The Line: Combat in Korea, January–February 1951 (review)

By late December 1950, United Nations (UN) troops in Korea had good reason to wonder if they might soon be driven off the peninsula altogether. Entering the war and providing reinforcement to the battered North Koreans, tens of thousands of Chinese “volunteers” poured into the conflict, forcing the southward retreat of UN forces and capturing Seoul. Unlike most historians who tend to take for granted the eventual outcome of the war, the men caught in the fighting had no assurance that they would or could stave off disaster and defeat. Through their efforts in January and February 1951, however, UN soldiers did just that, halting the Chinese offensive and even pushing the enemy back. In The Line: Combat in Korea, January–February 1951, the first of three volumes exploring combat in the Korean War, William T. Bowers chronicles this critical two-month period and the major engagements that helped revive the UN initiative and renew troop morale.

An oral history sandwiched between an introduction and a conclusion by Bowers and punctuated with brief editorial comments, The Line places the reader as close to the action as possible. While most other oral histories of the war—of which there are only a handful, most notably Rudy Tomedi’s No Bugles, No Drums (1993) and Donald Knox’s two-volume The Korean War (1985 and 1988)—rely heavily on interviews and memoirs generated long after soldiers returned home and rejoined civilian life, Bowers’ work weaves together previously overlooked contemporary accounts straight from the battlefields and command posts in Korea. The Line synthesizes first-hand recollections gathered from participants by U. S. Army historians only hours or days after battles, American unit and command reports, recommendations for the award of the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor and other material collected by the military as the war unfolded to tell the story of these pivotal months from ground view in the war zone.

Certainly for the general reader Bowers’ approach and choice of sources contain certain drawbacks. For those uninitiated into military culture, references to Army organization and structure as well as weaponry and maneuvers, never adequately explained in the editorial notes, might prove confusing as they are unfamiliar. Similarly, despite an annotated list of abbreviations provided by Bowers following the Preface, the terminology and jargon spattered throughout the pages of the book can make for a challenging read. Moreover, created specifically for military purposes, many of the accounts included in The Line have a “just-the-facts” reporting style, seemingly lacking some of the emotion that so often permeates the personal narratives of combat and to which many in the oral history audience have become accustomed.

To dwell on any minor weaknesses in The Line, however, would be an injustice to this important addition to the literature of the Korean War. Pushed relentlessly by Bowers from one battle story to another, the reader nearly suffers secondhand shell shock while gaining enormous insight into warfare as experienced by UN troops, especially American soldiers, in Korea. In Bowers’ narrative, soldiers fight the enemy to be sure, but the protagonists as frequently confront a faulty communication system, logistical and supply problems, adverse weather, conflicting orders, and, above all, confusion. In the pages of the book, men forget to pull the pins out of grenades before lobbing them into enemy positions, mistake the Chinese for Republic of Korea allies, and give contradictory eyewitness accounts of the same action. Here, there exist no textbook battles and, though victory and the UN effort hang in the balance, General Infantry sometimes follow their guts instead of their orders, going absent without leave when left on the line with no blankets with which to face the brutal cold and taking cover in ditches rather than fanning out to protect a moving column under fire. Still, without making heroism the sole focus of The Line, Bowers manages to demonstrate how the commonplace courage and selflessness of men...