Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Bridges at Toko-Ri,’ on ‘The Sacrifices of a Few’ in War)

[A WWII veteran, Lt. Harry Brubaker, has been drafted back into service in the Korean War as a Naval Reserve pilot, and asked to undertake a dangerous new mission.]

Rear Adm. George Tarrant [played by Fredric March]: “Son, whatever progress this world has made, it's always been because of the efforts and the sacrifices of a few.”

Lt. Harry Brubaker [played by William Holden, pictured]: “I was one of the few, Admiral, at New Guinea, Leyte, Okinawa. Why does it have to be me again?”

Tarrant: “Nobody ever knows why he gets the dirty job. And this is a dirty job.”— The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), screenplay by Valentine Davies, adapted from the novel by James Michener, directed by Mark Robson

I have known about this movie for quite a while, but had never seen it till this weekend, when I watched it in preparation for a talk next month on one of its stars, Grace Kelly (who plays Holden's loyal but worried wife). This quote seems especially appropriate on Veterans Day.

The screenplay is not everything it could have been, but it captures quite well the ambivalence that even the best service personnel, like Tarrant and Brubaker, feel about such conflicts. 

And the Oscar-winning special effects powerful approximate the visceral sensations involved with flying into the form of hell known as the combat zone—something that most of us will, fortunately, never experience firsthand.

This Day in Military History (MacArthur Named UN Commander in Korea)

July 8, 1950— Having claimed that he knew “the Asiatic mind,” and acclaimed as the architect of Allied victory in the Pacific only five years before, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was named commander of the UN troops desperately trying to repel Communist forces from taking control of the entire Korean peninsula.

At the time, the appointment seemed logical, even inevitable, considering the general’s decades of experience, bravery, intellect, and a strategic skill manifested during WWII with an “island-hopping” campaign that minimized loss of life.

But, within a year, MacArthur’s overweening ego and hubris would imperil US troops, threaten a wider conflict, and precipitate a historic showdown concerning civilian authority over American armed forces with President Harry Truman.

Some signs, even within the first two weeks after Communist forces invaded South Korea, were already ominous for MacArthur’s leadership. Aides were initially reluctant to break the news of the attack to their boss, and even after learning of it, for the first 24 hours he downplayed its severity.

If he could get the 1st Cavalry Division into action, he told GOP foreign-policy maven (and future Secretary of State) John Foster Dulles, “Why, heavens, you’d see these fellows scuttle up to the Manchurian border so quick, you would see no more of them,” according to Bruce Cumings’ The Korean War: A History.

When he was prevailed upon at last to depart from Tokyo (where he was serving as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan) for the first of a series of one-day flyovers over Korea, he veered sharply towards alarm, telling Truman that South Korean forces were in no position to repel the invaders without American support.

One military observer—like MacArthur, often mentioned as a Presidential candidate—Dwight Eisenhower, was skeptical but not surprised that his fellow WWII hero was not at the top of his game. Privately, he wondered if MacArthur, now 70, might be too old for command.

Eisenhower, who had noted acidly that he had “studied theatrics” under MacArthur as his aide in the Philippines in the 1930s, would have had the personal knowledge and credibility to gain immediate public approval for a decision to relieve his old boss of command. But MacArthur’s superior at the moment was Truman, who lacked the stature of the commander of US forces in Europe in the last war.

Two and a half months after his appointment, MacArthur pulled off the kind of unexpected, daring move for which he had become known by ordering an amphibious assault on Inchon, the port city of Seoul that, because of its tides and lack of beaches, was deemed by MacArthur’s subordinate Gen. Edward Almond, “the worst possible place” for such an operation.

Inchon achieved the surprise MacArthur desired, and he predicted to Truman that US troops would be home for Christmas. But instead of stopping at the 38^th Parallel, the point at which America’s allies had agreed would restore the division between North and South Korea at the start of the conflict, the commander “went ahead to the Yalu frontier and set up an enormous disaster, which clouded his reputation,” according to historian David Fromkin.

“There’s a spot where the mountains go down on a north-south basis,” Fromkin explained to C-Span’s Brian Lamb in a September 1995 interview on “Booknotes,” “and if you’re a commander going there, you don’t want to get in that position because you have to split your troops. But he [MacArthur] did and he shouldn’t have; he went all the way up to the Chinese border, although there were signs that if he did so, they’d come in against us with their limitless manpower.”

