School of War - Ep 84: Mike Gallagher on the Korean War and Confronting China Today

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

Mike Gallagher, U.S. representative for Wisconsin's 8th congressional district and Chair of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, joins the show to talk about why the Korean War should be front-of-mind for American policymakers and strategists.  ▪️ Times      •    02:06 Introduction      •    04:05 Wolf-warrior diplomacy     •    10:42 A new Cold War     •    13:05 T.R. Fehrenbach     •   22:25 “This stuff matters”      •    25:25 Task Force Smith      •    29:44 Route clearances     •    31:23 Inchon     •   35:06 Truman’s failures      •    38:19 Eisenhower brings balance      •    42:24 China has gotten stronger Follow along on Instagram And here is a link to checkout the article Aaron and Mike wrote for Foreign Affairs Why America Forgets and China Remembers the Korean War

70 years ago this summer, the ceasefire agreement freezing the Korean War was signed. It was the last time the United States and China fought one another. Following communist North Korea's invasion of the South in the summer of 1950, and a few months thereafter, China's intervention in the war, a period of dramatic and devastating battlefield maneuver had been succeeded by two years of grueling, largely static stalemate, a battlefield stalemate that was largely self-imposed by the Tribute Administration, which had focused on keeping the conflict localized.

This summer, I led a class for the Hurtag Foundation on the Korean War with Congressman Mike Gallagher, in which we used the classic history, T.R. Ferenbach's this kind of war and asked our students and ourselves a question, if the Korean War is America's forgotten war, why does the Chinese Communist Party remember it so well? In this episode, Congressman Gallagher and I

reflect on our class, on the war, and on what it all means for dealing with China today. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who not see buildings. We shall fight on the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, photos, and more School of War content, follow along on Instagram at School of War. Just tap the link in the show notes and subscribe. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Congressman Mike Gallagher, who represents Wisconsin's 8th Congressional District.

He chairs the House Select Committee on strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. And he is a man who the Chinese Communist Party refers to as, quote, Well, someone who, quote, his arrogance and madness are comparable to that of Douglas MacArthur, end quote. Congressman Gallagher, thank you so much for joining the show. Well, as I pointed out, when we were recently collaborating in a class, Douglas MacArthur is, in fact, technically a Wisconsinite, having moved back to Milwaukee to get his appointment to West Point, leveraging his family connections and his father fought for Wisconsin Regiment in the Civil War. This is something I learned. What we're going to talk about today is this class we just taught together for the Hurtag Foundation in Washington, D.C. on the Korean War. And something I learned from you that I confess I did not know

is that Wisconsin is apparently at the center of American foreign policy and Cold War history and pretty much everything is the impression I got from you. This is, of course, a highly objective assessment on my part. It just happens to be true that at every major junction in history, Wisconsin has been there. From the moment, a young, Arthur MacArthur picked up the colors in Chattanooga and shouted on Wisconsin to the moment. His son was helping to productively win World War I to the moment that the great and underappreciated John Blaine voted against the Kellogg Brand Pack in the interwar period, recognizing the naivety of outlawing war to MacArthur again playing a role in World War II. I could go on George Kennan, Wisconsinite, sort of for, although he was a subject of much criticism from you in this class. That's true. Formulating the doctrine of containment. Mel Laird, one of the greatest Secretary's

Defense of all time, whose gavel I wield. I aggavel of his, the Marshall Clinton was kind to give me and who wrote me a letter, a couple letters before he died. So the more you study history, the more you realize that Wisconsin is responsible for every major success that America has had on the world stage. Well, this can be the subject of the next Hurtag Foundation class that you teach, is why Wisconsin matters even more than you thought it did. Can I ask you first raised the issue of this class to me, and it was already in your mind as a Korean War class. Was that, did that come from the Hurtag Foundation? Was it you who decided to do Korea?

And how did you decide to do that if so? It was me. And it kind of goes back to the early stages of the pandemic where, like many, I was, you know, we were trapped inside. And I started to notice, we were at a high watermark for what's called Wolf Warrior diplomacy, which is a variety of Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks, really spreading anti-American propaganda, primarily on American social media apps that their own citizens don't have access to. And of course, what was galling about this was the fact that the virus came from China, most likely from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Chinese Communist Party undoubtedly did everything possible to cover it up. And yet they had the

temerity to use the pandemic to blame us, blame for Dietrich for the outbreak of the virus, attack America. This was also sort of the time we had a lot of violent riots in America related to racial issues, and the Chinese Communist Party seized upon that to propagate the narrative that America is an evil, racist, neocolonial hellscape. So then I started to wonder, why are they called Wolf Warrior Diplomats? Sorry for the wind up here. I'll get to the point, which led me to watch Wolf Warrior I and Wolf Warrior II, which at the time were the highest grossing Chinese movies of all time. They are action movies that make a Michael Bay film seem subtle in comparison.

