The Korean War (21 page)

Many men’s service on the Naktong was painfully brief. Lieutenant David Bolté of the 2/8th Cavalry, son of the US Army’s Chief of Plans, arrived in Korea straight from West Point. Many of his men, he learnt, were slow to understand that here, the penalty for failing to behave like a soldier was death. The shortages even of basic equipment were a constant source of frustration. Bolté found himself wrestling with a machine gun under heavy communist fire, lacking the tool for removing a ruptured barrel. He himself had been compelled to take over the gun when he saw it standing abandoned. One of its crew had been wounded, and the others had seized the familiar excuse to take him to the rear. There were chronic problems with men drifting away out of the line in darkness: ‘They just didn’t want to be up there at night.’ Bolté saw a man blow himself to pieces, clumsily dropping a primed grenade into his own foxhole. He himself lasted just ten days in Korea, before a bullet smashed into his shoulder as he peered at the communist lines through his binoculars. In the days that followed, as he lay in a Japanese hospital where plaster was so short that they could not put a cast on his arm, he remembered his last night before embarkation, watching three smart young paratroopers
celebrating in the Top of the Mark Hopkins hotel in San Francisco. An excited woman said: ‘Oooh, it’s just like World War II all over again.’ Bolté looked back from the perspective of a man who would never be fit to see a battlefield again: ‘One had this great romantic ideal, of an adventure in which people don’t bleed.’ In that Japanese hospital where the halls were crowded with stretcher cases, where nurses were working twelve-hour shifts to cope with a thousand-patient overload, Bolté’s youthful ideal died.

The difficulties of defending the Pusan Perimeter were caused, above all, by inadequacies of training and leadership in the American formations thrust into the line after five years’ chronic national neglect of the armed forces. Some of Walker’s formations were in desperate condition. After its terrible mauling in July, the 24th Division was scarcely battleworthy – ‘a completely defeated ragtag that had lost all will,’ in the words of Colonel Paul Freeman of the 23rd Infantry. Like most American officers, Freeman could also find little to say in favour of the ROK army’s contribution to the campaign: ‘It was pitiful. But it wasn’t their fault. They lacked the training, the motivation, the equipment to do the job. Whenever their units were on our flanks, we found that they were liable to vanish without notice.’
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Nor were some of the American reinforcement units much better. The men of 1st Cavalry Division were scornfully nicknamed ‘MacArthur’s pets’ for their supposedly decorative, rather than active function in Japan. The 1st Cavalry would suffer terribly in the autumn and winter of 1950 for their shortcomings of training and competence.

The line could not have been held at all without the ruthless professionalism of a handful of outstanding officers, among whom must rank Colonel John Michaelis of the 27th Infantry. ‘Iron Mike’ was a thirty-seven-year-old ‘army brat’ who graduated from West Point in 1936. By 1945, the tall, slim Californian had become one of America’s outstanding combat soldiers, commanding the 502nd Airborne regiment, a twice-wounded veteran of D-Day and
Arnhem. Michaelis was posted to the Operations Section of Eighth Army in 1949, where he was dismayed to find so many of the best officers being diverted from regimental duty to administrative and staff jobs. He assumed command of the 27th ‘Wolfhounds’ when its CO was abruptly relieved in the field. His second-in-command and two of his battalion commanders were likewise drafted in haste. With his ranks filled with so many green, frightened young soldiers, Michaelis resorted to drastic measures to raise their confidence. One of his master sergeants took post behind a wall while their own guns dropped 105mm shells in front of it, to demonstrate the effectiveness of cover. The 27th had lost many of its best NCOs, who were sent to stiffen the 24th Division when it was first committed to Korea. Michaelis was acutely conscious of the shortcomings of leadership at platoon level. He was ruthlessly frank about the difficulties of taking into battle men with pitifully little tactical or weapons training. At the height of the battle in August 1950, when many heroic myths were being circulated about the fighting qualities of Eighth Army, Michaelis told an interviewer from the
Saturday Evening Post
:

In peacetime training, we’ve gone for too damn much falderal. We’ve put too much stress on Information and Education and not enough stress on rifle marksmanship and scouting and patrolling and the organisation of a defensive position. These kids of mine have all the guts in the world and I can count on them to fight. But when they started out, they couldn’t shoot. They didn’t know their weapons. They have not had enough training in plain, old-fashioned musketry. They’d spend a lot of time listening to lectures on the difference between communism and Americanism and not enough time crawling on their bellies on manoeuvres with live ammunition singing over them. They’d been nursed and coddled, told to drive safely, to buy War Bonds, to give to the Red Cross, to avoid VD, to write home to mother – when somebody ought to have been telling them how to clear a machine gun when it jams . . . The US Army is so damn roadbound that the soldiers have almost lost the use of their legs. Send out a patrol on a scouting mission and they load up in a three-quarter-ton truck and start riding down the highway.
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If it sometimes appears, in the course of this narrative, that a British author is adopting too critical an attitude towards the professional conduct of the US Army in Korea, it is worth recalling the brutal professional strictures of Michaelis, echoed by other objectively minded observers. In September 1950, even as the colonel talked to his interviewer at his command post in the chemistry laboratory of a Korean middle school, there was a shot outside, followed by a report that a man had killed himself cleaning his pistol. ‘See what I mean?’ said the colonel. ‘They still don’t know how to handle their weapons without blowing their own brains out. They’ve had to learn in combat, in a matter of days, the basic things they should have known before they ever faced an enemy. And some of them don’t learn fast enough.’
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The colonel’s comments on the shortcomings of Eighth Army remained equally vigorous, thirty-five years later.

The 27th Infantry became a vital ingredient in Walker’s defensive operations, the Perimeter’s ‘fire brigade’, held in reserve to be rushed from point to point as enemy attacks developed. Again and again under Michaelis’ ruthless leadership, the Wolfhounds proved the force that stemmed the tide. Their morale soared from this knowledge. It was a Korean officer, Paek Sun Yup, who remembered watching Michaelis lose his temper after a neighbouring ROK unit broke off an action and withdrew without informing the Americans. ‘If we lose this battle, we may not have a Korea,’ the furious colonel of the 27th told the hapless ROK battalion commander. ‘We have nowhere else to go. We must stand and fight.’

Throughout the struggle for the Perimeter, Syngman Rhee’s army was being reinforced by the most ruthless means. Each day, police combed the city and the countryside for any male capable of bearing arms: boys, teenagers, grandfathers were relentlessly rounded up, given a few hours’ rudimentary weapon training, and
herded into the line to join a unit. ‘It was never at any time possible to obtain a firm or official figure for the number of South Korean troops in the field,’ wrote a British correspondent.
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‘They were at most times heavily outnumbered, and their casualties were enormous. The intake was vast, the training almost unbelievably cursory. The man was drafted at the age of eighteen. On the Sunday he might be at work in the paddies or the shop; by the following Sunday he was in the line; in next to no time he was either a veteran or a corpse.’

Lee Chien Ho, the young Seoul chemical engineering student who had sought to defend his campus with a broomstick in the dying days of June, reached Pusan on 4 August after an endless, painful journey by train, oxcart, and shoe power. He went to the temporary Ministry of Education building and asked where he might go to continue his schooling. An official looked at him in astonishment: ‘Your country is at war.’ Then he learned that Lee spoke a little English: ‘The Americans need interpreters.’ He was sent to the 1st Marine Brigade, and soon felt relieved to be fed, clothed – to belong somewhere. He remained with the Marines through all the battles of the six months that followed.

As the struggle continued, American and South Korean units began to learn – or rather, relearn from history – painful tactical lessons. It was fatal to seek to defend a sector by spreading men in penny packets along its length: defend everything, and you defend nothing. Units must concentrate on key positions. If the enemy outflanked a position, the defenders must hold their ground while reserves were brought forward to counter-attack. Every battalion, every company, every platoon must site its foxholes for all-round defence. These were principles essential to survival. Some units had still failed to learn them by November 1950, with tragic consequences. But there were enough – just enough – men of Eighth Army who did so in August and September, to hold the Pusan Perimeter.