The counterattack by the Chinese forces reversed all the gains by the US at Inchon. Communist momentum was only blunted when Matthew Ridgway took over command of the US Eighth Army in Korea and re-energized the demoralized troops.

By now, MacArthur was not only violating Truman’s directive to clear any statements with the White House first, but alarming the Joint Chiefs of Staff and allies with his urging that China lay down its arms or face “a decision by the United Nations to depart from its tolerant efforts to contain the war…[that] would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.”

He provided GOP leaders eager to score points against Truman over the military stalemate with a soundbite for taking the war to China: “There is no substitute for victory.”

Truman’s decision to relieve MacArthur of command led to a firestorm of controversy back home, but it was necessary to preserve the constitutional structure of ultimate Presidential authority over the military.

Just as important, by scotching the general’s proposal to drop up to 50 nuclear bombs at air bases, depots, and supply lines to create a radioactive barrier and halt Chinese and North Korean advances, Truman prevented the direct intervention of the Soviet Union in the conflict—and the possibility of World War III.

Photo of the Day: Korean War Memorial, Westfield, NJ

In October, while I was down in Westfield, NJ for the afternoon, my eye was drawn to a hillside near the traffic circle, where this railroad suburb has chosen to honor onetime residents in several American military conflicts: the Spanish-American War, World War II and Korea.

I think it might be worthwhile to highlight, in this brief description and the photo I took that day, the last of these, America’s so-called “Forgotten War, and the local servicemen who, as Abraham Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, gave “the last full measure of devotion” to duty, their comrades and country.

Westfield’s Korean War Memorial, dedicated in 2004, was created by a then-17-year-old high school senior, Kevin Devaney. The granite piece drew my eye not for its size but for its design: a cutout of Korea, a peninsula where, over three years, 6.8 million American men and women served. Approximately 54,200 of them died, with 33,700 of these occurring during combat.

The memorial honors three men who died within three months of each other:

* Charles A. Lipphardt, an army first lieutenant who, after serving in the South Pacific in WWII, returned to active duty in September 1950. Lipphardt, who died in February 1951, was awarded the Purple Heart, Combat Infantryman's Badge, Korean Service Medal, United Nations Service Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Korean War Service Medal.

* Richard R. Wilson, an army private first class, was listed as missing in action in January 1951.

* Griswold M. Hill Jr., a marine private first class, lost his life in March 1951.

Ranging in age from 24 to 30, this trio never had the chance for a normal life span. For many passersby in this busy downtown 70 years later, they might be merely names on a tablet. But they meant far more to their families and this community for years, and their sacrifice is worth recalling and honoring.

This Day in Media History (Marguerite Higgins, First Woman to Win Pulitzer for International Reporting, Born)

Sept. 3, 1920—Marguerite Higgins, who overcame the rampant sexism of her time and profession to become the first female winner of the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting, was born in Hong Kong, in the Asia-Pacific Rim where she would establish much of her reputation.

In the Library of America anthology Reporting World War II, Higgins was the last by birth among the approximately 80 writers represented. A day shy of 25 when Japan formally surrendered, she reported on some of the major stories coming out of the latest six months of the European conflict: the refugee crisis and the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.

These would have been great scoops for any reporter. They were extraordinary for a recent graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a woman in an unrelieved, unapologetic masculine environment.

But it was in Asia—specifically, in Korea and Vietnam—where Higgins advanced closer to achieving her stated post-collegiate goal of becoming more famous than Dorothy Thompson, perhaps the most influential female journalist of the day. How she moved towards her goal has made her the subject of speculation and even controversy ever since.

Stationed in Tokyo as the New York Herald Tribune’s Bureau Chief, Higgins was ideally situated to cover the outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950. Despite her credentials as a war correspondent in WWII, she was initially ordered out of the country by Gen. Walton Walker.

Only a direct appeal to Douglas MacArthur, who had become Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command in Korea, enabled her to report on the conflict. She joined MacArthur's troops on the daring invasion at Inchon that, for a time, changed the direction of the war. In fact, she was the only female reporter to land on Red Beach (“a rough, vertical pile of stones”) with the men.

