The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (38 page)

So the loss of China was merely the visible part of the iceberg, the issue that might help them recover control of the country, making it once again their America. Theirs was the America of the turn of the century, an America of sound business practices and old-fashioned virtues, of which they were exemplars. They did not owe money and did not depend on the government to employ them. They were the town leaders in an era when that leadership was almost exclusively white, male, and Protestant, and they were largely professional men, in an age when the middle class was still narrow. They belonged to civic clubs where almost everyone they knew felt much as they did about the drift of the country away from what they considered Americanism. The New Deal—and the forces that it had opened the door to—was the enemy. Or, as Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska had said before the 1946 election, “If the New Deal is still in control of the Congress after the election, it will owe that control to the Communist Party in this country.” These men were instinctively nativist,
believing it a strength, not a weakness. They neither liked nor trusted the America that had elected Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the big-city America of Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and unions. They distrusted anything or anyone that was different; and now it was time to get even. Roosevelt’s America was a
them
and worse, a them that had run the country for almost twenty years.

Both Truman and Acheson were aware of the political game being played, and they were contemptuous of the men who were leading this gathering force. “The primitives,” Acheson called them. “The animals,” Truman said. Truman had known from the start that China was a loser in both domestic political and foreign policy. At a cabinet meeting in March 1947, the president had complained bitterly about their Chinese allies. As he wrote in his diary, “Chiang Kai Shek will not fight it out. [The] Communists will fight it out—they are fanatical. It [more aid] would be pouring money down a rathole under [the] present situation.” The president was, in fact, furious at Chiang and his government and had been since the moment he had taken office. In his mind, he had been handed a failed policy and a treacherous, dishonest ally. There had been some quiet governmental investigations of where the aid money was going, and an immense amount of suspicious currency speculation on the part of Chiang’s family had been noted. The Nationalists, Truman said, were nothing but “grafters and crooks. I’ll bet you that a billion dollars of [the aid] is in New York banks today,” he once told David Lilienthal, a New Dealer and public power advocate who had helped create the Tennessee Valley Authority.

What enraged Truman—and rage was the proper word—was the relentless quality of the political pressure applied by the Nationalists without any compensating military performance on their part. It went against everything he believed in—a government that would not fight, but attacked him politically and constantly demanded more weapons, which its troops did not deign to use. There was one particularly revealing meeting Truman had with Ambassador Koo on November 24, 1948, that reflected (in a phrase that would come into currency in a future war) the vast credibility gap the Nationalists now had. Truman was all too aware as he and Koo sat down together that he was dealing not just with the representative of a troubled foreign nation but with a major political enemy; that Koo, for all his considerable charm, was a de facto leader of a large part of the political opposition and that the embassy had been extremely close to Tom Dewey, whom Truman had just defeated.

Koo’s timing could not have been worse, and his condescension toward the American president obvious. “I spoke American to him, rather than English, and we got along perfectly in our talk,” Koo later noted. It was not an ideal time for the representative of a dying regime to ask for more military aid. Truman
did not seem at all receptive. Did Koo know, the president asked, that he had just received information about
thirty-two
Chinese divisions surrendering to the Communists up around Xuzhou? And that they had turned over all of their equipment to the Communists? No, as a matter of fact, Koo did not know about it, he admitted. On the subject of aid, Truman told Koo, he knew the Chinese people had suffered a great deal and he would talk to Marshall, but that was all he would volunteer. What went unsaid was that thirty-two divisions meant that perhaps 250,000 to 300,000 men had gone over, with a comparable amount of equipment, and that this was not an isolated incident. As soon as Koo left the White House, he checked in with a friend, George Yeh, the vice minister for foreign affairs. How was the battle for Xuzhou going? he asked. Not too badly, Yeh replied. But President Truman had just told him that thirty-two divisions had surrendered there. Was that true? Well yes, admitted Yeh. Such was truth, such was reality in the days when the Nationalist armies were unraveling.

In the final months before the Communist takeover, Major General David Barr, the head of the U.S. military assistance group, actually sat in on planning sessions with Chiang’s senior staff as if he were a Chinese general (among other things pleading with them to destroy their gear before they retreated so that it would not be captured by the Communists, one of many suggestions that no one ever listened to). The last American ambassador to China, John Leighton Stuart, was not allowed to meet the senior Chinese Communist leadership because that might have incited the domestic critics of U.S. policy.