And then all of a sudden, I discovered that those movies were supplanted by another Chinese movie that coincided later with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the party, which is called the Battle at Lake Changin. What was interesting about this was it was a retelling of the Battle of Chosen Reservoir, which every Marine, like yourself and myself, knows about Frozen Chosen. It holds a hallowed place in the history of the Marine Corps, a historic fighting retreat. And I started to realize there was this emerging cult of the Korean War inside of China. that notably talked about the Korean War as a great victory for China. And obviously, as a war that MacArthur started, ignoring entirely the North Korean invasion. And this narrative that Xi Jinping himself was telling the party and the people was that this was a moment when a technologically inferior China defeated the technologically superior America. And then I started to pull the string on that and just became fascinated by the way in which Chinese kids, Chinese students were being forced to

learn about the war. She himself was referencing the war, praising Mao's brave decision to cross the Yalu River and by throwing one punch, showing that 100 punches could be avoided. So I really kind of became interested in it in that regard, which led me to then start studying books I should have studied when I was in the Marine Corps, notably a book called This Kind of War by T.R. Ferenbach, which had been on the Marine Corps, the Commandants reading list for a long time when I was on active duty, but I had never really studied it until recent years. And after reading that book, I would was just, I was hooked. And I just found the Korean War fascinating as this moment in the early Cold War where we're caught off guard, the Cold War turns hot. I was fascinated by the fact

that it is it is a forgotten war. Many people gloss over it. The history is poorly understood. It doesn't receive as much attention. And so all those reasons led me to become obsessed with the Korean War and then jump at the opportunity to church to teach this seminar for the Hurtog Foundation. I will say one final thing. I quickly realized that particularly when I was put in charge of this committee, I would have no time to teach this course on my own. And so I had to find someone who would be kind enough to help me and carry the heavy load. And having exhausted 10 of our alternatives, I was then finally forth to come to you, Aaron, and enlist your services. But it was really a remarkable experience. I would say it's sort of revealing about you how you spent your 2020. I think most people,

at least I read in the New York Times, most people were baking. But you were, you were reviewing Chinese propaganda films and rereading old texts about infantry combat. Yes. I was. Well, I was also interested in like this confluence between the CCP propaganda and a lot of the woke narratives that were coming out of the sort of radical left in America. And then that led me to write an article in National Review talking about this issue of wokeism in the military and sort of the growth of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and some of just the garbage social science that all this was based upon. And so I don't know. I've also, I should say, I've always been fascinated by the early Cold War when I did graduate school. Though I was in a political science program,

I was kind of a historian at heart and all of my case studies were early Cold War related. A Truman case study, two Eisenhower case studies. I spent about a month at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and then about three months of my life total in Abilene, Kansas, doing archival research there, which is a great place to do archival research because there was nothing else going on, props to the Holiday Express right out the highway there. My friend Glenn Shank, met on the golf course, a 70-year-old man. He was my only friend. So I got a lot of work done. It was very productive. But I've just always been fascinated by this period post-World War II, the early Cold War, where we were sort of trying to understand the enemy we faced.

And as I pointed out in this course, and this is another bias of mine, we tend to look back on this with rose-colored glasses, you know, if only we could go back to the heady days of the Cold War, where there was a bipartisan foreign policy consensus. And things were simpler. It was us versus the Soviets and the bipolar world. But the most of the most of the military. But the The more you dig into the archives, the more you realize, things were really complex at this moment. It was incredibly dangerous. And you think about that period from really 1949, let's say, to 50, 51. I mean, you have the Soviet nuclear test in 49, just punctures our sense of, you know, peacetime dividend. We can bring the boys home. People start freaking out. You have a series of

domestic spying cases that pop up in America. And then, of course, you have the outbreak of hot war on the Korean Peninsula, which then forces us into a war, which we never really kind of fought before. The closest analog, at least in T.R. Ferenbach's telling would be sort of the wars, you know, for settling the rest of America with various Native American tribes. And so I don't know. I've always just found it to be a fascinating, period, and the people involved in it, very fascinating. I don't know if you agree with this, but as we were preparing for and then teaching the class, I came around to the view that the world in 2023 looks more and more like. the world of the late 40s and early 50s from a strategic perspective, then I would have certainly

said 10 years ago. I mean, on at least two grounds, right? One, there's Chinese Russian collusion and cooperation both then and now to a much greater degree than existed in between. And then, too, obviously, you know, expansion is China. China set straightforwardly on territorial expansion. Do you agree with the general assessment? I agree, but I'm also aware that having spent so much time in the period from 1947 to 1961, which, by the way, when I was single, was a real great opening up on day. I'm surprised. Can I say, I'm a surprise you're talking about it.

