Fifties (12 page)

After Ike turned down the job, Truman offered it to Bradley, who reluctantly accepted it. By May 1949 the standing army was down to 630,000 men. Thirteen months later, in June 1950, due to the general desire to bring the boys home, conservative Republican wariness of intervention, and Truman’s own fiscal conservatism, the army consisted of only 591,000 men. The American Century was about to begin, but clearly no one wanted to pay for it. A certain schizophrenia was at work here: We wanted to be the policemen of the world, particularly in Asia, but we certainly did not want to get involved in messy, costly foreign wars. As Acheson once noted, the foreign policy of the United States in those years immediately after the war could be summed up in three sentences: “1. Bring the boys home; 2. Don’t be Santa Claus; 3. Don’t be pushed around.”

Curiously, the Republican right represented the last vestige of isolationism in America. Its members were not so much in favor of stronger American involvement in Asia (for no one had wanted to send American boys to save Chiang) as they were against America’s traditionally strong ties to Western Europe, now stronger than ever. In general, they preferred the Pacific to the Atlantic, Asia to Europe. They certainly preferred China (a smiling, happy, and, above all, obedient China) to England (supercilious, snobbish, with its fancy airs and ways). The Pacific, Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Rovere wrote, was their favorite ocean, precisely because it was not the Atlantic, which was the internationalist’s ocean (and which connected America to England). In this century, they noted, the Pacific “has become the Republican ocean.”

Their attitudes toward Asia were rooted not so much in contemporary realities as in missionary daydreams. Serious study of the complexity of a postwar pluralistic world was not their strong point. As Chiang collapsed of his own weight and his own corruption, Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, a leader in what was to be known as the China Lobby, had announced, “China asked for a sword, and we gave her a dull paring knife.” Truman was already on the defensive from assaults about his weakness on Communism made by the Republican right wing. To any objective observer, America had emerged from the war rich and more powerful than ever, its industrial base, unlike that of Europe, undamaged. But to the right-wingers, isolated from much of the real pain caused by the war and dissatisfied with the peace that followed, there was a sense of betrayal.

Thus the North Korean thrust across the 38th parallel stunned a nation whose rhetoric and defense policies were in no way in synch: the rhetoric was grandiose, the policies were minimalist. Despite all the warnings no one was prepared for the assault, or for the toughness of the In Min Gun. As the North Korean forces made their first overt border crossing, the panic was on. The assault consisted of ten divisions, moving in four major thrusts. Many of the top commanders had fought with Mao during the Long March. The elite troops leading the advance were highly disciplined and easily smashed through the relatively frail ROK defenses. The real difference, though, was the Russian T-34 tanks. They had a broad tread, heavy armor plating, and a low silhouette, and they carried one 85 mm gun and two 7.62 machine guns. They had first been used in July 1941 against the German forces advancing on Moscow, and General Heinz Guderian, the famed German panzer commander, had credited them with stopping his drive. Now they were at the head of a long, well-armed column moving against soldiers who had no weapons with which to stop them.

The American advisers in South Korea, in their determination to do with public relations what they could not do on the training ground, had earlier called the South Korean Army the best for its size in Asia, but the truth was a great deal less than that. Faced by the awesome force of the elite units of In Min Gun, it broke and ran. Chaos reigned in Seoul. The bridge over the Han River, which cuts through Seoul and constitutes a natural barrier, was blown before the ROK Army had a chance to retreat. More than five hundred people were on the bridge when it was detonated. By June 28 Seoul had fallen. When Douglas MacArthur arrived in Korea
on June 29, landing at Suwon, a small airfield twenty miles south of Seoul, he was stunned by the sight of long lines of South Korean troops retreating, most of them without their weapons. “I did not,” said MacArthur angrily, “see a wounded man among them.”

The news that the North Koreans had struck stunned the Truman administration. In Washington, Communism was seen as a monolith, and therefore it was assumed the invasion was something that Stalin had decided on. The question therefore was what would the Communists do next, not in Korea, but in the world. Truman, reflecting the fears of many, noted in his diary, “It looks like World War III is here—I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.” When Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway saw the first cables about the North Korean attack, he wondered to himself if this might be “the beginning of World War III ... Armageddon, the last great battle between East and West.”

