While weakening our own infantry, Johnson also decided to limit our Korean allies to "defensive" armament. At the start of the KW, the ROKs found themselves facing 170 of perhaps the best tanks developed in WWII, with only satchel charges (20 pounds of TNT, virtually useless against modern armor), the 2.36in. rocket launcher, 37mm and 57mm anti-tank guns, no medium artillery, and no tanks at all.
Convinced by General Omar Bradley who was scathingly contemptuous of the Navy and Marine Corps that there would never again be a major amphibious assault, Johnson also reduced the Marine Corps to a poorly equipped skeleton of its supposed strength, about 6 fighting battalions, equipped with worn out WWII weapons. Incredibly, the 5th Marines, (LtCol Ray Murray), were the troops carrying the colors of the entire 1 stMarDiv in July of '50. (That's right! Six rifle companies of about 7 officers and 255 men each, were the only available Marine fighting force that many believe actually saved South Korea and the Eighth Army in the Pusan Perimeter. They didn't get the third companies in their rifle battalions until after the 1 st Battle of the Naktong, 17-18 August of '50!)
In another blunder, Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson even left South Korea out of our defined sphere of world interests. To Stalin and Mao, this was a virtual invitation to include it in their own. Whatever Acheson's definition, a free South Korea was vital to the safety of the entire Japanese theater, and ~ prime opportunity for Communist expansion.
Although newer series of infantry weapons, radios, and vehicles had either been developed or were in production on both sides, they were all largely withheld, along with nuclear weapons. The Communist bloc, fighting through its secondary powers, followed the same course in employing old or obsolescent weaponry, however many Communist arms were of more recent manufacture, or in better condition, than those in American and ROK hands in 1950. For example although the "burp gun" was very effective in the close infantry assaults of the Korean War it was not equal to the AK-47, a Soviet standard in 1949. From the infantry point of view, the KW was an anachronism.
No milestone military developments arose from the war. The US took innovative measures in logistical techniques, cold weather clothing, and battlefield medical assistance MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) units, but the only significantly new developments were the use of helicopters for reconnaissance, transport, and evacuation on a large scale, and the employment of ~t aircraft in combat. The most modern jet, the F-86 Sabre, was deployed only when Communist forces first introduced their MiG-15.
It has long been forgotten by most that the Truman administration refused to indict Alger Hiss for treason and instead attempted to crucify Whitaker Chambers, Hiss' exposer. (When Soviet files were made public some 50 years later it was conclusively shown that Hiss had led one of the most powerful groups of subversives in our history, even being the principal advisor to Roosevelt at Yalta where Poland and essentially Eastern Europe were given away to the USSR.) The reasons for this blindness were assumed to be the Truman cabinet beliefs that the Communists wanted peace~ and that ground warfare was ended forever.
The facts turned out otherwise. As Johnson found (to his horror, one hopes!) the Communists considered war a basic tool for expanding their ideology, and ground warfare became· the primary choice for combat when the alternative was world nuclear destruction. Johnson discovered that arming the ROKs with satchel charges and grenades hadn't really given them much defense, against tanks. The ROKs died by the hundreds under the steel treads of T -34s, and the best of their 1950 army never got back south of the Han.
Then, ready or not, Truman sent our civilians in uniform with their own obsolescent weapons into one of the most vicious infantry wars our country has ever fought.
Get your own Free Home Page