Fifties (13 page)

Because he had to conserve his ammunition, Smith ordered his 75 mm recoilless rifles to wait until the tanks were only seven hundred yards away. The recoilless rifles scored hits but did no damage to the tanks. Then, as the tanks came upon the infantry positions, some of Smith’s bazooka men, completely heedless to their own safety, closed to thirty yards and fired away. But even firing at virtual point-blank range did not help. It was only with the use of the 105 mm howitzer and the HEAT shells that they knocked out two tanks.

The battle lasted less than an hour, twenty of Smith’s men were killed or wounded, and twenty-nine tanks rolled right through them. By early afternoon Smith gave the order to retreat, and when he did many of his soldiers ran, throwing away their weapons. Smith himself had to leave behind his dead and wounded. The Korean War had started.

Unlike Vietnam in the next decade, it did not come back to America live and in color on television. The nation was not yet wired, and Korea, so distant, the names of its towns so alien, did not lend itself to radio coverage, as did the great war that had preceded it. The best reporting in Korea was done by daily journalists, who caught its remarkable drama, heroism, and pathos for a nation that largely didn’t care and was not at all sure it wanted to pay attention to such grim news. America tolerated the Korean War while it was on but could not wait to forget it once the war was over. In contrast to World War Two and Vietnam, it did not inspire a rich body of novels, plays, or even movies. Fittingly enough, the most recent history of the war was entitled
The Forgotten War,
a phrase used originally by General Matthew Ridgway. Some forty years after it had begun, there was no monument to it in Washington. Its most famous contribution to American mass culture was the movie and
television series
M*A*S*H,
and even that was often associated in the public mind with Vietnam rather than Korea.

It took five days for Smith to round up his men. As one American soldier later said, “Instead of a motley horde armed with old muskets, the enemy infantry were well-trained, determined soldiers and many of their weapons were at least as modern as ours. Instead of charging wildly into battle, they employed a base of fire, double envelopment, fire blocks on withdrawal routes, and skilled infiltration.” The first few weeks of the war were like that. Our troops were unprepared, and the leadership at the lower levels was often appalling. Colonel John (Mike) Michaelis, a regimental commander with the legendary Wolfhounds and one of the early heroes of the war, thought the American troops did not know their weapons, or even the basics of infantry life and survival. “They’d spent a lot of time listening to lectures on the differences between communism and Americanism and not enough time crawling on their bellies on maneuvers with live ammunition singing over them. They’d been nursed and coddled, told to drive safely, to buy War Bonds, to give to the Red Cross, to avoid VD, to write home to mother—when someone ought to have been telling them how to clear a machine gun when it jams.” Michaelis was the first to notice that the American soldiers had become the prisoners of their own hardware or, in his words, “so damn road bound that they’d lost the use of their legs. Send out a patrol on a scouting mission and they load up in a three-quarter-ton truck and start riding down to the highway.”

What had started out as something of a game had turned into a military nightmare for the American troops. Here they were, tens of thousands of miles away from home in this godforsaken country, seemingly abandoned by their own country in a war no one was even willing to call a war. The Korean troops, with whom and for whom they were fighting, seemed to be constantly throwing down their weapons and running. The weather was unbearable—the hottest Korean summer in years, with no sign of the heavy rains that generally cooled things off during that season. There was nothing to drink, and often the desperate men scooped up paddy water, neglecting to use their water-purification tablets. At first there were almost as many casualties from the unrelieved heat and intestinal diseases as from the enemy.

The first week ended with the Americans trying to dig in behind the Kum River, a good natural barrier. It had been a week of unrelievedly bad news: two American regiments torn up, as many as three thousand dead, wounded, or missing. It had been a psychological
victory of immense proportions for the North Korean People’s Army. Washington was still in shock. MacArthur began drawing up an immense list of what he needed: a Marine regimental combat team, the Second Infantry Division; a regimental combat team from the 82nd Airborne; eleven artillery battalions, an armored group of three medium tank battalions. At the Pentagon, Matt Ridgway recommended most of what MacArthur wanted. He also moved to stem the battlefield panic by rushing 3.5 bazookas and ammo to Korea, along with special instruction teams. He made this a personal mission, assigning his own men to guide them from the factories to the shipping points to Pusan. There would be none of the usual screw-ups, he had decided. On July 10, just six days after the first clash, some twenty 3.5 bazookas were on their way along with 1,600 rounds of ammo.