I mean, are we going to ruin your political career here if I reveal? You're speaking very vaguely about graduate school. You're a PhD. You're Dr. Congressman Gallagher. You have a thesis and everything. I'm sorry. I come from a family of actual physicians, and so they will, they refuse to refer to me as doctor. I get no respect in my own house.

My dad says, if you're on a plane and someone yells, is there a doctor on the plane? And you can't answer yes to that question, then it doesn't count. So having got no respect for my own family, I don't mind you pointing out the fact that I wasted my GI Bill and a lot of my life on getting a credential. Although I found the archival research fascinating.

I guess what I was trying to say is that just my bias is that I see parallels everywhere between the early Cold War. And I have made the argument that we are in the, early stages of a new Cold War with Communist China. Now, it's not perfectly analogous to the old Cold War with the Soviet Union for obvious reasons. We were never economically entangled with the Soviet Union of different countries, different enemies. But I think there are the, the comparison is helpful both for the similarities and the differences it elucidates. More to the point, I, I, what I do in Congress, or at least my main effort, as I conceive it, is to play a part in prevent.

to deter war, to deter war. And I'm always interested in studying deterrence failure like that we saw on the Korean Peninsula in 1950 in order to adduce lessons that we can apply to the present day. And perhaps that's a Sisyphesian task. They're just too different, both in time and place. But I don't know. I think it's important to study history in an effort to learn lessons so as not to repeat them. And that's another reason why I'm drawn to the period. Well, we should get into those lessons here in a second, and we wrote, I should say for listeners, Congressman Gallagher and I wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs, which you can get with your one free foreign affairs article a month, which I know everyone avails themselves of at the website now,

and we can talk about it here in the podcast as a supplement. But before we do, just because you raised it, let's talk a little bit about this kind of war in TR. Farimbach, who is this, you know, he seems to be to be a slightly crazy person. The book is both a crazy and a wonderful book. It's kind of unlike any other history of the Korean War you might come across. What about it spoke so powerfully to you? A few things. One, maybe most importantly, because this is not always the case with history books,

books in general. It's very well written. Now he has a few kind of stylistic things that one can quibble with and may, and I'm certain strict historians do quibble with because the style kind of bleeds into the accuracy. at some point, but he's a very gifted writer, and it's very powerful the way he lays things out. And I think when you're treating any subject as complex as the Korean War or war in general, it's very difficult to choose where do you focus. And almost unlike any other book that I've encountered on this war, any other,

he really does a good job of zooming in and out and going from the tactical and giving you a sense of what a squad leader or fire team, just a member of a fire team in Korea would have experienced and then zooming up to what someone at, you know, division command experience and then zooming up and giving you the MacArthur Truman level of the war. And so it's just fun to read in a way that I don't, I don't think it's true of a lot of histories of the period. The second thing, I mean, perhaps his argument throughout the book reflects my own bias, which is that if we're going to ask young men to fight and die on behalf of the country, then they need to be trained in a pretty

hardcore manner. And we need to do this without any illusions as to the nature of the task we're putting in front of them. Ferenbach has this argument that, you know, part of the reason we were unprepared for Korea was that we didn't understand that, you know, you need to have legions in order to patrol the frontiers because, in his phrase, they're tigers in this world. And we were laboring under the delusion that we could bring the boys home and we made a decision. And he attributes a lot of this to the Doolittle Board to civilianize the military. And a lot of the young men that found themselves on the Korean Peninsula just simply weren't physically, mentally, or emotionally prepared for the type of combat that we put them into. And I see a lot of, I have concerns about

politicization and civilianization and lowering of standards in the present day military. Beyond that, Maybe it's my bias as a Marine. I think Ferenbach's pretty kind to the Marine Corps throughout the book, and he's not as kind to some of the other units. But I don't know. Let me ask that same question to you, because we spent a portion of our final class talking about why this book endures. And it does. And it's not what one would call the most accurate or comprehensive history of the Korean War, but it has a unique appeal that persists to the present day. Yeah, I'll give an answer. I'll also say, you know, on the question of Marines, Ferryin is definitely kind of Marines. I didn't realize, I had not watched the battle at Lake Changin before preparing for this class with you.

