The Coldest Winter
America and the Korean War
DAVID HALBERSTAM
For Jean, again
Contents
Glossary of Military Terms
List of Maps
Note on Military
Map Symbols
Introduction
PART ONE: A Warning at Unsan
PART TWO: Bleak Days: The In Min Gun Drives South
PART THREE: Washington Goes to War
PART FOUR: The Politics of Two Continents
PART FIVE: The Last Roll of the Dice: The North Koreans Push to Pusan
PART SIX: MacArthur Turns the Tide: The Inchon Landing
PART SEVEN: Crossing the Parallel and Heading North
PART EIGHT: The Chinese Strike
PART NINE: Learning to Fight the Chinese: Twin Tunnels, Wonju, and Chipuongni
PART TEN: The General and the President
PART ELEVEN: The Consequences
Epilogue
Author's Note
Acknowledgments
Afterword by Russell Baker
Notes Bibliography Searchable Terms About the Author Other Books by David Halberstam Copyright Glossary of Military Terms
NOTE ON MILITARY UNITS The size, composition, and leadership of military units varies with time, place, and circumstances. In the early fighting in Korea, almost every unit was always under strength. Therefore, these numbers are approximations.
Army 100,000 soldiers Comprised of 2 or more Corps Normally commanded by a full General Corps 30,000 soldiers Comprised of 2 or more Divisions Normally commanded by Lieutenant General Division Up to 15,000 soldiers, often only 12,000 in Korea Comprised of 3 Regiments Commanded by Major General Regiment Up to 4,500 men, with affiliated units, such as artillery, armored, and medical units, included Comprised of 3 Battalions Commanded by Colonel Battalion 700 to 850 soldiers Comprised of 4 or more Companies Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Company 175 to 240 soldiers Comprised of 4 Platoons Commanded by Captain Platoon 45 or more soldiers Comprised of 4 Squads Commanded by Lieutenant Squad 10 or more soldiers Commanded by Staff Sargeant WEAPONS AND ARTILLERY M-1 Rifle A 9.5-lb. rifle, with an 8-round .30-caliber clip, the basic American infantry-weapon.
Carbine A short-barreled rifle with a .30-caliber 15-or 30-round clip with less range and accuracy.
Browning Automatic A two-man weapon—one Rifle, or BAR .30-caliber Machine Guns to feed ammunition, one to fire—that was both semi-and fully automatic, capable of firing 500 rounds a minute.
The .30-caliber machine guns were capable of sustained fire of 450 to goo rounds a minute.
The .50-caliber gun was mounted on trucks, tanks, and other vehicles. It fired 575 rounds per minute to a range of 2,000 yards.
Rocket Launcher The ineffective 2.36-inch or Bazooka launcher was replaced by 2.36-inch and 3.5-the 3.5-inch in 1950 even inch as the North Koreans drove south. The new bazooka was capable of penetrating thick armor plate; it had a range of up to 75 yards.
These front-loaded weapons fired shells at a high angle, able to reach into valleys and trenches, with a range of 1,800 to 4,000 yards.
Infantry Mortars .60mm .81mm 4.2mm Howitzers 105mm 155mm 8-inch Cannons with a range of 2 to 5 miles.
List of Maps
1. The Korean Peninsula before Hostilities. May 1950
2. First Encounter with Chinese Communist Forces November 1, 1950
3. The Unsan Engagement. November 1—2, 1950
4. The North Korean Invasion, June 25—28, 1950
5. Task Force Smith, July 5,1950
6. Height of North Korean Advance. Late August 1950
7. The Pusan Perimeter. August 4, 1950
8. The Naktong Bulge, August 31—September 1, 1950
9. The Inchon Landings. September 15, 1950
10. The Drive to Seoul. September 16—28,1950
11. UN Breakout and Invasion of North Korea
12. Chinese Attack at Chongchon River, on Second Division. November 25—26,1950
13. Chinese Assault on Love Company. November 25-26,1950
14. The Main Chinese Campaign in the West. November 25-28,1950
15. The Marine Sector. October—November 27, 1950
16. The Gauntlet, November 30, 1950
17. Breakout from Chosin Reservoir, November 27—December 9, 1950
18. High Tide of the Chinese Advance, January 1951
19. The Fight for the Central Corridor
20. The Twin Tunnels—Chipyongni-Wonju Area, January—February 1951
21. Battle of Twin Tunnels, January 31—February 1, 1951
22. Battle of Chipyongni, February 13—14,1951
23. McGee Hill. February 13-15. 1951
24. Task Force Crombez. February 14—15. 1951
25. The Korean Peninsula after the Cease-fire, July 27.
Note on Military Map Symbols
Every effort has been made to update the maps in The Coldest Winter to a modified version of the standard MIL-STD-2525B common warfighter symbology used by the U.S. Military. This is a comprehensive system that gives a trained interpreter instant information about a military unit's alignment, size, type, and identity.
In some cases, complete information was not available for specific military units, and rather than introduce inaccuracies, an easily legible shorthand has been applied. With clarity in mind, other modifications that aren't standard MIL-STD-2525B have been made to improve readability.
While MIL-STD-2525B accounts for hundreds of military designations, only a few are necessary to understand the units employed in the Korean War.
The name of the unit can be displayed to the left of the unit symbol, the name of the larger group it is part of appears to the right of the unit symbol, and the size of the unit is indicated by the marking at the top. For example, the symbol for the Third Battalion of the Eighth Cavalry is:
Unless otherwise noted, a solid black line represents U.N. positions or a defensive perimeter.
The Coldest Winter
Introduction
On JUNE 25, 1950, nearly seven divisions of elite North Korean troops, many of whom had fought for the Communist side in the Chinese civil war, crossed the border into South Korea, with the intention of conquering the entire South in three weeks. Some six months earlier, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in a colossal gaffe, had neglected to include South Korea in America's Asian defense perimeter, and the only American forces then in the country, part of a tiny advisory mission, were almost completely unprepared for the attack. In the early weeks of the invasion, the Communist offensive was a stunning success. Every bit of news from the battlefield was negative. In Washington, President Harry Truman and his top advisers debated the enemy's intentions. Was this, as they greatly feared, an assault ordered up by the Russians? Were the North Koreans nothing but Moscow's pawns? Or was it a feint, the first in a series of what might be provocative Communist moves around the world? They quickly decided to use United States, and in time United Nations, forces to draw a line against Communist aggression in Korea.
The Korean War would last three years, not three weeks, and it would be the most bitter kind of war, in which relatively small American and United Nations forces worked to neutralize the superior numbers of their adversaries by the use of vastly superior hardware and technology. It was a war fought on strikingly harsh terrain and often in ghastly weather, most particularly a numbing winter cold that often seemed to American troops an even greater enemy than the North Koreans or Chinese. "The century's nastiest little war," the military historian S. L. A.
Marshall called it. The Americans and their United Nations allies faced terrible, mountainous terrain, which worked against their advantage in hardware, most notably their armored vehicles, and offered caves and other forms of shelter to the enemy. "If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location to fight this damnable war politically and militarily, the unanimous choice would have been Korea," Secretary of State Acheson said years after it was over. "A sour war," Acheson's friend Averell Harriman said of it.
To call it an unwanted war on the part of the United States would be a vast understatement. Even the president who had ordered American troops into battle had not deigned to call it a war. From the start, Harry Truman had been careful to downplay the nature of the conflict because he was intent on limiting any sense of growing confrontation with the Soviet Union. One of the ways he tried to do that was by playing with the terminology. In the late afternoon of June 29, four days after the North Koreans had crossed the border, and even as he was sending Americans into battle, Truman met with the White House press corps. One of the reporters asked if America was actually at war. Truman answered that it was not, even though in fact it was. Then another reporter asked, "Would it be possible to call this a police action under the United Nations?" "Yes," answered Truman. "That is exactly what it amounts to." The implication that U.S. soldiers in Korea were more a police force than an army was a source of considerable bitterness to many of the men who went there. (A similar verbal delicacy would be employed four months later by Chinese leader Mao Zedong when he ordered hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers into battle, deciding, for reasons somewhat parallel to Truman's, to call them volunteers.)