In Washington a fat new $11 billion supplemental appropriation bill was rushed through. Ninety-two National Guard units, or the equivalent of four National Guard divisions, and the entire Marine Reserve were called up. Some units, such as the two battalions of the 29th Infantry Regiment, were supposed to get six weeks of training; instead, they were promised they would receive ten days of intensive training upon arrival in Korea. Once in Pusan, however, they were told that the situation was too critical. Instead, they would have three days to draw equipment and zero in their weapons. Then even that order was rescinded: They were, over the bitter protests of their officers, rushed immediately to Chinju. One day after arrival in-country, they found themselves at the most forward position.

The second week of combat was hardly better than the first. The In Min Gun kept pushing the Americans back. The 24th Division was badly mauled. Unit after unit was torn up, and after absorbing terrible losses and falling back, they regrouped, only to be torn up again. After three weeks in battle, the 24th was at half strength; of the almost 16,000 men who had been committed, only half were still able to fight. More than 2,400 men had been lost, either dead or missing. It was one of the worst periods in American military history; but gradually, fresh troops were pouring into the country. The quality of hardware was improving. The real question was whether this small, outmanned handful of American troops could win its fight against time before being driven into the sea. There was fear of an Asian Dunkirk. General Walton Walker, who had become commander of the Eighth Army, got edgier and edgier. There were reliable reports that he had gone after a T-34 tank with a handgun, had led a bazooka team to stop the enemy tanks, and had, in fact, nailed one at point-blank range. “I got me a tank,” he
was reported to have said. When one battalion commander, Morgan Heasley, arrived, Walker greeted him at the airport and told him, “I’m sending you up to the river to die.”

In late July, General Walker gathered his various unit commanders at a command post at Sanju. Help, he said, was on the way. “We are fighting a battle against time. There will be no more retreating, withdrawal, or readjustment of the lines or any other term you choose. There is no line behind us to which we can retreat. Every unit must counterattack to keep the enemy in a state of confusion and off balance. There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan, a retreat to Pusan would be one of the greatest butcheries in history. We must fight to the end. Capture by these people is worse than death itself. We will fight as a team. If some of us must die, we will die fighting together. Any man who gives ground may be responsible for the deaths of thousands of his comrades ... We are going to hold the line. We are going to win.”

Many of his commanders thought Walker histrionic. There were other defensive lines to which they could retreat, wearing down the North Koreans, making them pay an increasingly dear price for the real estate. Slowly, the Americans began to rally. The more compact their position, the better their lines of communication and the greater Walker’s ability to switch units back and forth.

By the same token, the North Korean army’s lines of communication were now far too long and being taxed by constant bombing. The UN forces moved back across the Naktong on August 1; it was their last great defense line. On August 2 they blew the main highway and railroad bridges (in the process killing hundreds of refugees, who refused to obey orders to get off them). This was the Pusan perimeter, a great bend in the river, running some one hundred miles north and south and then roughly another fifty miles east. To the east was the Sea of Japan; to the south, the Strait of Korea, to the north, rugged mountains that limited NKPA movement. It was only on the long front to its west that the Eighth Army faced its formidable foe. Though the American troops were spread somewhat thin, they had exceptional mobility; they could move units back and forth by rail and by road; they could rush supplies up to the front, which had just been off-loaded at the Pusan docks. In addition, they had brilliant intelligence on the North Koreans, who had been careless with their codes; they used simple ones and changed them only once a week. It took the Americans only one day to break them. Thus Walker had advance knowledge of almost everything the North Koreans were going to do and he was able to shuttle his troops around to head off their attacks.