Still, if Chiang lost China, he had gained, if not all of Washington, enough political support to keep him in power in Taiwan. In 1952, just after Dwight Eisenhower’s election to the presidency, there was a grand dinner party given by Wellington Koo, still Chiang’s ambassador, attended by a few of the most powerful China Firsters—Henry Luce, Senators William Knowland, Pat McCarran, and Joe McCarthy, as well as Representative Walter Judd. At one point near the end of the evening they all rose as one and toasted Chiang with their favorite battle cry, “Back to the mainland!”

I
N KOREA A
showdown was coming. In the early days of August 1950, North Korean forces prepared for their final assault against the still undermanned UN units aligned behind the Naktong River. But the In Min Gun offensive had been slowing down noticeably. The UN command had decided that the Naktong River offered the best barrier behind which their troops might be able to catch their breath, even as new forces were arriving in country from the States. Roy Appleman, the Army historian, described the Naktong as forming a huge moat that protected roughly three-quarters of the Pusan Perimeter. The perimeter, it should be noted, was not small, and so the fighting over the next few weeks took the form of hundreds of small battles and on occasion a few larger ones. Appleman described the Pusan Perimeter as a rectangle, running roughly one hundred miles north to south, fifty miles east to west, bordered by the Sea of Japan on the east, the Korean Strait on the south, and by the Naktong itself for much of its western boundary. The river itself was slow and muddy, no more than six feet deep at its deepest point and a quarter-to a half-mile wide. (“About as wide as the Missouri,” said Private First Class Charles [Butch] Hammel of the Second Engineers, who had grown up about fifty miles from the Missouri and who helped build a bridge over the Naktong, just in time for the final big North Korean push, so that they, rather than the Americans, got to use it first.) Without the natural protection the Naktong offered, American forces might not have held. For them, it was more than a barrier; it became a place where Walker could concentrate his troops, and for the first time protect his flanks.

Inside the perimeter, things were getting better. Given the state of the roads and rail lines, there was, for the first time, a chance to bring reserve units up and into action quickly and effectively. Thus, plugging the holes in his lines became somewhat easier for Walker. In addition, in mid-July, the first elements of the Second Infantry Division had shipped out from the States for Korea, and at virtually the same time some elements of the First Marine Provisional Brigade arrived as well, a force that eventually became the First Marine Division
and that would spearhead the Inchon landing. All of this added up to a change in the balance of forces: the fighting ability on the part of the American units was about to improve dramatically, and time was beginning to run out on the North Koreans. By the end of August, everyone in the American command knew that a major North Korean strike was coming. The North Korean units, preparing to strike from the north and west sides of the Naktong, were still formidable, some thirteen infantry divisions, averaging about seventy-five hundred men per division, plus an armored division of about one thousand men and two armored brigades of five hundred men each. Though it was still a well-trained army, everything that had come so easily to the North Koreans only a few weeks earlier was now becoming harder. The UN Air Force flew, for instance, twice as many missions in support of the UN troops in August as in July, grinding the North Koreans down, depriving them of food and ammo and logistic support and the ability to rest. By late August, when the decisive battles along the Naktong began, the In Min Gun’s best days were already behind it, though few on either side realized this. In the words of T. R. Fehrenbach, who commanded an infantry unit there, it was already “bleeding to death.” As Yoo Sung Chul, a retired North Korean general, said years later, “The Korean War was planned to last only a few days so we did not plan anything in case things might go wrong. If you fight a war without planning for failures, then you are asking for trouble.”

By the time Kim Il Sung threw his thirteen divisions into the final battle of the Naktong on August 31, the force levels of the two sides were surprisingly equal, and elite American units were still arriving in country. For example, the last of the three regiments of the Second Infantry Division to arrive, the Thirty-eighth Regiment, reached Pusan on August 19. That meant, as some one hundred thousand North Koreans prepared for what they hoped would be the final battle and their assault on the port of Pusan, there were almost eighty thousand American troops from the Eighth Army ready to defend the Pusan Perimeter.

