John Osborne, TIME & LIFE senior correspondent in the Pacific, last week cabled this report from the Korean battlefront :
THIS is a story that no American should ever have to write. It is the ugly story of an ugly war. Because there is so much to tell that is sorrowful and sickening, let the story begin with a few good and heartening things that also can be said about our war in Korea.
The American effort and the American soldier in Korea are magnificent. Doubtless we could and should have been better prepared. But the more important fact is that never before in all our history have we been so nearly prepared at the start of any war as we were at the start of this one. Today we have in Korea more men and more arms than we sent to the invasion of North Africa in November of 1942, eleven months after Pearl Harbor.
Already, though still outnumbered, we have the greater weight of arms, on the ground and in the air and at sea. We know how to use and coordinate the arms, as we did not know for many months after the start of World War II. It is a wonderful and thrilling thing to see, as I have just seen, infantry in action with the support of fighters from the Air Force, bombers from a naval carrier, and, if the field commander had wanted it, bombardment from warships standing offshore.
It is wonderful and thrilling, too, to ride the pipeline into Korea. The EUR-545, the C-46s and 47s stream into the airports of Japan, laden with everything from battlewise noncoms to dismantled artillery.
We might yet be pushed out of Korea. But the buildup of American power has been achieved at a pace and on a scale that would never before have been possible so early in a war so far from home.
How to Live & Die. Then there are the soldiers. They are boys, most of them, in their teens and early 20s, many of them lately trained only in the softening and vitiating duty of the occupation in Japan. They were scared at first. In some places, they abandoned positions that seasoned troops might have held. But in a land and among a people that most of them dislike, in a war that all too few of them understand and none of them want, they became strong men and good soldiers—fast. Quite literally overnight they learned all there is to know about sticking, fighting, killing and dying. The business of soldiers is not to die but to live, and they are learning to do that, too. I have seen boys who by rights should have been freshmen in college transformed by a week of battle into men wise in the terrible ways of this especially terrible war.
I say that this is an especially terrible war. It is so for reasons which every American must understand if we are to grasp the extent, the nature and the immense complexities of our problem in Asia. Much of this war is alien to the American tradition and shocking to the American mind. For our men in Korea are waging this war as they are forced to wage it and as they will be forced to wage any war against the Communists anywhere in Asia.
Our soldiers will continue to be forced to war in this fashion—until our political and military leaders acquire and apply an understanding of war in Asia that they have not as yet displayed in Korea. Above all, our leaders must grasp one quite simple fact: war against the Communists of Asia cannot be won—not really won—by military means alone.