That movie, in its way, is also strangely kind to Marines, which I was not anticipating at all. Kind is the wrong word. Respectful. It's respectful of Marines. And the big climactic battle scene actually really doesn't focus on the first Marine division at all. It sort of passes over that in almost polite silence and focuses on the 31st Infantry Regiment and the soldiers who were on the east side of the reservoir and just got in history, unfortunately, pretty much demolished by, the Chinese volunteers who were attacking them. I thought that was interesting. I don't fully know what to read from it. But yeah, go ahead. There's one comment. There is a scene. Spoiler alert,

if you haven't seen the battle at Langean yet, if you have three and a half hours of your life that you're prepared never to get back. There's a moment when Ned Almond who, well, I will say Ned Allman in almost every telling of the Korean War to include historical fiction. I think one of the Jeff or Michael Sherro wrote a fictionalized account of it comes off kind of as the villain on the American side. There are other histories like Max Hastings where he gets a more balanced treatment, but there's one scene in the movie where Net Alman goes to O.P. Smith, the Marine General, who's kind of like the only American who they treat nicely, and it's like, I'm going to scalp you for this. I'll scalp you. I'm pretty sure he never threatened to do that. But then they get it up at the

end where they kind of have O.P. O.P. Smith, who they treat with some respect, grudgingly salutes the frozen, brave Chinese soldiers who sacrificed. their lives. It's like the message is not, yeah, it's not so subtle. It's like this, this one respectable American warrior realized the superiority of the Chinese troops on the battlefield. So even in their respect, there's an artful bit of propaganda going on. Or an artful bit of propaganda. Yeah, yeah, no, it's all pretty blunt. It's pretty broad, I would say. I haven't seen the sequel. I don't know if you've seen the sequel. The sequel, I don't know if that gets into the Marines at all, but certainly in the first edition, not so much. Yeah, on the book, on Farrenbach, look, I read it

years and years ago when I was Marine and coming back to it now. I, you know, I think one of the reasons why it's so compelling is it is, as you point out, it's this polemic. It's almost, it's written in this almost prophetic tone. And I mean that in the sense of like he's like a condemning Old Testament prophet who has been let down and is speaking on behalf of those who have been let down by their country. And he brings such passion in force to making that argument and making that argument is definitely his first priority. He's quite open. He says in the preface to the book that his historical method is probably not something

that would, I don't, I don't have the exact words right in front of me, but, you know, his method relies to a degree on, you know, sort of posteche and paraphrase in a way that academic history would not permit. And I verified this on a few occasions as I was looking up stuff that we discussed in our foreign affairs piece. And I realized that he has a quote from Truman on the issue of, of prisoner repatriation, which of course becomes this huge issue in the war. Truman is not simply going to send all enemy prisoners of war home because something like

half of them don't want to go home. And Ferenbach has a quote from Truman in the book on this issue, which I then looked up. And Truman's actual words are basically completely, they're in the New York Times at the time. They're completely different. The spirit of them is the same. He's fairly quoting the spirit of what Truman was saying as part of this famous incident, but for whatever reason just didn't feel particularly obliged to match him word for word. it as I'm sure when you were you were in graduate school, your supervisors would have insisted that

you do. But his passion, you know, on the issues that he is arguing about is got this like compelling quality that makes the book kind of unput-downable. And I would just say, you know, on the question of him not quite meeting academic history standards, there's, if you really want to, I'm going to nerd out here for a second and make a reference to Aristotle who has this famous comment that poetry or literature is more philosophical than history. Because history is full of stuff that just happens. Like sometimes someone just walks out in the street and gets hit by a bus. It doesn't really mean anything.

It just happens. Whereas in poetry, everything happens for a reason. Everything is part of some constructed whole. And Ferenbach is kind of taking history and finding the poetry in it. He is finding ways to tell a story about something that's important to him without, I think, in fairness to him and in defense of him, without like misrepresenting. presenting the fundamentals of things. He is getting at, in a way, the deeper truth of things through his method, even if it wouldn't pass, you know, the committee standards of a PhD committee today. This is why this is such a rewarding experience. And let me preface this by saying,

I have no reason to blow smoke here, Aaron, because I think I've already achieved multiple guest status on this pot. You are. You are. You're a friend of the pod. And so at this point, I'm just going to come back whenever I want. But you having taught at the Naval Academy, I was, I was sitting there, we kind of divided up each day, you'd take the first half, or I'd take the first half, and vice versa. And just to watch you teach and your pedagogical method was very, I learned a ton from it. And as someone who's always wanted to teach and never had that opportunity in grad school because I wasn't going full time and very much wants to do it again, I learned a ton just from watching you work. You had this one riff, which you channeled your no fun undergrad, great books experience, where you went from like Hobbs, to communism in five minutes that I wish I could have just, I could have videotaped that.

