The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (85 page)

It had flared into the open during the difficult fighting that had taken place in mid-September. They were in the Taegu area, engaged in a vicious seesaw struggle to take Hill 174, when Crombez ordered Treacy’s Love Company up it three times. The third time, Treacy finally objected to what he felt was a suicidal assault. The North Koreans, extremely well dug in, drove them
back again, inflicting heavy casualties. Then Crombez ordered Treacy’s Item Company up the same hill, and Treacy objected. “The enemy knows that we’ll be coming…. The gooks will be ready for [us]. Item Company is the only company of good strength in the regiment and probably Eighth Army and if they get chewed up that will be the last strong company gone to hell.” But Crombez insisted. So once again up they went, eventually taking the hill at a high price, only to be driven off by a ferocious Korean counterattack. Once more Crombez ordered Item to take the hill. This time Captain Norman Allen, the company commander, refused the order. “Colonel,” he told Treacy, his immediate superior, “I never thought I would ever have to do this, least of all to you, but you can report to Regiment that Captain Allen of Item Company refuses the order!” Treacy had turned to him, quite weary, Allen remembered, and said, “That’s all right, Norm. I understand. I refuse the order too!”

Then Allen had asked Treacy what he had been doing on Hill 174 himself the day before—a battalion commander going forward on an extremely dangerous assault that he was in no way supposed to be part of. Treacy pointed out that four days earlier the battalion had had almost 900 men. Now they were down to 292. “If I had been ordered to take Hill 174 again, I was going to refuse the order, and I wanted to insure that there would be no basis for a charge of personal cowardice!” he told Allen. He did refuse the next order, and Allen learned later that Crombez had called him yellow in front of the other battalion commanders. What tore at Treacy was the unnecessary loss of men in useless assaults in this particular stretch of fighting. At night, some of the other officers had noticed that he seemed to be mumbling to himself just before he went to sleep. At first they thought he was saying his prayers. One officer asked if Treacy were reciting Hail Marys. No, the answer came back, he was reciting the name of each man in his battalion who had died and asking God’s forgiveness for his own responsibility in his death.

NOW, ON THE
road to Chipyongni, Treacy found himself in a very difficult position—asking a superior, who was under almost unbearable pressure and who clearly bore him some animus,
not
to put his infantrymen on top of the tanks. Crombez was unmoved by his protest. He made only one concession. If the Chinese hit them hard, he would stop his tanks while the infantrymen got off, and he would use his considerable suppressive firepower on the enemy. Then there would be a signal for the men to reboard before they moved on. Treacy responded by demanding the right to accompany his men. He could not ask them to do what he himself was not willing to do. But Crombez denied that request, ordering Treacy to take command of the rest of the convoy and to
move forward to Chipyongni only after the road was cleared. So it was that the 160 men of Love Company boarded the tanks.

Barrett, the company commander, and the tank company commander, Captain Johnny Hiers, worked out signals. If the tanks were going to move on, Hiers was to radio Barrett, giving the infantrymen time to remount. But the poor quality of their radios, plus the overwhelming noise of the tanks and the chaos of battle, offered little guarantee of success. Treacy was sure something terrible was about to happen. He told Barrett to leave behind one man from each squad in case Love Company needed to be reorganized after the mission. That would give them a kind of ghost structure to rebuild around. In addition, he asked every man in the unit to write home and put any personal effects in the letters.

Thus did the rescue convoy set off, each tank spaced about fifty yards from the next. The newer Patton tanks were in the lead; the older Shermans, with less mobile big guns, followed. Crombez was, as the historian J. D. Coleman notes with considerable irony, in the
fifth
tank, with the hatch
closed
. The combat engineers would ride on top of the first four tanks, the troops from Love Company on the others, ten men to a tank, with the last four empty. Captain Barrett rode on the sixth tank. Colonel Treacy argued for and won the right for a two-and-a-half-ton truck to follow the column to pick up any wounded men. Just as the convoy was moving out, Treacy jumped aboard the sixth tank and rode with Barrett.

