Category: Books

Some miscellaneous items learned from reading On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle by Hampton Sides.

Impressed by hysterical headlines regarding today’s weather?

The same day the Chinese delegation arrived in New York, an unusually powerful storm system began to form across the eastern third of the United States, one that would temporarily divert the attention of the Truman administration from the looming conflict with China. The storm started with an Arctic cold front that fingered down through Ohio and eastern Kentucky. Across Appalachia, the mercury dropped from the fifties to the teens within a few hours. By the next day, as the cold air mass barreled toward the east, a vast pocket of warm, wet Atlantic air from the Carolinas began to wrap underneath it. The storm had become an “extratropical cyclone.” Huge amounts of snow began to fall across Ohio, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. In one town, deep in the hollows of West Virginia, fifty-seven inches of snow fell in just over a day. On the east side of the front, gale-force winds began to buffet New York and New England, cutting electricity from more than a million households. Manhattan recorded a peak gust of nearly a hundred miles per hour, and surging seas breached the dikes at LaGuardia Airport, flooding the runways. The nasty weather forced the Chinese delegates to stay inside their Waldorf-Astoria rooms for two days. The event, which continued to rage through Thanksgiving weekend and beyond, would affect twenty-two states and would kill 353 people. On some of the worst-hit highways, National Guardsmen were brought in to remove snow with tanks and flamethrowers. Newspapers called it the Storm of the Century. Whatever it was, the cyclone was an anomaly that would be studied for decades. “The Great Appalachian Storm of 1950,” as it would officially become known, was the costliest and most destructive storm then recorded in U.S. history—a wintry vortex that few saw coming, and few understood even after it had arrived.

We nearly blew up Canada:

The following day, November 10, [1950] an even weightier event took place that would again disturb Truman’s concentration. That night, a Boeing B-50 Superfortress took off from Goose Bay Air Base, in Labrador, Canada. Flying over the St. Lawrence River, the heavy bomber ran into trouble. First one and then another of its four engines failed. Protocol required that the pilot immediately jettison his cargo—and so he did, right over the river, not far from the city of Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, 250 miles northeast of Montreal. The cargo in question happened to be a Mark IV atomic bomb, a revised version of the “Fat Boy” that had obliterated Nagasaki five years earlier. The crew set the squat, five-and-a-half-ton device to detonate at an altitude of 2,500 feet. Mercifully, the bomb was missing its plutonium core, so no nuclear reaction occurred. But the resulting explosion was massive nevertheless, and it rained more than a hundred pounds of moderately radioactive uranium over a wide arc of the Quebec countryside.

American and Canadian officials immediately moved to cover up the accident, telling reporters that what residents had heard was merely a five-hundred-pound “practice” bomb—conventional, not atomic—that had been intentionally and safely detonated. Not until the 1980s would the United States Air Force acknowledge that this was a case of a lost nuclear bomb—there would be several during the Cold War—an incident category known in military parlance as a “broken arrow.”

The Chinese and Russians subscribed to their own version of our Domino theory:

At the Zhongnanhai, the former imperial palace in Beijing, Mao Zedong was in secret deliberations with his advisers about the Korea situation. Mao was eager to enter the war. “Another nation is in a crisis,” he reportedly said. “We’d feel bad if we stood idly by.” His foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, having recently returned from a series of meetings with Stalin at his dacha on the Black Sea and gaining his tacit support, concurred. Mao decided to assign the command of China’s armies to Peng Dehuai, a veteran officer of the civil war and an old comrade from the days of the Long March. Peng accepted. “The U.S. occupation of Korea, separated from China by only a river, would threaten Northeast China,” he argued. “The U.S. could find a pretext at any time to launch a war of aggression against China. The tiger wanted to eat human beings; when it would do so would depend on its appetite. No concession could stop it.” In characterizing the prospect of an American presence on the Yalu, some of the Chinese commanders employed a hypothetical analogy: The United States would not countenance a scenario in which the Chinese invaded Mexico and marched right up to the Rio Grande and the Texas border. That, in reverse, was precisely the situation here. Peng and Mao agreed on a strategy to entrap the Americans—an enemy that, they fully realized, had far greater firepower. Peng wrote, “We would employ the tactic of purposely showing ourselves to be weak, increasing the arrogance of the enemy, luring him deep into our areas.” Then Peng’s far more numerous armies would “sweep into the enemy ranks with the strength of an avalanche” and engage at close quarters. This strategy, Peng thought, would render “the superior firepower of the enemy useless.”

