Quotes August 21, 2020

“Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefiled and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.”
David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
 
 
 
 
“A military situation at its worst can inspire fighting men to perform at their best.”
Marguerite Higgins, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent
 
 
 
 
“Duty, Honor, Country” — those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn…”
Douglas MacArthur
 
 
 
 
“A retreat to Pusan would be one of the greatest bloodbaths in American history. We must fight until the end…. If some of us must die, we will die fighting together. Any man who gives ground may be personally responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of his comrades. I want everybody to understand that we are going to hold this line. We are going to win.”
Gen. Walton Walker
 
 
 
 
“In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak. […] Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores.”
Harry S. Truman
 
 
 
 
“The monstrous effects on Korean civilians of the methods of warfare adopted by the United Nations — the blanket fire bombing of North Korean cities, the destruction of dams and the resulting devastation of the food supply and an unremitting aerial bombardment more intensive than anything experienced during the Second World War. At one point the Americans gave up bombing targets in the North when their intelligence reported that there were no more buildings over one story high left standing in the entire country … the overall death toll was staggering: possibly as many as four million people. About three million were civilians (one out of every ten Koreans). Even to a world that had just begun to recover from the vast devastation of the Second World War, Korea was a man-made hell with a place among the most violent excesses of the 20th century.”
Reg Whitaker, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945-1957