The ability of the Eighth Army to hold on in the previous two months represented an immense personal achievement for Johnnie Walker. Disrespected by both Tokyo and Washington, a tanker in tank-resistant terrain, a commander fighting a war with forces demonstrably weaker than those he had led in France and Germany, in those six or seven weeks from the end of July to the middle of September he was nothing less than a remarkable, fearless commander, doing almost everything right. If American military history has shortchanged any of this country’s wars in the past century, it is Korea, and if any aspect of that war has been overlooked, it is the series of smaller battles fought along the Naktong in July, August, and September 1950, and if any one
commander has not been given the credit he deserves, it is surely Walton Walker in those battles. “He was,” his pilot Mike Lynch once said, “the forgotten commander of the forgotten war.”

If the Korean War itself never captured the imagination of the American public, the fighting in the Naktong Bulge and along the Pusan Perimeter was vastly overshadowed by larger battles still to come; and yet in that terrible period it is possible that Walton Walker in Korea was a great commander. With his poorly prepared, poorly equipped, and badly undermanned forces, he was managing ever so slowly to put a brake on the advance of a talented, fierce adversary, even as the country he represented slowly began to accept its new responsibilities. When he had ordered his men to stand and die, he meant nothing less, and he included himself in that edict. If necessary, he intended to be the last American standing when the North Koreans made it to Pusan. One day in early September, he and Lynch—his constant companion—were in Taegu, quite an unimportant town to the rest of the planet before this war started, but by then for them a critical junction. If the North Koreans took Taegu, it might open the door for their army to strike at Pusan, a mere forty-five miles south. Walker had turned to Lynch and said, “You and I may finish up standing in the streets of Taegu fighting it out with these guys. My plan is that if they break through, you stay here with me. And then we’ll stay here until the last minute.”

Walker was tireless and fearless, flying in his tiny reconnaissance plane, sometimes just a few hundred feet above the ground, almost daring enemy machine guns to bring him down. He would lean out the window on occasion, screaming down at his troops through a bullhorn. If he thought they were retreating or panicking, he would yell at them to get back up on the line and fight, goddamn it! They flew so low that Lynch sometimes removed from the skin of the plane the requisite three stars signifying that this was the personal plane of a lieutenant general. As the history of the Korean War gradually unfolded, and as other commanders, most notably Matt Ridgway, came to the fore, Johnnie Walker faded into the background. What tended to be remembered, if anything at all, was that he had been one of the men victimized by the devastating giant Chinese ambush up along the Chongchon River in late November and early December, a folly that seriously damaged Walker’s reputation, even though it had essentially taken place without his consent.

It was unfair, because in the Naktong fighting he patched units together with a deft touch, stealing a battalion from one regiment and lending it to another, using the Marines and the Twenty-seventh Wolfhounds as fire brigades to stanch potential North Korean breakthroughs. He used certain key advantages over his enemy well—greater mobility in this particular piece of real estate thanks to access to a simple but valuable rail system, and a simple but effective road system. The
North Koreans were at a deficit here—they could not shift their forces quickly enough to exploit momentary breakthroughs. Much of their failure in this period reflected weak battlefield planning, failure to concentrate their forces properly, and a failure to communicate effectively as well as shift forces quickly as a given battle required. The speed of battle against an army with the technological advantages of the Americans was escalating all the time—more hardware coming into the country made the pace of battle ever faster. Their limitations, the Americans thought, were not just weaknesses in their communications equipment but basic weaknesses in an army that was too hierarchically organized. To some of the men in the Eighth Army command, Walker seemed more like a magician than a commander, so nuanced was his sense of where the North Koreans were going to hit next. A magician he was not, but he was a very good listener: the North Koreans were using extremely primitive radio codes, which they did not change frequently enough, and the Americans had broken them. Often Walker did indeed know in advance exactly where the In Min Gun was planning to strike. That was one valuable source of information. Another was his own eyes. He and Lynch flew over the In Min Gun positions so often and so low that he had a surprisingly good idea of the enemy troop dispositions and how much they changed day to day.

Still, if there was one word to describe his situation, Walker thought that it was “desperate.” He was always short of men and constantly fearful of a Communist breakthrough. He began each day by turning to Colonel Eugene Landrum, his chief of staff, and saying, “Landrum, how many reserves have you dug up for me today?” That was what they needed—more men; always, the call was for more men. For the possibility that the North Koreans might punch through to the sea was a very real one. The one place where Walker had significantly underestimated the In Min Gun’s capacity was in the area called the Naktong Bulge, where the river briefly bent slightly to the west before it turned east. That created a small bulge that ran about five miles on a north-south line and about four miles on an east-west one. It became in time the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of the entire war. Because the Americans had pounded the North Korean Fourth Division in that area and had received quite good intelligence from prisoners about how badly beaten down the division was, they assumed North Korean assault capabilities were limited there. What they did not realize was that the enemy force in the Bulge now included not merely some elements of the Fourth but also elements of two other divisions, the Second and Ninth.

