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(More customer reviews)I bought this book on the recommendation of a friend with similar tastes in military history. As historians, we both prefer facts and in-depth research, especially when an author challenges a long held and firmly believed historical perception. Col. Thomas E. Hanson successfully challenges the notion that the American soldiers who deployed to Korea in July 1950 were soft, pampered, and ill-trained. As a result of Hanson's thorough research and clear prose, I no longer believe in that particular thesis, so eloquently and dramatically described in T. R. Fehrenbach's "This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness." Although Hanson does not delve into the opening battles in Korea, as his book is confined to training conducted by American occupation troops in Japan before the outbreak of war, I now believe that faulty tactical dispositions, systemic logistical problems arising from the Truman administration's parsimonious allocation of military expenditures for the Army, and a gross misunderstanding of the enemy they faced, contributed to the debacles such as Task Force Smith and the defeat of the 24th Infantry Division at Taejon. However, as Hanson sometimes alludes to, not all American units did poorly in the opening phase of the Korean war. Also examined in this account, but not in great detail, are the personnel policies of a post-war US Army that included shortened command tours, placing non-infantry officers in charge of infantry units, and accepting greater than normal personnel turnover. Hanson rightfully identifies the Army Chief of Staff, GEN J. Lawton Collins, as contributing to the systemic unpreparedness that emerged in the harsh light of combat during the Summer of 1950. On a cautionary note, this book is not written for someone with a hankering for drama or a cursory interest in the U.S. Army. It talks mainly about training and personnel policy, topics that would resonate more with historians having considerable military background or long standing interest in those specific topics. That said, if you are interested in a new interpretation of the opening days of the Korean War, pick up Hanson's book.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Combat Ready: The Eighth U.S. Army on the Eve of the Korean War (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series)
In the decades since the "forgotten war" in Korea, conventional wisdom has held that the Eighth Army consisted largely of poorly trained, undisciplined troops who fled in terror from the onslaught of the Communist forces. Now, military historian Thomas E. Hanson argues that the generalizations historians and fellow soldiers have used regarding these troops do little justice to the tens of thousands of soldiers who worked to make themselves and their army ready for war.In Hanson's careful study of combat preparedness in the Eighth Army from 1949 to the outbreak of hostilities in 1950, he concedes that the U.S. soldiers sent to Korea suffered gaps in their professional preparation, from missing and broken equipment to unevenly trained leaders at every level of command. But after a year of progressive, focused, and developmental collective training—based largely on the lessons of combat in World War II—these soldiers expected to defeat the Communist enemy.By recognizing the constraints under which the Eighth Army operated, Hanson asserts that scholars and soldiers will be able to discard what Douglas Macarthur called the "pernicious myth" of the Eighth Army's professional, physical, and moral ineffectiveness.
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