Re: Fw:

[<Cfbernard@aol.com>]

Dutch,

This extends my discussion with you at the last reunion.

Best,

Carl Bernard


I've just returned from a fascinating trip to New York.  My time was spent 
with The New York Military Affairs Symposium.  The occasion was their 
Conference on the Korean War.  Something over fifty very interesting persons 
attended.  Many were professors at various New York schools.  Few were as old 
as me, but the ones with whom I talked were tough, hard, and very well 
informed.

Four of us made hour-long presentations and then answered this audience's 
piercing questions.  James Dunnigan's two hours were fluid, riveting and 
comprehensive.  He focused on The U.S. Army in the 1950s, and spoke as though 
he had been everywhere with them.  Were he not so young, I would have 
believed him to be an eyewitness to the situation he described. I am 211 
pages into his Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War and had some hope of 
diverting him to parts of this.  He diverted me!   Both his oral presentation 
and this written work are encyclopedic.  Do push this book on anyone with a 
need to know and no time to do more than one work on the subject.

Alexandre Mansourov spoke of Stalin's and Mao Tse Tung's roles in Kim Il 
Sung's decision to launch the Korean War.  Mansourov was a Soviet diplomat in 
PyongYang for some years and did university courses and much of his research 
there.  The material he has acquired from the opening Soviet archives has 
been matched to what he learned in Korea.  Naturally, his preparation for 
this assignment, including the language, made him aware of the efforts begun 
by Kim in 1948 to get Stalin's support for this venture.  Mansourov's 
discussion of Stalin's treatment of both Kim and Mao as subordinate 
communists, fellow Asians, and filial sons for whom he was responsible, made 
the Soviet's fluctuating role in the preparation of the war and its evolving 
conduct far more comprehensible to me than it had been.  I will read his 
written version of his fascinating presentation as soon as Harvard decides to 
publish it for the rest of us.  (They have not yet decided on what its title 
will be!)  Mansourov is a visiting fellow at Brooking's now, doing research 
on Korean foreign policy.  I suggest lunch with him soon.  I will also ask to 
attend his next presentation of this subject, and alert you to when and where 
it may be.

My discussion was the "grunt's" appreciation of how my first unit, Task Force 
Smith, prepared themselves for and fought this war's first battle.  Recall my 
description of us as a "speed bump" and a source of souvenir's for the 
formidable Korean force that crashed through our hastily prepared positions.  
General MacArthur's expectation that they would withdraw immediately after 
they realized an American force was opposing them speaks volumes of the 
ignorance and innocence of that day's Army chiefs.  My stark and depressing 
description of the Army of that day, which believed that nuclear weapons made 
WWII's infantry fighting skills irrelevant, may have both surprised and 
offended some of the audience.  The hard truth is that the President's 
mistaken impression that our Army was competent and capable (an impression 
fostered by the advice he received from those same Army chiefs who allowed 
the Army to drift into complacent incompetence in the first place), led him 
to commit this Nation to a task we were capable of executing only by an 
enormous loss of lives.  TFS delayed the North Korean advance by some  seven 
hours.  The sacrifice of TFS's soldiers, while successful to that extent, 
should not have been necessary, and cannot now be justified or rationalized.  
We must never again forget that preparedness (training, discipline, morale) 
is the cornerstone of our defense.

Norman Friedman used his: The Fifty-Year War, Conflict and Strategy in the 
Cold War, to put the Korea I knew into its proper perspective.  My hope is 
that this work and this man can help our decision-makers construct the forces 
our nation needs for the next fifty years.  This does not mean extending the 
life of the ones we have now.  They are as relevant as the horse cavalry 
became with the invention of the machine gun.  Inertia is the most powerful 
force governing the military, however, and it will take heroic efforts to 
make its leaders and their compatriots in the defense industry and the 
Congress understand a new reality.  Friedman and the allies he gains with his 
writing and in his presentations to such groups as the NYMAS, could force 
changes that would help the military in the evolutions it must make.