From the Publisher

"The Forgotten War captures the intensity of the conflict through the eyes of senior officers, explaining defeats and victories from the perspective of the U.S. battalion, regiment, and division commanders responsible for the war's progress. As a collective portrait of the American officer corps at war, the book is uniquely valuable." Highly critical of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's leadership during the period, Blair also takes President Truman to task for his misjudgments and occasionally faults the conduct of corps and division commanders while offering unstinting praise for Gen. Matthew Ridgway's turnaround of a demoralized field army. This day-by-day, unit-by-unit account of what went on provides details unmatched in other books on the subject.

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THE FORGOTTEN WAR

Naval Institute Press

Chapter One

On January 20, 1949, Harry S. Truman strode onto an elaborate stand in front of the United States Capitol and was sworn in for his first full term as president of the United States.

That chilly day in Washington Truman stood at the pinnacle of his personal power and popularity. In the previous November's presidential elections, despite major defections in the Democratic party and an apparently invincible Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey, Truman had not only won an upset victory for himself but also delivered a Democratic majority to both the Senate and House. Never before in American politics had there been such a personal triumph. Truman was appropriately deemed the "wonder man" of American politics.

Truman had many noble qualities. He was decent, honest, foursquare, close, and loyal to his family and determined to do the right thing. He came from humble circumstances-a Missouri farm-where he had acquired a habit of thrift or, in a grander phrase, fiscal conservatism. He had a good ration of common sense. He could spot a city slicker a mile away. Although he had not gone beyond high school, he had improved on his education by prodigious reading in history and biography. He was physically fit and, at age sixty-four, still mentally keen and receptive to new ideas. Professionally he was a dedicated, loyal Democrat-a strict party man-who had slowly climbed the ladder to the Senate, from which Franklin D. Roosevelt had plucked him to be his vice presidential running mate in 1944. Innately modest and at times self-deprecating, Truman had not sought the White House. When it suddenly and unexpectedly came to him on Roosevelt's death on April 12, 1945, Truman likened it to being hit by a load of hay and asked one and all to pray for him.

He had all these fine qualities-and more-but he had one fatal weakness as president and commander in chief: He had little or no grasp of grand strategy or military power. Worse, he did not concede that weakness. On the contrary, he fancied that with one or two exceptions he knew more about the military and grand strategy than all his generals and admirals put together.

He held most professional military officers in contempt. After he had returned to private life, he said: "You always have to remember when you're dealing with generals and admirals, most of them, they're wrong a good deal of the time.... They're most of them just like horses with blinders on. They can't see beyond the ends of their noses...." Half to three-quarters of all generals were "dumb." Besides that, he said, "No military man knows anything at all about money. All they know how to do is spend it, and they don't give a damn whether they're getting their money's worth or not.... I've known a good many who feel that the more money they spend, the more important they are." The "worst offenders" were the admirals, Truman said. The basic fault of both generals and admirals was the education they received at West Point and Annapolis: "It seems to give a man a narrow view of things."

These harsh words may have sprung from an adolescent rejection. As a youngster of thirteen or fourteen Truman read widely in military history and fantasized a military career so grand, he wrote, it would "make Napoleon look like a sucker." By the time he was graduated from high school, the fantasy had hardened to a "wild desire" to go to West Point. However, as luck would have it, Truman was born with "terrible" eyesight (flat eyeballs), and as a consequence, his application to West Point (and later Annapolis) was turned down. That not only shattered his adolescent dreams but denied him the easiest way to get a free college education. From that time onward he was hostile to the professional military establishment and appeared to have a deep, perhaps even unconscious, desire to scold and punish it.

Notwithstanding this rejection, Truman remained attracted to the military and at age seventeen joined a local National Guard artillery unit as a private. Since most guardsmen then (as now) tended to hold the Regular Army establishment in contempt, Truman may have felt right at home in this environment. He did well, advancing first to corporal, then to sergeant, and when his unit was mobilized for service in France in World War I, the men elected him (as was the custom) a lieutenant. In France he was promoted to captain and named to command Battery D, 129th Artillery Regiment of the 35th Division, which he ably led in combat.

