in THOSE SMALL units that had been hit so hard, the men believed that the longer they fought, the more time they were buying for their battalions and regiments, and most of all for the division. But were the people at Division and Corps listening? Lieutenant Charley Heath, who was in the regiment's Headquarters Company, always remembered the fury in the voice of Colonel Peploe as he talked with someone at higher headquarters at least two days after the big attack began: "Yes, goddamnit, they had been hit by Chinese, and yes, he damn well knew the difference between a Chinaman and a Korean and did any of them want to leave Division and come down to his headquarters with an interpreter and check on the accuracy of what he was saying because he had some prisoners, because he would damn well like to give them a tour proving they were Chinese, and even if they didn't have an interpreter, he had a hell of a lot of very dead Chinese to prove he was right." Heath had never seen an angrier officer. "Jesus Christ," Peploe said when he put the phone down. "You'd think those goddamn people at Division would give me credit for knowing a Chinaman when I see one."

SAM MACE'S BELIEF that Division equaled safety turned out to be a great illusion. The worst thing about Division headquarters was the fear in the air. Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield, Mace believed, and it could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse, it was contagious and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear-suppression business; great ones could take the undertow of fear, the knowledge that it was always there, and make it an asset; weaker commanders tended to let it fester. The very same men who will fight bravely under one commander will cut and run under another who projects his own fear. Great commanders are not just men gifted in making wise tactical moves, they are men who give out a sense of confidence, that it can be done, that it is their duty and their privilege to fight on that given day. Thus does the strength of any unit ideally feed down, from top to bottom. The commander generates strength in the officers immediately underneath him, and it works all the way down the chain of command.

In Kunuri, it was as if no one was in command. The men who were supposed to be in charge seemed lost and dazed. Dutch Keiser, the division commander, as far as Mace's commander, Jim Hinton, could tell, had been paralyzed by the Chinese attack. Even before that moment, he had been a kind of ghost commander, preferring to let the assistant division commander, Brigadier General Sladen Bradley, be the more visible officer, the one who visited the troops. The degree to which Keiser deferred to Bradley, some officers thought, was a reflection that Keiser himself knew that it was all past him, and that he was too old to be commanding in this war, in this cold, against this enemy. As the division shattered, Keiser had no earthly idea of how to put it back together.

His was the ultimate nightmare for a commander of a large unit: the Chinese were pressing in on him and he was now in danger of losing his entire division. The general belief in the division was that he and the other senior officers had already squandered three days in grasping the extent of the Chinese attack. He and the men above him had been very slow to understand that this was the big one, that as many as twenty Chinese divisions might be operating in the western sector. By November 29, though, everyone in Kunuri knew that the Chinese were drawing closer by the hour, that it was like a noose being tightened around their collective necks, and that the clock favored the Chinese, because there were obviously so many of them, and because they would be able to block the avenues of retreat.

This then was going to be the most important decision of Reiser's career. They had been fighting the Chinese for four and in some cases five days, and the state of their military intelligence was pathetic. They did not seem to know where the Chinese were coming from or how many of them there were. Worse, no one seemed to be sure what the main route out should be.

Jim Hinton agreed with Mace—the confusion at headquarters seemed like a kind of virus. The division had a number of light spotter planes, but as far as Hinton could tell, they had not been up. Mace was shocked when he quickly realized that the entire division was now in jeopardy and that they were on their own. He was sure there was little chance of any relief mission reaching them. There was talk about a British relief column on its way to help them, but he had his doubts. Even in the worst days of the Battle of the Bulge, when he had shivered in the terrible cold at Bastogne and the Germans had pounded away with their heavy artillery, he had believed that someone was on the way. They were so good back then, so damn efficient and powerful, that when things went wrong, they soon went right. But he had no such feeling now. Dutch Keiser was bad enough, but Mace was convinced that the real problem was with the higher headquarters, and that the paralysis worked downward. From then on, for the rest of his life, Mace refused to speak of Douglas MacArthur by name. Instead he simply called him, in letters and articles for veterans' groups, and in conversation, the Big Ego.

If there was a fault line in Korea in those critical hours, it fell between those in the field being punished so harshly and those in Tokyo reluctant to admit that they had blundered into a catastrophic trap. In the field that fault line ran between the senior officers in Division, trying however inadequately to represent the dangers to its men, and Corps, still responding to the hopes and vanities of commanders in Tokyo. Whatever Dutch Reiser's faults—and he was a completely inadequate leader—Corps was worse.

At 4:30 P.M. on the twenty-ninth, with darkness falling, Dutch Keiser radioed to Corps that his situation at Kunuri was perilous. The Chinese were becoming more audacious all the time, now beginning to fight even in the daylight. But the people in the command structure just above him, at Ninth Corps, were even weaker than he was, and may have been even more culpable for what happened in those critical two days, when they had the last, best chance to get the division out largely undamaged. The corps commander, John Coulter, was frozen in place and very slow to respond to the catastrophe now happening except when it came to moving his own headquarters farther south, to Pyongyang. Corps was now in danger of losing an entire division, and Coulter, a weak commander, almost a figurehead and a pawn of Tokyo, was overwhelmed. His sources of information were poor, he had little sense of the battlefield as it existed, and he was far too fearful of what were by then hopelessly outmoded orders from headquarters in Tokyo. More than anything else he seemed to fear what Tokyo thought. Corps should have been a source of wisdom and guidance and, if need be, additional troops. If anything, most of what guidance Corps gave in those vitally important hours proved flat-out wTong—it was a negative rather than a positive force.

Major General John Coulter, known as Nervous John to much of his staff, was the most timid of the three corps commanders. That he was not up to the job was not exactly a secret. When Matt Ridgway took over the command of the Eighth Army a month later, Coulter was the first corps commander relieved, though the relief was masked as a promotion, for generals were always to be protected, and a star, his third, was added along with the Distinguished Service Medal. He was then given a staff job, as Ridgway's liaison officer with the South Koreans and Syngman Rhee.

He had always been MacArthur's man. He had graduated from the West Texas Military Academy in San Antonio in 1911, MacArthur's old pre—West Point school, had served in Mexico with General Jack Pershing before World War I, then with MacArthur's Forty-second, or Rainbow, Division during the war, and had been a battalion commander at St. Mihiel. In World War II, he had commanded the Eighty-fifth Division, which had fought alongside Ned Almond's Ninety-second Division in Italy. In 1948, MacArthur brought Coulter to the Far East as commander of the U.S. Seventh Division; he then served as deputy commander of U.S. forces in Korea and commander of First Corps in Japan. He returned briefly to the United States, but with the North Korean invasion, MacArthur brought him back to Korea and gave him First Corps again, officially under Walker, but in effect he was a MacArthur-Almond man in Walker's upper command structure.

Walker had been unimpressed with the way Coulter had used First Corps during the Naktong fighting, but it was always difficult to deal with a subordinate you did not like who happened to be a favorite of your superior officer. Walker dealt with his problem by giving First Corps to Shrimp Milburn at the time of Inchon. That meant Coulter was essentially in reserve during the march north—his new command, Ninth Corps, did not even become operational until September 16 and was then put in charge of mopping-up operations.

In the Army it is the responsibility of a commander to give primary attention to any unit that is endangered. Of all the American units in the Eighth Army still engaged in the fighting on the western side of the peninsula by November 30, only the Second Division was in serious trouble. Coulter was the man who had access to additional forces and had the right to ask his superior commander, Walton Walker, for reinforcements if necessary^-.

When the Chinese attack had begun, the original attitude back at Corps had been that this was serious but not apocalyptic. American forces were in trouble, it was believed, only because the ROKs had folded, thereby momentarily placing some American units in jeopardy. It was, Coulter had said, "a local problem." By November 27, more than two days into it, the people at Division were becoming frustrated with orders from Corps calling for bite-sized pullbacks, in effect minor retreats that did not allow^- regiments or battalions to break off from the Chinese, regroup, and consolidate at more advantageous places. They were in effect moving from positions that were vulnerable to other positions that were no less vulnerable. On the morning of the thirtieth, Keiser had been engaged in a prolonged debate with Corps for at least three days. He felt his orders were inadequate, retrograde movements that were four or five miles at best. He wanted to pull the division farther back and then regroup. He had argued, for example, with an earlier order to pull back to Won-ni, which was only a mile and a half north of Kunuri. It was a half-baked move, Keiser had said, dangerous to execute without granting his division any real additional security. His division would be just as endangered, just as far out on a limb, once it got to Won-ni.

What that order reflected was the vast distance that by then existed between reality on the battlefield and the illusions that existed in Tokyo. In those first few days, MacArthur's command was still trying to minimize the importance of what had happened—for a full-scale retreat would shatter the last of his great dreams. As Dick Raybould would say many years later of the chaos that hung over his division, "We failed because we were set up to fail." Yet, if anything, at that moment what was happening was obvious, and not onlv were most of the senior officers in Korea far ahead of Tokyo in their awareness of the scale of the catastrophe, but journalists were as well. On November 28, Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribwie, who was soon to win his second Pulitzer for his Korean War reporting, wrote, "U.N. forces are now paying the initial price for the unsound decision to launch an offensive north of the peninsula's narrow neck. The move was unsound because it was undertaken with forces far too small to secure the long Korean frontier with China and Russia. Even without the open intervention of Red China, the U.N. Army was too weak to justify scattered garrisons along the Yalu River." Bigart added that it might be possible to hold the line at the narrow' neck of the peninsula, if the divisions could be moved south quickly enough, "but the overall picture is grim."

Later, Dutch Keiser was blamed for the division's terrible performance on its most tragic day, November 30, but much of the blame belonged to higher headquarters. Still, Keiser was the commander, and commanders have to think for themselves and their troops, and he had taken the advance north, dangerous though it self-evidently was, at face value. From the start he had underestimated the dangers his troops faced, and had scoffed at those who tried to warn him. Right after Unsan, he had given an interview in which he said that the Chinese had not yet committed "their best and most loyal troops to Korea," that those who had appeared were "forced volunteers who do not want to fight" and were not "any more ferocious than the Korean Reds." As for his men, they were "bayonet sharp," ready for any assignment. Those were words he would soon regret.

TO UNDERSTAND WHAT Keiser did not do, and what a great division commander might have done, it is only necessary to know what Major General O. p. Smith, his counterpart with the First Marines in Ned Almond's Tenth Corps, did. Operating in the eastern part of the front, the First Marines were supposed to advance to the Manchurian border near the Chosin Reservoir and then move west and link up with the rest of the troops of the Eighth Army. Smith too had his orders—to push ever faster toward the reservoir and the Yalu—and they came from the relentlessly aggressive, and very abrasive, Almond. "His [Almond's] greatest weakness as a commander in Korea was his conviction that MacArthur could do no wrong," Roy Appleman wrote, rather generously, in his account of the Marine breakout from the Chosin Reservoir. No one had ever faulted Almond for a lack of aggressiveness. "When it paid to be aggressive, Ned was aggressive," said Maury Holden, the G-3 of the Second Division. "When it paid to be cautious, Ned was aggressive." Nothing was going to get in his way.

Here then a great collision was taking place, with Almond, in effect, playing the part of Tokyo's proxy on the ground in the eastern sector, and Smith representing the reality of the battlefield. Even before thev collided over the use of the Marines in the Chosin-Yalu area, Smith loathed Almond and was completely distrustful of him. The two men already had a history, of course. Even before Inchon, Almond had postured to Smith, an expert in amphibious landings, about how easy they were, though he had never been part of one. On the day of that landing, Almond had been standing on the deck of the Mount McKinley, MacArthur's command ship, with Victor Krulak, a senior Marine officer, watching as the LVTs came out of the mother ship. The LVTs were immense amphibious tractors, essential to getting the troop and equipment ashore. When Krulak in passing told Almond what wonderful machines they were, Almond asked, "Yeah, can those things float?" "I immediately went and told ten people," Krulak noted, "because I didn't want it forgotten. Here was the man commanding the landing force at Inchon asking, 'Can those things float?'"

Even before the final push north began, Almond was, in the words of Martin Russ, who fought in Korea and wrote two exceptional books about it, "at the very top of [the Marines'] always lengthy shitlist." It was a point of pride among the Marines that their officers share as much as they could the hardships of the men in the field, that there not be greater warmth and better food for the brass. To them Almond represented a completely different and very outmoded military culture. His personal trailer was filled with numerous comforts and amenities, most important, heat in a country where everyone else was dreadfully cold. Creature comforts were important to him and he lived in a surprisingly grand style. His trailer even had a bathtub, and there almost always seemed to be hot water. (Smith, offered a trailer with some amenities, turned it down.) In addition Almond had a separate tent with a heater for his toilet. He always ate very well—the best steaks flown in regularly from Tokyo, along with fresh vegetables and the finest wines. The men under his command knew this, of course, and resented it. Nothing travels faster among combat infantrymen in a hellish environment than news of a superior officer's excessive lifestyle. It was, thought one contemporary, like dealing with the last of the World War I generals. There had been a memorable dinner he had given on October 9 to which he had invited Smith and his three regimental commanders. The four Marines had been appalled by the entire performance—they had been served by enlisted men in white uniforms; there were linens on the table with fine china and silver place settings. It was, thought Lewis (Chesty) Puller, one of the regimental commanders and a legendary figure in the Corps, "an unconscionable waste in a war zone." The Marine officers, Puller said, preferred to eat cold rations and use their trucks to haul ammo. There were three thousand men serving the Corps headquarters, Puller estimated—enough to form an additional regiment. To the Marines, good officers simply did not do things like that and retain the respect of their men.

In a way the madness—for that is the right word—behind MacArthur's final offensive showed more clearly on the eastern front than on the west. On the western side the generals might not have been as good as Smith, but Walker himself was Wary of it all, reluctant to push his men too hard, and even as he told his generals to go forward, he was warning them of the dangers ahead as well. But Almond was MacArthur's boy, the true loyalist, headstrong and arrogant, determined to make the reality of the Korean battlefield fit the dreams of the commander in the Dai Ichi. That was why the ongoing confrontation between Almond and Smith was so important—it was really a struggle between MacArthur and Smith, with Almond as a self-important, highly impatient middle man, demanding that the men under him follow orders that were essentially conceived in madness, while Smith played the unfortunate role of the subordinate officer, charged with representing the battlefield as it actually was, and protecting the lives of his men if at all possible. Ordered to go north toward the Yalu as fast as he could (the words "barrel through" were sometimes used), Smith systematically tried to undermine his orders. The area in which his division was to operate and dominate the Chinese contained one thousand square miles, filled with rugged mountains, in freezing temperatures. He was absolutely convinced that the Chinese were there in large numbers, and he did not intend to fragment his division in the way that Almond demanded. When the Chinese struck, which he was quite sure they were going to do, he did not want his regiments so poorly dispersed that they were unable to support one another. He tried to impress Almond with the fact that the superior power of the First Marine Division came from using it as a whole, but he felt that, whatever Almond's other skills, listening to subordinates was not one of them. As such, Smith fought his orders as best he could for as long as he could. He slow-walked them when he could and came perilously close to out-and-out insubordination to a superior known for the explosive quality of his temper. Had he been an Army officer and not a Marine, there is no doubt that Almond would have relieved him. In the end, because he was so careful and obstinate, he not only saved the First Marines from total destruction, but saved Almond's command as well.