So, out of a question casually asked and rather casually answered, were policies and even wars defined. The terminology Truman offered that day in some ways endured. Korea would not prove a great national war of unifying singular purpose, as World War II had been, nor would it, like Vietnam a generation later, divide and thus haunt the nation. It was simply a puzzling, gray, very distant conflict, a war that went on and on and on, seemingly without hope or resolution, about which most Americans, save the men who fought there and their immediate families, preferred to know as little as possible. Nearly thirty years after it was over, John Prine caught this spirit exactly in the song "Hello in There," where he sings eloquently of the tragic loss of a young man named Davy, and how he sacrificed himself for no good reason. Over half a century later, the war still remained largely outside American political and cultural consciousness. The Forgotten War was the apt title of one of the best books on it. Korea was a war that sometimes seemed to have been orphaned by history.
Many of the men who went to Korea harbored their own personal resentments over being sent there; some had already served once, during World War II, had been in the reserves, had been called away from their civilian jobs most reluctantly and told to serve in a war overseas for the second time within ten years, when all too many of their contemporaries had been called for neither. Others who had served in World War II and had decided to stay in the Army were embittered because of the pathetic state of U.S. forces when the North Koreans struck. Undermanned, poorly trained American units, with faulty, often outmoded equipment and surprisingly poor high-level command leadership, were an embarrassment. The drop-off between the strength of the Army they had known at the height of World War II, its sheer professionalism and muscularity, and the shabbiness of American forces as they existed at the beginning of the Korean War was nothing less than shocking to these men. The more experienced they were, the more disheartened and appalled they also were by the conditions under which they had to fight.
The worst aspect of the Korean War, wrote Lieutenant Colonel George Russell, a battalion commander with the Twenty-third Regiment of the Second Infantry Division, "was Korea itself." For an army that was so dependent on its industrial production and the resulting military hardware, especially tanks, it was the worst kind of terrain. Countries like Spain and Switzerland had difficult mountain ranges, but these soon opened onto flat areas where industrially powerful nations might send their tanks. To American eyes, however, as Russell put it, in Korea "on the other side of every mountain [was] another mountain." If there was a color to Korea, Russell claimed, "it came in all shades of brown"--and if there was a campaign ribbon given out for service there, he added, all the GIs who fought there would have bet on the color being brown.
Unlike Vietnam, the Korean War took place before television news came into its own and the United States became a communications society. In the days of Korea, television news shows were short, bland, and of marginal influence—fifteen minutes a night. Given the state of the technology, the footage from Korea, usually making it into the network newsrooms back in New York days late, rarely moved the nation. It was still largely a print war, reported in newspapers in black and white, and it remained black and white in the nation's consciousness. In the year 2004, while working on this book, I chanced into the Key West, Florida, library: on its shelves were some eighty-eight books on Vietnam and only four on Korea, which more or less sums up the war's fate in American memory. Arden Rowley, a young engineer with the Second Infantry Division who had spent two and a half years as a POW in a Chinese prison camp, noted somewhat bitterly that, from 2001 to 2002, each year marking a fiftieth anniversary of some major Korean battle, there were three major war movies made in America—Pearl Harbor, Windtalkers, and We Were Soldiers—the first two about World War II, the third about Vietnam; and if you added Saving Private Ryan, produced in 1998, the total was four. No film was made about Korea. The best known movie linked to Korea was 1962's The Manchurian Candidate, the story of an American POW who had been brainwashed in a Chinese prison camp and turned into a robotic assassin aimed by the Communists at an American presidential candidate.
To the degree that the Korean War ever had a niche in popular culture, it was through the Robert Altman antiwar movie (and then sitcom) M*A*S*H, about a mobile surgical hospital operating during that war. Ostensibly about Korea, the film was really about Vietnam, and came out in 1970, at the high-water mark of popular protest against that war. It was a time when Hollywood executives were still nervous about making an anti-Vietnam movie. As such Korea was a cover from the start for a movie about Vietnam; director Altman and the screenwriter, Ring Lardner, Jr., were focused on Vietnam but thought it was too sensitive a subject to be treated irreverently. Notably, the men and officers in the film wear the shaggy haircuts of the Vietnam years, not the crew cuts of the Korean era.
And so the true brutality of the war never really penetrated the American cultural consciousness. An estimated 33,000 Americans died in it. Another 105,000 were wounded. The South Koreans lost 415,000 killed and had 429,000 wounded. Both the Chinese and North Koreans were exceptionally secretive about their casualties, but American officials put their losses at roughly 1.5 million men killed. The Korean War momentarily turned the Cold War hot, heightening the already considerable (and mounting) tensions between the United States and the Communist world and deepening the chasm between the United States and Communist forces asserting themselves in Asia. Those tensions and divisions between the two sides in the bipolar struggle grew even more serious after American miscalculations brought China into the war. When it was all over and an armed truce ensued, both sides claimed victory, though the final division of the country was no different from the one that had existed when the war began. But the United States was not the same: its strategic vision of Asia had changed, and its domestic political equation had been greatly altered.
THE AMERICANS WHO fought in Korea often felt cut off from their countrymen, their sacrifices unappreciated, their faraway war of little importance in the eyes of contemporaries. It had none of the glory and legitimacy of World War II, so recently concluded, in which the entire country had seemed to share in one great purpose and every serviceman was seen to be an extension of the country's democratic spirit and the best of its values, and was so honored. Korea was a grinding, limited war. Nothing very good, the nation quickly decided, was going to come out of it. When servicemen returned from their tours, they found their neighbors generally not very interested in what they had seen and done. The subject of the war was quickly dispensed with in conversation. Events on the home front, promotions at the office, the purchase of a new house or a new car were more compelling subjects. In part this was because the news from Korea was almost always so grim. Even when the war went well, it did not really go very well; the possibility of a larger breakthrough seldom seemed near, much less anything approaching victory, especially once the Chinese entered the war in force in late November 1950. Soon after, the sardonic phrase for a stalemate, "die for a tie," became a favorite among the troops.
This vast disconnect between those who fought and the people at home, the sense that no matter the bravery they showed, or the validity of their cause, the soldiers of Korea had been granted a kand of second-class status compared to that of the men who had fought in previous wars, led to a great deal of quiet—and enduring—bitterness.
Part One
A Warning at Unsan
1
It WAS THE warning shot the American commander in the Far East, Douglas MacArthur, did not heed, the one that allowed a smaller war to become a larger war.
On October 20, 1950, the men of the U.S. First Cavalry Division entered Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Later, there was some controversy over who got there first, elements of the Fifth Regiment of the Cav or men from the South Korean First Division. The truth was the men of the Cav had been slowed because all the bridges in their sector going over the Taedong River had been blown, and so the South Korean troops, or ROKs (for Republic of Korea), beat them into the ruined city. That did not diminish their pleasure. To them, the capture of the city meant the war was almost over. Just to make sure everyone knew that of all American units in country, the Cav got there first, some troopers, armed with paint and brushes, painted the Cav logo all over town.
Small private celebrations were taking place throughout Pyongyang. Lieutenant Phil Peterson, forward observer with the Ninety-ninth Field Artillery Battalion, and his best buddy, Lieutenant Walt Mayo, both working with the Third Battalion of the Eighth Regiment of the Cav, had their own two-person celebration. They could not have been closer as friends, having been through so much together. Peterson thought it an unusual friendship, one only the Army could forge. Walt Mayo was a talented and sophisticated man who had gone to Boston College, where his father taught music, whereas Peterson was a product of Officer Candidate School, and his formal schooling had ended back in Morris, Minnesota, in the ninth grade because they were paying $5 a day for men to work in the fields. In Pyongyang Lieutenant Mayo had managed to procure a bottle of Russian bubbly from a large store of booze liberated from the Russian embassy, and they shared it, drinking the pseudo-champagne, so raw it made you gag, from the metal cups in their mess kits. Vile, but good, they decided.
Sergeant First Class Bill Richardson of Love Company of the Third Battalion felt a wave of relief sweep over him in Pyongyang. The war was virtually over, and the Cav might be getting out of Korea. He knew this, not just because of all the rumors, but because Company headquarters had called asking all men who had experience loading ships to notify their superiors. That was as sure a sign as any that they were going to ship out. Another sign that their days of hard fighting were over was that they had been told to turn in most of their ammo. All the rumors seeping out of the different headquarters must be true.
In his own mind Richardson was the old guy in his unit: almost everyone in his platoon now seemed new.