Truman made up his mind from the start: He would contest the Communists in Korea. “We are going
to fight,
” he told his daughter, Margaret. “By God I am not going to let them have it,” he told another aide. Almost all his top aides felt the same way: This was the first chance to show that they had learned the lessons of Munich. Probably no one reflected the mood of the national security-military complex better than Omar Bradley, a man not given to hasty rhetoric. Bradley termed the invasion a “moral outrage.” If we gave in, he said, it would be appeasement. We had to draw the line somewhere, and Korea “offered as good an occasion for drawing the line as anywhere else.”

Drawing the line in Korea was to be one of the few things Truman and MacArthur would agree on. Almost immediately, MacArthur, as was his want, exceeded his authority by ordering the bombing of North Korean airfields. He thought of himself as a sovereign power in the Pacific; the President and Joint Chiefs had hegemony in Europe, in his mind, but not in Asia. That was his. Essentially he believed himself above the authority of his commander in chief. But bombing would not stop the North Korean drive. On June 30, after returning from his personal inspection of the South, MacArthur reported that the South Korean Army was retreating in complete chaos. The only way to hold the line against the North was to introduce American troops. He requested two divisions and one regimental combat team for immediate deployment. In Washington Joe Collins, the Army Chief of Staff, received the fateful cable to send American ground troops to the mainland of Asia. He did not even bother to summon the rest of the Joint
Chiefs. He called MacArthur and told him his request needed presidential approval, but in the meantime he had permission to move a regimental combat team to Pusan. MacArthur demanded a clearer mandate, without delay. By then it was 5
A.M.
, June 30, in Washington. Truman was already up and the secretary of the army, Frank Pace, called to brief him. Truman immediately approved the use of the Reserve Combat Team (RCT), postponing a decision on more troops. But essentially the deed was done and, without congressional approval: Americans would fight in South Korea. Later that morning the Joint Chiefs met to discuss the rest of the commitment. No one dissented over giving MacArthur the two additional divisions. Events were taking over; no one wanted to go ahead, but as Bradley later noted, “in a sense it was unavoidable and inevitable.” A little later the Chiefs met with Truman at Blair House. To their surprise, Truman said that America should not limit MacArthur to two divisions but should send whatever was needed. Indeed, at that meeting Truman noted that he already had an offer from Chiang of 33,000 Nationalist troops, which he was inclined to accept. Acheson, wary of both the quality of the troops and the implications of the offer, quickly suggested we decline, as it might lead to an expanded war.

Initially, Truman tried to downplay the commitment. At a meeting with reporters, he said, “We are not at war.” A reporter, searching for a way to describe the commitment, asked the President if it was a “police action.” The President, in a moment he would later regret, noted that yes, that was an apt description. Of the American troops ordered to Korea from Japan, only the elite 82nd Airborne was combat-ready. The rest were occupation troops, grown soft from easy duty. According to General William Dean, who commanded them in early days in Korea, they had become “fat and happy in occupation billets, complete with Japanese girlfriends, plenty of beer and servants to shine their boots.” These were not the same battle-hardened troops who had swept across the Pacific and defeated elite Japanese units in an endless series of bitter struggles in tiny island outposts. Fewer than one in six had seen combat; many had been lured into service after the war by recruiting officers promising an ideal way to get out of small-town America and see the world. “They had enlisted,” wrote one company commander, T. R. Fehrenbach, “for every reason known to man except to fight.” Suddenly, after the invasion there was a desperate need for manpower. Men, on their way back to America to the stockade, were reprieved and marched, still in handcuffs, to Yokohama. They would be allowed
to fight in Korea as a means of clearing their records. Only as they boarded the planes and ships on their way to Korea were their handcuffs removed. When word of the North Korean invasion reached members of the 34th Infantry Regiment in Japan, the first reaction was, “Where’s Korea?” The next was, “Let the gooks kill each other off.” On the night of June 30, Lt. Col. Charles B. (Brad) Smith, commanding officer of the First Battalion of the 21st Infantry Regiment of the 24th Division, was called by his commanding officer and told to take his battalion to Korea. At the airport, Brigadier General William Dean told Smith his orders were simple: “When you get to Pusan head for Taejon. We want you to stop the North Koreans as far from Pusan as we can. Block the main road as far North as possible. Contact General Church [who had flown from Tokyo to Taejon in the middle of the night]. If you can’t locate him, go to Taejon and beyond if you can. Sorry I can’t give you more information. That’s all I’ve got. Good luck to you and God bless you and your men.”