Slowly, the balance of force was changing. By early August the UN forces, including ROK units, actually outnumbered the In Min Gun. And while the Eighth Army had suffered terrible casualties—more than 6,000 men—so had the North Koreans. Rough American military estimates of damage caused to the NKPA were 35,000 casualties; later, based on careful prisoner interrogation, that figure was judged far too cautious and raised to 58,000. The North Koreans had used most of their best men and equipment in that sudden, shocking first strike. Now they were replacing elite troops with green conscripts, including men from the South drafted willingly or unwillingly as the army had driven toward Pusan. They had gone from some 150 tanks to about 40. If the situation was turning around, not everyone realized it: There were still top-secret plans for a massive Dunkirk-like withdrawal from Pusan, if need be. For the summer of 1950 had proved a dark time, when America was reluctantly being drawn into a world it had never made and when what was happening in Korea amplified our worst fears. There was always the danger that this small war would grow larger. Averell Harriman and General Ridgway visited MacArthur in Tokyo to ask, among other things, that he make certain this did not happen. MacArthur was supremely confident; if the Chinese decided to enter the war, he would deal them such a crushing blow that it “would rock Asia and perhaps turn back Communism.” Modesty was never his strong point.

FIVE

D
OUGLAS MACARTHUR HAD NOT
been home in thirteen years. Truman had twice invited him to receive the appreciation of a grateful nation, but MacArthur turned him down, saying that he was too busy in Tokyo. Since a presidential request was in fact an order, both Truman and George Marshall were furious. Truman suspected that MacArthur’s reasons were political, that he was biding his time, in order to create a Republican groundswell with a dramatic return just in time for a primary run. MacArthur’s explanation was simpler but predictably vainglorious. He could not return, he told an aide, because, “If I returned for only a few weeks, word would spread through the Pacific that the United States is abandoning the Orient.”

He was seventy years old in 1950, a towering figure who had worked long and hard to perpetuate his own legend. As Truman
suspected, he hungered for the White House, but in the political arena he was surprisingly clumsy. He was the darling of the far right, corresponding regularly and indiscreetly with all sorts of figures on that side, encouraging them to believe he shared their views that the New Deal signaled the end of Western civilization. As early as 1944, a writer named John McCarten wrote in
The American Mercury,
“It may not be his fault but it is surely his misfortune that the worst elements on the political right, including its most blatant lunatic fringe, are whooping it up for MacArthur.”

Not everyone thought he was the right leader for this particular war. He was older than the norm for a combat commander, and his reputation exceeded in some ways those civilians to whom he was supposed to report. Far more than most generals, he held to the idea that the commander in the field was
the
decision maker—not merely tactically, but strategically as well. He was known among his peers as one who manipulated the information he passed on to his superiors in order to justify the plans he intended to carry out. From their years together in the Philippines, when Ike was an aide to MacArthur, Eisenhower understood MacArthur’s Olympian style of deciding “what information he wants Washington to have and what he will withhold.” This was especially relevant in Korea, a new kind of limited war, which demanded all sorts of political decisions and a certain pragmatism that was alien to MacArthur’s sense of duty. Eisenhower thought a younger commander would have been far more appropriate than, as he phrased it, “an untouchable.” There was also the danger with MacArthur that he had begun to see his mission in Asia in a quasi-religious light, as the leader of a holy crusade against a godless enemy.

Be that as it may, in 1950 Douglas MacArthur was at the summit of one of the most glorious careers in American history. He was the son of Arthur MacArthur, a Civil War hero who won the Congressional Medal of Honor at age eighteen and who later commanded American troops during the Philippine insurrection (“Arthur MacArthur,” one of his aides noted, “was the most flamboyantly egotistical man I had ever seen, until I met his son”).

His mother, Pinky, felt that the Army had never treated her husband with proper respect and she had constantly intervened with his superiors trying to gain him promotions and better posts. She failed in that particular course, but later in her life she transferred her energies to her young son. On the day of his final exam for West Point he felt nauseated, but she steadied him with a pep talk: “Doug, you’ll win if you don’t lose your nerve. You must believe in yourself,
my son, or no one else will believe in you. Be confident, self-reliant and even if you don’t make it, you will know you have done your best. Now go to it.” He passed with the highest grades of anyone taking the exam.