Major General Oliver Prince Smith was in fact one of the great, quiet heroes of the Korean War. Other Marines thought he should have won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his leadership. Yet, unlike Chesty Puller, his heroics lacked a certain drama, and few outside the Marine Corps knew his name. Smith was highly professional, wary of hubris, almost deliberately non-charismatic, and most important of all, respectful of his adversaries. He looked, as Martin Russ wrote, like someone who might have been "cast in an amateur play as a small town druggist, a man whom older ladies would call nice looking if only he would put on a little weight." His career had been an exceptional one, but it had been slow as well—he had spent seventeen years in grade as a captain. He had been the assistant division commander of the First Marine Division at the battle of Peleliu during the Pacific campaign in September 1944. Peleliu was a small island, not necessarily of great strategic value, that had proved very costly. It was roughly four miles long on a north/south axis and two miles wide on an east/west one, consisting mostly of coral, a place where it was virtually impossible to dig a decent foxhole. It had ended up one of the major disasters—if not the major disaster—of the Pacific War, in the view of many Marine officers. "The worst campaign in the history of warfare—far worse than Iwo Jima or the others," said Colonel Harold Deakin, a staff member under Major General William Rupertus, who commanded the First Marine Division there. The Japanese, by then on the defensive, had hunkered down during the prolonged air and artillery assault preceding the landing, and only afterward surfaced to fight with great courage and ferocity. Rupertus shared a good many of Ned Almond's qualities—he was vainglorious, impetuous, contemptuous of the forces arrayed against him. There might be some casualties, he had said before the battle, but "this is going to be a short one, a quickie. Rough but fast. We'll be through in three days. It might take only two." Instead it took a full month of yard-by-yard, cave-by-cave fighting. It had taken, the Marines estimated later, almost sixteen hundred rounds of ammo, both heavy and light, to kill each of the ten thousand Japanese soldiers on the island. So when Smith dealt with Almond, it was as if he had been there once before.

Smith did not intend to be the man who would lose the First Marine Division to the Chinese in some frozen wasteland because he had blindly followed orders he believed bore no relationship to the battlefield. The Marine breakout from the Chosin Reservoir was certainly one of the great moments in the Corps' history—and no small amount of credit for its success was Smith's, more for what he did not do than for what he did. When he finally sent his troops forward, he left a number of supply dumps along the way. Those supply dumps, Division operations officer Alpha Bowser later noted, "were ultimately to save the lives of thousands of fighting men, and may have saved the Marine Division as a whole."

The day that the Marines were to kick off their part of the big drive north was November 27, but for almost three weeks Smith had been struggling to thwart a battle plan he completely distrusted. He thought Tokyo a city of fools—first they had split Tenth Corps off from the Eighth Army, and now they were trying to split all of his regiments off from one another, making each part far more vulnerable, and thus playing into Chinese hands. Almond, the Marines decided, loved to break larger forces down into little ones. He favored, albeit on a limited scale, Bowser noted, grand sweeps and broad arrows on his maps—big operations similar to what the Allies had mounted in Europe. The Chinese, Smith had been assured by Tokyo, could not move through these allegedly impenetrable mountainous regions to his west. He didn't think his troops should be operating there in the first place. "The country around Chosin was never intended for military operations," Smith said after the battle was over. "Even Genghis Khan wouldn't tackle it." But Smith had his orders to push forward. He let his subordinate officers know' the danger he felt they were in—not that they needed any additional warnings—and that he wanted every unit buttoned up at night in perfect defensive positions, as if that night was the one during which the Chinese would strike. If Smith had his doubts about what they were doing, he also had a certain nervous respect for the MacArthur mystique. When the general decided to push all the way to the Yalu, Smith told one colleague, "Well, he got away with it at Inchon, so he'll probably get away with it here." But, Smith later added, this time he did not.

No one was going to be able to help bail Smith out. By the beginning of November, he had come to believe that the Chinese were probably setting a vast trap for the American forces. On October 29, around the time of Unsan, a ROK unit in Smith's sector had captured sixteen Chinese soldiers. They were from an ammunition platoon, were taller than most Chinese and considerably darker, wore quilted uniforms, and spoke openly of their unit. They were from the 370th Regiment, in the 124th Division, of the Forty-second Army, in the Ninth Army Group. They had crossed into Korea on October 16, they said, and added that there were at least three Chinese divisions—the 124th, 125th, and 126th—from the Forty-second Army in the area. Almond came and met with them, got them to do some close-order drills, and did not seem impressed. They were scruffy-looking and exhausted—they had not eaten in several days. He used, the Marine historian John Hoffman wrote, the phrase "Chinese laundrymen" to describe them, not the first or the last time he would use it. They were not, he told some of the men around him, very intelligent. The Marines were not, as Hoffman wrote, "so sanguine." When Charles Willoughby eventually arrived and checked out the prisoners, he decided that they were part of a relatively small group of Chinese volunteers, perhaps ten thousand men, in effect a token Chinese force, not part of any massive Chinese Army.

Colonel Homer Litzenberg's Seventh Marine Regiment, one of Smith's three regiments, replaced the ROK unit that had captured the Chinese and was almost immediately engaged by a large Chinese force, at least a division and possibly more, at Sudong—the first significant battle between the Marines and the Chinese on the eastern front. It went on from November 2 to 4. "We thought for a while that we were like Custer at the Little Big Horn, and that we were not going to get out—it was very very tough," said Major James Lawrence, who for a time was a battalion executive officer there, and received the Navy Cross for his leadership. It was very hard fighting. The Marines finally fended the Chinese off, but in the process they took heavy casualties—44 dead, 162 wounded, and one man missing in action.

If the ferocity of the battle did not slow down Tokyo or Almond, then it made Smith warier than ever. His job, he believed, was to slow down the journey into that trap if at all possible and, in his phrase, "not go too far out on a limb." Thus did tensions with Almond continue to increase. "Our Marine division was the spearhead of Tenth Corps," as Colonel Bowser, Smith's operations man, noted. "General Almond had already begun to notice that the spearhead was hardly moving at all. We were in fact just poking along—deliberately so. We pulled every trick in the book to slow down our advance, hoping the enemy would show his hand before we got more widely dispersed than we already were. At the same time we were building up our levels of supply at selected dumps along the way."

On November 5, the Marines picked up a lone Chinese soldier sleeping in a hut. Everything he said seemed authentic and in no way hyped up. He was a member of the 126th Division and seemed to be full of information—one of the differences in the Chinese Army was that, as part of the new egalitarian spirit, ordinary privates, through lectures from the political commissars, often knew a great deal about battle orders. The prisoner told the Marines that twenty-four Chinese divisions had crossed the Yalu. On November 7 this was passed on to Almond—and for a brief time Smith thought that this information, along with the news of what had happened at Unsan, had had the effect of sobering Almond up. For the first time he seemed amenable to the idea of Smith concentrating the First Marines. But then the orders came down from Tokyo to speed it up, and Almond pushed Smith to drive ahead faster.

Meanwhile, in the Chinese command post, Peng Dehuai was talking about placing 250,000 Chinese on the western front against 130,000 of Walker's men, or a 1.92 edge in manpower, with 150,000 Chinese against 100,000 UN troops on the eastern front, or a manpower ratio of 1.67. They were by now on the south side of the Yalu, well hidden away in caves. It was almost as if their earlier clashes were a means of taunting the Americans and UN forces, striking at them and disappearing. "To catch a big fish, you must first let the fish taste your bait," General Sung Shih-lun of the Chinese Ninth Army Group, the overall commander of the Chinese forces on the eastern front, told his staff. In mid-November the UN forces were, in the phrase of one senior Chinese officer, "still far from our preselected killing zones."

On November 15 Smith met with Almond, and Almond again pushed harder for speed. The Marines had reached Hagaru, at the south end of the Chosin Reservoir, and now he wanted them to go toward Yudam-ni, fourteen miles away, while another Marine regiment moved east. The third regiment was fifty' miles south. The division was still badly fragmented. "We've got to go barreling up that road," Almond said. Smith immediately exclaimed, "No!" but Almond, according to Brigadier General Ed Craig, the assistant division commander, pretended not to hear it. Then Almond flew out. After he did, Smith said, "We're not going anywhere until i get this division together and the airfield [which he wanted midway between the coast and the reservoir in order to airlift the wounded out in case the Chinese struck] built." That day, still bothered by Almond's failure to comprehend the dangers he was sure they faced, and by his insistence on fragmenting the division, Smith did something very unusual—he wrote to the Marine commandant, Clifton Cates, complaining about his orders, citing chapter and verse of the dangers inherent in them, in effect warning that there was a danger of losing the entire division.

The Chinese who had hit Litzenberg had withdrawn north, he wrote Cates, but he had issued no orders to pursue them. His own left flank, he said, was "wide open." The nearest element of the Eighth Army was eighty miles away. His own troops were not able to support one another. "i do not like the prospect of stringing out a Marine Division along a single mountain road for 120 miles from Hamhung to the Manchurian border." He was made extremely nervous by the orders from above. "i have little confidence in the tactical judgment of X Corps or in the realism of their planning. There is a continual splitting up of units and assignments of missions which puts them out on a limb. Time and time again i have tried to tell the Corps Commander that in a Marine Division he has a powerful instrument, and that it cannot but help lose its effectiveness when dispersed." Finally, he was obviously worried about the cold and the mountains. "i believe a winter campaign in the mountains of Korea is too much to ask of an American soldier or Marine, and i doubt the feasibility of supplying troops in this area during the winter or providing for the evacuation of sick and wounded." Finally in mid-November he got one of the things he most wanted, a small airstrip near Hagaru. Even that had been hard. He had done it jointly with Major General Field Harris, who was in charge of the Marine air operations. One day Almond had asked Harris what he was looking for, and Harris had answered that it was a small strip so they could land enough transports to bring in supplies and carry out the casualties. "What casualties?" Almond had asked Harris—who soon lost his own son up near the Chosin. "That's the kind of thing you were up against. He wouldn't admit there even would be casualties," Harris later told Bemis Frank, a Marine historian. "We took 4500 casualties out of that field."

14- THE MAIN CHINESE CAMPAIGN IN THE WEST, NOVEMBER 25-28, 1Q5Q Smith was now sure that the Chinese were baiting an immense trap for him, and there was one bit of empirical evidence that definitely showed that. That was the Chinese failure to blow the bridge at the Funchilin Pass. The road from Hungnam, the port from which the Marines would eventually disembark, to Yudam-ni, which was their farthest penetration and where they were when the Chinese made their major assault, was seventy-eight miles. On the way north from Hungnam, the road at first was relatively flat. From Sudong, where the Chinese had first struck the Marines on November 2, to Hungnam was about thirty-seven miles. Just north of Sudong and south of Kotori, the road became more and more difficult, elevating at an accelerating rate, twenty-five hundred feet in eight miles, to a terrifying stretch known as the Funchilin Pass, becoming, as Matt Ridgway wrote, "a narrowing, frightening shelf with an impassable cliff on one side and a chasm on the other." At a critical point in the pass the only way to keep going north was over a concrete bridge that covered four gigantic pipes, which pumped water from the Chosin Reservoir to a power plant. The mountain was so steep, and the passagew-ay so narrow, that if the Funchilin Pass bridge were blown, given the hideous nature of the terrain and the overwhelming logistical limitations, it would be the end of the offensive for the American troops, so dependent on motorized equipment. But the Chinese heading north had nor blown the bridge. To Smith, it was like the dog that hadn't barked. The failure to blow the bridge on the part of so formidable and shrewd an adversary was a sure sign that the Chinese wanted the Americans to cross it—it was virtually an imitation—but it meant nothing to Almond, so disrespectful was he of his adversary. "Smith was sure that they wanted us to come across, and that they were going to blow the bridge after we crossed, thus completely isolating us," said Major (later Major General) James Lawrence, who had been the executive officer at Sudong when the Chinese struck. "It was shrewd of Smith to understand that but it's hard to think of any other capable officer who was paying attention not coming up with much the same scenario. Almond seemed to have so little respect for the Chinese as fighting men that it was as if he didn't care.

By November 26, Smith had essentially won his most important victory. He had consolidated his division to what he considered an acceptable degree. Almond had pushed him to put men just west of the Chosin, at Yudam-ni, and he had two regiments in the general Yudam-ni area, closer to each other than they had been before, but still separated by the reservoir itself. Smith was hardly happy with the entire situation, but it was much better than it had been. When Craig brought the degree of fragmentation that still existed up with him, all he said was "It's what the Army wants."

15. THE MARINE SECTOR, OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 27. lQfiO To the east of Yudam-ni, where the Seventh Marines were, the reservoir pointed like a very long icicle toward Hagaru, just south of it. Yudam-ni was about fourteen miles west of Hagaru, and the Fifth Marines were on the other side of the icicle. At Hagaru, Smith had posted a battalion from Puller's First Marine Regiment. Another battalion of Puller's troops was posted at Kotori, about eleven miles directly south of Hagaru, on the Main Supply Route, and another battalion at Chinhungni, about another ten miles south. Puller's men were to keep the road open. It might not be ideal, given that their intelligence had now pinpointed at least six Chinese divisions in the area, but with a break or two, it might allow' the division to fight like a division. As Colonel Bowser said, "Even so we were now at the end of a long, cold, snow-covered limb. The limb was sixty-five to seventy-five miles long, depending on where you wanted to measure." Smith had, unlike Keiser and some other Army generals, thought long and hard about what would happen if the Chinese appeared. The timing of the Tenth Corps offensive in the east was important. It began on November 27, two days after the massive Chinese assault against the Eighth Army. The Marines had heard some of the early reports, but did not know the scope of the disaster. The essential plan in the east nonetheless was bizarre—the work, said Bill McCaffrey, of madmen. The Marines in Tenth Corps were to drive west to Mupyongni, some perhaps forty or fifty miles away, but each mile likely to be impassable, on roads that might or might not exist. Mupyongni was a village high up on the Chongchon, and thus in the Eighth Army sector; getting there would allegedly link them up with Walker's men. This way they would theoretically encircle any Chinese troops in the area and cut off their escape, and, in the minds of the Dai Ichi architects, cut off all Chinese supply lines as well. Given the thinness of the American forces, and the absolute harshness of the terrain, some mountains reaching seven thousand feet, and the cruelty of the weather, often twenty degrees below, it was pure insanity. The people in the Dai Ichi simply did not understand that those being cut off would be the UN forces themselves, completely isolated in the most unreachable place in the country, that in the unlikely event that the Marines with all their vehicles actually tried to make it through to Mupyongni on what would turn out to be an ox trail really, by then sure to be ice-covered, over mountainous peaks, they would be the perfect target for the Chinese. But for MacArthur this linkup of Tenth Corps and the Eighth Army was a symbol of victory, the crowning moment of a career-crowning campaign, proof that he had conquered the country and the enemy. It mattered nothing to him that even if the Marines managed to get through to Mupyongni, it would have no military value, because they would barely control the land they stood on. No one could talk him out of it. "The plans bore no resemblance to the country. In those days it was like complete insanity in the command," Bill McCaffrey said years later. "From the time we headed to the Yalu it was like being in the nut house with the nuts in charge. You could only understand the totality of the madness if you were up there in the north after the Chinese had entered in full force, and we were being hit and hit again by these immense numbers of troops. And what we were getting from Tokyo was madness—absolute madness. The only real question was whether we could get any of our people out of there, and yet the orders were still to go forward." MacArthur, after Inchon, he added bluntly "was nutty as a fruitcake."

