The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (61 page)

The Americans had started the first day with seventeen tanks in his unit, and they had lost all but two by the end of it. He had managed to make it out when his tank was hit, and had fought as an infantryman for days, in a kind of hell he had never experienced, a constant artillery bombardment, each shell bringing its own terror. The cold had been unbearable, and in Korea he was often reminded of it, because he had thought the German cold was the worst cold in the world, but Korea eventually was worse than the Ardennes, lasting longer and dominating your life as the Ardennes cold never did. In the Ardennes you always believed that the cold would break in a day or so; in Korea you never did. In early November 1950, moving forward on the front edge of the Second Division, the caution Mace had learned in the Ardennes remained with him. He distrusted everything that he could not vouch for personally and was wary of officers who were casual. Everyone around him might think this was a cakewalk, but as far as he was concerned, they were deep in what he considered Indian territory, and there were no cakewalks in war.

After they had bandaged the Korean prisoners, Mace’s men climbed a number of hills before coming to a small bridge that went over a dry creek. This was where they were supposed to turn back. His riflemen were spread out nicely over a wide perimeter, but Mace was tense because they made wonderful targets and he had no idea what lay in front of them. Every yard they went forward was another yard into the unknown. As they came upon the bridge, they were in a deep, broad valley filled with what looked to him like a Korean version of juniper trees, vegetation that seemed to have been put on earth only to hide potential enemy soldiers from his eyes. Then the music started. “The strangest music I ever heard,” he remembered. He ordered all his tank drivers to cut their engines so he could catch this foreign, almost haunting sound more clearly. “It was so strange. It seemed to be aimed right at me and my men. Like the enemy was watching us and serenading us and mocking us all at the same time. It was if the valley itself was serenading you,” he said. “And it
seemed to be coming out of nowhere—maybe right out of the trees. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand out.” Later, after the Chinese struck the Eighth Army along a wide front and they all learned how the Chinese used music as a means of giving orders, Mace became convinced it was the Chinese commander, somewhere up in the hills above him, telling his troops that, though they had Mace’s tanks and his men surrounded and in their sights, the time was not quite right to attack.

When Mace and his men returned to the hut where they had left their prisoners, the one prisoner who had not been wounded suddenly made a break for it. They shot him. They were puzzled by his attempt to break away—after all, they had been good with the prisoners, giving all of them emergency medical care. After they recovered the escapee’s body, they checked him for papers, and he had none. That in itself was unusual because most Koreans seemed to carry a lot of letters and to hold on to them. Then underneath his Korean uniform they found another uniform, that of a Chinese soldier, and what they were sure was an officer’s blouse. Even before they did the strip search, the Koreans attached to his unit had insisted that he was Chinese. First the music, then the dead man who might well have been a Chinese officer: none of that was comforting, Mace thought. Later that day Mace told the intelligence people that he thought they had killed a Chinese soldier. But no one seemed very interested.

From then on, as he moved north, he was more cautious than ever. At that moment, the Second Division was on the far right of the Eighth Army. East of it were the Taebaek Mountains, and east of them, unavailable if any unit got hit, was Tenth Corps—even though theoretically it was supposed to be able to help if there were a crisis. (Comparably, the commander of the division on the other side of the Taebaeks, serving as part of Tenth Corps, Major General O. P. Smith of the First Marine Division, was equally frustrated because his left flank was so open.)

In late November, the Third Battalion of the Thirty-eighth Regiment, which Mace and his five tanks were supporting, was on the right flank of the Second Division. They were at a village of about fifteen huts called Somin-dong. Mace had placed his tanks as best he could in support of all three companies of the battalion. He was puzzled that they had moved the battalion headquarters up so near the rifle companies, so close, he said, that you could have hit them with a stone. But then, no one was expecting trouble.

In fact, the Chinese had been waiting patiently, aware of every move the UN forces made, which units were positioned where, and above all, which ROK units were supporting them on their flanks. Of the 300,000 men they had moved into North Korea undetected in just one month, an estimated 180,000 were waiting along the western part of the extended front, in the area commanded by
Johnnie Walker where First and Ninth Corps were positioned, and an estimated additional 120,000 were farther to the east, poised and waiting as Ned Almond’s Tenth Corps moved north. As the UN forces moved up, encumbered by an enormous amount of machinery, they were very visible targets. But the waiting Communist Army, containing some
thirty Chinese divisions,
had remained essentially invisible; in the apt words of S. L. A. (Slam) Marshall, the military historian, “a phantom which cast no shadow.”

IT WAS AS
if one vast part of the Army, the part not commanded by Douglas MacArthur, knew that trouble was imminent, as the other part kept moving forward. On Thanksgiving Day, General Al Gruenther visited Dwight Eisenhower, his old boss from Europe, at Eisenhower’s residence at Columbia University. Gruenther’s oldest son, Dick, class of 1946 at West Point, had a company in the Seventh Division, some of whose men were very far north and headed for the Yalu. On November 17, four days before his senior officers reached the Yalu and pissed in it, Dick Gruenther (who had been sure they were already fighting the Chinese) was severely wounded in the stomach in one of the small battles that preceded the main Chinese offensive. Al Gruenther, Eisenhower’s former chief of staff in Europe, had just finished a tour as director of the one-hundred-man JCS staff, which meant that he was aware of all the warning signals that MacArthur was now ignoring.

