The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (41 page)

“Dutch, where’s your division?” was the first thing Walker asked. “Where are your reserves? What are you doing about positioning your reserves? You must hold at Yongsan! If you don’t, we could lose Miryang, and if we lose Miryang, we could lose Pusan. You’re in the heart of this thing and you don’t know what’s going on.” Keiser, indicating that he was still waiting for his liaison men to return and tell him where different units were, complained that the roads were jammed with troops, which were slowing his men down. Of course, they’re jammed with troops, Lynch thought. They’re your own damn troops bugging out.

Keiser tried to fill Walker in on where his division was, but nothing he said gibed with what Walker had just seen. “That’s not it at all,” Walker interrupted him. “I’ve just flown over your front line.” Just then, one of Keiser’s liaison officers arrived, apologizing for being late but he had been slowed down by some colonel who was standing at a road junction, ordering everyone to stop retreating. “No son of a bitch who can fight passes this line,” the colonel had been saying. “Yes,” said Walker, “I know that colonel—that’s my assistant G-3.”

Then Walker laid down the law: “You get this division under control or I’ll take control of it, and I’ll run you out of the Armys! I am not going to lose this battle.” He explained to Keiser exactly where he wanted his troops to make a stand. Then, as he got up to go, Keiser started to accompany him back to his plane, but Walker shook him off. “You get busy now. I don’t need anyone to walk me to my plane.” At the plane, instead of getting in, Walker sat down for a moment, obviously trying to pull himself together. Lynch assumed he wanted a moment of quiet until he looked over and saw that Walker was crying. “I can’t let this Army be destroyed, but I’m losing the whole Army and I don’t know what to do to stop it.” He was, Lynch thought, absolutely exhausted. Not beaten,
not defeated, not broken, just exhausted, completely wrung out. Lynch wondered how much more the Army could get out of one man in a situation like this before he broke.

Walker needed fresh troops to plug the gaps, but he was losing them to the coming Inchon assault. All too many of the troops coming from the States seemed to be ticketed for the Seventh Division, which would be part of MacArthur’s Inchon landing force. In addition, he was about to lose the Marines, who were going to be the main assault force at Inchon. He had been arguing with Tokyo for several days, trying to keep the Fifth Marine Regiment (part of the First Marine Division) under his command. He had reached a tentative agreement that he could have them—but only through September
4,
and only if he would do his best not to use them in defense of Pusan. After all, the Inchon landing, scheduled for September 15, was the main event and it was now only two weeks away. MacArthur wanted these troops fresh for so dangerous an assault. As such, they were Walker’s more in theory than in reality. But if ever there was a moment when he felt himself perched on the very edge of failure, this was it. After watching the battering part of the Second Division was taking, he called Brigadier General Eddie Craig, the Marine commander, and told him he was going to need the Marines to protect the road to Miryang, and they should start moving up
now
. He also called MacArthur’s headquarters and spoke to Major General Doyle Hickey, the assistant chief of staff, who was acting as G-3 (operations officer), with Almond so involved in the Inchon planning. He issued an emotional request for permission to use the Marines—essentially, an ultimatum of the sort MacArthur himself was famous for. “If I lose the Marines,” he told Hickey, who was considered by outsiders to be unusually fair-minded, “I will not be responsible for the safety of the front.” Those were words that could chill any higher echelon officer. Back came word from Hickey that MacArthur had approved their use in Pusan and that Walker’s control of them, if needed, was now extended beyond September 4.

Armies, no matter how great or small, poised between defeat and victory, depend more than anything else on the leadership of junior officers. One of the many junior officers who helped save Walker and the Eighth Army in those first terrible days was a lieutenant from the Second Engineer Battalion of the Second Division named Lee Beahler. With his engineers, he skillfully created a tiny but effective blocking force and, miraculously, stopped the North Koreans at Yongsan just when it seemed like they were going to pour through. By the end of September 1, there had seemed no chance to hold Yongsan. But Beahler and his engineers, in time with other Army units and the Marines joining in, managed to do it. The battle for Yongsan lasted two weeks, and it was continuous and ferocious; to some of the men who fought there, and never forgot it,
Yongsan was both a war within a war, and a war without end. To the GIs and Marines, who heard again and again how important Yongsan was, the village, once taken, was a singular disappointment: two streets, one east-west, one north-south, crisscrossing each other. No more than that. If it had been a town back in the States, as one of the engineers said, the first thing you’d have wanted to do was get the hell out of it. When they finally walked through Yongsan, there was a sense almost of wonderment—that so much blood, Korean and American, had been shed for something that seemed so without value. Men had fought and died for Paris and Rome—more than three hundred thousand Russians had died in the final battle for Berlin—but to fight so long for something that barely existed amazed the Americans, and seemed to emphasize the special madness of this war. But Yongsan
was
important, for the road from there could lead to Miryang, some twelve miles away, and the road from Miryang led to Pusan, and beyond Pusan was a lost war.