The lead regiment was supposed to be Ray Murray's Fifth Marines, already too isolated for their own good. Of the projected attack west, Murray later said, "It was unbelievable. The more you think about it, the more unreal it becomes. Well, anyhow those were the orders, and that's what we started to do." It was, as Almond's own chief of staff, Nick Ruffner, put it, "an insane plan." It ranked, Clay Blair wrote, "as the most ill-advised and unfortunate operation of the Korean War."

ON BOTH coasts of the peninsula, the recognition of the sheer size and scope of the Chinese offensive was delayed because the Tokyo command remained loath to admit its tragic miscalculation. Johnnie Walker was slow to react, neutralized by conflicting forces and feelings—and by the time he understood the full gravity of the situation, he had little leverage. In the first few days Walker thought there was still time to pull his forces back and establish a line at the narrow neck of Korea, near Pyongyang. By contrast, his opposite number on the east coast, Almond, remained an enthusiast for the attack.

With the great offensive, Ned Almond had gotten his last career command, the one he had so badly wanted, and he had been slow' indeed to come to terms with the hopelessness of it, and to tell his superior that it was in effect a failure. As late as November 28, three and a half days into the great Chinese attack, Almond was still refusing to admit the catastrophe it had become and still pushing the Tenth Corps forces to advance. At noon on that day, he choppered up to Smith's headquarters at Hagaru to give one of his patented pep talks. Smith paid as little attention as he could. He was busy consolidating his Marine division, already dangerously close to being entrapped, for what he hoped would be a breakout to the south. To the Marines, there was something almost crazed about Almond then, as if he were commanding an Army still on a great victory march, when in fact it was facing total annihilation. Part of it, they were convinced, was his own subconscious racism, which blinded him to the ability of the enemy. "There was a disrespect for them as soldiers, a belief that they had been fleeing from us because they should be fleeing from us not because they might be setting a trap—whereas we who were fighting them and had been fighting them from early November knew how good they were—that's where the phrase 'laundrymen' came from. It was pure racism. It was as if the only person in Tenth Corps who did not know how good they were and how dangerous our position had become was the Tenth Corps commander," said Major Jim LawTence, a battalion executive officer in those days.

Then Almond flew to the headquarters of Colonel Allan MacLean's Thirty-first Infantry Regiment, part of the Army's Seventh Division, the other critical element of Tenth Corps engaged by the Chinese. Almond had earlier issued orders that had dangerously fragmented the Seventh Division, at the same time creating a gap between the units of the Seventh Division and the Marines. Those orders, as Clay Blair noted, would have tragic consequences. By the time of Almond's visit, Colonel MacLean's regiment was already being hammered badly on the eastern side of the Chosin Reservoir by large numbers of Chinese troops. If there was ever a time to retreat and try to link up with the Marines to the south, this was it. But Almond wanted them to press on.

MacLean, who was killed there the next day while trying to lead the Thirty-first Regiment out, was not at the CP but was out with his badly endangered unit, known as Task Force MacLean. But Lieutenant Colonel Don Carlos Faith, a battalion commander in the Thirty-second Regiment, Was there. Almond seemed oblivious to the fact that a critical part of his command was being annihilated. Faith, who himself would be killed three days later while leading his badly battered Task Force Faith out of its hopeless position and would receive a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor for his leadership, tried to explain how desperate their position actually was: they were being hit by two entire Chinese divisions. "That's impossible," Almond said. "There aren't two Chinese divisions in all of North Korea!" The enemy who was attacking them, he said, was nothing more than remnants of Chinese forces fleeing north. "We're still attacking and we're going all the way to the Yalu. Don't let a bunch of goddamn Chinese laundrymen stop you!" He thereupon ordered Faith to retake the high ground he had lost the previous night.

Then—for Almond loved nothing more than on-the-spot medal presentations—he announced that he had three Silver Stars he wanted to give out—one to Faith and two to whomever Faith chose. Faith was appalled, but he thereupon chose a w^rounded lieutenant and asked him to come and stand at attention to get his medal. Just then the mess sergeant of Headquarters Company, George Stanley, walked by. Faith ordered him over. In front of a few men of Headquarters Company, the pathetic little medal ceremony took place. With that, Almond flew off in his helicopter. A moment later, Faith's operations officer, Major Wesley Curtis, walked over. "What did the general say?" he asked. "You heard him, remnants fleeing north," said an angry Faith as he ripped the medal off and threw it in the snow. One of his officers heard him say, "What a damned travesty."

When Almond got back to his headquarters later that day, he found a message ordering him to return to Tokyo. Johnnie Walker received the same message. In Tokyo, they quickly went into a somber meeting with MacArthur, who was slowly beginning to comprehend what had happened. "The wine of victory had turned to vinegar," in Clay Blair's words. MacArthur "had been outsmarted and outgeneraled by a 'bunch of Chinese laundrymen' who had no close air support, no tanks and very little artillery, modern communications or logistical infrastructure." His post-Inchon commands, Blair added, had added up to "an arrogant, blind march to disaster." On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth he had sent the Joint Chiefs a message. They now faced, he said, "an entirely new war." "This command," he wrote, "has done everything humanly possible within its capabilities but is now faced with conditions beyond its control and its strength." In that sentence was the first surfacing of what would become known in Washington as MacArthur's Posterity Papers. He was already pulling back from any responsibility for the catastrophe taking place, blaming it instead first on the fates, and then on the Chilians in Washington.

ALMOST TO THE end Ned Almond had wanted to drive to Mupyongni. It was, thought Bill McCaffrey, as if he had become a prisoner of not just the orders from Tokyo, but also the myth of MacArthur. Bill McCaffrey had almost lost his own life in the foolishness. Just before the Chinese struck, he had been ordered by Almond to take a small number of men and set up what they called a "jump command post," a small, temporary one, about a couple hundred yards from the Marine headquarters at the Chosin Reservoir. McCaffrey had been ordered by Almond to keep his small CP separate from the Marines, but to use it to pass on Corps orders to the Marines, to push them harder to attack to the west, because Smith now absolutely refused to move—he believed the orders were murderous. McCaffrey would be there as a presence from Corps and a means of goosing the Marines. My job, McCaffrey had thought to himself, is to pass on orders that are crazy to men who know they are crazy, and will surely be killed if they follow them.

Almost as soon as he set up the CP, he was ordered back to Hungnam. As he drove his jeep out of the area, one of the Marines at the last outpost waved him through and yelled out, "Sir, you watch your ass going on from here—there's Chinks all over these mountains." He made it back to Hungnam, got a bite to eat, and, absolutely exhausted, went to bed. Around midnight he was awakened—the lieutenant colonel he had left in charge of the small CP was on the phone, his voice more desperate by the minute: The Chinese were attacking in strength.... The CP was about to be overrun.... What should they do? McCaffrey told the officer to try to make it to the nearby Marine headquarters, but even as he told him, the radio went dead. None of the men who had manned the small outpost was ever heard of again. I might have been the last man out, McCaffrey later thought.

THE MEETING OF principals took place in Tokyo on the night of November 28, three days after the Chinese struck. It began just before 10 P.M. and lasted almost four hours. MacArthur did most of the talking, and as Blair noted, he was still underestimating the sheer size of the Chinese force by perhaps as many as a hundred thousand men. He seemed to think that only six Chinese divisions, or some 60,000 men, were engaged with Tenth Corps, when by then the more realistic number was twelve divisions, or about 120,000 men, with another eighteen or twenty divisions, and close to 200,000 men, engaged in the west. Walker was considerably more realistic than either Almond or MacArthur. He believed that they had to retreat but with luck should be able to hold a line at the narrow waist of the peninsula, near the North Korean capital. Almond, a prisoner of his earlier miscalculations, still wanted to continue the offensive, but it was far too late for that. It was time to save what remained of both commands—if possible. The word to pull back finally came from headquarters on November 29—very late in the battle, during which each day and each hour that passed had worked for the Chinese and against, in particular, the Second Infantry Division.

If there was one symbolic moment that reflected how disconnected the Dai Ichi headquarters was from the battlefield, it took place at that meeting when Pinky Wright, who was the acting G-3 for MacArthur, suggested, in the midst of this crisis, that the American Army's Third Division, relatively new in country and essentially used as a reserve so far by Almond, set out to cross the Taebaeks and link up with Walker's force. It was a truly astonishing suggestion—a senior in ROTC at an American high school might well have come up with a better idea. That, even Almond noted, simply could not be done—there were no roads going west. Any American unit trying to cross on whatever trails existed would be easy prey for the Chinese.

On THE WESTERN side of the peninsula, the decision to pull back the UN forces brought little relief for the Second Division. Dutch Keiser still had his division up front, in effect offering protection for other American units that were then retreating, but the division itself was in mounting danger. If November 30 was to be the tragic day in which Reiser's division was torn apart, then November 29 was the wasted one, during which he failed, despite numerous appeals, to get his superior at Corps to understand the desperation of his position and begin the breakout, or at least discover what the possibilities were. On the morning of the twenty-ninth, Corps finally gave Keiser permission to go south on the road to Sunchon, about ten miles south of Kunuri. Corps assured Keiser that the road was open. A Turkish brigade, they said, was moving up the road at that moment as a relief column.

John Coulter was greatly enamored of the Turks, even though he knew almost nothing about their fighting abilities. The Turks, striking-looking men, especially with their immense mustaches, simply appeared to him to be fierce warriors, and without much of an initiation process, he had made them his Corps reserve. Now he was throwing them into battle at a critically important moment. They were in general, it turned out, very green troops, led by poorly trained officers, and they suffered from serious language problems in dealing with both the Americans and the Koreans. Early in the fight against the Chinese they had allegedly captured two hundred Chinese soldiers, a wonderful moment at a bad time, which had given everyone a lift—except that the prisoners had turned out to be two hundred fleeing ROKs, who were quite humiliated because they had surrendered to their comrades. Now, sent north to hold a sector to the southeast of the embattled Second Division, the Turks were not exactly the relief force that Keiser needed. The Chinese, already waiting, promptly hammered part of the unit, and many of the troops, reported Paul Freeman of the Twenty-third Regiment, simply fled: "The Turks had been committed, but they had taken a look at the situation and they had no stomach for it and they were running in all directions."

All of this was of little help to Keiser, who had spent the twenty-ninth getting contradictory messages about whether or not the road south was open. At 4:30 P.M. on the twenty-ninth, with darkness falling, he had radioed to Corps that his situation at Kunuri was perilous. In that message, Keiser told Corps that the Turkish brigade that was supposed to reinforce his eastern flank had failed completely, and that his own badly battered Thirty-eighth Regiment, positioned on his east, could no longer hold. What was worse was his fear that his men could not break through on the main road going south to Sunchon, where the Chinese were already gathering, as evidenced by their destruction of the Turkish relief force. Keiser asked for permission to try an alternate route out, rather than the main road, which he feared was blocked by the Chinese. But he could never get any response, other than staff members telling him to stay with his existing orders.

By the morning of the thirtieth, Coulter had had close to four days to understand accurately what the fate of the Second Division might be, even as the Chinese were gathering in ever-stronger units south of it, presumably ready to cut off the road. But he had done very little. Instead he had been busy moving his own headquarters to a safer location on the twenty-ninth and therefore had been difficult for Keiser to reach. It was his staff members—largely powerless—who had been forced to deal with Reiser's increasingly desperate pleas. (Coulter, Paul Freeman bluntly noted later, had simply "fled the battlefield.") His aides had passed on useless bromides indicating, for instance, that the British Middlesex Battalion was on its way north to help, when it was completely stalled out well south of what the Americans would eventually call The Pass, the critical bottleneck on the road out, about five and a half miles south of Kunuri. Perhaps more than anything else, the limited force sent in relief told it all in this sad tale of always too little and always too late. With as many as six Chinese divisions closing in on an American division trapped with marginal escape routes available, and other than untested Turkish troops, Coulter had sent a British battalion.

By the night of the twenty-ninth, Keiser was all too aware that a vast front was collapsing on him. Two of his three regiments, the Ninth and the Thirty-eighth, were no longer really combat-ready. He had three choices. The first would have demanded an exceptional anticipatory sense of what to do if the Chinese struck in force. That choice would be to consolidate the division, in effect circle the wagons, and use the aw^resome firepower of an American division against the Chinese, resupplying his own men by air, until the enemy was worn down. That would have meant turning the Second Division into an instant airborne division, momentarily isolated behind enemy lines, but still indefinitely resuppliable. That, one of Reiser's artillery commanders, Lieutenant Colonel John Hector, suggested to a subordinate, Ralph Hockley, a few months later, was the way they should have gone. Eventually, based on some of the lessons learned at Kunuri, that would indeed become a critical part of the future American strategy', and under Matt Ridgway's directions and Paul Freeman's leadership, it was employed with great success at Chipyongni some two and a half months later. But no one had given it a moment's thought before the Chinese struck, and by November 29, events had already outstripped this option.

That left Keiser with two choices: go south to Sunchon as Corps had ordered, or go west, on the only other road out, to Anju. Whether that road was open no one was certain. The road to Anju ironically was mostly an American-made one, having recentiy been built up from little more than a trail by Hobart Gay, the commander of the First Cav. When the Cav had driven north after Unsan, Gay had become increasingly nervous about the Chinese presence, and at one point earlier in November when the division CP was positioned at Kunuri, he had ordered the engineers to work on the road to Anju to make it capable of servicing an American division, "just because you never know when you might need an extra way out, if they hit again," as he told Lieutenant Jack Murphy, whom he was trying to recruit as an aide. But the Second Division's intelligence remained shockingly bad. On the morning of the twenty-ninth, Keiser had jeeped over to Corps headquarters, still just a few miles west of his headquarters, and flown back in a light spotter plane because the road traffic was so heavy. His visit to Corps had not been a great help. Coulter had not been there. From the plane he had seen the roads choked with people moving south. At first, he had believed these were refugees. If that was true, there was hope that his troops too could get out. Later, he would decide that he might well have seen Chinese troops. Back at Kunuri the pressure was building as the Chinese forces closed in, and he kept getting conflicting reports about which route out might be safer and which he was permitted to use.

