Sexy Friday – 20231020

2Pack:

You recently asked for book recommendations by David Halberstam and I said “The Reckoning” (about Ford Motor Company) and “The Fifties” (about the 50s).

The following block quote is from the beginning of Chapter Seven of “The Fifties,” which introduces us to MacArthur’s great failure at the Yalu River during the Korean War. This is Halberstam’s description of the Communist Chinese Fourth Field Army

“The Fourth Field Army was one of the great infantry forces of the modern era, even though it consisted of peasants and remarkably little hardware. It had fashioned a brilliant victory over Chiang, who had far greater firepower. It moved on foot instead of by wheels and, lacking even the simplest of modern communication systems, coordinated its attacks with bugles—which had the additional advantage of terrifying the adversary. The troops had grown up in a world where the enemy always controlled the skies. Therefore they were trained not to move at all when an airplane passed overhead. To say that they were tough and experienced was a vast understatement. They marched (or trotted) 286 miles to their assembly point at the Yalu in eighteen days, carrying only eight to ten pounds of gear and supplies: a weapon, a grenade, eighty rounds of ammunition, perhaps a week’s supply of rice, and a tiny bit of meat and fish. An American soldier, by contrast, carried sixty pounds. Being familiar with the terrible cold of the Korean winter, the Chinese soldiers did have thickly padded, quilted jackets. They were not expert marksmen; rather, they were trained to attack close to their enemy and unleash bursts of automatic fire, a method that demanded that they take extremely heavy casualties.”

— The Fifties by David Halberstam