It was one of the more brilliant things I've ever seen. I should also throw something out. I had no, I didn't really know, having not taught, I didn't know kind of what the quality of students would be. They were exceptional. I agree. Our students were phenomenal. They had all done the reading. They were eager to participate. A lot of them brought in outside materials. And it was really, really cool to see them not only respond to the text, but I think get into the period and tease out both the, not just the strategic issues at play, but I think one thing you also help bring to them was a sense of the tactical and what it means to be in a rifle platoon or in a rifle company and how that relates to all these divisions and basic sort of elements of being in a

firefight that your average college student doesn't know anything about for good reason. So for that reason to many others is very rewarding. Well, you're far too kind about me. I appreciate it. And I will say in return that no one who saw you teaching would have thought you were teaching for the first time. But we'll stop. We should stop saying nice things about each other because the listeners are going to turn us off. But I agree. You're totally right about the students who were genuinely impressive. And if I may, I'm going to give a shout out to AJ Dilts,

who told me in the course of the week that he's a huge school of war fan. So AJ, thanks for listening. There were no grades, AJ. So why would you say that? Any points? I don't know. I don't know. But he was one. I mean, it was a really impressive group. And they very gratifyingly accepted the premise of the class, which is that this stuff matters. It matters to anyone focused on on U.S.-China relations today or contemporary events today. And I, you know, like on the military stuff, nobody, I mean, nobody studies military history in college anymore. I mean, not like it was a core requirement 50 years ago, but there, it was not unusual to find scholars of, of military history, of strategic questions, and of political history

that kind of verged into high-level military history on a regular basis. And that is just less and less the case on campus day. Honestly, it's one of the premises of this podcast is that this is a gap that needs to be filled. So I do think even for kids who are not going to serve, there is some value to just knowing what a regiment is and what a division is and, you know, what do these things mean? And how does air support actually work? You know, just at the very top level. Because they could find themselves as policymakers one day and they all are citizens and are all going

going to be voting one way or the other. And another sort of Ferenbach theme, and I know we kind of want to get into some of the meta things that happen in and around the class as opposed to just the text itself. But another theme I would argue is that notwithstanding advances in technology. And here the Korean War is a bit of a dichotomy because on the one hand, we're in the nuclear age. So there were dramatic advancements in technology. But I believe at the end of the book in the appendix, when he's describing all the weapon systems, he makes the point that really we were just fighting with technology left over from World War II, with the exception of maybe one experience. experimental aircraft, there weren't sort of the same massive leaps forward in technology that you'd find on the battlefield.

Part of the story of the early phases of the war, too, are the forces are horribly unequipped to do things like stop, and this is the story of Task Force Smith, right? Just stop a file of tanks that's lazily drifting down the road where you could easily have stopped them if you had. I think at one point he says there's not one anti-tank mine on the Korean Peninsula at that point. But a Fairbock theme is just sort of there are enduring. realities about warfare, which involve a contest of will and endurance between men in the mud. And I say that because at the time the war was fought between men and obviously in the

All Volunteer Force present days, men and women, that, you know, he has this one of the more famous quotes in the books is like, you can, you know, you can pulverize Earth, you can bomb it, but still you need to have men in the mud. And I've always found that to be attractive. I think it's fair to say that technology can train, can change the character of war without changing the enduring nature of war. And Farrenbach really brings that out throughout the story. So the story of Task Force Smith, if listeners don't know, is this battalion-sized force that's sent into South Korea to stop the North Korean invasion. They set up this roadblock in early July to stop the North Korean assault. We'll not stop it, but delay it at least. And they do not

delay it much at all. A column of Soviet tanks, Soviet-made tanks operated by North Korean soldiers, drives right through the middle of them. The following, a follow-on infantry forces pretty much take them apart. They have no anti-tank mines, as you point out, and they have, I think what Ferenbach says is one-third of all the anti-tank, you know, shoulder-launched ammunition in Japan, which is six rounds, six rounds, which are such, they're so obsolete that they're bouncing off the sides of the Soviet tanks. So it's a disaster. You have the soldiers who, you know, run away from the battlefield in one'sies and Tuesdays. Some of them make it to the east coast of Korea after, you know, a few days or weeks, some of them make it to the West Coast, others retrograde to the South. Can I, can I ask,

as we were going through this, what were your, what were your sort of top moments of the Korean war that you think that people should have in mind and maybe most people don't know about? Well, you referenced Task Force Smith, which MacArthur infamously refers to as an arrogant display of strength that he feels will intimidate the North Koreans. And of course, it is arrogant, but it does not intimidate the North Koreans. There's also another task force incident that doesn't get as much attention, which is that of Task Force. Force Faith, which at the time, elements of the First Marine Division are pushing up sort of to the northwest of Chosen Reservoir. They're on the east side. And there's a striking moment in the book

where Ned Allman, who is in charge of Temp Corps at the time and obviously carrying out MacArthur's intent of pushing as rapidly as possible north of the 38th parallel. This is after the remarkably successful landing at Incheon, which we can talk about, you know, and there are various elements of the military, MacArthur Foremost among them, who want to go as far north as possible. Some of them even urinate in the Yalu River, according to Ferenbach and some other accounts. But there's an Army task force on the east side, ultimately commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Don Faith, I believe. And there's this moment in the book when Allman flies in on a helicopter, and he says, I have three silver stars. And he's, I'm giving one to you. And he's like,

who should I give the other two silver stars to? For those who aren't in the military, listening to this like that's a that's a big deal to get a silver star like that's a pretty big award right there and i believe correct me if i'm wrong erin he he finds uh someone who works in the mess who just happens to be walking by like a cook or a there's a there's a lieutenant or an officer i think it's lieutenant sitting on a crate nearby he was wounded the previous day he tells that guy to get over here and then yeah then a mess steward is walking by and these are the two guys he grabs so it just hastily appends silver stars on them and then Faith then throws a Silver Star into the snow, showing his disdain for Allman.

