Those Who Have Borne the Battle (22 page)

World War I was an exception, of sorts—though it followed some German provocations, it represented as well an American assumption of responsibility to “make the world safe for democracy.” The exaggeration of this threat and the frustration of the objectives led to a sense of cynicism and isolationism. This national mood was reversed by World War II in which Americans could claim both a major military provocation and a just cause. And the United States came out of the war as the dominant power in the world. Most Americans were comfortable with the responsibility that went with that—the economic aid provided by the Marshall Plan would restore our allies, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would affirm our commitment to protect them.

Treaty commitments were deemed essential in light of the postwar threats of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union, and international communism. There was widespread agreement that Americans needed allies in order to stand united against aggression. Former enemies like Germany and Japan now joined this anticommunist coalition. It was an unstable and uncertain world, with an ominous and threatening edge due to what seemed to be constant communist provocations. It was not yet a war, but it was a “cold war,” and the United States found itself thrust into an active role in this conflict.

In a world marked by implicit threats and continuing challenges, in a world in which Americans were constantly reminded of the need for readiness, the country maintained an unprecedented level of peacetime military alertness. This resulted in the armed forces being in a standby position at a level unlike any previous experience in the nation's history. The post–World War II military required a continuing supply of citizen soldiers to provide a standing force ready for conflict. The assumption was that in this world on edge, there would be no time to mobilize a military in the way that it had worked down through World War II. Ships and bombers were always in a state of alert, as were American troops stationed in Europe and at other overseas posts.

When World War II ended, the status of Korea was at most an afterthought. The Japanese occupiers went home, and the United States and
the Soviet Union agreed to a temporary division of this land and people who were weary of occupation. The thirty-eighth parallel was almost casually determined to be a good temporary dividing line. The United States would occupy the South, and the Soviets would occupy the North. The Korean War followed a series of calculations—and miscalculations—that related to US politics as well as East-West tensions. The administration of Harry Truman had seemed to ignore Korea, excluding it from the regions the United States would defend. The North Koreans, as well as the Soviets and Chinese, did not believe Americans would—or could—defend South Korea.

On June 25, 1950, when North Korea, under the leadership of Kim Il Jung, sent a massive force of tanks and troops across the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea, the political leadership in the West was shaken. And within a week the United Nations and the United States had resolved to stem this aggression and to protect the South Korean government, led by Syngman Rhee. The result was a broader war that no one had expected, including the North Koreans, the Chinese, and the Soviet Union, which had agreed finally to the invasion of the South.

In order to downplay the military commitment and to avoid the need for a congressional declaration of war, President Truman described the war as a “police action,” a regrettable term. At the time, he had no way of predicting the length and the extent of this engagement. It was quite a police force before it was over in July 1953. Almost 1.8 million US service members would serve in Korea. Along with the 37,000 who would die there, more than 100,000 were wounded.

The war was, at its core, a result of the tensions between East and West that had followed World War II. American fear of Joseph Stalin's aggressive ambitions had been enhanced by the news that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb. America's proprietary postwar security blanket was now shared. And the victory of Mao Tse-Tung's Communists in China confirmed for many the global reach of communism.

American domestic politics played into this stew of strategic concerns. Republicans were stepping up criticism of the Truman administration for “losing” China and for a far too tolerant approach to the communist threat. Meanwhile, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy had launched
his campaign against communists in the American government in February 1950. Democrats were on the defensive and benefited from a decisive display of anticommunist resolve.

In addition to this political context, the policy makers of this generation shared an interpretation of their own history. President Harry Truman was convinced that World War II might have been averted if western European and American leadership had stood up to Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s. It was crucial not to repeat this mistake in the face of communist aggression. “If history has taught us anything, it is that aggression anywhere in the world is a threat to peace everywhere in the world.”
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One of his major Republican critics, Senator William Knowland of California, held the same view of history, arguing that “Korea stands today in the same position as did Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, and Czechoslovakia at an earlier date. In each of those instances a firm stand by the law-abiding nations of the world might have saved the peace.”
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And Democratic senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut asked, “What difference is there in the actions of northern Koreans today and the actions which led to the Second World War?” He quipped, “Talk about parallels!”
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These confident assumptions would frame the overall conduct of the war. This in turn shaped views of the war and of those who fought it. The Korean War provided a model—imprecise and surely unintended though it may have been—for the wars that would follow. It was a presumptive war, one aimed at a presumed threat, and one with changing goals.

After North Korea's invasion of South Korea on June 25, on Friday, June 30, 1950, after a series of meetings, the White House issued a statement: “In keeping with the United Nations Security Council's request for support to the Republic of Korea in repelling the North Korean invaders and restoring peace in Korea,” the president had authorized the air force to “conduct missions on specific military targets in Northern Korea wherever militarily necessary and had ordered a Naval blockade of the entire Korean coast. General MacArthur has been authorized to use certain supporting ground units.” It was understood by all at the outset, even if not announced, that under the latter authorization, US combat units would be
moved into Korea immediately.
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It was this order that provided the authority for the army to move Private Shadrick's battalion to Korea.

 

 

While the United States was not prepared politically, intellectually, or culturally for war in the summer of 1950, it was even less prepared militarily for immediate major combat operations of the scale demanded in Korea.

