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4. A Tale of Two Task Forces
- The University of Alabama Press
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4 A Tale of Two Task Forces As a son of the World War II generation and an armored cavalry veteran of Vietnam, I find I cannot read or think about Americans in combat during the Korean War without a mixture of rage and horror, on one hand,at the utterly misbegotten way that war was conducted and of gratitude and relief, on the other, that I did not have to fight in it. It has been called the forgotten war, the coldest war, and the first hot war of the cold war.At the time it was not officially considered a war but a “police action,” with the latter term justly adduced over the years as a measure of the distance between the horror of combat and the sanitizations of political discourse and popular understanding that would become a signature of post1945 American military involvements. More properly one might see it as both the last conventional war and the first unconventional war, combining the slaughter and chaos of earlier large-scale wars with the strange new battlefield terrors and unknowns of a host of shadow wars to come. For soldiers and marines in the middle of it the misery was beyond naming , combining the worst features of twentieth-century mass-formation slaughter with the savage, small-unit, close-quarters combat of the patrol , the outpost, and the ambush soon to become the trademark of a new style of postatomic limited war. Further, as if this were not sufficient, it remains distinguished to this day by the combination of mischance and mismanagement that prevailed at every conceivable level of operation. The barest summary of events evokes to this day a shifting nightmare scenario, offensive and counteroffensive, crushing advance and bloody re- A Tale of Two Task Forces / 65 treat, overwhelming attack and desperate, last-ditch defense, a kind of black hole of military memory expanding and contracting before one’s eyes. A massive July 25, 1950, cross-border invasion by six divisions of North Korean People’s Army (NKPA), at the 38th parallel dividing the peninsula into post–World-War II communist and free world clientstates , resulted in South Korean forces and hastily committed American units nearly being pushed into the sea. With U.S. and U.N. combat forces fed in to support collapsing South Korean formations, a desperate defense was mounted in the enclave known as the Pusan Perimeter. Beginning in mid-September, an allied counteroffensive, coupled with a high-risk amphibious flank maneuver at Inchon, then drove the North Koreans back the entire length of the peninsula to the Yalu River, marking the country’s northern border. In turn, a late-November cross-border counterattack by new Chinese formations numbering in the hundreds of thousands pushed the allies with tremendous losses back across the 38th parallel into positions near the original defensive perimeter. After a surreal seven months of bloody march and countermarch, battle lines were restored roughly at midcountry. Twenty thousand Americans would be dead, and the most legendary warrior-general in the national history since Grant or Pershing would be dismissed from supreme command for insubordination. Two years of bitter, murderous stalemate would follow, during which thirteen thousand more American troops would die. When an armistice would be signed,the two armies would still find themselves facing each other at the 38th parallel. A spectacle of slaughter, rout, and capture, eventually subsiding into a grinding, inconclusive misery of attrition, the Korean War would remain among the strangest, most ill-fought, and least understood wars in American history. In terms of the experience of the American soldier, Korea may now also be said to have encompassed a bizarre anthology of twentiethcentury American wars, replaying in its opening phases nearly everything that went wrong in well-remembered World War II combat debacles before then going on to anticipate such bitter, inconclusive struggles as ensuing wars in Vietnam and Iraq. For those with the memories of 1941 to 1945 fresh in their minds, the opening rounds especially, with entire units committed to hopeless defense or plunged into fighting retreat, recalled dark images of catastrophe ranging from Bataan to the Battle 66 / Chapter 4 of the Bulge. Whole formations suffered annihilation. Platoons, companies , and battalions, even in some cases regiments and divisions, simply vanished, ceased to exist in the face of a relentlessly advancing enemy. Two years would then follow of the equally bitter, savage, close-up war of the perimeter, the patrol, the outpost, and the ambush, the...