The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (7 page)

THE ASSAULT OF
the Chinese had come as a complete surprise to the men in the Eighth Regiment’s First Battalion. In fact, they had already fought the Chinese in a brief skirmish without knowing they were Chinese. For Ray Davis, a nineteen-year-old corporal with Dog Company in the First Battalion, a heavy weapons company, it was a random firefight, the kind that took place all the time. They had arrived in Unsan on October 31, and he had been part of a company-sized force moving through a rice paddy when they started taking fire from some nearby hills. Davis remembered that he and his men had been rather casual when the firing began. Most of them hadn’t even been wearing their helmets. Then both sides had backed off. The real hit came a day and a half later.

Davis was part of a heavy machine gun team, posted on reasonably high ground, on a hill on the south side of a road that wound in an east-west direction. The road was narrow—just wide enough for one oxcart at a time—and it was by then bumper to bumper with the vehicles of the Eighth Cav, a reflection of an Army that did all its movement on wheels and so would prove unusually vulnerable to this new enemy. The Chinese, who moved by foot, invariably had easier access to the high ground, while the Americans were
fatefully linked by their vehicles to the roads, which were almost always in the valleys.

A little after midnight, the Chinese struck with full force. For almost four months Davis had been in battles where the enemy always had vastly superior numbers, and where the great problem for those in his squad—like so many other machine gunners—had been the way their machine guns tended to wear out from the heavy use. Davis knew this all too well. As he had moved from being just an ammo bearer when he first arrived in country, to second and then first gunner on the two-man weapon, he had already gone through three or four machine guns. They always needed more firepower because of the sheer numbers of the attacking enemy. The basic infantry weapons they had started out with—the M-1 rifle, the carbine, even the machine guns—had not been designed for the force levels they were encountering. Lieutenant Colonel Bob Kane, his battalion commander, once told Davis that the key to this war was that you had to get one hundred of the enemy before you could go home. Once you got your one hundred, that was that. How you proved that you had your one hundred Kane never quite explained.

Davis had never seen anything quite like this. When the Americans sent up flares, Davis, who had grown up on a farm in upstate New York, saw so many enemy soldiers that he was reminded of nothing so much as wheat waving in a field back home. It was a terrifying sight, all those men, thousands and thousands, it seemed to him at that moment, coming right at him. If you got one, another would come; if you got one hundred, another one hundred would be right behind them. It put a bitter edge on Kane’s joke. Then Davis spotted the men on horseback, who seemed to be directing the others. They had bugles, and when the bugles blew, the enemy soldiers would sometimes change the direction of their attack.

Davis knew that the handful of men around him had a limited amount of ammo and thus a limited amount of time left. The Americans fired and fired—often at point-blank range. They had, Davis later figured, an hour, at best two, before they ran out of ammo or the machine guns overheated. About 2
A.M.
, his platoon sergeant came to get him. Davis destroyed his machine gun with his last thermite grenade, and the two of them managed to make it back to a point where their mortars, firing air bursts against the Chinese, offered them some protection. The first thing was to make it through the night. Then when dawn came, they tried to regroup, somewhat surprised to still be alive. They were completely surrounded.

AT THE HASTILY
created perimeter near the battalion CP, Lieutenant Giroux had emerged as the de facto leader of the encircled men, even though he was
seriously wounded. He was a World War II veteran, an experienced infantry officer, and he seemed to have a sense of how limited their possibilities were—and how to act as best they could on them while there was still time and still any degree of choice. Working with him were Lieutenant Peterson and his friend Walt Mayo, along with Bill Richardson, who was not an officer but had become in the long trek north from the earliest days of the war a very experienced NCO. From the first hit, they had all understood that it was the Chinese, and that their entire regiment had become the point unit in what was becoming an entirely new war. The men thrown together inside the perimeter had managed to make it through the first night, but it looked very bleak. If help was on the way, as higher headquarters kept saying, there was no sign of it yet. That day a helicopter tried to land to take out some of the wounded, but the fire from Chinese positions was so lethal that it had to fly away after dropping off some medical supplies, mostly small compresses.