Despite the US expansion of its nuclear and some of its strategic capability as part of the Cold War, the end of the Second World War was followed by a massive and accelerated demobilization of the American forces. In 1945 national defense expenditures were nearly $83 billion, some 89.5 percent of the federal budget. By 1948 they were $9.1 billion, 30.6 percent of the budget. Following some increases in the fiscal year ending on June 30, 1950, defense expenditures were 33.9 percent of the budget, at $13.7 billion. There were 1,460,261 men and women in uniform on that day, 510 of whom were stationed in South Korea. Most of the troops sent to Korea at the outset were, like Private Shadrick's unit, part of the occupation force in Japan. They were not trained or equipped for combat, and they were not physically conditioned for the demands of fighting in Korea.

At the end of World War II, Congress had temporarily extended the draft in order to sustain a military force during demobilization of the war veterans. This extension ended in 1947, but the concerns about the Soviet Union and the difficulties the army had in meeting its enlistment goals led President Truman to request a new peacetime draft in 1948, which Congress approved. This was in most respects a continuation of the procedures for the World War II draft. Under the new legislation, all men ages eighteen to twenty-six were in the pool, but no one would be drafted prior to age nineteen. Congress provided that the armed forces could seek voluntary enlistments, and the military far preferred enlistees. In fact, the air force, navy, and marines met their goals through enlistments, many, no doubt, draft induced.

At the start of the Korean War in June 1950, the army was at about half of the strength it had at the time of Pearl Harbor following the mobilization
in 1940–1941. In fact, with the atomic bomb in the arsenal and with an exaggerated confidence in airpower, there were few investments in ground weaponry. As a result, the North Koreans, beneficiaries of Soviet support, had more modern weapons and armor in 1950 than the American troops. The
New Republic
said in July 1950 that the army was “fighting a World War III army with World War II weapons.”
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In light of the trend toward strategic air warfare, the navy and Marine Corps had taken major budget cuts in the interwar years. The Defense Department even cut from the budget a new carrier for the navy, believing that these vessels would be less consequential in the next war. Land-based strategic airpower would be the key.

There was another element motivating these cuts. President Truman simply did not like the Marine Corps. He found its favorable public image and political clout irritating and unacceptable. He said, “The Marine Corps is the Navy's police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's.”
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He would later apologize for this remark—but it is not clear if he ever changed his view. The marines had fewer than sixty-five thousand men at the outset of the Korean War. They were better trained than the army generally because they had maintained a higher proportion of veterans in the enlisted ranks as well as a strong cohesive culture. They also had the advantage of not having to serve, as the army did, as occupation forces. They could focus on training.

The army had resisted its reduced role in military planning. Some strategists even wondered whether, with the importance of strategic airpower, the army could become to the air force what the marines were to the navy. Most soldiers were convinced that the army would be necessary to fight a war, and they were concerned that anyone thought otherwise. General Dwight Eisenhower had argued in his last report as army chief of staff in 1948 that modern war would still depend upon the “foot-soldier.” He pointed out, “The introduction of the plane and the atomic bomb has no more eliminated the need for him than did the first use of cavalry or the discovery of gunpowder.”
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Korea proved that this confidence in air warfare was seriously misplaced. Historian Adrian Lewis has written with finality, “The Korean
War was an infantry war. All the advances in technologies, airpower, nuclear power, naval power, missiles, and other machines of war contributed, but they were not decisive, nor did they have the potential to be. Short of extermination warfare, they could not deter or stop the advance of the North Korean People's Army (NKPA). It took soldiers and marines, infantrymen, fighting a primitive war in the heat, stench, rain, mud, and frigid conditions of the Korean peninsula with individual weapons,” to stop the Chinese and North Koreans.
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Marguerite Higgins put it simply: Korea taught us “we can no longer substitute machines for men.”
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The first months of the Korean War were difficult. “Desperate” would be an appropriate description. On July 30 the
New York Times
noted, “An atmosphere of urgency has replaced the customary calm of the Pentagon.” Part of the frustration was a natural consequence of the optimism that Americans brought to this war. After all, this was the military force that had won World War II. It possessed what everyone assumed was superior technology and was fighting what most Americans considered a second-rate power. As one young soldier with those earliest forces deployed to Korea said, “Everyone thought the enemy would turn around and go back when they found out who was fighting.” Military historian S. L. A. Marshall writes that in July, there was among the Americans “an air of excessive expectation based upon estimates which were inspired by wishful optimism.”
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As more US and United Nations troops came into Korea, they had some successes in defending positions along the Naktong River, but there was a general recognition that the Pusan perimeter might not be defensible and that the need for a Dunkirk-type withdrawal from Korea at Pusan was not totally out of the question. This pessimistic mood turned around in September when General Douglas MacArthur succeeded with an audacious amphibious landing at Inchon, west of Seoul. This, along with an offensive from the south, managed to push back the North Koreans.

UN forces recaptured Seoul on September 27, three months after the city had fallen to the North Koreans, and then they pushed north of the thirty-eighth parallel. UN troops occupied the North Korean capital of
Pyongyang on October 19. Suddenly, all of the confidence seemed well placed. The United States and the United Nations made a fundamental decision in September 1950: they would take the war into North Korea. The original objective of securing South Korea and pushing back the invaders now escalated to the more aggressive one of defeating North Korea and taking steps to unify Korea.

General MacArthur was a genuine hero before the Korean War. His flair for publicity had exaggerated his accomplishments, genuine as some of them were, and ignored his shortcomings, as substantial as they were. His success as the head of the occupation forces in Japan, along with his dramatic accomplishments at Inchon and his movement into North Korea, only enhanced the statesman and strategic-warrior image. President Truman met with him in October 1950 on Wake Island. MacArthur was confident of victory, even condescending. When the president asked him about the possibility of Chinese intervention in Korea, MacArthur was dismissive of the idea.