Alexander - How great generals win: a military historian appraises the worlds greatest commanders, from Hannibal to MacArthur

THE RULES OF WAR ARE SIMPLE BUT SELDOM FOLLOWED

M Y UNDERSTANDING of how great generals win commenced with realizing how not-so-great generals dont win. This learning process started on a hot day in August 1951, when, as commander of the U.S. Armys 5th Historical Detachment, I stood in a valley of the Taebaek Mountains of eastern Korea and watched American artillery pulverize Hill 983 about 1,000 yards in front of me.

This mountain and the similar one just to the north had not then attained the namesBloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridgeby which they would go down in history as the quintessential battles of the Korean War. But those of us standing there on that summer day watching the artillery shells methodically obliterate all traces of vegetation from 983 already knew what was in store.

The attack was to be directstraight up the steep slopes of the mountain, climbing 3,200 feet above sea level. The attack was also to be without surprise: the assemblage of a dozen artillery battalions in the valley south of the mountain had told the North Korean defenders that the top American commander in Korea, Lieutenant General James A. Van Fleet, had singled out their bastion for assault.

Thus the gruesome battle that followed, and the even more gruesome battle to capture Heartbreak that came directly on its heels, were programmed from the outset, as if both sides had been handed a script and told to follow it precisely.

The American artillery destroyed all the vegetation but could damage only a tiny fraction of the dirt-, rock-, and timber-covered bunkers in which the Communist soldiers hid. Thereafter, American, South Korean, and, on Heartbreak, French infantrymen climbed the steep fingers leading up to the peaks, the only avenues available to root the enemy out of their bunkers and drive them away. The North Korean and Red Chinese soldiers knew these avenues of approach as well as the United Nations troops, and they carefully zeroed in their automatic weapons and mortars on them and created fields of fire to decimate the climbing United Nations infantry.

It all worked out as programmedthe superior UN firepower at last wrested the peaks from the Communistsbut the cost was staggering. UN casualties, the vast bulk of them American, totaled 6,400, while Communist losses may have reached 40,000. Yet the UN command gained nothing. Its strategic position in Korea was not affected one iota, and there were almost no tactical gains: behind Heartbreak loomed another ridgeline equally pitted with bunkers. And behind this third ridge rose many more ridges that could have been armored with bunkers as well.

The only thing achieved by the battles of Bloody and Heartbreak ridgesand by all the numerous other battles for ridge-lines that the 8th United States Army in Korea ordered during the fall of 1951was that the American command finally realized the futility of frontal attacks against prepared positions. There was no great intellectual awakening to the foolhardiness of the policy. The reason was simply that the cost of further attacks was too high. The period between the start of the peace talks in July and the cessation of the ridgeline assaults at the end of October 1951 had produced 60,000 UN and an estimated 234,000 Communist casualties.

It is incredible that it took such bloodletting to teach an obvious lesson. From the beginning of organized warfare, frontal attacks against prepared defenses have usually failed, a fact written large in military history for all generals to see. Even more pertinent, because it was part of the active-service experience or training of the senior generals in Korea, was the trench warfare of World War Iwhich this phase of the Korean War copied almost exactly. World War I had showed conclusively that frontal attacks could not succeed, except at such an enormous human cost that the term victor became derisory, since no one emerged a winner from those rendezvous with death at the disputed barricades of the western front.

Yet the lesson had not been learned. The men who had seen or studied the trench warfare of World War I ordered it anew in the Korean War. And the results in Korea were identical to what they had been in Europe: enormous human losses and no appreciable tactical or strategic gains.