The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (4 page)

He was a man who had already been through his own prolonged hell. Captured by the Japanese at Bataan at the start of World War II, he had managed to survive the Bataan Death March and more than three years as a prisoner. Generally, being a prisoner of war did not help an officer’s career—this would be especially true in Korea, where the treatment of American prisoners by the Communists was unusually cruel and where, because of the brainwashing, some men had been damaged—but Johnson eventually ended up as chief of staff of the Army. “He was the best,” Lester Urban said years later, “someone born to lead men. I think he was always thinking about what was good for us. Nothing ever got by him.”

His experience on Bataan had made Johnson less trusting of conventional wisdom, and he knew more about the consequences of undue optimism than most officers. At that moment, he had the Fifth Cav positioned as a reserve force just a few miles south of his old unit, but he was becoming nervous, hearing talk of a large enemy force moving through the area, one that might cut the road, severing the Eighth Regiment from the rest of the division. On his own Johnson had driven north to check the situation out. On the ride, the same
stillness that had bothered General Paik, the fact that there was
nothing
moving, upset Johnson too. Something like that, he later said, made the back of your neck prickle. When he finally reached his old battalion, he did not like what he saw at all. His replacement, Robert Ormond, was brand-new to his job and, to Johnson’s eye, had dispersed the battalion poorly. Most of the men were positioned in the flat paddy land and not even very well dug in.

Watching the two officers meet, Urban sensed Johnson’s distress. Johnson was not, as Urban saw it, a man to chew another officer out, but what he said to Ormond seemed surprisingly tough: “You’ve got to get these men out of the valley and up on the high ground! They’re much too vulnerable where they are! You’ve got no defense if you’re hit!” (“I thought he was going to whip Ormond’s butt right then and there,” Urban said years later.) Johnson assumed that Ormond would pick up on what he said and was appalled to discover later that his advice had been ignored. Nor was it just the Third Battalion that was poorly positioned. After the entire tragedy was over, many of the more senior officers would admit that the disposition of the entire Eighth Regiment had been very poorly done. The men were arranged as if they had no enemies to fear.

Lieutenant Hewlett (Reb) Rainer joined the regiment immediately after the Unsan battle, and one thing he decided to do was put together in his own mind what had happened. He was shocked at the way the regiment had been positioned: “The first thing was that the battalions could not really support each other. They were not properly linked up. The second thing was that you could drive a division or maybe two divisions of Chinese soldiers through them and the people spending the night there might not even know it. And that was the way the enemy fought—he came up and moved along the flanks, then encircled you, and then squeezed you,” Rainer said. “I know Regiment hadn’t gotten the word from higher headquarters about the Chinese, but still, they were very far north; it was Indian country; something was clearly up; and there was no point at all in being positioned as if you’re back in the States on some kind of war game. To say it was careless—that was an understatement.”

Sergeant Bill Richardson, who had a recoilless rifle section of a heavy weapons platoon in Love Company, remembered October 31, 1950, exceptionally well. His section had drawn duty at the south end of the Third Battalion’s position, near a place called the Camel’s Head Bend, part of a unit guarding a bridge where a small road crossed the Nammyon River. The day before, they had finally received a shipment of what the supply people claimed were winter clothes: some field jackets, fresh socks, and nothing much else. Richardson had told one of his men to distribute the jackets as best he could and skip the sergeants because there just weren’t enough to go around. Years later, it infuriated
him when he read that the men in his company had been caught asleep in their sleeping bags. It had been bad enough the way they were hit, but they sure as hell weren’t in their sleeping bags, because they didn’t have any. They had to create do-it-yourself sleeping bags as best they could, wrapping their blankets and shelter halves together.

That day, Richardson had been on duty at the bridge when Lieutenant Colonel Johnson stopped on his way back from the battalion command post. Johnson had wanted to talk, but he was also being somewhat guarded. “Look,” he said, “we’ve had reports of a few minor roadblocks in the area. We think they’re remnants of the North Korean Army, and they may be coming up the river bend heading towards you, going north.” Richardson was not bothered by the news. He told Johnson (“my famous last words”), “Colonel, if they come up the river bend, they’ve had it.” Then Johnson warned him to be careful and they shook hands. Johnson wished him good luck and Richardson thought to himself—because Johnson was driving through the countryside virtually alone—Colonel, sir, you’re the one who needs the luck.