On the thirtieth as on the twenty-ninth, Corps continued to withhold permission to go out west, while continuing to feed Keiser illusory reports on the alleged strength of the Chinese on the road south and on the British relief force, code named Nottingham, supposedly fighting its way north. No one mentioned to Keiser that the road was now actually in much worse shape because it was littered with the carcasses of the vehicles that the Turks had been using, clogging up what had been a rather narrow pathway in the first place. Corps thought the Chinese positions were some six miles south of where thev actually were. Division thought the same thing. Corps thought the British relief team was making progress, when it had been completely stopped. So did Division. Worse, Division thought on the morning of the thirtieth that the Chinese block was relatively thin and that a strong party could smash through. "The hope was that [the Chinese] were in a relatively small place far down the road, and that when we got there We could suppress their fire there, drive them off, or just barrel through" was the way Captain Alan Jones, the Ninth Regiment intelligence officer, put it. Neither Corps nor Division knew* whether the road west to Anju was open. Henry Becker, the division provost marshal, and thus in charge of its MPs, had erroneously reported that it was blocked. But even if it were open, Keiser was not sure he had permission to go out on it.

NOTHING SHOWED JUST how vulnerable they were and how little time they had left more clearly than the first Chinese attack on Division headquarters on the night of the twenty-ninth. Early that evening the headquarters commandant visited various units clustered around the schoolhouse that served as headquarters, to warn them of a probable attack that night. Captain Malcolm MacDonald, the young assistant G-2, took his telephone and some of his other equipment and moved them outside the schoolhouse to a nearby building foundation. Sure enough, about 8 P.M., the mortars and the machine gun fire began. MacDonald watched, fascinated. He could see the flash of the Chinese weapons about three hundred yards away. One of the first mortar rounds landed on a nearby tent, igniting it and thereby giving the Chinese an exceptionally good look inside the perimeter. There had probably been a company of Chinese involved—undoubtedly just a probe—and it took about an hour to drive them back. But it underlined how dangerous the division's status was, how little buffer there was between them and the enemy, growing stronger by the hour. It was not a comforting thought for MacDonald. You might expect enemy troops to slip up to a regimental headquarters. But to a division headquarters? He had never heard of it before.

At one point during the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, Major General Milburn, the First Corps commander and a close personal friend of Reiser's, had called in to see if he could offer any help. His sector was to the west of Keiser. He had heard about the Sunchon road being cut. How was it going? he asked.

"Bad," Keiser answered. "We're getting hit in my CP."

"Well, come out my way," Milburn said, meaning the road to Anju.

It was a tempting invitation, but it would have to be cleared through the people at Ninth Corps. Earlier on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, with Corps' approval, the division had sent some of its trains of heavy equipment out by the road to the west, that convoy linking up with men of First Corps moving south. But that was a very different thing from committing the entire division to the road. In the meantime there was a swirl of rumors about what was open and what was closed—and Division headquarters seemed effectively blind. Very late on the twenty-ninth, after the mortar attack on headquarters, Keiser called Corps one more time suggesting they take the Anju road out, and was turned down. Thus, at about l A.M. on November 30, he summoned his top staff and told them that Coulter had just ordered him to attack down the Sunchon road at dawn. Coulter had flown over the road that afternoon and did not think the Chinese block was very strong. He was confident, he had added, that the Second Division should be able to break through. With that, the argument was over. The road south might be narrow, with high banks on both sides, just perfect for an ambush; it might be cluttered with American vehicles, which would slow down traffic, all of it a prescription for a retreat through hell—but they now had their orders.

ON THE MORNING of the thirtieth, the Second Engineers were waiting for their place in the convoy slated to head south. The convoy was moving at a pathetically slow pace. None of the battalion's senior officers was happy with the decision to go south. They all knew, in the way that soldiers always know, that it was very bad on the road, and getting worse; the reports coming back were ever more ominous, and the engineers were well aware that their exceptionally heavy gear would be a prime target. Captain Larry Farnum was acting as both the S-2 and S-3 (intelligence and operations officer—in a division it's G-2 or G-3; in a regiment or battalion it's S-2 or S-3) of the battalion because his superior did not trust the nominal S-3. On his own, because the engineers were so burdened with heavy gear, he had been running recon units, trying to figure out which way out was best, and he was convinced that the road to Anju was still open and the road south effectively closed—that any attempt to push a force as clumsy as a division down it would meet with disastrous results. He knew that a number of attempts to remove the Chinese blocks along the road had already failed. The situation, he believed, was clearly out of control.

On his own, Farnum went to Division headquarters early on the afternoon of the thirtieth and pleaded for the right to go out west. At least, he pleaded, let's send our heavy gear out west. But Colonel Maury Holden, the division G-3, kept saving he had his orders and could not change them. When Farnum pushed him hard, Holden, widely regarded as the ablest officer at Division, resisted him and kept repeating that it was orders, and orders were orders.

The problem, Holden told Farnum, was Tokyo. Talking to Corps, he said, was like talking to Tokyo because they were so fearful there. "But because I was such a brash young captain and because so much was riding on it," Farnum recalled, he pushed Holden to try one more time. So Holden, with a shrug of resignation, got on the radio. "You and I know what the answer is going to be," he added. He spoke to Corps briefly and shook his head again. Then he turned to Farnum and said he had to go, they were closing up headquarters; his jeep was already loaded, and he and the top division officers, surrounded by ack-ack guns and tanks, were heading south. And with that, as headquarters packed up and left, communications between different units of the Second Division, always bad, became even worse.

So it was that the men of the Second Division began their retreat from Kunuri. They were beleaguered before they started, exhausted, many of their units already badly battered. Of the three regiments, the only one not already torn apart in the previous five days was Paul Freeman's Twenty-third. It was assigned to hold the line against the vast Chinese forces gathering north of Kunuri.

By the time Keiser sent out his weakened battalions of the Ninth Regiment to help clear the sides of the road south, the Chinese had moved to within a mile of his headquarters and had fire positions over a full six-or seven-mile stretch of the road. They were already dug in on the high ground and would have been hard to dislodge even by fresh troops with plenty of fire support. The Chinese might not have heavy weapons, just mortars and machine guns, but they were good with those mortars, and their burp guns threw out a lot of fire at close range—it was, by the testimony of a good many American officers, the best basic infantry weapon in Korea. It lacked the accuracy of the M-i rifle or the carbine, but it provided a lot more firepower a lot more quickly. The burp gun was a formidable weapon in that war: it sounded, said Captain Hal Moore (eventually a three-star general), "like a can of marbles when you shook them, but on full automatic it sprayed a lot of bullets and most of the killing in Korea was done at very close range and it was done quickly—a matter of who responded faster.

In situations like that it outclassed and outgunned what we had. A close-in patrol fight was over very quickly and usually we lost because of it."

Keiser had started the day by trying to clear the ridges on both sides of the road, assigning two battalions from the Ninth Regiment to do the job (one for each side of the road). But he overestimated the strength of the now ravaged Ninth—both units, according to Alan Jones, were at less than half strength, at most 300 men in a battalion that should have had at least 800 to 850 men—and quite likely fewer who were truly able-bodied. No one was sure of the numbers, but it was possible that they had started the day with a division of Chinese covering the road, and more arriving as the hours wore on.

The Second Battalion of the Ninth Infantry Regiment, commanded by Major Cesidio (Butch) Barberis, had been hit repeatedly by the Chinese since the twenty-fifth, probably harder than any other infantry battalion in the division. By the end of the first day of the Chinese attack, George Company of the Second Battalion, which normally had around two hundred men, had had seventy-three either killed or wounded, while E Company was down to a handful of men. All of Barberis's men were exhausted—in the first three days of fighting his men had crossed the Chongchon four times. He had received a significant whiskey ration before the Chinese struck, and each time his men made it across the river, he would insist that they change their socks and then he would give them a shot of whiskey right then and there, and a second one for their canteens. By the time Barberis and his men had reached Kunuri, Barberis, though still commanding, had been wounded, and had about 150 of his original 970 men—the number he'd had when he had first crossed the Chongchon—available to fight. That pathetic little unit was now designated to drive a large, well-entrenched Chinese force off one of the ridgelines.

It wasn't going to happen. Long before he reached his assembly point, Barberis looked up and saw movement on the high ground in the distance. He got on the radio and asked who was up on the ridgeline. The ROKs, he was told. He looked through his field glasses and noted two machine guns, as he put it, "looking down my throat." Colonel Sloane, the regimental commander who had sent Barberis to the ridgeline, had been told earlier in the day that there might be two Chinese companies up there. Instead, according to Malcolm MacDonald, the intelligence officer, it was minimally two regiments, around six thousand men. Now Barberis called Sloane and told him, "I'm four thousand yards from my assembly area and I see enemy positions. I think I've got my tit in a wringer." Then the Chinese machine guns opened up. "All hell broke loose," Barberis said. His unit was quickly attacked from the other side of the road as well. He called Sloane, who told him to come back for a conference. Then the Chinese struck with mortars, and Barberis was wounded for the second time. The retreat down the road south had barely begun, and the road was already littered with the dead and with disabled vehicles.

IT WAS DUTCH Keiser himself who told Captain Jim Hinton, the company commander of the Thirty-eighth Tank Company, to take his tanks and lead the way south. Hinton had his tanks lined up at the very head of the column when Keiser walked up to him and said, "We've got a little roadblock down there, about two hundred or four hundred yards deep. Do you think you can get through?" Hinton answered—thinking almost the moment the words were out of his mouth what a smart-ass he was, thirty-five years old and cocky as hell. "Well, General, I've been running roadblocks for five days, so I guess I can run another one." Privately, Hinton had grave doubts about going south. He had done his own recon two or three miles down the Anju road, the one that went out west, that many of the officers wanted to try, and it looked open to him. It was, for a Korean road, not bad, if anything even a little wider than most. The one thing he understood in the midst of all the uncertainty was that the men giving the orders that day had no earthly idea of what they were doing. The roadblock that Keiser had mentioned to him, allegedly about two hundred to four hundred yards long, was in reality several miles long.

Hinton decided to use Sam Mace to lead the convoy—an easy choice, for Mace was his best man. So he ordered Mace to take his five tanks and clear the road south to Sunchon. They started out, Mace up front, and Hinton in a jeep two or three vehicles back, followed by more tanks and then infantry loaded up on big deuce-and-a-half trucks. They had gone several hundred yards when the Chinese opened up from both sides. Hinton was immediately hit in the wrist. His exec officer called in and said that they were sitting ducks out there, and Hinton replied that no one had to tell a sitting duck that it was a sitting duck. So he amended his order to Mace. It was now How Able, or in translatable, basic English, Haul Ass. A roadblock of four hundred yards at most, the hell you say, Hinton thought bitterly. This one looked like it went on forever. They had walked right into one of the largest ambushes in American military history.

Mace thought the exact same thing. He had been told that when he headed south he was to clear the enemy out and then meet up with a British armored unit that was heading north. Well, a small roadblock, he could take care of that. But the road was a skinny one. It was immediately apparent that it could easily be blocked by just one disabled tank or overturned heavy truck. There was a high bank on the eastern side that might have been designed for a prolonged ambush. Mace's five tanks were to lead a convoy interspersed with trucks and with some infantrymen riding on top of the tanks to help control the road and suppress, if need be, Chinese fire from the high ground. From the start, Mace's tanks took heavy fire from the hillside. It was a slow, wildly dangerous start-and-stop process, of letting the infantrymen off the tanks and then firing back to suppress Chinese fire; Mace had a profound sense of foreboding that he and his men had somehow become bit players in a script written by the enemy.

Among the infantrymen was Lieutenant Charley Heath of the Thirty-eighth Regiment. About a quarter mile into the journey, Mace came upon an abandoned M-39 vehicle blocking the road. There had already been other vehicles in their way, and Mace had been able to tank-doze them off to the side. The M-39 was big and its tracks were locked. But Mace was one of those men who seemed to know how to do everything. He yelled out for someone to unlock the tracks, and Charley Heath suddenly appeared, a target for every Chinese soldier on the heights. That's a good man, Mace thought, and he yelled out instructions on how to move the levers to release the tracks. Out of that moment came a lifelong friendship begun in what both thought was a curious place, on that god-awful, narrow road, the Chinese firing away from both sides, men getting killed all around them. Heath felt like bait for the Chinese until finally he got the levers right and the wheels released, and Mace smashed the M-39 to the side. On the way back to his tank, Heath suffered a concussion when an American fighter-bomber dropped a rocket a bit too close, and soon he could barely see because his eyes began to bleed from the effect of the explosion. Still, he had made it to the M-39 ^an(l back alive. Lucky Charley, he had thought to himself, at least so far.

A little later, Mace swung his tank around a sharp curve and almost froze. There ahead of him, about three miles away by his reckoning, he could see the section of the road called The Pass. Here, for about five hundred yards, the road had been cut through what appeared to be one large hill. The banks on both sides were very sharp and steep—and the passage was exceedingly tight. As he got closer, it seemed as if any enemv soldier on either side could almost reach out and touch the American vehicles. If the Chinese knocked out even one or two of them in The Pass, Mace thought they might be able to stop this already cumbersome American convoy from getting out. As he finally drove his tank into The Pass, he wondered for an instant if it might not be the last thing he would ever do in his life. But to his surprise, the world did not explode.

The Pass was already littered with vehicles—the ruins of the Turkish convoy that had been torn apart the day before—the carcasses of jeeps, weapons carriers, two-and-a-half-ton trucks, a grand trail of useless metal that the Chinese could now use against the Americans. Mace did not know' whether he was more scared or angry at that moment, because this wTeckage clearly had been there some time and no one had said a thing about it. Where the hell had any aerial recon been? he w'ondered. Corps had lots of spotter planes. Why hadn't Division known on its own? So he cleared the road as best he could. It was a miserable, dangerous job, but he was lucky, he thought later—though if there were such a thing as real luck, he wouldn't have been in Korea at all—the Chinese had not yet filled in positions on either side of the road, and so the firing was lighter than it would be later in the day. Mace and another tank driver rammed everything in sight out of the way, maybe thirty or forty vehicles. If they hadn't, the disaster that day might have been immeasurably worse. As he finished trying to clear the area, Mace wondered briefly why Keiser had not sent one of his own men along and used Mace's tank as a recon vehicle, or at least had a light spotter plane flying overhead. When they finally pushed through, Mace and his men were the only members of the Second Division who knew just how dangerous the road south was—how many Chinese were already gathered there, with at least forty machine guns, he was sure, as well as countless mortars trained on the road. He knew as well that the British were not going to be of any help—but there was no way to get word back to Reiser's headquarters because his tank radio did not connect with Reiser's. It was the perfect preamble for the disaster still to come.

Mace found an American and British position just to the south of The Pass. Some of the Americans felt that the British had not tried very hard to fight their way through, and the British in turn felt that the Americans were expecting them to work miracles. An American colonel rushed over and told Mace to turn his tanks around and go back, but he answered no way, there was just no room on the road. He had done his best to clear it. Then he watched the convoy dribble through ever more slowly, the noise from the battle becoming louder as ever more Chinese manned The Pass with ever heavier weapons. Some of the Americans who emerged alive after coming through The Pass seemed so badly shaken that to Mace they appeared more like the living dead. What had been for a time a small hell was in the process of becoming a very big hell, he thought.