The desperate men inside the perimeter now faced a double dilemma: how to get out and how to deal with all their wounded. They were also in danger of running out of ammo. In addition, they did not have enough weapons, but a cold, hard estimate told them that that was probably the least of their problems. Enough men were going to be killed that there would soon be weapons for all. Their tiny defensive perimeter was about seventy yards—seventy very flat, very open yards—away from the battalion CP, where most of the wounded had been moved. On midday of November 3, Peterson, Mayo, Richardson, and Giroux went over to the CP for a final doomsday kind of meeting. Because he was not an officer, Richardson did not attend the meeting, but he knew what it was about. All the officers, many of them wounded themselves, were talking about a forbidden subject—what to do with the wounded in the terrible final moment that everyone knew was coming. The wounded officers were going to have to decide whether to leave themselves behind to the mercies, such as they were, of the enemy. Bromser and Mayo went over to Lieutenant Kies and said they were going to try to get out. They asked if he could make it, and Kies answered no, they had to forget about him; he couldn’t walk, and he wasn’t going to slow the others down.

What heartbreaking decisions for young men to make, Richardson had thought at the time and still pondered half a century later. He volunteered to take some men, stay behind, and protect the bunker with the wounded for as long as he could, but the offer was turned down by the wounded officers. No one who was mobile, who might be able to
lead,
was to be wasted, if that was the word, defending the wounded and the dying. They all knew time was short, that the next hit would be even harder. They could hear the Chinese digging a trench from the riverbed directly into their perimeter, which would allow
them to come up right on top of the Americans before they became targets. With Richardson was a particularly tough noncommissioned officer whose name Richardson never learned. Richardson went around collecting grenades from everyone, gave them to the sergeant, and told him that his job was to stop the Chinese dig. The sergeant crawled out there—it was one hell of a brave performance, Richardson thought, the kind of act you’re more likely to see in movies than in real life—and personally slowed down the creation of the trench.

But the noose was tightening, and talk of relief missions was dying down. They had gotten an air strike that day, Australians flying B-26s, but time was working against them. There had been one resupply attempt; a small spotter plane had dropped a couple duffel bags about 150 yards beyond the perimeter. Richardson had crawled out and gotten them, but there wasn’t much inside, and not what they needed: lots of ammo and lots of morphine.

Relief was not going to come. Hap Gay, the division commander, who had been arguing for a regimental pullback for days, had sent additional forces north to relieve his men, but they had been hammered by the Chinese, who had picked near perfect ambush positions to intercept the inevitable relief forces—it was a basic part of the Chinese MO, to wait for and destroy relief forces. The relief forces were short on both artillery and airpower, the two instruments that might give them an advantage when they assaulted the Chinese positions. One of the units sent to try to break through was Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Johnson’s Fifth Regiment of the Cav, and one of his battalions took 250 casualties. On November 3, knowing it was hopeless, Gay, under orders from Milburn at Corps to pull his division back, made what he later called the hardest decision of his career. He ended all relief operations and left the men out there alone.

Later in the day, another spotter plane dropped a message telling the besieged men to try to get out as best they could. It was not exactly a comforting message, but Richardson and most of the other men had already assumed they were on their own. When night finally fell, the Chinese again attacked in full force. The besieged Americans fired their bazookas at some of their own stranded vehicles along the road to the south and southwest, setting them afire. It was like creating your own long-lasting flares, and it helped the defense immensely. Once a vehicle was lit up, it burned for a long time. The number of able-bodied men holding the perimeter continued to drop throughout the night, however. They had started with no more than a hundred men, and there were fewer men by the hour, and little ammo. By November 4, Richardson estimated that a quarter of the Americans still fighting were using Chinese burp guns scrounged off dead bodies. The second full night had been another horror. That night the last tank
had departed—some of the men said it had been ordered out, but others believed it had just taken off—and with it, all radio contact with anyone outside the perimeter ended. That in itself was terrifying; somehow it symbolized the fact that they had been abandoned. One thing that Peterson remembered vividly from that day was how American bodies piled up around their last machine gun as the Chinese concentrated their fire on it.