They had been together since training at Fort Devens back in Massachusetts. Richardson had served in Europe at the tail end of World War II, arriving in that war too late to see combat, only the devastation it had wrought. But in Korea, he would eventually be battle-tested far beyond the norm, in combat as difficult and dangerous as any American force had ever been exposed to. He had grown up in Philadelphia and his parents had been entertainers. He was a less than diligent student, and was sent in time to the local industrial school, which was the system’s way of telling him to forget about college, in the unlikely event that the idea had ever entered his mind. His formal schooling ended in the ninth grade, and he joined the Army and found he liked it. He had been trained by skilled professionals, men who had been through the worst of World War II and passed on the little things that were most likely to save your life. In the early spring of 1950, Richardson was on the third extension of his enlistment in a period of post–World War II downsizing, and the Army had been trying to force him out. Then the North Koreans moved south, and overnight the people who ran the Army decided they wanted him to stay on.

So instead of mustering out at Fort Devens in late June, he became a charter member of the 3/8. Richardson remembered that immediately after the North Korean invasion, on June 26 or 27, Johnny Johnson had assembled the whole battalion at a post movie house, and the unit was so small that only the first two or three rows were filled. They were shown an infantry propaganda movie that ended with some soldiers being awarded Silver Stars and Bronze Stars. Johnson had told them, “Men, those of you who aren’t wearing one of those will be in a few weeks.” Richardson had thought he was crazy at
the time. Within days men started arriving from every kind of outfit; MPs and cooks and supply men, all infantrymen now, enough to fill any movie theater. Then they shipped out.

Later, after they were hit by the Chinese, Richardson believed that Johnson had been trying to warn him of his concern that the Chinese were in the area and that the approaches to the Eighth Cav were open. Perhaps it was as much of a warning as you could give at a moment when to utter the magic word “Chinese” to an NCO might trigger panic. If Johnson had still been their battalion commander, Richardson was sure, he would have tightened up their positions, moved them to higher ground, and made sure that their firepower was mutually supportive and much more concentrated. Ormond might become a fine officer someday, Richardson thought, but this was neither the time nor the place to make your combat debut.

Major Filmore McAbee, the S-3, or operations chief, of the Third Battalion, like Johnny Johnson, was uneasy with the way the regiment was dispersed, but he would not get a chance to discuss it with Johnson for a long time, because he spent the next two and a half years in a prison camp. McAbee, an experienced combat officer from World War II, had been a company commander with the First Cav from the moment it arrived in country. He was considered an excellent combat leader, but at the moment the Chinese struck he was mainly a frustrated officer. Both Ormond and his exec, Major Veale Moriarty, were new in command, and their experience, as far as McAbee could tell, was primarily as staff men at the regimental level. They knew each other well and left McAbee, the more combat-tested officer, feeling crowded out. “I was the uneasy one, but I was the outsider,” he would later say. He had tried to alert Ormond about the battalion’s poor positioning, to no avail. Nor did he like the mood of the unit, and he blamed that on the senior officers: too many of the men were becoming far too careless and cocky. There was too much talk about where they were going after Korea. All they talked about was their next two stops—the Yalu and then home. Later, when McAbee found out that some Chinese prisoners had been captured and units like his, up on point, had not been warned, he felt that the decision at headquarters to conceal, if not suppress, this information was one of the most appalling acts he had ever heard of—a complete abdication of military responsibility. After he came to learn much more about Chinese military tactics, it struck him that his regiment, spread out as it was, had presented a particularly enticing target.