And then Allman flies away. And then Task Force Faith is slaughtered. Absolutely slaughtered afterwards. And then that leads to another incident, which you probably know better than I, where the Marines are having this debate about, okay, we're surrounded. How do we possibly fight our way out of this? There I'll see to you for the superior knowledge. There's this vivid scene in Ferenbach where, you know, the first Marine division is spread out all along this road running up the other side of the reservoir from where Faith is.

And the Marines have been moving slowly and cautiously because the regimental commanders in General Smith are all little skeptical of what's going on. They're skeptical of Allman. They're skeptical of MacArthur driving of the Yalu. So they kind of been dragging their feet a little bit. And then, yeah, they get cut off. I mean, they are dramatically surrounded by Chinese forces and realize they're going to need to walk back down this road. The same stuff is happening all over Korea at this point, this last week of November, 1950, and on the east side of the reservoir, you have faith getting demolished.

You've got the second infantry division, which we, the army, the second infantry division, which we talked about in class, on the other side of the sort of central mountain range of Korea, in a very similar situation having to go back down a road to get away from the Chinese, and sort of Farimbach goes into their planning and operations order for that, and it's essentially just an order of March. They get an order and they drive down the road, get trapped and get demolished. So the scene that you make reference to is the commanders of the fifth and seventh Marine Regiments who are the regiments most advanced down the road, who are the most likely to get

wiped out should this situation continue to fall apart. Because Chesty Puller's still south. Chesty Puller's the first regiment commander, and he's back on the other side of the past. They've got to get across. There's a company holding this pass, Fox 2-7, and they are up there alone and unafraid, just fighting off human wave attacks, and these two regiments have got to get up and through this pass.

And so Murray and Litsenberg, the two commanders are chatting, and they basically say to each other, you know, the Chinese, they're doing these night attacks coming across the high ground. I'll bet they don't think that we can do night ridge attacks. That's what we're going to do. And they just agree right then and there standing on the road that they're going to in the dark go back down this road with marine companies deployed on either side of the road, just running the ridges, ridge after ridge at night, which is, you know, about as harrowing and difficult as it sounds, not even can. counting the 20 degree below zero temperatures, you know, their weapons aren't functioning properly because the lubricant is freezing. It's actually too cold for the oil in the weapons. And now all the other factors, if you can imagine applying in this situation. It's just this incredible moment of like a battlefield conference

that does not result in caution and hesitation, but actually the kind of the most aggressive and sort of insane course of action you can imagine, but in a circumstance where that's the only thing that makes sense. They're going to do a route clearance. They're going to do night route clearance. in reverse through divisions of Chinese. And I mean, they take a ton of casualties, of course,

but they maintain, the first Marine division maintains its unit integrity and walks out, walks out with its equipment and it's wounded. Well, your comment about hesitation, I interpret as allusion to something McCarthy-McArthur says, which is that councils of war breed timidity, which is something his father had told him, and he recalls this moment. He recalls this advice when he's debating, to the extent MacArthur debated,

the Inchon landing with his top Navy and Marine Corps, an army staff. And this, this doesn't really come out in Fairenbach's treatment of it so much as Halbersom's treatment in a book called Coldest Winter, but this is incredibly sort of like emotional appeal. And this is where MacArthur does deserve credit, right? Like he, he had conceived of the Incheon landing in the earliest days of the war. It gets delayed because the American forces are getting crushed on the battlefield. But he, against the advice of all of his top lieutenants, you know, amidst the ambivalence at best of the joint chiefs and the White House decides to make this massive gamble. And in the Halversham account, he makes this very emotional appeal to the Navy saying the Navy had never let me down in World War II.

