Chipyongni turned out to be the battle Matt Ridgway had wanted from the moment he arrived in country. It was one of the decisive battles of the war, because it was where the American forces finally learned to fight the Chinese. For years after, what Paul Freeman did there was studied at the Command and General Staff School at Leavenworth as a textbook case of how to deal with a numerically superior enemy. Turning point though it was, like other battles in Korea it was rarely known outside the world of the men who fought there, or the military men and scholars who studied the history of the war. But at that small village the almost mythical sense of Chinese superiority, perhaps even invincibility, came to an end. By then, a mordant humor had emerged among the soldiers when it came to the Chinese and how many there were likely to be in battle: "How many hordes to a platoon?" went one line; "I was attacked by two hordes yesterday and killed both of them" went another. When Chipyongni was over, there was a new sense, not just among the commanders but among the fighting men themselves, that if they held the right positions with the right fields of fire and had the right leadership, the burden of battle would be on the less heavily armed Chinese. Equally important, when it was over, the Chinese knew it too.

Chipyongni was one of those many small Korean villages that war celebrates as peace does not. It was fairly typical for the country—a mill, a school, and a Buddhist temple. Along the main street ran a small stream. All in all, it was not much, at least by Western standards. By the time the Twenty-third Regiment arrived to take up its positions, the mill had been demolished, the school and the temple destroyed, and most of the villagers were gone. In that way it was also all too typical of the Korean countryside of that moment—competing armies came and went in this war, and every time one of them arrived, there was less of the village left. But to both sides it had a disproportionate strategic importance, because it controlled passage—by rail east and west, by road north and south—through the central part of the country, where there were few other routes of any consequence.

To the surprise of Freeman and his men, they entered Chipyongni without opposition. For whatever reason, the Chinese, who were moving a great many men around in the sector, let the Americans take it unchallenged. Though his defense was eventually cited as a textbook case in the use of limited forces, in the beginning Paul Freeman was not entirely pleased with his situation. He would have greatly preferred, as he told Captain Sherman Pratt, to hold a series of hills around the village that were much higher than those he finally settled on, but given the limited number of men at his disposal, his forces would have been spread too thin if he had. His very first decision was subsequently viewed by experts in infantry tactics as unusual, but in the end brilliant. The most basic rule for an infantry commander, especially one contemplating a defensive stand against an enemy with vastly superior numbers, is to hold the high ground. Nominally the higher hills or mountains in that area would have created an almost impregnable defensive barrier. But to man them would have necessitated a ridgeline defense some twelve miles long, and a perimeter with a four-mile diameter, which would have required a division, not a regiment. A perimeter that large might have been a much easier one for the Chinese to break through at key points, rolling the entire defensive line up as they preferred to do.

So Freeman wisely chose to concentrate his defense on the smaller but closer hills. That gave him a rectangular defensive perimeter only one mile in depth by two miles in length. On almost all sides he held ground high enough to present serious problems for any attacking troops. In a way he was setting up the kind of defense that a good many American commanders had been pondering since they were first hit by the Chinese along the Chongchon. No less important was what he was nor doing. He was not preventing his heavier guns from supporting one another; he was not making it impossible for one of his reserve units to come quickly to the aid of a troubled position.

He was also, he hoped, exploiting a great weakness of the Chinese, their lack of heavy artillery pieces. The Chinese would hold the distant higher ground, to be sure, but the Americans would have the advantage in long-range artillery. As for machine guns, the Chinese would have plenty of them, but planted on the distant higher ground they would be of little or no value. The Chinese, he had to expect, would have mortars and would surely use them well. But perhaps UN airpower would be able to take some of them out, if the weather broke just right. The other crucial advantage that Freeman had was time. He was the first American commander to have the luxury of time in this new war and some idea of what to do with it. His troops arrived in Chipyongni on February 3; the Chinese attack did not come until the evening of February 13: ten precious days to prepare his positions. Every man in the Twenty-third was aware of the regiment's vulnerability and that their lives depended on how well they dug in (though the Army historian Roy Appleman walked their foxholes in August 1951 and was surprised that they were not deeper). Fields of fire were measured for mortars and artillery pieces, marking precisely all potential avenues of approach. Barbed wire was strung until it ran out. Mines were planted until they had no more of them. A small airstrip was cleared, which would allow them, if need be, to bring in supplies and evacuate the wounded.

For the first time, Freeman believed that he had almost too much ammunition. On that, he learned soon enough, he was wrong. Spotter planes flew overhead every day trying to pick up any Chinese movements in the surrounding hills. Every day, Freeman sent recon patrols out, trying to find out what the Chinese were up to. As the days passed, and they got closer to the Chinese D-day, there was just one hitch. In a battle that was both separate and yet very connected, ROK forces attacking north from nearby Wonju, about ten miles to the south and east, had collapsed, and American and Dutch forces fighting with them were now in danger of being overrun and annihilated. The drive of UN forces north of Wonju that had begun on February 5 was by February 14 going very badly. The ROK advance that had initiated the larger battle on Wonju was, a number of senior people in the division, including George Stewart, believed, part of an ill-conceived, almost bizarre Almond plan. He had sent the ROKs north as the lead element, which had amazed everyone. When the Chinese struck the ill-prepared ROKs—and estimates were that there were four Chinese divisions operating in the Wonju area—they had quite predictably destroyed the ROKs, and it had opened up vast avenues for the Chinese into the American and Dutch forces. That greatly endangered the entire Wonju area, and quite possibly Chipyongni as well. Thus even before the battle of Chipyongni began, its defenders were in ever greater jeopardy. Not only did the battle of Wonju have a priority on any call for airpower, but there was now a fear that unless the balance at Wonju was redressed, the Chinese might soon be free to throw even greater forces, perhaps four more divisions, at Freeman.

By February 10, the small patrols that Freeman was sending out had determined that the area was swarming with Chinese and his terrain was shrinking by the hour. That Paul Freeman is now considered one of the three or four most distinguished regimental commanders of the Korean War, his reputation based largely on his performance at Chipyongni, is not without considerable irony. For in the days immediately preceding the battle, he wanted badly to pull back, fearing the immense buildup of Chinese all around his perimeter. By February 12, it was clear to him that his men were soon to be encircled by an overwhelming force. That was bad enough. Worse yet, American forces in two of the Thirty-eighth Regiment's battalions were being cut up just north of Wonju, and it was possible that the rest of Tenth Corps might not be able to hold the town itself. Already two relief forces sent out to reinforce Freeman, one of them the British Commonwealth Brigade, had been hit hard and found themselves unable to break through. To Freeman, his lonely salient facing what seemed to him like all the Chinese ever sent to Korea was "sticking out like a sore thumb."

When he asked for permission to pull back, he was told that Ridgway wanted him to stay put. As the moment when the Chinese would attack grew even closer, all the senior officers of the Twenty-third knew that some kind of argument was going on at a pay level far above theirs. All the other UN units in the area were pulling back—but not the Twenty-third. Their orders on February 12, as recorded by the regimental operations officer, were to stay put: "We are to remain. By order of Scotch." (Scotch was the code name for Ridgway.) On that same day, Major John Dumaine, the regimental operations officer, told Captain Pratt that Freeman wanted to pull back, but he was doubtful they would be able to get out now, partly because of the masses of Chinese moving in around them: "I don't think we could withdraw now if we wanted to. The latest report by Shoemaker [Major Harold Shoemaker, the regimental intelligence officer, who would die at Chipyongni] is that the road south, our only avenue of escape, is already swarming with Chinese and is closed. Even if we got permission to withdraw, we would have to fight another gauntlet to get out. I think we are going to stay and fight it out." That seemed to seal it; a siege was already on and airdrops of supplies already taking place. For those at Chipyongni, their destiny, they now knew, was something they would have to determine themselves. They were on their own.

But Freeman and Ruffner at Division still hoped to get their orders changed. Even Almond agreed, in part because of the growing failure of other units under his command. Almond had flown in to meet with Freeman around noon on February 13, aware that the battle around Wonju was going very badly, which placed Chipyongni in even greater jeopardy. He found Freeman anxious, talking about the possibility of losing his entire regiment in this battle. Freeman asked for permission to withdraw on the morning of the fourteenth. He wanted to retreat to Yoju, about fifteen miles south, even though there was an increasing likelihood that the Chinese had cut the road. His position, he said, was very fragile. He had the approval of Ruffner, the division commander, to move back, and now Almond seemed to agree as well.

Inside the Twenty-third perimeter, word got around very quickly that they were going to pull back. In fact the commander of tire RCT (Regimental Combat Team) antiaircraft battery, sure that they were soon to retreat and believing he had too much ammunition to take out with him, asked for permission to fire some of it into the distant hills. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Meszar, the regimental executive officer, told him to wait another day just to be sure. By the time Almond got back to his corps headquarters, Freeman had changed his mind—he no longer felt he could wait an additional day and wanted to go out on the thirteenth. Right after his meeting, Freeman sent a message to Division headquarters: "Almond here about i¹?2 hours ago, asked my recommendation when I could move back to Yoju. I told him in the morning. I have changed my recommendation to as early as possible this evening.... Pass this request to CG Xth Corps and relay answer to me as soon as possible." Now the decision belonged to only one man, the man who had wanted this particular battle in the first place. Ridgway remained immune to additional pleas from inside Chipyongni. What he did promise was that, if Freeman stayed and fought, he would make sure a relief force punched through. If need be, he said, he would send the entire Eighth Army to rescue them.

As an old airborne man, he was convinced that Freeman's troops, well dug in and with a good deal of firepower, could be resupplied with ammunition and other needs by air. This then was the test battle he had been hoping for; imperfect perhaps, but one never got the perfect battle. It pitted, if things worked out, superior U.S. firepower against superior numbers, in a venue more or less chosen by the Chinese rather than by us, and as such ought, Ridgway hoped, to be a litmus test for the rest of the war.

Sometime in the late afternoon of the thirteenth, Sherman Pratt visited Freeman and found him fatalistic. Freeman showed Pratt a map that reflected their complete encirclement by perhaps four divisions of Chinese troops, he said. He told Pratt simply, "If they [the Chinese] want it, they are going to have to come and fight for it. I think we are ready—that we can fight well where we are now." Early on the evening of the thirteenth, Freeman called his commanders together. There had been a lot of talk about pulling back, he said, but it wasn't going to happen. "We'll stay here and fight it out." He wanted every commander to check each foxhole and each field of fire one last time. The attack, he said, might come that night.

He had placed the First Battalion on the northwest sector, the Third Battalion on the northeast and east sectors, the French battalion to the west, and the Second Battalion to the south. He had some fifty-four hundred men under his command, a beefed-up regiment, a regimental combat team. The Chinese, it was believed, had elements of five divisions, a force of perhaps thirty to forty thousand men. Chipyongni was to be not just a battle but a siege. The only way for Freeman's forces to get more ammo and food was by parachute airdrops.

EvEN AS THE defenders at Chipyongni were digging in, the battle of Wonju was coming to a climax. The Wonju battle plan, Operation Roundup, had been pure Ned Almond and it had been a curious one, especially at this stage of the war. Almond's assault was part of a larger Ridgway-planned offensive—in effect, the right flank of Operation Thunderbolt. But it was significantly less cautious than that of his commander, even though his assigned terrain was more mountainous and so better tailored for the tactics of the Chinese. Almond once again ignored warnings from his senior intelligence people that the Chinese command had shifted the core of its forces into the area and the Chinese were up to something big. The fiasco along the Chosin, so much of it his responsibility, it was believed, had not created a new, more tempered, and wiser Ned Almond. Now, ten weeks later, given another chance to engage the Chinese, he was still far too aggressive, still careless about his incoming intelligence, still given to sending out units that could readily be isolated by the Chinese and thus destroyed, still underestimating the professionalism and the tactics of his enemy. All of this ended up, as Clay Blair wrote, "evoking memories of Almond's operations in northeast Korea." "Almond's Folly," Jim Hinton, who had made it out of Kunuri successfully but who was seriously wounded in the coming battle, called it. What Hinton remembered was the fury of Colonel Robert Coughlin, the new commander of the Thirty-eighth Regiment. Almond had effectively taken over command of his regiment, Coughlin told Hinton, breaking it up into smaller units, separating the battalions from one another, isolating them, and making each battalion that much more vulnerable.

That was in contrast to the force moving north on the western front, where the different units were quite tightly bound to one another. If the Chinese struck, it would be hard for these weakened units to defend themselves. As far as Coughlin could tell, it was the exact opposite of what they were supposed to have learned from the first go-round with the Chinese.

For those Americans who admire the military, the remarkable presence of a great military force within a working democracy, Almond's role in this war remains, more than half a century after he left the battlefield, singularly disturbing. Almond was old school, but it was a dubious old school. In the ultimate democratic institution where men were supposed to be judged only on their battlefield performance, and their willingness to die if need be, he refused to judge them on merit and instead preferred to hang on to his prejudices. To the end he held on to the racism of his early years. In 1971, six years into the combat phase of Vietnam, when he was long retired, he was still saying as forcefully as he could that integration weakened combat units.

His racism had always been a critical part of the problem. His prejudices did not necessarily set him apart from other senior officers in the Army at that moment, but there was an intensity—a passion—to them that disturbed younger officers around him, not to mention the black soldiers and officers who were the victims of his racism. He thought of blacks, some of whose first victories as full American citizens were about to take place in this war, as an inferior species. If they served at all, it should be in some servile way, what was called "ash and trash." Harry Truman and now Matt Ridgway were trying to desegregate the Army, and Ned Almond in his own way was trying to resegregate it, trying as best he could to create separate black units.

In mid-January 1951, during an early battle around Wonju, a black captain named Forest Walker successfully led a bayonet and hand grenade charge against some well-dug-in North Koreans. His battalion commander, Butch Barberis, greatly admired and by then a lieutenant colonel, whose word was never doubted by his peers, told Ridgway about Walker's valor a day later, and Ridgway, visibly impressed, ordered the Silver Star for him. Eventually Almond found out about the medal, stopped it, and had Walker relieved of his company command. When one of his favorite officers from World War II, Bill McCaffrey, finally got a regiment in Korea, a command expedited by his connection to Almond, the general was furious with his old friend for integrating it. McCaffrey had placed three black soldiers in every squad. "You didn't," Almond said.

"Yes, sir, I did," McCaffrey replied.

"You of all people should have known better than that," Almond shot back—a reference to their days together with the Ninety-second.

"But, General, it's working," McCaffrey insisted.

Almond just shook his head. To him, it was like a betrayal by a member of his family.

