The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (80 page)

UP ON THE
knob of the hill, during the late afternoon, some of the men had noticed dust being kicked up by what were probably the jeeps and trucks of an American column. But Wilson doubted they would get through in time. The Chinese seemed so close—sometimes only thirty or forty feet away, and there
were so many of them and so few Americans that every assault made the defense that much weaker. More men were incapacitated or dying all the time. Some men who had been wounded were now dead, and some who had been able-bodied were wounded and unable to fire back. The living were busy scrounging bullets from the bodies of the dead. Wilson decided that his birthday was a disaster. How could you reach the moment when you were finally a grown-up, and could buy a drink in any state in the Union, and that was the end of it? What bothered Wilson most was that he was never going to see his daughter.

Once, when the Chinese were making a rush to the top, Wilson pulled the pin on his last grenade, but then when the Chinese broke off, ammo being so valuable, he lay down on it to keep it suppressed. Afterward he thought he might even have fallen asleep momentarily in that position. He remembered, in a dreamlike way, the last part of that night before Tyrrell’s men arrived, part of it obviously real and part of it very fuzzy. He believed a few Chinese had actually penetrated the perimeter, and that one of them had kicked him hard in the ribs. In his memory the Chinese had reached the top and Lieutenant Penrod had told his men to pretend to be dead, and in time the Chinese had left. But he was unsure how much of what he remembered had any truth—although in the following days his side gave him a lot of pain, as if someone had in fact kicked him there.

He remembered the sound of heavy fighting when the troops from Tyrrell’s company first started coming up the hill, and then a silence, such a deathly silence that he feared the relief column had been wiped out. Then around eleven that night, voices speaking English—as yet unseen—were yelling not to fire, because they were GIs. Someone on the knob yelled, “Who won the Rose Bowl game?”—but they were in
Korea,
so who the hell knew the teams in the Rose Bowl, let alone the winner?

It took almost four hours to get all the men—alive, wounded, and dead—off that hill, with Wilson still carrying his live grenade. At one point, he slipped and fell and the grenade got away from him, but he quickly grabbed it, threw it as far as he could, and no one was hurt. Of the sixty men who had started out on the patrol, thirteen were dead, five were missing (and presumed dead), and thirty were wounded, many quite seriously. Only twelve came out unscathed, one of them being Laron Wilson, who lived well beyond his twenty-first birthday. From then on, whenever he had troops in his jeep, he tried to make sure that at least one of them had a BAR. The survivors, grateful for their rescue, later had a banner made up that said, “When in peril, send for Tyrrell.”

T
HE NEXT DAY,
Ned Almond ordered the Twenty-third Regiment right back to the area. He wanted action and he wanted it immediately. He wanted the Chinese cleared out and he wanted prisoners. By then, Almond was hardly a welcome figure around regimental headquarters. He was not the division commander, but he always acted as if Nick Ruffner, the nominal division commander, did not exist. He was already regarded by many of the senior officers in the Second Division much as he had been by the First Marines. His style, wrote J. D. Coleman, who served in one of the units that fought under him at Wonju and then wrote an exceptional history of that battle, was “to bully, to meddle, and to constantly interfere with the normal chain of command. He had an enormous ego and he spared no one—officers or soldiers—in his efforts to demonstrate his superiority.” By the time of the Twin Tunnels battle, Ruffner, formerly Almond’s G-3 at Corps, had become the Second Division commander, and George Stewart the assistant division commander, which was unusual because he was not an Almond man and was not trusted by his superior.

The failure to respect the Chinese at Chosin seemed not to have slowed Almond down or, amazingly enough, made him significantly more respectful of the enemy. To many of the men who admired Ridgway and understood some of the reasons why he had not relieved Almond, there was nonetheless a feeling that allowing Almond to remain as a corps commander had been his one big mistake in those early months. As Ken Hamburger noted, for the men of the Second Division, Almond had gained an unwelcome “reputation as a martinet who often commanded by instilling fear in subordinates.”

After Almond gave his order to return to Twin Tunnels, the Twenty-third assembled some six miles short of the area. Paul Freeman was not happy with the order. He thought it impetuous. Over on the west coast Ridgway was moving his forces up in a relatively consistent tightly knit line, trying not to expose any one unit, and always careful about his flanks. But here, Freeman felt, his regiment was being pushed too far ahead of UN lines and well out of range of
most of the division’s artillery support. As for air support, the weather made it problematical. Sometimes the best lesson learned on the battlefield was that of modesty, but modesty was not yet a virtue in Tenth Corps—audacity for audacity’s sake was. As Freeman saw it, Almond’s audacity just played into the Chinese hands. What made it worse as far as he was concerned was that the troops being put at risk were Freeman’s.