I know it's not going to let me down now, but it was an incredibly gutsy call. Some historians argue that it sort of planted the seeds of his later cubris, which results in him ultimately getting fired. Part of what we argue in our piece is that one of the three lessons of the Korean War is that while MacArthur deserved to be fired, his basic point at the time was we should either get out or we should be all in in order to win this war. And that's why he wanted to expand the war to include bombing, Chinese supply lines in Manchuria, for example. The risk of that, of course, was general war. And I think that's what bred a lot of the timidity in the Truman administration. But what happened is this two-year period, which people tend to gloss over, right? Because the history of the Korean War is usually initial invasion,

Pusan Perimeter, Incheon Landing, you know, chosen reservoir, yada, yada, yada, yada, armistice. Well, the yada, yada, yada, is two years of brutal, brutal combat, as we're negotiating under the UN cloak in over 500 meetings where people are dying on all these hills. We're playing King of the Mountain to use T.R. Farronbach's phrase and places like baldy, pork chop hair, heartbreak ridge, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's probably the more provocative of the three arguments. Yeah, yeah, it seemed to really trigger the CCP, too.

I have to say, I've taught a fair amount over the years. This is the first class I have ever taught where real-time pushback from a foreign adversary became part of the class because the way in which I introduced you at the start of this podcast. So our article for foreign affairs goes up in the middle of the week. And within 24 hours, China Daily, which is an English language mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party publishes an unsigned editorial attacking the piece viciously and you specifically as the second coming of MacArthur, which is, as Matt Contonetti put it last week, it's not clear to him that that's a bad thing to be compared to Douglas MacArthur. But in any event, you know,

I left, I have to say, I left this experience much more critical of the Truman administration than I came into it. I had, you know, I hadn't made this serious study of the period that you did, but my general view was, you know, containment seems to have worked out. Cold War liberal, you know, soured on the Soviets, you know, soon enough at least, and built the structures that more or less over a very long period of competition carried the day. But when you zoom into Korea, you zoom into a very unflattering part, I think, of the Truman record. And of course, Truman was deeply unpopular through these years. And there's a way in which the academic or historical consensus on Truman has sort of forgiven him for a lot of this stuff and forgotten the political.

of the day and part of me thinks, well, actually they deserve, they deserve to be remembered a bit because these passions existed for a reason. I mean, the administration and Truman personally are, you know, in some ways, importantly responsible for the war beginning through their lack of clarity when it comes to deterrence. You have Dean Atchison's famous speech where he describes the security perimeter for the United States and the Pacific. He leaves South Korea and Taiwan off of the list, which plays a role in Stalin deciding to allow Kim Il-sung to try his hand. So you have a deterrence failure. You have the readiness failures that we were discussing already here on the podcast

in terms of the military that's really unprepared to fight. And then, as you point out, you have this two-year period, which is just glossed over in history, but it is this brutal period of the war of stalemate that is essentially self-imposed. In one area where Ferrenbach, I don't think, does full justice to the historical record, at least in the way he emphasizes things in his book, because he's very focused on the infantry war and he's an infantryman and he wants, I mean, this is what he's writing about.

He doesn't, I think, do credit to what the record shows in terms of the punishing effect of American air power on first the North Koreans and then later the Chinese. I mean, Chinese accounts of the war focus on the role of American air power, focus on the misery that American air power generated for them, how it made it impossible for them to operate like any military normally would. They have to travel at night. They're traveling off the roads. They have to build these World War I style fortifications.

and even so they are taking losses such that by the spring summer of 1951, they're kind of on the ropes. I mean, they shot their shot. The North Koreans shot their shot, then the Chinese came in to save them and shot their shot in the winter of 50-51. And they've got very little left in the tank in the summer of 51, and that is when negotiations began at the Truman administration's requests. General Ridgeway commanding asks for talks to begin out on a ship at sea. the North Koreans and Chinese refuse and insist that negotiations start at a place south of the 38th parallel, one of the few places where communist forces remain south of the parallel. And they proceed to engage in the most outrageous delays and provocations and bad faith conduct in these talks.

And the American negotiators being American negotiators being Western liberals who have come in good faith to talk about peace, allow themselves to get played with. I mean, I'm oversimplifying here, but basically for two years, failing to recognize the sophistication with which the communists are integrating what they're doing at the negotiating table and what's actually happening on the battlefield. It's a shameful episode, and ultimately, Dwight Eisenhower comes in, starts threatening to do exactly what Douglas MacArthur said he wanted to do. It's not the only factor, but it is a factor in the fact that the war ends pretty swiftly thereafter. As my diatribe,

that's what I walked away from having learned in what we write about in foreign affairs. I don't disagree with any of it, except I feel like part of your criticism of Truman is that you wish NSC 68 had just gone further in its rhetoric and in the funding thereof. And remember, there was no budget associated with NSA 68. It was estimated at $40 billion when the cap on defense spending at the time was around $13 billion. Whereas I have always felt that NSA 68 was, the language is inspiring, but it's a strategically incoherent document in that it doesn't meaningfully link ends ways and means. And it took Eisenhower to sort of bring balance to the force. I'm influenced by two historians on this point, Robert Bowie and Richard Emmerman. Regardless, one of the more fun moments of the course was to take the students through Eisenhower's famous,