Pushed by Walker, Keiser had taken the Second Combat Engineers, who had already seen a good deal of action, almost all of it as infantrymen, and attached them to the already battered Ninth Regiment. Lee Beahler commanded Dog Company of the Engineers. The odyssey that had taken him back to Korea in July 1950 had not been an entirely happy one. He had served in the Army in World War II, then gone back to the Texas College of Mines. There, somewhat to his surprise, he found that he missed the camaraderie and sense of purpose he had found in the Army, and so in 1946 he decided to go back in. There, in the mysterious ways that the Army operated, he had been offered a chance to go overseas and had, he thought, been given a choice of possible destinations. He had expressed a great preference for Europe, but had of course been sent to Korea, a country he quickly came to dislike, in no small part because of its pervasive smell—that of human waste turned into instant fertilizer, a fragrance that bothered many other Americans as well. Nor had he found the Korean people, angry over their years under a colonial reign and unsure of what the Americans represented in terms of their future, particularly sympathetic. Other Americans told him how much more pleasant Japan was and how friendly the Japanese, now defeated and eager to imitate their conquerors, had become. There was surely an injustice in this: the people who had inflicted the cruelest colonial horrors on another nation turned out to be, once the war was over, a great deal more likeable than their victims in the eyes of most Americans.

Nothing during his two-year tour of Korea had given him pleasure, and when his time was up he was thrilled to be going home. But then, in June 1950, newly married, his wife pregnant, he got orders to return to Korea as a combat engineer in a war that did not have a good feel to it. He was heartsick about going back, and the condition of the American units, his own included, made
him feel far worse once he got there. Just as they were shipping out, his superiors had opened the doors to the stockades back at Fort Lewis, with a onetime fight-in-Korea-or-be-tried-at-home offer, and he had ended up taking in some men charged with serious crimes. Still, his company as it moved up to Yongsan was at about two-thirds strength, only 150 men in place. (There was one moment, during the brutal fighting at Yongsan, when a young private, grimy and exhausted, who had distinguished himself during a North Korean attack, thanked Beahler for getting him out of the stockade. Such is the complex journey of modern warriors, Beahler had thought.)

The Ninth Regiment, which was supposed to be holding Yongsan, was in terrible shape at that moment. Some of its men, under orders from higher headquarters, had launched an ill-advised probing attack against the North Koreans just as the greatly superior Communist force was starting to cross the Naktong. The assignment, Operation Manchu—the Ninth was known as the Manchu regiment—called for them to cross the river and harass the Communists, and had apparently come down from Keiser’s headquarters. Later, many of the people in the division thought it nothing less than a demented order from an officer trying to be aggressive for aggression’s sake—under pressure from above. After all, early intelligence reports had already confirmed the considerable size of the North Korean force. The vulnerability of the Americans maximized—for there was nothing more difficult than a river crossing—they had been caught completely off guard when the North Koreans crossed first. Instead of being hit while holding strong defensive positions, many of the frontline troops of the Ninth had been caught in the open, and those elements of the Ninth up along the Naktong were already small and scattered—like the elements of the Twenty-third.

