the mindless, robotlike obedience and self-abasement of a Prussian grenadier. Both American sociologists and soldiers agree that it means, basically, self-restraint—the self-restraint required not to break the sensible laws whether they be imposed against speeding or against removing an uncomfortably heavy steel helmet, the fear not to spend more money than one earns, not to drink from a canteen in combat before it is absolutely necessary, and to obey both parent and teacher and officer in certain situations, even when the orders are acutely unpleasant.

  Only those who have never learned self-restraint fear reasonable discipline.

  Americans fully understand the requirements of the football field or the baseball diamond. They discipline themselves and suffer by the thousands to prepare for these rigors. A coach or manager who is too permissive soon seeks a new job; his teams fail against those who are tougher and harder. Yet undoubtedly any American officer, in peacetime, who worked his men as hard, or ruled them as severely as a college football coach does, would be removed.

  But the shocks of the battlefield are a hundred times those of the playing field, and the outcome infinitely more important to the nation.

  The problem is to understand the battlefield as well as the game of football. The problem is to see not what is desirable, or nice, or politically feasible, but what is necessary.

  T.R.F.

  JULY 4, 1962

  SAN ANTONIO,TEXAS

  | Go to Table of Contents |

  Part I

  Beginning

  1

  Seoul Saturday Night

  Who desires peace, should prepare for war … no one dare offend or insult a power of recognized superiority in action.

  — From the Latin of Vegetius, MILITARY INSTITUTUIONS OF THE ROMANS

  ON 8 JUNE 1950 newspapers of the city of P'yongyang, capital of Chosun Minjujui Inmun Kongwhakuk, the North Korean People's Republic, printed a manifesto of the Central Committee of the United Democratic Patriotic Front. The manifesto announced as a goal for the Central Committee, elections to be held throughout both North and South Korea, and the parliament so elected to sit in Seoul no later than 15 August, fifth anniversary of the liberation from Japan.

  No mention was made of the Taehan Minkuk, the Republic of Korea, which south of the 38th parallel was United Nations-sponsored and American-backed, and of which Dr. Syngman Rhee was president.

  The manifesto was picked up by Tass, Russian news service, and reprinted in Izvestia, 10 June 1950. By devious routes a copy of Izvestia came to the Library of Congress, untranslated from the Russian.

  This manifesto made interesting reading. It was a storm signal. It seems a pity no one in the West bothered to read it.

  But then, if it had been read, it would have been ignored. Storm signals had been flying for more than four years. In Asia, Nationalist China had fallen. There was Communist-directed war in Indo-China. World Communism, from its power base in Soviet Russia, undeterred by the nuclear bomb, continued its aggressive course, causing misgivings in the West, making its nations sign defensive alliances.

  But the West did not prepare for trouble. It did not make ready, because its peoples, in their heart of hearts, did not want to be prepared.

  It would not have mattered if anyone had read the P'yongyang Manifesto.

  Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku, thirty years old, was Operations Officer, II Corps, of the Inmun Gun, the North Korean People's Army, and all week he had been working very hard. Since 15 June 1950, every regular division of the Inmun Gun had moved from their normal billets and had been deployed along planned lines of departure just north of the 38th parallel. It had meant staff work, and lots of it.

  Only now, as darkness fell on Saturday, 24 June, could Lee Hak Ku allow the hard lines of his square young face to relax, and to permit himself leisurely to enjoy a cigarette. In a people's republic Saturday night meant nothing, but every unit of the Inmun Gun had been in position since midnight 23 June, and for a few hours there was really nothing more to do.

  And that was good staff work.

  Standing relaxed in his somewhat shoddy Russian-style blue uniform with its flaring breeches and polished high boots, Senior Colonel Lee could review the turmoil and ferment of the last few days. Eighty thousand men had been moved, some divisions coming down from the high and distant Yalu, and it had all been done smoothly. Beyond doubt, the running dogs of the American imperialists, the South Koreans, suspected nothing.

  The commander of the Inmun Gun, Chai Ung Jun, and his staff of veterans from the Manchurian wars, could take deep pride in their work. Since the meeting of high Soviet and Chinese Communist officials in Peiping in January to plan the invasion of the United Nations and American-backed Republic of Korea, the Inmun Gun had achieved prodigies for so small and so new an army.

  There had been the dumps and depots to build near the parallel, to hold the mountains of arms and equipment shipped in by freighter from the Soviet Union. There had been the crews of the 105th Armored Brigade to train in the use of the Russian T-34, the main battle tank that had stopped panzer leader Guderian in front of Moscow, and young fliers to be accustomed to the intricacies of YAK fighters. And there had been the thousands of Korean-extraction veterans of the Chinese Communist Forces to reintegrate into the Inmun Gun. With Chiang Kai-shek defeated and his Nationalist remnants exiled to Taiwan, Red China could release her Korean-speaking soldiers; by June 1950, they made up 30 percent of the Inmun Gun.

  On Friday, 23 June, shortly before midnight, 90,000 men stood ready in the misting rain. In addition to their 150 medium tanks and 200 aircraft, they had small arms and mortars in profusion, backed up by plentiful 122mm howitzers and 76mm self-propelled guns. They were seven infantry divisions, one armored brigade, a separate infantry regiment, a motorcycle regiment, and a brigade of the fanatical Bo An Dae, the Border Constabulary.

  Beginning 18 June, Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku and his brother officers had seen to it that their orders went out.

  First, Reconnaissance Order 1, in the Russian language, had come down from Intelligence, directing that information concerning South Korean defensive positions along each division's projected route of attack be obtained and verified no later than 24 June.

  The Inmun Gun had hundr
eds of spies across the parallel, many of them working directly for the American advisers to the South Korean Army. The mysterious officers in Intelligence, who wrote in Russian script, received what they asked for.

  By 22 June the divisions issued their operations orders, in Korean. The 1st, 3rd, and 4th divisions attacked down the Uijongbu Corridor toward Seoul, armored elements leading. Other divisions attacked in the east. Common soldiers were to be told they were on maneuvers. Officers were to know it was war.

  Red-eyed, smoking too much, young Senior Colonel Lee waited now in his Operations Post, listening to the torrential showers of the beginning monsoon slash down into the green paddies outside, smelling the pungent odors of earth and fertilizer the rains released. He was tired, but he was also spring-tight with a disciplined excitement, waiting for the hours to pass. He looked at his cheap watch. He did not have long to wait.

  The orders had gone out, and he knew they would be obeyed. Aside from its fanatical core of Russian-and Chinese-trained veterans, there were many conscripts, rice Communists, in the ranks of the Inmun Gun. But even these men would obey.

  Hesitancy, in the Inmun Gun, was cured neatly, efficiently, and permanently by the application of a pistol to the back of the head.

  As Saturday waned, Major General Chae Byong Duk, Deputy Commander—under Syngman Rhee—of the Republic of Korea Armed Forces, was not content. For "Fat" Chae, five foot five, two hundred and fifty pounds, darling of the Seoul cocktail set, was not completely a fool.

  For years the Communists north of the parallel had been making trouble in the South. They made rice raids across the border; they fomented disorder and subversion in the cities. They incited and supplied the rebel guerrillas in the southern mountains, doing everything in their power to destroy the Republic of Korea. They kept a third of Fat Chae's Army tied down on constabulary work.