The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (78 page)

I
N A WAY,
there were two battles of Chipyongni. First came the battle of Twin Tunnels, between the two gathering armies, in which the Chinese nearly overwhelmed the UN forces. That, in turn, triggered the battle of Chipyongni. All of this was part of a larger contest for control of the transportation arteries leading south through the central corridor. Chipyongni itself was about fifty miles east of Seoul, about forty south of the thirty-eighth parallel, and about fifteen miles northwest of Wonju. The Twin Tunnels were “about three miles southeast of Chipyongni,” in the words of historian Ken Hamburger, who wrote with exceptional clarity of both battles. There, he noted, the railroad “abruptly turns south to east and tunnels under two ridgelines before turning again to the south and east. The terrain in the tunnels area consists of the two ridgelines generally running north to south and rising to about one hundred meters above the valley floor. The ridgelines curve toward one another in the north where they close into a horseshoe with a single constricted road leading to Chipyongni. As this road leads out of the valley, it crosses the east-west railroad between the two tunnels that give the area its name.” The valley floor, Hamburger noted, ran about five hundred meters from east to west, and one thousand meters from north to south. Several high hills of about five hundred meters each surrounded it.

The American command was beginning to look at nearby Chipyongni as critical, because it would help them control the access to Wonju, the larger communications center, where the Americans, like Peng, now believed one of the fateful battles of the central corridor would be fought. In late January, as Ridgway’s forces over on the west began their first major operation, the Second Division found itself ordered to protect its flank on the east, and at the same time to move into the Chipyongni area and try to locate the Chinese Forty-second Army. Ridgway’s intelligence people believed it was hiding out somewhere in the central corridor but had not yet revealed itself. For it was one of those great contrasts of the first year of the war, the stark difference between the two armies and the way they maneuvered: on the eve of battle, even
facing a force that had nine divisions in it, the Americans did not yet know where the Chinese were; by contrast, hiding an American division on Korean soil would have been comparable to hiding a hippopotamus in a pet store.

There were three stages to the Twin Tunnels battle: a recon, and then two battles, each of escalating violence. The Eighth Army’s Operation Thunderbolt, Ridgway’s main drive and his attempt to reclaim the initiative in the war, kicked off on January 26, and the first recon into the Twin Tunnels area, led by Lieutenant Maurice Fenderson, took place the next day. Fenderson was new to the Twenty-third, having arrived right after the Kunuri fighting, for which he remained eternally grateful. He was assigned to Captain Sherman Pratt’s Baker Company, given its first platoon, and as an added welcome assigned to take his men and recon an area to the east where there were some railroads and, he was told, two tunnels. There were scattered reports of some Chinese troops operating in the area. All he had to do was go over there and check it out—nothing much to it, he was told.

It was an eerie assignment. Even the spot his motorized patrol started out from was already deep in enemy territory, far north of the American lines. At every moment he feared a possible ambush. As a kid of seventeen, straight out of high school, Fenderson had served in World War II, as part of the Seventieth Division, mostly trying to keep up with George Patton as his tanks raced across France. That race, its sheer muscularity, stood in stark contrast to the patrol he was now leading. This was about being apart from other American units, and, more than anything else, about the loneliness of war. If bad things happened, you were out there by yourself. His patrol proceeded to the assigned location, perhaps a mile south of the tunnels, very cautiously. There, they spotted soldiers, almost surely Chinese, and a brief firefight ensued. Fenderson was then ordered to return to base, which he did, feeling he had done his job and been lucky as well.

The next day, on Almond’s orders, Freeman sent out a larger force to recon the area, setting in motion the next stage of the Twin Tunnels struggle. The men in this task force were to patrol the area, but if at all possible not engage any larger enemy force. Elements of two companies were sent in, the reconstituted Charley Company of the Twenty-third Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant James Mitchell, and a company from the Twenty-first Regiment of the neighboring Twenty-fourth Division, commanded by Lieutenant Harold Mueller. About half the men from Charley Company were brand-new, hardly surprising given all the hits the company had taken in the last few months. Many of them were just out of the repot-depot, where replacement troops arrived, and few were trained combat infantrymen. The two units were to join up at the village of Iho-ri and then head for Twin Tunnels, some fifteen miles away.

20. T
HE
T
WIN
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UNNELS—CHIPYONGNI-WONJU
A
REA,
J
ANUARY–FEBRUARY
1951

It was a relatively small combined force—four officers and fifty-six enlisted men. The weaponry was quite heavy for so small a unit: eight BARs, two heavy machine guns and four light ones, a rocket launcher, a 60mm mortar, and both a 57 and a 75 recoilless rifle. In a fight, nearly half the unit would either be firing a heavy weapon or assisting on one. They also had two three-quarter-ton trucks and nine jeeps. A liaison plane flew overhead, a spotter in case Chinese units, unseen from the ground, were moving in on them. The plane enjoyed better communications with their base than did the men on the ground, and the plane’s link to the men on the ground was weak. Captain Mel Stai, the assistant battalion operations officer, had also joined the unit. He was supposed to return to Battalion headquarters when the patrol left Iho-ri, but he decided on his own to stay with them to Twin Tunnels. In his jeep was the only radio capable of contacting the spotter plane. It was slow going all day—there was a lot of snow on the icy road, and also heavy fog, all too typical of the Korean winter. The spotter plane was of little value for much of the morning.