Lee Beahler had been wary of Operation Manchu from the start. He knew from World War II how difficult any river crossing was. The entire business had only confirmed something he had suspected almost since he arrived in country: that he was working with superiors who in all too many instances did not know as much as they were supposed to about combat. When the assault was first discussed, he had asked the regimental commander, Colonel John G. Hill, if his men had been trained in river crossings. Hill had replied that they didn’t need special training. Beahler insisted that they did; that he knew because he had been involved when the Thirty-sixth Division had tried to cross the Rapido in Italy, one of the great disasters of the war, the Rapido being fast and high, and the Germans well dug in on the other side. Hill had brushed away Beahler’s objections. He had no idea how difficult it was, all the men in the boat made so vulnerable, especially if they had not practiced a comparable assault. He seemed to think, Beahler decided, that crossing a river was like
calling a taxi. Hearing Hill reject his warnings, which were primarily about the safety of the men, Beahler’s respect for him fell away. He wondered then, and not for the first time, about some of the commanders whose job it was to know so much, but who knew so little and never listened to those who might know more. So the North Koreans had caught the Ninth exposed, on the water itself or at the river’s edge. A number of Hill’s regimental staff, including his S-3, were killed almost immediately, as was Keiser’s aide, Tom Lombardo, a famed West Point football player. Fifty-four years later, Lee Beahler could say of that moment when he first saw the torches of the North Korean troops coming down to the river and preparing to cross, “That’s when I began to get a very shaky feeling about what was going to happen, how brutal it was going to be for our forces—and I’ve still got that shaky feeling, still have it today when I think back to those days.” Beahler immediately sent most of his own men back to Battalion headquarters to keep them from being overrun at the riverbank. That night and the next morning, terror was in the air.

On that second day, Beahler was a reluctant witness as the top echelon of a large American unit experienced something akin to a nervous breakdown. Beahler did not know of the angry exchange that had taken place between Walton Walker and Dutch Keiser, but on the morning of September 2 he did watch the relief of Hill, the regimental commander. Brigadier General Sladen Bradley, the assistant division commander, who was out in the field far more than Keiser, showed up at regimental headquarters to find out what was going on. Bradley was clearly enraged by the lack of control he found around him. “Colonel, where’s your First Battalion?” he asked. Hill answered that he did not know, that he had not heard from it since midnight.

“Well, Colonel Hill, where’s your Second Battalion?”

Hill had not heard from it either. Then Bradley gave him a cold, hard look, one that Beahler remembered all too well. “Colonel, apparently this situation is out of control, and I am assuming command of this regiment.” A few minutes later Bradley turned to Beahler and informed him that his company of engineers was now going to fight as infantry and assigned it to move up to Yongsan immediately. It would be the job of the Second Engineers to hold Yongsan for twenty-four hours, he said, until the Marines could arrive and take over. In the process, Beahler would learn that he had a new battalion commander, Major Charley Fry, because the old one, Lieutenant Colonel Joe McEachern, had, like Colonel Hill, not appreciated how fragile the situation was. During World War II, McEachern had apparently worked as an engineer on the Pan American Highway and therefore had no combat command background. He still thought he was there to build roads, not to shoot at North Korean Communists. He had made the mistake of arguing with Bradley over a
change in his orders, when Bradley had told him that his men were to stand and die if need be to stop the North Korean advance. “But, sir, these men are specialists,” McEachern had protested, “they’re not infantrymen. You have to understand that they’re technicians.”

“Colonel, do you not understand me? Am I not making myself clear? I said stand and die and I meant stand and die, and they will fight as infantrymen.” Bradley had answered, and lest there were any other officers who did not understand how critical the situation was and had their own private doubts, he relieved McEachern on the spot, replacing him with the battalion executive officer. “Major Fry, do you understand the order?” Bradley asked him. “Yes, sir,” Fry replied instantly. General Bradley then sent the newly relieved Colonel Hill to help Beahler set up his defense at Yongsan. There, Beahler decided, Hill was still not a great asset. Recently defrocked as a regimental commander Hill might be, but he was still a colonel and an infantryman, and Beahler was a first lieutenant and an engineer, which made the relationship chancy. But Beahler was the more experienced combat officer; his unit had led the landing at Salerno in Italy, which meant he had been in some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II. The Italian campaign had been a hard one, and not all those battles had ended up in American glory and victory. Some were defeats, and in defeat, he believed, you often gained the most wisdom; Beahler had learned that one of the keys to successful leadership is knowing an enemy’s strengths as well as his weaknesses. That wisdom had, in the few short weeks they had served together in Korea, helped earn him the respect of his men. “Why are some officers better than others?” one of his squad leaders, Sergeant Gino Piazza, once wondered. “Well, they have a feel for it, they anticipate well and they respond well. They see danger points before they happen, and they’re good with the men. You have a feeling that what they do is not just about themselves and getting promotions and medals but about the men in their command as well. On that scale, he was one of the best. One of the very best. We were very lucky to have him.”