The Pulitzer Prize committee cited Higgins’ "enterprise and courage" in her coverage of the campaign, noting that she deserved "special consideration by reason of being a woman." But even as she was winning a new level of renown, she was stirring animosity among the largely male cadre of war correspondents that would dog her even beyond her early death.

Thousands of readers were amazed at how Higgins smashed through conventions that restricted women’s chances for achievement; a smaller cadre of colleagues were disgruntled at how they believed she ignored traditional ethical codes in pursuit of her laurels. It is still not easy sorting through these issues more than a half-century after her death.

While displaying outward bravado, Higgins was inwardly driven by an insecurity so unrelenting that it manifested itself as bravery so extreme that some males believe it shaded into foolhardiness. (Among them was Herald Tribune colleague Homer Bigart, who, like Gen. Walker, wanted her out of the country--leading not just to heightened competition between the two journalists but also to a closely watched feud between the two.) 

Such aggressiveness might be taken for granted among male reporters but were eyed critically when exhibited by females—and led to speculation that Higgins was not above stealing colleagues’ scoops.

Another serious charge against her arose from her good looks. Anyone glimpsing the stunning blonde in the attached photo might be forgiven for thinking that Betty Grable or even Marilyn Monroe had suddenly morphed into a top-flight journalist.

Those same people were often convinced that someone that glamorous could not have succeeded through her own efforts, but by sleeping with important men to further her career. 

In the process, these critics ignored factors that facilitated her work—knowledge of French and Chinese; extraordinary sympathy and compassion for young soldiers that sealed their bond with her; and willingness to endure extreme discomfort and danger.

(Ironically, when particularly obsessed with a story, Higgins was so oblivious to how she looked that she neglected to clean her face.)

Opinion remains divided to what extent those charges were true. But, if ruthlessness in pursuing scoops and straying outside traditional sexual norms are to be assessed, many if not most of Higgins’ male rivals would be as guilty as she.

A third charge against Higgins is more troubling: that, through personal associations and ideological preconceptions, she abandoned objectivity in her reporting on the early days of the Vietnam War. 

In 1963, younger reporters such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan were making plain in their dispatches that South Vietnamese forces were collapsing in the Mekong Delta. Based on her high-ranking military sources, Higgins disagreed strongly, airing their view that the Viet Cong were being progressively crushed. Any problem in Southeast Asia had resulted from journalists accepting at face value the notion that Buddhists in Vietnam were being oppressed by President Ngo Dinh Diem's "Catholic-dominated government":

"In the fall of 1963 Washington went into the business of hiring and firing governments,” Higgins charged in Our Vietnam Nightmare. “We not only forgot the one overriding priority, the war effort, but also, for the first time in history, conspired in the ouster of an ally in the middle of a common war against the Communist enemy, thus plunging the country and the war effort into a steep spiral of decline."

Higgins was ill-prepared to examine the reality of Vietnam dispassionately. In 1947, she had witnessed how Communists employed deception in taking over Poland. Friendly with both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, she had adopted their view of the need to counter Soviet aggression. And, in 1952, she had married William Evens Hall, an Air Force Lt. General.

Vietnam undermined the credibility of a fellow journalist who accepted the government line, columnist Joe Alsop. Long before that happened, a tropical disease contracted in that country led to Higgins’ death in 1966 at age 45. She is one of a handful of war correspondents buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

During her lifetime, Americans became very familiar with the sight of Higgins—in well-attended lectures, her book covers (War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent and News is a Singular Thing), and TV appearances (in 1956, the quiz show What’s My Line?). 

Though her celebrity has faded, her face and story have still attracted enough posthumous attention to land her on a postage stamp (in 2002) and have made her the best-known character in a little-noticed film about the early days of the Korean War last year, The Battle of Jangsari.

I have not yet seen that movie, but in a sense its most famous cast member, Megan Fox, should be able to identify intensely with Higgins. In both women’s cases, men were so besotted by their looks that they sometimes had a difficult time taking their drive and work seriously. Time will tell how well Fox counteracts that perception.

Photo of the Day: Korean War Memorial, Pittsburgh PA

I took the attached photo exactly a year ago, on a weekend stop in Pittsburgh. No occasion since then has seemed appropriate to blog about this, till this week—the 70^th anniversary of the start of American involvement with the Korean War.

