Reading Fehrenbach's book on the Korean War.

Anyone have any suggestions on some reading I can do on what happened to the armed forces (in the name of reform, no doubt) in the years between the two wars.

Obviously there was a big downsizing, but the book makes it seem like the civilian pols did some real damage also.

Any suggestions appreciated.

(Cross posted on Military board).

I can't recall the name of the book but I do remember reading there was a concerted effort between the wars to fold the Marines into the Army and eliminate the branch. Truman allegedly supported it. I offer this as some insight into the political maneuvering going on. The book went on to assert that the Marine's ability to deploy quickly to Korea and defend the Pusan Perimeter essentially settled the argument over their value as a branch in their favor. Wish I could remember the name of that book.

BQ_90 said:

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The branches all where racing to stay relevant in the nuclear age. Nobody thought there would be another conventional ground war. It was all about nukes.

Or any conventional war was going to be in Europe vs Russia. I don't know, but my assumption is most of the truly equipment, combat ready troops where all in Europe.

I thought the occupying force still in Japan wasn't being trained or wasn't equipped.

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The Fehrenback book I am reading (Some Kind Of War) takes the view that convential ground fighting will never go away but that nuclear weapons have made it so that these ground operations will always now be limited in scope and not ever become the "total war" type that we saw last in WW2.

Probably and hopefully true, at least for countries that possess or have the ability to quickly possess nukes. Unless you are able to guarantee that nukes won't be used or can be defeated (and I'm not sure how that could be guaranteed) it's hard to imagine a country taking the risk to themselves.

We're so detached from the world before WWII that we often forget the default expectation in the United States after a war was a massive demobilization of the military. We also forget how strong isolationist beliefs were in the years before the war. They didn't all magically disappear during the conflict, the isolationists just held their tongues until the immediate emergency had passed.

That's coupled with the American fixation on Europe after the war. Obviously there was a lot of effort into rebuilding Japan, but otherwise Asia was not a high concern for most in the military or civilian leadership (or public for that matter).

Now we see the Cold War as this preordained thing, but even those who believed a conflict with the Soviets was inevitable didn't know what it would look like. They certainly didn't expect a series of peripheral police-style conflicts.

The result is a population eager for peace and addressing domestic issues, a military whose fighting capacity became an afterthought, assumptions that focused on Europe and peer-to-peer conflict, and a devastated Asia that was already a mess before the war due to decaying imperial structures.

According to the book one of the biggest problems we had (other than a general demobilization) was that in a conscript army in peacetime you have a lot of people with civilian mentalities and mores in uniform.

And it takes a lot of hurt and tragedy to convert these people back into soldiers. I have seen this type of thing described elsewhere as a "Kasserine Pass moment".

Squadron7 said:

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BQ_90 said:

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The branches all where racing to stay relevant in the nuclear age. Nobody thought there would be another conventional ground war. It was all about nukes.

Or any conventional war was going to be in Europe vs Russia. I don't know, but my assumption is most of the truly equipment, combat ready troops where all in Europe.

I thought the occupying force still in Japan wasn't being trained or wasn't equipped.

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The Fehrenback book I am reading (Some Kind Of War) takes the view that convential ground fighting will never go away but that nuclear weapons have made it so that these ground operations will always now be limited in scope and not ever become the "total war" type that we saw last in WW2.

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I suspect this hypothesis will be soon tested. Seems the major powers are moving more and more to a war readiness setting than we've seen in more than a generation.

AgBQ-00 said:

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Squadron7 said:

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BQ_90 said:

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The branches all where racing to stay relevant in the nuclear age. Nobody thought there would be another conventional ground war. It was all about nukes.

Or any conventional war was going to be in Europe vs Russia. I don't know, but my assumption is most of the truly equipment, combat ready troops where all in Europe.

I thought the occupying force still in Japan wasn't being trained or wasn't equipped.

---

The Fehrenback book I am reading (Some Kind Of War) takes the view that convential ground fighting will never go away but that nuclear weapons have made it so that these ground operations will always now be limited in scope and not ever become the "total war" type that we saw last in WW2.

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I suspect this hypothesis will be soon tested. Seems the major powers are moving more and more to a war readiness setting than we've seen in more than a generation.

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A lot of them say they are. We shall see.

I haven't had a chance to read it (yet), but A&M emeritus history professor Brian Linn has a book called Elvis's Army: Cold War GIs and the Atomic Battlefield that you might be interested in.

My Dad enlisted in the Marines right after Pearl Harbor. Went overseas in 1942 and got home in May 1946. He thought he was done. Then Truman threatened to disband the Marine
Corps. He and many others reenlisted or went into the Marine Corps Reserve. That got him a free trip to Korea!

He never had a good thing to say about FDR or Truman. Especially Truman. Although they got off easier than the Red Cross.

McCullough's Biography on Truman talks about it.

As I recall, there was tremendous pressure to demobilize. Soldiers wanted to return to civilian life. Their families wanted them to return to civilian life. And there was a still a significant isolationist block in the GOP led by Senator Taft (son of President Taft) who didn't want to maintain a large army and who certainly didn't want to maintain a large army overseas or join NATO. (This block didn't go away until Ike won the presidency and Taft abruptly died.)

And so the American demobilization was rushed, even as the communist nations maintained their large militaries.

Truman later regretted it.

Back in the '90s there was an Army Command & General Staff College study on Task Force Smith, which was a Battalion (-) deployed from Japan to Korea to halt the initial advance of the North Koreans. The TF got overrun due to a variety of reasons, but the authors' basic argument was that the senior staff didn't plan the operation properly because staff training was lax. That was an interesting conclusion, since most of the senior staff were experienced WW2 vets.