What was important about Almond's prejudice, loathsome as it was in itself, was that—in addition to being extremely painful for the black soldiers serving under him—there were serious professional consequences to it. For there were men who fought under him and studied him, who believed that his racism did not stop there. As J. D. Coleman noted, Almond saw the Chinese in much the same way. One of the reasons he pushed his troops forward so recklessly in the Chosin Reservoir fighting was that he did not take the Chinese seriously as an opponent. He believed that even if they showed up on the battlefield, they would flee from American forces, because they were a lesser people. That was what was so important about the laundrymen phrase; he saw this talented enemy not as they had become on the battlefield. Instead, they were still, in his eyes, the kind of people who should be back in America, doing the laundry of white people.

Coleman, who had fought with the 187th Regimental Combat Team under Almond, believed his lack of interest in the way the Chinese fought, his failure to learn from earlier battles against them, was but one more reflection of what he called Almond's "incipient racism." In the weeks that followed the battles in the north that had gone so badly, none of his commanders was ever summoned to discuss what had been learned so far about the Chinese. "Post-Korea we did a lot of studies on their tactics," Coleman said years later, "but at the time we did very little—there was no attempt to put together as quickly as we could in those first few weeks what we had learned about them, their tactics, their strengths, weaknesses, logistical limitations, how they tried to panic you and then set up an ambush south of you. There was a lot to learn and we didn't learn it. It was as if we didn't need to—they were not seen as a foe worthy of study. And it cost us badly at Hongchon and Hoengsong and Wonju [all part of the greater battle for Wonju]. I've always put it off to a kind of innate, unconscious American racism. Almond failed to learn quickly enough from the first defeat and I think it was because his prejudices blocked out his intelligence." As late as mid-February, Almond seemed to think all he had to do was hit the Chinese a little harder, Coleman believed. "His racism tainted every decision he made in battle," Coleman said.

Operation Roundup was the name that Almond gave to his battle plan for the Wonju area. It looked like a perfect Fort Leavenworth plan. There was even a certain grandeur to it. It was large scale and involved much coordination between different units. If it had been done at Leavenworth, a theoretical battle in a theoretical country (preferably a much flatter and warmer one) against a theoretical enemy (that made its approaches down major roads, easily identifiable from the air), it might have been impressive. There were lots of arrows driving ever so relentlessly on critical enemy positions, an envelopment here, another there, all ending wondrously in a double encirclement of the village of Hongchon, which lay about twenty-four miles north of Wonju, by then in American hands. Naturally, the success of this assault was based on perfect coordination between the participating units and the willingness of the Chinese to let the Americans do pretty much what they wanted to do, rather than smuggling four or five divisions of their own into the area and thus knocking the arrows askew.

To anyone with a sense of what it was actually like to fight in Korea, the flaws of Almond's plan were painfully obvious. Wonju was an extremely large, dangerous area, one that threatened to swallow up his somewhat limited UN forces. The weather was erratic, with great banks of clouds coming over each day, limiting any ability to make good use of American air superiority; and finally, Almond's forces were once again far too dependent on the professional skills of the South Korean forces. In this battle, Almond had done something that other officers found absolutely inexplicable: he had placed some American units under the command of ROK officers, which meant if things unraveled, which they were quite likely to do, the Americans would not have complete control over their own forces. Of the many strange things that Ned Almond did during this war, this was probably the most bizarre. The assumption of other officers was that Almond, who did not respect the ROK performance any more than most Americans, meant this as a confidence builder, as George Stewart noted, to show the ROKs he had more confidence in them than he really did, in hopes that they would therefore fight better. As for the South Koreans, they were in no way happy with the plan and thought in their own way that it was racist. General Paik Sun Yup, the best of the ROK commanders, in his memoir of the war, suggested that Almond was planning to use the Koreans as cannon fodder meant to absorb the heaviest punishment in the initial Chinese attack.

So Operation Roundup started with two ROK divisions, the Fifth and the Eighth, in the lead, participating with elements of two of the Second Division's regiments, the Thirty-eighth and the Ninth, as well as the 187th Regimental Combat Team, an airborne unit. On the other side, yet to show their hand, were four Chinese divisions from the 100,000 to 140,000 Chinese troops now in the central corridor region immediately above Wonju, readying themselves, with many more obviously available. At first, all seemed to go well for the UN forces, in no small part because the Chinese wanted them to go well—the more they succeeded in the first stage of the drive, the more isolated they were going to be when the Chinese struck. So the Chinese and the North Koreans pulled back, letting the American and South Korean forces push ever deeper into alien terrain. As J. D. Coleman noted, "The movements of the ROK and American units could not have been more favorable for the Chinese if General Peng had personally been in the X Corps Command Post and drawn them up himself." By February 10, the UN/ROK position was, in Coleman's words, like "an indefensible balloon inflated into enemy territory." On February 11, at 10 P.M., three Chinese divisions suddenly hit the ROK Eighth Division and it simply vanished, some seventy-five hundred men and officers gone like that, although three thousand men would eventually show up back at UN command posts.

The Chinese attack did not come as a complete surprise to Ridgway's headquarters, which was increasingly uneasy over intelligence reports indicating the gathering of an enormous Chinese force in the greater Wonju area. In fact, the intelligence coming from Ridgway's G-2 shop was surprisingly accurate. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Fergusson, the Eighth Army deputy G-2, who back in November had had a much more realistic sense of the Chinese threat to the Eighth Army than had his superiors, turned out to be quite prescient about what was going to happen.

Only on the likely date of the Chinese attack was he off—by four days. Ridgway took the G-2's report seriously: on the eve of the start of the battle, his foot was already on the brake, and he was telling his forces not to move farther north. But Almond's foot was not—despite warnings from his own G-2, Lieutenant Colonel James Polk. Polk would later note that although he had issued serious warnings about the number of Chinese in the area, he had not paid enough attention to the word of one very important prisoner, a former Chinese Nationalist doctor who had given stunningly accurate estimates of the Chinese force about to attack—they simply had not believed that a doctor who was only a captain would know so much. Although Almond's Corps headquarters received an order from Ridgway to hold its positions on February 11, no comparable message went out from Corps to subordinate units for hours—and when it finally did, it was two hours after the Chinese struck.

It w^ras a disaster in the making, a curious repeat of what had happened in late November when the main Chinese attack had come. As the ROK units collapsed, a number of units in Tenth Corps, especially the First and the Third battalions of the Thirty-eighth Regiment, were immediately cut off. What made the problem worse was Almond's bizarre command structure and the fact that so many of his subordinate commanders were so fearful of him and were slow to make their own decisions. Lieutenant Colonel John Keith, commander of the Fifteenth Field Artillery Battalion, which had been assigned to support ROK troops, immediately found himself in danger of being cut off. He called headquarters about 1:30 A.M. on February 12, knowing everything was collapsing on him, and asked Brigadier General Loyal Haynes, the division artillery commander, for permission to pull back. Haynes, a timid officer, was unable to give him an answer; he had to clear it with Ruffner or Corps. By the time the approval came through from Almond himself an hour and a half later, it was too late; the Chinese troops had completely cut Keith off, with all his unit's heavy gear and giant trucks. The ROKs whom Keith was supposed to protect (and who in turn in a situation like this were supposed to help protect him) were long gone. Keith's only road out was narrow⁷ and mountainous, and controlled by the Chinese. He soon joined up with a battalion of the Thirty-eighth Regiment, also under heavy attack and just as badly cut off. Together they tried the road, but as Clay Blair noted, the Chinese troops "had created a gauntlet, not unlike that which the 38th Infantry had run below⁷ Kunuri." In the end, on the way south to Hoengsong, the Fifteenth Field Artillery⁷ Battalion lost five howitzers, four 155s, and one 105.

Just before dawn on February 12, what was left of the badly banged up First Battalion and Keith's artillerymen reached the Third Battalion of the Thirty-eighth, just north of Hoengsong. But here too the Chinese were pressing in and the American perimeter was fast shrinking. Just south of them the Chinese had yet again cut the road. At Corps everyone was aware of one order above all others from Ridgway—they were not to lose any more artillery pieces. If the Chinese overran Keith and his men and took more heavy guns, the ramifications for Corps were going to be very serious. Keith was ordered to continue south to Hoengsong where, it was hoped, he and the units with him would be able to create a strong defensive position. So the artillerymen moved out, accompanied by the remaining troops from the First Battalion. But after going about a half mile south, they were hit so hard by the Chinese that no one could move, and they were pinned down for some four hours. Finally Corps ordered the Third Battalion to leave its perimeter, join up with the other two units, and help drive through the Chinese blockade. At the same time, Corps ordered an armored infantry relief column from the 187th Regimental Combat Team to fight its way north and link up with them. It too was hit hard by the Chinese, but eventually broke through. It was dark now and the Chinese still controlled the road. Yet there was some hope that the larger combined force by now led by the 187th could break out again and make it south. Then one of the lead trucks in the convoy, which was towing a 105 howitzer, flipped over, blocking the road. That was the worst possible news for the men trying to get out.

From the start the Chinese believed they could control the road simply by disabling the larger Americans vehicles just as they had below Kunuri. They concentrated their fire on the driver compartments of the big trucks. Their fire was so heavy and so well concentrated that there was no possibility of clearing the road. Most of the big guns would have to be left behind. Fourteen 105s and five 155s were abandoned, along with 120 trucks, some of them carrying wounded. It was in all ways a disaster. Colonel Keith was first listed as missing in action and then as probably having died in a prison camp. Fortunately, the Dutch battalion fighting hard at Hoengsong managed to hold; and the varying forces of the Thirty-eighth along with some of the artillery men managed to retreat through Hoengsong and back to Wonju. The losses had been devastating: the two battalions along with the Dutch battalion suffered more than two thousand casualties. There were about ten thousand ROK casualties as well. Ridgway, hearing the news, was furious, and soon showed up at Tenth Corps headquarters and gave Almond a ferocious blistering. It was, said Lieutenant Colonel Jack Chiles, who was an Almond deputy at the time, the worst ass-chewing he had ever heard. Ridgway did not yet know of the full casualties in the battle, but he knew how many artillery pieces they had lost, and that in his book was sinful, the loss of big guns to the enemy. There was a great deal of talk about reckless misuse of artillery, and a great deal of emphasis, Chiles said, "that this will never happen again!" But for whatever reason—fear of upsetting MacArthur, the incompetence of his other corps commanders—

Ridgway did not relieve Almond.

The knowledge that the equivalent of an entire battalion had been lost was brutal enough, but a month later, during another American offensive, some Marines went through the same valley and discovered that the battlefield was littered with American bodies, those of the men of the Thirty-eighth Regiment who had been killed trying to get back to Wonju. Salvage and recovery troops were sent in and recovered more than 250 American and a large number of Dutch bodies, including that of their battalion commander, Marinus den Ouden. Most of the men had multiple bullet wounds—a sign that they had fought to the last and had eventually been overrun. After the war was over and a more careful accounting was done, the regiment's death toll for the three days of battle was placed at 468. Of that total 255 died on the battlefield and another 213 in captivity. Keith's Fifteenth Field Artillery Battalion lost 83 men killed that night, and another 128 in Communist prison camps. "Massacre Valley," the Marines called the area. One Marine posted a sign that reflected, among other things, the bitterness over the nomenclature chosen for the war: "MASSACRE VALLEY/SCENE OF HARRY TRUMAN'S POLICE ACTION/ NICE GOING HARRY."

THE COMMUNIST SUCCESSES in the central sector were mounting. Three days into what had started as an American offensive, the Chinese were now moving in on two of the prizes they had sought from the start, Wonju and Chipyongni. As the Chinese seemed ready to take Wonju, fears for Chipyongni grew. So far almost everything the Americans had done in Wonju had gone wrong, and the Communist victories had seemed like a continuation of what had happened around the Chongchon. Then, with both Wonju and Chipyongni at stake, the Americans caught a major break, the kind that can turn defeat into victory.

On the morning of February 14, a small artillery spotter plane was flying over the Som River, which cut its way through the mountains northwest of Wonju. One of the observers, Lieutenant Lee Hartell of the Fifteenth Field Artillery Battalion, happened to look out. There, along the sandy beach of the river, was an unusually heavy tree line, or so he thought at first, a lot more trees than one usually saw in that area. He decided to look again. This time he noticed that the tree line was moving. It was not a tree line, he suddenly understood, but a vast Chinese force, seemingly well camouflaged, and so confident that they were moving en masse in daylight as they almost never did, and did not even freeze as they were supposed to when a plane came over. With victory so close and time so precious, they now had too litde respect for their enemies and had simply ignored the spotter plane. Hartell and his stunned pilot placed the force at as many as two divisions, perhaps fourteen thousand men moving four abreast, almost surely on their way to the final battle for Wonju. Hartell radioed in his find and called for artillery fire. The battle was soon to be memorialized by the Americans as the Wonju Shoot.

The first round was a white phosphorous marker, and with that, the Wonju Shoot began, as the Americans poured in a brutal barrage of artillery fire on the Chinese. The Americans had massive artillery ready to fire on the Chinese force—some 130 big guns, thirty 155s and one hundred 105s—and a commander, Brigadier General George Stewart, who, though not an artillery officer, knew how to exploit a stunning break like this. If there was one senior officer in the entire corps who stepped forward and acted professionally in the midst of the larger battle of Wonju and Hongchon and Hoengsong, it was Stewart. Among the men of the Second Division he was considered the most rational, professional, thoughtful, and perhaps most important of all, independent senior officer.

Stewart had become the assistant division commander almost bv chance. He was someone who had always thought he would be an infantry officer, had graduated from West Point in 1923, but had not managed to get an infantry command. When World War II started, he was too old for a junior command and did not have enough going for him to get a more senior one. Instead he had been given one of those vital assignments no one really wants, but which need to be done and done well. He w^ras made chief of transportation for the Allied forces, first in North Africa, then in Italy, next in the Southwest Pacific, and he was in charge of transportation for the invasion of Japan when the war ended. He had performed brilliantly at his various tasks, an irreplaceable man in two theaters of war. But his abilities worked against his career ambitions. He was too badly needed elsewhere to get the infantry commands he always wanted. He had ended the war as a brigadier general, had been bumped down to colonel during the demobe, and then promoted back to brigadier in January 1947. He was, thought Ken Hamburger, the soldier, historian, and teacher, "one of those special men the Army produces, talented and brave and thoughtful, all in all an exceptional officer, but not quite ruthless enough to be a great general. The great generals, men like Ridgway, though they are not reckless, know when the moment arrives when you have to risk the lives of your men in the call of duty." Stewart in 1950 was still doing logistics and had overseen the logistics of the Inchon landing, still longing for that infantry command that was always just out of reach.