CAPTAIN ALAN JONES, the Ninth Regiment's S-2, had watched the day turn into a nightmare, almost minute by minute. The intelligence had been hopeless really. Communications between different units and the commanders had gotten worse throughout the day, especially after the senior officers left the CP and headed south. If the Americans named one particularly bad stretch The Pass, they came up with a fitting name for the entire cruel six miles from Kunuri to Sunchon. The Gauntlet, they called it—for they were men who had to run The Gauntlet. The first thing Jones was aware of as he moved through The Gauntlet was that he was witnessing the complete breakdown of order and hierarchy. In the Army, structure was believed to be everything, and this day the structure had simply disappeared. Once it was gone, it was very hard to get back. Altogether too many units had simply disintegrated, and there was less and less command structure all the time.

What he was witnessing was nothing less than the destruction of much of an American division right in front of his eyes, something he would never be able to forget. A vehicle would be hit, and it would block the road for others, and some brave soul would try to move it aside, and all the while the Chinese would be pouring fire down on them. Bodies lay right in the middle of the road—some possibly still alive, for all anyone knew—and the driver of the next truck or jeep would have no choice in that narrow passage but to run right over them. Sometimes a driver might hesitate, and if he did, his vehicle instantly became the next target, and the convoy would be slowed just that much more. The men themselves more often than not seemed numbed by it. Some of them just huddled along the side of the road, and sometimes it was hard for Jones to tell who was dead and who was wounded, and who was simply paralyzed—men whose bodies still functioned but whose spirits were broken.

It was hard to estimate the time of day, but Jones believed he had gotten onto the road about 2 P.M. His orders were simple. Colonel Sloane had told him to get through to Sunchon and set up an assembly point for the rest of the regiment. Jones's jeep was hit fairly early on, and his driver was wounded, but he managed to get the driver into another vehicle. When he got back to his own jeep, its engine had been hit and it had stopped running. He managed to push it off the road and began walking. From time to time he was able to gather some men, all from different outfits, around him in a hastily formed mini-unit, and they would return fire in quick little spasms of combat, and then in the confusion the group would disintegrate, and a little farther along another unit would form up around him. The men, beaten, emptied out physically and spiritually, and leaderless, were caught in something that was simply too big for them; a few were able to fight back, but as the command structure was gone, so was much of their will to fight.

16. THE GAUNTLET, NOVEMBER 30, 1Q5Q Tlie one thing he had decided was that he was going to walk out and fight another day, or he was going to die on that road trving. He was not going to be captured again by anyone. He had gone about four miles down the road on foot when he happened to look up and see a Chinese gunner pointing a machine gun right at him. It was a rare thing, Jones thought, to catch a glimpse of a man who intended to kill you. There was no doubt that he was Chinese, and that he was manning an American 30-caliber machine gun. He was about a hundred yards away, midway on the forward slope of a hill. Jones could see the muzzle flashes even as he dove for a ditch at the side of the road. As he did, he was hit in the foot. Under other circumstances, it might not have seemed like such a terrible wound, but the bullet tore that foot apart and there was a lot of bleeding, and when he tried to put a tourniquet on it, he kept losing consciousness.

Now effectively he had only one foot. He was sure he was going to die. Just then a jeep drove by with Captain Lucian Truscott III, Captain John Carley, and a third officer inside. They saw Jones struggling with his wound—he looked purple, Carley remembered— and they stopped. Truscott carried Jones to the jeep, and the third officer bandaged his foot. Somehow they made it to Sunchon, though Jones had little memory of the rest of the ride. He never learned the name of the officer who had bandaged his foot. He was soon flown to a hospital in Japan. More than fifty years later, Jones was living in a special Army retirement home near Fort Belvoir, when one day he noticed a newcomer and asked if he wanted to join him for lunch. They were both, it turned out, Korean veterans, both former members of the Second Division. In fact both had been caught in The Gauntlet. At a certain point Bill (Hawk) Wood looked at Jones and asked, "Say, you wouldn't be the officer whose foot I bandaged that day on the road to Sunchon, would you?"

MALCOLM MACDONALD, THE young intelligence officer who had been caught in heavy fire when the Chinese raked Division headquarters on the night of the twenty-ninth, started November 30 by checking the headquarters area. There he found the body of a young friend of his, Lieutenant William Fitzpatrick; he had taken a bullet in the head the previous night. MacDonald had seen a good deal of death in those few days, but the death of someone he knew and liked seemed to mark the day from the start. Later that morning, he was standing outside headquarters with a young photo-interpreter, Private John McKitch, when the Chinese snipers began shooting again. McKitch was hit in the upper arm. Just a little less wind and he gets it in the head, MacDonald thought, and a little more wind and I get it in the gut. The fact that the snipers were zeroing in on them was a sure sign that it was time to go. Then the order to get out came down. Each man could bring his weapon, his ammo, a first aid kit, and a canteen of water. They had to leave their duffels and their arctic sleeping bags—the very few who had them—behind. MacDonald went out in the jeep of Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Foster, the division G-2, and it was start-and-stop all the way, under constant fire.

It was a day of tears, MacDonald thought years later. Some men wept and others perhaps should have. At one point, as they were coming up on The Pass, the convoy stopped and MacDonald walked toward the head of the column to find out what the delay was. Along the way, he saw Butch Barberis, commander of the Second Battalion of the Ninth Regiment, standing by the side of the road. Bullets were landing everywhere, but Barberis seemed immune to danger, in no way afraid of the Chinese, but not moving either. He and MacDonald had been friends, young officers of roughly the same age posted together back at Fort Lewis before the war, and MacDonald had always thought of Barberis as perhaps the single most fearless officer he knew. It was just like Barberis to stand there contemptuous of enemy fire, rallying his troops, MacDonald thought. Then he noticed that Barberis was weeping. "Mac," his friend said, "I've lost my whole battalion."

On that retreat, just when you thought you had been through the worst of it, there was something worse ahead, something to haunt you for the rest of your life. As they came to The Pass, the convoy began to pick up speed, and MacDonald, by now leading one subsection of it, drove as quickly as he could, because there was safety in speed, and death at every stop. As he came around a big curve, making what was on that road fairly good time, MacDonald saw a two-and-a-half-ton truck lying on its side, and alongside it a bunch of GIs trying to flag him down, pleading with him or anyone else in the convoy to stop. It was as if the entire scene were taking place in slow motion. He did not have to hear them to know what they were saying, that they believed they were going to die unless he helped them.

It was, thought MacDonald, the worst moment of the worst day of his life. If he stopped, he feared, the Chinese would hammer the convoy and then block the road again. He had his mission—to get a jeep already loaded with wounded out and make room for those other vehicles. So he hardened himself and just kept driving. "I said a prayer for those poor souls there along the road and I asked for their forgiveness," he remembered years later. When he finally reached a small ford at the end of The Pass, one that the Chinese were covering with a devastatingly accurate machine gun, he was sure that he was not going to be able to cross. But then a B-26 came in on a napalm run and took out the machine gun. Finally across, MacDonald had a hard time grasping that he was actually going to live. Of one thing he was sure—none of the men who had been there that day was ever going to be quite the same again.

DUTCH KEISER LEFT his headquarters in the early afternoon. By the time he went out, he was well aware that his division was caught in a trap of monstrous proportions. He and the other senior officers had given up their vans to the wounded. He was not in good shape. He had been fighting a cold for several days and left wrapped in a parka. The journey out did not favor generals much more than it did enlisted men. At one point Maury Holden, the G-3, was kneeling behind a jeep firing into the nearest Chinese position next to Major Bill Harrington, the assistant G-2. Suddenly Harrington fell over on top of him, shot right through the heart.

Even with the constant fire, Keiser and his group moved reasonably well until they neared The Pass. Then the convoy stalled. So Keiser and the others got out of their jeeps, witnessing the same physical and emotional destruction that so many others had seen. For the first time he realized how* completely it had already unraveled—the sheer scope of the tragedy. He was shocked by how* few of his men were firing back. He moved among them, shouting, "Who's in command here?...Can't any of you do anything?" He finally decided to recon The Pass himself and began to walk it, at one point trying to step over a body in his path. Tired, he did not get his foot high enough and stepped on the body by mistake. Suddenly, the body spoke: "You damned son of a bitch!" The voice stunned Keiser and he found himself apologizing—"My friend, I'm sorry"—before continuing on his way. It was an epitaph for the day. There was death all around him, and he understood that it did not matter how little help he had gotten from Corps. It was all his responsibility. It was the destruction of his division and it was intensely personal. Corporal Jake Thorpe, Reiser's bodyguard, who had dedicated his life to protecting him, had been killed that afternoon while manning their jeep's machine gun. At first, they had placed Thorpe's body in the back of the jeep, but eventually, because there were so many wounded lying along the road, they had had to leave it by the roadside in order to make room. That was a hard thing to do, leaving behind the body of a man who had given his life protecting you.

WHEN GENE TAKAHASHI finally made it through The Gauntlet, he was stunned by what had happened to his company, his battalion, and his regiment. He had known it was bad, but it had been so much worse than he had realized. Love Company was down to about a dozen men. As far as he could tell, he was the only officer left—all the others had either been killed, seriously wounded, or were missing in action. When they had an assembly a few days later near Seoul, only 10 men of the original 170 of Love Company were there. Of the 600 men in Takahashi's battalion, only 125 to 150 made it through. As combat units, Love and King companies, which had been on point for the division when the Chinese assault began, no longer existed. The Third Battalion barely existed. And the Ninth Regiment was well under half strength.

AS OTHER UNITS from the Second Division were being torn up on the Sunchon road, Paul Freeman was trying to save his regiment. In the days after the initial Chinese attack, some of his frustration showed over the fact that he had sensed accurately what was coming and his superiors had ignored him. He told Reginald Thompson of the London Daily Telegraph how well the Chinese had been fighting despite their limited hardware. "Without air and artillery they're making us look a little silly in this godawful country." On the morning of the thirtieth, his Twenty-third Regiment was the last barrier between the rest of the Second Division and the massive Chinese forces closing in from the north. Its job was to hold the Kunuri perimeter for as long as possible and then follow the Ninth and the Thirty-eighth down the Sunchon road. But Freeman could see that going south was hopeless.

Freeman had been spending a lot of time with his own artillery officers, Paul O'Dowd, the forward observer for the Fifteenth Field Artillery Battalion, noticed. He was always checking in, asking what they were hearing, and there was a good reason for that, because when all the other forms of communications were breaking down, the artillery generally had the best communications left. The artillery had to have good communications; if they didn't, they risked killing their own troops. So they had their own spotter planes, and their reports from the field were very good, or at least very good on the scale of communications that existed by then. They knew from the start that the road south was only for the dead and dying. O'Dowd, who had been studying Freeman, knew immediately what he was up to, and decided that he was a damn smart officer. Other division officers tended to categorize the artillery as a unit to which you gave orders, not one you listened to. Because of what he was hearing, Freeman decided relatively early in the day to go out on the Anju road, the route Shrimp Milburn had offered to Keiser.

By noon on the thirtieth, Freeman's position was already desperate. He knew he had very little time left. He could actually see the masses of Chinese troops who had crossed the Chongchon, and he told Division of his growing vulnerability. What made his circumstances even more difficult was how poor his communications with Division were with Keiser on the move. Soon, he could reach Division only through Chin Sloane's jeep radio, with Sloane, commander of the sister Ninth Regiment, designated to relay messages as best he could to Keiser. Then he lost even that connection. In the early afternoon, Freeman was still trying for permission to go out west. He finally reached Colonel Gerry Epley, the division chief of staff, and Epley told him he could not change his orders. Then the communications got even worse.

Sometime later Freeman reached Sloane and asked if Sladen Bradley, the assistant division commander, could call him—he desperately needed permission to switch his orders. About two-thirty, Bradley called and Freeman made his case to go out west. The decision had to be made immediately—and they had to move before night fell: the Chinese were being held off only by superior American firepower, principally the artillery. With darkness, the enemy would be able to move at will, and Freeman's regiment would be doomed. He wanted to leave by the Anju road about two hours before dark. About 4 P.M. Bradley, who had been unable to reach Keiser, called back and gave him permission to do whatever was best for his regiment. Freeman then asked the commanders of units still remaining in the Kunuri area if they wanted to go out with him. Some chose to, some did not.

It was getting toward dusk, and everyone knew" how bad the whole tiling was. Paul O'Dowd was with the artillerymen who by then were buttoning up their guns, preparatory for the last move. If they went south, it was going to be a very bad trip, they all knew, because they had two spotter planes flying over the road and the reports on the destruction were shocking. It sounded like a massacre to O'Dowd. But for the moment he had only one job, getting those guns out of there. Lieutenant Colonel John Keith of the Fifteenth Field Artillery Battalion had told him to load up their guns, and he was doing just that, sure that they had fired their last round in the Kunuri region. Just then one of his forward observers, First Lieutenant Patrick McMullan, showed up and started screaming, "Fire mission! Fucking Chinese! Fire mission! Fucking Chinese everywhere! Fire mission!" O'Dowd had never seen McMullan so out of control—he thought maybe he was drunk, for some of the men in other units had been drinking that day. "Fire mission! More fucking Chinese!"

"We're on closed station march orders," O'Dowd told him, which was the exact phrase they used for the moment when they had closed it up and were ready to get out. But gradually O'Dowd got more information: the Chinese were moving in for the kill right out in the open in daylight, seemingly thousands of them. Just then Colonel Freeman walked by and asked O'Dowd what was going on, and O'Dowd explained what McMullan had seen. "Get the goddamn guns into fire positions," Freeman ordered.

There they were, all those Chinese, perhaps five thousand yards away, a vast field of them closing in just as McMullan had said. Freeman told the men that their mission was to delay the Chinese, even if they did not get out in time themselves, even if they did not get out at all. The regiment, Freeman later remembered, unloaded all its weapons and ammo, and the men laid everything out in front of them. This is where they Were going to make their last stand, he thought, and quite possibly die. The artillerymen had unloaded the big 105s from the trucks and pointed them in one direction—eighteen howitzers in all, the last guns of Kunuri. It was called a Russian front in the artillery. Paul O'Dowd had fought in two wars, survived the worst of the Naktong fighting, and he had never seen anything like this. Everyone in the unit—cooks, clerk typists—helped take shells off the trucks and carry them to the guns. They fired everything they had in what seemed to O'Dowd about twenty minutes, though it probably took longer. There was a lot of ammo because they had shells that two other artillery units had left behind. They were firing so fast that the guns were overheating and the paint was peeling, just rolling off the guns in giant chunks. The recoil systems on those guns were going to be ruined, O'Dowd decided, but there was no time to worry^- about that. He was just a little scared that the chambers were so hot the guns might blow.

It was an apocalyptic moment. The noise was deafening, eighteen guns that never stopped. How many rounds went out in that brief span—three, four, five thousand? Who knew? And then, suddenly, it w^ras over. They had fired their last shell. After all that noise, the silence was overwhelming. Then they destroyed the guns with thermite charges, so the Chinese could not use them. They had completely stopped the Chinese attack, and Freeman believed that, even more important, the Chinese had dug into defensive positions, because an artillery barrage like that often signaled the coming of an infantry attack. The last orders Freeman gave were "Get the hell out of here, and don't stop!" The road to Anju was completely open and the Twenty-third ran into very little Chinese resistance.