In a way, Pittsburgh’s Korean War Memorial is a throwback to an age when state and local authorities rather than the federal government commemorated the wartime sacrifices of its citizens.  The Vietnam Veterans Memorial changed all that.

Since 1995, visitors to Washington have been able to see the Korean War Veterans Memorial. But, though directed at the national level, this conflict was fought by local boys all around the country—and the word “boys” is not stretching matters much, as those drafted were as young as 18 1/2. The youngest Korean War veterans, then, would be close to 90 today. 

Many, of course, never had the chance to live this long, including the approximately 2,300 men service personnel from Western Pennsylvania whose names are inscribed on the memorial in Pittsburgh. The memorial—installed in 1999, located between Heinz Field and PNC Park, on the Allegheny River’s North Shore—also includes plaques showing different phases of the conflict, as well as a stepped fountain.

A bas relief for the memorial, erected by the Korean War Veterans of Western Pennsylvania, reads:

They told us, ‘We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.’ So we fought in the mountains on Heartbreak Ridge and waded ashore at Inchon. We froze in the winter and baked in the summer sun. At times, we were greatly outnumbered; but we still fought on and many of us gave our lives for Freedom…for Justice…and for Peace.  

The ambiguous nature of the war (a ceasefire ended hostilities, but no peace treaty was ever concluded) may have worked against honoring in a timely fashion those who fought it. It is probably a mistake to call this America’s “Forgotten War” (can any conflict dramatized on network TV in M*A*S*H over 12 years really be called “forgotten”?), but “Misunderstood War” might be appropriate.

Several aspects of the war make it unique among modern conflicts—and distinguish it from a later Asian conflict, the Vietnam War:

*The United States was broadly supported in the war, with 16 nations entering on the side of South Korea.

*For a fleeting moment in the post-WWII era, the United Nations acted against an aggressor. (With the USSR boycotting the Security Council over the issue of Red China’s admission to the UN, the path was clear for the US to push through resolutions calling for the Soviet-supported North Korea to withdraw from South Korea.)

*This was not to say, however, that the war was fought on an entirely legal basis. Not only did President Harry Truman send forces to the Korean peninsula without prior congressional authorization, but he never asked Congress for a formal declaration of war that would have stated the conflict’s causes and war aims.

Photo of the Day: Irish Korean War Memorial, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn

In this post, an outgrowth of some musings meant originally for St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I would focus on a patch of green—a small portion of Brooklyn’s famous Green-Wood Cemetery, no less. The Irish Korean War Memorial is just one marker in one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the United States, populated by thousands of New Yorkers who happened to be among the most well-heeled that Gotham has ever known.

But, while the Irish-born servicemen who are remembered here might have been of modest means, their hope in their new land was enormous—exceeded only by the fearful price they would pay.

I came to Green-Wood Cemetery early last fall to see a breathtaking landscape that, at one time in the 19^th century, was the biggest tourist attraction outside of Niagara Falls. I hoped to see the graves and mausoleums of many famous New Yorkers, including Leonard Bernstein, Cabaret lyricist Fred Ebb, newspaper editor Horace Greeley, and notorious machine politician “Boss” Tweed. (See, for instance, my prior post on Leonard Jerome, the American maternal grandfather of Sir Winston Churchill.)

I never expected to be so taken by a two-ton granite slab with Celtic cross, engraved with an epigraph and the names of 28 men from the Republic of Ireland who made the ultimate sacrifice for a different country that had not yet granted them citizenship.

The 27 G.I.s and one marine honored here were born in Counties Kerry, Mayo, Cork, Roscommon, Limerick, Leitrim, Antrim, Longford, Galway, Tipperary, and Louth. Their final remains are scattered: some in the U.S., some returned to Ireland, four never recovered. Hardly had they come to the U.S. than they ended up halfway across the world in a land they had never seen. According to the law operational till that point, they would still have to wait five years to become citizens upon returning to the U.S., just like everyone else.

The problem was that, though more than 50,000 American servicemen died in Korea from 1950 through 1953, no official declaration of war was ever made by Congress (a pattern that has held true for American military conflicts since then). The U.S. government called it a “police action.”