In early December, as the Chinese drove south, Stewart was told that—lest the Chinese overrun it—his logistics command would move south to Pusan. He wanted no part of the move. His son, George Stewart, Jr., a 1945 graduate of West Point, was a lieutenant in the 187th Regimental Combat Team. The idea that he would be operating from a safe slot in a safe haven while his son was in harm's way the elder Stewart found singularly offensive. He visited the Eighth Army chief of staff, Lev Allen, and asked for a different assignment. Allen told him to get on with his assignment and get to Pusan. But on his way out of Allen's office Stewart ran into Bob McClure, who had just been given command of the Second Division. On a whim, he asked McClure whether he needed a good assistant division commander. Because the then-ADC, Sladen Bradley, was in the hospital, Stewart was given the job, at first on a temporary basis, eventually permanently. His position in the hierarchy was vulnerable, more so after McClure, his sponsor, was so quickly relieved. Stewart had limited authority, more adviser than commander; he was to give no commands on his own. Everything he did had to be cleared with Ruffner, who had replaced McClure, and that meant, in effect, with Almond, who wanted him gone.

Earlier, with Wonju about to be assaulted by Chinese forces, the size of which they were just beginning to comprehend at Corps, Almond had put Stewart in charge of the town's defense, and he did it in a distinctly Almondesque fashion. He ordered Stewart to Wonju late on the day of February 13, the day before Hartell spotted the two divisions, and left behind for him quite specific instructions on how to fight the battle: "General Almond directs that you take command of all the troops in the vicinity of Wonju, defend and hold that important road junction at all costs. The General believes that the Chinese will attack on your right, BUT THE DECISION IS YOURS. The General believes you should place the one intact BN of the 38th on the line, BUT THE DECISION IS YOURS." Then, having passed on the orders, the G-3, as Stewart noted, immediately departed the endangered post.

The instructions, Stewart decided, were completely worthless. He had studied the terrain and, with the limited intelligence he had, decided the attack would come from the left—in this he was correct—and so he held in reserve the one good battalion of the Thirty-eighth that remained. Though he was an infantry officer and not an artillery man, he was exceptionally knowledgeable about the uses of artillery because of some cross training he had done in the 1930s. Now, with a relatively small defensive force under his command and perhaps as many as four divisions on the attack, he knew he was going to need all the expertise in big guns that he could muster, and he was shrewd enough not to count on any help from Loyal Haynes, the division artillery commander, whom he, like many other men, considered an exceptionally weak officer. Upon arrival, even before the battle started, he ordered Haynes to have his men prepare data so that they could fire on critical points of approach upon command; he wanted map overlays prepared that could allow⁷ his artillery to hit different points simply by using a preselected number. In effect, he wanted to be able to call in massive fire instantaneously without any calculation in the middle of battle. No time was to be wasted.

Thus, when Hartell first spotted the Chinese, Stewart and his guns were ready. Catching a giant Chinese force in the open with so many artillery tubes at his disposal, he intended to maximize his advantage. On several occasions that day Haynes tried to slow Stewart down, but he was ignored. With Lieutenant Hartell still able to fly over the scene and call in adjustments, the artillery men very systematically poured shell after shell on the Chinese. And yet the Chinese kept coming. Nothing, it seemed, could stop them, not even this merciless hail of fire. For this was one of their great weaknesses at that point in the war: once a battle was initiated, they had little ability to make adjustments. So the artillery shoot went on for more than three hours. At one point Haynes asked Stewart to stop because they were running low on ammo—but Stewart, knowing this was a chance he might never have again, waved him off. "Keep firing until the last shell is used," he said. He then ordered up an immediate ammo resupply from Japan. It was, as J. D. Coleman pointed out, in its logistics a stunning symbol of a most unlikely American advantage. Additional artillery shells could arrive for the Wonju garrison in hours—whereas for the Chinese it often took several days or more to get more ammunition to a battle. A little later Haynes called Stew^rart to insist that they had to slow down because his guns were overheating. Again Stewart paid no attention. "Keep firing until the gun barrels melt," he ordered.

It was the turning point in the battle. An estimated five thousand Chinese were killed and thousands more wounded. Though there was more hard fighting to come, Wonju had been saved. The Chinese losses in the central corridor wore monstrous, possibly as high as twenty thousand killed and wounded. At the command level there was no doubt that Stewart was the hero of the battle, though Almond, he eventually noted, seemed quite unappreciative. Late in the afternoon, when the artillery shoot was over, Brigadier General William Bowen, the commander of the 187th RCT, arrived at Wonju CP headquarters, and Stewart was ordered rather peremptorily to return to Division headquarters. ("Corps felt my presence was no longer necessary," he dryly noted.) Almond awarded Bowen a Silver Star for his part in the battle but awarded nothing to Stewart. Honoring him, after all, would mean that Stewart had correctly reversed Almond's own erroneous instructions on how to fight, and more important, that he was a worthy ADC and would henceforth have to be taken seriously in the division hierarchy.

Though the Chinese offensive had been blunted at Wonju, Chipyongni still stood exposed.

Lieutenant paul mcgee of Belmont, North Carolina, had finally gotten his first real taste of combat when George Company of the Second Battalion of the Twenty-third Infantry⁷ Regiment relieved a French company on the top of the ridge at Twin Tunnels. McGee commanded George Company's Third Platoon. It had taken long enough—he had tried to join the Marines on December 8, 1941, when he was seventeen, but had been rejected by the Corps because he was color-blind. His subsequent service in World War II had somehow⁷ disappointed him. Only when he and his men climbed the hill at Twin Tunnels to relieve the French was McGee struck by how⁷ brutal war truly Was, and how⁷ callous it seemed to make the men who did the fighting. George Company had arrived after the fight was over, just in time to survey the carnage of a terribly hard-fought battle. McGee could understand much of the battle just by letting his eyes follow the trail of Chinese bodies, hundreds of them it seemed, representing the early waves of the enemy's assault, corpses that were now frozen, fixed permanently in the final moments of their lives. It was as if he had discovered a giant, open-faced Chinese burial ground. As he and his men climbed the hill, it only got worse: French soldiers were coming down, carrying their dead on a path so narrow they had no choice but to descend single file, two-man teams hauling out the dead, using the most primitive kinds of slings, the body being dragged on the ground on a rope between two men.

What struck McGee was how casual the living seemed about what they were doing, how immune to death they were. The French soldiers were talking—laughing, sometimes—as if nothing had happened, and yet the bodies they were carrying had been their buddies just the day before. There was no sign of mourning. He wondered if the French were different from American soldiers, or whether this was part of the secret ritual of survival, known only to other combat troops who had made it through their own small hells, because if you thought about it too much, you could no longer function. McGee pondered that again at the top of the ridge, where the French position had been. The word was that the French tended to dig deeper foxholes than the Americans, but because of the rocks and the ice, their holes were not very impressive, in some places just a couple of inches deep, and everywhere on the ground was blood; in some cases, brains spilled out. For the first time McGee wondered what he had gotten himself into.

Well, he had done it all by himself. He had chosen this place, had volunteered to go to Korea, and worse had pushed to be with the frontline troops, thereby violating the most basic law of the Army, which was never to volunteer for anything. Truth be told, he had not merely volunteered, but had systematically pressured the Army to give him his own rifle platoon. He had forced the Army to pluck him from the job it greatly preferred for him—as an instructor back at Fort Benning, Georgia, training other young men to go to Korea—and to send him all the way here instead. Now, ten days after that first jarring view of the carnage of battle at Twin Tunnels, he was at Chipyongni, waiting patiently in his foxhole on the south side of the perimeter, guarding the sector that would turn out to be the most vulnerable part of Paul Freeman's regimental defense.

McGee was a country boy from rural North Carolina, and he had wanted to serve his country for a long time. After the Marines turned him down, he had joined the Army and waited patiently in England to cross the Channel for his chance at battle. He was not in on D-day or anything else that mattered in the subsequent weeks. He envied those who, to his way of thinking, were luckier. Instead his unit, the Sixty-sixth, or Black Panther Division, was held in reserve. Then, during the Battle of the Bulge, it had been chosen to go in with the Third Army and reinforce the embattled troops near Bastogne, and McGee had been pleased. But during the Channel crossing, a German U-boat hit a transport carrying one of the division's other regiments, and 802 men went down with the ship. Because of that, they had pulled McGee's division and regiment back and finally sent it to another area, near St. Nazarre, where its job was to keep German units guarding sub bases bottled up. That had seemed more like police work than combat, and when the war was over, McGee wondered if he would ever get his chance. He was too young to realize that, for those eager enough, there was always going to be enough war to go around.

McGee had returned to North Carolina, and stayed out of the service for about a year and a half before joining the reserves. He and his older brother Tom, with whom he was very close, were running a small grocery store and filling station in the Belmont area, and there was one Army recruiting sergeant whom they liked and who had them marked down as possible enlistees. The McGee filling station and store was not a stunning financial success. People were moving from the country to the city and suburbs, and the store was already beginning to run on credit. So the sergeant kept coming by and selling them the virtues of the Army in a time of peace—the chance to see the world, without the likelihood of ever having to fight for their country. Finally the McGee brothers, Paul and Tom, agreed to re-up if they could choose their area, pick their unit, and serve together. The sergeant said that would be just fine. They picked the Far East because they had already been to Europe, and Asia sounded much more exotic. They got what they wanted—Japan and the Seventh Infantry Division, Paul in Able Company, Tom in Baker Company of the Seventeenth Regiment. Paul McGee was surprised by how much he liked the Japanese people, who were friendly, and Japanese women, who were even friendlier in those days, because when he had been fighting in Europe he had not hated the Germans, but for some reason he did not understand at the time he had hated the Japanese.

Japan had turned out to be good duly. The only thing that had bothered McGee was the terrible shape the Army was in. He remembered one cold, rainy day when he was giving a training lesson on how to set up a combat outpost. General Walton Walker came by, complimented him on the job he was doing, and told the assembled GIs to pay attention to this fine young soldier who knew something about warfare, because sooner or later they were going to be in a war. Then Walker asked McGee if he wanted to be an officer. That was an interesting question because McGee was already an officer in the Army reserve, but as an active soldier he was only a sergeant with two rockers. He had been warv of becoming a regular Army officer because in his mind they were mostly West Point men, or college graduates anyway, and he did not think that a country boy with a shaky tenth-grade education would stack up well against them. Then Walker asked if McGee would be interested in Officer Candidate School (OCS), and that seemed like a better idea. He said yes, but only if his brother Tom could come along. Walker thought it could be done. So both McGees filled out their papers, but it turned out you had to be at least a sergeant for OCS, and Tom McGee was a mere corporal. So only Paul McGee ended up at OCS after all.

When the Korean War started, Paul, back in the States, could not wait to get over there. He immediately volunteered to go, but the Army, ever the contrarian force, held him at Fort Benning, while his brother, with the Seventh Division, was cut off near the Chosin Reservoir in late November. That made him want to go more than ever; he was sure Tom needed him, even after he was one of the lucky⁷ ones who made it back from the Chosin. In time the Army decided that it did need Paul in Korea, and that he was an officer, not an enlisted man, and since platoon leaders were in great demand, they shipped him out. He was assigned to the Second Division and managed to con people into putting him in the Twenty-third Regiment because it was closest to Tom's Seventeenth Regiment in the Seventh Division, which was also part of Tenth Corps. He had gotten up to the Twenty-third Regiment in January and was immediately sent to the Second Battalion. The people at Battalion were so happy to see him that they offered him the heavy-weapons platoon, filled as it was with mortars and machine guns. Instead he asked for a rifle platoon in George Company because that was the unit nearest to his brother's regiment.

The people at the Second Battalion headquarters thought he was a lunatic. "McGee, you're crazier than hell," one of the officers said. "We're losing platoon leaders in our rifle companies every day. But the heavy weapons platoon—that's another thing. That's the best deal we've got. You're surrounded by all that firepower, and they're about three or four hundred feet back from the front line where the other troops are." No, McGee replied, he knew all that, but he wanted to be up on the line, wanted to command nothing but men who really wanted to fight under him, and he wanted to be as close as he could to the Seventeenth Regiment. That first night he got word to his brother, and Tom drove right over in a jeep to see him. "What the hell are you doing here?" Tom McGee asked. "I came out here to get you out of this goddamn place," Paul McGee said. "Boy," answered Tom, "you're really going to be sorry. People are getting killed here every day—you should have stayed back home." So it was that Paul McGee had taken command of the Third Platoon of George Company, whose perimeter at Chipyongni was approximately five hundred yards long—the equivalent of five football fields.

Waiting up there on the line, he knew the time was coming close when the Chinese were going to hit. He had been on several patrols, and enemy activity had increased dramatically every day, while the range of the patrols had shortened accordingly. He had also heard through the rumor mill that any attempt to withdraw from the village had been rejected. That guaranteed that they were going to stay and fight. He was finally going to get his chance. On February 13, the word was that the Chinese were likely to come that night.

George Company's position was hardly ideal. It jutted farther out than the rest of the defensive positions and lacked the elevation of most of the other UN defensive points. It faced Hill 397, and they knew there were Chinese there. In fact, it was as if there were a ridge that emerged from the George Company position and virtually connected it with Hill 397, almost, as Ken Hamburger noted, like a finger extending from their position to the Chinese position. That gave the Chinese a natural approach to McGee's platoon. As he waited for the battle to start, Paul McGee had no idea that his sector would prove to be the most bitterly contested in the entire battle, or that his battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Edwards, would in his after-action reports name this small part of the larger perimeter McGee Hill.

McGee had a total of forty-six men in his platoon. They seemed like good men, but he had no way of really knowing, because he had never fought with them before. He had made sure their foxholes were adequately deep—four feet at least. His own was just fine, four feet wide, six feet long, and about six feet deep, with a firing step that allowed him to duck when he wanted to, and fire back when he was ready. But, regrettably he thought, theirs was an oddly barren hill. There was no way to create any kind of cover around their foxholes—no logs, no debris of any sort. That made it possible for attacking troops to lob grenades in. Worse yet, although a good deal of barbed wire had gone up around the greater Twenty-third perimeter, they had run out of it before reaching George Company. There had been just enough to place a double apron in front of George's First Platoon, but none in front of McGee's position. At that moment, whatever Division and Corps could spare, whether it was airpower or barbed wire, went to Wonju.