He often thought of the men he had started out with three months earlier, a period that seemed to have lasted longer than the preceding twenty-one years of his life. Some were dead, some wounded, and some missing in action. The only other soldier in Richardson's platoon who had been there from the start was his pal Staff Sergeant Jim Walsh, and Richardson sought him out. "Jesus, we did it, buddy, we made it all the way through," he said, and they congratulated each other, not quite believing their good luck. That mini-celebration took place on one of the last days of October. The very next day they were reissued their ammo and ordered north to save some South Korean outfit that was getting kicked around.
Still, the word was out: there was going to be a victory parade in Tokyo, and the Cav, because it had fought so well for so long in the Korean campaign, and because it was a favorite of Douglas MacArthur's, the overall commander, was going to lead it. They were supposed to have their yellow cavalry scarves back for the parade, and the word coming down was that they better be prepared to look parade-ground sharp, not battlefield grizzled: you couldn't, after all, march down the Ginza in filthy uniforms and filthy helmets. The men of the Cav were planning to strut a bit when they passed MacArthur's headquarters in the Dai Ichi Building. They deserved to strut a bit.
The mood in general among the American troops in Pyongyang just then was a combination of optimism and sheer exhaustion, emotional as well as physical. Betting pools were set up on when they would ship out. For some of the newest men, the replacements, who had only heard tales about how hard the fighting had been from the Pusan Perimeter to Pyongyang, there was relief that the worst of it was past. A young lieutenant named Ben Boyd from Clare-more, Oklahoma, who joined the Cav in Pyongyang, was given a platoon in Baker Company of the First Battalion. Boyd, who had graduated West Point only four years before, wanted this command badly, but he was made nervous by its recent history. "Lieutenant, do you know who you are in terms of this platoon?" one of the senior officers had asked. No. Boyd answered. "Well, Lieutenant, just so you don't get too cocky, you're the thirteenth platoon leader this unit has had since it's been in Korea." Boyd suddenly decided he didn't feel cocky at all.
On one of their last days in Pyongyang there was another positive sign. Bob Hope held a show there for the troops. Now, that was really something: the famous comedian, who had done show after show for the troops in World War II, telling his jokes in the North Korean capital. That night many of the men in the Cav gathered to hear Hope, and then, the next morning, with their extra ammo restored, they set out for a place just north of them called Unsan, to protect a ROK unit under fire. Surely, all they would have to do was clean up a small mess, the kind they believed South Korean soldiers were always getting into.
When they headed off, they were not particularly well prepared. Yes, they had gotten some of their ammo back, but there had been the question of uniforms. Should they take the ones they would wear on parade in Tokyo, or winter clothes? Somehow, the choice was made for the dressier ones, even though a Korean whiter this was to be one of the coldest in a hundred years—was fast approaching. And there was their mood: a sense on the part of officers as well as troops, even as they headed for areas perilously close to the Yalu River, the border between Korea and Chinese Manchuria, that they were out of harm's way. Many of them knew a little about the big meeting just two weeks earlier on Wake Island, between Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur, and the word filtering down was that MacArthur had promised to give Washington back an entire American division then being used in Korea and ticket it for Europe.
MacArthur himself had shown up in Pyongyang right after the First Cav arrived there. "Any celebrities here to greet me?" he had asked when he stepped off his plane. "Where is Kim Buck Tooth?" he joked, in mocking reference to Kim Il Sung, the seemingly defeated North Korean Communist leader. Then he asked anyone in the Cav who had been with the unit from the beginning to step forward. Of the roughly two hundred men assembled, four took that step; each had been wounded at some point. Then MacArthur got back on his plane for the flight back to Tokyo. He did not spend the night in Korea; in fact he did not spend the night there during the entire time he commanded.
AS MACARTHUR HEADED back to Tokyo, it was becoming increasingly clear to some officials in Washington that he was planning to send his troops farther and farther north. He was sure that the Chinese would not enter the war. His troops were encountering very little resistance at that point, and the North Koreans had been in full flight, so he was stretching his orders, which in this case were much fuzzier than they should have been. He obviously intended to go all the way to the Yalu. to China's border, brushing aside the step-by-step limits Washington thought it had imposed but was afraid of really imposing. A prohibition issued by the Joint Chiefs themselves against sending American troops to any province bordering China seemed not to slow MacArthur down at all. There was no real surprise in that: the only orders Douglas MacArthur had ever followed, it was believed, were his own. His confidence about what the vast Chinese armies everyone knew were poised just beyond the Yalu River would or would not do was far greater than that of top officials of the Truman administration. He had told the president at Wake Island that the Chinese would not enter the war. Besides, if they did, he had already boasted of his ability to turn their appearance into one of the great military slaughters in history. To MacArthur and the men on his staff, wonderfully removed from the Alaska-like temperatures and Alaska-like topography of this desolate part of the world, these were to be the final moments of a great victory march north that had begun with the amphibious Inchon landing behind North Korean lines. That had been a great success, perhaps the greatest triumph of a storied career, all the more so because the general had pulled it off against the opposition of much of Washington. Back in Washington most senior people, both civilian and military, were becoming more and more uneasy as MacArthur pushed north. They were not nearly as confident as the general about Chinese (or for that matter Russian) intentions, and they were made uneasy by the extreme vulnerability of the United Nations forces. But they realized that they had very little control over MacArthur himself—they seemed to fear him almost as much as they respected him.
If the balance now favored the UN, the first phase of the war, when the North Koreans had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel back in late June, had decidedly favored the Communists. They had gained victory after victory over weak and ill-prepared American and South Korean forces. But then more and better American troops had arrived, and MacArthur had pulled off his brilliant stroke at Inchon, landing his forces behind the North Korean lines. With that, the North Korean forces had unraveled, and once Seoul had been taken after some very hard fighting, the North Korean resistance had generally vanished. But in Washington many of the top people, though pleased by Inchon, were quite uneasy about the extra leverage it gave MacArthur. The Chinese had warned that they were going to enter the war, and yet MacArthur, difficult to deal with under the best of circumstances, had become even more godlike because of Inchon. He had said the Chinese would not come in, and he liked to think of himself as an expert on what he called the Oriental mind. But he had been wrong before, completely wrong, on Japanese intentions and abilities right before World War II. Later some of the senior people in Washington would look at the moment when the UN troops reached Pyongyang and before they went on to Unsan as the last chance to keep the war from escalating into something larger, a war with China.
NO LESS NERVOUS were some of the men and officers who were leading the drive north. For experienced officers making the trek as the temperature dropped alarmingly; and the terrain became more mountainous and forbidding, there was an eerie quality to the advance. Years later. General Paik Sun Yup, commander of the South Korean First Division (and considered by the Americans the best of the Korean commanders). remembered his own uneasiness as they moved forward without resistance. There was a sense of almost total isolation, as if they were too alone. At first, Paik, a veteran officer who had once fought with the Japanese Army, could not pinpoint what bothered him. Then it struck him: the absolute absence of people, the overwhelming silence that surrounded his troops. In the past, there had always been lots of refugees streaming south. Now the road was empty, as if something important were taking place, just beyond his view and his knowledge. Besides, it was getting colder all the time. Every day the temperature seemed to drop another few degrees.
Certain key intelligence officers were nervous as well. They kept getting small bits of information, from a variety of sources, that made them believe that the Chinese had already entered North Korean territory by late October—and in strength. Colonel Percy Thompson, G-2 (or intelligence officer) for First Corps, under which the Cav operated, and considered one of the ablest intelligence officers in Korea, was very pessimistic. He was quite sure of the Chinese presence, and he tried to warn his superiors. Unfortunately he found himself fighting a sense of euphoria that had permeated some of the upper ranks of the Cav and originated in Tokyo. Thompson had directly warned Colonel Hal Edson, commander of the Eighth Regiment of the First Cavalry Division, that he believed there was a formidable Chinese presence in the area, but Edson and others treated his warnings, he later noted, "with disbelief and indifference." In the days that followed, his daughter Barbara Thompson Eisenhower (married to Dwight Eisenhower's son John) remembered a dramatic change in the tone of her father's letters from Korea. It was as if he were writing to say farewell. "He was absolutely sure they were going to be overrun, and he was going to be killed," she later remembered.
