This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition

TR Fehrenbach has done a very good job of describing what that conflict was like for the men who fought it, what went wrong, what went right (very little), and how the US ended up as the eternal protector of S Korean sovereignty. From the beginning the author unambiguously and without apology describes the pathetic state of readiness of the US Army. It is just shocking to imagine soldiers forward deployed to Japan who could not field strip and clean their weapons! Standards in the US Army had radically degraded in the five years since the end of World War II. Thankfully the Marines did not suffer that same disgrace. But all the combatants did not know what they were being asked to fight and die for and all did not want to be there.This was a monstrously bloody affair. The soldiers not only had to fight the N Koreans but also the Communist Chinese and the brutal weather and tortuous terrain as well. We learn that the ROK Army did an adequate job of fighting a delaying action until US dominated UN forces began to arrive within weeks of the N Korean attack. Stabilizing a defensive perimeter was not easy given the radically poor state of readiness of the US Army. However, the army still had massive firepower and used it. The US Navy and the Air Force were prepared and quickly established air dominance over the battlefield.Really the only thing that went right was MacArthur’s Inchon landing. Quickly reversing the status of the conflict the invasion set the N Koreans on a rapid retreat and much of their force was destroyed. Pursuing the shattered remnants of the N Korean Army north of the 38th parallel triggered the movement of large formations of the PRC Army south into N Korea.It is shocking to imagine army commanders and non-coms who would tolerate near complete lack of discipline to the point of insubordination. The author, early on, says this is due to “pampered” young men. I take exception with that description. These guys were brought up during the Great Depression and the most destructive war in modern world history. Not pampered! Just abysmally trained! The dereliction that must have gone on to graduate soldiers from basic and advanced training only to have them unable to keep their carbines functioning is really, for me, not possible. I served for three years and whatever else was wrong at the time we knew our jobs and could maintain our weapons and equipment. We understood discipline and the chain of command and we knew how to follow orders. The soldiers we sent to Korea at the beginning did not have even those basic minimum requirements and standards.The last two years of the war slowly dragged out while the N Koreans and the United States negotiated to end the war; S Korea was not involved until a deal was reached. The author says, “…politically unable to win, strategically unable to withdraw…the [US] government, from failure to understand clearly that Communists negotiate fairly only when it is in their interest to do so, or when unbearable pressure is placed upon them…” found itself in a trap. Reading this book and Halberstam’s book, makes it extremely clear that no one learned any lessons from this conflict. Not a GD thing. All that blood and treasure. All the domestic discontent. Truman’s decision to not seek another term. No one learned anything! The idiots in our government and military did it all over again in Vietnam. And we still didn’t learn anything!What is evident from the history is that our civilian and military leaders have never learned anything from our previous wars. It always starts with the civilian leadership and they are as uninformed as the general public when it comes to American history.The author has written a very good history of the war that really focuses on the ground combat. It is reasonably well written but I did find fault with the author’s style. One reviewer said his writing style is “laced with bold aphorisms and narrative brio that recalls H.G. Wells, Winston Churchill.” While true, at times his prose do become rather tortured. He is from an earlier era but, even in the early 1960s, referring to the Japanese as Japs would not have passed a scholarly review. He does not make it a habit but slips into using the derogatory name at one point in the narrative and then slips out again. Despite his obvious knowledge he did seem to think Puerto Rico was a separate nation state. In the end, all of this, for me, was trivial. What Fehrenbach accomplishes is a very complete telling of the circumstances surrounding the causes of the war, how the war progressed and how it eventually ended.I put this book in my “to read” list because I wanted a good history of this conflict and this book was considered a classic. Originally published under the title of This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness in 1963, its longevity recommended it. Then Defense Secretary Jim Mattis gave it a solid plug in 2017. So, I thought it would be the one-stop place to get a good idea of what happened in Korea in 1950. Then I ran into David Halberstam’s book and decided to make it two books on Korea.TR Fehrenbach actually fought in the Korean War commanding men from the platoon level through to battalion reaching the rank of colonel although he does not mention his service at all in this book. I think it was his personal experience that allowed him to so eloquently describe the horror of fighting in that miserable war.

