The Korean War (33 page)

I left the area on a truck with the rest of the wounded. We were being fired on constantly by enemy machine-guns. Our planes were trying to help by dropping napalm between our troops and theirs. As a result some of our men got burned pretty bad and were put aboard the trucks with us wounded. I will never forget the smell of human flesh after that. A lot of them died before too long.

McAlister himself was hit shortly afterwards by a stray bullet which rendered his right arm useless. Then the trucks were halted by a Chinese roadblock. Their captors ordered the occupants out. When those who could walk had climbed down, to their sick horror they watched North Korean soldiers run along the line, setting fire to the vehicles, together with those who remained aboard them. For several days that followed, McAlister and his comrades were held captive close to the road. Then, numb and at the limits of exhaustion, they were gathered together, to be marched north. McAlister sat down on the running-board of a burned-out American truck. He could not bring himself to move when a Korean guard ordered him to his feet. He was hit twice, hard, on the head, and passed out.

When I came to, I was alone. I guess they figured I was dead. I stumbled around for what seemed to be hours, and finally got back to the lake. I could only walk for a few minutes before falling down. My feet were frozen and I couldn’t use my hands much. Somehow I got started towards Hagaru-ri. At last I met a ‘big ole Marine colonel’ who carried me to a truck, and onto an aid station from which I was flown to Japan. I had frostbite in both feet and hands, shrapnel in the head, and my right wrist was almost severed. I was in hospital until 31 May, 1952.
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When the predicament of Task Force Faith became apparent, General Almond blamed O. P. Smith for the Marines’ failure to leave a force at Hagaru strong enough now to send a relief force to the 7th Division’s aid. At Almond’s insistence, an attempt was made to cut a path up the east side of the reservoir to link up with the retreating units. But this rapidly encountered heavy opposition. It was abandoned. Colonel Faith spoke to Hagaru for the last time through a Marine air liaison officer’s radio link: ‘Unless someone can help us, I don’t have much hope that anybody’s going to get out of this.’ He was told: ‘We are bringing in an awful lot of air support, but that’s all we can give you. We just don’t have enough people here to risk losing our hold on the foot of the reservoir.’

‘I understand,’ said Faith.

This was his last contact with Hagaru. Air support could do nothing by night, when the fate of Task Force Faith was sealed, and its courageous commanding officer killed. ‘Whenever I hear the words “task force”, I shudder,’ said a distinguished Marine veteran later.
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In Korea, all too often, the phrase became an apology for a makeshift collection of vehicles and men, committed to disaster.

A staff officer who entered the general officers’ mess at Hungnam the evening of the arrival of the news of the destruction of Task Force Faith found inside it, alone by the stove, General David Barr, the 7th Division’s commander. He was sobbing quietly. ‘Barr was a nice man,’ said the officer later, ‘but he had no personal magnetism, and should never have been permitted to command a division at war. He was too old, and too soft. The Chosin campaign finished him.’ Barr was relieved of his command and sent home.

If General Almond’s chief preoccupation in mid-November had been to seize North Korean real estate, at whatever cost to the dispersal of his corps, by the end of that month he had become as hasty in his anxiety to get his command back to the coast. As the weight of Chinese forces confronting X Corps and threatening its Main Supply Route became apparent, those privy to the intelligence reports felt a growing, gnawing fear that they were close to
the brink of a great disaster for American arms. ‘I really thought we’d had it,’ said Colonel Al Bowser, G-3 of 1st Marine Division. ‘We did not know the detail of what was happening to Eighth Army, but we knew that there was only eighty miles of open flank on our left. We knew the size of the Chinese forces against us – and we didn’t at that time understand their shortcomings. I would not have given a nickel for our chances of making it. Fortunately, a lot of people down the line could not see the overall position as I could see it, and continued to conduct themselves as if they were going to get out.’
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Fresh argument now broke out between the army and the US Marines, precipitated by the newly acute sense of crisis: the soldiers favoured abandoning all heavy equipment and artillery, and pulling back south as fast as 1st Marine Division could march and ride. O. P. Smith, however, was determined to conduct what he termed ‘an orderly and honourable withdrawal’. He would bring out all his vehicles and guns. ‘Don’t worry about your equipment,’ Almond told Smith impatiently one morning at Hagaru. ‘Once you get back, we’ll replace it all.’ Smith said: ‘I’m not going to do that. This is the equipment we fight with.’