When Dwight Eisenhower became President in 1953, he altered policy so that any immigrant in the armed forces didn’t have to serve in a declared war nor wait the required five years, just 90 to 180 days. But the change applied only going forward, not retroactively, and didn’t account for reservists. Not only were the Irish-born casualties never able to take the oath of citizenship, but their wish would not be granted for another half-century after their deaths.

It wasn’t until 2003 and the efforts of then-New York Congressman Ben Gilman (himself a veteran), before U.S. citizenship was granted to the 28 Irish nationals, through a special Act of Congress. And it wasn’t for another three years after that, through the efforts of local Irish-American associations, that the current monument was erected in Green-Wood Cemetery—appropriately enough, close by the grave of Matilda Tone, widow of Theobald Wolfe Tone, leader of the ill-fated Irish rebellion against British rule.

Several years ago, my father was speaking of a young Irishman he had gotten to know in the early 1950s in East Durham, N.Y., a portion of the Catskills nicknamed “the Irish Alps.” Then his new friend told their group he would be off soon to fight in Korea. “The next thing we knew, we heard he’d been killed,” my father said. “We couldn’t believe it.” He shook his head, suddenly quiet and wistful. 

Left unsaid were all the things he himself had gained within a few years—a job, family, the right to vote, and all the other advantages of U.S. citizenship—that his friend—and the Irish nationals now remembered in Green-Wood Cemetery—would never know.

(For more information on the Irish Korean War Memorial, please see this post from the blog "The Wild Geese.") 

This Day in Presidential History (Truman Fires MacArthur)

April 11, 1951—When President Harry Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of command of American and United Nations forces in the Far East battling in Korea, it plunged the Missourian into the fiercest firestorm of his two controversy-filled terms.

But, though the short-term political damage was intense, the President demonstrated what distinguished the United States from younger, infinitely more fragile republics: the clear ascendancy of civilian over military authority.

It’s funny how current news items confirm the truth of Mark Twain’s observation that history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. This morning’s edition of The New York Times reported on retired General Stanley McChrystal’s decision to accept an offer from the Obama administration to lead an advisory board supporting military families.

Yes, that’s the same soldier who last year was removed by the President from his post overseeing our surge in Afghanistan. As far as I know, nobody today bothered to note the remarkable coincidence of this more recent event with the anniversary of the earlier civilian-military clash. A year ago, though, the parallel with MacArthur’s firing—a Democratic President in the midst of a troubling Asian land war sacking a general who questioned his leadership—was too irresistible for the media to miss.

But when you get right down to it, that’s about as far as the similarities went. Walter Karp’s extraordinarily incisive analysis of the MacArthur situation in American Heritage 27 years ago makes clear why the McChrystal case was at best only a 48-hour news story: plain-speaking Harry had done all the heavy lifting for Obama and, indeed, all his other successors in the Oval Office these past 60 years.

The differences in the outcomes of what we can call “the two Macs” are so stark that they speak volumes about the changed landscape in this country:

* Truman acted at a point when the prestige of the military was close to an all-time high. By mid-1951, Americans were dismayed that American soldiers had been set back on their heels by North Koreans backed by Chinese and Soviet Communists. But they hadn’t forgotten that just six years before, American commanders had brought “The Good War” to victory. The questioning of military authority that erupted in the Vietnam War was still off in the distance.

* Truman, a captain who led troops under fire in WWI, then achieved national attention investigating procurement policies in WWII, was intimately experienced with war and its commanders in a way that Obama is not. Truman had seen enough of war in his week’s worth of combat to understand the chaos of conflict and know that leaders were not infallible (the commanding officer and chief of staff of his division left headquarters just as the Meuse-Argonne offensive began). As head of a Senate committee investigating the defense industry in the war, he learned all the tricks used by what Dwight Eisenhower would memorably call “the military-industrial complex.” In contrast, Obama would not only be part of a generation that, because of the all-volunteer military, would be unlikely to serve in the armed forces, but, because he had only served in the Senate four years before he ran for President, he had little time to master the details of his work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

