army demobilized from eight million men and eighty-nine divisions to less than
600,000 and ten under-strength divisions; most units were only manned at two-
thirds their authorized strengths, and many lacked organic armour. 53 Although a
number of the Second World War veterans remained in service, training was not
as intense as it had been in the years before 1945, and overall the level of combat
readiness was low.
Thus, when North Korean forces began their offensive on 25 June 1950,
military units of the United States and the Republic of Korea performed poorly.
Casualties were high, as UN forces fell back all the way to the Pusan Perimeter. 54
On 15 September 1950, UN forces, under the command of General Douglas
MacArthur, successfully counter-attacked at Inchon with a surprise amphibious
operation, which some historians have called ‘Pattonesque’, that required im-
mense cooperation among all three services. By 22 September, the operation had
succeeded in capturing Seoul and cutting most of the major north–south trans-
portation routes; the North Koreans fell back with heavy losses, while UN forces
advanced rapidly north to the Manchurian border.
UN intelligence failures, combined with extraordinary efforts at concealment
by the Chinese, contributed to a successful counter-offensive by Communist
forces, which drove UN forces back with heavy losses. Nearly 200,000 Chinese
troops had moved into staging areas undetected. Once their offensive began in
late October 1950, it gained ground rapidly and changed the complexion of the
war. Chinese intervention eventually forced an alteration in US policy: the Tru-
man administration was now prepared to accept limited objectives, namely
restoring the political autonomy of the Republic of Korea, in order to avoid a
general war and potential nuclear escalation. 55
However, MacArthur remained fixed on achieving military victory, stressing
the likely necessity of crossing the Yalu River and taking the war into Manchuria.
The Chinese counter-offensive eventually stalled as the flow of logistics, though
but a fraction of that required by UN forces, was continually disrupted by air
attacks, and because the Chinese practice of living off the land had run its course.
Thereafter, a series of smaller offensives and counter-offensives, driving back and
forth across the 38th parallel, characterized the remainder of the war until an
armistice was signed on 27 July 1953. Truman’s war for limited objectives had
finally come to an end, at the cost of some 139,000 American casualties (34,000
dead), 50,000 South Korean deaths, and nearly a million and a half North Korean
and Chinese casualties.
MacArthur was relieved in April 1951 for his repeated and public disagree-
ments with Washington’s policies. 56 Ironically, MacArthur’s approach has been
described by some historians as representative of the American way of war; that is,
the ‘habit of thinking of war in terms of annihilative victories’. 57 It is actually
more accurate to say that this operational approach was simply the further
refinement of war’s first grammar, which—notwithstanding the US Marine
Corps’Small Warsmanual (1940)—formed the primary focus of American
operational art. It was partly the legacy of the Second World War that war was
considered to have only one proper grammar.
American Operational Art, 1917–2008 151