It was, Freeman felt, as if they were being told to charge right into the valley. By contrast, Freeman was already beginning to think that, against the Chinese, the best method was to probe, find the enemy, make sure you were in easy range of your artillery, and dig into good positions on the high ground, and then if at all possible let the enemy come to you. Ridgway, aggressive but cautious, was already devising a comparable strategy. “Lure and destroy,” the French would soon call it.

Paul Freeman’s unhappiness with the order sending his regiment back into Twin Tunnels, so far out of reach of the Division artillery, was palpable. Brigadier General George Stewart, the assistant division commander, who also feared he was about to be relieved, happened to be with the Twenty-third when the order came down, and he remembered an embittered Freeman saying, “They’re going to murder my regiment.” Stewart told him he had no choice—you had to accept your orders. But aware that there was an ominous feel to the entire scenario, Stewart decided to accompany the Twenty-third to Twin Tunnels. He too believed that Almond was impetuous and often gave orders that were not well thought out, but he also believed that Freeman, though exceptionally able, was unusually combative with superiors if he thought his men were being put at risk.

So Freeman sent two battalions—the newly attached French unit and his Third Battalion—for what would be the second full stage in the battle of Twin Tunnels. To them he attached a regimental headquarters company, a regimental mortar battery, a tank company, and a medical company. In addition, the Thirty-seventh Field Artillery Battalion and an antiaircraft unit, whose lowered weapons made unusually vicious infantry weapons against both the North Koreans and now the Chinese, were made part of the force. Freeman placed the artillery battalion about three miles south of Twin Tunnels and left many of his other vehicles there; he then turned their drivers into infantrymen, thereby giving his heavy guns an extra ring of protection. No one was going to be wasted, and he could not spare any additional infantrymen to protect the guns.

What Freeman knew was that before he moved into the valley, it was imperative to take and control Hill 453, which commanded the area, and which momentarily was vacant. His troops moved slowly up its slopes, covered with
ice and snow, carrying a lot of gear. Perhaps earlier in the war they might have complained about the climb, Freeman later wrote, but no longer. They had learned by then that the hard way was the better way, that those who stayed on the roads were more likely to be ambushed and die. They had learned as well to bring extra ammo even if it meant fewer rations, and to dig deeper foxholes even through what sometimes seemed like rock-solid frozen earth and ice. If that was true under normal conditions, then it was more important than ever when they were twenty miles from any other friendly unit, in a place where, only the day before, a violent ambush had taken place. The enemy, his men knew by then, liked to set traps for lazy, road-bound Americans. For, almost without anyone noticing it, the Second Division and the Twenty-third Regiment—fairly typically of American units in Korea then—were beginning to become part of a skilled, battle-tested army. The defeat at Kunuri masqueraded the fact that this process was already under way. If the Second Division, for example, had arrived in country in pathetic physical condition and not yet really shaken down, the constant fighting up and down hills in the Naktong Bulge had changed that. The physical condition of most of the men had improved dramatically. They were gradually becoming every bit as battle-hardened as the men who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge or on Iwo Jima.

That was one of the great mysteries of combat, the process of going from green, scared soldiers to tough, grizzled, combat-ready (but still scared) veterans. Some men, a small percentage, never made it; they remained green, a burden to themselves and the men around them, in a permanent, hopeless incarnation as soldiers. They were incapable of or unwilling to break out of their civilian selves. Most men, however, whether they liked it or not, went through that transformation. They might regret it when they came home, and it might be a part of their lives they never wanted to revisit, but they did it. This had become their universe, and it was a small and brutal one, cut off from all the things they had been taught growing up. Most important of all, it was a universe without choice. No one entirely understood the odd process—perhaps the most primal on earth—that turned ordinary, peace-loving, law-abiding civilians into very good fighting men; or one of its great sub-mysteries—how quickly it could take place. One day troops were completely raw and casually disrespectful of whatever training they had received. In basic training, the machine gun bullets that whistled overhead were designed
not
to hit you. Then they found themselves on a battlefield in places like the Naktong, in situations that were terrifying, where any mistake might be fatal for them and their friends, and they became tough, experienced soldiers, knowing the elemental rules of survival. Suddenly they could fight almost by pure instinct. “How do you recognize a North Korean or Chinese soldier? What do they look like?” a
young replacement soldier named Ben Judd asked an older veteran when he first joined the Twenty-third Regiment, just before Chipyongni. “You’ll know ’em when you see ’em,” the soldier had answered, with what Judd came to realize was the wisdom of the ages.

Writing in
The Saturday Evening Post
of the very troops who had been so green only a few months earlier but fought so well at Twin Tunnels and then Chipyongni, the veteran correspondent Harold Martin said, “Much of their wisdom is the battle know-how the individual soldier picks up as he survives fight after fight, the simple things the books have always taught, but no soldier ever learns until he has been shot at: to keep off the sky line; to spread out in the attack, instead of bunching up like quail; to dig deep when on the defensive; to treat his communications equipment as tenderly as he would treat his sweetheart; to keep his socks dry and his weapons clean; and to hold his fire until the enemy is close enough to kill.”

