What America’s top military leaders have learned from a 54-year-old history of the Korean War.
Last Monday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general with a legendary appetite for military history, ticked off a list of book recommendations to a crowd of U. S. Army leaders and supporters—titles that might help them understand command, strategy and the ways war is evolving. But he kept coming back to one book in particular: T. R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War, a 54-year-old history of the Korean War that’s much better known in military than civilian quarters.
Fehrenbach, Mattis explained during his address to the Association of the United States Army ’s Exposition on Building Readiness, reminds us of two essential truths about war: its “primitive, atavistic, and unrelenting nature” and the “absolutely fundamental” importance of boots on the ground, even in an age of drone attacks and cyberwarfare. “You may fly over a nation forever, you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life. But if you desire to defend it, if you desire to protect it, if you desire to keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground the way the Roman legions did: by putting your young men in the mud,” Mattis said, quoting Fehrenbach. “I would only modify it today by saying, ‘by putting your young men and women in the mud.’”
These citations were preludes to Mattis’s final punch. The last question he took from the audience finally addressed the concern on everyone’s mind: As Trump and Kim Jong Un exchange dire nuclear threats, “what can the U. S. military do to lessen the likelihood of conflict on the Korean Peninsula?”
“There’s a reason I recommended T. R. Fehrenbach’s book,” Mattis replied, “that we all pull it out and read it one more time.”
This Kind of War is a comprehensive, sequential, but frankly subjective account of America’s “forgotten war” in Korea, told in a bluff style laced with bold aphorisms and narrative brio that recalls H. G. Wells, Winston Churchill and other popular historians of an even earlier era. Fehrenbach, who’s best known to civilian readers for his many chronicles of his native Texas, eschewed footnotes and bibliography, though he seemed to dive deeply into the archives. He recounted and analyzed the torturous diplomatic twists and strategic turns of a war that cost more than 3 million lives, 36,574 of them American (plus thousands more missing) and most of them civilian, and left the combatants facing off across nearly the same border where they started off. Interspersed with this high-level narrative are gritty, close-grained accounts of the grim ordeals, heroic sacrifices and, sometimes, tragic blunders of individual soldiers, from privates to generals.
Fehrenbach proudly credited “the greater portion” of his account to “the personal narratives of men who served in Korea” whom he interviewed and may have served with himself. (He never mentions his own experience, and only the jacket reveals that he commanded platoon-, company-, and battalion-level units in Korea and retired as a colonel.) “Portions may be more hearsay than history,” he acknowledged. “Men who did not lead troops in Korea may disagree with them—but they are in no position to contradict.”
That approach tends to leave scholars unimpressed. One, Steven Hugh Lee of the University of British Columbia, complained in Pacific Affairs about Fehrenbach’s “rather simplistic understanding of Asian societies” and concluded that his book’s “main contribution to scholarship lies in the way it reflects American cold war assumptions about Korea in the 1940s and ’50s.”
This Kind of War is indeed a book of its time, in language, in outlook and in its mistaken predictions. It repeatedly refers to “Puerto Ricans” as a separate national group, along with Americans, Brits, Turks and others in the United Nations force in Korea. It generalizes blithely about the “Orientals”: “Koreans were a disorganized and submissive people, almost without political education… the Irish of the Orient, changeable, mercurial” and degraded after 35 years of Japanese repression.