The first time the tanks stopped and the infantry got off, the fighting went reasonably well. It was a relatively light engagement. Crombez seemed delighted by the way his tanks and the infantrymen were hammering the Chinese. “We’re killing hundreds of them!” he said over the intercom. But even before that battle ended, the tanks under Crombez’s orders suddenly roared off, seemingly with no warning to the infantrymen. About thirty infantrymen, some of them wounded, were left behind. As the tanks were pulling out, Captain Barrett, who had barely made it back onto a tank, yelled out to the others, “Stay by the road! We’ll come back for you.” It was exactly what Treacy had feared, especially because there was not that much pressure from the Chinese. Barrett later told Clay Blair that, after they reboarded, Treacy insisted he would bring formal charges against Crombez when it was all over. Then it got even worse. About a mile out of Koksuri, as Martin Blumenson, the military historian, has written, they were hit much harder. The Chinese were in strong positions on the ridges on both sides of the road, firing down at them. Some of the infantrymen dismounted, moving out about fifty yards on either side of the tanks. Suddenly, again without any warning, the tanks took off. Among those wounded and left behind were Colonel Treacy and a
corporal named Carroll Everist. Treacy was hit relatively lightly, a flesh wound near his mouth, Everist more seriously, in the knee. Treacy dressed Everist’s wound, and then gave him his medical kit. He seemed more worried about the state of the other men who had been stranded than about himself, Everist remembered. Soon Chinese soldiers arrived and took a group of seven of them prisoner. The small battle had turned into a mini-disaster for the exposed infantrymen. This time even more men had been left behind. As Ken Hamburger points out, in the course of the rush to Chipyongni exactly how many infantrymen were actually left behind remains in dispute—at least seventy, perhaps one hundred.

When the Chinese first captured them, Everist was too seriously wounded to walk, so Treacy carried him several miles on his back. Soon, the Chinese decided that Everist slowed them down too much and left him behind to die. Eventually, after the battle was over, he stumbled and crawled his way back to American lines. Treacy was taken to a North Korean prison camp. He survived his wounds, but his health soon began to fail. Captain Barrett, who followed what happened to his battalion commander very carefully, later talked with a number of POWs when they were sent home in 1953 and was told that Treacy died about three months after his capture. His health failed in part—so Barrett was told—because he gave what little food he had to other prisoners. “I put him in for the Congressional Medal of Honor,” Barrett told Clay Blair, “but Crombez killed it.” Crombez also put a note in Treacy’s file saying he had disobeyed orders—an appalling, essentially posthumous (and thus unanswerable) assault on another officer.

B
ACK ON THE
southern perimeter of Chipyongni, the second night of battle was going poorly for Paul McGee’s platoon. The Chinese had found, if not a superhighway, at least an access route into the American position, where the two pieces of terrain, one Chinese-held, the other American, seemed to feed into each other. For the second night of battle McGee would have liked more men, but every man—except those in the reserve units—was being used. He would have to make do with what he had.

The Chinese could get closer to the American positions in front of George Company than anywhere else, and they pushed that advantage hard. There were many, many more of them on that second night, and they began their attack far earlier, at dusk, adding a new and unnerving touch: just before the assault one of their buglers had blown Taps, the American ceremonial tribute to the dead. Then they struck, maybe, McGee thought, a regiment-sized force hitting his tiny sector. They quickly overran two foxholes belonging to the neighboring First Platoon, on McGee’s right. That meant his men were soon taking lethal machine gun fire from the First Platoon area, fire that cut right across his own positions. He called his company commander, Lieutenant Thomas Heath, who called down to the First Platoon commander, who in turn assured Heath that the platoon was still in position and had not lost any foxholes. Unbeknownst to both Heath and McGee, the master sergeant commanding that platoon had set up his CP in a small hut on the
back
side of the hill and had not ventured out to check on his forward positions.

Told by his superior that the First Platoon was still holding at all points, McGee was not at all reassured. Each burst of machine gun fire from his right increased his doubts. This time when he called Heath, he was more specific: “There’s a machine gun up on our right in the First Platoon section and it’s kicking the shit out of us, and it sure as hell ain’t one of ours.” So Heath made another call to the First Platoon leader and the same answer came back. “McGee,” he was told, “we’re still up there.” Later, McGee thought that when one of your platoon sergeants said he was being hammered by flanking fire
from a friendly position, someone had to verify it. Someone had to be responsible. That breakthrough on his right cost him dearly. Because of it, his men had been terribly exposed and he had lost more men by being flanked than by frontal attack. He was more than a little bitter—losing so many more men than necessary because of another platoon leader’s carelessness.

Knowing they had discovered a weak point in the American lines, the Chinese pushed harder, using the most primitive kind of explosives. One fought them, McGee thought, tried to kill them, and yet admired their bravery. A soldier would crawl forward pushing a pole with a stick of dynamite at its end. If he went down, another would take over, until they were right on top of an American foxhole, and then the dynamite would detonate. The human cost was terrible. McGee and his men kept firing, ever so carefully, determined not to waste ammo, killing pole carrier after pole carrier, amazed that there was always one more man to pick up the pole.

The Chinese wounded one of McGee’s squad leaders, Corporal James Mougeot, by throwing a grenade in his foxhole, and Mougeot had come out of the hole shouting, “Lieutenant McGee, I’m hit, I’m hit!” When he made it to McGee’s foxhole, McGee tried to calm him down. “I’m not hit bad,” Mougeot finally said, and prepared to go back to his position. Just then McGee noticed a couple of Chinese soldiers only about twenty yards below his platoon’s forward position. One of them kept calling out McGee’s name, learned, he assumed, from Mougeot’s calls. “Who’s that?” he asked the BAR man next to him. “It’s a Chink,” the BAR man replied. So McGee rolled a grenade down the hill toward the Chinese soldier, who, wounded, tried to roll down the slope toward his lines, but McGee took the BAR and killed him.