From Mao’s perspective, this was a confrontation decades in the making. American imperialism, which the Chairman viewed as merely an extension of the old imperialism of the European colonial powers, had been thwarting China’s progress and intervening in her internal affairs for more than a century. He viewed American meddling as a pernicious force, going back as far as the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, and the disruptive role of American missionaries deep in China’s hinterlands. The United States had actively and openly subverted Mao’s revolution, supplying arms and assistance to Chiang Kai-shek. Now, from their base in occupied Japan, the Americans appeared to be expanding their sphere of influence throughout Asia. When the defeated Chiang decamped to Taiwan and Mao threatened to attack him there, President Truman had sent the Seventh Fleet to guard the Strait of Taiwan—an action Mao viewed as an affront.

When trying to persuade Stalin to join him in ejecting the United States from Korea, Mao had warned the Soviet dictator that “if the Americans conquer all of Korea, both China and the Soviet Union will be threatened—like teeth getting chilled through broken lips.”

Being in the Chinese military was not a status symbol:

Most of Mao’s soldiers were powerless and desperately poor young men. They came from the lower echelons of an ancient society that did not particularly value the individual and had traditionally viewed warriors as an expendable class. (“As you do not use good metal for nails,” went an old Chinese proverb, “so you do not use good men for soldiers.”)

Mao and Harvey Weinstein had some things in common, including the bathrobe:

The fifty-six-year-old paramount leader of the newly minted People’s Republic of China, having triumphed over Chiang Kai-shek the previous year, was anxious to consolidate his power and flex his muscles on the world stage. Ruthless, paranoid, a devotee of the ancient military philosopher Sun Tzu, and a cunning strategist himself, he was a powerfully charismatic man with odd habits and obsessions. To the alarm of his security police, he was infatuated with the idea of swimming in all of China’s major rivers, including the mighty Yangtze, as a way to imbibe the spirit of China. Otherwise, Mao rarely showed himself to the public and conducted much of his state business by his pool, deep inside the palace complex, often wearing a terry-cloth robe and slippers. … Mao refused to pay attention to schedules or conventional expectations about time. He followed no rhythm, circadian or otherwise, and his staff was perpetually perplexed by his erratic habits and spasmodic bursts of energy. Mao also had an apparently unslakable sexual appetite and believed that orgasms directly halted the aging process. To ward off impotency, he received frequent injections of an extract made from pulverized deer antlers. Although he was married, he had his staff secure him beautiful young women to sleep with—sometimes as many as a dozen liaisons in a single day. He had hideous teeth, rendered dingy brown from chain-smoking and his refusal to practice the most rudimentary oral hygiene—he would only rinse his mouth, once a day, with dark tea.

There was an assassination attempt on Truman:

Collazo and Torresola were Puerto Rican Nationalists, tied to cells that were attempting to foment a violent insurrection and assert independence for the island. The two men believed that only a sensational act would bring attention to their movement. They were also angry about the Korean War, and the contradictions they saw in the fact that so many Puerto Rican soldiers had joined the U.N. effort to fight for freedoms they themselves did not enjoy on their home island. … It was the largest gunfight in the history of the Secret Service. Two men lay dead or dying, and three others were wounded. Twenty-seven shots had been fired in less than two minutes.

More: Read On Desperate Ground

On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle by Hampton Sides is a sobering Memorial Day read.

The book tells the story, from the American point of view, of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir.

As with the World War II history that I recently read, the author is not a fan of Douglas MacArthur. He sets an arbitrary date for recapturing Seoul even if it means destroying the city in order to “liberate” it:

As the Marines began to probe the outlying precincts of the city, the human cost of MacArthur’s deadline became more apparent to [Major General Oliver Prince] Smith. He felt the September 25 date was contrived—little more than a political gimmick designed to win headlines. Smith reckoned that his Marines could probably take Seoul by the twenty-fifth, but only by laying waste to large sections of the city, pounding it with artillery, bombing it to cinders. Seoul would be badly scarred, and the civilian death toll could be terrible. Smith knew that there were other, less destructive ways to take the city. Alpha Bowser insisted that the Marines could capture Seoul “with hardly a brick out of place.” They could encircle it, cut the enemy’s supply lines, and methodically ferret out the defenders, block by block. But this kind of fighting would take more time than MacArthur was willing to tolerate. So the big guns were brought forward, and the ritual of “softening up” targets across the city began. This, of course, was but a euphemism for a devastating bombardment that could only strike terror in the hearts of Seoul’s residents. General Almond was pleased to note that the enemy would be pounded to pieces. That a city might be razed in the process appeared not to trouble him.

After destroying a city, MacArthur destroys an American army by ignoring intelligence regarding hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers who’d crossed over into North Korea and falling right into a trap set by Mao.

