The Korean War (3 page)

In one important respect, I must be numbered among the revisionists. Many writers about Korea in the fifties, not to mention politicians and voters, looked back on the war with bitter distaste for the long stalemate, the growing tensions between allies that it generated, and the inconclusive truce that brought it to an end. Misgivings about Western wars in Asia were intensified by the long misery of Vietnam. Yet whatever obvious criticisms must be made of MacArthur’s excesses, of the West’s handling of Peking, of the conduct of the first winter campaign, I remain convinced of the rightness of the American commitment to Korea in June 1950. The regimes of Syngman Rhee and his successors possessed massive shortcomings. Yet who can doubt, looking at Korea today, that the people of the South enjoy incomparably more fulfilling lives than those of the inhabitants of the North? Civil libertarians may justly remark that the freedom of the South’s thirty-five million people remains relative. Yet few would deny that relative freedom, to pursue personal prosperity or private professions, remains preferable to absolute tyranny. North Korea is still among the most wretched, ruthless, restrictive, impenitent Stalinist societies in the world. South Korea is one of the most dynamic industrial societies even Asia has spawned in the past generation. The 1950–53 Korean War, which confirmed the shape of the two Koreas as they are today, remains one of the most significant, compelling clashes of arms in this century. Those who experienced it have long been irked by a sense of the world’s neglect of what they endured, and of what they achieved. I hope this book will make at least a modest contribution towards remedying the omission.

Max Hastings

Guilsborough Lodge,

Northamptonshire.

January 1987

PROLOGUE: TASK FORCE SMITH

In the early hours of 5 July 1950, 403 bewildered, damp, disorientated Americans sat in their hastily dug foxholes on three Korean hills, looking down upon the main road between Suwon and Osan. The men of 1/21st Infantry had been in the country just four days, since the big C-54 transports flew them from Itasuki in Japan to the southern airfield at Pusan. Ever since, they had been moving north in fits and starts – by train and truck, sleeping in sidings and schoolhouses, amid great throngs of refugees crowding roads and stations. Some men were sick from the local water; Lieutenant Fox was injured on the train before they heard their first shot fired, by an inglorious stray cinder from the engine blowing into his eye. All of them were savaged by mosquitoes. They learnt that Korea stank – literally – of the human manure with which the nation’s farmers fertilised their rice paddies. They watched earnest roadside rendezvous between their own officers and the smattering of US generals in the country. General William Dean, commanding the 24th Division, told the 1/21st commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles ‘Brad’ Smith: ‘I’m sorry – I just don’t have much information to give you.’

They knew that the communist North Koreans had invaded the anti-communist South on 25 June, and had been striking ruthlessly southwards ever since, meeting little opposition from Syngman Rhee’s shattered army. They were told that they themselves would be taking up defensive positions somewhere in the path of the enemy, as far north as possible. But after years of occupation duty in Japan, the notion of battle, of injury and sudden death, seemed infinitely remote. Their unit, like all those of the Japan occupation
army, was badly under-strength and poorly equipped. Their own A and D Companies, together with many of their supporting elements, were still at sea between Japan and Pusan. On the night of 4 July, they were ordered to take up a blocking position on the Suwon road, some fifty miles south of the capital, Seoul, which was already in communist hands. In a country of mountains, the paths open to a modern army were few and obvious. The enemy sweeping south must make for Osan. The 1/21st, the first unit of the United States Army available to be committed to battle in Korea, must do what it could to meet them. ‘They looked like a bunch of boy scouts,’ said Colonel George Masters, one of the men who watched the battalion moving to the front. ‘I said to Brad Smith: “You’re facing tried combat soldiers out there.” There was nothing he could answer.’
¹

They moved forward, as most soldiers move forward to battle in most wars, in drizzle and darkness. The South Korean drivers of some of the commandeered vehicles flatly refused to go further towards the battlefield, so the Americans drove themselves. They unloaded from their trucks behind the hills that Colonel Smith had briefly reconnoitred that day, and began to climb, by platoons, through the rock and scrub amid much tired, muffled cursing and clanking of equipment. Their officers were as confused as the men, for they had been told to expect to meet a South Korean army unit to which to anchor their own positions. In reality, there was no one on the hill. Smith’s company commanders deployed their men as best they could, and ordered them to start digging. At once, for the first time, Americans discovered the difficulty of hewing shelter from the unyielding Korean hillsides. For some hours, working clumsily in their poncho capes in the rain, they scraped among the rocks. Below them on the road, signallers laid telephone lines to their single battery of supporting 105mm howitzers, a thousand yards to the rear. A few truckloads of ammunition were offloaded by the roadside, but no one thought to insist that this was lugged up the hills in the dark to the company positions. Then, for an
uneasy hour or two, most of the Americans above the road lay beside their weapons and packs, sodden clothes clinging clammily to their bodies, and slept.