Slowly, however, the battle began to turn in favor of the Chinese. One of the keys to holding McGee’s increasingly vulnerable position was a machine gun right in its center, being fired by Corporal Eugene Ottesen and his men. With a superb field of fire, Ottesen was able to cover a spur on a hill that the Chinese had to cross in order to reach them. So the Chinese had gone after his machine gun from the start, and sometime that night they had hit the first of his men firing it. That was when Ottesen himself took over. As long as Ottesen could fire, McGee was in a reasonably solid position. But the Chinese threw wave after wave of men at the position. Ottesen never panicked, even though he knew he was a marked man. He kept firing—short, tight bursts—undoubtedly, like McGee, sure that he was going to die there. McGee marveled at Ottesen’s bravery in such a terrible moment—true courage, he thought, from some secret storage place that few men had.

Sometime around two in the morning, Chinese soldiers managed to lob grenades into Ottesen’s foxhole and suddenly the gun went silent. McGee
yelled over to Sergeant Kluttz asking what happened to the machine gun, and Kluttz shouted back that the Chinese had knocked it out. Ottesen was dead, his body never recovered. (He was eventually listed as MIA.) Now McGee’s left flank was open, and the Chinese were pouring through. McGee ordered Corporal Raymond Bennett, a squad leader whose men had not been especially hard hit yet, to try to retake Ottesen’s position. Bennett himself was quickly hit—by a hand grenade that blew off part of his hand, then by a bullet in the shoulder, and finally a piece of shrapnel in his head. But some of his men managed to dig in and block the opening where Ottesen’s gun had been.

McGee’s overall position was now desperate. There were too many holes in it, and too few men to hold back the Chinese. He had a good many wounded men and had called back to Company for litter teams, but there were no litter teams available either, and ammo was also turning out to be a problem. Sometime early on that second morning they became aware that they were running short, that they could not keep up with their rate of firing. There was always another attack. It seemed at that moment like a battle without end in a war that also seemed without end. The war was not limited, but the ammo was. The Air Force had tried to resupply, air-dropping boxes of ammunition with parachutes. But they had been forced to come in very low because the perimeter was so tiny and they did not want the parachuted ammo to fall behind Chinese lines. As a result, many of the crates had been damaged when they hit the rocky, frozen ground. That meant McGee’s BAR kept jamming because damaged shells sometimes stayed in the chamber. McGee had a small pocketknife, which he used, again and again, to pry the bad casings out, but the gun continued to jam, and finally, in his frustration, he had dropped his knife and couldn’t find it.

Private First Class Cletis Inmon, his runner, who was in the foxhole with him, trying to help out, handed McGee his own mess knife, but it was too big for the chamber. So McGee reluctantly gave up on the BAR and went back to his carbine, a weapon that very few fighting men liked. He thought the carbine was fine, especially for a battle like this—the M-1 had more range, but here the killing was taking place almost face-to-face, sometimes at ranges as close as twenty to thirty yards. But then his carbine started acting up on him too. The cold weather had gotten to it; the oil in the weapon had frozen, and he could not get the bolt to go all the way home. Even as it jammed, he saw a Chinese soldier moving in on him, and so he slammed the bolt home as hard as he could and shot him.

The Chinese now held positions on their right, where the First Platoon was being overrun, and sometime that morning, the Second Platoon on their left pulled back without telling him. That meant that McGee’s Third Platoon was
in a salient jutting out and almost completely surrounded. By the early morning, McGee had a sense—it was instinct more than anything else—that the handful of men in his platoon still alive and firing were the key to the survival of the entire Twenty-third Regiment, and that the longer they could hold out, the better the chance the regiment had of surviving. If the Chinese pushed through here and took their position, they might be able to sweep through on the soft flank of all the other regimental positions. His thinking, which his superiors later came to agree with, was based not merely on the intensity of the fighting or the fragmentary reports he had received on the relative stability of the line elsewhere, but on his sense that the regiment’s defense was at its thinnest exactly where George Company was. Every once in a while another of his guns would stop—now a BAR in front of him suddenly went silent—and he would realize the battle was steadily turning against them, and that if the Chinese took his position it would be like a giant arrow aimed at the very heart of the regiment. By 2
A.M.
he figured there were still several hours to go until daylight, and he knew they could not hold out much longer.