Thompson had good reason to be uneasy. His early intelligence reads were quite accurate: the Chinese were already in country, waiting patiently in the mountains of Northern Korea for the ROKs and perhaps other UN units to extend their already strained logistical lines ever farther north. They had not intended to hit an American unit that early in the campaign. They wanted the Americans to be even farther north when they struck; and they knew the difficulty of the march north made their own job easier. "On to the Yalu," General Paik's soldiers had shouted in late October, "on to the Yalu!" But on October 25, the Chinese struck in force. It was like suddenly hitting a brick wall, Paik later Wrote. At first the ROK commanders had no idea what had happened. Paik's Fifteenth Regiment came to a complete halt under a withering barrage of mortar fire, after which the Twelfth Regiment on its left was hammered, and then his Eleventh Regiment, the division reserve, was hit on its flank and attacked from the rear. The enemy was clearly fighting with great skill. Paik thought it must be the Chinese. He reacted by reflex, and thereby probably saved most of his men. He immediately pulled the division back to the village of Unsan. It was, he later said, like a scene from an American Western, when the white folks, hit by Indians and badly outnumbered, circled the wagons. His division had walked into a giant ambush set by the Chinese. Some other ROK units were neither so lucky nor so well led.
That it was the Chinese Paik soon had no doubt. On the first day of battle, some troops from the Fifteenth Regiment had brought in a prisoner. Paik did the interrogation himself. The prisoner was about thirty-five and wore a thick, quilted, reversible winter uniform, khaki on one side, white on the other. It was, Paik wrote, "a simple but effective way to facilitate camouflage in snowy terrain." The prisoner also wore a cap, thick and heavy, with earmuffs of a sort they would soon become all too familiar with, and rubber sneakers. He was low-key but surprisingly forthcoming in the interrogation: he was a regular soldier in the Chinese Communist Army, from Guangdong province. He told Paik in passing that there were tens of thousands of Chinese in the nearby mountains. The entire First ROK Division might be trapped.
Paik immediately called his corps commander, Major General Frank (Shrimp) Milburn, and took the prisoner back to Milburn's headquarters. This time Milburn did the interrogating, while Paik interpreted. It went, he later wrote, like this:
"Where are you from?"
"I'm from South China."
"What's your unit?"
"The Thirty-ninth Army."
"What fighting have you done?"
"I fought in the Hainan Island battle [in the Chinese civil war]."
"Are you a Korean resident of China?"
"No, I'm Chinese."
Paik was absolutely sure that the prisoner was telling the truth. He was without pretension or evasiveness. Of the seriousness of his information there should also have been no doubt. It had long been known that the Chinese had at least three hundred thousand men poised just over the Yalu, ready to come in when they wanted. The only question was whether Beijing was bluffing when it warned the world of its intention to send Chinese troops into battle. Milburn immediately reported the new intelligence to Eighth Army headquarters. From there, it was sent on to Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, Douglas MacArthur's key intelligence chief, a man dedicated to the proposition that there were no Chinese in Korea, and that they were not going to come in, at least not in numbers large enough to matter. That was what his commander believed, and MacArthur's was the kind of headquarters where the G-2's job was first and foremost to prove that the commander was always right. The drive north to the Yalu, involving a limited number of American, South Korean, and other UN troops spread far too thinly over a vast expanse of mountain range, was premised on the idea of Chinese abstinence. If MacArthur's headquarters suddenly started reporting contact with significant Chinese forces, Washington, which had been watching somewhat passively from the sidelines, might bestir itself and demand a major role in the war, and Tokyo headquarters could lose control of its plan and not be able to go all the way to the Yalu. That was most decidedly not what MacArthur wanted to happen, and what MacArthur wanted was what Willoughby always made come true in his intelligence estimates. When the first reports about Chinese forces massing north of the Yalu came in, Willoughby had been typically dismissive. "Probably in the category of diplomatic blackmail," he reported. Now, with the first Chinese prisoner captured, an unusually talkative one at that, the word soon came back from Willoughby's headquarters: the prisoner was a Korean resident of China, who had volunteered to fight. The conclusion was bizarre, and it was deliberately aimed at minimizing the prisoner's significance; it meant that the prisoner did not know who he was, what his nationality was, what unit he was with, or how many fellow soldiers he had arrived with. It was a judgment that would have pleased the Chinese high command—it was exactly what they wanted the Americans to think. The more cavalier the Americans were, the greater the victory the Chinese were sure they were going to reap when they finally closed the trap.
In the coming weeks, American or ROK forces repeatedly took Chinese prisoners who identified their units and confirmed that they had crossed the Yalu with large numbers of their compatriots. Again and again, Willoughby downplayed the field intelligence. But if Division, Corps, Army, and Far East Command were now arguing over whether Chinese prisoners were in fact really Chinese, whether they were part of a division, an army, or an army group, and what this meant for the extremely vulnerable troops of the United Nations force, little of this reached down to the troops themselves. Typical were the men of the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, who had been convinced, as they moved from Pyongyang to Unsan, that they were pursuing the last ragtag remnants of the North Korean Army and would soon reach the Yalu itself and, if at all possible, piss in it as a personal symbol of triumph.
A very dangerous kind of euphoria had spread through the highest ranks of the Eighth Army, and no one reflected it more than MacArthur himself. As he, the most experienced officer in the American Army, was overwhelmingly confident of the road ahead, so were those in his command, including many of the senior people at Corps and Division. The higher you went in headquarters, especially in Tokyo, the stronger was the feeling that the war was over, and that the only job left was a certain amount of mopping up. There were many telltale signs of this overconfidence. On October 22, three days before the first Chinese prisoner was captured, Lieutenant General Walton Walker, commander of the Eighth Army, had requested authority from MacArthur to divert all further shipments of bulk-loaded ammunition from Korea to Japan. MacArthur approved the request and ordered six ships carrying 105-and 155mm artillery shells diverted to Hawaii. An army that had spent much of the previous four months starved for ammunition now felt it had too much.
In the Eighth Army sector, Major General Laurence (Dutch) Keiser, commander of the famed Second Infantry Division, summoned all his officers for a special staff meeting on October 25. Lieutenant Ralph Hockley, a young forward observer with the Thirty-seventh Field Artillery Battalion, remembered the date and the words precisely. The Second, which had been through much of the heaviest fighting in the war, was going to leave Korea, Keiser said. He was in a wonderful mood. "We're all going home and we're going home soon—before Christmas," he told his officers. "We have our orders." One of the officers asked where they were going. Keiser answered that he couldn't tell them, but it would be a place they would like. The speculation began: Tokyo, Hawaii, perhaps the States, or even some base in Europe.
THE MEN OF the Eighth Regiment of the First Cavalry Division reached Unsan without difficulty. Sergeant Herbert (Pappy) Miller took the news that they had to leave Pyongyang and head north to Unsan to steady the ROKs philosophically. Miller was an assistant platoon sergeant with Love Company of the Third Battalion of the Eighth Cav. He might have liked a few more days in Pyongyang, but these were orders and that was the business they were in, plugging holes. He had never understood why the brass had thought the ROKs could lead the way north in the first place. Miller wasn't worried about the Chinese coming in. What worried him was the cold, because they were still in summer-weight uniforms. Back at Pyongyang they had been told that winter clothes were on their way, already in the trucks, and supposed to arrive the next day, or the one after that. They had been hearing that for several days, but no winter uniforms had arrived. Because Miller's regiment had been in so many battles for so long, the green troops of July and August had, through attrition, been replaced by the green troops of October. He and his close friend Richard Hettinger, from Joplin, Missouri, another World War II veteran, had vowed to keep an eye on each other. There was a lot of talk now about going home by Christmas, but Miller had a somewhat more jaundiced view, which was that you were home when you got home.
Pappy Miller was from the small town of Pulaski, New York. He had served with the Forty-second Division in World War II, gone back to Pulaski, found little in the way of decent employment, and rejoined the Army in 1947. He was part of the Seventh Regiment of the Third Infantry Division, which had been detached and assigned to the First Cavalry, and he had only six months to go on a three-year enlistment when he was ordered to Korea in July 1950. In World War II, he had thought everything was always done right; and in Korea, damn near everything was done wrong. He and his company had arrived in country one morning in mid-July, had been rushed to the front lines near the village and key juncture of Taejon, and had been thrown into the line that first day. He had been through everything ever since, which was why his men called him Pappy, though he was only twenty-four years old.
There had been a lot of bravado on the way up to the line near Taejon that first day, young soldiers who knew battle only through war movies bragging that they were going to kick some Korean ass. Miller had stayed silent while they boasted: better to feel that way after the battle was over than before it began. But there was no point in telling them that—it was something you had to learn yourself. And that first battle had been terrible; they were ill-prepared and the North Koreans were very effective, very experienced troops. By the next day, the company had been reduced from about 160 men to 39. "We were damn near annihilated that very first night," Miller said. There was not much talk about kicking Korean ass after that.