The same thing had happened to Freeman. He had wrestled at first privately with his own self-doubts and pessimism, doubts shared by some of the other officers who met him: Was he a staffy—that is, a staff man who talked big but was always back at headquarters—or a real commander? Was he a planner or a fighter? Now those doubts had long since been answered. He had commanded the men in the Naktong fighting, depriving the North Koreans of what they had wanted most of all, the road connections that would lead them to Pusan. Then he had brought them out of Kunuri in fine shape, in effect fighting off bad orders that would have taken them down The Gauntlet and surely gotten many of them killed. He had done the hardest thing for any commander, he had won their trust in battle. When he had started, they knew nothing about him as a commander; now there was a growing pride in what they had accomplished, and that pride extended to him. The trust came in part because they believed he was focused as much on taking care of them as he was on pushing his own career. That was a crucial factor. The men always watched for any telltale sign that a commander thought more of his career than of their lives; it was as if any man who had that overweening ambition always gave off a special odor that even the youngest and most naïve private could detect.

So when they had gone into Twin Tunnels, they had done it with a certain combat-produced wariness, for they were effectively behind enemy lines. If, in the days to come, the men of the Twenty-third felt that they were operating on their own, they were right; they were uncommonly exposed, an isolated salient with little additional support to count on. Ned Almond had showed up at the headquarters late on the afternoon of January 31, irritated that Freeman had not yet made contact with the Chinese, irritated as well that Freeman had not simply gone straight into the valley and driven right through on his way to
Chipyongni. It helped confirm his growing view of Freeman as too timid a commander. Others, including General Stewart, who had measured the Chinese and knew how easily they could hide during the day, several divisions right on top of you and not a single soldier detectable, thought it was a lot better to move cautiously than audaciously, better to end the day on the high ridges of Hill 453 than to race too quickly into the valley of Chipyongni, and arrive there too late in the day to gain the high ground. Twin Tunnels itself was an exceptionally difficult place to defend. What was particularly troubling was the fact that the two critical high points in the area were separated and not mutually supportive. Thus the attackers, if they had great numbers—and the Chinese surely would—could in effect isolate each of the high points from the other.

George Stewart sympathized with Freeman and thought he was right tactically to err on the side of caution, but Stewart himself was extremely vulnerable in the chain of command. He had been brought in by the departed Bob McClure, and thus was regarded as the pal of a despised former commander; he also knew that, because of Almond’s dominating nature, the division had a serious need for someone outside Almond’s control. But he understood as well the need to tiptoe around, that he was always on Almond’s turf, and that if anything went wrong, it would be blamed on him and he would be gone. Indeed, he realized, he might be gone even if nothing went wrong.

Now he steeled himself and told Almond that Freeman was right to be wary in a situation like this, and that they were moving up cautiously because of the size of the force encountered just the day before and an awareness that even larger forces were probably in the area. In addition, he said, they had decided to stay on Hill 453 because they had taken up their positions relatively late in the day and they needed to be on the high ground at night. But Almond was still bristling with aggressiveness, and he ordered Stewart to put Chipyongni under fire immediately—it was as if he needed to do
something,
anything, before he left, to put some mark of his own on this action. It was not an order Stewart wanted to obey, but he felt he had no choice, as much to protect Freeman as himself. It was, he later noted, a ridiculous order, but he took a tank and rode over to Chipyongni. There he encountered no enemy fire, and, wary of shooting up Korean huts and schoolhouses for no particular reason, he fired a few rounds over the village’s buildings, then returned to Freeman’s headquarters.

Freeman was by then furious with Almond and angry with Stewart as well—by firing, Freeman felt, Stewart had signaled to the Chinese that they were back in the Twin Tunnels area and on their way to Chipyongni. Now, Freeman felt, Stewart had sent up a come-and-get-us flare. Stewart privately agreed: the firing on Chipyongni had added nothing to their security, and quite possibly diminished it. Like Freeman, he always wondered whether the
subsequent battle of Twin Tunnels would have developed as it did if he had not gone down to Chipyongni and shot those pointless rounds into the air. That afternoon, Captain Sherman Pratt, one of the company commanders, remembered watching Freeman simply explode, as he talked to Lieutenant Colonel Jim Edwards, one of his battalion commanders. “I don’t mind the corps commander being around and there’s no problem with him telling me what to do. He should as a courtesy go through his division commander, but that’s between those two. What I can’t accept is his telling me how to do it, especially if I think his way is dangerous to my command and mission.” Pratt, a World War II vet, had never seen a senior officer that angry at a superior. “If Almond wants to be a regimental commander, damn it, let him take a reduction to bird colonel and come down and be one,” Freeman had added. Then, still in a rage, he drove off in his jeep.