At first John Eisenhower, Dwight’s son, had thought it odd that Gruenther was there for Thanksgiving, because he had a family of his own. But later he decided that Gruenther was there because Eisenhower was still the man you talked to—he had that special status—when something this serious was going wrong at so high a level. John Eisenhower remembered that a cloud hung over that Thanksgiving Day meal, something that he himself did not entirely understand. Gruenther told his father that the American forces were simply too exposed and far too vulnerable. When Gruenther left, Eisenhower turned to his son and said, “I’ve never been so pessimistic about this war in my life.” John Eisenhower was teaching at West Point at the time, and when he left his father’s residence to drive back to the academy, he turned on the car radio and heard a report about how MacArthur was promising the war would be over by Christmas. The next day the Chinese hit.

It was on the night of November 25 that the Chinese finally struck. Rarely has so large an army had such an element of surprise against its adversary. The Chinese had precise intelligence on the Americans, and the Americans on the west coast—the Marines on the east were shrewder and better led—were essentially blind to the trap they had walked into. When the Chinese hit, it became clear that what had driven MacArthur’s forces was not so much a
strategy as a bet—that the Chinese would not come in. The bet had been called, and other men would now have to pay for that terrible arrogance and vainglory. Worse yet, the bet had had a pathetic little bluff built into it, one that very few senior American officers believed in: that the South Korean Army had become an acceptable fighting force, capable of holding its own against the Chinese. The South Korean troops were absolutely terrified of fighting the Chinese, and predictably, almost all their units simply broke and disappeared in the first shock of assault. (In the case of one regiment, as Slam Marshall noted, some five hundred men disappeared with almost all their weapons, but some of the officers did manage to make it back to Seoul, bringing Syngman Rhee a bottle filled with water from the Yalu River.) The American commanders in the field had known the ROKs were not yet ready to fight if the Chinese came in, but to the men of the Dai Ichi, with their own troops spread so thin, the maps looked better if the ROK units were penciled in. Their prompt disappearance from key positions on the flanks of American and other UN units meant that the Chinese had a series of virtually unobstructed routes into the very heart of the UN positions.

Nor had the American command in Tokyo made allowance for or prepared their troops for the manner in which the Chinese might fight—for the lack of frontal attacks, and for the way they would move at night on foot and slip along the flanks of their enemies, looking for soft spots, while taking up positions behind them in order to cut off any retreat. No one had studied how well and quickly they could move, even at night and when there were no roads. They were much less encumbered by heavy weapons, ammunition, and food than the Americans, and that lightness was their strength (and would eventually be their weakness as well). There had been a mistaken belief in the Dai Ichi that somehow the Chinese would turn themselves into easy targets for the American Air Force. The idea that they disappeared during the day had somehow not been fed into the Dai Ichi’s calculations. The Chinese, it turned out, understood a good many of their own weaknesses. They did not do a lot of things, but the things they did, they tended to do well. In those early days before the Americans figured out how to fight them, they managed to turn what were seeming American strengths—a dependency on heavy weaponry and thus on the roads, which were always, it seemed, in the valleys—into weaknesses. Yet to anyone who had been paying attention to what had been going on in China in the years right after World War II, there were few surprises in the way they fought.

C
OLONEL PAUL FREEMAN,
commander of the Twenty-third Regiment, was sure that his men had been encountering Chinese troops from the moment they moved above Sunchon. By the time the Chinese finally struck, he was absolutely sure that they had been all around him for at least two weeks, watching his men but not making their move. His own recon patrols kept reporting the most unusual kind of contact with the Chinese—a kind of show-and-feint-and-wait. Some ten days before they struck, one of his more experienced company commanders, Captain Sherman Pratt, had taken a company-sized patrol on a recon and headed north toward Kanggye. As they moved about five miles north, they kept seeing figures on the skyline above them, but always in the distance. Pratt and some of his men decided that, by their uniforms, they had to be Chinese. So he halted his patrol, ordered his men not to fire a shot, turned his vehicles around so they could get out quickly, and did not go very much farther north. Eventually, when he got back to headquarters, he reported to both Claire Hutchin, his battalion commander, and Freeman what had happened. The next day Freeman sent another patrol out, and this time the American force pushed beyond the line the Chinese seemed to be offering as a demarcation point, and the Chinese opened fire. Several Americans were wounded, and the patrol had been forced to withdraw, leaving some wounded behind. On the third day, Freeman sent out another patrol, only to find the wounded from the second mission, lying by the road, all bandaged up and wrapped in blankets.