It was not that the kids had fought badly. They just weren't ready, not right off the boat, and there were so many North Koreans. No matter how well you fought, there were always more. Always. They would slip behind you, cut off your avenue of retreat, and then they would hit you on the flanks. They were superb at that, Miller thought. The first wave or two would come at you with rifles, and right behind them were soldiers without rifles ready to pick up the weapons of those who had fallen and keep coming. Against an army with that many men, everyone, he thought, needed an automatic weapon. And the American equipment was terrible. Their basic infantry gear was often junk. Back at Fort Devens, they had been given old training rifles in terrible shape, poorly cared for, not worth a damn, which seemed to indicate how the nation felt about its peacetime army.
Once they got to Korea, there was never enough ammo. Miller remembered a bitter fight early in the war when someone had brought over an ammo box and it was all loose. They had to make their own clips. He had wondered what kind of army sent loose ammo to outnumbered infantrymen whose lives were hanging in the balance. It was amateur hour, he thought. The North Koreans were driving good tanks, Russian A-34S, and the sorry old World War II bazookas the Americans had couldn't penetrate their skins. In World War II, you always knew what your objective was and who was fighting on your left and right. In Korea, you were always fighting blind and were never sure of your flanks, because, likely as not, the ROKs were there.
On the day they reached Unsan, Miller took a patrol about five miles north of their base, and they came upon an old farmer, who told them that there were thousands of Chinese in the area, many of whom had arrived on horseback. There was a simplicity and a conviction to the old man that made Miller almost sure he was telling the truth. So he brought him back to his headquarters. But no one at Battalion headquarters seemed very interested. Chinese? Thousands and thousands of Chinese? No one had seen any Chinese. On horseback? That was absurd. So nothing came of it. Well, Miller thought, they were the intelligence experts. They ought to know.
Of the men in the Eighth Regiment, a young corporal named Lester Urban in Item Company, Third Battalion, was one of the first to sense the danger. He was a runner attached to Headquarters Company, which meant that he was around Battalion headquarters a lot and tended to pick up what the officers were saying. The seventeen-year-old Urban was only five-four, a mere one hundred pounds, too small for the football team at his high school back in the tiny town of Delbarton, West Virginia. His nickname in the Cav was Peanut, but he was tough and fast, and so he had been picked as runner. Given the sorry state of American wire and radio communications in Korea—the equipment rarely functioned properly—it was his job to deliver messages, oral and written, from Battalion to Company. It was exceptionally dangerous duty. Urban was proud of the fact that he knew how to do it and survive. If he made four or five trips to the same place in a day, he always varied his route and never got careless. Get predictable and get dead, he thought.
Urban had a sense of unease, because there were no American units on either flank, which maximized your vulnerability. But they had been on such a roll and there had been so little opposition in the last few weeks that he wasn't particularly worried, at least not until they reached Unsan. At Unsan, though, his regiment jutted out, in his words, like nothing so much as a sore thumb, and if you thought about it, then you realized that its three battalions were ill-placed and ill-spaced. The gaps between them, small on a map somewhere back at headquarters, were surprisingly wide if you had to run from one unit to another, as he did.
Urban was near Battalion headquarters on October 31 when Lieutenant Colonel Harold (Johnny) Johnson, until the previous week the battalion commander of Third Battalion of the Eighth Regiment—the 3/8—but recently promoted to the command of his own regiment, the Fifth Cav (also part of the First Cavalry Division), had driven up to check on his old outfit. One of the last things Johnson had done before they all left Pyongyang was hold a memorial service for the men of the Third Battalion who had been lost since the war began—some four hundred of them. He was joined at the service by the soldiers who had been there from the start, "a pitifully small remainder," as Johnson put it.
Johnny Johnson was more than admired, he was loved by most of the men in his old outfit. He had been with them from the day they arrived in country, and they felt he always made the right decisions in battle. He had an unusual sense of loyalty to the men under him, the kind of thing that ordinary soldiers notice and value when they grade an officer—and they were always grading officers, because their lives depended on it. They knew that Johnson had turned down a chance to be a regimental commander early in the fighting in order to stay with the battalion when it was new to combat, because he felt obligated to the men he had brought over.
He was a man who had already been through his own prolonged hell. Captured by the Japanese at Bataan at the start of World War II, he had managed to survive the Bataan Death March and more than three years as a prisoner. Generally, being a prisoner of war did not help an officer's career—this would be especially true in Korea, where the treatment of American prisoners by the Communists was unusually cruel and where, because of the brainwashing, some men had been damaged—but Johnson eventually ended up as chief of staff of the Army. "He was the best," Lester Urban said years later, "someone born to lead men. I think he was always thinking about what was good for us. Nothing ever got by him."
His experience on Bataan had made Johnson less trusting of conventional wisdom, and he knew more about the consequences of undue optimism than most officers. At that moment, he had the Fifth Cav positioned as a reserve force just a few miles south of his old unit, but he was becoming nervous, hearing talk of a large enemy force moving through the area, one that might cut the road, severing the Eighth Regiment from the rest of the division. On his own Johnson had driven north to check the situation out. On the ride, the same stillness that had bothered General Paik, the fact that there was nothing moving, upset Johnson too. Something like that, he later said, made the back of your neck prickle. When he finally reached his old battalion, he did not like what he saw at all. His replacement, Robert Ormond, was brand-new to his job and, to Johnson's eye, had dispersed the battalion poorly. Most of the men were positioned in the flat paddy land and not even very well dug in.
Watching the two officers meet, Urban sensed Johnson's distress. Johnson was not, as Urban saw it, a man to chew another officer out, but what he said to Ormond seemed surprisingly tough: "You've got to get these men out of the valley and up on the high ground! They're much too vulnerable where they are! You've got no defense if you're hit!" ("I thought he was going to whip Ormond's butt right then and there," Urban said years later.) Johnson assumed that Ormond would pick up on what he said and was appalled to discover later that his advice had been ignored. Nor was it just the Third Battalion that was poorly positioned. After the entire tragedy was over, many of the more senior officers would admit that the disposition of the entire Eighth Regiment had been very poorly done. The men were arranged as if they had no enemies to fear.
Lieutenant Hewlett (Reb) Rainer joined the regiment immediately after the Unsan battle, and one thing he decided to do was put together in his own mind what had happened. He was shocked at the way the regiment had been positioned: "The first thing was that the battalions could not really support each other. They were not properly linked up. The second thing was that you could drive a division or maybe two divisions of Chinese soldiers through them and the people spending the night there might not even know it. And that was the way the enemy fought—he came up and moved along the flanks, then encircled you, and then squeezed you," Rainer said. "I know Regiment hadn't gotten the word from higher headquarters about the Chinese, but still, they were very far north; it was Indian country; something was clearly up; and there was no point at all in being positioned as if you're back in the States on some kind of war game. To say it was careless—that was an understatement."
Sergeant Bill Richardson, who had a recoilless rifle section of a heavy weapons platoon in Love Company, remembered October 31, 1950, exceptionally well. His section had drawn duty at the south end of the Third Battalion's position, near a place called the Camel's Head Bend, part of a unit guarding a bridge where a small road crossed the Nammyon River. The day before, they had finally received a shipment of what the supply people claimed were winter clothes: some field jackets, fresh socks, and nothing much else. Richardson had told one of his men to distribute the jackets as best he could and skip the sergeants because there just weren't enough to go around. Years later, it infuriated him when he read that the men in his company had been caught asleep in their sleeping bags. It had been bad enough the way they were hit, but they sure as hell weren't in their sleeping bags, because they didn't have any. They had to create do-it-yourself sleeping bags as best they could, wrapping their blankets and shelter halves together.
That day, Richardson had been on duty at the bridge when Lieutenant Colonel Johnson stopped on his way back from the battalion command post. Johnson had wanted to talk, but he was also being somewhat guarded. "Look," he said, "we've had reports of a few minor roadblocks in the area. We think they're remnants of the North Korean Army, and they may be coming up the river bend heading towards you, going north." Richardson was not bothered by the news. He told Johnson ("my famous last words"), "Colonel, if they come up the river bend, they've had it." Then Johnson warned him to be careful and they shook hands. Johnson wished him good luck and Richardson thought to himself—because Johnson was driving through the countryside virtually alone-Colonel, sir, you're the one who needs the luck.
