The Greatest Limited War

...So it is today with argument about the war in South Vietnam...

...Rees is at his best in his exposition of such problems...

...Rees is as adept at phrasemaking as any modern historian, and there is not one page which does not include something highly quotable...

...More so than either World War, the U.S...

...Over the years Acheson's remark in the MacArthur hearings seems less a political justification than a sybilline utterance, the vastly expensive twelve-word lesson of Korea, the greatest of all the limited wars: Time is on our side if we make good use of it.' " It may never have occurred to Dean Acheson that he was uttering a profundity, and today he might even feel tempted to quote Lewis Carroll against himself: "Own that at least we've striven to succeed and take the good intention for the deed...

...possibly a Briton would feel loath to put it that way...

...Toward his close Rees says: "In this perspective the Eisenhower years appear as a barren period when the passions of the absolutists and the neo-isolationists were abated...

...Most members of the staff of U.S...

...commitment in Korea proved divisive rather than uniting on the home front...

...What is remembered is that the strategists advising the President decided that the War was deadlocked and finally settled for far less than victory, while the General stood for nothing less than winning the field, and had a plan—which he vowed could do it—that was balked by faint hearts in Washington...

...Between the moment when the surgeon pronounced that death had come to General Douglas MacArthur and the sounding of taps near the graveside, national mourning for the departed hero was consumed by national disputation over questions beyond answer, now as when they first arose...

...But the last tender line of the Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna comes naturally to mind: "We left him alone with his glory...

...No matter, there is also a corresponding analysis of the parliamentary storms in Britain arising from the Korean War, storms only slightly less violent than our own but of which Americans knew little at the time and remember still less...

...That the opinion on both sides is prejudiced and partisan is suggested by one element strangely missing ever since the relief of the General by President Harry Truman foreclosed public interest in any further exploration of the middle ground...

...But if that plan was unworkable on every count—and sober analysis compels that judgment of it—while at the same time Communism might have been defeated in North Korea by a bolder, broader try and more enlightened planning, the controversialists could be equally wrong...

...What immediately followed those defeats is equally pertinent...

...So it happened, and to the eye of Rees, Ridgway's impact on the battlefield became pivotal to the controversy: "Ridgway knew that he had the measure of his enemy...

...Though this may be, as I have suggested, a vast over-simplification, I hasten to add that it is one of the few flaws in a generally superb treatment of one of the most confused chapters in our recent history...

...By a great irony born of the revulsion against Korea, the lessons of that War were largely ignored...

...These qualities distinguish Rees' authorship: He writes at a remarkably fast pace, his style is graced by economy of words along with the use of plain English speech, and he achieves strength through understatement...

...It has been left to another Democratic Administration to apply the lessons of the Truman-Acheson era with a more pragmatic approach and limited goals...

...It is relatively safe to be positive, or wrong-headed, about that which is too little understood...

...Instead, there shortly arrived General Matthew B. Ridgway, who demonstrated with the force-on-hand that these gloomy estimates were totally wrong...

...His method is to assemble the evidence pro and con, and then say in effect: "Come let us reason together...

...Sad, indeed, that it could not be written of the recent event at Norfolk...

...Who was right about what should be done in Korea in 1950-51...

...Rees says clearly enough that the defeat of the MacArthur forces in North Korea in the battles of late November 1950 were the direct consequence of his blunders in generalship...

...Certain of the classified materials, which might have modified his findings somewhat, seem to have eluded him...

...The late, lamented aftermath serves but to rewrite a famous line: When old soldiers become embroiled in historic political controversies, they may die, but prejudiced partisan opinion never fades away...

...General Walton Walker, though an otherwise resolute soldier, would not buck MacArthur on strategy or grand tactics...

...For Rees has written the bestbalanced, most penetrating and fullest chronicle of the Korean conflict yet printed...

...Ridgway reached Korea while MacArthur was at nadir, after the Army and X Corps had been at last consolidated, before there was any sign of recovery, and when the fluxing situation most needed one resolute voice...

...He was there to take orders...

...he has probed far more deeply than anyone else, with the result that all the way through new light is shed on extremely dark corners...

...That is what he told his staff on returning to Seoul, though this fact has never been published...

...Thereafter General Ridgway ran his own show...

...Until this hour, the debate continues as to the true significance of the performance by Americans in the POW camps, with neither side in the contention giving an inch...

...But this is not done without whiplash phrases...

...that was his concept of duty...

...The MacArthur relief, the military adversities which preceded it, and the political hearings which followed, arc highly sensitive and extremely complex subjects...

...What might have happened if that which happened had not happened remains forever undeterminable...

...Too late, at the conference with his chief in Tokyo on November 30, 1950, after the damage was done, he protested that the split command was folly and one general should have command of the combat army...

...There is somewhat more to it than that...

...In summing up his study of the Korean War, David Rees, a supremely gifted young Englishman, comments that the unfolding of the future will determine whether MacArthur had true vision or the President and Joint Chiefs were correct in accepting a truce on a drawn field...

...But nothing is really simple about Korea and its aftermath...

...In their hour of frustration, many of the ablest American high commanders in Korea felt exactly that way about the situation...

...Though it is commonly said that the people were not with it, that cavil is far less subject to proof than that leading figures in the Congress and public opinion-forming media continued to play politics with the War, possibly because it was both little and remote...

...Eighth Army had already come to Ridgway's view and were confident that the Chinese would be flummoxed by the same vice which had foredoomed MacArthur's reach for the Yalu—over-extension...

...They felt victory was attainable, while never believing it could be won with MacArthur's plan...

...Rees' review of the troubled American domestic political scene during that period, scintillating in its profiling of the contending personalities, sweeping in its examination of the issues and the nature of the political crisis arising therefrom, reflects an insight comparable with the acumen of Lord Bryce...

...It is impossible to see how any tactician could argue to the contrary, though numerous of his followers have tried...

...And in addition to all this, he is utterly fair-minded and his judgments have the firmness of a Solomon...

...But that is unimportant...

...Rees describes what is well set forth in the March issue of Leavenworth's Quarterly Review—how MacArthur thereon concluded that all was lost, the Chinese mass was irresistible and the expedition irretrievably ruined, unless massive reinforcements were speeded from the United States...

...Reviewed by S. L. A. MARSHALL Author, "Night Drop," "Pork Chop Hill" and "Battle at Best" This is not to be an essay on military funerals, raising the question why poets find them more poignant than the passing of a young life...

...The problem was ideally suited to his temperament...

...There is, in fact, so much to praise in Rees' book that it is almost niggling to start with this minor dissent...

...No note is taken, however, of the fact that there was no comparable emotional convulsion within the fighting services, which adhered to their traditional view...

...But to MacArthur, who instantly recognized the significance of Ridgway's success, the establishment of the War of containment in Korea as a going concern meant something else—a viable alternative to his own program...

...Everyone has an opinion, but no man knows, or can know...