[46] Ibid., 13.
Altogether, the army of Red China may be appraised as a formidable instrument on terrain suited to its tactics. Several of America’s foremost military thinkers were convinced, nevertheless, that Eighth Army reverses of the first few months in Korea were the penalty paid for a national preoccupation with airborne atomic weapons at the expense of preparations for limited wars.
It was only natural that the American public and its political and military leaders in Washington should have been much concerned about a weapon with the capability of wiping out a medium-size city in a minute.[47] Their anxiety was heightened by President Truman’s announcement on 23 September 1949 that Soviet Russia had exploded an atomic bomb. A great many Americans, probably a majority, sincerely believed that it was hardly worthwhile to prepare for an old-fashioned limited war when the Armageddon of the future would be fought to an awesome finish with thermonuclear weapons. National policy was shaped by this line of reasoning; and though we had every opportunity to study Chinese tactics prior to 1950, few if any preparations were made to cope with them. The outbreak of Korean hostilities found the four U.S. skeleton divisions in Japan woefully unready, both morally and materially.
[47] The day had not yet dawned when the hydrogen bomb would have a much greater potentiality for frightfulness.
At a later date three high-placed U.S. Army generals, Matthew B. Ridgway, James M. Gavin, and Maxwell D. Taylor, would retire because they could not reconcile their views with a national policy which they interpreted as placing all our strategic eggs in the basket of intercontinental bombers and guided missiles. Afterwards, as advocates of preparedness for limited as well as atomic warfare, they published books presenting their side of the case.[48]
[48] Gen M. B. Ridgway, Memoirs (New York, 1956); Gen J. M. Gavin, War and Peace in the Space Age (New York, 1958); Gen M. D. Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet (New York, 1959).
On 15 January 1951 these developments were still in the future, of course. But even at the time it had already been made evident that the armed forces of Red China were not an exception to the age-old rule that there is no such thing as an invincible army. When they came up against well trained and led U.S. Army outfits in both of their offensives, they always had a fight on their hands and frequently a repulse.
The Marines had proved beyond doubt in their Chosin Reservoir campaign that the Chinese Reds could be beaten by ground and air firepower engendered by sound training, discipline, and combat leadership. Five Chinese armies, of three or four divisions each, were identified in northeast Korea during the November-December operations. Three of them were directly or indirectly opposed to the 1st Marine Division, with a U.S. Army battalion and smaller Army units attached. Yet the beleaguered American forces seized the initiative and fought their way for 13 days and 35 miles through enveloping CCF units which had cut the mountain MSR in five places.
Throughout the CCF January offensive, EUSAK G-2 officers anxiously sought every scrap of evidence as to the whereabouts of the five CCF armies identified in northeast Korea as late as 10 December. Even if reduced by casualties, they would have been a formidable and perhaps even decisive reinforcement to the seven CCF armies engaged. But they did not appear. Nor were they encountered again until the middle of March 1951, when similarly numbered units filled with replacements reached the front.
The full story may never be known, since the Chinese Reds are not fond of acknowledging their disasters. But it is a likely conjecture that the fatal combination of Marine firepower and General Winter created terrible havoc among Communists who had been so certain of an immediate victory that they were neither armed, clothed, nor supplied for a 13-day campaign in subzero weather.