Of the four American divisions in Japan, the 24th was, by anyone’s standards, the least combat-ready. Most of its training had involved jiggling efficiency reports to reflect combat preparedness. Its equipment was old. A good portion of the ammunition for its mortars was faulty. Its .30-caliber machine guns were worn and not very accurate. Somewhere between a quarter and a half of its small arms were not serviceable. It lacked 3.5 antitank bazookas. Instead, it was equipped with the old 2.36-inch bazooka from World War Two, a good weapon in its time but utterly useless against the T-34s. Another regiment that was dispatched was in only slightly better shape. One of its officers wrote later that it was “rather sad, almost criminal that such understrength, ill-equipped and poorly trained units were committed.” Because of the budgets cuts, the Air Force was even hard-pressed to find planes to transport them to Pusan. Yet the Americans set off for Korea astonishingly confident of an easy victory. Almost everyone, from top to bottom, seemed to share the view that the moment the North Korean soldiers saw they were fighting
Americans
rather than ROKs, they would cut and run. It was arrogance born of racial prejudice. One colonel in the 34th Infantry, Harold Ayres, told his troops as they were arriving in Korea, “There are supposed to be North Korean soldiers north of us. These men are poorly trained. Only about half of them have weapons and we’ll have no difficulty stopping them.”

He and the rest of the American units were in for a rude awakening. The North Koreans were a formidable foe. Their troops were
rugged peasants who showed exceptional discipline in battle. Their camouflage was excellent: They wore netting over their helmets and their uniforms so they could fix branches and leaves to them. They moved well over the hard terrain and did not necessarily stay on the roads, as the Americans did. Their battlefield tactics, borrowed from Mao’s armies, were deft: They tended to make a frontal approach while sliding flanking troops to the side, and then hit the American forces. What made their attacks even more devastating was that they would infiltrate relatively small units behind the American positions so that when the Americans began to retreat, they ran into the NKPA on all sides and thought themselves completely surrounded. It took a long time for the American commanders to learn to punch through the smaller forces behind them. The North Koreans preferred to fight at night because it limited the effectiveness of America’s air power and artillery. The North Korean commanders also ordered their men to engage the Americans in closer combat than the Americans were accustomed to—so that when dawn arrived, American air power would be neutralized.

Even the trip over for the first American units was hard. The C-54 transport planes were so heavy they tore up the runway, so the Air Force had to turn instead to the smaller C-47s, which could hold only eighteen soldiers. Col. Smith himself made it over only on the tenth flight, and he had to leave behind much of his heavy firepower, including two recoilless-rifle teams and two mortar teams. The Koreans cheered them as they moved by train to Ansong on their way to battle—although in retrospect, American lieutenant William Wyrick decided that the Koreans were cheering not the Americans but the train, which would take them further south on its return trip.

General Dean, the RCT commander, broke his unit down into three groups to fight at three different places with virtually no communication with each other. Dean still believed that his job would be relatively short and easy; the American uniforms would do it all. The morale in Task Force Smith was high. As the Americans moved up to the front, they passed ROK engineers busy putting explosives on a bridge in case they had to retreat. The Americans upbraided them for their cowardice and threw their explosives into the river. “No thought of retreat or disaster entered our minds,” Colonel Smith later wrote.

On the morning of July 5, Brad Smith and about 540 of his men took up their positions two miles north of Osan, on the high ground, with a good view of the main highway ahead. Much of their artillery support was still back at Pusan. At 7
A.M.
a sergeant named Loren
Smith spotted eight enemy tanks. “Hey, Lieutenant,” he told Lt. Philip Day. “Look over there. Can you believe?!” Day asked what they were. “Those are T-34 tanks, sir, and I don’t think they’re going to be friendly toward us.” Low-slung and menacing, they were T-34s for sure; following them was a column of infantry and then another column of twenty-five tanks. This was merely the vanguard of a vast advancing force that stretched out some six miles along the narrow highway. Col. Smith’s people readied their artillery pieces. A little after 8
A.M.
, when the tanks were about a mile away, Smith gave the order to fire. But 4.2-inch mortars were useless. Smith had a mere six rounds of HEAT (High Explosive AntiTank shells). The Americans were firing away, there were more and more hits, but the tanks kept coming.