This Kind of War; A Study in Unpreparedness

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Fair. xii, 688, [4] pages. Illustrated endpapers. Maps. Chronology. Glossary of Principal Weapons. Key to Map Symbols. Index. Front board weak and restrengthened with glue. Spine frayed at top and bottom. Some cover soiling. Format is approximately 6.5 inches by 9.5 inches. Theodore Reed "T. R." Fehrenbach, Jr. (January 12, 1925 - December 1, 2013) was an American historian, columnist, and the former head of the Texas Historical Commission (1987-1991). He graduated from Princeton University in 1947 and wrote more than twenty books, including the bestseller Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans and This Kind of War, about the Korean War. Senator John McCain called this book "perhaps the best book ever written on the Korean War". Secretary of Defense James Mattis said "There's a reason I recommended T. R. Fehrenbach's book...that we all pull it out and read it one more time." For almost 30 years, he wrote a weekly column on Sundays for the San Antonio Express-News. "This Kind of War has been studied by generations of soldiers. Fehrenbach describes good decisions and bad ones with insight and expertise. But what he does best of all is his eloquent, sometimes painful description of the GIs who must bear the burden of those decisions. This book has a challenging theme, that a great power must maintain a highly professional army organized along lines different from the society it is set up to protect. This work is written from the perspective of those who fought it. Drawn from official records, operations journals and histories, this book is also largely based on the personal narratives of the small-unit commanders and their troops. The book provides both an overview of the war, and a "you were there" account of American soldiers in fierce battle against the North Korean and Chinese communist invaders. As Americans and North Koreans continue to face each other across the 38th Parallel, This Kind of War commemorates the past and offers vital lessons for the future. Derived from a review by Barry Strauss of the Hoover Institution found on the internet: A journalist rather than an academic, Fehrenbach (1925-2013) wrote larger-than-life history of a heroic bent. This Kind of War originally appeared in 1963 with the subtitle of A Study in Unpreparedness. Although This Kind of War starts with a quotation from Sun Tzu, Fehrenbach adopts a Clausewitzian approach. He understands the Korean conflict not as a test of power but of wills, in particular, of American will. The Communists, he writes, doubted that the United States "had the will to react quickly and practically and without panic in a new situation." They were wrong, but it cost about 37,000 American lives to prove it. Fehrenbach's framework is tragic. The United States was unprepared to fight a limited war halfway around the world and when it intervened it overreached before finally winning partial victory and painful wisdom. If there is almost poetry in the author's understanding of Americans' frustration over Korea there is also prophecy in his statement (in 1963) that they would face other frustrating conflicts all over the globe. Although a history, This Kind of War has the vividness of a memoir. It is based largely on personal narratives of small-unit commanders. "This is very much a platoon leader's book," the author writes. He himself commanded U.S. army units in Korea at company and battalion as well at the platoon level. Fehrenbach's prose style takes no prisoners. Of Korea's war-torn history he says, "the people of the Hermit Kingdom wished to be left in peace. The wish is hopeless, for Korea is a buffer state." (p. 10) Of the North Korean People's Army, he writes, "Hesitancy ... was cured neatly, efficiently, and permanently by the application of a pistol to the back of the head." (p. 5) He describes MacArthur's ill-fated invasion of North Korea thus: Because Washington permitted soldiers to make and to act on decisions that were beyond the purview of the military, because it forced them to bring purely military thinking into maters that remained in essence political-in short, because Washington still sometimes acted as if there could be a separation between war and politics, the United States, intoxicated with the heady taste of triumph, was heading for disaster. Unfortunately, Washington still hasn't learned the lesson.