They reached the Twin Tunnels area around noon, well behind schedule. Mitchell waited at the south end of the valley that led to the tunnels, until Mueller caught up with him. So far everything had gone reasonably well. Mitchell had kept his jeeps about fifty yards apart in the convoy and the trucks with the heavy weapons farther back so if the jeeps were hit, they could quickly come to their aid. It was at this point, as Ken Hamburger later wrote, that a kind of Murphy’s Law took over—and everything that could go wrong began to go wrong. They had stopped just where the main road led north to the tunnels, but a side road shot off east to the nearby village of Sinchon. Because the patrol was late, Captain Stai volunteered as a courtesy to go into Sinchon by himself and look it over, allowing the main body to continue without interruption. He drove partway to the village, left his vehicle at the side of the road, and walked in, taking with him, of course, the only radio compatible with the one in the spotter plane. That was a critical mistake. His jeep was soon destroyed, his driver killed, and Stai was never seen again.

Effective communication between the force on the ground and its eyes and ears in the sky was now gone. Up in the spotter aircraft, Major Millard Engen, the battalion executive officer, had spotted a sizeable force of enemy soldiers moving rapidly toward the Americans from the slope of Hill 453, which dominated the southern approach to the Twin Tunnels area. He immediately tried to radio Lieutenant Mitchell to get out of the valley as quickly as possible, but of course, he could not get through. Soon there was no need to warn them that the Chinese might attack—they were already being hit hard. The spotter plane then turned back to refuel, but not before Engen radioed regimental headquarters that the patrol was in danger of being wiped out.

In fact, even as they entered the open valley, they had been trapped by a considerably larger Chinese force. Private Richard Fockler, who was caught along with the other men in the patrol when the Chinese struck, later remembered that they were just about to have lunch when the first mortar round landed near them. Almost immediately other weapons joined in. The drivers were ordered to turn their vehicles around immediately. But the road was so narrow that it was hard for the jeeps, let alone the trucks, to maneuver. They had just gotten most of the vehicles facing the right way when the lead jeep was hit. The driver, Fockler remembered, panicked and stalled it out, blocking the rest of the convoy. Then a Chinese machine gun began hammering away at them, the tattoo of an automatic weapon on a metal target, followed by the worst noise imaginable, Fockler believed, a kind of terminal sound, that of coolant draining from a radiator. When the Chinese began to fire, there apparently was a brief disagreement between Mitchell and Mueller. In Mueller’s view their only chance to avoid total annihilation was to head for the high ground—a hill just off to the east—and dig in. For a brief moment, Mitchell still hoped they might be able to fight their way out by road. Then Mueller yelled to Mitchell: “We’re going to have to get to the top of that hill. The Chinese are coming up from the other side. This is our only chance!” The Chinese understood that as well, so both sides started racing for the hill and the high ground. But if they were in a race for the hill, and if time was suddenly the critical factor, then the Americans were going to have to travel light, leaving most of their heavy weapons behind. In the end, they took only a rocket launcher, a light machine gun, and some of the BARs.

The day the patrol was hit happened to be the twenty-first birthday of a young man named Laron Wilson, a driver for Headquarters Company of the Third Battalion of the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment, who had been loaned to Charley Company. The patrol was going to be an easy one, he had been assured, because the recon the previous day had made only the most minimal contact with the enemy. Wilson was just a little uneasy: for all of the assurances, going on a mission always had an element of uncertainty and danger, and he was going to be doing it without knowing anyone else in the unit. When he connected with the men he was to drive from the Twenty-fourth Division—four soldiers, all of them strangers, with a light machine gun—he felt very much alone. He did not even know the other jeep drivers from the Twenty-third, and that added to the loneliness—you were always supposed to know the men you went to war with, because in the end you fought for them as much as for yourself. It was never a lark, anyway, he believed, not up where they were operating, where they might well be completely surrounded by Chinese and not even know it until it was too late. One thing he noticed—rather enviously—was that the men from the Twenty-fourth Division all
had the new reversible parkas that were just arriving in country. They were warmer, and one side was white, which offered that much more camouflage in snowy Korea.

Wilson had joined the Army in 1948 right after finishing high school in Salt Lake City. He had always intended to be a soldier. When he was a boy and American troops had marched down Salt Lake City’s main drag during World War II, he had unfailingly rushed into the streets to watch. He loved the sight of those mighty convoys heading for a nearby Army base. In high school, he had taken ROTC because he was so sure that the Army would be his career. He had been in the Twenty-third for more than a year. The last night that his unit had spent in the States before shipping out in late July had been his first wedding anniversary. He had been given permission to spend the night with his wife at a nearby hotel. This had greatly irritated his first sergeant who, not married himself, did not believe that any serious soldier should have a wife or anything else not issued by the Army. As he headed into Twin Tunnels, Wilson was still dealing with the idea that he had just become a parent—his first child, Susan, had been born only three weeks earlier. The reality of that was hard to come to terms with because he was so far away, but it had immediately made him feel he had a lot to live for.

He had fought through the Naktong battles and made it out of Kunuri. He had great faith in Colonel Freeman and special confidence in Captain John Metts, commander of his Headquarters Company, as cool a customer as he had dealt with. In those final hours at Kunuri, when everything was falling apart, Wilson had been in the process of disassembling a cooking stove. Just then, with the Chinese getting ever closer and the tension becoming unbearable, Captain Metts appeared. Wilson put together a plate of food and some coffee for him, anything to fight off the numbing cold, and joined him with a coffee of his own. Suddenly, the Chinese started firing away. Two bullet holes promptly appeared on the stovepipe right next to him, and Wilson quickly hit the ground, spilling coffee all over himself. Metts never moved. “Well, that’s two more rounds we don’t have to worry about” was all he said. Somehow they had managed to slip away on the road west to Anju. Their jeep conked out on the road and they chained it to a tank. Not the most elegant way to leave town, he thought, but it had worked.