The new plan was for most of Smith’s division to hasten forty miles up the coast, then turn toward the northwest, across the plains and into the Taebaek Mountains—the extensive range that forms Korea’s spine, the so-called dragon’s back. They would move up a narrow road that twisted for more than seventy miles into the highlands, toward a large man-made lake that, according to the old Japanese maps the Americans were working from, was called the Chosin Reservoir. Upon reaching its shores, Smith’s men were to keep marching for the Yalu, which was another hundred miles to the north by way of a patchwork of roads. [MacArthur’s deputy Edward] Almond called for maximum speed, much as he had during the battle for Seoul. From the start, Smith was suspicious of Almond’s plan. Among other things, it meant that his division would be strung along a narrow mountain road for nearly one hundred miles, in a long train of men and vehicles. They would move along this single artery, relying on a supply chain that the enemy could sever at any point. In this desolate country, there were no airstrips, no functioning rail lines, no other ways to receive reinforcements or evacuate casualties. They had only one road in, and, should anything happen, only one road out. The more they progressed, the more they would stretch themselves—and the more their survival would depend upon this fragile umbilical cord.

Upon reaching the village of Sudong, about twenty miles inland at the base of the mountains, one of these patrols met a unit of South Korean troops and found them positively rattled. They reported that they had just engaged in a firefight with the Red Chinese—more commonly referred to, among American commanders, as Communist Chinese Forces, or CCF. When asked how large a force they had encountered, the South Koreans would say only that there were “many, many.” But the South Koreans had captured sixteen prisoners and, upon interrogating them, had learned that they were from the 370th Regiment of the 124th Division of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—Mao’s army. They claimed they had crossed the Yalu River in mid-October. These Red soldiers were surprisingly forthcoming with information; they seemed to have nothing to hide. It was almost as though they wanted the U.N. troops to know who they were and where they had come from. They freely indicated that they were part of a much larger Chinese force, numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

[MacArthur’s intelligence chief, General Charles] Willoughby quickly concluded that the Chinese prisoners at Sudong were merely “volunteers,” part of a token force of zealous Communists, probably from Manchuria, who had picked up their weapons and, in piecemeal fashion, streamed down of their own free will to help the North Koreans.

It was a fiction that MacArthur seemed entirely willing to believe, one that provided sufficient cover for him to continue advancing toward the Yalu. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had given him carte blanche to keep on going—unless and until he saw evidence that the Chinese had officially entered the war. And here it was, evidence as clear as one could ever expect to find. MacArthur’s response was to accept Beijing’s propaganda at face value.

At least one American politician appreciated the risks:

young senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy, … he accused Truman of being in league with known Communists and charged that the Democratic-held White House had presided over “twenty years of treason.” McCarthy would say of Truman: “The son of a bitch should be impeached.” McCarthy inveighed against the Truman administration’s creation of a “Korean death trap,” saying that “we can lay [it] at the doors of the Kremlin and those who sabotaged rearming, including Acheson and the President.”

The late fall temperatures in the mountains (about 4,000′ high) of North Korea fell to -25F and were accompanied by high winds. It was time for General Song Shi-lun to implement Mao’s published strategy:

The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.

I don’t want to ruin the suspense, but here are a few high points:

• the Chinese beat us despite our overwhelming superiority in weapons and equipment
• aviation was critical to avoiding a complete disaster; General Smith had made building a mountain runway big enough for the DC-3 a top priority
• the Marines fought tenaciously despite frostbite and every kind of wound

Tempted to despair over today’s headlines?

According to the Pentagon, 33,651 Americans had died fighting in the war, as did 180,000 Chinese. An estimated 2.5 million Korean civilians lost their lives.

I recommend this book as a way to remember the sacrifices of American soldiers in conditions that are unimaginable to a modern-day civilian.

More: Read On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle

After reading World War II at Sea: A Global History you won’t accept media reports of military success uncritically. Some examples:

The Americans, too, inflated their achievement in the Coral Sea. Headlines in the New York Times insisted that American bombers had sunk no fewer than seventeen Japanese warships, including “the certain destruction of two aircraft carriers, one heavy cruiser, and six destroyers.” The papers were initially silent, however, about American losses, reporting only that they were “comparatively light.” In fact, American losses in the Coral Sea were heavier than those of the Japanese, and the loss of the Lexington in particular, representing as it did one-quarter of the nation’s available strike force in the Pacific, was especially worrisome. At the moment, however, the public was hungry for good news, and the Navy Department did not discourage the national celebration.