One of the top ten books I have ever read. I have purchased multiple copies over the years. No only does the reader learn about the unpreparedness of US Forces, the author in 1955-56 predicts the conflict in Vietnam. I was fortunate to meet the author in 88 and spent several hours with him. You won’t want to put the book down, I have read it at least ten times and reference it many times when I discuss the lead up to Vietnam War

1. Short review: :-) (Amazon rating: 4 out of 5 stars -- I like it. My edition is riddled with typos, obvious missing text, and textual transpositions. I have reports that those have been fixed. Were all the rampant copyreading errors fixed, I would give This Kind of War 5 stars. Perhaps I shall try another download to see if these errors have been fixed.)2. Long review:2.1. What I liked: Account of the American military and concomitant political experience in Korea. TRF includes accounts of the Brits and the Turks and mentions the French battalion, but his emphasis is on the American history. At the end, TRF expounds his views on the meaning of the Korean War to the US and on the use of citizen soldiers versus legionnaires. I found these instructive.Roller-coaster or walk-in-the-park? A roller-coaster.Good value for the money I paid. Do-not-miss value at the current price.2.2. What I did not like: My edition is riddled with typos, obvious missing text, and textual transpositions. I have reports that those have been fixed. I see these problems as an unforgivable sin of traditional publishers. Rather than pay for competent copyreaders, they OCR-scan old books to produce a digital copy and upload that as an ebook. The evidence is that they give that copy no copyreading nor editing. This Kind of War was first published in 1963 by MacMillan. MacMillan died in 2001. The current incarnation is a shell owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. The e-version of This Kind of War is published by Open Road Media. How Open Road came by the rights to This Kind of War I don't know, but I would be stunned to discover that they have no connection to Holtzbrinck. I have found the same problems with other print books that have been scanned to produce an e-version; for example, The Angel of Zin. In my opinion, traditional publishers are using readers as unpaid copyreaders.2.3. Who I think is the audience: Americans with an interest in history.2.4. Is the book appropriate for children to read? Yes, if the child is an American with an interest in history.2.5. On the basis of reading this book, will I buy the author's next book? I will buy anything written by TRF. With a caveat. Given the terrible conversion from print to ebook, I am decidedly disinterested in buying anything published by Open Road.2.6. The plot in a nutshell: Given that this is a history, there should be no plot, but there are at least four. The first third of the book could be entitled The Adventures of Frank Muñoz in Korea. FM leads George Company in one desperate action after another, fighting and surviving and sometimes winning during the first year of the war. Sergeant Schlichter's experience as a POW is another story. He promised his wife he would return. The Army reported him MIA and presumed dead to his wife and offered her his death benefits. She refused them. Schlichter, a medic, administered care to POWs until the end. He was in the last group that was repatriated. The North Korean and Chinese POWs were kept on Geoje Island in South Korea. 132,000 of them in one camp. Hard-core Communists controlled the POW chain of command. They received orders from Peking to make trouble to be used for propaganda purposes. They kidnapped an American brigadier general. LtGen Mark Clark sent BGen Haydon Boatner to recover the general and restore order to the camp. Boatner accepted the command on the condition that he had a free hand to deal with the POWs as he saw fit and to exclude the press from the island. Clark agreed. Boatner built a new camp and 14 June 1952 moved the POWs to it with combat troops armed with bayonets (their rifle magazines were empty). The POWs resisted with spears. Some POWs died in the melee. Some GIs were wounded but none were killed. Boatner succeeded in breaking the back of the Communist resistance on Geoje. Found among the effects in the old POW barracks were plans for a general POW uprising and escape scheduled for 22 June 1952. Most of the UN forces in Korea were ROK Army. TRF admits that but never covers any ROK Army victory; he only covers their defeats. He does write well of the Brits in action and of the Turks in captivity. He mentions the French battalion (wanna bet they were Foreign Legion?) but never gives any details of them in action. For the first year the Korean War was one of movement. The NKPA invasion bore a striking resemblance to the Hindenburg Offensive on the Western Front in the spring of 1918. The invasion at Inchon and the UN drive to the Yalu River were a replay of MacArthur's campaign along the northern shore of New Guinea. With the start of peace talks, the front stagnated, and the troops entrenched. From June 1951 to the armistice in August 1953, the Korean War resembled Verdun in 1916. Factoid: The US Army expended more artillery shells in the Korean War than in World War II.2.7. Other: In the Korean War, American politicians -- that is, Harry Truman -- tried to use American citizen soldiers as legionnaires. When the war was fought to expel the Communists from Korea, the Americans did well. When their direction changed and they fought to contain the Communists, morale suffered. You can motivate men to die for victory but not for stalemate. Americans have never come to grips with the Korean War. They understand the Inchon Landings and the heroism of the Marines at Chosin Reservoir but they do not understand the lack of victory. TRF treats with this in a persuasive argument that Americans see war as a crusade, not as an instrument of gov't policy. TRF himself fought in Korea but never mentions that.