If McGee was unhappy about this critical shortfall, he accepted it as well. That was the deal and soldiers w^rere meant to accept the deal. If it had been a perfect battle in a perfect world, they would have had enough of everything, not just barbed wire, but logs to protect the foxholes, and enough mines, and a hell of a lot better communications. But it was not a perfect battle in a perfect world—it was going to be a difficult battle in a godforsaken place—most battles w^rere. Some of the regiment's engineers came and helped create two fougasse bombs, taking fifty-five-gallon drums, filling them with a mixture of napalm and oil, in addition to what they hoped w^ras a reliable ignition system, all in a lethal homemade mine, which they then buried. It was a potentially devastating weapon; each fougasse might take a lot of Chinese with it, but as a one-time weapon it was no substitute for barbed wire. As it happened, neither fougasse went off—perhaps the engineers had not done the ignition system right, McGee thought. They also created some other homemade mines, taking some hand grenades, pulling their pins, but keeping the ignition suppressed inside a ration can and running lines to them so that when the lines were jerked, the grenades would explode.

The Chinese hit first, as expected, on the night of the thirteenth. McGee heard the bugles around 10 P.M. Then they started coming—and just kept coming and coming. Some people had said they would come in human waves, but that was not quite right, unless you thought of a very small wave, and then a slightly bigger one each time, as if the attack was first a squad, then a platoon, then a company. They were clearly looking for the American positions and marking them, wasting if need be a good many lives in the process. The first night, McGee thought, went quite well. He had ordered his men not to fire on sound, but only when they actually saw the enemy, in order to conserve ammunition. When dawn came, there were stacks of Chinese bodies sprawled around the position, but no one had penetrated it, and McGee had lost no men.

22. BATTLE OF CHIPYONGNI. FEBRUARY 13-14.

The Chinese had, however, discovered a blind or dead spot right in the center of his position. It was a dry creek bed, about four feet deep, almost like a giant ditch, that seemed to come directly from Hill 397 and empty out right on top of the George Company position. It was quite literally a natural channel into the George Company sector and allowed the Chinese very good cover right up to the foot of McGee's small hill. The Chinese could hardly have done better, if months earlier, knowing that there might be a battle here, they had carved the channel out themselves. McGee knew it was a dangerous avenue into his position, but there was not much he could do about it. With dawn just arriving on the morning of the fourteenth, he noticed some Chinese soldiers near the mouth of the creek bed, and told Bill Kluttz, his platoon sergeant, to fire his rocket launcher at the spot. Kluttz hit a tree, which gave him an air burst illuminating about forty Chinese soldiers, who rose up out of the cover of the trees and started running back across the flat land right in front of the American position; the Americans opened up with their machine guns and caught most of them in the open field. Now' they knew for sure that the Chinese were going to keep on using the creek bed for protection.

COLONEL PAUL FREEMAN thought the first night of the battle had gone reasonably well. All positions had held and his casualties were surprisingly low. He knew he did not entirely control the course of the battle—the Chinese would do that, depending on how many men they were willing to feed into the fight. He worried, though, about his supply of ammunition. There were so many attackers that, no matter how much his men had, it probably was not going to be enough. The Air Force was trying to air-drop more, but most of it was falling outside the perimeter. Still, morale was high, which was a critically important factor in any siege. It was almost as if his men were eager to be here, and anxious to be given a chance to make up for Kunuri. Freeman kept busy during the night moving around the perimeter, checking in with his different subordinate commanders. If there was a place of vulnerability, it was to the south and southwest, where George Company and the French battalion were potential targets. But he had already spoken to Jim Edwards, the commander of the Second Battalion, which included George Company, about moving reserve units up to reinforce those positions. Then, at daybreak of the fourteenth, a Chinese 120mm mortar round landed right next to Freeman's tent. The regiment's intelligence officer, Major Harold Shoemaker, was grievously wounded and died a few hours later; several other officers, including Freeman, were w^rounded less severely. He took a small slice of shrapnel in his left calf, which did not seem serious: Freeman had been lying down on his cot when it happened, and had just reversed his position so that his feet were where his head had been. He and Lieutenant Colonel Frank Meszar, his good friend and the regimental executive officer, later joked about what might have happened if he had not reversed his position on the cot. It was, they decided, the kind of luck you needed in battle. While the wound itself did not seem that bad, there might have been a break in the lower leg that would have to be dealt with later. Captain Robert Hall, the regimental surgeon, quickly dressed the wound, gave Freeman two aspirin, and told him to get in touch if he had any problems.

23. mcgee Hill. February 13-15, 1Q51

Freeman continued to visit forward positions, often virtually alone, with a limp. But the wound was what Ned Almond had been waiting for, and using it as his excuse, he moved immediately to relieve Freeman of his command in the middle of a battle. He had wanted to put one of his own boys in charge of the Twenty-third for some time. A few days earlier, he had made his first try. Irritated because he thought Freeman was not forcing his men to use dry socks to prevent trench foot and frostbite, he sent Lieutenant Colonel John Chiles, his operations officer, to Ruffner to tell him to relieve Freeman. That was the last thing Ruffner wanted to do with a serious battle looming. He looked at Chiles and replied, "Do you know what? My radio just went out of whack. I have no way in the world of reaching Paul Freeman." That provided only a brief stav of execution.

The senior officers in the Twenty-third were furious that Almond would use a marginal wound as an excuse to change commanders in the middle of a battle that was going well, and was about to increase in intensity. To substitute for a much admired officer someone no one knew and who would always be considered part of a coup was appalling, they thought. Dr. Hall had received a call from Colonel Gerry Epley, division chief of staff, almost as soon as word of the wound had reached higher headquarters.

"How serious is the wound?" Epley asked.

"It's not that serious," Hall answered. "Maybe under normal conditions you might evacuate him for treatment. But these aren't normal conditions."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Well, this is a tough place and this is a very tough battle and he's the one man holding the regiment together. We're surrounded, we're going to be short of ammo. The men can see that some of the ammo drops are falling short, but they absolutely believe in Freeman, and they believe that he'll get them out of here. The Twenty-third Regiment believes in itself because he's led them before. Without him I think it's a different regiment. Evacuating him would be unnecessary, unwanted, and undesirable."

Hall instantly knew he had been too candid. Epleys voice changed. He was furious, Hall realized: how dare a surgeon tell him what to do on a military matter. "Don't you dare to presume to tell me about tactical matters! We don't need any of that from you. I asked you for a medical judgment. I just want to know how deep the wound is. That's all the answer I need from you."

But Hall thought he would give it one more shot. He was not, after all, a kid, and he had no time for the politics of Division or Corps headquarters now. He had been a combat surgeon in World War II, had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and had gone into civilian practice for a time. When Korea began, he had asked to go back on active duty and volunteered specifically for the Second Division after it had been hit at Kunuri, because he had lost some close friends up there. In all of this he had been motivated by old-fashioned loyalties. Now, he felt, those same loyalties gave him the right to speak candidly. Besides, who knew more about the mood of the regiment than a doctor, whom soldiers often told things they would never tell other officers. This regiment, he insisted to Epley, more than most, believes in its commander, and takes much of its strength and identity from his presence and leadership. It would be extremely dangerous for regimental morale if he were pulled out. Epley signed off angrily, and Hall knew they were going to pull Freeman anyway.

Freeman was enraged. This was his battle and his regiment, and he did not want to leave. There was nothing worse in terms of unofficial Army codes than to be relieved of command in the middle of a battle. "I brought them in," he told headquarters during one call, "and I'll bring them out." He tried talking Ruffner out of it, but in a fight between Almond and Freeman, Ruffner was powerless. Freeman finally turned the matter over to George Stewart, the one man at Division whom he trusted. Freeman told Stewart he was not going to give up his command or be evacuated. Being relieved like this was the worst disgrace that could befall a commander, a career ender. Stewart, who knew Freeman was at least partially right, listened sympathetically. No one, he said, was going to question his performance. It was not going to damage his career, but if he did not leave as ordered there could be far more serious consequences. Finally, Freeman realized he had no choice. In the military, after all, you could not challenge orders.

But later that day, when Chiles flew in, Freeman managed not to be at the little airstrip to go out on the same plane. It would be used to take out wounded men, but not the outgoing regimental commander. Chinese mortar fire was falling on the strip as the plane landed, and the pilot needed to get out quickly. For the moment, the Twenty-third had two regimental commanders. "I told Chiles to find a shelter and stay out of my way until my departure," Freeman said years later. Chiles was shrewd enough to stay in the background and let Freeman run the show through the night of the fourteenth and well into the late morning of the fifteenth. Even when Chiles officially took command at midday on the fifteenth, he let the regimental exec, Frank Meszar, who knew the relative value of all the subordinate commanders, continue in Freeman's role.

MATT RIDGWAY HAD given Paul Freeman his word that if the Chinese attacked in full force, he would send help, and he intended to make good on his word. He was prepared to send the British Commonwealth Brigade, and the Fifth Cavalry Regiment under the command of Colonel Marcel Crombez. The Fifth Cav was a part of the First Cavalry Division. But help was not going to arrive any too quickly. The Commonwealth Brigade had a better, more direct route to Chipyongni, but it had run into an enormous Chinese blocking force and quickly found itself embattled and stalled, hardly in a position to rescue another trapped force. So Crombez was ordered by Major General Bryant Moore, the neighboring Ninth Corps commander, to get to Chipyongni in a hurry. In a case like this unit titles are often confusing: the First Cav itself was not a cavalry division, it was what the Army calls straight leg, that is, regular infantrymen; but the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, a part of the First Cav, was armored, and had been held in reserve at that time by Ninth Corps, at a base near Yoju. When he first started out on the rescue at Chipyongni, Colonel Crombez's force had twenty-three tanks, three infantry battalions, two battalions of field artillery, and a company of combat engineers. It was a not inconsiderable force. Crombez would have plenty of firepower. In addition, if things went badly, there was always the possibility of dispatching air cover to protect him.

Crombez first heard about the mission on the morning of February 14, when General Moore called to say that it looked like he might be used in the relief of Freeman's force. At 4 P.M., Moore called back, telling him he would have to move out that night to relieve Freeman's regiment—"and I know you'll do it." An hour later, Charles Palmer, newly promoted to two stars and made the commander of the First Cav, arrived at Crombez's CP and confirmed the order. Crombez was something of a controversial figure—a man who dressed with dash, wearing a cavalryman's yellow scarf (as if he were fighting the Indians back in the Wild West), having an oversized eagle painted on his helmet, and pinning a grenade on his harness much as Ridgway did. He also carried with him a blue poker chip that he would flip up and down while talking with his men, telling them they had to know when to play their blue chip—the implication being that a great combat commander had a sixth sense about battle and always knew when to strike. Some in his unit thought, however, that he did not fight with equal dash. He had, until then, seemed the possessor of a self-invented mystique, one not actually forged on the battlefield. Some of the men under him thought he sought glory too intensely, wanted a star too badly, and did not seem adequately committed to them. "Brave, yes. Professional, no," Clay Blair quoted a fellow West Pointer saying.

By the time he had his force ready to move, much later on the fourteenth, it was already dark, not the ideal time to push forward on roads where the Chinese might already be dug in. That first night Crombez made it to Yoju, about ten miles south of Chipyongni. There his units waited while the engineers built a bypass around a blown-out bridge over the Han River. Having finally managed to clear the Han on the evening of the fourteenth, his tanks were slowed by another blown bridge over a creek near Koksuri, about five miles from Chipyongni, and never really got moving until the morning of the fifteenth. Paul Freeman, monitoring Crombez's progress by radio, knew that no relief party was going to make it through on the fourteenth. Meanwhile the heaviest fighting yet at Chipyongni was taking place on the night of the fourteenth and into the morning of the fifteenth. Freeman, aware that the relief mission was moving more slowly than expected, then requested all the air strikes he could get, but almost nothing came— because the Air Force was so committed to the fighting at Wonju. What he did get Was a light spotter plane—the Firefly, the men called it—that dropped flares; a wonderful addition to the battlefield, Freeman later said, because it turned "night into day." His men, he knew*, wore going to have to hold out a second night before help arrived.

IN THE ANNALS of the Korean War few incidents are as controversial as that of Marcel Crombez's final dash to the rescue at Chipyongni. Yes, he got there, and he got there in time, and yes, what he did was what Matt Ridgway had ordered him to do. But there was an unnecessary recklessness to it, which resulted in unnecessary losses among the infantrymen who accompanied him that many involved felt reflected an almost cavalier disregard for their lives. That he had put the mission above the proper care and treatment of his own men angered those infantrymen who survived, and left a bitter aftertaste in the accounts of historians who believed the same results could have been achieved with far fewer casualties, and who in addition wondered, when it was over, about the personal courage of the rescue commander himself. It raised one of the great questions of command in wartime: Does elemental success in a crucial battle excuse all other failures and lapses? And if you succeed, are there are other issues you should answer to?

On the morning of the fifteenth, Crombez ran into heavy Chinese resistance just south of Koksuri. He had placed his infantrymen on either side of the road, but his progress remained slow. At that moment it was not clear whether his tanks would be able to push through in time. Around noon Crombez received a message from the CP of the Twenty-third (by then under Chiles) saying, "Reach us as soon as possible, in any event, reach us."

The importance of his mission had repeatedly been made clear to Crombez from the start by his superiors. He was visited by General Moore, the Tenth Corps commander, who told him to be there by evening, and then by General C. D. (known to his peers as Charley Dog, to match Army terminology) Palmer, his rather crusty division commander, and then by Nick Ruffner, the division commander of the besieged unit. All three of them pleaded with him to hurry. "I'll do it personally," Crombez promised. Finally, General Palmer landed in his chopper to talk to Crombez, check how things were going, and ask when he might reach Chipyongni—one more urmeeded reminder that time was of the essence. "I'll get there and before dark," Crombez had assured him. Palmer then lent his chopper to Crombez, who scanned the area and saw that the road was still open but that the hills were full of Chinese. The decision to defend Chipyongni was Ridgway's, and it was vital to his larger strategy for the war. Thus the pressure on Crombez to get through was immense, each visit or call a reminder of how badly Ridgway wanted this one; it was as if the heat falling on Crombez was a direct extension of the heat coming down level by level from Ridgway to the officers-nothing but brass—immediately below him.

From the moment the battle began, Ridgway seemed to believe that the tide of the war depended on its outcome, that the sooner the Americans and their UN allies showed they could handle the numerical superiority of the Chinese, the more quickly other victories would come. What was at stake was not just a specific small piece of terrain, but the very psyche of his army. If Freeman, and now Chiles, could hold, it would be a symbol to all the other fighting men that they had entered a new phase of the war, one in which the Chinese had been stripped of the immense psychological advantage they had gained at Kunuri. In the months to follow, Ridgway was determined to keep adjusting the battlefield odds, to make things better for the men under his command—better food, warmer clothes, better armaments, better commanders—and to wage a campaign by artillery and air that would turn the lives of the Chinese soldiers into pure misery. But first and foremost he needed to change the mind-set of his own men.