There, Walker had placed two of the three battalions of the Second Infantry Division’s Twenty-third Regiment, the third being on loan to the First Cav. To say that they were stretched hopelessly thin would have been a singular understatement. Master Sergeant Harold Graham was then serving as an acting platoon leader in Charley Company of the First Battalion of the Twenty-third
Regiment of the Second U.S. Infantry Division. He had already been recommended for a battlefield commission and was waiting for the commission to come through, but ended up being so severely wounded on the first night of the major Communist offensive at the Naktong Bulge that his military career would essentially be ended. Graham estimated that the division, understrength, worn down by earlier fighting, and minus a regiment, totaled around nine thousand men, instead of its normal eighteen thousand men. It had to cover a front of almost forty miles, and the First Battalion of the Twenty-third, with perhaps four to five hundred men, was holding down an area of roughly three or four miles. “I’m not sure we were ever thinner on the ground before a major attack,” said Joe Stryker, a platoon leader in Charley Company who had been reassigned to the regiment as a communications officer only a few days before and so was one of the few of them to make it through those days (and who would turn himself into an expert on what happened). “It was a trip wire, I guess, but the smallest, thinnest trip wire you ever imagined,” he said. Those were astonishing figures, a description not so much of a genuine defensive position but of a giant human sieve. If every soldier in the battalion had his own helicopter, it might have been doable—but realistically, it was a hopeless task. It had been that way, Stryker remembered, from the moment they had first arrived in country. When he had taken up one of his first combat positions near the front, right after their arrival, he had done what you were always supposed to do in combat—scout out the friendly units on each side of you and work out communications with them. In this case he had gotten in his jeep and driven, and driven, and driven—in all about five miles. Finally he spotted two GIs. They were from the neighboring Twenty-fourth Division and seemed thrilled to see him—they cheered him as a symbol of the entire Second Division’s arrival in Korea. He barely had the heart to tell them that he was positioned five miles away.

As the men of the Twenty-third Regiment waited for the attack, the sense of isolation was even more profound than usual. Later, Colonel Paul Freeman, the commander of the regiment, reflected that though Walker’s intelligence on what the North Koreans were doing generally had proved extraordinarily accurate, at this one moment in this one area, he had missed it altogether. As August was coming to an end, the men in the First Battalion of the Twenty-third Regiment were aware that something big was coming. They had spent only two days on the east bank of the Naktong when the North Koreans made their major strike. The Second Battalion had moved up behind them, first to the village of Miryang, a staging point for the defense of the Naktong, then to a village called Changnyong, even closer to the river. By the evening of the thirty-first, they were picking up so much information about increasing North Korean
movements on the other side of the river that word went out all along the line to expect an attack either that night or the next one.

SOMETIMES IT IS
the fate of a given unit to get in the way of something so large that it seems to have stepped into history’s own path. So it was with Charley Company that night. Greatly outmanned, it faced the last great push of a huge force from the North Korean People’s Army. If many of the American units placed along the long, meandering path of the Naktong were thin, then none was thinner and more endangered than the Twenty-third Regiment, and no unit of the Twenty-third was more endangered than the men of Charley Company, whose members, the handful who survived those few days, eventually came to refer to their unit as “the late Company C.” Lieutenant Joe Stryker could not, even years later, believe the imbalance between the two forces that first met at the Bulge. Almost certainly, he thought, two divisions of North Koreans, perhaps as many as fifteen to twenty thousand men, poured through the general area held by Charley Company, with perhaps as many as eight to ten thousand North Koreans coming through their precise position. Normally, Stryker noted, a company, which has a strength of about two hundred men, covers a sector of twelve hundred yards. But the First Battalion, of which Charley Company was a part, had a frontage of sixteen thousand yards, which meant that each of its three companies, none of which was at full strength, had to cover about five to six thousand yards. That meant a platoon of at best about seventy men had to cover two thousand yards, and a squad of about twenty to twenty-five men seven hundred yards, or seven football fields.