Quotes from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“A nation that does not prepare for all the forms of war should then renounce the use of war in national policy. A people that does not prepare to fight should then be morally prepared to surrender. To fail to prepare soldiers and citizens for limited, bloody ground action, and then to engage in it, is folly verging on the criminal.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“None of them were equipped, trained, or mentally prepared for combat. For the first time in recent history, American ground units had been committed during the initial days of a war; there had been no allies to hold the line while America prepared. For the first time, many Americans could understand what had happened to Britain at Dunkirk.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“War was to be entered upon with sadness, with regret, but also with ferocity.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“The real issues are whether the power of Western Civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism; whether the rule of men who shoot their prisoners, enslave their citizens, and deride the dignity of man, shall displace the rule of those to whom the individual and his individual rights are sacred; whether we are to survive with God’s hand to guide and lead us, or to perish in the dead existence of a Godless world.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“Revolution and terror are synonymous; only with the passage of time does any revolution become respectable.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“These men had not accepted the fact that culture and weaponry, or even culture and plumbing are not synonymous, and while a society may lag a hundred years behind in comforts and ethics, it may catch up in hardware in a human lifetime.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“Yet every democratic government is reluctant to face the fact. Reservists and citizen-soldiers stand ready, in every free nation, to stand to the colors and die in holocaust, the big war. Reservists and citizen-soldiers remain utterly reluctant to stand and die in anything less. None want to serve on the far frontiers, or to maintain lonely, dangerous vigils on the periphery of Asia. There has been every indication that mass call-ups for cold war moves may result in mass disaffection.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“History has shown very clearly that for democracy to continue, the people, and not the generals or even the executive authority, must have control over the military. The”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“But control does not imply petty interference.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“The problem is to see not what is desirable, or nice, or politically feasible, but what is necessary.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“Collective security had a fine sound, but it was still little more than a word; it would still be the United States, and the United States alone, that held the far frontier. No one else had the will or the power.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“Fortunately, there was government by consent of the governed in America—but just as unfortunately, such governments dearly hate to admit a mistake.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“The ranks of the Marines were now diluted with reservists, at least 50 percent. Few of them were mentally prepared to fight, or physically hardened to war. Inch’on, luckily, had been easy. But now, on the frozen hills above Yudam-ni, the Marines, regular and reservist alike, faced reality. Because their officers were tough-minded, because their discipline was tight, and because their esprit—that indefinable emotion of a fighting man for his standard, his regiment, and the men around him, was unbroken—weak and strong alike, they would face it well.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“The United States will be forced to fight wars of policy during the balance of the century. This is inevitable, since the world is seething with disaffection and revolt, which, however justified and merited, plays into Communist hands, and swings the world balance ever their way.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“If war is to have any meaning at all, its purpose must be to establish control over peoples and territories, and ultimately, this can be done only as Alexander the Great did it, on the ground.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiesence of the military toward the liberal view of life.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“A free press is equally free to print the truth or ignore it, as it chooses.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“Americans have never admitted that guns may serve a moral purpose as well as votes.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“There was and is no danger of military domination of the nation. The Constitution gave Congress the power of life or death over the military, and they have always accepted the fact. The danger has been the other way around—the liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiesence of the military toward the liberal view of life.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“In 1950 a Marine Corps officer was still an officer, and a sergeant behaved the way good sergeants had behaved since the time of Caesar, expecting no nonsense, allowing none. And Marine leaders had never lost sight of their primary—their only—mission, which was to fight. The Marine Corps was not made pleasant for men who served in it. It remained the same hard, dirty, brutal way of life it had always been.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“Marine human material was not one whit better than that of the human society from which it came. But it had been hammered into form in a different forge, hardened with a different fire. The Marines were the closest thing to legions the nation had. They would follow their colors from the shores of home to the seacoast of Bohemia, and fight well either place.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“They will not face the fact that the military professionals, while some have ideas about society in general that are distorted and must be watched, still know better than anyone else how a war is won.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“But so long as he had no new policy, so long as he sought only to contain, the enemy without would always hold the initiative.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“And, caught in a Communist trap, the moral courage of some leaders grew less. The pressure on Tokyo to hold down the loss never ceased. In Korea, on tile ground, it intensified. It was no longer possible to permit juniors any latitude, or any possibility for error. What Boatner foresaw happened. Soon battalion commanders led platoons, and general officers directed company actions, for the loss of one patrol could ruin the career of a colonel. In one way, it was an efficient system. It worked, for the lines were stable, and no senior officer had enough to do. But the damage done to the Army command structure would be long in healing. If a new war came someday, there would be colonels and generals—who had been lieutenants and captains in Korea—who had their basic lessons still to learn.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“They—those who lived—would have to learn again that discipline means keeping a full bandoleer of ammunition and a full canteen, despite their weight, and all the equipment men wiser than they had issued to them.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“Not until long afterward was it even dignified by the name of war—the governmental euphemism was Korean conflict—and it rapidly became the most forgotten war in American history. There was little in it, from near-disastrous beginning to honorable but frustrating end, that appealed to American sensibilities.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“If the United States ground forces had not eventually held in Korea, Americans would have been faced with two choices: holocaust or humiliation. General, atomic war, in a last desperate attempt to save the game, would have gained Americans none of the things they seek in this world; humiliating defeat and withdrawal from Korea would have inevitably surrendered Asia to a Communist surge, destroying forever American hopes for a free and ordered society across the world.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

“It was the Army that knew the worst frustration, from July 1951 to the end of the war. The mission of the Army is to meet the enemy in sustained ground combat, and capture or destroy him. The Army was indoctrinated that strength lay not in defense but in attack, and that the offensive, as Clausewitz wrote, always wins. The Army not only could not win; it could not even work at the task. Yet it was locked in a wrestler’s grip with the enemy, suffering hardship, taking losses, even after the peace talks began.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

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