Early on the morning of the fourth, Richardson, Peterson, Mayo, and another soldier were chosen to lead a patrol to see if they could find a way out. Rank did not matter very much. Mayo and Peterson were officers, but they were artillery men, forward observers, and Richardson had been reminded by Giroux that, though he was an NCO, he probably had the most experience in infantry tactics and to trust his instincts. Peterson remembered a terrible moment before they left. As he crawled past his radio operator, who was lying there, badly wounded, the man had said, “Lieutenant Peterson, where are you going?” Peterson answered that they were looking for a way out, so they could get help. “Lieutenant Peterson,” the man began to plead, “please don’t leave me! Please don’t leave me! You can’t leave me here to them!” A glance at the man and Peterson knew it was only a matter of hours before he would be dead. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but we have to go and get help,” he said, and crawled off to join the search party.

Richardson was sure that there was a way out to the east because the Chinese assaults were all coming from the other three directions; and, moving very slowly, they eventually found a riverbed littered with wounded Chinese, and knowing how close so many of their own men, especially the wounded, were to becoming prisoners, Richardson told the men with him: Don’t even look like you’re thinking of pointing a weapon at them, let alone shooting one. Don’t think about it. Those are the truest orders you’ll ever get. They stopped at one house where American supplies had briefly been stored. Now it was crowded with wounded Chinese. The wounded Chinese in the house kept whispering something eerie that sounded like “Shwee, shwee.” The word was
shui,
Richardson was later told, their word for water. They finally reached a riverbed, only to find even more Chinese, perhaps four to five hundred bombing victims, most of them dead but some alive or barely alive, holding out cups and begging for water. The Americans were now convinced that they could get through by heading east, and they slipped back to join the other men at the perimeter.

For Bill Richardson, the decisions they made after he returned to the perimeter proved the most painful he ever experienced. Nothing that happened in the next few days, or for that matter in the rest of his life, measured up to it. There were perhaps 150 wounded men there by then, and there was no
way any of them could take the dangerous trip out at night under enemy fire in mountainous terrain, at least not without compromising the able-bodied men. All of the wounded in the perimeter knew what was up. None of them wanted to be left behind for the Chinese. Soon after his return, some of them who were still partially ambulatory, started coming up to Richardson, crying, telling him not to leave them, please, dear God, not to leave them, not for the Chinese, please dear God take them, don’t leave them there to die. Was it possible, he wondered, to do your duty, to follow the orders of your superiors, orders you agreed with in the end, and get as many men out as best you could, and yet feel worse about yourself as a human being? Do you ever forgive yourself for some of the things you do in life? It was a question he would still be asking himself a half century later. He was abandoning so many men he knew—who had fought so well.

Giroux had been very good in those first few days, helping create some kind of order, taking care of the more seriously wounded, but he would die in a prison camp. Kies had waited with the other wounded for the Chinese to arrive, sure that it was all over. When the Chinese finally showed up, and one of their men ordered him to stand up, he had tried and fallen over. His legs were useless. He had already cut off his combat boots because his feet were swelling up so badly. He remembered that the Chinese separated the prisoners, putting men like Dr. Anderson and Father Kapaun, who were ambulatory, in one group and the others, men like him who could not walk and needed to be carried—he estimated that there were about thirty such men—in the group to be borne on litters. Five of the men in his group died from their wounds the first night. Over the next few weeks they kept moving the group from house to house. There was almost nothing to eat, and they had to scrounge to get water—one of the men could crawl, and he brought back a little foul-tasting water in a helmet. They got no medical care, not even a Band-Aid or iodine, Kies remembered, for sixteen days, and even then it was the most primitive kind of care. They moved slowly and at night. His memory was of the Chinese taking them north for about two weeks, and he believed after about two weeks he heard the sound of a river, and he was sure it was the Yalu. Then one night, to his surprise, they turned south and headed toward the American lines. Perhaps they were tired of carrying American prisoners, he later thought. They left their prisoners in a house a few miles north of American positions in late November, and one of Kies’s group, a newcomer who could walk, managed to go farther south to connect with the Americans, who finally sent vehicles to pick them up. All told, Kies had been a prisoner for just under a month. He was one of the lucky ones, he knew. The men who were ambulatory spent the rest of their time in Korea, more than two years, in brutal captivity, and many
of them died. He thought that his original group of thirty men had shrunk to about eight before they were rescued. His left leg was broken in four places and he had fifty-two wounds from a mortar round below his waist. “You look like shit,” one of the men who rescued him said. But he went through Army hospitals, got most of his health back, and eventually spent two years as an adviser in Vietnam.