This Kind of War, Classics Military History of the Korean War by TR Fehrenbach

Author:TR Fehrenbach
Format: epub
Published: 2017-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

It is given to the President of the United States, with the advice and consent of the Senate, to conduct the foreign policy of the Republic. From the time of Athens and Republican Rome, no representative parliament has ever had much success with dealings beyond the water; there have been historians who claim that continued involvement of a people beyond its own frontiers inevitably produces Caesarism.

The jury on this question must be reported to be still out. At least, no Caesars were produced by the Korean conflict. Both potential Caesars were, in fact, humbled, one at the hands of his superiors, the other by his people. But first they collided, and the shock was felt around the world.

Douglas MacArthur, one of the most brilliant military minds America has yet produced, graduated from West Point at the turn of the century. He stemmed from a distinguished military family; his father was a lieutenant general and proconsul—of the Philippines—in his own right.

MacArthur was a product of the old, alienated American officer caste, but, like Dwight Eisenhower, he was never typical of that group. While Eisenhower came to embody all the virtues—and vices, to some—of the old-American bourgeoisie, remote from the hard-bitten cavalry of the sun-blasted plains, MacArthur's mind and heart, at the age of thirty-eight, were forged in the horror of the trenches of World War I.

At an age when most professionals looked forward to leaves or eagles, Douglas MacArthur wore general's stars. Yet, from the ghastly slaughter of 1917-1918 he retained a profound horror of the effects of war, as well as a never-faltering belief in the idealism that lay behind that war.

That slaughter he saw at close hand. He was decorated seven times by an awed government and people for valor in the field.

After what he had seen in the trenches, war could never again be a mere profession to Douglas MacArthur. He would continue to be a professional soldier, but forever afterward war to him would be an awful act, to be entered on only for the most transcendental of purposes.

In this feeling MacArthur was one with most of the nonmilitary intelligent men of his age. He had a profound hatred of war, but any war upon which he embarked must henceforth be a crusade. In no other way could the suffering be justified.

It would occur to few of that generation that wars fought for a higher purpose must always be the most hideous of all. It is desperately hard for men to accept that there is a direct path from the highest ideals to the torture chamber—for no man who accepts with his whole heart can fail equally to reject with his whole being.

In his feeling for war, MacArthur was a typical American of his school. He was one with Woodrow Wilson, whose pronouncements deeply influenced him, and he was one with Franklin Roosevelt. War was to be entered upon with sadness, with regret, but also with ferocity.

War was horrible, and whoever unleashed it must be smitten and destroyed, unto the last generation, so that war should arise no more.

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