Combat Ready? The Eighth U.S. Army on the Eve of the Korean War

Book excerpt: "Historians and sliders have not been kind to either [General Douglas] MacArthur or the soldiers whom he placed in harm's way in the summer of 1950 ... This study seeks to redress the imbalance that exists between fact and interpretation. For too long historians and soldiers have roundly criticized Task Force Smith's performance, extrapolated from its fate a set of assumptions about what constitutes readiness, and then used those assumptions to condemn the entire Eighth Army. The reality is much more complex. A proper examination of the historical record reveals wide disparities in the readiness and combat effectiveness of the subordinate units of America's first forward-deployed Cold War field force ... This work will demonstrate how units achieved that readiness by means of case studies of four infantry regiments, one from each of the four infantry divisions that constituted the Eighth Army in 1950. It synthesizes contemporary training doctrine, training records generated by maneuver units, unit histories, reports of inspections by outside agencies, contemporary self-assessments, and the observations of veterans who served in Japan in the fifteen months before the outbreak of the Korean War. It challenges the long-standing reputation of the Eighth Army as flabby, dispirited, and weak"--Introduction.