His experience and close contact with the Regular Army establishment hardened his earlier contempt for it. His letters to his future wife, Bess, from that period are laced with acid comments about West Pointers. They were "ornamental and utterly useless" fops, he wrote, who sat close to the throne and to whom "promotion comes easy." He would "not trust 'em with a pair of mules or any surplus cash" because they would either lose the mules or sell them and use the money to buy whiskey. Anyone who would want to make the Army a career in peacetime was "certainly off in his upper works." In a remarkable foreshadowing of one of his future roles, in 1919 he wrote from France: "For my part I want to be [in civilian life] where I can cuss 'em all I please when I please, and you can bet there are some in this man's Army who are going to get cussed and more if they fool around me when I get out. I'd give my right arm to be on the Military Affairs Committee of the [United States] House [of Representatives]."

In the period between the world wars Truman continued his close ties to the Army. He remained in the Army Reserve, going to summer camp every year. He eventually rose to full colonel and command of an artillery regiment. Perhaps in part to enhance his political career, he founded-and commanded-the Missouri Reserve Officers Association. He was also an enthusiastic member of the American Legion. These continuing military activities did not, however, diminish his disdain for the Regular Army establishment or elevate or broaden his strategic vision.

When World War II broke into full fury, Truman was a United States senator newly elected to his second term. As such he created an instrument which enabled him to "cuss" the regular military establishment on a grand scale. He founded and chaired a special Senate subcommittee to investigate "waste" and "duplication" and "fraud" in military procurement. Then (as now) it was a fertile field for a senator, especially one with a chip on his shoulder. He rooted the field with diligence and zeal, publicly flailing generals, admirals, and defense executives. He later boasted that his efforts had saved the nation $15 billion and uncounted lives on the battlefield. The claims would be difficult to confirm or assess, but the very existence of what became known as the Truman Committee probably exerted a positive influence on defense procurement and manufacturing. In any event its work made Truman famous.

Journalists and some historians were to assert that this wartime investigating work in military procurement significantly elevated and broadened Truman's strategic vision and grasp of the military. However, a contrary case could be made: that a prolonged submersion into the world of machine tools, assembly-line schedules, steel quotas, turgid defense contract clauses had the effect of narrowing Truman's strategic vision. One thing is certain: The experience powerfully reinforced Truman's conviction that all military men were fiscal idiots, that many engaged in budgetary legerdemain, and that a few were downright crooks.

The journalistic acclaims heaped on the Truman Committee led in part to Roosevelt's decision to choose Truman as his vice presidential running mate in 1944. Then and in the postelection period one would have thought that Roosevelt would have drawn Truman close into his high inner circle to elevate and broaden his strategic vision. Quixotically, Roosevelt did not. He foolishly isolated Truman from most grand strategy and foreign policy making, even after Truman had been sworn in as vice president. When Truman succeeded Roosevelt as commander in chief of the most powerful military force in the history of the world, he still had the military vision of a National Guard artillery colonel and an American Legionnaire who knew a lot about military procurement. He wrote that he had never even heard of the nation's most expensive single defense outlay: the atomic bomb.

Early in his role as commander in chief Truman signaled his contemptuous attitude toward the military-the Army in particular-by his choice of senior Army aide and adviser in the White House. He had his pick of the many young, brilliant, and dedicated West Point strategists who had emerged in World War II. Instead, he chose a fat, sloppy old Missouri National Guard and American Legion crony, political fixer, and influence peddler, Harry H. Vaughan, who had campaigned in Truman's behalf during Truman's tough and close race for reelection to the Senate in 1940. Truman had first brought Vaughan to Washington to serve as an aide on his Senate investigating committee. After Pearl Harbor Vaughan had volunteered for active duty, but following injury in a plane crash, he returned to serve Truman as military aide thereafter. Although Vaughan's military credentials were slight to nonexistent and he was utterly lacking in strategic vision, Truman promoted him first to brigadier, then to major general. As one of Truman's closest friends and advisers Vaughan wielded enormous influence in military matters. To the Army, Harry Vaughan was not merely an embarrassment but an insult?