At a certain point, Crombez called Chiles and said he did not think he could get there with his full train of infantrymen and supply trucks and ambulances. "Come on, trains or no trains," Chiles replied. Then Crombez made a fateful decision, one that would forever after cling to his reputation as a kind of permanent asterisk. He decided to turn his charge to Chipyongni into an armored assault. He would get rid of most of the non-armored part of his column, narrowing it down from three battalions to a much smaller, more streamlined force. He would take his tanks and the engineers—he needed the engineers to remove land mines, for the Chinese used their sappers skillfully. In addition, he would place a company of infantry on top of the tanks, and, less burdened, go all out. What bothered the men who made the rest of the assault, and the historians who wrote about it afterward, was the decision to put the infantrymen on top of the tanks.

To mount on the tanks he chose Love Company, with its 160 men, led by Captain John Barrett. Lieutenant Colonel Edgar Treacy, who had begun the rescue mission as the infantry battalion commander, was appalled by the idea. It violated every aspect of Army doctrine—if the Chinese continued to hit the convoy, the infantrymen riding on the tanks would be sitting ducks for the Chinese machine guns and mortars. Both Treacy and Barrett protested the order—the casualties would be horrendous, they said. Not only were the men on the tanks likely to be exceptionally vulnerable to Chinese fire, but when Patton tanks heated up, they could set a man's clothes on fire. In addition, the sweep of one of the tanks' big guns could knock men off at any time. What most men—certainly military historians who wrote about it—believed was that the tanks should have been buttoned up, with perhaps some infantrymen and engineers riding inside protected vehicles that followed behind the tanks. Then they could have gone hell for leather to Chipyongni. At the very least, if the infantrymen got off, there had to be some very dependable means of communication between their commander and the commander of the tanks.

What made the battlefield confrontation between Crombez and Treacy particularly difficult and caused subsequent events to be touched by exceptional bitterness and anger was the fact that there already appeared to be unusually bad feeling between the two of them. Both were West Point men, but theirs had been very different West Points and very different careers after graduation. Crombez had been born in Belgium, had enlisted in the Army in 1919, and had made it to West Point, graduating in 1925. He had always retained a rather heavy accent, and had been seen by his classmates as a heavy-handed striver, too crudely ambitious in terms of the academy's culture. What had attached itself to Crombez early on was the back-channel word that he wanted it all too much and yet did not have the right stuff. At the start of World War II, he was sixteen years out of the academy and was, in terms of command possibilities, a little too old for the lower ranking commands and not good enough for the more senior ones. He had done stateside training for most of the war. By war's end, he had made colonel. Like almost everyone else in the postwar military, his personal position shrank and he became a light colonel.

After the war, he finally got a command, being placed in charge of two separate regiments of the Seventh Infantry^- Division in Korea. He was, in the vernacular of the Army, something of a hard-ass, a petty one at that, it was believed, someone who seized on small things and made them too important. Before the Korean War started, he seemed disproportionately interested, for example, in keeping the troops stationed near Kaesong away from the hookers in town. Troops being troops, they were going to find a way to connect, even if it meant slipping the women into the barracks, as they sometimes did, disguised as ROK soldiers. Crombez once showed up at a company headquarters and threw a fit because in the little stand where the soldiers could buy some basic needs, the different candy bars for sale were not lined up properly. Still he had managed to hang on and, in 1949, was promoted once again to colonel, this time permanently. When the war started, he was given command of the Fifth Cav. His position, however, was in jeopardy, for Ridgway was eager to replace most of the regimental commanders with younger men. As the oldest of them, Crombez was a prime candidate to be sent somewhere else and thus fall short of getting his star. It was an unenviable situation, one likely to make an already aggressive officer even more so.

By contrast, Lieutenant Colonel Edgar Treacy was as close as you could get to being Crombez's mirror opposite, a gifted younger commander of virtually the same rank who had graduated from West Point ten years later. He was a kind of golden boy, with admirable connections within the Army's hierarchy, and yet beloved by the men in his battalion. Whether the bad feelings began because the younger man's career seemed so effortless, blessed as he was with personal grace and the support of powerful superiors, or because Treacy, as some men believed, had sat on the board that recommended that Crombez be reduced to lieutenant colonel at the end of World War II, no one was sure. But the tension had been apparent since the early days of the Naktong fighting, when Treacy was a battalion commander under Crombez.

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

Then Allen had asked Treacy what he had been doing on Hill 174 himself the day before—a battalion commander going forward on an extremely dangerous assault that he was in no way supposed to be part of. Treacy pointed out that four days earlier the battalion had had almost 900 men. Now they were down to 292. "If I had been ordered to take Hill 174 again, I was going to refuse the order, and I wanted to insure that there would be no basis for a charge of personal cowardice!" he told Allen. He did refuse the next order, and Allen learned later that Crombez had called him yellow in front of the other battalion commanders.

What tore at Treacy was the unnecessary loss of men in useless assaults in this particular stretch of fighting. At night, some of the other officers had noticed that he seemed to be mumbling to himself just before he went to sleep. At first they thought he was saying his prayers. One officer asked if Treacy were reciting Hail Marys. No, the answer came back, he was reciting the name of each man in his battalion who had died and asking God's forgiveness for his own responsibility in his death.

NOW, ON THE road to Chipyongni, Treacy found himself in a very difficult position—asking a superior, who was under almost unbearable pressure and who clearly bore him some animus, not to put his infantrymen on top of the tanks. Crombez was unmoved by his protest. He made only one concession. If the Chinese hit them hard, he would stop his tanks while the infantrymen got off, and he would use his considerable suppressive firepower on the enemy.

Then there would be a signal for the men to reboard before they moved on. Treacy responded by demanding the right to accompany his men. He could not ask them to do what he himself was not willing to do. But Crombez denied that request, ordering Treacy to take command of the rest of the convoy and to move forward to Chipyongni only after the road was cleared. So it was that the 160 men of Love Company boarded the tanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Told by his superior that the First Platoon was still holding at all points, McGee was not at all reassured.

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

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

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

Slowly, however, the battle began to turn in favor of the Chinese. One of the keys to holding McGee's increasingly vulnerable position was a machine gun right in its center, being fired by Corporal Eugene Ottesen and his men. With a superb field of fire, Ottesen was able to cover a spur on a hill that the Chinese had to cross in order to reach them. So the Chinese had gone after his machine gun from the start, and sometime that night they had hit the first of his men firing it. That was when Ottesen himself took over. As long as Ottesen could fire, McGee was in a reasonably solid position. But the Chinese threw wave after wave of men at the position. Ottesen never panicked, even though he knew he was a marked man.

He kept firing—short, tight bursts—undoubtedly, like McGee, sure that he was going to die there. McGee marveled at Ottesen's bravery in such a terrible moment—true courage, he thought, from some secret storage place that few men had.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Up on the hill McGee knew it was pretty much over; he vras going to die there. It was down to Kluttz and him fighting side by side with a couple of other men nearby. He was oddly fatalistic about it. He felt no self-pity at all. He had volunteered, had wanted this battle and this war, and he had gotten all of it. If he felt bad, it was for his mother and father, who would take it hard. He and Kluttz were in the same foxhole by then, McGee firing a BAR, which he had taken from a man two foxholes over, and Kluttz with a machine gun taken from a wounded gunner. Kluttz was a damn good man who was not going to break, not even here at the end. "Kluttz," McGee yelled out, "I believe they've got us."

"Well, let's get us as many of the sons of bitches as we can first," Kluttz replied, and they opened up with both weapons.

Then Kluttz's machine gun jammed and that seemed to be that. "Kluttz, let's try and get out," McGee shouted, and then threw the last of his grenades. Sometime early on the morning of February 15, probably about 3 A.M., their ammo almost completely gone, McGee, Kluttz, and two other men managed to slip out. Of the forty-six men in McGee's platoon, only four were able to walk out on their own power. Everyone else was killed, wounded, or missing in action. Paul McGee received a Silver Star for his bravery and leadership, as did Bill Kluttz.

IN THE VERY early morning of the fifteenth, among his last commands, Paul Freeman had tried to send some reserve units, including the Ranger Company, to stiffen the George Company position. If they had been unable to drive the Chinese off the hill, they had somehow managed to neutralize them, and as dawn approached, the chances of the Chinese exploiting their position began to shrink. By mid-morning, George Stewart and some of Freeman's pals at his own regimental headquarters were telling him that he simply had to leave as Almond had ordered or events might take a very ugly turn for him. So far, they reminded him, he had done everything right, but there was a time when you had to accept the fact that you were in a command structure. Besides, his colleagues argued, the battle was essentially done. Crombez had apparently broken out of the last of the traps set for him by the Chinese and would almost surely be there before nightfall. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Edwards, commander of the Second Battalion, whose forces were still bitterly engaged near McGee Hill, told Freeman that the Chinese had been driven off. It was something of a white lie, Edwards noted later, but otherwise, Freeman might have refused to leave and surely would have been court-martialed by Almond. With that, Freeman flew out for treatment at a MASH unit at Chungju. There, he was met by Ridgway, who congratulated him, told him he had done just fine, and awarded him the DSC. After talking with Ridgway, Freeman believed he would go to the States briefly for R & R, and then return to Korea. He had, after all, spent eight straight months of constant fighting in the line and needed a bit of a break. He was now confident that, like Mike Michaelis, against whom he always measured himself, he would get his star. But Paul Freeman did not return to Korea. Instead, much to his chagrin, he was assigned to make public appearances to explain the war to civic clubs—he was uncommonly good-looking and spoke well. Whether his return was blocked by Almond he never knew. He went on to a full career and eventually received four stars.

THE CHINESE HAD finally taken the ridge of McGee Hill, but it had cost them dearly: McGee was told later that when the battle was over they found the bodies of more than eight hundred enemy soldiers immediately in front of his position. The surprising thing was that when the Chinese had finally gained it, albeit with the hours of darkness disappearing, and having expended such a terrible amount of human resource, they hesitated and so failed to maximize their success. It was a failure not caused by lack of bravery—they had been absolutely fearless against an enemy with the terrifying capacity to create areas that were nothing less than killing zones. Not only did the Americans have the capacity to hammer a given target with endless artillery rounds, but they had now added to it a new weapon that the Chinese quickly came to fear, a jellied death that American planes could spread from the air and that had the capacity to burn out entire units in fiery communal deaths. It was called napalm.

With their troops finally atop the high ground, the Chinese failed to exploit their breakthrough. Their troops fought tenaciously once there, beating back repeated American attempts to drive them off. But in front of them that morning lay a far greater victory, had thev been ready. They could have rained fire down on the Americans below. It was a fateful moment, and they simply stayed on McGee Hill. They certainly had enough troops available in that sector, and they might have been able to move more men over from other sectors in the west and east. But they never did. Perhaps the breakthrough had come too late in the day and they were simply not ready for it. It reflected at the very least a failure in communications, but possibly a failure of imagination as well.

One of the great weaknesses of the Chinese at that point in the war, the Americans were beginning to discover from prisoner interrogation, was the rigidity of their command structure. It worked top-down with little flexibility and little room for individual initiative at lower levels. It produced brave, rugged, incredibly dutiful foot soldiers who often served under middle-level commanders who, in the midst of battle, had neither the authority nor the communications ability to make critical decisions as the battlefield changed. Wonju had been a classic example of that, of their inability to adjust in mid-battle. That was in stark contrast to the American Army, where the initiative of good NCOs was valued and the ability to adjust to a battle as it unfolded was becoming a major asset.

There were other limitations the Americans began to discover about this fierce new enemy. The Chinese could fight with great intensity for two or, at most, three days, but limits in ammo, food, medical support, and sheer physical endurance—as well as the intensity of the American airpower—affected their ability to exploit any advantages or breakthroughs, and magnified any breakdowns or defeats. By the third day of a given battle they began to run out of everything and needed to break off contact. Chipyongni and Wonju were the great primers for all of this. At different moments, both battles had seemed as if they might come out a different way.

Matt Ridgway had not only gotten the battle he wanted at Chipyongni. Equally important, he was learning priceless lessons about an enemy he badly needed to understand. He had already received a number of early lessons in the strengths of the Chinese; now, for the first time, he was learning their weaknesses.

THE SOUND OF a column of tanks on the approach is not a gentle one, and most of the men besieged at Chipyongni heard their rescuers long before the relief column arrived. There had been one last desperate attempt on the part of the Chinese to stop the tank column. About a mile south of Chipyongni, there was a cut in the hills, where the road narrowed, with high ground on both sides, a perfect place for an ambush. The cut went on for about 150 yards and the Chinese were dug in about fifty feet above the road waiting with their mortars and bazookas to hit the tanks. The lead tank, struck by a bazooka round, made it through, as did the second and third. A bazooka round penetrated the fourth tank's skin and ignited ammunition inside. Some of the crew, including Captain John Hiers, were immediately killed. The driver was badly burned, but in a great show of valor, he gunned the engine and somehow⁷ managed to drive the tank through the cut so that the road remained unblocked for the rest of the column.

Crombez's tanks arrived at Chipyongni a little after 5 P.M. Just as his column was approaching, three American tanks inside the perimeter ventured out to fire at the Chinese behind their lines, and there Was a tense moment as the two tank forces eyed each other Warily, the rescuers and the rescued, neither quite sure who was who, before the defenders understood that the Cav had arrived and the siege Was broken. At almost the same moment, the Air Force started hitting the surrounding hills with napalm. Suddenly the Chinese began to break and abandon their positions. For a brief time it was a free-fire zone, as thousands of the enemy were caught moving through open territory, and the American commanders poured artillery, tank fire, and napalm down on them. To the Americans watching from the hills surrounding the village it was, as one American soldier said, like "kicking an anthill" and suddenly seeing, rather than ants, thousands and thousands of Chinese emerge from a place where you thought none existed, and only then becoming truly terrified, as if realizing finally just how many Chinese had actually surrounded them.

Nothing reflected the complexity—and the moral ambiguity—of war more clearly than Crombez and his mission. To the men trapped inside Chipyongni, exhausted, low on ammunition, fearing they could not hold out another night, Crombez's tankers were nothing less than saviors, who like the storied cavalrymen of a thousand western movies, had arrived just in the nick of time. To the men of Treacy's battalion, it was another matter entirely. Captain Barrett was in a rage. Love Company had been torn apart, and so many men, he believed, had died so needlessly.