Battles like this, even when the smallest units are engaged, are never static, and the fight on what came to be called McGee Hill had a rhythm of its own. Thus, each lost foxhole was a new Chinese position, allowing ever more Chinese to come up the hill and making the other foxholes ever more vulnerable for the Americans and easier for the Chinese to attack. Cletis Inmon, McGee’s runner, thought he had never seen so many Chinese as that night—even though it was dark, you could see them fairly clearly, because they were so close. It was, he decided, like an endless line of soldiers that started someplace back in the middle of China, maybe a thousand miles away, whatever the distance was, marching all the way to Korea, one long line emptying out right in that little creek bed in front of them. Until that night Cletis Inmon thought he was one of the luckiest men in the United States Army. He was a country boy from Garrett, Kentucky, and had signed up to fight in Korea because a sixteen-year-old from his high school had been killed there and somehow he felt he owed it to him to go there and pay them back. He had done his basic training at Fort Knox and arrived in Korea just in time for a big Thanksgiving dinner, and then headed north on a truck to join George Company and the Twenty-third Regiment up near the Chongchon, a river they had never studied back in Kentucky. They were well north when they came upon an American lieutenant blocking the road who said they couldn’t go any farther because the Twenty-third was cut off and no one could get through to them. Inmon, who was religious and did not drink or swear, thought that God’s hand was on him because, had he arrived a few days earlier, he would have been up there himself when the Chinese first came in, and he was sure he would have been killed.

The other thing that confirmed God’s blessing was landing in a unit with men like McGee and Kluttz, who knew all the little tricks of combat and were skilled at breaking a new man in. It was a curious thing, what you remembered about it all a half century later, but he recalled Kluttz telling him before the battle of Chipyongni just how to deal with the Chinese, who, he said, were very good soldiers. They were very canny, he said. They would sneak up very near your foxhole and then lie low and listen to the sound of the clip in your M-1. There was a little click the M-1 made when a clip was finished, and as soon as they heard that click, they would charge while you were changing clips. That meant you had to be able to snap the next clip in very quickly. McGee had told Inmon that he picked him as a runner because he was sure that Inmon would not let him down. Someone else might think being a runner was unusually dangerous duty, but Inmon considered it good duty because you didn’t have to lug a radio around all day and make yourself the perfect target for the enemy. He had started the second night, with three other men in a foxhole right next to McGee. There was, he remembered, a Filipino; another guy brand-new to the outfit, his first day in battle; and a third man about whom he could remember almost nothing. All three were killed that night. Inmon never remembered the name of the new guy—all he could recall was that he had showed up in a brand-new uniform, and it had stayed new, no wrinkles, none of the usual grime, except the next day it was covered with bloodstains.

Inmon had been handling a BAR that night, and eventually he moved into McGee’s foxhole as the battle wore on. Sometime that night, probably around 1
A.M.
, his luck ran out. He heard a whistling sound and then he was hit and he grabbed his face. He had been hit by shrapnel, and blood was pouring out. He completely lost control, so much so that he was ashamed later. “I’m hit! I’m hit! Get me off the hill, McGee! Get me off the hill!” he screamed.

“Quiet down, Inmon,” McGee said. “You quiet down. Don’t you be yelling—they’ll hear you. You lie down now! We’ll get you off.” McGee called over to the next foxhole, to Kluttz, to send the medic over, and somehow the medic got to Inmon’s foxhole. The shrapnel was over his left eye, and he could now see only through his right eye. But they cleaned him up a little and his nerves began to steady. McGee asked him if he could see well enough to fire his M-1. Inmon said no. “Can you load the magazine for my carbine?” McGee asked. Inmon found he could still do that, and he loaded while McGee kept firing. A little later, when the fighting died down momentarily, McGee asked the medic if he thought he could get Inmon out. The medic said yes, and he half-carried, half-dragged Inmon down the hill to the aid station. Inmon was amazed: he knew that McGee still needed him, and that he could still be useful as a loader. One of his last thoughts before he passed out from the drugs at the
aid station was that McGee had been willing to die up there alone, but one of his last acts had been to try to save Inmon’s life.

McGee had sent his other runner, Private First Class John Martin, back to tell Lieutenant Heath that they were in a desperate situation, that they needed more of everything, especially men and ammo, and if at all possible litter bearers. Heath then asked his artillery unit to loan him some men, and Lieutenant Arthur Rochnowski assembled fifteen of them. Martin led them back up the hill, but when they reached the crest, the Chinese had opened up and a mortar round immediately killed one man, wounded another, and panicked the rest of them, and they raced down the hill again. Heath gathered up some of the panicky artillerymen, but as they reached the ridge the Chinese were there, and they fled again. Heath was screaming at them as they scattered, “Goddamn it, get back up on that hill! You’ll die down here anyway. You might as well go up on the hill and die there.” Martin, however, rallied a few men, picked up some ammo, and went back up the hill.