They had been together since training at Fort Devens back in Massachusetts. Richardson had served in Europe at the tail end of World War II, arriving in that war too late to see combat, only the devastation it had wrought. But in Korea, he would eventually be battle-tested far beyond the norm, in combat as difficult and dangerous as any American force had ever been exposed to. He had grown up in Philadelphia and his parents had been entertainers. He was a less than diligent student, and was sent in time to the local industrial school, which was the system's way of telling him to forget about college, in the unlikely event that the idea had ever entered his mind. His formal schooling ended in the ninth grade, and he joined the Army and found he liked it. He had been trained by skilled professionals, men who had been through the worst of World War II and passed on the little things that were most likely to save your life. In the early spring of 1950, Richardson was on the third extension of his enlistment in a period of post—World War II downsizing, and the Army had been trying to force him out. Then the North Koreans moved south, and overnight the people who ran the Army decided they wanted him to stay on.
So instead of mustering out at Fort Devens in late June, he became a charter member of the 3/8. Richardson remembered that immediately after the North Korean invasion, on June 26 or 27, Johnny Johnson had assembled the whole battalion at a post movie house, and the unit was so small that only the first two or three rows were filled. They were shown an infantry propaganda movie that ended with some soldiers being awarded Silver Stars and Bronze Stars. Johnson had told them, "Men, those of you who aren't wearing one of those will be in a few weeks." Richardson had thought he was crazy at the time. Within days men started arriving from every kind of outfit; MPs and cooks and supply men, all infantrymen now, enough to fill any movie theater. Then they shipped out.
Later, after they were hit by the Chinese, Richardson believed that Johnson had been trying to warn him of his concern that the Chinese were in the area and that the approaches to the Eighth Cav were open. Perhaps it was as much of a warning as you could give at a moment when to utter the magic word "Chinese" to an NCO might trigger panic. If Johnson had still been their battalion commander, Richardson was sure, he would have tightened up their positions, moved them to higher ground, and made sure that their firepower was mutually supportive and much more concentrated. Ormond might become a fine officer someday, Richardson thought, but this was neither the time nor the place to make your combat debut.
Major Filmore McAbee, the S-3, or operations chief, of the Third Battalion, like Johnny Johnson, was uneasy with the way the regiment was dispersed, but he would not get a chance to discuss it with Johnson for a long time, because he spent the next two and a half years in a prison camp. McAbee, an experienced combat officer from World War II, had been a company commander with the First Cav from the moment it arrived in country. He was considered an excellent combat leader, but at the moment the Chinese struck he was mainly a frustrated officer. Both Ormond and his exec, Major Veale Moriarty, were new in command, and their experience, as far as McAbee could tell, was primarily as staff men at the regimental level. They knew each other well and left McAbee, the more combat-tested officer, feeling crowded out. "I was the uneasy one, but I was the outsider," he would later say. He had tried to alert Ormond about the battalion's poor positioning, to no avail. Nor did he like the mood of the unit, and he blamed that on the senior officers: too many of the men were becoming far too careless and cocky. There was too much talk about where they were going after Korea. All they talked about was their next two stops—the Yalu and then home. Later, when McAbee found out that some Chinese prisoners had been captured and units like his, up on point, had not been warned, he felt that the decision at headquarters to conceal, if not suppress, this information was one of the most appalling acts he had ever heard of—a complete abdication of military responsibility. After he came to learn much more about Chinese military tactics, it struck him that his regiment, spread out as it was, had presented a particularly enticing target.
WHAT NONE OF them, including Ormond, knew was that, before the Chinese hit, a debate was under way at higher headquarters. The commander of the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, Colonel Hal Edson, wanted to move his troops back. His unit was too exposed, he believed—and there had been enough warnings by then to make a man pay attention. On November 1, when he woke up, the skies were thick with smoke from forest fires. Edson and others suspected that the fires were set by enemy troops eager to shield their movements from American air observation. Major General Hap Gay, the First Cav Division commander, who took the reports of the Chinese in the area more seriously than some of his superiors, was also becoming edgier by the hour. On that first day of November, he had set up his division command post, or CP, at Yongsan-dong, south of Unsan. For some time Gay had been disturbed by the way his division was being split up, with different battalions being shipped off to other divisions, based on the whims of the people at Corps, and not on the integrity of the division itself. He particularly did not like the way the Eighth Regiment was sticking out so nakedly, open to the enemy on all sides.
His aide, Lieutenant William West, believed that Gay had been smoldering all along over the way the Army had been handling the Korean War. Gay, General George Patton's chief of staff in World War II, believed that he had been taught how to do things right and how not to do things wrong, and in Korea they had been doing things wrong from the start. He had been shocked by the terrible state of the Army when the war began; and bothered as well by MacArthur's initial failure to respect the ability of the enemy, his belief that he could handle the North Koreans, as he had said, "with one hand tied behind my back." Gay seemed to think his superiors in Tokyo had little feel for the enemy, or for the terrain, and surprisingly little curiosity about either. "Those goddamn people don't have their feet on the ground—they're living in a goddamn dream world," he told West once after he left MacArthur's headquarters. Nothing angered him more, however, than the way the most talented officers, the kind of men he badly wanted as battalion commanders, always seemed to be siphoned off to staff jobs at MacArthur's headquarters. He was appalled as well by how much larger it had grown than comparable headquarters in the previous war. He would mutter about how Third Army headquarters back in 1945 had only a few hundred officers to deal with thousands of men in the field, but how Tokyo in this war had thousands of men at headquarters to support hundreds of men in the field. There was an officer whose main job, it seemed, was just to fly in from Tokyo to Gay's headquarters periodically to see what he needed. At one point, Gay gave him a list of officers from World War II then assigned to Tokyo whom Gay wanted to command his troops. When the officer next returned, Gay asked where his potential battalion commanders were. "General MacArthur says they're too valuable to be spared," the officer replied.
"Jesus Christ, what in the hell is more valuable than battle-tested officers leading American troops in combat?" Gay muttered.
He was bothered as well by all the talk about being home by Christmas. "Which Christmas—this year or next?" he would say. "That's stupid talk. All it does is get the troops too excited about going home, and they get careless." Now, fearing the possibility that one of his regiments might soon be encircled, he was pushing hard to pull it back and consolidate the division. But his superior, First Corps commander Frank Milburn, was reluctant to do it. The Army did not like to use the word "retreat" unless it had to; the proper phrase was "retrograde movement"—and Milburn did not want to make a retrograde movement, not after almost six weeks of steady advances and, above all, not with the mounting pressure coming in from MacArthur's headquarters to go all the way to the Yalu as quickly as possible. Gay, West knew, was becoming more and more fearful about losing a regiment to an enemy that Tokyo still insisted did not exist. There was a fault line in this war. On one side was the battlefield reality and the dangers facing the troops themselves, and, on the other side, the world of illusion that existed in Tokyo and from which all these euphoric orders emanated. The fault line often fell between Corps and Division, with Corps feeling the heat from the general in Tokyo, and Division sensing the vulnerability of a regiment of badly exposed troops. More than once when there was still time to move the Eighth Regiment back, Milburn refused to give the order.
On the afternoon of November 1, Hap Gay was in his CP with Brigadier General Charles Palmer, his artillery commander, when a radio report from an observer in an L-5 spotter plane caught their attention: "This is the strangest sight I have ever seen. There are two large columns of enemy infantry moving southeast over the trails in the vicinity of Myongdang-dong and Yonghung-dong. Our shells are landing right in their columns and they keep coming." Those were two tiny villages five or six air miles from Unsan. Palmer immediately ordered additional artillery units to start firing, and Gay nervously called First Corps, once again requesting permission to pull the entire Eighth Cav several miles south of Unsan. His request was again denied.
With that was lost the last real chance to save the Eighth Cavalry and especially its Third Battalion. In some ways, the battle that followed was over almost before it began. Two divisions of elite Chinese Communist regulars, among the most experienced men in their army, were about to strike units of an elite American division that was ill-prepared and ill-positioned for the collision, and commanded in too many instances by men who believed the Korean War was essentially over.