To the men of the Twenty-third, Captain Barrett at that moment did not seem like a hero or a rescuer so much as a madman, an officer completely out of control, running around with his pistol out, screaming about Crombez and his goddamn blue chip and how he had gotten all of Barrett's men killed. Barrett kept shouting that he was going to kill Crombez. He was in so violent a rage, his desire to kill Crombez so genuine, that the medical team of the Twenty-third eventually had to give him a shot to sedate him. A French soldier, Corporal Serge Bererd, remembered the men of Love Company being so exhausted, and in such a state of shock from the assault, that they could not respond when he tried to talk to them. "They were just too tired to kill [Crombez]," Bererd said. Men like Bererd, who had endured the siege and felt grateful to be rescued, were puzzled by the violent attitude of Crombez's infantry—they wore not men celebrating the success of an extremely dangerous mission, but mourning what in their minds was a defeat.

THE DAY AFTER the battle was over, Sergeant Ed Hendricks, who had arrived with the Fifth Cav, saw a terrifying sight—twenty to thirty trucks, all giant deuce-and-a-halfs, lined up to take the American dead out. But the men doing the loading couldn't lay the bodies down the way they normally might have, flattened out. The dead had been frozen as they had died, arms and legs sticking out in every direction, some frozen in firing positions. Their bodies had to be stacked awkwardly atop one another, the loaders using the space as best they could. Fitting them in, Hendricks remembered, was like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle. It was the worst thing he had ever seen.

That same morning, when Crombez asked the men of Love Company' which of them wanted to return to their base along with his tanks, none volunteered. Many of the Love Company infantrymen who had been left behind when Crombez had driven ahead eventually found their way back. Total casualties for the unit were thirteen killed, nineteen missing and likely captured, thus thirty-two likely dead, and more than fifty wounded. Crombez wrote in his after-action report that his force suffered only ten men killed in action. He also noted that Colonel Treacy had disobeyed orders by joining the attack column. That, as Ken Hamburger noted, was shocking of itself, extremely close to an official reprimand for a man missing in action and most likely dead. Captains Barrett and Norman Allen went among the officers and men taking signatures and statements recommending Treacy for the Medal of Honor. Their recommendations never left the Fifth Cav. When the papers were brought to Crombez, he threw them on the floor and ground his boot on them. "Medal of Honor, no, goddamn it, no. If he ever returns to military control, I will court-martial him." Crombez, however, quickly put himself up for an important medal, dictating his own recommendation for the Distinguished Service Cross. The recommendation wound its way up through the Army command until it reached the chief of staff of the Eighth Army, Brigadier General Henry Hodes, who turned it down, saying, "No son of a bitch earns a DSC inspiring his troops buttoned up in a tank. I know. I am an old tanker." But Crombez apparently made a personal appeal to Ridgway, who told Hodes that yes, the medal was questionable, but to give him the DSC anyway—after all, he had promised Freeman that if his men fought and held at Chipyongni against those terrible odds, he would send the entire Eighth Army in to relieve them if need be, and Crombez had done just that. So Crombez got the DSC, and eventually one star, and retired as a brigadier five years later. In his book on the Korean War, Ridgway never mentioned his name. To experienced Ridgway-ologists, that was a sure sign of the commander's own ambivalence and distaste about what had happened.

STILL, EVEN IF the defense had been imperfect it had been a major victory at a site that the Chinese, not the UN, had chosen, and Ridgway had gotten what he had wanted. Taking and holding terrain, so important in other wars, was less important here. Inflicting unbearable losses on the Chinese was now perceived to be the key to winning, or at least proving to the Chinese that they could not win. If Douglas MacArthur had once been lulled by preconceptions, it was now Mao's turn to be the prisoner of his own mind-set. As MacArthur had failed to factor in the effect of a political revolution in a country he had known almost nothing about, so Mao now failed to factor in the effects of the vast American technological superiority, and the ability of American troops when commanded by a great general. As Mao had once said of MacArthur, arrogant, egotistical men were easy to defeat.

Peng Dehuai, warier than Mao of an all-out confrontation with the Americans, had been more realistic about future confrontations back in January. The question following Chipyongni and Wonju was whether he would finally be listened to. There had already been considerable tension between the two men in the months preceding Chipyongni. But the defeats and the casualties had come as a shock. "Chipyongni," said Chen Jian, the Chinese historian, "changed everything. Up until then the Chinese thought they were doing very well and they thought they knew how to fight the Americans—that they had the secret. They were sure they were going to win the war and do it very quickly. They had all the momentum starting with the victories up along the Chongchon river." The defeats at Chipyongni and Wonju were devastating to Peng. He had used frontline Chinese troops, the best he had from his best divisions. And in the end they had suffered grievous casualties and his men had been forced to flee the battlefield. While the Chinese were always secretive about casualties, the Americans estimated that they might have killed as many as five thousand soldiers at Chipyongni alone. To Peng it was obvious that this was a new and very dangerous foe with—because of its airpower—a very long and a very quick reach.

Peng, who hated to fly—if he could not walk to a destination, he greatly preferred trains—flew to Beijing on February 20 to see Mao. There is a difference of opinion among historians as to whether he went on his own or was summoned there. It is at least possible that the initiative was Peng's, that he felt he had to explain in person the nature of the changed battlefield they now faced. When he reached Mao's house in mid-morning, the chairman, very much a night person, was asleep.

Mao's bodyguard tried to block Peng. "You can't go in there—he's still sleeping."

"You cannot stop me," Peng answered. "My men are dying on the battlefield. I can't wait for him to wake up." So Peng barged in and woke Mao and told him that they had an entirely new war on their hands. There would be no rush to Pusan, no great American retreat south. They now had to prepare for a long war, and they were going to rotate some of their troops because the kind of combat they were engaged in was exhausting to the men. That morning they agreed upon some rotation of troops, even though part of Mao, clearly dreaming different dreams from Peng and other commanders on the battlefield, still believed that the entire Korean peninsula might yet be his.

CHIPYONGNI AND WONJU were huge victories for the United Nations, a major turning point in the war. What was particularly encouraging to Ridgway was the fact that he had not chosen these particular battlefields; the Chinese had selected them, on terrain far more favorable to them than existed near either coast. Though there had been mistakes and some United Nations units had suffered disproportionately, Ridgway had gotten a kind of textbook example of what UN forces might do if even partially prepared for an attack in decent defensive positions. It was a warning to the Chinese leadership of what the future might hold. Even when some of Ridgway's units had been momentarily isolated, he had, in at least one critical showdown, been able to send a relief column in time. Ridgway was sure that his intelligence would get better and that his airpower would now be able to limit the ability of Chinese forces to gather and strike, as well as their ability to resupply and feed their troops. In that he was correct. He thought it would only be a matter of time before the Chinese realized that they, like their UN adversaries, had run into a certain kind of wall.

In WASHINGTON, THERE was a profound sense of relief, for the fact that they would no longer have to think the unthinkable and be forced off the peninsula in some terrible Dunkirk-like humiliation, as MacArthur's cables had only recently seemed to imply. But the improved battlefield did not end the tensions between Tokyo and Washington. If anything, the Far East commander now became even more difficult in his dealings with Washington, more openly critical of the Truman administration's strategy' for the war, more openly condescending about Ridgway's successes (except when taking credit for them), and finally more openly political, as if he were not merely a commander under the authority of the president but wore the hat of military consultant on hire to the Republican leadership in Congress as well. Where he had only recently dissented from Truman and the Joint Chiefs in doomsday terms, claiming that the sheer size of the Chinese Army meant the United States lacked the ability to stay on the peninsula without major additional forces or the use of nuclear weapons, his argument was now quite different. He was frustrated, he told sympathetic editors and politicians on the right, because we had lost our will to win in Korea, even though by his terms winning translated into nothing less than all-out war with China on the Asian mainland.

Now, his reputation damaged by the first great Chinese offensive and the retreat of his troops, with his military peers in Washington paying less and less attention to him, and with Ridgway stalemating the Chinese forces in a way he had said could not be achieved, MacArthur seemed to be spoiling for a fight with Washington. The fight was more political than military. This was to be about a wider war, or perhaps even a total war, with an adversary that the senior civilians (as well as their military advisers) considered an ancillary enemy: China, not Russia, had already showed in its struggles against the Japanese that it had the capacity to absorb endless numbers of invading troops even as the invaders might think they were winning.

There were, it should be noted, no political benefits from Ridgway's successes for the Democratic administration. An embattled administration remained no less embattled, an unpopular war no less unpopular. What the Ridgway strategy seemed to promise was more of the same, more of what had made the war unpopular in the first place. The longer it went on, it now appeared, the greater the political price to be paid. The domestic issue that the Republicans had seized on, subversion, seemed to some people to be validated by the fact that we were now fighting the Chinese Communists in Korea. If, in terms of his relationship with the Joint Chiefs and the president, MacArthur was on the defensive, he still had reason to believe that the people who were for him back in America, whose political agenda and geopolitical vision he seemingly embodied, wore on the ascent. It was a situation guaranteed to bring out the worst in him. Cut off, and essentially bypassed by Washington, he was spoiling for a fight.

The president—and in terms of the public's exhaustion with the Democrats, there was no easy separation from the Roosevelt administration, which had preceded him—had probably governed for too long in too hard a time, where there wore too many forces outside his control. The news that the Russians had the atomic bomb, the fall of Chiang, the Hiss case headlines, and the Korean War itself had placed the administration in an ever more unpalatable position. With the Chinese engaged in Korea, the war seemed darker than ever, without an acceptable solution in sight. What made this so hard to swallow* for Truman and the men around him was the fact that the military situation had gotten much worse because of the miscalculations of MacArthur, who was now lining up against them politically and showed no interest in accepting any of the blame.

All of this made the final collision between the president and the general inevitable, for there were no restraints now on the general's side. By late January 1951 there were signs that he was committed ever more publicly to pushing for a larger war. He had flown to Suwon on January 28. Ridgway had greeted him on arrival, and the journalists gathered around them had overheard MacArthur say, as he stepped off the plane, "This is exactly where I came in seven months ago to start this crusade. The stake we fight for now, however, is more than Korea—it is a free Asia." The word "crusade" as well as the reference to a "free Asia" were immediately picked up by British journalists and published in London, greatly upsetting the British government, which sensed, accurately enough, that the commander in Tokyo wanted a larger war, quite possibly an all-out war with China.

MacArthur did not see what was now* taking shape in Korea as most other senior military men, and certainly the Joint Chiefs, did. No command interested him save his own. He had no interest in the threat the Soviets might pose in Europe. Always aware that the Soviets could easily make countermoves if the United States escalated the war in Korea, Truman feared crises in, among other places, Berlin, Indochina, Yugoslavia, and especially Iran. A minor incident would be created, the president liked to say, and the Russians would use it as an excuse for an intervention. As for bombing China's cities, Truman and his people thought the general was overlooking what would happen after the bombs dropped. Then the first calls would go out for the UN to bomb the Soviet port of Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian Railroad, because of all the materiel the Russians would send in by train. Truman doubted very much that MacArthur considered the way this would escalate the war, ultimately placing Japanese cities at risk from Russian countermoves.

When Joe Collins and other members of the Joint Chiefs tried to make their case to MacArthur, he simply turned a deaf ear. As Max Hastings, the British military historian, wrote, "It will never be certain how far MacArthur's affronted personal hubris influenced his attitude to the Chinese, how far he became instilled with a yearning for crude revenge upon the people who had brought all his hopes and triumphs in Korea to nothing. [But] it did seem probable that he did not consider it beyond his own powers to reinstate Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist regime in Beijing." If Hastings was not entirely sure what drove MacArthur in those last months in Tokyo, Omar Bradley had few doubts. As he later put it, in words unusually harsh for one general to write about another, "MacArthur's reaction arose, I feel certain, at least in part from the fact that his legendary military pride had been hurt. The Red Chinese had made a fool of the infallible 'military genius.' By then it must have been clear to him that his failure to send X Corps in pursuit of the North Korean Army after Inchon and to split his forces and send X Corps to Wonsan was an error of grave magnitude.... Furthermore, the Chinese had made a mockery of his intelligence estimates, of his vainglorious boasts that his all-out air assault including bombing the Korean ends of the Yalu bridges would make northwest Korea a desert, and his assertion that our men would advance to the Yalu and 'be home by Christmas.' The only possible means left to MacArthur to regain his lost pride and military reputation was now to inflict an overwhelming defeat on those Red Chinese generals who had made a fool of him. In order to do this he was perfectly willing to propel us into an all-out war with Red China and possibly with the Soviet Union, igniting World War III, and a nuclear holocaust."

If anything, Ridgway's almost immediate successes at Chipyongni and other places with the same force levels MacArthur had so recently deemed wholly inadequate made things worse. What others viewed as a limited victory was, in effect, a second great defeat for MacArthur's pride. Equally wounding was the fact that, because of his battlefield successes and his blunt, candid style, Ridgway was developing a very admiring press corps. The limelight, which MacArthur so craved, was, late in his career, going over to a subordinate, something he had never permitted before. Reporters liked Ridgway; he was professional and straight, a general obsessed by his mission, who spoke to them in an honest, blunt way, not unlike Joseph Stilwell had. His obsession seemed to be with the war itself, and not how he looked in their dispatches. He was generous in crediting subordinate officers. There was a tone in the new coverage that MacArthur especially hated, an implicit sense that the good Ridgway was replacing the bad MacArthur, someone in touch replacing someone hopelessly out of it.

Soon a new pattern emerged: Ridgway would plan a major offensive, and just as it was about to kick off, MacArthur and his top people would suddenly fly in from Tokyo, go to the relevant headquarters, where the general would immediately hold a press conference—as if to steal back Ridgway's increasingly admiring press corps—and claim credit for the planning. When Ridgway's Operation Killer was about to kick off, MacArthur flew to Suwon and announced that it was he who had ordered the attack. Ridgway later wrote angrily that neither MacArthur nor his staff had had any part in the planning of the operation: "It is not so much that my own vanity took an unexpected roughing up by this announcement as that I was given a rather unwelcome reminder of a MacArthur that I had known but had almost forgotten," a general all too eager to keep his "public image always glowing."

As Walter Millis wrote, the one person not ready to deal with the improved military situation was the general himself, "MacArthur had provided for every contingency save one—the contingency of 'success.'" Soon MacArthur escalated his assault on the Truman administration in a constant series of barbed remarks to journalists and political figures and in his cables back to Washington. As early as December, after Truman put out his directive demanding that all statements on Korea be cleared through the State Department, MacArthur quite deliberately violated it. His complaints against the administration were of a kind: the limits imposed upon his command, unique, he seemed to think, in the history of warfare; the lack of an adequate number of troops to get the job done; the sanctuaries offered his enemies, with no mention of the sanctuaries the Americans had—most notably the industrial and port facilities of Tokyo and Yokohama, exceptionally tempting targets that the enemy did not touch. It was all part of the odd set of quid pro quos now* being established as the great powers struggled to figure out what in this ever more dangerous world they could actually do and what they dared not do. At the heart of MacArthur's messages lay the most politically charged aspect of all, what he began to describe as a failure of wall on the part of an administration unwilling to seek a real victory. In the rhetoric of the time, failure of will sounded perilously close to appeasement. His line was relatively simple: a stalemate in Korea was a defeat, while only a wider war with China would bring genuine victory, and in the past America had always sought total victory.