Truman's trench-level military outlook combined with his fiscal conservatism and contempt for generals and admirals had led him to weaken gravely the armed forces of the United States during his first, inherited term as commander in chief. He chose this course notwithstanding the almost day-by-day intensification of Soviet bellicosity and adventurism in the postwar years and the onset of the cold war. Moreover, the weakening continued unabatedly despite Truman's own ever-tougher cold war foreign policy, which clearly demanded substantial military strength to give it credibility.

The president's sins against the military in his first three years and nine months were legion. The first and without doubt the gravest was his decision to impose unrealistic-even crippling-budget ceilings on the Pentagon which were based not on strategic considerations but on what Truman himself decided the country could afford.

Truman was determined that in the postwar years America must maintain a balanced federal budget and reduce the $250 billion national debt, all without incurring new federal taxes. The Pentagon threatened these fiscal objectives by recommending a minimum postwar "austerity" budget of about $15 billion a year. In order to stay on his fiscal course, Truman arbitrarily cut the Pentagon budget by a third-to about $10 billion a year-and turned a deaf ear to repeated pleas from his military chiefs for more. In fact, his unannounced goal was to cut the Pentagon budget even more drastically: to about $6 or $7 billion a year.

One rationale for these crippling military cuts was a revolutionary new cold war policy known popularly as "foreign aid." The theory was that American money given to certain countries would prime economic pumps, speed up recovery, and make these countries less vulnerable to an external or internal Communist takeover, thereby reducing the need for military protection from America. This concept, which Truman eagerly embraced, led to foreign aid grants in the immediate postwar years totaling about $10 billion, most of it for the Marshall Plan. In the long term, foreign aid worked as designed in many countries; however, to view foreign aid as a viable or realistic substitute for American military power was, to say the least, naive.

The severe budget ceilings on the Pentagon compelled a drastic postwar reduction in America's standing forces and in the quality and quantity of its armament. At the end of World War II America had 12 million men and women in uniform. By December 1948, at the end of Truman's first term as commander in chief, the standing forces had shrunk to a mere 1.5 million men and women. It had slight combat effectiveness and was everywhere in desperate need. For example:

Army. The Army of World War II numbered 6 million men and nearly 100 superbly equipped and trained divisions. When the war was over, a nationwide clamor arose to "bring the boys home." Notwithstanding the new global responsibilities that had befallen America, Truman caved in to political pressures and allowed a frenzied and disgraceful demobilization to occur. Within a matter of a few months the great wartime American Army was reduced to a few regular cadres processing incoming, unhappy draftees, most of whom were assigned to clerical or occupational duties in Germany and Japan.

No one wanted to maintain a big postwar American Army sustained by a draft that unfairly favored the affluent. After careful study, outgoing Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall recommended that America maintain a standing Army of about 700,000 professionals, backed up by universal military training (UMT). Under UMT all physically qualified Americans would serve in an arm of the military for about one year of training, then go into a Reserve force which, in theory, could spring to arms within a matter of days.

UMT was a sensible and fair policy for a democracy, an extension or sophisticated version of the early militia of the colonial era. However, there was not a prayer that Congress would approve UMT or anything like it in peacetime, especially on the heels of an all-out world war. Nonetheless, Truman sincerely and passionately-and naïvely-embraced UMT for at least two main reasons. First, he believed universal military service would foster a democratization of the Army, diluting the influence of the West Point professionals. Secondly, it would save huge sums of money, enabling him to reach his goal of a $6 or $7 billion Pentagon budget.

Truman pursued the UMT fantasy energetically all through his first term and allowed the unpopular draft to expire in 1947. As a consequence, by March 1948 the Army had dwindled to 530,000 men and was, as Chief of Staff Omar N. Bradley wrote, "in a shockingly deplorable state." It had "almost no combat effectiveness" and "could not fight its way out of a paper bag." There was only one division-the 82d Airborne-that could be remotely described as combat-ready.

Continues...

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Excerpted from THE FORGOTTEN WAR by CLAY BLAIR Copyright © 1987 by Clay Blair
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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