‘Okay,’ said Almond wearily. ‘I just wanted you to know that we would replace it.’ When the two men parted, Smith turned to Colonel Bowser: ‘This guy is a maniac. He’s nuts. I can’t believe he’s saying these things.’
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On this occasion, it was Smith’s will which prevailed, that formed the basis for the legend of the retreat from Chosin, perhaps the only really creditable American military performance of that winter campaign of 1950. On 1 December, the 10,000 men of 5th and 7th Marines began their epic fourteen-mile fighting retreat from Yudam-ni to Hagaru, battalions leapfrogging each other southwards, pressed at each pass by the Chinese, who were machine-gunning and mortaring every point upon the road upon which their weapons would bear. The Marines could move forward only by clearing the ground commanding the road in front of mem, yard by bitterly contested yard. The 3/7th, leading the
assault, became bogged down, and Taplett’s 3/5th were ordered to pass through and take up the lead. When night came, with the men utterly exhausted by wading in snow up to their hips on the hillside, Taplett asked if his battalion might halt, at least for long enough to establish its own precise location. Permission was refused: ‘Attack, keep attacking,’ he was told. Item Company of Taplett’s battalion was almost wiped out on the first day. Taplett himself lost four runners attempting to pass messages to its commander. A single tank led the column, followed by Taplett’s command jeep, directing the infantry on the shoulders above the road. Ray Murray appeared at Taplett’s jeep and demanded to know why the attack was stalled.

‘We can’t even get artillery support,’ said Taplett.

‘We’ve got trouble behind us, too,’ explained Murray.

‘If you want to get out of here,’ said Taplett flatly, ‘you’ll give the guys at the front the support.’
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In a sea of mountains reaching to the horizon, it was impossible for the infantry to reach and command the higher ground. They could seek only to hold the shoulders and suppress the Chinese small-arms fire while the great regimental train crawled along the road below. It was fortunate for the Americans that the Chinese now appeared to have outrun the artillery they had brought down on the marines at Yudam-ni. The Marines could see communist troops swarming on the hills around them. Without the dedicated support of the Marine air wings, few men believed they would ever have made it. Even Marine pilots who were tasked to fly interdiction missions against targets further north kept a bomb, a rack of rockets, or a few seconds of cannon ammunition to expend in close support of their own people, on the way home. Men marvelled at the great gusher of snow, the black impact on the hillside, as each Skyraider unloaded its ordnance. Prosaically it reminded Major Ed Simmons ‘of a giant bird taking a crap’.
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On the one day when blustering snow and low cloud made air support impossible, the column scarcely moved. Every few hours, a group of Chinese succeeded in breaking through to the road,
disabling a vehicle, blocking the route. Then the Americans were compelled to counter-attack, to shift the wreckage, before they could get movement started again. Even without the intervention of the enemy, mechanical failure or a moment’s carelessness by a driver would block the road with a stranded or ditched vehicle. There were difficult decisions: whether to keep the artillery moving, or suffer the delays of causing guns to unlimber on the road, to provide urgent support for the infantry. It was an agonisingly slow business, by day and by night, for men crippled by exhaustion and the weather, the inescapable elements. The cold seemed to gnaw into their bodies, sapping reserves of strength, making every movement painfully slow and clumsy.

The first men of 1st Marine Division entered the perimeter at Hagaru on the afternoon of the 3rd, the last on the evening of the following day. Taplett’s battalion was reduced to 326 effectives out of some 2,000 whom he had commanded at Yudam-ni. Many of the casualties were suffering only from frostbite, but the serious cases still required evacuation from the overworked airstrip. It was also found necessary to introduce rigorous security on the runway, to prevent stragglers from sneaking aboard one of the C-47 casevac aircraft that could offer them a priceless passage to safety. The aircraft that flew out wounded brought in supplies and some replacements, many of them men wounded on the Naktong or in Seoul. ‘The feeling now was – “let’s get the hell out of this”,’ said Taplett. ‘ “This is too much for us with our resources”. It was hard to take, for men who had been told that the war was won, who were looking forward to that big parade we had been promised in San Francisco.’