The Republicans back in the United States had been charging the administration with appeasement and the loss of China—now here America was fighting the Chinese, and the country's most famous general was all but accusing the same administration of appeasing the enemy. His new dissent was perfectly tailored toward his political constituency, the more militant anti-Communist part of the American right wing. They wanted, it seemed, to win China back without the loss of a single American boy on Chinese soil. More, these calls had a certain popular resonance now' that the United States was stalemated in Korea. Some voters were angry and frustrated; they wanted something different even if they were not sure what it was; it need only cost very little in human terms—that is, in terms of American casualties.

If the United States did not defeat Communism in Asia, MacArthur suggested in letters to his close friends in the press corps and in Washington, the failure would cost them dearly in Europe. One could save Europe from Communism only by saving Asia from Communism first. He was eager to do it, and the forces, he assured them, were there—for there were those troops of Chiang's ready to march. He was willing to inflict on the Chinese, and on Communism, a terrible defeat, if only Washington would free his hand, he lamented. There was no small irony in this because MacArthur had been one of the most influential people in bringing the Russians (and thus the Communists) into Korea in the first place. That had been some six years earlier at the end of a different war against a different enemy, and he was then the man charged with commanding the Allied force about to invade the Japanese home islands. He was hardly alone in wanting the Russians to enter the Pacific War. Most senior military men felt the same way. The few who knew* about the Manhattan Project were hardly sure it would work or become so decisive a military instrument. That he wanted the Russians to enter the war in order to alleviate the pressure on the Allied forces was the most natural impulse for any general. But now, it was as if the second Douglas MacArthur, the MacArthur of the Cold War, had never even been introduced to the first Douglas MacArthur, the commander during World War II, who had once wanted Soviet help.

Now*, the Cold War deepening, he implied that he had always opposed Russia coming into the war. Unfortunately for him, there were any number of witnesses who knew better. One of them was Colonel Paul Freeman, who, having held a brief combat command in the Philippines in late 1944, was about to fly back to Washington, where he was once again to work for George Marshall. Before leaving the Philippines, however, Freeman was suddenly summoned for a command performance by MacArthur. It was a fascinating meeting that lasted for almost two hours. Freeman understood that he was to be a messenger to Washington, an instrument to express the general's views. The first part of the meeting was devoted to MacArthur's traditional resentment of Washington. Freeman listened and finally dissented as best he could to a great figure. General Marshall, he said, had frequently supported MacArthur as much as possible in terms of forces and supplies and had taken MacArthur's side in his desire to liberate the Philippines when the top Navy people wanted to bypass them and go directly for Taiwan. That was not exactly what MacArthur wanted to hear, but sheer personal honor dictated that it be said.

The second part of their meeting proved far more interesting. MacArthur knew that the invasion planning was at a serious stage, and as the putative commander, he wanted to get his own feelings in: "I will not consider going into any part of the Japanese islands unless the Japanese armies in Manchuria are contained by the Russians." That would be strong stuff for them back in Washington, Freeman knew, a general with MacArthur's rather considerable political following insisting that it would be a no-go in Japan unless the Russians entered the war. When the meeting was over, MacArthur's aide Bonnie Fellers immediately had MacArthur's view's typed up and cleared so that Freeman could bring them back to Washington.

There was nothing unusual about what he wanted. Most senior military men believed that, based on their experiences fighting the Japanese on various Pacific islands, the mainland battle would be a cruel struggle, house by house, cave by cave, with terrible casualties borne by both sides. That Douglas MacArthur, even in 1944 the American commander with the closest ties to the American right wing, wanted the Russians in was important. But what made these views even more important was the fact that, twelve years later, in 1956, when MacArthur had more than ever become the darling of the right wing, those views had become an embarrassment. He was, after all, a man who had always believed that the truth was whatever he said it was at that moment, and in the early 1950s he had started giving interviews claiming that, had he been in charge of the decision-making in those final days of World War II, he would never have brought the Russians into the war.

That was the MacArthur that all too many other high officials in the Pentagon had dealt with too often in the past, the MacArthur who redid history to suit his immediate needs. Now the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower decided to strike back. When that happened, Paul Freeman got a private tip from friends in Washington warning him that the original papers he had brought back from the Pacific were about to be released and that he should keep his head down because it was going to get very ugly for a few days. The exchange was a reflection of the internal struggle between the two Douglas MacArthurs: the pragmatic military man who wanted all the help he could get before a difficult invasion, and the general who had become a politician and who needed to bend old facts to fit them into a new political reality in which he had never been wrong.

But in the first months of 1951, more frustrated than ever, MacArthur moved toward a historic showdown with the president of the United States. At first it was quite a one-sided affair—the general nicked Washington and then nicked it again, and only when administration officials refused to respond did his challenges become more serious and frontal. In a way, the people in Washington had been setting themselves up for something like this for almost a decade. In their minds, dealing with MacArthur had always been like making a deal with the devil. They had few illusions about him, or how little loyalty he was likely to show to their policies at critical moments. But Washington had usually gotten what it wanted when it needed it, not just the talent, but the myth of the talent, especially vital back early in World War II. But the longer the men in Washington had delayed confronting MacArthur because the price seemed so large, the more the price had gone up because the myth, which Washington had helped create, kept growing, fed quite consciously by the general himself.

For more than a decade, two presidents and their top advisers had allowed MacArthur to lionize himself at their expense. When, in the years following World War II, they had less need for his talent, they nonetheless delayed any confrontation out of fear of him—exactly because he had already attained too much stature. (Although Truman had often complained about Roosevelt's deification of the general, and spoke privately of how* Roosevelt should have let the Japanese capture MacArthur at Bataan, he too had feared taking him on and let the cult continue.) Each year not only had the price gone up, but the timing had become less favorable for them, as the political forces aligned with the general became more powerful. Now, very late in the game, when they indeed had no choice but to pay that price, it had become exorbitant. For an elaborate process of self-deification had been taking place for a very long time, mostly at government expense. Now the piper had to be paid.

But whatever chance MacArthur might have had of bringing some of the Joint Chiefs with him had disappeared with Ridgway's successes. Admiral Forrest Sherman, the naval chief and probably the most hawkish figure of the Chiefs, who had momentarily seemed like an ally when there was so much talk of being driven off the peninsula, was now slipping away. As that happened, MacArthur turned his fire ever more precisely on administration officials and the president himself. They were the ones blocking his will, stealing his final victory from him, the men, in William Manchester's words, "thwarting his last crusade."

What began now was, if not a deliberate campaign to force the president to fire him, then surely the next closest thing. If he could not have his way in Korea, he was going to do all he could to bring down those who stood in his way. Specifically, he now set about systematically violating Truman's December 6 directive. The gag rule was a joke, he said. He was, he told one luncheon guest, "an old man of seventy-one" and therefore had nothing to lose by ignoring it. If they fired him, so be it. Clay Blair, who wrote more meticulously than any other historian about this stage of the war, put the number of violations of the gag order at six, some major, some minor. "To MacArthur watchers," he wrote, "a pattern seemed to be emerging. MacArthur would fly to Korea, visit the battlefront, then issue a communique containing criticism of the Administration's war policies. But again, no one in Washington felt inclined to rebut or reprimand him. Officially MacArthur was ignored." Among other things he had taken a quick slap at Truman in speaking of the war as a "theoretical military stalemate." Reporters quickly turned that into a more down-to-earth phrase, "die for a tie": in other words, good men were still going to have to die for a stalemate in Korea.

The last thing the people in Washington wanted, now that they seemed able to contain the Chinese armies, was an additional war with their own theater commander. But a war it would be. On March 7, for instance, MacArthur started out a press conference in Korea by tweaking President Truman, with references to what he called the serious, indeed abnormal inhibitions placed on him, the lack of additional forces given him and other restraints imposed from Washington. Then, at a moment when Washington was just beginning to contemplate trying to move Beijing to the peace table, he mocked the Chinese for their failures and their own limitations—virtually taunting a proud enemy that had just defeated him. That in itself greatly angered the president because MacArthur had just made it a great deal harder to negotiate with China.

In a military sense, MacArthur was also becoming increasingly critical of Ridgway's strategy. All that Ridgway had gained, he now said publicly and with contempt, was "an accordion war"—a war where the UN forces might move up twenty or thirty miles during an offensive, only to move back when the Chinese attacked again in force. If no one in Washington thought such a war was ideal, they were convinced that it was punishing the Chinese infinitely more than their own forces, perhaps on a casualty ratio of ten or fifteen to one, and that the alternatives were much worse. Yet it was an insulting phrase, and Ridgway smoldered when he heard it. Here was his superior speaking so condescendingly about what he and, perhaps even more important, the men righting under him had seen as a considerable success. It was an assault on their morale, if nothing else, from someone who was supposed to be on their side. Five days after the MacArthur press conference, Ridgway held his own. For UN troops to reach the thirty-eighth parallel, he said, would be a "tremendous victory." Then he added—as clear a dissent from the views of MacArthur as he had yet uttered—"We didn't set out to conquer China. We set out to stop Communism: we have demonstrated the superiority on the battlefield of our men. If China fails to throw us into the sea, that is a defeat for her of incalculable proportions. If China fails to drive us from Korea, she will have failed monumentally." Years later, MacArthur paid Ridgway back. Although he had been MacArthur's own choice to succeed Walker, in an interview⁷ with Jim Lucas, a star writer for the Scripps Howard chain, which was always favorable to him, he ranked Ridgway "at the bottom of the list" of his field commanders.

There was, of course, more to come. MacArthur wrote Hugh Baillie, the head of United Press International, and one of his chief journalistic admirers, that with a force of the size needed to hold the line at the thirty-eighth parallel, as Washington now wanted to limit the war, he could also drive the Chinese back across the Yalu. Most assuredly Matt Ridgway did not agree. That was his fourth violation of the gag rule. Two far more important assaults on the administration were still ahead. On March 20, MacArthur received a top secret cable from Washington notifying him that the administration felt it was the right time for a major peace initiative. With the new successes that Ridgway had enjoyed on the battlefield, there was a chance of talking, and eventually stabilizing the lines at the thirty-eighth parallel and ending this grim, mutually hopeless war. It was an embryonic feeler at best, and there was an awareness that Mao might not yet be ready to move forward, but at least it was a beginning.

The important thing was that Washington was ready to talk. Truman intended to make a major speech in the near future suggesting that both sides go to the negotiating table and end up somewhere back near where the war started. To MacArthur that kind of stalemate was nothing less than a defeat. Informed of what Washington intended to do, he set out quite deliberately to sabotage it. On March 24, as he was paying another of his visits to Korea, his office released a communique again taunting the Chinese military leadership.

"Of even greater significance than our tactical success," his communique said, "has been the clear revelation that this new enemy, Red China, of such exaggerated and vaunted military power, lacks the industrial capacity to provide adequately many critical items essential to the conduct of modern war." He then enumerated some of what he saw as China's weaknesses: the Chinese enemy "lacks manufacturing bases and those raw materials needed to produce, maintain and operate even moderate air and sea power, and he cannot provide the essentials for successful ground operations, such as tanks, heavy artillery and other refinements science has introduced into the conduct of military campaigns." He then mentioned China's inability to control the sea and air. When these limitations were "coupled with the inferiority of ground fire power, as in the enemy's case, the resulting disparity is such that it cannot be overcome by bravery, however fanatical, or the most gross indifference to human loss."

It was a remarkable, singularly insulting document, a simultaneous assault on two capitals, Beijing and Washington. With its publication, whatever chance there was of a first step toward a peace process was lost for the time being. It was, in Blair's words, "the most flagrant and challenging" violation of the Truman directive yet. His communique reached Washington about ten o'clock on the night of March 23. Dean Acheson, Bob Lovett (by then the number two man at Defense), and Dean Rusk were together at Acheson's house and they were all livid. "A major act of sabotage," Acheson called it. Truman gave no inkling of his own personal decision on what the next step should be, but Acheson, probably the counselor best attuned to him, later wrote that his state of mind "combined disbelief with controlled fury." His daughter, Margaret, later quoted him as saying, "I couldn't send a message to the Chinese after that. He [MacArthur] prevented a cease fire proposition right there. I wanted to kick him into the North China Sea right there."

The communique had taken the struggle between the president and the general to a new level. It went to the question of who the commander in chief was. The next day, Truman met with his top people, and the idea of a peace proposal was dropped. With that, the central issue became not so much whether to fire MacArthur, but when. Lovett, usually so low-key, wanted to do it then and there. Marshall fretted about the anger such an act might create on the Hill, and its effect on the defense appropriations bill. Acheson was nervous about its broader political ramifications. There was also the question of the Joint Chiefs—would they come along without a dissenting voice? Getting senior military men to turn on one of their own was always a sensitive business. If just one chief failed to go along with them, MacArthur's position would be greatly enhanced. But there was also no doubt that Truman had made his decision and was merely waiting for the right moment.

That came soon enough. MacArthur had received, at roughly the same time, a letter from the Republican leader in the House, Joe Martin, a passionate backer of Chiang and a China Lobby member, soliciting his views about Asia, and in particular the use of Chiang's troops in opening a second front against the Chinese. This was something Martin greatly favored. "Your admirers are legion and the respect you command is enormous," Martin wrote. MacArthur, he added, could answer confidentially or publicly. To most military men this might seem like a trap set by a tricky politician to catch an innocent, unworldly general: to MacArthur it was nothing less than a golden opportunity.

When MacArthur answered Martin on March 20, he set no restrictions on how Martin could use his words. His views, he said, were "to meet force with maximum counterforce, as we have never failed to do in the past. Your view with respect to the utilization of the Chinese forces on Formosa is in conflict with neither logic, nor this tradition." Then he added, a now familiar litany of explanation and complaint: "that we fight Europe's war with arms while the diplomats there fight it with words; that if we lose the war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable, win it and Europe would most probably avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you pointed out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory."

JUST AS MACARTHUR wanted, Joe Martin took the bait and read the MacArthur letter on the floor of the House on April 5. Nothing could have been more political or more potentially injurious to so embattled a government (or, for that matter, more terrifying to its allies).