If THE SECOND DIVISION was the tail end of the Eighth Army now heading south, then the Second Engineers were at the very end of the tail, the last of the units to go out. Gino Piazza, who had fought so well with Dog Company of the Second Engineers during the worst of the Naktong fighting, thought that November 30 was the worst day of his life. For the first time, he Was sure he was going to die. As far as he could tell, many of the officers at more senior levels had bailed on the men. A number of the officers in the Second Engineers had gone out in a group. There had been one young second lieutenant, John Sullivan, whom Piazza particularly liked and who had wanted to stay with the men because he thought that was w'hat officers were supposed to do, but he had gotten his orders, and so had said good-bye to Piazza—in tears. All too many of the officers whose job it was to get the Second Engineers into the larger convoy had in Piazza's opinion just been goddamned old-fashioned cowards who did not give a damn about the men. "It was the moment of truth, the moment when you needed your officers most, and they were trying to separate all the officers from the men and ferry them out by themselves—turning the retreat into some kind of officer's club for safety!" Piazza said.

Engineers do not move lightly, something infantry commanders often seemed to forget. For more than a week before the Chinese made their initial strike, the Engineers' commander, Colonel Alarich Zacherle, had been pushing Division to make a decision on all their heavy construction gear, the bulldozers and heavy trucks loaded with bridging equipment, which was at the heart of what engineers did. In any military convoy, Zacherle had tried to remind them, this would make the Engineers the slowest of the slow and the easiest of targets, slowing down everyone else. Zacherle wanted permission to send the heavy stuff back four or five days before the Chinese attacked. They were sure as hell not going to build anything new this far north. There would never be an instant airstrip to sit alongside the Yalu River. Each day when Piazza had asked Zacherle if they had a decision on the heavy equipment, the colonel would simply shake his head—and there was an implication, Piazza thought, in the way he answered that Zacherle did not think the men in charge knew what the hell they were doing. And so they were stuck with all that heavy gear now.

The night before the final retreat, Zacherle had visited Gerry Epley, the Division chief of staff, to find out what was going on. Epley had then invited him to go out with some of the Division staff. Zacherle was surprised by the offer. No, he had answered, he would go out with his own men. He thought that was the right way to do it. He was already—at least, so some of his men thought—badly shaken by the damage inflicted on his unit. The Second Engineers had lost up to two hundred of their nine hundred men in the first seventy-two hours of the Chinese attack. Zacherle had always taken his command quite personally and was proud of the fact that he knew—or at least thought he knew—every man in the battalion by name. In most circumstances such an attitude greatly aided morale. But now his affection for and commitment to his men made things harder for him.

So the Engineers were going to have to go out late, and they were going to have to go out burdened with all their heavy equipment, waiting for their place, which would be near the end of that cumbersome main convoy. They were all formed up, Dog Company in the lead, Headquarters Company next, followed by Able, Baker, and Charley companies. As the afternoon moved along, though, there was a growing sense that the situation was hopeless—word kept filtering back to the waiting units that the convoy was being torn up just a mile or two down the road. There they were, Piazza thought, ever so patiently waiting their turn to be part of a growing disaster. Piazza was in the lead jeep. They were told they would get their slot in the convoy around 4 P.M., but the convoy was moving ever more slowly and the time was being pushed back. Soon it was dusk and they hadn't moved; then dusk had gone and it was getting darker. The 503rd Field Artillery passed them with its heavy guns. The Engineers were next. Just then five trucks from one of the artillery units cut in front of them, five big deuce-and-a-halfs. Normally, Piazza hated anyone doing that, but in this case he felt more philosophical—you want it, big guys, he thought, you're welcome to it.

Then his jeep led the Second Engineers into the convoy. Everyone was scared to death. They were in the convoy only thirty minutes, the artillery trucks just ahead of them, when the artillerymen came upon a small cut in the road, hills on both sides, and suddenly, in Piazza's words, all hell broke loose. It was as if the Chinese had been waiting expressly for the artillery and its carriers, all those big guns in those big trucks, moving so slowly, and they struck with their perfectly sighted mortars. The firestorm was overpowering—the artillerymen had driven into the perfect trap within a trap. The trucks simply exploded, one after another. Five had entered the trap; five were now' on fire. All those men, surely some Piazza had gone drinking with over the years, blown up just like that, one moment as alive as he was and then gone. If you sat down to dream up the worst possible scenario for your buddies, this would be it. In real life, he thought, you were supposed to wake up and find out that it was only a nightmare, but there was no waking up from this. You could not move forward; you could not move back; and right in front of you, hundreds of men whom less than an hour ago you had lightly cursed for cutting into the line, were dying.

TO GINO PIAZZA, the convoy seemed completely stalled. Then he heard a new set of orders. "Abandon your vehicles and assemble on the side of the road! Abandon your vehicles and assemble on the side of the road!" No one even knew where the orders came from or who had given them. So the men of the Second Engineers began to leave their vehicles and scramble up the hill on their right. Piazza wanted to blow up their trucks, which had a lot of communications gear he did not want the Chinese to capture, but he was told the Air Force would fly over the next day and blow them up for them. For the first time since he had been in Korea, Piazza found himself truly despairing. He sensed that his will to survive, which had helped sustain him during the Naktong fighting, was leaving him. He had never been especially religious, but now he started to pray. His prayers were very specific. He offered prayers for the souls in purgatory. That went back to his childhood in Brooklyn. It was the prayer his mother always offered up when something bad happened. Her explanation was quite simple: If you had lived a good life, then you went to heaven. But if you hadn't, and the chances were that Gino Piazza, given his myriad flaws and imperfections, had not, then the more prayers you offered for the souls in purgatory, the less they suffered—and maybe it would help you as well when you got there.

Strangely enough, it seemed to work, or at least it worked for him at that moment. At the very least it calmed him. He realized that in such chaos no one else was going to save him, so he had to save himself. If the Chinese wanted his ass, he decided, they were going to have to come and get it. There were a lot of men gathering on that hill, hundreds, he thought, maybe even a thousand. No one seemed to be in charge—so he might as well lead. He formed up one group and started for the crest, and his band seemed to grow larger by the minute because no one else seemed to be leading. The Chinese spotted them and raked their area with machine gun fire, which sent some of the men racing downhill again. A few NCOs who were helping Piazza tried to stop them, because when they were on the road they became perfect targets, but it was too late. They had broken when the machine gun opened up. Piazza doubted whether many of them ever made it out.

WHAT ALAPJCH ZACHERLE remembered most about the day when the Chinese captured much of his unit was how bad the communications were. No one seemed able to reach anyone else. It wasn't the fault of the radio operators—they stayed at their stations at the expense of their own safety—just poor equipment, and very poor leadership. He was supposed to come out near the end of the convoy, with the Twenty-third Regiment right behind him, and on a number of occasions each unit failed in its attempt to reach the other. Years later, long after Zacherle had returned from his two and a half years in a prison camp, he finally met Paul Freeman, who assured him he had tried to reach him several times to tell him the original plan was being abandoned, that his regiment was going out on the west road, and the Engineers should come with them. It had been a tense moment, because Freeman's unit had made it out relatively unscathed, while so many of Zacherle's men had been killed or captured. "Hell, yes, we would have loved to come out with you," Zacherle told Freeman, and assured him that he bore him no animus. What had happened that day, Zacherle believed, was the fortunes of war.

Back at his spot where the Engineers were waiting, Zacherle knew it was all coming to an end. The road wasn't going to open up; not for heavy equipment, that was for sure. Even before the end, Zacherle gave the order to blow up some of the heavier stuff, the trucks and bulldozers. They used phosphorous grenades to burn the gears. Then, sometime in the very late afternoon, with the Chinese closing in, they burned the unit colors. He and the other officers did not want the Chinese to capture them and flaunt them. They were in a wooden box, and Zacherle ordered an extra dose of gasoline poured on them. Burning the colors, that told it all. Then it was time to start walking out. The Engineers were more vulnerable than other units—they were known as combat engineers, and they might be used as infantry, but they had no automatic weapons and no mortars. In any confrontation with the Chinese they would be seriously underarmed.

Bob Nehrling, battalion adjutant for the Second Engineers, knew that it was all over too. They had started the day as part of a blocking force for Division headquarters, and they were a unit, Nehrling decided later, that could be sacrificed. Somebody, somewhere up the chain of command had decided that. Nehrling was with a group of about thirty-five staff officers from Battalion, and Zacherle had told them that they were going to have to get out as best they could. They never had a chance, Nehrling thought. They had barely moved from their waiting point near the road when suddenly there were Chinese everywhere, as surprised to come across them as they were to be surrounded.

The Chinese who captured them were headed south, and so for a time they too kept going south, the group of prisoners increasing steadily as stragglers from the Ninth and Thirty-eighth regiments were captured. Pretty soon they had about twenty infantry officers with them as well as engineers. It was the beginning of a terrible time, from which very few of them made it back.

GINO PIAZZA TRUSTED his instincts in no small part because he had nothing else to go on. It was dark by then and no one had a compass. Piazza had a general sense that they needed to head southeast, and he knew the terrain better than most because he had done some recon earlier on, looking for mines in the area. He managed to line up the general direction he wanted by sighting on two stars—it was the most primitive kind of compass sighting—and soon he found an old railroad spur heading that way for them to walk along. His group—maybe five hundred at tops, and two hundred at its smallest—took fire constantly. Piazza, with a carbine and several hundred rounds of ammo, was careful to fire only when he had a target. When it was over, he had very few rounds left, so he knew he had been firing through much of the night.

Some of the officers in his group kept wanting to turn right—as if some tidal pull were affecting them—a direction that would surely bring them back where they had started out, but gradually, in the mysterious way that these things work, Piazza took command of this bedraggled unit. He seemed the only one with the requisite confidence. Eventually, in a clearing, they came across another group whose leader, an officer, wanted to dig in for the night. But Piazza argued with him. They could not dig in, he insisted; they lacked the weaponry to hold the Chinese off, and the Chinese were right on top of them. In the end, they kept going as Piazza wanted. Once, from a high point, they looked down and spotted a tunnel on the tracks below'. Some of the men wanted to go down there, as if a tunnel were the perfect hiding place. Piazza told them not to, but a number went anyway. It was exactly where the Chinese would look first, he believed. What looked safe was not safe; what looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

Finally, they spotted the main Kunuri-Sunchon road. Some of the men wanted to go down immediately, because it looked like the easiest way out. The road, Piazza understood, represented the familiar to American troops and they found comfort in the familiar. He had to fight that impulse not just in himself but in the men he was leading. When some soldiers peeled off from the group and made for the road anyway, the Chinese opened up on them immediately. Gradually, Piazza sorted out command functions with other NCOs, so they could have some structure if he was hit. He even found an officer, Lieutenant Wilbur Webster, from the Eighty-second AAA, or Anti-Aircraft Artillery, an antiaircraft unit used thus far as an infantry weapon, and suggested he take over, but Webster said, "No, Sergeant Piazza, you're doing just fine." And so they slowly worked their way along the high ground, resisting the temptation of the easy, and they eventually made it back. Perhaps three hundred men came out with Piazza. He thought the prayers to those in purgatory had made the difference.

PERHAPS NO UNIT in the Second Division was hit as hard as the Second Engineers. When the retreat was over and they assembled near Seoul, it seemed as if each man stood where once an entire platoon or squad might have been. Gino Piazza, who became a kind of ex officio historian of the group, believed that there had been about 900 men in the battalion as it was moving north. There were a total of 266 men in that final formation, he remembered. Perhaps as many as 500 men had been lost in that one day—it was a ghost battalion now. You couldn't be exact on the figures, Piazza believed, because some of the men had been back in rear echelon positions and had not been hit by the Chinese. But it had been a terrible day. The Second Engineers, Piazza later reflected, with untempered bitterness, paid an unusually high price for the stupidity and arrogance of other men.

LATE IN THE afternoon, Paul Freeman started moving his regiment west toward Anju. After it was all over, there was some muted criticism of him, because he had come out a different route and had not protected the rear of the convoy. But most of the men who knew what happened that day thought he had done the right thing—that whatever terrible fate befell the other units in the convoy, Freeman's regiment would not have made any difference, because the assault had not come from the rear, it had come from the retreat itself, from the Chinese already in position firing as the division came into their sights. Freeman, most observers thought, had not only done the right thing but had done an exceptional job in responding to changing battlefield pressures and saving what would have been an otherwise doomed unit.

Night was falling as the Twenty-third went west out of Kunuri. They had no idea at what moment the Chinese might strike and cut the Anju road—only that if it happened, they would be bound to the road and badly outnumbered. By chance, the key bridge on the approach to Anju was still in American hands. A company from the Fifth Regimental Combat Team, a part of First Corps, had been sent there to cover its own corps' retreat. The company commander was a young captain named Hank Emerson, who went on to considerable fame as one of the most audacious commanders during the Vietnam War, when his nickname became The Gunfighter.

At that moment, Emerson's orders—absolutely terrifying, since the Chinese in great numbers were on the move south—were to try to hold that bridge until the late afternoon. He had one company with which to do it. Chinese divisions were headed right at him, and the cold was a brutal enemy all its own. (He still remembered quite precisely more than half a century later that the temperature that day hit twenty-three below.) As Emerson waited, he began to think about something that he would ponder for much of his career: what was it like for a unit of infantrymen who believed that those above them had decided they were more or less expendable as part of a larger need for the rest of a division's survival? Were they some kind of unfortunate offering to the gods of battle? As darkness settled in and the cold only deepened, Emerson's tension grew. Just when he thought he might be able to leave, a small American spotter plane was shot down nearby, an unwanted sign of just how close the Chinese were.

Emerson and his men had been assigned to rescue the downed flyers, when he happened to look up. There, coming from the east, was an immense caravan of American troops heading toward his bridge. There had been no heads-up from his superiors about an American unit coming through. As far as he could tell, communications being what they were, no one from First Corps knew this unit was coming out. It was like a vast lost patrol appearing out of nowhere, the men looking exhausted and bedraggled, but somehow^ proud and determined as well. Some men, those who could, were walking, others were crowded into trucks and on top of tanks, sometimes on top of one another. The column stretched as far as he could see. Someone passing by told Emerson they were from the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment.

What Emerson remembered best about that day—other than the fact that when he radioed in, he was then ordered by his superiors to give the Twenty-third all his trucks, which meant that his own men eventually came back riding on the outside of his tanks—was that the commander of the Twenty-third came in on the last vehicle, a jeep with a mounted machine gun. Emerson immediately understood the meaning of that—a commander who had made himself one of the most vulnerable members of his outfit should the Chinese catch up with them. The last man out, Emerson thought, that's good; that's what a real commander does. The commander, whose name was Paul Freeman, stopped briefly to talk to him, and was very cool, and very much in command—as if something like this, taking a regiment down a back road to escape three or four Chinese divisions, was something he did every day.

"Son, what outfit is this holding this bridge?" he asked.

He has no more idea who we are than I do who he is, Emerson thought. "Sir, this is Company A of the Fifth Regimental Combat Team."