The performance of 1st Marine Division in desperate circumstances began to command the attention of America, so hungry for heroic news at a moment when there was so little to be had. O. P. Smith captured headlines all over the country when he told correspondents who flew into Hagaru on 4 December: ‘Gentlemen, we are not
retreating. We are merely advancing in another direction.’ His remark was interpreted as a magnificent defiance of reality. Yet as he said afterwards, it was also tactically accurate, as the great military historian S. L. A. Marshall perceived: ‘ “Slam” was the only one who understood that what we were doing really was attacking in another direction, because you couldn’t withdraw when you were completely surrounded,’ said Smith.

The feud – for it was nothing less – between Smith and Almond became a focal point of controversy both during the campaign, and in the recriminations after it ended. At times, the Marines almost seemed to relish the X Corps commander’s misjudgements. During the struggle to hold the Hagaru perimeter, Smith took bleak pleasure in the discovery of a group of big treadway trucks with winches, which Almond had dispatched to prepare his Corps Command Post, when he believed that he was presiding over an administrative advance to the Chinese border. Officers who flew down to Hamhuing returned with scornful tales of the china, napkins, fresh fruit and meat flown in from Japan for the corps commander’s table.

Almond seemed to lack any instinct for identifying himself with the men of his command in their brutal predicament. One morning, he flew into Hagaru from his headquarters, and sought to make himself agreeable to some of the Marines on the perimeter. ‘Well, men, and how are you today? Pretty cold, isn’t it.’ The bearded, muffled scarecrows peered out at him from the inch or two of exposed flesh around their eyes. ‘Do you know I wear a plate?’ persisted Almond conversationally. ‘When I got up this morning, there was a film of ice on the glass by my bed.’ ‘That’s too f-ing bad, General,’ said one of these men who could not dare to dream of ever seeing a bed again. Almond strolled on, oblivious of the impression he had made. It was a soldier, a member of Almond’s staff, and not a Marine, who recounted witnessing that incident.
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Yet some able officers retained great respect for the X Corps commander’s abilities: ‘I consider Almond was an excellent corps
commander,’ said General Lemuel Shepherd, commanding the Fleet Marines. ‘He was energetic, forceful, brave, and in many ways did a good job under most difficult conditions. He and O. P. just didn’t get along.’
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Ed Rowney and Al Haig, both officers who served on Almond’s staff in Korea and rose to high rank in the US Army, retained a lifelong respect for their old commander. Lieutenant-Colonel Ellis Williamson, Almond’s G-3, took an ambivalent view: ‘O. P. Smith wasn’t a team player at all. He just wanted to do what he wanted. Ned Almond was one of the most energetic, dedicated officers I have ever known. He was so energetic, that at times he was tactically careless. He could not visualise himself being wrong. He was almost as bad as MacArthur in this. Once he had made up his mind that something was so, he was just not listening any more.’
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The evidence is overwhelming that O. P. Smith was indeed a slow and cautious commander. Likewise, his habit of lapsing into sturdy silence when confronted with Almond’s tantrums precluded any possibility of understanding between the two men. Smith was disgusted by Almond’s obsession with achieving a personal triumph on the battlefield. If fortune had fallen otherwise, if Almond had been granted his opportunity to lead a Patton-like pursuit, a dash for victory, he might indeed have earned his place in military history, while Smith would have been remembered as a plodding encumbrance. Instead, however, on the road back from Chosin, Smith’s dogged, imperturbable leadership not only saved the honour of 1st Marine Division, but the reputation of American arms in Korea. Almond, on the other hand, was branded by many as the commander whose impatience and overweening personal ambition came within a hairbreadth of creating a catastrophe.