* MacArthur was an American legend, used to getting his way in several high-profile posts; McChrystal fell to earth almost as soon as he had nobody to run interference for him. Given a command of his own, no longer simply reporting to David Petreus, McChrystal ran straight into political headwinds. A Los Angeles Times piece that ran last year about McChrystal used terms such as “flinty,” “forbidding,” “hard-charging” and “unyielding.” Still, he certainly had nothing on MacArthur, who had been a WWI hero, superintendent of West Point, Army Chief of Staff, head of U.S. Army forces in the Far East in WWII, and overseer of the occupation of Japan after the war. Eighteen years before tangling with Truman, he disregarded orders from President Herbert Hoover by ordering attacks on the tents and shacks where the “Bonus Army” and their families were encamped in D.C. A few years later, when he bitterly complained about his reduced military budget to Franklin Roosevelt (“When we lose the next war and an American boy is writhing in pain in the mud with a Japanese bayonet in his belly, I want the last words that he spits out in the form of a curse to be not against Douglas MacArthur but against Franklin Roosevelt"), the President shot back: “Never speak to the President of the United States that way." MacArthur was fortunate not to be fired long before Truman got around to it.

* McChrystal was fired more for comments made by his staff in front of a Rolling Stone reporter than for what he himself said; MacArthur was relieved of duty for a letter he wrote to Republican Congressman Joseph Martin criticizing the President’s decision to seek a negotiated end to the Korean War. The lips of McChrystal’s staff concerning Obama and his aides loosened through considerable consumption of alcohol; MacArthur initiated his firing offense while he was stone-cold sober.

* McChrystal, a soldier with no discernible political ambitions, apologized before his last meeting with Obama, then left his post quietly; MacArthur, of course, did not. When asked what he did before WWII, Eisenhower replied that he had studied theatrics under General MacArthur. Has there ever been another American commander with such a flair for the dramatic as MacArthur? Do you think he could possibly leave the national scene without saying, “Old soldiers never die--they just fade away”? Do you think he could simply “fade away”? Not on your life--particularly when, even in the midst of WWII, he had done little to discourage speculation that he might run for President one day as a Republican.

* McChrystal was a blunt soldier serving a famously silver-tongued Chief Executive; MacArthur was an ornate rhetorician serving a President famously given to “Plain Speaking.” If a general’s staffers are any reflection on him, then McChrystal’s were, at times, almost hilariously offensive. On the other hand, while the press eagerly reported on every saying of MacArthur (perhaps the only American general to deserve a monograph entitled, Douglas MacArthur: Warrior as Wordsmith), Truman could not have been more direct in a radio address about the aim of the limited war he wanted MacArthur to conduct: “In the simplest terms, what we are doing in Korea is this: We are trying to prevent a Third World War.” The general, confident that he knew “the Oriental mind,” had previously dismissed warnings that advancing on the Yalu River risked bringing Chinese Communists into the war. The resulting massive offensive by Mao Tse-tung’s troops unleashed what MacArthur mordantly told the Joint Chiefs of Staff was “an entirely new war.”

A farmer and failed haberdasher before his entry into politics, Truman, unlike the Ivy-educated Obama, was not perceived by the public as a learned man, but he enjoyed reading history--and there is every reason to think it left an impression on him.

Several weeks ago, I caught a few minutes of a C-Span special featuring the descendants of American Presidents. The reminiscence I recall most vividly was from Clifton Truman Daniel, Harry’s grandson. (He also recounted this story in the pages of Prologue Magazine.) When four-year-old Clifton and two-year-old brother William came downstairs in their house, after their grandfather had left the 0val Office, Truman found them sneaking into the den to watch television. Nothing doing, the ex-President said: “I have a better idea.”

Truman pulled a book down from the top shelf, then began reading it to them. It wasn’t a comic-strip book, a boys’ adventure, or anything like that. It was Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. More than 40 years later, a now-grown-up Clifton still found that book “tough going.”

Maybe so, but Harry Truman appears to have absorbed the wisdom of the ancient Greek: even the seeming justice of a cause does not justify foolhardy military adventurism. He wanted Communist rulers to know that aggression would be countered, but he was absolutely bent on ensuring that military action would not be widened beyond a point where it could provoke a war waged against astronomical odds. Because Douglas MacArthur did not share this outlook, he had to go.