In the last ten days of August, there came a lull in the fighting along the entire Pusan front. The communists were reorganising and regrouping their shattered formations. They acknowledged the mistake they had made by attacking successively at different points, enabling the Americans to rush reserves to meet each thrust in turn. This time, it would be different. They would mount a co-ordinated assault. The North Korean 6th and 7th Divisions would attack in the south, by Masan, on the US 25th Division front. The 2nd, 4th, 9th and 10th would strike at the Naktong Bulge, against the US 2nd Division. The 8th and 15th Divisions, in the north, would seek to cut off Pohang-dong and the ROK units covering the line of communications from Taegu. The 5th and 12th Divisions would strike directly at Pohang-dong. Underwater bridges were constructed across the Naktong, log and sandbag constructions intensely difficult to detect even from the air, in the muddy water. Each night, there was intense activity on the communist front: guns and ammunition being moved forward, such tanks as remained being concentrated, small armies of men labouring with shovel and mattock. Walker knew for certain that the communists were coming. He was in doubt only as to when.

The onslaught, the last great North Korean effort of the battle, was unleashed on the night of 31 August. In the south, the attackers broke through the defences of the 25th Division to threaten Masan. Further north, the 2nd Division was almost cut in two by KPA troops overrunning some of its forward positions, sweeping on to leave others completely isolated. Around Taegu, the US 1st Cavalry lost Waegwan, and Walker was compelled to transfer his own main headquarters to Pusan, so imminent seemed the threat to EUS AK HQ at Taegu. Pohang-dong fell once more. By 5 September, Walker was obliged to consider a general withdrawal. Almost everywhere along the line, the will and ability of his army to sustain their positions seemed in serious doubt.

Yet over the next hours and days, reports reaching Eighth Army first hinted, then confirmed that the communist advance had run out of steam. On every sector of the front, the fighting
was withering away. Desultory North Korean movements were checked with little difficulty by the defenders and their air and artillery support. The communists had reached the limits of men, guns, supplies, ammunition. The Pusan Perimeter held, and more than a few of its defenders now heard the astonishing rumours of a great operation for their relief already being mounted from Japan. The spirits of Eighth Army rose perceptibly, and with it their respect and gratitude to Walker, the fiercely energetic little Texan who had made their survival possible. Walker would not go down in history as a military intellectual, a man of ideas. But he would be remembered for bringing to the battle for the Pusan Perimeter the qualities that made its survival possible: ruthless dynamism, speed of response, dogged determination. He was leading one of the least professional, least motivated armies America had ever put into the field. Even many of its higher commanders seemed afflicted by ‘bug-out fever’, a chronic yearning to escape from Korea and leave the thankless peninsula to its inhabitants. Walker kept his men at their business by sheer relentless hounding, goading, driving, and the support of a handful of exceptional officers and units whose competence decided the day. Eighth Army’s performance at Pusan narrowly maintained the United Nations presence in Korea. It remained to be seen whether the achievement of survival on the battlefield could now be translated into outright victory over the communists.

5 » INCHON

For all its undisputed Korean provenance, the name of Inchon possesses a wonderfully resonant American quality. It summons a vision of military genius undulled by time, undiminished by more recent memories of Asian defeat. Inchon remains a monument to ‘can do’, to improvisation and risk-taking on a magnificent scale, above all to the spirit of Douglas MacArthur. So much must be said elsewhere in these pages about American misfortunes in Korea, about grievous command misjudgements and soldierly shortcomings, that there is little danger here of overblowing the trumpet. The amphibious landings of 15 September 1950 were MacArthur’s masterstroke. In a world in which nursery justice decided military affairs, Operation CHROMITE would have won the war for the United States.

From the early stages of the conflict, as Eighth Army struggled to maintain fighting room in the south-east of Korea, MacArthur’s thoughts had been fixed with almost mystic conviction upon a possible landing at Inchon. In July, he told General Lemuel Shepherd, Fleet Marine commander, as they pored over the map in his office: ‘If I had the 1st Marine Division, I would make a landing here at Inchon, and reverse the war.’
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By all manner of improvisations and expedients, 1st Marine Division was indeed being assembled and hastened across the Pacific. But six weeks of acrimonious, passionate debate preceded Inchon. On one side were ranged the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all the key naval officers in the Far Fast, and an overwhelming proportion of army, marine and amphibious specialists. For this, it must be recalled, was still the immediate post-war period, when the middle and upper ranks of America’s
armed forces were still thickly populated with officers who had planned and carried out opposed landings from end to end of the Pacific. These men understood from experience every subtlety of tides, beach gradients, unloading capacity, fire support plans. They examined MacArthur’s concept with acute professional care and, almost unanimously, declared against it.