I Shall Go to Korea speech in Michigan in 1953 and kind of sort of debate the political nature of the speech versus the geopolitical nature of the speech. And there again, Wisconsin's lurking in the background because prior to that, Wisconsin, I had been forced to campaign. with Joseph McCarthy from the 8th District of Wisconsin, and manages to actually go to Korea, do a battlefield tour, and then ultimately arrive at an armistice. That I think part of the counterfactual will never be able to answer is whether anyone besides Eisenhower could have done that, because Eisenhower was, of course, leveraging his military experience. One thing that I think is clear, if you analyze the war from the perspective of the communists involved,

they didn't really know how to deal with this American general that was now. now president. And then another big thing happens in April of 53, which is that, or March of 53, sorry, March or April. Stalin dies. March 6. Or is that Shaquillo-Aneal's birthday? Check me on that, loyal listeners, which then throws everything into confusion. Eisenhower, I think, sort of brilliantly seizes the moment to launch this peace offensive. He delivers a chance for peace speech, which I think was less of like based on a sincere hope that there would be peace and more an element of political warfare against the Soviet Union to keep them on the back foot. But ultimately, I think Eisenhower comes out looking pretty good from the incident.

We did also, in another weird coincidence, on Thursday, when we were teaching this portion of the conflict, sort of the end of the war and the armistice, it happened to be the 70th anniversary of the signing of the armistice. And so we went down to the Korean War Memorial, which I highly recommend to anybody in Washington, D.C. It doesn't get the attention that the Vietnam War Memorial or certainly the Lincoln Memorial does, but it's a great memorial. And we observed the ceremony. I thought I was going to be observing the ceremony. But I then got impressed into service and had to deliver an impromptu speech.

One of your colleagues, I don't know if I should be kind here and not name names. There was a member of the United States Senate who was supposed to be the keynote speaker. He did not appear. And you and I were standing on the side of the ceremony observing when the, I have to say, the very well-organized and observant members of the foundation, who were responsible for the memorial in the ceremony, spotted you, spotted you in the crowd and essentially asked if you wanted to give the keynote address, which, how could they know? How could they know?

You spent the last six months learning, you know, everything there was to know about the Korean War and proceeded to give. You're obviously a very talented extemporaneous speaker. That's not surprising, but I think was surprising to them was just how deep you could go off the cuff on the Korean War. It was a great performance. Well, I did. I didn't want to do it because I like to prepare.

But then I had this thought, if ever there was a moment where I could speak contemporaneously about the Korean War, it is on this day, this Thursday, on the 70th anniversary I just happened to know the material. But it was a great ceremony. And shout out to the organizers and the Korean ambassador and everyone who was there as well as the veterans, both Republic of Korea as well as American veterans who were in the audience. And it was really cool to talk to those guys. And I think part of our goal in teaching this course and doing this podcast and writing about

it is to ensure that the forgotten war is indeed not forgotten. For no other reason, even if you disagree with us that the lessons aren't relevant, what still matters, to quote Farronbach, is that it happened. And I take that kind of in two senses. One, it's that we should seek to avoid deterrence failures in the future and make sure that wars don't happen. And two, notwithstanding everything else, you still have remarkable acts of bravery and courage and really a human drama underlying all of it.

And it's important that we don't forget those sacrifices and ensure they weren't And just to take it back to where we started, it's not forgotten in China. They have not forgotten the Korean War. They are studying it. They are talking about it. They take it as a source of national pride that they stopped, you know, in their view. And there's, you know, there's some truth of this. They stopped the American behemoth almost immediately after the end of their own civil war and ground us to a stalemate, ground us to a halt. One final point on that. In the the CCP op-ed attacking our article, attacking my honor and expounding on my madness and arrogance, there was a line where they said that the only thing that's changed between now and then, I'm paraphrasing, is that China has grown

stronger. And I actually agree with that. I mean, China has made incredible investments in their military. They, I believe, are studying the friction that Putin is encountering in Ukraine right now, and they are preparing to achieve what is Xi Jinping's lifelong ambition, which is to take over Taiwan by force if necessary. And if Ukraine has taught us anything, it's that we should pay attention when dictators tell you what they're going to do. So yet another reason why the Korean War should be studied and we should pay attention to what CCP leaders are doing and why they're studying. Mike Gallagher, in addition to all of your already extremely impressive accomplishments, you have now achieved the status of a multi-time school of war guest.

joining an elect group of scholars and statesmen. So I think if you do five, you get a set of steak knives. But we appreciate you coming on as always. And there you go. Who'd you get that right now? I just happen to have a half a snake knife on my desk right now from my wife's. The podcast is audio only, but for every way, Congressman Gallagher did just produce a set of steak knives here on the other side. Thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate the conversation and to be continued. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.