UNITS OF THE Fifth Cavalry under Johnny Johnson, which had been moving north toward Unsan on a relief mission, soon ran into a major Chinese roadblock. Not only would they not be able to help the Eighth Cavalry, but it was touch and go whether they could extricate themselves from a vicious battle without being destroyed. As Roy Appleman, an exceptionally careful historian of the Korean War, has pointed out, by nightfall of November l, the Eighth Cav was encircled on three sides by the Chinese forces. Only on its east, if the Fifteenth ROK Regiment actually stayed in place and fought, might it have any protection.
2. FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH CHINESE COMMUNIST FORCES, NOVEMBER 1, l950
Lieutenant Ben Boyd was the new platoon leader in Baker Company of the Eighth Cavalry's First Battalion. The First Battalion—with its attached unit of tanks and artillery, in reality a battalion task force—was the most exposed of the regiment's three battalions, positioned about four hundred yards north of the town of Unsan. Boyd's battalion commander, Jack Millikin, Jr., had been his tactical officer at West Point, and Boyd thought him a good, steady man. As far as Boyd knew, their battalion was up there alone—they had been the first of the three battalions out of Pyongyang, and he had no idea whether the rest of the regiment was following. That first afternoon, right after they arrived, they registered their mortars on some surrounding targets, and there were even brief exchanges of fire with the enemy, but the action was light, and everyone had assumed it was North Korean stragglers. That night, though, Boyd was called over by his company commander, who had just been briefed at Battalion. The word Boyd got was: "There are twenty thousand laundrymen in the area." Boyd knew what that meant—twenty thousand Chinese near them.
Then they heard musical instruments, like weird Asian bagpipes. Some of the officers thought for a moment that a British brigade was arriving to help them out. But it was not bagpipes; instead it was an eerie, very foreign sound, perhaps bugles and flutes, a sound many of them would remember for the rest of their lives. It was the sound they would come to recognize as the Chinese about to enter battle, signaling to one another by musical instrument what they were doing, and deliberately striking fear into their enemy as well. Boyd believed his men were in decent positions, though they were not a full platoon in his mind. Nearly half of them were KATUSAs, Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army, poorly trained Korean soldiers attached to American units who, most American officers believed, could not be relied on if there was a serious fight. They were there to beef up American units, to make the UN forces look larger on paper, if not in battle, than they really were. It was an experiment that no one liked, not the company commanders, not the American troops who fought alongside the Koreans but could not communicate with them, and certainly not the KATUSAs themselves, who more often than not gave every sign of wanting very badly to be almost anywhere else.
At roughly 10:30 P.M., the Chinese struck. It was stunning how quickly something could fall apart, Boyd thought. The American units were so thinly positioned that the Chinese seemed to race right through their fragile lines, almost like a track meet, some of the men later said. What had once been a well-organized battalion CP (command post) quickly disintegrated. Some of the survivors from different platoons tried to form a makeshift last-second perimeter, but they were quickly overpowered. There were wounded everywhere. Millikin was handling the growing chaos as best he could, Boyd thought, trying to put together a convoy with about ten deuce-and-a-half trucks and loading as many wounded as possible onto them. At that moment, Boyd ran into Captain Emil Kapaun, an Army chaplain who was tending to a number of wounded. Boyd offered to assign the priest to one of the trucks, but Father Kapaun refused. He planned to stay with the wounded men who would not be able to get out on their own. They would have to surrender, he was sure, but he would do all he could to offer the wounded some modest protection.
The battalion had two tanks, and when the convoy finally took off, it was with Millikin aboard the lead tank and the other tank bringing up the rear with Boyd on top of it. About a mile south of Unsan, the road split, one branch veering southeast, the other in a southwesterly direction, through the edge of the Third Battalion position and over the bridge that Bill Richardson and his weapons section were guarding. Millikin blindly headed them southeast. That any of the men made it out at all came from that choice.
The Chinese had set up a formidable force on both sides of the road, waiting to ambush them. It was hard to measure distance or time in those moments when the enemy was striking with such force, but Boyd thought his convoy got about five or six hundred yards down the road before the Chinese opened up. Their firepower was overwhelming, and the convoy, with so many wounded, had almost no means of fighting back. In the confusion—the vehicles all had their lights off—the driver of Boyd's tank panicked and began to rotate his turret wildly. The dozen or so men on top were all knocked off, and Boyd promptly found himself sprawled in a ditch. Later, he would decide that he survived only by the grace of God.
He could hear the Chinese approaching. His only chance was to play dead. Soon, they started beating on him with their rifle butts and kicking him. Luckily, no one used a bayonet. Finally, they rummaged through his pockets, took his watch and his ring, and left. He waited for what seemed an eternity, hours at least, and then slowly started to crawl away, totally disoriented, suffering from a concussion, among other wounds. In the distance, he could hear artillery fire, and, assuming it was the Americans, he headed that way. He hobbled across a stream, probably the Nammyon, and discovered that his leg was in terrible pain. He realized that he had been badly burned, probably from the white phosphorous the Chinese were firing.
Boyd moved cautiously in the next few days, at night, hiding as best he could during the day. He was out there at least a week, maybe ten days, trying to work his way back to American lines, in constant pain and voraciously hungry. He was helped by one Korean farmer, who fed him and, using primitive hand signals, directed him toward the American positions. He was sure he would not have made it without the farmer's help. Around November 15, after a trek of almost two weeks, Boyd reached an American unit. He was immediately sent to a series of hospitals—his burns were serious indeed. His Korean War was over. He was one of the lucky ones. He had no idea how many of his platoon had died, only that the company commander had been killed. He never saw any of them again.
AT THE SOUTHERN part of the Eighth Regiment's defenses, at the moment just before the Chinese hit, Bill Richardson of Love Company was still guarding his concrete bridge, a span of about ninety feet over what was alleged to be a river but was essentially a dry creek. He and most of his section were in the flatlands on the north side of the bridge, which itself was technically the southernmost position of the regiment. The battalion headquarters was about 500 yards to the north, and the rest of Love Company about 350 yards to the west. When he first noticed noises coming from a hill just south of them, Richardson asked his pal Jim Walsh, the only other experienced man in the squad, "You hear what I'm hearing?" Richardson knew something was going on out there, but he couldn't spare even the four or five men necessary for a recon. He put in a call to Company headquarters hoping to get some help. It took three tries before Company even picked up. He was furious—how could the people there be so casual? Company then called Battalion, and Battalion finally sent one soldier over from its intelligence and recon section. He came ambling down the road with no sense of urgency at all. Richardson explained the mission, and the soldier disappeared, only to reappear a while later with a squad of four men, who went up the hill making enough noise, Richardson thought, for an entire division.
When the recon patrol returned—just as noisily—the lead soldier said, "There's no one up there." But one of his men was carrying an entrenching tool and a pair of padded gloves that were different from any gloves Richardson had seen so far. More important, they were dry, which, given all the frost and fog, meant they had been left there recently. "Well," the soldier finally admitted, "there are some foxholes, but they've obviously been there a long time." Richardson was quietly furious. The importance of the dry gloves was the kind of thing you were supposed to understand instantly, even if you weren't from the S-2, or a battalion's intelligence section. Richardson insisted he take the gloves and the tool to his boss and tell him that something might be up. Obviously irritated, the soldier said, "Look, if you don't like what we did, then get your own ass up there."
All of this was making Richardson edgier by the minute. Some time after ten that night, he got a call to send some men to Battalion for a recon patrol. That stretched his limits. He had only about fifteen men, and five were KATUSAs, none of whom could speak English. Richardson decided to keep the KATUSAs and send Walsh, his best man, up there with three other Americans. When they reached Battalion, Richardson found out later, they were told just to dig some prone shelters and get some rest. It was still quiet in Richardson's sector, but both the First and the Second Battalions were already being hammered.
3. THE UNSAN ENGAGEMENT. NOVEMBER 1-2, 1950
Then, about one-thirty in the morning of November 2, it all exploded. The Chinese hit the Third Battalion of the Eighth Cav. Years later, Richardson read that they had slipped into the area wearing captured ROK uniforms, but he did not believe it. There was no need for disguise. They just poured in from the east, which was completely open. One moment the battalion headquarters was a center of American military activity; the next, it had been completely overrun and was filled with Chinese. At the same time, about 350 yards away on Richardson's left, the Chinese hit Love Company and overran it. That meant that four Chinese machine guns could swing their fire back and forth across Richardson's position, tearing it to pieces.