A very revealing and detailed history of the Korean conflict with abundant opinions/conclusions offered by the author. I found the Kindle version lacking in so many of the usual areas that I thought it worth mentioning as an example, in case anyone at Amazon cares about such things. Not having read a paper version, it’s possible many failing were in the original publication but they are typical of my experience with Kindle versions.- No table of contents.- Copyright page at the end of the book. At least there’s Google to find when the book was written, etc.- Not a single map to refer to.- No tables of organization as the author jumps back and forth from various army/corps/divisions to platoon levels and their commanders. Worse than a Russian novel with no list of characters.- At least there was a chronology at the end but I eventually found it, when I got to the end.- At the end, there was also glossary of weapons used by both sides that wasn’t much use.- One saving grace was the newish feature allowing the user to scroll through pages 9 at a time,finally giving the user the ability to “thumb through the pages” and reread bits.

The author provides a comprehensive but shallow telling of the Korean war and the United States unpreparedness for it. To some extent it provides a prelude to the Viet Nam War that followed all too soon after 1953 in terms of the unpreparedness of the American soldier and his discipline for it. An essential read for all who consider army training and discipline too rough on the citizen soldier.

No wonder General Mattis recommends this exceptionally well written book as required reading by American Politicians and Military because the Author’s knowledge, honesty and fearlessness in his reporting and analyses of the Military and Politicians of the 1950s are even more relevant today in the era of President Trump who most definitely should - but undoubtedly won’t - add this work to his very limited reference material. I’m an 81 years old Australian who at times has been critical of US politics and policies but who appreciates that there have been, and presently are, American Politicians of the ilk of the late John McCain whose love of and contributions to America clearly demonstrates that the Trumpian slogan to “make America Great AGAIN” is such a terrible insult to all of those Americans who have made significant contributions to their Nation - particularly those who have given their Lives - to ensure that America WILL ALWAYS BE GREAT, despite evidence of shortcomings from time to time but where the correction of such shortcomings have added to that greatness!!!

I have to say this is one of the worst war books I've read. There are two aspects - 1) the editing/proof reading/kindle edition, and 2) the author's style.1) There are many mistakes in this book. Frequent typos, a repeated section, sentences that just don't make much sense. Some of this I think is down to the lazy kindle conversion (clearly just applying OCR and not checking the result) but other things are simply a case of proof reading and mistakes on the author's part.2) The writing style. The first half of the book is OK, with a mostly linear blow-by-blow account of the build up to the war and various battles that the author picked out as being particularly crucial or illustrative of the war as a whole. But then at about 60% the author seemingly abandons this linear account and switches to a fragmented style of short anecdotes interspersed around an extremely wordy, repetitive and tiring essay about the mindset of Americans at the time of the war, the state of its armed forces and the psychology of its leaders and generals. There are frequent parallels drawn between the USA forces or particular battles and past conflicts, right back to the classical era. The author suddenly starts describing the USA forces as "legions". And by the way most of the actual meat of this essay was already covered earlier on in the book. It's amateurish, high school level writing. It makes for an extremely sluggish read at a crucial juncture in the war, just when the reader really wants to know what happens next in the war, not read a 10,000 word essay. This book really needed a strong editor to cut the vast majority of this down or incorporate it into the earlier parts of the book.I spent some time picking a book about Korea to read and I'm very disappointed to have picked this one. I am absolutely certain there must be a better book out there.

It is difficult to find a truly objective history of the Korean War, for war, although called other less aggressive names, is what it was.The reader could be forgiven for thinking that the US were the sole participants with very minor action from other members of the UN.That said, there are some very full accounts of the absolute horror that the soldiers on the ground experienced. If I had had a large scale map of Korea to hand, then a better picture of the combat areas would have been available.This Kindle book would benefit greatly from proof-reading. The punctuation, spelling remind me of the cheap books printed on poor quality sugar paper that were common around the time of the Korean War.