There was one additional thing that strongly affected Truman and the men immediately around him in those days that was not part of the public record, but helped generate the feeling that MacArthur was a rogue general. As Joseph Goulden wrote in his authoritative book on the Korean War, the National Security Administration, the supersecret institution that was in charge of listening covertly to the rest of the world when it thought it was communicating privately, was picking up intercepts from its listening station at Atsugi Air Base near Tokyo. Mostly that station was used for listening in on the Chinese, but sometimes it listened in on friendly countries as well. In the late winter of 1950—51, the people there picked up a series of intercepts from both the Spanish and Portuguese embassies in Tokyo. Those were embassies with which MacArthur had closer ties than Washington because of Charles Willoughby's affinity for their respective dictators, Francisco Franco and Antonio Salazar. In these messages the Spanish and Portuguese diplomats told their home offices that MacArthur had assured them he could turn Korea into a larger war with the Chinese. Paul Nitze of Policy Planning and his deputy Charles Burton Marshall eventually saw the messages, as did the president. According to Goulden, when Truman read them he slapped his desk in anger. "This is outright treachery," he exclaimed.

After all, nearly ninety years later, Lincoln was the most honored of presidential names and McClellan among the least valued of military ones. The president understood that history in this case was going to be his ally, that he was not the first president to have trouble with a general with a superiority complex.

Nonetheless, Truman moved cautiously. Martin spoke on a Thursday. That Friday, April 6, Truman met with Marshall, Acheson, Bradley, and Harriman and, without giving away his own inclinations, asked them what he should do. Marshall was still cautious. Acheson wanted to fire him, but warned, "You will have the biggest fight of your Administration." Harriman pointed out that Truman had been struggling with the MacArthur conundrum since August 1950. Truman then asked them all to meet again later the same day. He asked Marshall to review' all the messages that had gone back and forth from Washington to MacArthur, to check out whether he had actually been insubordinate. Bradley was assigned to check out the feelings of the Joint Chiefs, so critical in any forthcoming political battle. When they met later that day, Marshall suggested not firing MacArthur but bringing him home for consultations. Acheson and Harriman were strongly opposed to that—they envisioned the political circus that would take place. Because Joe Collins was out of reach, it was decided to wait until Bradley could talk to him. They all met again on Saturday, slowly, surely focusing on the inevitable.

When that meeting was over, Marshall and Bradley went back to Marshall's office. Both were soon to retire. Marshall had already taken a great deal of abuse from the right wing, while Bradley, who had not been in the China line of fire, was still unscathed as a grand figure of World War II. If they relieved MacArthur, Bradley knew, he and a military career of sterling quality would no longer be immune to the ugly virus of the ongoing political struggle. In addition, both men feared that firing MacArthur might politicize the Joint Chiefs. They tried drafting a letter that would, in effect, tell MacArthur to shut up, but it was a little late in the game for that. There were no half measures left. The general had forced their hand.

That Sunday, Bradley met with the Joint Chiefs. They were still trying to figure out some way to avoid a vote on MacArthur's relief, so odious a decision for senior military men dealing with the most senior military man of all. There was some talk about separating MacArthur from the Korean command, leaving him only with the defense of Japan, but they knew he would never accept such a solution. In the end they all signed on to relieving him. With that the Chiefs met with Marshall. It was a grim and sobering meeting. Firing MacArthur was like tearing pages out of your most prized history book. Marshall went to each of them and asked if he would concur in the decision should Truman fire MacArthur. Each did, as did Bradley, though he was not a voting chief.

On Monday, April 9, Truman met with his senior people again and for the first time revealed his own position—that MacArthur had to go. Ridgway would replace him and Jim Van Fleet, who had risen to prominence during the Greek civil war, would take command of the Eighth Army in Korea. This, he told them, was about elemental constitutional processes, not about politics. Nothing revealed his attitude as clearly as a mild rebuke he gave to one of his speechwriters working on a statement just before he announced the decision. There had been an argument between Charlie Murphy, a senior White House figure, and Ted Tannenwald, a junior member of the staff and a Harriman man, over the announcement. Tannenwald wanted to include the fact that the decision had been made with the unanimous agreement of the Joint Chiefs and the president's most senior civilian cabinet members, especially Marshall, whose name still held real authority for many Americans.

At their final meeting on the statement, the president went around the room in what was a speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-tongue moment. Tannenwald again suggested that the president add the fact that he was doing this at the unanimous suggestion of the Joint Chiefs and his senior officials. But Truman quickly cut him off. It might have been as fine a moment as he enjoyed as president, a reflection of his rare ability to understand what the office truly was about and to rise to its needs. "Not tonight, son," he told Tannenwald. "There'll be plenty of time for that later. But tonight I'm taking this decision on my own responsibility as President of the United States and I want no one to think I'm trying to share it with anyone else. That will [all] come out in 48 or 72 hours, but as of tonight this is my decision and my decision alone."

So it was done and the president prepared to address the nation. At the last moment, Averell Harriman noticed that the statement did not mention that Ridgway was replacing MacArthur, so they wrote it in by hand, ushering in, in addition, a more modern era. (The first thing Ridgway did when he took MacArthur's job was to move a telephone into MacArthur's old office, thus connecting the commander with the outside world.) The reason he had made the decision, the president said, was irreconcilable differences over policy. Then he added: "General MacArthur's place in history as one of our greatest commanders is fully reestablished. The Nation owes him a debt of gratitude for the distinguished and exceptional service which he has rendered his country in posts of great responsibility. For that reason I repeat my regret at the necessity for the action I feel compelled to take in his case." He was sure, he told staffers, that MacArthur had wanted this confrontation: "I can show just how the dirty so and so double crossed us. I'm sure MacArthur wanted to be fired. He's going to be regarded as a worse double crosser than McClellan." Everyone, he added, "seems to think I don't have courage enough to do it. We'll let them think so and then we'll announce it." Later, privately, he spoke of MacArthur in much blunter terms: "The difficulty was that he wanted to be the Pro-consul, the Emperor of the Far East. He forgot that he was just a general in the army under his commander in chief, the President of the United States."

MacArthur knew the firing was coming. The day before he had seen Ned Almond. "I may not see you anymore, so good-bye, Ned," he had said. Almond was puzzled and asked what MacArthur meant. He answered: "I have become politically involved and may be relieved by the president." That was absurd, Almond insisted.

The firing itself, despite Truman's largely generous words, was badly botched. Frank Pace, the secretary of the Army, was supposed to tell MacArthur personally, but in Washington, the Chicago Tribune, ever hostile to the president, was on to the story, and the White House feared that MacArthur might resign before he could be fired, attacking Truman in the process and placing the White House on the defensive. Because of that, the White House decided to rush the announcement. The news was given out at a rare 1 A.M. briefing on April 11, Washington time, and it reached Tokyo by radio before the general had been officially notified, making the White House look infinitely more callous and MacArthur far more the victim. Even as he was being fired, his aides suggested, he remained the great MacArthur. Though the general himself did not meet with the press at first, Major General Courtney Whitney, one of his top aides, did. "I have just left him," Whitney told reporters at the time. "He received the word of the president's dismissal from command magnificently. He never turned a hair. His soldierly qualities were never more pronounced— this has been his finest hour."

THE ASSAULT ON Truman was immediate. "Seldom has a more unpopular man fired a more popular one," wrote Time magazine, whose publisher, not unlike the general himself, was not that hostile to the idea of a larger war with China. MacArthur, Time added, was "the personification of the big man with the many admirers who look to a great man for leadership.... Truman was almost a professional little man." The immediate reaction in the country was similarly partisan and exceptionally violent. Richard Nixon, who was a considerable political beneficiary of Chiang's collapse in China and the tensions generated with the Chinese during the Korean War, called for MacArthur's immediate reinstatement. Senator William Jenner of Indiana, who had already accused George Marshall of treason, now said, "I charge that this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. Our only choice is to impeach President Truman." MacArthur was quickly cast (much as he intended) as both hero and martyr; and the president who stood for civilian control over the military in firing him, as the villain. After a long and often distinguished career, MacArthur's lesser side had finally caught up with him; he had become, in the end, too much like his father. He was, as Max Hastings summed up, "too remote, too old, too inflexible, too deeply imprisoned by a world view that was obsolete to be a fit commander in such a war as Korea."

Truman and his advisers had expected a serious explosion, but it was much worse than any of them had imagined. Huge crowds turned out for MacArthur everywhere. It began in Tokyo, where, as he departed, some 250,000 Japanese, many of them weeping, most of them waving small Japanese and American flags, lined the streets. Giant crowds gathered in Hawaii, where he landed after midnight, and an even larger one met him in San Francisco, again after midnight—a crowd so immense and so emotional that the security people could not hold them back. When he eventually came to New York for a ticker-tape parade, it was said that 7 million people turned out, twice as many as Dwight Eisenhower had drawn on returning victorious from World War II. The reaction continued to be deeply emotional. "It is doubtful that there has ever been in this country so violent and spontaneous a discharge of political passion as that provoked by the president's dismissal of the general," wrote Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Rovere in their book on the confrontation. "Certainly there has been nothing to match it since the Civil War."

It was a political and geopolitical confrontation of the utmost gravity and presented the country with the ultimate kind of constitutional crisis. George Reedy, later a press officer for an enterprising young senator from Texas named Lyndon Johnson, but then a young reporter for United Press, later recalled that it was the only time in his life when he thought the government of the United States was truly in danger. He had felt, he said, watching MacArthur go up Pennsylvania Avenue on his triumphal arrival in Washington, that if the general had said, '"Come on, let's take it,' the adoring crowd that thronged the streets would have gone with him." It was as if the country were about to explode with long suppressed rage from all the frustrations of this new, unsatisfying postwar incarnation. The struggle seemed to cut across every fault line in the country. There were fights in bars between strangers and fights on commuter trains between old friends. When Dean Acheson got into a taxi in Washington right after the firing, the cabdriver looked at him and asked, "Aren't you Dean Acheson?" "Yes, I am," the secretary of state answered. "Would you like me to get out?"

In a way that few understood at the time, it was a kind of giant antiwar rally, not just anti—Korean War, but probably anti—Cold War as well, a reflection of a kind of national frustration with a conflict that was so unsatisfying and distant and gray and brought so little in the way of victories and seemed so strangely beyond the reach of our absolute weapons. It was about the frustration of living side by side with an unwanted enemy who was real and powerful in an age that, because of the sheer terror of weaponry, seemed to preclude any concept of total victory. It bridged eras in a way. It was the last hurrah for a great hero of World War II, combined with a powerful, visceral protest by a nation that did not enjoy its new superpower status. It was produced by almost equal parts of love and anger. It was very powerful stuff.

It was also very political—not the acclaim of the crowds, the millions of Americans who rallied to MacArthur's cause, which they saw as something simpler than it was, but the challenge of the Republican right. Herbert Hoover, filled with distaste for the country's political direction after his own unfortunate presidency, his own political wounds still uncommonly raw, spoke for the forces long beaten down who now felt they wore on the ascent. After meeting with MacArthur upon his return from Tokyo, Hoover talked of "the reincarnation of St. Paul into the persona of a great General of the Army who had come out of the East."

At first, the general had it all his way. He was in complete control of this drama, and his villains wore, for the moment, compelled to play their roles much as he scripted them. It all culminated in a single powerful, if somewhat overly sentimental speech he gave before a joint session of Congress. There, he had made his case, and seemingly made it effectively. There was, he said, as he had said in letters to so many of his admirers, no substitute for victory. In this entire matter, he claimed, the Joint Chiefs wore in agreement with him, as wore almost all military leaders he knew.

Those who did not see what he saw, those who did not want to use all of America's force in Korea, were guilty of appeasement. The A-word was in play several times, and there was no doubt who his target was. The people who would "appease Red China" were, he said, "blind to history's clear lesson, for history teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement but begets new and bloodier war." Those who thought we lacked the forces to hold the Communists in both Europe and Asia were wrong. Considering that particular view, he swore he "could think of no greater expression of defeatism." He had wanted reinforcements, but could not get them from Washington. He had wanted to use the six hundred thousand Nationalist soldiers on Taiwan, but was not granted them. "Why, my own soldiers asked me," he said, suggesting endless nonexistent conversations with ordinary soldiers in their foxholes, "surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?" He could not, he insisted, answer them. That day, even before his final summation, the applause was tumultuous; the Democrats, already on the defensive, sat silently in their seats.

Then came the great peroration, rich and powerful, full of nostalgia and bathos, but virtually irresistible and perfect for the emotions of the occasion: "I am closing my fifty-two years of military service. When I joined the Army even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plains of West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day, which proclaimed most profoundly that—'Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.' And like the old soldier of that ballad I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-bye." These were the seemingly modest words of one of the nation's most immodest men, who had absolutely no intention of fading away.

The spontaneous response was overwhelming. "We saw a great hunk of God in the flesh and we heard the voice of God," said Congressman Dewey Short of Missouri. Truman was, predictably, blunter: "It was nothing but a damn bunch of bullshit." Acheson thought that there was a certain relief to having it all over. It reminded him, he said, of the father who lived just outside an Army post with his very beautiful daughter and spent all his time worrying about her virginity. Finally, one day she showed up pregnant. "Thank God that's over," he had said.

For so many Americans, rarely had their nation's policies seemed so errant, and rarely had one figure—a famed, bemedaled general—spoken so confidently of what seemed like an easier course, one that would quickly settle a war with so much less American bloodshed. All of this set the stage for an epic moment in a democracy, though not many people saw it that way at the time. To them the epic moment was MacArthur's speech with its high-octane emotions; what followed, the analysis of the choices at stake, and the consequences of those choices, debated as they were in Senate hearings, lacked the same glamour but were far more important. At first it did not seem like an entirely fair fight: one side had title to all of those passions; the other side was forced to make an unpopular case for an unpopular war that, in effect, no one wanted to hear—that it was a victory merely to limit a localized war, that victory now was simple human survival.

For any serious student of what was soon to come, there were important warnings that MacArthur's next appearance in Washington would not be so pleasant or heroic. When Truman and MacArthur had met on Wake Island six months earlier, Vernice Anderson had by chance (or not, as later claimed by the general's angry partisans) sat outside the open door to the main meeting and kept that stenographic record of the talks, including MacArthur's cavalier assurance that the Chinese would not enter the war. That she had kept a record was not exactly a secret. When the Truman team returned to Washington, her notes were typed up and sent to various participants, including MacArthur, for approval. On November 13, 1950, just before the main Chinese attack but after the Unsan and Sudong ones, Stewart Alsop had mentioned in one of his regular columns for the New York Herald Tribune MacArthur's assurances that the Chinese would not enter the war.