There were other signs of the Chinese presence as Thanksgiving had approached, and Freeman was convinced there were Chinese everywhere watching. So were his intelligence people. But, as he later noted, they “apparently hadn’t convinced anyone in Far East Headquarters.” Because of his years serving in China during the war, Freeman spoke Chinese, knew how Mao’s men fought, and had taken their threat to enter this war seriously. His mood was deeply pessimistic. He felt privately that crossing the thirty-eighth parallel had been a catastrophic mistake, that the American leadership was placing the entire Eighth
Army in jeopardy, and that America’s leadership had ended up playing right into the hands of the Russians—fighting an unwinnable war in Asia while the Russians sat on the sidelines. In that sense, ironically, his forebodings were almost exactly the same as those of George Kennan. Freeman’s mood, darker by the day as the division and his regiment moved north, showed primarily in his letters to his wife, and in his cautionary words to his own battalion commanders, to be prepared every night for the worst.

His letters home are a fascinating record of a key commander, caught in a terrible moment, convinced that his superiors were making a miscalculation of epic proportions over which he was powerless. On September 25, when almost everyone else was euphoric about how well the breakout from the Naktong line was going, Freeman remained very cautionary. “I am still apprehensive,” he said in a letter on that day, “about the Manchurians coming down from the north.” Even before the UN forces crossed the thirty-eighth, Freeman was very nervous because the drive north depended not on American strength—which was self-evidently limited—but on Chinese intentions, and the Chinese had said they intended to enter the war.

The answer, as far as he was concerned—the end to any private doubts he had already harbored—had come with Unsan. His letters reflected his darkening mood, and were becoming more and more pessimistic. He was fine physically, he wrote his wife on November 7, except for the brutal North Korean cold, which was bearable. But emotionally he was depleted. “I just can’t see any solution for this monstrous predicament in which our forces find themselves. Surely somebody must have an out, and I have hope of some miracle extricating us from this untenable situation. How our leaders could have become involved so naively without any plan or assurances that the Chinese wouldn’t intervene is unbelievable to me. From here I just don’t see a solution.”

On November 11, the Twenty-third Regiment was supposed to move forward to an assembly point and from there to make the final drive to the Yalu. Freeman was convinced that they had been abandoned by rational thought and policy. “It’s the most monstrous situation I can imagine for the U.S. It seems we’re playing right into Soviet hands and sinking our might into the Asiatic morass. I don’t like it a bit,” he wrote. The most pessimistic of his letters was written on November 13, just eleven days before the American offensive started, and twelve days before the Chinese struck. The great miscalculation, he believed, given the limits of forces available and the dangers ahead, had been the decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel, instead of making some kind of settlement there. “Even in the darkest days on the Naktong, fighting for our very existence, I could always see a ray of hope, a solution. When we returned across the 38th I thought it was utterly fantastic that we should take such a risk for
nothing. I feel now that we are in a combination of the Second Crusade, Napoleon’s march on Moscow, and Bataan. I see no end to it but WW III, and to sacrifice all our forces here in that event would be a monstrous error. Even if we battle to the Yalu at a great cost and by mastering logistic obstacles almost akin to those in Burma, we would be further out on the limb with no chance of extrication. It’s just an impossible mess and I feel lower than mud about it.”

The night before the UN forces were to start the big offensive, Freeman and Claire Hutchin went to dinner with Dutch Keiser, the division commander, who was an old friend of Freeman’s. Both Freeman and Hutchin spoke of their complete inability to understand what was going on. Everything they knew indicated that the Chinese were in the area and that they might strike. The worst thing that the UN forces could do was go on the offensive. The only explanation for an offensive move in the face of a threat like that, Freeman said, was that General MacArthur had, in his words, “some very, very secret information that these Chinese were not really going to resist, but [were going to] allow us to push them back across the river.” Perhaps, he added, that secret information revealed that the Chinese were there but did not want to be there, and wanted the Americans to push them back over the river. That suggestion, he added, laconically, years later, “turned out definitely not to be the case.”

Because of his wariness, Freeman kept his regiment as tightly concentrated as he could, and told all his battalion commanders that they were to be well buttoned up at night. On the first night that the Chinese attacked, the Twenty-third held quite well. Its positions were generally strong, and they ended up inflicting heavy casualties on the Chinese and taking about one hundred of them prisoner, the most Freeman remembered that they ever captured during the war. Because he spoke Chinese, he was able to interrogate the prisoners, and found that most of them spoke the same northern dialect. He spent the remainder of that day trying to consolidate his regiment, and that night the Chinese struck again and ended up capturing the CP of the Twenty-third, although the regiment was able to take it back the next day. What struck Freeman about the Chinese prisoners he interrogated was that not many of them seemed to want to be there. A number of them had feared the American fighting machine. It was a fear, Freeman noted, that soon began to disappear, because the American Army performed so poorly in those first few days—in contrast to how it might have performed if it had been dug in and well prepared when the Chinese struck.