Blinking and shuffling in the first light of dawn, the men of Task Force Smith – the grandiose title their little force had been granted in a Tokyo map room – looked down from their positions. They were just south of Suwon airfield, three miles north of the little town of Osan. They began to pick out familiar faces: ‘Brad’ Smith himself, a slightly built West Pointer of thirty-four with a competent record in the Pacific in World War II; his executive officer, ‘Mother’ Martain, now demanding some changes in positions chosen in darkness. Major Floyd Martain was a New Yorker who had served in the National Guard from 1926 until he was called to active duty in 1940, then spent the war in Alaska. Unkind spirits considered Martain something of a fussy old woman, hence his nickname. Yet he also earned it by looking after his men, many of whom felt a real affection for him. Corporal Ezra Burke was the son of a Mississippi sawmiller who was drafted in time to see a little action at the tail end of the Pacific campaign, then stayed on to share the heady pleasures of Japan occupation duty. Burke was one of many Southerners in the unit, young men whose home towns in the late forties could offer neither a pay check nor a lifestyle as attractive as that of MacArthur’s army. Now, as a medical orderly, Corporal Burke and his team were laying out their field kits in a hollow behind the battalion position. They had ‘figured to be a week in Korea, settle the gook thing, then back to Japan’. Now, uneasy, they were less confident of this timetable.

Lieutenant Carl Bernard, a twenty-four-year-old Texan, had served as an enlisted Marine in World War II. Quickly bored by civilian life when it ended, he enlisted in the 82nd Airborne Division, and was commissioned into the 24th Division in 1949. When the Korean crisis broke, as one of the few Airborne-qualified officers in the division, he spent some days at the airfield in Japan,
supervising the loading of the transports. Now, he was put in command of 2 Platoon of B Company, where he knew nobody, after rejoining the battalion a few hours earlier.

Corporal Robert Fountain of the Communications Platoon watched Colonel Smith scanning the black smoke columns on the horizon through binoculars, his shoulders draped in an army blanket against the rain. The colonel looked like an Indian chieftain, thought Fountain. He himself, a nineteen-year-old farmboy from Macon, Georgia, was chiefly concerned whether the telephone lines would hold up. They had been unwound, used, spliced, rewound repeatedly on manoeuvres in Japan. Yet they were now the battalion’s principal means of communication, with so many of the radios rendered unserviceable by the rain. Fountain had found the experiences of the past few days deeply bewildering. With his parents divorced and jobs hard to come by, he joined the army at sixteen because he could think of nothing else to do. He had never thought much about fighting. For himself, like many of the men, the flight to Korea was a first-ever trip in an aeroplane. In the days since, they had been strafed by presumed North Korean Yaks, which they later discovered were Australian Mustangs. They had watched an ammunition train explode, and a South Korean officer without explanation force one of his own men to his knees and shoot him in the back of the neck. There had been scares of enemy tanks which turned into friendly caterpillar tractors. Fountain and his comrades had left Japan under the impression that they would be away only five days: ‘When the gooks hear who we are, they’ll quit and go home.’ They left clothes, possessions, money in their barrack rooms. Yet now the vainglory of their departure had faded. Fountain ate a can of cold Crations, and asked if anybody had any water left in his canteen. He felt cold, wet and confused.

A few minutes after 7 a.m., Sergeant Loren Chambers of B Company called to his platoon commander: ‘Hey, look over there, Lieutenant. Can you believe it?’ Advancing towards them down the open plain from Suwon was a column of eight green-painted tanks.
Lieutenant Day asked what they were. ‘Those are T-34 tanks, sir,’ answered the sergeant, ‘and I don’t think they’re going to be friendly towards us.’ All along the crest line, men chattered excitedly as they peered forward at this first glimpse of the enemy. Officers hastened forward to confirm the threat. Captain Dashner, B Company Commander, said: ‘Let’s get some artillery on them.’
²
The Forward Observation Officer of the 58th Field Artillery Battalion cranked his handset. A few moments later, rounds began to gusher into the paddy fields around the road. But still the tanks came on. The guns of the 58th possessed negligible armour-piercing capability.

Lieutenant Philip Day and one of the battalion’s two 75mm recoilless rifle sections manhandled their clumsy weapon to a position overlooking the road, and fired. Inexpert, they had sited on a forward slope. The round did no visible damage to the enemy, but the ferocious backblast slammed into the hill, provoking an eruption of mud which deluged the crew and jammed the gun. Urgently, they began to strip and clear it.