Quote of the Day (Benjamin Patton, Descendant of Heroes, on Preserving Family History)

“Every family has a story, and every member's story is worth preserving—certainly for the living family, but even more so for future generations. Experiencing history through the lens of another person's life can offer unexpected insight into your own. It gets you to think: What sort of mark will I make? How will I be remembered?”—Benjamin W. Patton, “Recovered Ground: Gen. George S. Patton’s Grandson Finds His Calling in the Ashes of His Father’s Journals,” Smithsonian, June 2009

Before I go any further, a word about the photo.

It’s not who you expected, was it? But George S. Patton Jr.—“Old Blood and Guts”—has been so endlessly discussed—everything from celebrated to dissected—that there’s not much I could say about him that many of you don’t already know.

His namesake and only son, rather—the father of the man who wrote the words above—is, however, another matter. He was every bit the proud warrior that his father was, but, because he fought in one war that is largely forgotten and another that so many wish could be because of its resulting anguish and futility, the great bulk of the American public know little if anything about him.

Anyone interested not only in military but family history should hunt down Benjamin Patton’s essay in the new issue of Smithsonian. It seamlessly weaves the story of perhaps the most glorious family in American military history with the author’s own journey of self-discovery—and it lays out, simply but eloquently, the importance of preserving memories, even if your own family as not as celebrated as the Pattons.

In case you’re wondering: yes, the article does have a few glimpses of the great WWII hero (e.g., building a motorboat with his son in the family garage), as well as the author’s great-great-grandfather, a Confederate colonel whose gold coin deflected a bullet and saved him to fight another day.

But the surprise here—for many of us, anyway—is Benjamin’s father, a hero of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. This Patton won the Purple Heart and saw more frontline combat action than his father. This Patton, not his father, possessed a gravely voice that reminded many of the Oscar-winning actor George C. Scott. This Patton had a daughter who embarked on a career as unmartial as you could get: a Benedictine nun.

A post of mine last week advocated oral histories for aging soldiers. Much of Benjamin Patton’s work is designed to accomplish much the same purpose, though he arrived at this career in a circuitous fashion.

By his own admission a bit at sea growing up, with no wish to join the family trade, Benjamin took up taping interviews to raise his father’s spirits following a disastrous fire in the family basement that consumed precious journals. When that project was finished, other people—many the children of veterans—conducted him about preserving their relatives’ memories, launching him on his current career as a producer and film educator.

The most fascinating story I ever heard about Patton the WWII hero was that, as a young man, he spent hours walking around the French countryside, learning every detail of the terrain, convinced that in a future campaign this would come in handy. It took more than a quarter-century, but he was proved correct.

It’s a story about the unusual paths we take to our destinies—something that his grandson has reenacted, in captivating detail, in this short, affectionate and moving memoir.

This Day in Military History (Korean War Ceasefire Signed)

July 27, 1953—More than three years after hostilities broke out, a ceasefire brought the Korean War to a standstill. An expected peace treaty was never formally concluded, leaving in place an unsettled state of affairs in which nuclear tensions have arisen, particularly over the last two decades.

One of the most popular nicknames of the conflict is “The Forgotten War,” but it could just as easily be titled “The Misunderstood War.” At the time it was fought, it was justified as a struggle to prevent another Munich-style appeasement of a totalitarian power. Twenty years later, after the film and TV series M*A*S*H, it was seen as a precursor of another treacherous Asian land conflict, Vietnam.

The war had its own unique challenges (notably the first postwar proxy battle between the superpowers; the first post-World War II conflict in which war was not formally declared; and the first postwar conflict in which limited war rather than unconditional surrender became Washington’s guiding policy).

But Korea did resemble these two seemingly sharply different wars—as well as the Iraq War, the war over Filipino independence, the Civil War, the War of 1812, and the American Revolution. All these conflicts flew in the face of the glorious military traditions celebrated in school texts, ending up being far more protracted and messy than many initially expected.

The war began on June 25, 1950, less than six months after Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, described an American “defensive perimeter” in the Pacific that ran through Japan, the Ryukyus, and the Philippines. Critics later charged that the exclusion of Korea gave Joseph Stalin the green light to aid North Korea in its push against the 38th Parallel.