From the south, a young lieutenant named Robert Kies, a platoon leader in Love Company of the Third Battalion, new to the unit, and Richardson's friend Pappy Miller, the assistant platoon sergeant who had picked up warnings about the Chinese the moment he arrived in Unsan, were pulling back from a position two or three hills to the southeast of Richardson, a place called Hill 904. Richardson barely knew Kies—the Cav went through platoon leaders very quickly—but Kies arrived eager to use Richardson's landline phone to try to find out what was going on.
Because of the pathetic state of their communications, Kies and his men were completely cut off. By then Richardson's landline phone was out—the Chinese, Kies decided, had already cut the wires. Kies decided to take his men up the road to Battalion. Miller shook Richardson's hand and wished him good luck. ("The next time I saw him was fifty-two years later at a Cav reunion," Miller said.) By that time, Richardson couldn't even communicate with his own company. He had sent one of his men across the 350-yard gap to Love Company, but the soldier had been hit and had not been able to make it through. He had crawled back toward Richardson, apologizing repeatedly as he got near: "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I can't make it." When Richardson reached him and opened his jacket, it was completely soaked with blood; the man died in his arms. At that moment, the worst thing, Richardson would recall, was that he could not even remember the soldier's name.
The bridge they were guarding was now open to the Chinese. Richardson took two or three of his remaining men and started north toward Battalion. He was in a ditch alongside the road when he ran into two soldiers coming the other way, part of the team he had sent off with Walsh earlier. "The rest of the squad is all dead! Walsh is dead!" one of the men said. By chance, the soldier added, he himself had gone to take a leak just when the Chinese broke in and shot the others while they were just waiting there. Otherwise he would be dead too. Just a few days earlier Richardson and Walsh, his oldest friend in the unit, had reached Pyongyang and congratulated each other on making it through that far. Now Walsh was dead, and their regiment was being destroyed.
FOR MAJOR FILMORE MCABEE, the Third Battalion S-3, the worst thing was the chaos and confusion. They had no idea who had hit them or with what size force. "Was it ten thousand or was it a hundred or a thousand? Were they Chinese or were they Korean?" he said years later. Soon, there were two other paramount questions: Who was in charge of the American units and what were their orders? Ormond, the battalion commander, had tried to go north to the village of Unsan to check out their positions, had been severely wounded, and was already dying or dead. McAbee never saw him again. Veale Moriarty, the exec officer, went off reconnoitering and McAbee never saw him again either. He remained bitter about Moriarty's disappearance for years afterward—the exec had made it out, but McAbee believed it was his job to stay and help hold the battalion together.
McAbee headed south, to find out what was happening. Along the way, he was overtaken by three Chinese soldiers—he guessed who they were instantly by their padded, quilted jackets and the earflaps on their hats. They seemed as puzzled to stumble upon him as he was them. They raised their rifles and pointed them at him. Communication was impossible, so he just pointed up the road, and remarkably enough, they headed off in that direction without shooting him. Only then did his luck begin to run out. He was hit twice, apparently by Chinese soldiers positioned some distance from the road, whom he never saw. The first bullet struck the side of his head. Then another bullet shattered his shoulder blade and he sensed that it was over: he was bleeding heavily from the head wound and growing weaker by the minute. He knew the terrible cold worked against him, and he was sure he was going to die there when an American soldier found him and somehow guided him back to Battalion headquarters.
LIEUTENANT KIES, WHO had been cut off since he left Richardson at the bridge, was moving his platoon toward Battalion headquarters when the Chinese opened up with machine guns and mortars. He tried to get his platoon to a ditch that ran along the side of the road, but they were caught between the Chinese and the American forces and losing a lot of men.
"Lieutenant, I think we've got gooks all around us," Sergeant Luther Wise, one of his squad leaders, said. Just then a mortar round came in and killed Wise and wounded Kies. The lieutenant found that he could not lift one of his arms. But he kept moving what remained of his platoon toward the battalion command post. In the chaos he almost stumbled into a Chinese officer, but saw him first, and quickly moved his men back, and eventually brought them to what was the new CP, which was in effect a battalion aid station. There was a Chinese machine gun that had fairly good coverage of their path back to the battalion, but Kies had checked the way the Chinese gunner fired—a pause and a burst, a pause and a burst, exact increments of firing each time—and it was like breaking a code. He timed each burst and moved his men across in small groups during the pauses. Kies thought they might have gotten some protection from the Chinese machine gun, because the Chinese bodies were beginning to pile up, limiting the gunner's vision. By the time they reached the aid station, Kies estimated that he had only about twelve of the original twenty-eight men in his platoon left. They had been understrength from the start because of the shortage of replacements; now they were more like a squad. He was trying to help Dr. Clarence Anderson, the battalion surgeon, when a grenade landed near his feet, and he was wounded again, what turned out to be four breaks in one leg and some wounds in the other. Even as the grenade landed, a mortar round came in and killed five of the men left in Kies's platoon who could still fight. Kies was absolutely sure that not many more men were going to get out—certainly not him, because he couldn't move either leg.
The battalion command post was a disaster. Men dazed, wounded, completely numbed by what had happened were straggling in from different positions. When Bill Richardson finally reached it, he was shocked by the sheer chaos he found. Americans were mixed in with Chinese, who seemed unable to comprehend their victory, as if they had succeeded beyond their expectations. Now, having taken the CP, it was as if they had no idea what to do next. You could pass a Chinese soldier right in front of the CP at that moment and he would do nothing. A medic told Richardson they had created a small position nearby where they were protecting about forty wounded men. Dr. Anderson was there, along with Father Kapaun. But there was a serious question of who was in charge. Ormond and McAbee were both seriously wounded, and no one knew where Moriarty was. New leadership would have to rise to the surface on its own, Richardson thought.
He decided he would go back to Love Company and see if there were any other men he could help bring back. He started retracing his steps, shouting out his name so his own men wouldn't shoot him. He found Lieutenant Paul Bromser, the commander of Love Company, badly shot up, but the exec, Lieutenant Frederick Giroux, though wounded, was still functioning. It had been awful, Giroux said. The Chinese had swept right through them. Perhaps only 25 of the company's 180 men were left. "Can you get them out?" Giroux asked, and Richardson replied, "Yes, but not over the bridge." He would have to make his own return route, zigzagging back and forth. On the way he ran into two Chinese soldiers with bags of grenades, and shot one. A grenade went off, and then a Chinese machine gun opened up, panicking some of Richardson's men. As they neared the makeshift battalion perimeter, they spotted two American tanks, and, instinctively, some of the men climbed on—Americans always moved to their vehicles, Richardson thought, as if the vehicles could save them. He was sure the Chinese would go after the tanks first. So he and Giroux talked most of the men off.
The perimeter they were creating, about two hundred yards in diameter, abutted the old battalion CP. They dug quickly into the soft loam the river had left behind, with the three tanks inside giving them a little more firepower and some fragile radio links to other units. (Only the tank radios were working by then.) They took fire all the rest of that first night, but miraculously the Chinese, who seemed to have it in their power to overrun them at any point, never made another all-out attack. Probably, Richardson thought, the Chinese were as confused as the Americans on that first night, but their confusion, he remembered, did not last into the second day. When the dawn broke, the Americans relaxed slightly. They had outlasted the first attack. The enemy in this war rarely struck during the day, and even if this was their first battle with the Chinese, they doubted that they would be very different from the Koreans. There was still some vestige of hope. One of the last radio messages they had received was that help was on its way. At one point, Chaplain Kapaun, a man remembered for his remarkable bravery and selflessness (and who would be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism), asked Richardson how he was doing. "Do you know what day it is?" the chaplain wondered. Richardson said he had no idea. "It's All Souls' Day."
"Father," Richardson answered, "someone better be looking out for our souls because we really need it now."
"Well, He is, He is," the chaplain replied.
FIRST LIEUTENANT PHIL PETERSON, who had shared that bottle of Communist bubbly with Walt Mayo in Pyongyang, was an artillery forward observer with C Battery of the Ninety-ninth Field Artillery Battalion, which supported the Third Battalion of the Eighth Regiment and had been attached to King Company of the Third, which was set up near the battalion CP. Fifty years later, he believed he could still quote almost to the word how the people at Battalion had explained the reports of Chinese being in the area in those hours before the enemy struck: "It is assumed that these Chinese are here to protect the North Korean electrical generators [up along the Yalu], and you are not to fire on them unless they fire on you. No forward observer is to call in any fire on any electrical installation."