At the roadside, Lieutenant Ollie Connors clutched one of the unit’s principal anti-tank weapons, a hand-held 2.36-inch bazooka. In 1945, the serious defect of the bazooka rocket was well known – its inability to penetrate most tanks’ main armour. Yet even now, five years later, the new and more powerful 3.5-inch rocket launcher had not been issued to MacArthur’s Far East army. As the first T-34 clattered towards the narrow pass between the American positions, Connors put up his bazooka and fired. There was an explosion on the tank hull. But the T-34, probably the outstanding tank of World War II and still a formidable weapon, did not check. It roared on through the pass, and down the road towards the American gunline. As its successors followed, with remarkable courage Connors fired again and again at close range, twenty-two rockets in all. One tank stopped, appearing to have thrown a track. But it continued to fire with both its main armament and coaxial machine gun. The others disappeared towards Osan, to be followed a few minutes later by another armoured platoon. A single 105mm
gun possessed a few rounds of armour-piercing ammunition. One of these halted another T-34, which halted and caught fire. A crewman emerged from the turret firing a burp gun as he came. The communist’s first burst, before he was shot down, granted one of the gunners the unhappy distinction of becoming the first American soldier to die by enemy action in Korea. Lieutenant Day’s recoilless rifle began to fire again, but its flash made it an easy target. An 85mm tank shell disabled the gun, and left Day reeling from blast, blood pouring out of his ears. Between 7 and 9.30 a.m. some thirty North Korean tanks drove through Task Force Smith’s ‘blocking position’, killing or wounding some twenty of the defenders by shell and machine-gun fire. The Americans could think of nothing to do to stop them.

Around 11 a.m., a long column of trucks led by three more tanks appeared on the road from the north. They halted bumper to bumper, and began to disgorge North Korean infantry who scattered east and west into the paddies beside the road. Some of the mustard-coloured tunics began to advance steadily towards the Americans amid desultory mortar and small-arms fire. Others worked patiently around the flanks. Since Task Force Smith occupied only a four-hundred-yard front, and no other American infantry units were deployed for many miles behind them, it was immediately obvious that this action must eventually end in only one fashion. As the hours passed, communist fire intensified and American casualties mounted. Colonel Smith called C Company’s officers, west of the road, to the Company Command Post. The entire force would now consolidate in a circular perimeter on the east side, he said. The 150 or so men of Charlie Company left their positions platoon by platoon, filed down to the road, clambered up among the scrub on the other side, and began to hack foxholes and fields of fire for themselves as best they could.

Smith’s choices were not enviable. His unit was achieving very little where it stood. But if he chose to withdraw immediately from the position, put his men into their surviving trucks, and head south, sooner or later the column was likely to meet the communist
tanks that had gone before them. He would gain little, with his small force, by abandoning the high ground to launch a counterattack against the enemy infantry. Yet if they remained in place, they could expect neither reinforcement nor relief. Here was an extraordinary situation. This was 1950, when vast economic wealth, possession of the atomic bomb and the legacy of victory in the Second World War caused America to be perceived as the greatest power the world had ever seen, mightier than the Roman Empire at its zenith, or the British a century before. Yet now, on a hill in Korea, the first representatives of United States military power to meet communist aggression on the battlefield were the men of a mere under-strength infantry battalion which faced annihilation as a military unit. Not all the B-29s on the airfields of the United States, nor the army divisions in Europe, the fleets at sea from the Taiwan Strait to the Mediterranean, could mitigate the absolute loneliness and vulnerability of Task Force Smith. Those in Tokyo or Washington who supposed that the mere symbolic commitment of this token of American military might would suffice to frighten the North Koreans into retreat were confounded. Subsequent interrogation of North Korean officers suggested that the encounter between their 4m Division and Task Force Smith provided Pyongyang with its first inkling of American intervention, which had not been anticipated. Neither side on the Osan road was troubled by political implications. The communists were using mortars now, to some effect. American small-arms ammunition was growing short, as men stumbled up the slippery paths worn into the mud to the forward positions, dragging crates and steel boxes. Among the boulders below the position, the wounded lay in widening rows, the medics toiling among them, hampered by lack of whole blood. Captain Richard Dashner, the Texan World War II veteran commanding C Company, said abruptly to Major Martain: ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’ Lieutenant Berthoff, commanding Headquarter Company, agreed. At first, Smith said there would be no immediate pull-back. But as the fire from the flanks intensified, he changed his mind. ‘I guess we’ll
have to,’ he told his officers. Then he added unhappily: ‘This is a decision I’ll probably regret the rest of my days.’ C Company was to go first. Within minutes, the first of its men were slipping down the rear of the position and into the paddy fields beyond, stumbling and cursing at the stench and the enemy fire. There was no question of escaping along the road, open and vulnerable to raking machine guns as far as the eye could see. They could only scramble through the fields, balancing precariously on the intervening dykes, down the farm tracks as fast and as best they could, until they met friendly forces.