The Battle of Savo Island was a humiliating defeat for the Allies. With the exception of Pearl Harbor, it was the worst defeat in the history of the United States Navy. It was so bad that, like the Japanese authorities after Midway, the American government kept the outcome an official secret. Based on the official navy briefings, the New York Times reported on August 18: “An attempt by Japanese warships to hamper our landing operations … was thwarted. The Japanese surface force was intercepted by our warships and compelled to retreat before it could take under fire our transports and cargo vessels.” While technically accurate, it was also deliberately misleading.

When there was an actual success to report, of course, the stories were more accurate (even then, however, missteps that wasted lives tended to be omitted).

Maybe we think that we’re great at war because our government and media tell us that things are going our way even when we’re losing?

See also the Vietnam War.

World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig Symonds reminds us how painful it was to be a grunt in the Pacific:

The Marines went ashore on Peleliu on September 15[, 1944]. The landings were difficult and the casualties substantial. Nevertheless, the Marines advanced inland and within three days they had secured the critical airstrip. That, however, proved only the beginning. Geologically, the island of Peleliu was dominated by a series of limestone ridges honeycombed with caves and tunnels that were impervious to aerial bombing or naval gunfire. The ten thousand Japanese defenders withdrew into those caves, determined to make the Americans pay in blood for every yard of soil. Amid temperatures that occasionally exceeded 115 degrees, men of the 1st Marine Division, soon reinforced by the U.S. Army’s 81st Division, had to go into the caves and take out the defenders one at a time. It took ten weeks for the Americans to clear the island, and they did so only at a great cost to both sides. Virtually all ten thousand Japanese defenders were killed—only two hundred were taken alive. American losses, while lighter, were nevertheless painful: a thousand killed and five thousand wounded—greater than the losses at Tarawa.

In terms of being an empire with the ability to move troops and supplies from place to place, Japan was essentially beaten by the end of 1944, says the author:

In December, on his inaugural patrol as skipper of the Flasher, George Grider sank four tankers displacing 10,000 tons each. The tankers, very likely filled with volatile crude oil from Java or Borneo, “disintegrated with the explosions.” It was so spectacular a sight that Grider allowed his crewmen to come topside two at a time to watch them burn. Only a few days later, the Flasher sank three more tankers off Indochina. As a result of such attacks, oil became so scarce that the Japanese began fueling their ships with soybean oil. They confiscated the rice crops of Indochina, causing widespread starvation, in order to turn the rice into biofuel. In effect, American submarines were doing to Japan what German U-boats had failed to do to Great Britain: starve it of the essential tools of war.11 By late 1944 Japan was running out of ships altogether. In the last two months of the year, Japanese ship losses actually declined from more than 250,000 tons a month to about 100,000 tons a month, not because American submarines had become less efficient but because fewer and fewer Japanese ships put to sea at all. Lacking sufficient transports and tankers, the Japanese (like the Italians in 1943) turned to using submarines and barges—even rafts—as supply vessels. By the end of the year, American subs were literally running out of targets.

This was foreseen earlier in 1944:

The American conquest of the Marshall Islands had been so swift and one-sided that it encouraged Nimitz and the Joint Chiefs to consider bypassing Koga’s main base at Truk altogether. It seemed a bold move at the time, for Truk had been the principal Japanese base in the Central Pacific since 1942. In fact, however, it was not nearly as well fortified as the Americans thought, for the Japanese had never quite believed the Americans would get that far. Now that they had, Nimitz and Spruance concluded that the Fifth Fleet could leap past it nearly fifteen hundred miles, all the way to Saipan in the Marianas.

Having penetrated the inner defenses of the Japanese Empire, the Americans were now in a position to block Japan from the essential resources of the South Pacific. That could be accomplished by seizing either the island of Formosa or the Philippines. The American chief of naval operations, Ernie King, strongly preferred Formosa. It was, after all, a single island, albeit a large one, as opposed to the more than seven thousand islands that made up the Philippine archipelago. Then, too, from Formosa, the United States could more easily supply their Chinese allies on the mainland. Dutifully arguing the navy’s position, Nimitz suggested that the Philippines could be bypassed and cut off as Rabaul and Truk had been.

Since the Japanese couldn’t supply the islands that they’d previously conquered, the mid-level analysts in the U.S. Navy wanted to bypass most of the islands, and the horrific battles that would inevitably ensue after an invasion, in favor of taking only places that could directly help with an invasion of Japan or support of allies in China. According to the author, Roosevelt and MacArthur wanted to liberate the Philippines for personal political advancement, despite the country’s military irrelevance. The Battle of Luzon alone cost more than 215,000 lives, essentially to no purpose if we believe this book. The battle was essentially won by March 1945, less than six months before the war ended.

More: Read World War II at Sea: A Global History