"Well, son, God bless Company A of the Fifth Regimental Combat team. Thank you for what you're doing here." And then Paul Freeman passed through, and not long after, Company A pulled out as well. The last units whacked by the Chinese from the west side of the peninsula were now headed south for safer positions and with luck—if that was the word-preparing to fight another day.

It had been one of the worst days in the history of the American Army, surely the worst in the history of the Second Infantry Division, at the end of the worst week in the division's history. The numbers were heartbreaking. In those finals days of November, the Ninth Regiment had lost an estimated 1,474 men (including non-battle casualties, which usually meant frostbite); the Thirty-eighth Regiment, 1,178; and the Twenty-third, 545. The Second Engineers had lost some 561 men to battle casualties. An infantry regiment had an authorized strength of about 3,800 men; when it was time to regroup, the Ninth had only about 1,400 men left; the Thirty-eighth, 1,700; and the Twenty-third, 2,200.

LIEUTENANT CHARLEY HEATH had never dared think he would make it out alive. But because he had gone out with the first group of tanks, he was one of the first to arrive, and he had been able to watch the other men from the division as the fortunate ones reached Sunchon. Every story seemed to be worse than the last, as the Chinese presence along The Gauntlet had grown stronger, and he heard stories about so many friends who had died that day. But there was one scene that he always remembered: his regimental commander, Colonel George Peploe, just standing there weeping. There had been moments when Peploe had seemed to those who served under him almost unbearably cocky, but this was a different man; it was as if he had been wounded, but all the wounds were on the inside. He was standing there crying, unable to stop, when one of his battalion commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Skeldon, came over and held him and tried to steady him, more for emotional than physical reasons. But Peploe could not stop weeping, and then Skeldon, in the most tender of acts at the end of the most violent of days, took off his helmet and held it up to shield Peploe from the view of others, so no one else would be able to observe him crying. Though Peploe had lived when so many of his men died, it had clearly been a kind of death for him as well.

THE LEADERSHIP AT the top in the Second Division had been terrible. By contrast, because O. P. Smith had anticipated what the Chinese were going to do, the Marines were in much better shape. Their regiments were by no means perfectly connected, and still very vulnerable to being separated, and not nearly as close to their base at the port of Hungnam as Smith would have liked. The forward units near Yudam-ni were still far too exposed, and out on much more of a limb than Smith preferred, but at least they were somewhat better connected because he had stood up to Almond. Still, the vulnerability was unnerving. But at least they were not chasing wildly to the west to link up with the Eighth Army, as his orders had originally demanded.

There was very little about their subsequent heroic march back to Hungnam that had to do with luck—most of it was the result of great individual courage and exceptional small-unit leadership—but on two points they were fortunate. First they benefited from the fact that the Chinese struck when they did, instead of waiting an additional day or two, by which time Ray Murray's Fifth Marine Regiment might have been farther west, and thus more cut off from Litzenberg's Seventh Regiment and the rest of the division; and second, that the Chinese had such poor communications and so little ability to adapt to the changing reality of battle. Had their communications been more modern, as Colonel Alpha Bowser later said, the First Marine Division would never have made it back from the Chosin Reservoir.

Their breakout from the Chosin Reservoir is one of the classic moments in their own exceptional history, a masterpiece of leadership on the part of their officers and of simple, relentless, abiding courage on the part of the ordinary fighting men—fighting a vastly larger force in the worst kind of mountainous terrain and unbearable cold that sometimes reached down to minus forty. Of all the battles in the Korean War, it is probably the most celebrated, deservedly so, and the most frequently written about. As the news reached Washington and then the country about the dilemma of the First Marines, seemingly cut off and surrounded by a giant force of Chinese, there was widespread fear that the division might be lost. Omar Bradley himself was almost certain they were lost. When the First Marines started the breakout, there Were six Chinese divisions aligned against them, or roughly sixty thousand soldiers. In the two-week battle in which the Marines fought their way back to Hungnam, Smith believed that they had fought all-out against seven Chinese divisions and parts of three others. An estimated forty thousand Chinese were killed and perhaps another twenty thousand wounded. From November 27 to December 11, when the main battle with the Chinese began, the Marines lost 561 dead, 182 missing, 2,894 wounded, and another 3,600 who suffered from non-battle injuries, mostly frostbite.

17. BREAKOUT FROM CHOSIN RESERVOIR, NOVEMBER 27-DECEMBER Q. 1Q5Q The small number of men missing in action compared to the number of men killed and wounded is testimony to the discipline of both the officers and the men. The division's valor in fighting on island after island in the Pacific was well known long before the Korean War started. It had already distinguished itself, during the Naktong fighting, stopping breakthroughs whenever the North Koreans had momentarily penetrated the UN lines, and had performed with excellence after Inchon in the battle for Seoul. But this was its greatest challenge. Whether at that point any other American division could have made it out of what still seemed like an almost complete trap is doubtful. "It was the strongest division in the world," said one of its public information officers, Captain Michael Capraro. "I thought of it as a Doberman, a dangerous hound straining at the leash, wanting nothing more than to sink its fangs into the master's enemy, preferably one with yellow skin."

Some of the Army division commanders had been worried about the Chinese during the drive north, but most of them had been like Dutch Keiser and not acted on their fears. Smith had. He had, among other things, made clear to every officer in the division what he was to do when the Chinese struck. They would fight from the high ground, moving on paths if need be, but not anchored to the roads, as the Chinese hoped. They would use their artillery as their best weapon, the equalizer. They would move primarily during the day and they would try to button up at night. All of this meant they were prepared emotionally and strategically for the battle ahead, as most of the Army units had not been. The cold was if anything a more determined enemy than the Chinese. It was pervasive and never let up, and as if the natural cold registering on the thermometer up there on the Manchurian heights wasn't bad enough, most of the time they were in a kind of Manchurian wind tunnel where the cold had a constant extra bite to it. The men came to look like Ancient Mariners who had sailed too close to the North Pole, all of them bearded; their beards, filled with ice shavings, told the story. The cold made men want to quit and give up—made it hard to want to fight and live for another day—and yet every day they kept fighting. Years later, when one of the senior NCOs visited Chesty Puller at his home outside of Washington, Puller greeted him and said, "Hey, Sarge, thawed out yet?"

They did not like to think of it as a retreat: it was not as if they had met an enemy moving at them from the North and pulled back to the South. A journalist had asked Smith during the fighting what he thought about the Marines' retreat from Chosin and he had bristled. "Retreat, hell," he had said, "we're simply attacking in another direction." The Chinese had, of course, blown the bridge at the Funchilin Pass after the Marines had crossed over it heading north, just as Smith had anticipated, and it seemed for a time like a death warrant—perhaps they were trapped there—but the Air Force had done a brilliant job of dropping the parts of a Treadway bridge in, and miraculously it worked; they were able to air-drop in enough sections, and somehow the engineers managed to put it in place. It allowed the Marines to go across when they returned south, a feat of engineering and ingenuity to match the courage of the men who were fighting. The First Marines had been completely surrounded, and in one of the great dramatic examples of sheer military strength they had fought their way through. At least four Chinese divisions were rendered combat ineffective during the battle.

There were many bleak military moments in the Korean War, but this was not one of them. In 2002, some fifty-one years after the battle, when Ed Simmons, who had fought there, wrote his history of the Chosin breakout he noted that in their 140-year history' the Marines had received 294 Congressional Medals of Honor. Forty-two were awarded during the Korean War. Of that number, fourteen were awarded for action during the Chosin breakout, seven of them posthumously. Yet Smith's leadership, his almost prophetic sense of the battle that was to come, never gained the admiration of the man whose corps he had saved. Almond still could not bring himself to praise Smith—for to admit what Smith had done was to admit his own awful miscalculations, and his blindness to the forces that had awaited him. "My general comment is that General Smith, ever since the Inchon landing and the preparation phase, was overly cautious executing any order that he ever received," Almond said years later.

But in the end, for all of the unmatched heroism, it was a retreat—they had all gone too far north and they had been hit by a massive force and forced to move back. Smith and the Marines, proud though they were of their withdrawal, knew that. The one person who refused to admit that it had been a catastrophic mistake w^ras MacArthur. The Marines subsequently prepared a history of what had happened and sent it to MacArthur, and he had objected to the use of the word "retreat." "In all my experience I was never more satisfied with an operation than I was with this one," Smith quoted him as saying. Then the Marine general added, "Now what are you going to do with a man like that?"

THE ASSAULT UPON the Second Division in the west had been by contrast an epochal horror, moments of great courage dwarfed by the chaos and confusion and almost complete lack of leadership at the top. All in all what had happened in those days when the Chinese attacked the Army in the west, and in certain sectors of Tenth Corps, constituted, in the words of Dean Acheson (not an entirely disinterested bystander, for he by then seethed with hatred of MacArthur), the greatest defeat suffered by the American military since the battle of Bull Run in the Civil War. The men in the Second Division who made it out that day were always, some other veterans of the war thought, just a little different from most other veterans. Just as so many men who fought in Korea tended to be different when they came home, in the same way, the veterans of that one week, the week of the Chinese attack and the retreat down The Gauntlet, were just that much different from the other Korean veterans. There was very little bluster to them. They did not talk readily about their experiences, even to those who had also served in Korea. They seemed to recoil from those who might praise them or talk of them as heroes. They thought of themselves only as survivors. As their units had been devastated, so too, in different ways, had many of them been damaged. Certainly something had been lost in many of them. One day they had been soldiers with countless buddies, part of an army that had gained the upper hand in a war that most of them hated, sure that a very difficult stretch in their lives had almost ended, and on a triumphant note at that. A week later, so many of their buddies were gone, often to indescribable fates, which all too often they had witnessed. Many of them bore not just the normal burden of the survivor, that uneasiness over why they had lived when someone they valued greatly and perhaps thought of as a better soldier had died, but a secret feeling, expressed to no one else, that over the six or seven days when so many of their friends had been killed or captured there had been some moment, maybe no more than a split second, when they might have been just a tiny bit braver and thus other men might have lived. Making it through had brought with it the immediacy of relief in living one more day, but often as they thought back on what had happened, what they had witnessed and done, there was the endless self-doubt as well.

DUTCH KEISER KNEW from the moment the day was over that there was likely to be a need for a scapegoat, and that he was the most obvious choice. He was, in fact, relieved of his command four days later: an announcement from Tokyo indicated that he had a serious illness. A few days later Keiser called on Slam Marshall, the Army historian who was in Korea doing interview's for what became his book The River and the Gauntlet, and told him exactly what had happened. He had received a message from Eighth Army headquarters informing him "that he was ill with pneumonia and must report to a hospital in Tokyo." Keiser knew instantly that they were about to tie the can for the defeat on him. He told Marshall he deeply resented being "the goat for MacArthur's blunder." So he drove down to Seoul to see Lev Allen, the Eighth Army chief of staff.

The conversation, he said, had gone like this:

Allen asked, "What the hell are you doing here? You're ill with pneumonia."

"You can see for yourself i don't have pneumonia, so cut the bunk."

"But are you going to comply with the order?"

"Yes, because it is an order, but i don't want you to kid around with me." Then Keiser started to leave.

Allen ventured one last line: "By the way, General Walker says he will take care of you with a job around his headquarters."

"You tell General Walker to shove his job up his ass," Keiser said.

But that was just the beginning. Dutch Keiser was the easiest of targets. In the field, the entire military leadership was almost completely discredited. Walton Walker might not have liked the idea of the drive north to begin with, but the scope of the defeat underscored his own limitations as a field commander powerless in dealing with his superiors. He was sure that he was going to be relieved of his command, that he too would be a scapegoat. Ned Almond was protected politically in Tokyo as Walker was not, and his forces had been saved from complete destruction—but only because of O. P. Smith's virtual insubordination. After Chesty Puller helped lead his regiment out to Hungnam, a Time magazine reporter had asked him what the great lesson of the battle was. "Never serve under Tenth Corps," Puller had immediately answered. A few weeks later, when Matt Ridgway showed up in Korea to take command, he met with Smith, and the one thing Smith asked him was that the Marines never again be placed under Ned Almond's command, a request to which Ridgway readily agreed.

A FEW WEEKS after the breakout from Kunuri on the Anju road, Paul Freeman ran into Keyes Beech, the Chicago Daily News reporter. Beech was intrigued by Freeman's role: he had been in China as a young officer and he had seen the Chinese Army up close in those days when it had been something of a joke. Now he was fighting them. What did he think? "These are not the same Chinese," Freeman had answered.

In THE DAYS following the retreat from Kunuri, the great question was not whether it was bad, but how-bad it was going to be. How far south would they have to retreat? When Johnnie Walker had met with MacArthur in the late-night session on November 28, he had been confident that if they retreated back to the Pyongyang area and created an east-west arc where the country was narrowest, Pyongyang-Yangdok-Wonsan, they could hold. Later Truman himself would talk about this line and say that that was where they should have drawn a line in the first place. The arc looked relatively narrow', especially compared to the vast wider spaces north of it, as the country mushroomed out. But at the waist it was still 125 miles long—with seven American divisions covering it, which meant a division sector would be about twenty miles. It was still very far north; the roads were terrible, and it would be extremely hard to supply many of the units. The Chinese might well be able to slip around them, thus isolating them. They were in effect now dealing with all the cautionary realities that they had paid so little attention to in the previous six weeks. But as the first Chinese success became apparent, the myth of battle, so important to the men engaged, suddenly favored them: there were so many of them, they were such fanatics, fearless in the face of their enemies; they fought brilliantly at night; they could slip up on a un position and be inside it before the first shot was fired. The fear factor, which had weighed on the Chinese before the battle began, the fear of vastly superior American weaponry, now burdened the un forces. The most dangerous virus that can infect any army—the fear of its adversary—had now struck the Eighth Army. As they had so recently underestimated Chinese military capacities, they now magnified them. As they had gone so cavalierly north, they were now unprepared to hold any kind of a moderate fallback position. In the west it was not a retreat but a rout, of an army that had become, because of the carelessness at the top, a shambles.

Now, it seemed, no one was in charge. The people in Tokyo, their illusions of total victory completely shattered, were frozen. In a way, it was as if the crisis existed within MacArthur himself: he had always wanted those around him to see him as omniscient; now that he had been defeated on the battlefield by an Asian army and peasant generals, it was as if he had lost faith not just in his own forces but in himself. He had spoken before the Chinese entry into the war of achieving the greatest victory in the history of Christendom, of rivers running red with Chinese blood. Now he spoke in hardly less apocalyptic terms of either widening the war (and using the atomic bomb) or abandoning the Korean peninsula altogether. The last tiling he was prepared to do was admit the mistakes he had made, and then try to piece his broken army back together. He was a man who liked to talk about the Asian concept of losing face; now he himself, good Caucasian though he was, had lost face not just before the entire world, but before his own troops, and perhaps most important of all before himself. Later, both Omar Bradley and Matt Ridgway talked of this as a period where his mood swings, always considered a problem by other commanders and senior Chilians, were more pronounced than ever.