By the time U.S. Lieutenant General William K. Harrison and his North Korean counterpart, General Nam Il, signed the ceasefire, the casualties and overall costs of the war were appalling, including the following (I am using median numbers, rounded to the nearest 100, from Twentieth Century Atlas’ list of death tolls for major wars and atrocities of the last century; precise counts, particularly at this late stage, are well-nigh impossible):

* North Korea: Military deaths 316,000, civilian deaths one million, with most of its industrial capacity devastated.
* South Korea: Military deaths 113,000; civilian deaths 547,000.
* China: 416,000, and threatened with a ruinous economic boycott by the U.N.
* United States: 54,000
* Other UN forces: 2,200

Notice the country missing: the Soviet Union. The closest I can find to any number for them—299—is contained on this Web site. I don’t see any reason not to accept this as true.

If that’s the case, it lends credence to a view I heard on a C-Span panel discussion held last year, following the publication of the late David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter. One panelist, diplomatic historian William Stueck, observed that for nearly two years, peace talks at Panmunjom got nowhere because of Stalin’s intransigence. Even Communist China, which had assisted the North, wanted a way out of the stalemate that had taken hold. Only Stalin’s death in March 1953 helped break the diplomatic impasse.

Now, if the U.S.S.R.’s low casualties do reflect the correct state of affairs, Stalin’s opposition makes perfect sense. Three hundred of his countrymen dead cut no ice with a paranoid madman who could have had that many purged in one night, if he wanted to. He was content to let everyone else pay the cost of the fight—even his ostensible allies, the North Koreans and the Chinese. The more they bled, the more they’d have to depend on him.

The other aspect of the war’s conclusion concerns the role of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who managed to do within eight months after taking office what had eluded his predecessor, Harry Truman, in two and a half years: settle the conflict.

Ike’s October 25, 1952 speech, in which he made the famous promise, “I shall go to Korea” in order to assess the situation—a vow on which he made good after his election, in early December—undoubtedly galled Truman, particularly with its sharp declaration that the war, “perhaps more than any other war in history, simply and swiftly followed the collapse of our political defenses.” The former President couldn’t have been made much happier with the successful conclusion of the conflict on the watch of the man who criticized him.

In light of what Stueck notes about Stalin’s death, the election of Eisenhower does not appear quite as decisive in bringing the war to a conclusion as it did before. In another way, however, it did.

As the leader of the “Crusade in Europe,” Ike had the credibility to make the ceasefire stick in a way that Harry Truman would never have been able to do, with a Gallup Poll approval-poll rating even lower than George W. Bush’s right now. (Though if—make that when—the current economic crisis worsens, that will undoubtedly change, to Dubya’s discomfort. The way popularity plunges in Presidencies—kind of like an out-of-control elevator—may it’s changed already!)

Against Truman, Ike’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, would have gone public vociferously with his opposition to a ceasefire that, for all intents and purposes, returned things to the status quo ante. Under Ike, Dulles had to swallow his misgivings or else, like William Jennings Bryan and Cyrus Vance, resign in protest and end his diplomatic career. As it was, only the lunatic fringe of the GOP was prepared to call the ceasefire appeasement. But the American people would have no part of calling its greatest World War II hero the second coming of Neville Chamberlain.

The ceasefire did create a Tale of Two Nations. One, South Korea, whose autocrat, Syngman Rhee, was forced to resign, went on to become an economic force in the East. The other, North Korea, saw untold misery after being brought to illegitimate birth by the totalitarian Soviet Union and Communist China.

While the U.S.S.R. has ceased to exist and China has taken with a vengeance to the advice of Deng Xiaoping that "To get rich is glorious," North Korea lives on as the Grendel of Marxism—isolated, resentful, yet still capable of inflicting massive, unexpected damage.

The last week-long vacation that I spent in DC, I felt profoundly moved during my visit to the Korean War Veterans Memorial. The image accompanying this posting (which I found on the Web) conveys some of what I’m talking about. Imagine this field of 19 poncho-clad, weary figures on patrol, trudging across rough terrain in freezing conditions.

It’s an image far removed from the equestrian glory of so many earlier wars, or even of Augustus St. Gaudens’ stalwart image of Admiral David Farragut in Madison Square Park in New York. But it’s certainly a reminder of the silent heroism needed to endure ambiguity and the political and military mistakes of those who send young men to war.