WHAT NONE OF
them, including Ormond, knew was that, before the Chinese hit, a debate was under way at higher headquarters. The commander of the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, Colonel Hal Edson, wanted to move his troops back. His unit was too exposed, he believed—and there had been enough warnings
by then to make a man pay attention. On November 1, when he woke up, the skies were thick with smoke from forest fires. Edson and others suspected that the fires were set by enemy troops eager to shield their movements from American air observation. Major General Hap Gay, the First Cav Division commander, who took the reports of the Chinese in the area more seriously than some of his superiors, was also becoming edgier by the hour. On that first day of November, he had set up his division command post, or CP, at Yongsan-dong, south of Unsan. For some time Gay had been disturbed by the way his division was being split up, with different battalions being shipped off to other divisions, based on the whims of the people at Corps, and not on the integrity of the division itself. He particularly did not like the way the Eighth Regiment was sticking out so nakedly, open to the enemy on all sides.

His aide, Lieutenant William West, believed that Gay had been smoldering all along over the way the Army had been handling the Korean War. Gay, General George Patton’s chief of staff in World War II, believed that he had been taught how to do things right and how not to do things wrong, and in Korea they had been doing things wrong from the start. He had been shocked by the terrible state of the Army when the war began; and bothered as well by MacArthur’s initial failure to respect the ability of the enemy, his belief that he could handle the North Koreans, as he had said, “with one hand tied behind my back.” Gay seemed to think his superiors in Tokyo had little feel for the enemy, or for the terrain, and surprisingly little curiosity about either. “Those goddamn people don’t have their feet on the ground—they’re living in a goddamn dream world,” he told West once after he left MacArthur’s headquarters. Nothing angered him more, however, than the way the most talented officers, the kind of men he badly wanted as battalion commanders, always seemed to be siphoned off to staff jobs at MacArthur’s headquarters. He was appalled as well by how much larger it had grown than comparable headquarters in the previous war. He would mutter about how Third Army headquarters back in 1945 had only a few hundred officers to deal with thousands of men in the field, but how Tokyo in this war had thousands of men at headquarters to support hundreds of men in the field. There was an officer whose main job, it seemed, was just to fly in from Tokyo to Gay’s headquarters periodically to see what he needed. At one point, Gay gave him a list of officers from World War II then assigned to Tokyo whom Gay wanted to command his troops. When the officer next returned, Gay asked where his potential battalion commanders were. “General MacArthur says they’re too valuable to be spared,” the officer replied.

“Jesus Christ, what in the hell is more valuable than battle-tested officers leading American troops in combat?” Gay muttered.

He was bothered as well by all the talk about being home by Christmas.
“Which Christmas—this year or next?” he would say. “That’s stupid talk. All it does is get the troops too excited about going home, and they get careless.” Now, fearing the possibility that one of his regiments might soon be encircled, he was pushing hard to pull it back and consolidate the division. But his superior, First Corps commander Frank Milburn, was reluctant to do it. The Army did not like to use the word “retreat” unless it had to; the proper phrase was “retrograde movement”—and Milburn did not want to make a retrograde movement, not after almost six weeks of steady advances and, above all, not with the mounting pressure coming in from MacArthur’s headquarters to go all the way to the Yalu as quickly as possible. Gay, West knew, was becoming more and more fearful about losing a regiment to an enemy that Tokyo still insisted did not exist. There was a fault line in this war. On one side was the battlefield reality and the dangers facing the troops themselves, and, on the other side, the world of illusion that existed in Tokyo and from which all these euphoric orders emanated. The fault line often fell between Corps and Division, with Corps feeling the heat from the general in Tokyo, and Division sensing the vulnerability of a regiment of badly exposed troops. More than once when there was still time to move the Eighth Regiment back, Milburn refused to give the order.

On the afternoon of November 1, Hap Gay was in his CP with Brigadier General Charles Palmer, his artillery commander, when a radio report from an observer in an L-5 spotter plane caught their attention: “This is the strangest sight I have ever seen. There are two large columns of enemy infantry moving southeast over the trails in the vicinity of Myongdang-dong and Yonghung-dong. Our shells are landing right in their columns and they keep coming.” Those were two tiny villages five or six air miles from Unsan. Palmer immediately ordered additional artillery units to start firing, and Gay nervously called First Corps, once again requesting permission to pull the entire Eighth Cav several miles south of Unsan. His request was again denied.