To no one's surprise MacArthur did not take responsibility for the defeat; if anything he soon spoke as if he had been the principal victim of Washington's policies. Even worse, as a commander he could not bring himself to visit his men or the country where the defeat had taken place, as if to go there would mean having to face those who knew how badly he had failed. He stayed in the protective lee of the Dai Ichi, among his staff, not visiting Korea until December 11, two weeks after the Chinese strike. Some of his cables back to Washington in those days smacked of the purest fantasy: he claimed that Tenth Corps, in great jeopardy on the east coast when the Chinese had come in, was not, as everyone in Washington knew, fighting for its very life, but still on an offensive mission and had tied down six to eight Chinese divisions that might otherwise have been hammering the Eighth Army. "When messages like that came in," Ridgway later said, "it was as if the madness were in the room."

There had been a moment just before the Chinese struck when, as his biographer William Manchester wrote, MacArthur had been "a colossus bestriding Korea until the nemesis of his hubris overtook him." And then after the worst had happened, "he could not bear to end his career in checkmate." Suddenly, he looked to outsiders, even those who bore him some measure of goodwill, like an old man hopelessly out of touch. The British general Leslie Mansergh, who visited him in Tokyo then, observed that "he appeared to be much older than his seventy years. Signs of nerves and strain were apparent." He seemed to Mansergh completely disconnected from the battlefield reality: "When he emphasized the combined efforts and successes of all front-line troops in standing shoulder to shoulder, and dying if necessary in their fight against communism, it occurred to me that he could not have been fully in the picture. I cannot believe he would have made these comments in such a way if he had been in full possession of the facts which I would inevitably learn later, facts that some Americans had been less than staunch. It occurred to me then, and was emphasized later, that the war in Korea is reproduced in Tokyo with certain omissions of the more unpalatable facts."

He became, Clayton James, his generally sympathetic biographer, wrote, "depressed and short tempered at GHQ and often spent the nights suffering insomnia and pacing back and forth along the hallway at his home. His moods would swing to extremes— from buoyant optimism about winning the war before Christmas 1950, to alarmist predictions a little later that his troops would be forced to withdraw to Japan unless mightily reinforced." No one around him, James noted of that period, could bring certain subjects up with him, such as his dubious choice of Ned Almond as a corps commander or his decision to split his forces. He was irritable when the press made fun of him for relabeling what had once been a grandiose all-out boys-home-before-Christmas offensive as "a reconnaissance in force," successful, in his words, because it prematurely triggered the Chinese attack.

The mood swings had always been a problem, as the people dealing with him in Washington were very much aware. Omar Bradley wrote of "his brilliant but brittle" mind snapping in this period when he realized that his civilian superiors in Washington were not going to permit an all-out war with China, a larger war in which he would be able to reclaim victory and thus redeem himself. Matt Ridgway described him to one writer as a man capable of being brilliant and completely lucid at one moment and the next minute, during the very same conversation—as if he had suddenly thrown a switch—soaring off into a private world that only he understood (and inhabited), where defeats were not defeats and the victories of his adversaries not really victories. When he described MacArthur's behavior in the weeks after the Chinese entered the war, Dean Acheson would quote Euripides: "Whom the gods destroy they first make mad."

In the days after the Chinese attack and as the extent of the defeat became clear, it often seemed surreal for those reporters dealing with the command, the contrast between reality in Korea and in Tokyo. Joe Fromm, the U.S. News reporter who had been on Charles Willoughby's enemies list, long remembered one particular scene in that stretch. About a week after the defeat at Kunuri, there was a press briefing in Tokyo at which Willoughby presided. There he was, the chief of intelligence, at the lectern, as full of certitudes as ever, seemingly unshaken by defeat, and trying to prove that he and his people in G-2 had been right about the Chinese all along, had, in fact, been tracking them from the time they left the south of China and had known exactly what they were planning to do. Indeed, even when MacArthur had made his famous home-by-Christmas pledges, he had known that a great many Chinese had already crossed the Yalu and that there were troops from at least thirty divisions on both sides of the border in easy striking distance of American forces. Well, if that were true, one reporter asked, why had he gone ahead with his major offensive, knowing he was outnumbered three to one? "We couldn't just passively sit by," Willoughby answered. "We had to attack and find out the enemy's profile." The command, it turned out, had not been surprised at all. "I went back to my office," Fromm said years later, "and I thought to myself, Now they say that they always knew, because they're never wrong, and now* they say they were never surprised because they can never be surprised, and yet if you checked with the kids who fought there, someone fucked up, because the kids who fought there didn't know' about all the Chinese the way MacArthur and Willoughby knew about them. It's madness. Pure madness. Someone is crazy."

Gradually a new line began to emerge from Tokyo. To the degree that things had gone wrong, it was because Washington had hamstrung MacArthur, preventing him from attacking Chinese bases on the other side of the Yalu. He had not waited very long to launch his own defense in friendly journals and with friendly editors. On December l, ten days before he could bring himself to visit his men in the field, a long article appeared in U.S. News in which he attacked the administration for not letting him go in "hot pursuit" of the Chinese by bombing their Manchurian bases. That, he said, placed on him "an enormous [military] handicap, without precedent in history." In Washington it was viewed as another Posterity Paper. Truman was predictably furious. On December 6, he imposed a gag rule on all parties, demanding that any policy statements on Korea by anyone be cleared with State. Of all the rules put in place at this time, it w^ras the one MacArthur paid the least attention to.

Later Bradley ruminated that this was another critical moment when the Joint Chiefs badly failed the president. Washington had been impotent, forced to listen to bad news without being able to do anything to change the nature of the battlefield. To Bradley it seemed that "MacArthur was throwing in the towel without the slightest effort to put up a fight." In Washington, they knew that the Chinese had broken off contact after Walker retreated south of Pyongyang, and showed no taste for pursuit. "Why then," Bradley wondered, "was the Eighth Army running to the rear so hard and fast? Why hadn't MacArthur gone to Korea to steady Walker and rally the troops with his famous rhetoric? It was disgraceful." It was a defeated Army. Walker probably should have been relieved right then and there; his position had been untenable for too long. A new man was obviously needed on the battlefield, either Matthew Ridgway or Jim Van Fleet, another rising star who had done well in steadying anti-Communist forces in Greece. In addition, MacArthur should have been ordered to combine his two forces, Eighth Army and Tenth Corps. In the top echelon at this time, only Dean Rusk, Bradley noted, seemed to be pushing for such serious acts to break the mood of pessimism that had taken hold of the military. (Why, Rusk asked, couldn't we "muster our best effort and spirit to put up our best fight?" The British, he said, had done that time and again early in World War II—why couldn't we?)

It was the bleakest time for the Truman administration. The war, which the president had thought was virtually over, had not only been enlarged, but the commanding general was now surfacing as the administration's most serious adversary, as much a political as a military one, blaming the administration for a lack of support, and in effect for the defeat. The president himself, normally very much in control in press conferences, had slipped badly on November 30, as the Chinese offensive began. He answered a question about what the United States was going to do in Korea by saying they would do whatever was necessary to meet the challenge. "Will that include the atomic bomb?" another reporter asked. Truman could easily have ducked it, but he answered, "That includes every weapon we have." Then another reporter asked, "Does that mean there is active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?" And Truman responded, "There has always been active consideration of its use." Then he made things even worse by saying it was something the military people would have to decide and adding that the military commander in the field would be "in charge of the use of all these weapons." That terrified a great many people—American citizens and allies alike—because it implied that MacArthur, the commander in the field, was in charge of whether or not to use atomic weapons. Slowly, awkwardly, the administration pulled back from the president's words. The Joint Chiefs were especially weak in those months. Brave and otherwise independent men often became quite bureaucratic once they were members of the JCS. That reflected one of the great secrets of the military culture—how officers who had been so brave in battle, fearless when it mattered, could be so bland and cautious as they reached what was seemingly a career pinnacle. That had been true in Korea; it would be even truer in Vietnam. There were, it appeared, two very different kinds of courage in many military men—bravery in battle, and independence or bravery within the institution—and they did not often reside side by side.

The Chiefs wanted MacArthur to consolidate his forces, to fold Tenth Corps back into the Eighth Army and create a unified command in which American troops would be protecting the flanks of the main force. They believed that the superior mobility of their own forces, when combined with the limited logistical ability of the Chinese, would allow the UN troops to pull back forty or fifty' miles, regroup, and then present a much more formidable defensive line—backed by air and artillery—should the Chinese continue to advance. Except for the difficult talk of extricating the Marines from the area around the Chosin Reservoir, it was doable, they believed, because in most places the Chinese had broken off contact after their initial strike. As early as November 29, the Chiefs had cabled MacArthur suggesting just that. It was—and this was critically important—a suggestion, not an order. But he immediately turned it down, cabling them on December 3, "There is no practicality nor would any accrue thereby to unite the forces of Eighth Army and Tenth Corps." The Joint Chiefs were stunned. They could not understand the military logic behind the cable, except that, implicitly, their suggestion might have been taken as an indictment of his earlier decision to split his forces. The cable was a reminder that even when the general was wrong, he was never wrong.

His cables were now full of the most pessimistic of predictions. Unless he got vastly more troops, his forces would soon be forced to withdraw into beachhead bastions. The Chiefs were unnerved by the rising tone of pessimism—indeed panic—in these cables. Bradley later went through some of them, angrily writing comments in the margins, and added quite bitterly of that period that MacArthur had "treated us as if we were children."

THE ENTRANCE OF the Chinese and the terrible UN defeats in the North did not make America more cautionary. Rather it sharpened the existing political divide, made the China Firsters more hawkish, cast few doubts among the faithful about MacArthur's decisions, and subjected the administration to even more pressure, sending Truman's popularity spiraling still further downward. For those in the China Lobby it was absolute proof that American policy in Asia had failed; to Henry Luce it showed that he had been right on China all along as Acheson had been wrong. Now perhaps, Luce hoped, the administration would be more resolute in Asia. As one of Luce's biographers, Robert Herzstein, wrote, Luce had always seen Korea not "as a police action, or a quagmire, but as one promising front in the war to liberate China." Now the publisher was more aggressive than ever. John Shaw Billings, a senior Luce editor who kept a careful record of Luce's thoughts and feelings, noted in his diary on December 5, even as the rout from Kunuri was still taking place, "Luce wants the Big War, not now perhaps, but sometime." Luce was more convinced than ever that his vision of a major confrontation in Asia was right and that Communism could be rolled back—if the administration did not get in the way. At the same time, as their belief in the eventual and inevitable confrontation between the Communists and the West grew more certain, Luce and some of the senior people around him began to worry about the location of their offices, just in case the Communists dropped an atomic bomb. The Time-Life offices were about two miles from Manhattan's Union Square, considered the city's atomic epicenter. There was serious talk of moving the headquarters several miles farther away to Manhattan's Upper West Side, and some people even talked about moving the headquarters to Chicago. Nor eventually did MacArthur's weak showing before the joint Senate committees affect Luce, who wanted to make him Time's Man of the Year for 1951 but was talked out of it by his editors.

A NUMBER OF the men who were part of decision-making in Washington remembered the weeks that followed the Chinese entry as the darkest period of their governmental service, a moment of paralysis. They were under constant attack, and the man who should have been helping out and leading the resurgence of their military forces had become their leading critic. Every bit of news, it seemed, was bad. There was a horrible vacuum in leadership and no one in Washington seemed to be able to fill it.

Particularly upsetting was the fact that these were not the flawed troops the United States had thrown into Korea back when the war began: these were the best the country had, and yet they had been hammered badly; and now the Americans were fighting the most populous nation in the world, whose underarmed forces suddenly seemed invincible. It was a horrendous equation: the war was much bigger, the enemy more powerful, the domestic political support for it greatly diminished, and becoming slimmer by the day. In general, those who worked in that administration are now regarded as among the ablest men of a generation. The phrase "The Wise Men" has been applied to them in the title of an admiring, best-selling book. But all of them, even as they had sensed during October and November that something terrible was about to happen, had been silent, frozen in place, while MacArthur continued to stretch his orders. They and the civilians who had gone to Wake Island had never asked MacArthur the tough questions when it mattered, in no small part because the political tide was moving away from them. They, who had never trusted him, had acted as if he were some kind of prophet, authorized to speak not merely for his own command but for the Chinese commanders as well. Now, as he unraveled in Tokyo, they once again seemed powerless to do anything about him or the command.

It was not just the Joint Chiefs and the senior political people like Dean Acheson who failed to restrain MacArthur at that juncture, it was also the most respected public official of the era, George Catlett Marshall, who had just moved over after an enviable tour as secretary of state and an all too brief retirement to become secretary of defense. Of the senior group, he was the most knowledgeable and experienced, an icon of icons, more like a father figure than a peer to most of the men serving Truman. He was the quietest and most modest great figure of an era: he never raised his voice, never gave angry commands, never threatened or bullied people. His strength came from his sense of purpose and duty, which were absolute; his almost unique control of his own ego; and his ability to separate what mattered from what did not. Because of his awesome self-discipline and stoic personal qualities it was easy to underestimate Marshall's full value. He was often seen as being primarily skilled as a great management man, and what he did nor get credit for was his sheer intellectual firepower, something he was quite content to mask. George Kennan might have been a more classic example of a gifted intellectual figure working in a bureaucracy, and Acheson, with his cutting wit and his formidable verbal skills, a more forceful figure in any public debate, but Marshall quietly possessed a rare mind of uncommon intellectual strength, with an exceptional sense of the consequences of deeds. In some ways he was self-taught during that long and difficult career, but he had used every position he ever held, no matter how* lowly and disappointing, to understand the forces at play around him. What he had come up with was the rarest of things, and the hardest thing in the world to seek, and that was wisdom. His Was the most pragmatic kind of intelligence, never flashy, and he always made clear that a deeply held sense of duty was more important than sheer brilliance; far fewer men talked of Marshall's brilliance than they did of MacArthur's, but in a quiet, reserved way, Marshall tended to get the larger forces of history at play in his era right, as MacArthur often did not. His decline in that period was a grievous loss for the Truman team.

At this critical juncture, as in the days after Unsan, Marshall was surprisingly passive. It was probably his weakest moment in a long and distinguished career. Why he failed puzzled some of the others. Perhaps, thought some of his admirers, his long and unhappy personal relationship with MacArthur, one that went all the way back to World War I, was part of the problem. Perhaps, they thought, Marshall was a little more loath to set limits as he might have for another officer, for fear of becoming the caricature that MacArthur had created of him. But it had to be more than that. Was it the very nature of the job itself as Marshall saw it—that the job of secretary of defense was to support the commander, or the uniformed Chiefs, and not to impose his own will on men in uniform? In effect, did it mean that he was much freer to stand up to MacArthur when he was a senior figure at State than when he was at Defense? Or was he uneasy about usurping the powers of the Joint Chiefs? Had, in effect, his very strength, his modesty, his sense of a proper hierarchy, become a weakness? Certainly that was part of it. But finally it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the George Marshall of 1950 was not the George Marshall of World War II, that the crushing hours and burdens of both the war and the postwar era had taken their toll, that his health was slipping and he was simply not as strong a man physically or intellectually as he had been in that earlier incarnation. What made it worse was his standing among them: they instinctively deferred to him, took their signals from him, and now there were no signals.