The Korean War (23 page)

1st Marine Division’s commander, O. P. Smith, was in many ways the least likely of Marine heroes. A slim, white-haired Texan of fifty-seven, of professorial manner, unfailing courtesy – even diffidence – Smith was a cautious commander who believed that ‘you do it slow, but you do it right’. But many of his subordinates in this big, heavy division of some 20,000 men were cast in more exotic mould. Ray Murray of the 5th Marines was perhaps the outstanding regimental commander, who would become one of the critical figures of the campaign. Colonel Homer Litzenburg of the 7th Marines was slower and less impressive. Colonel Lewis B. ‘Chesty’ Puller of the 1st Marines was already a legend of his corps, a bombastic officer who led from the front, beloved of his men – perhaps less so of his seniors, who were sometimes exasperated by his tactical carelessness. All these men, and many of their subordinates, possessed immense combat experience in World War II.

The first slow convoy of Admiral Struble’s armada of 260 ships sailed from Yokohama on 5 September. It was a makeshift transport fleet that carried the Americans to Inchon. Of the bigger ships, thirty-seven LSTs were World War II veterans that had been transferred to the Japanese merchant service, and were now recalled to duty with their Japanese officers, supplemented by American personnel flown in from the United States. Some ships smelt vividly of fish. There was much wisecracking speculation about the personal histories of their inscrutable deck officers. ‘Everybody believed,’ in the words of a Marine, ‘that he was being ferried to Inchon by a Japanese who had been an admiral at Midway.’ There were constant breakdowns of aged machinery: ‘The whole thing was a rusty travesty of World War II amphibious operations.’

Few men found the voyage to Inchon agreeable, crammed aboard old ships devoid of creature comforts. Many were violently seasick as the convoy plunged and heaved amid Typhoon Kezia,
whose 125 mph winds wreaked havoc with the nerves of the naval commanders, and the stomachs of 70,000 hapless Americans below decks. On some ships, tanks and vehicles broke loose, demanding desperate struggles to resecure them as they smashed hither and thither on the cargo decks. The men lay in their bunks, or played cards incessantly. There was little left to prepare. The plans were all made. The command ship
Mount McKinley
sailed from Sasebo in the small hours of 13 September, the anniversary of Wolfe’s triumph at Quebec. The ship’s captain gave up his own cabin to MacArthur, and had a shed built for himself on the bridge wing. The convoy was maintaining radio silence, but Almond demanded that dispatches should be air-dropped to him each day. To the glee of his enemies on the staff, the first day’s attempt ended with the bag falling in the sea, and X Corps commander in a rage.

Lieutenant Jim Sheldon of the 17th Infantry, 7th Division, felt desperately anxious for the invasion and the war to be over, because Korea smelt so awful, and he found his own platoon so dismaying. Sheldon was a rebellious twenty-year-old who had been dismissed from the US Navy for misconduct, then enlisted in the army, and was commissioned from the ranks the day the Korean War broke out. He arrived in Japan as an officer replacement, and was abruptly given a fifty-four-man platoon, composed partly of Koreans, of whom some were wholly untrained civilians, ranging in age from the mid-teens to mid-sixties: ‘They were a pretty unhappy group of people for a twenty-year-old lieutenant to have to cope with, with their strange eating and sanitation habits. I couldn’t do anything to stop them sneaking out after dark and crapping in the middle of the compound.’ In four weeks, with the aid of a handful of experienced American NCOs, he had instilled the rudiments of tactical training in them. Then they were shipped to Pusan, where as part of the deception plan they were required to disembark from their ships, march out into the country, and reembark three times in succession. At last, to their astonishment,
they were told that they were on their way to take part in an amphibious landing. Sheldon and his platoon were not impressed.
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Just before dawn on 15 September, the
Mount McKinley
and the transport convoy attained the Inchon narrows. It was the fifth day of air and naval bombardment of Wolmi-do island. The commanders had gambled heavily upon the success of the diversionary operations to blind the defenders to the real significance of the barrage. At 6.33 a.m. after a final storm of rockets and napalm from the carrier strike aircraft, a last deluge of shellfire from the cruisers offshore, the first Marines hit Wolmi-do.

Throughout the voyage from Japan, the Supreme Commander himself had remained invisible in his cabin. Only now, as the first men clambered down into the landing craft amid the rolling thunder of the naval bombardment, did MacArthur betake himself to the bridge of the
Mount McKinley
in his grandeur. This was his creation, his hour, his last great moment of martial glory before the worm of disappointment, disillusionment, defeat began to gnaw into that enormous ego and reputation. He took the captain’s high seat on the bridge, to sit flanked by his reverential courtiers in all the stage properties of majesty: the corncob pipe; the massive peaked cap laden with brass; the proud chin and protective sunglasses. And there the photographers caught him for posterity, the master of ceremonies sitting high above the sea, watching the unfolding of his last triumph.

Ellis Williamson, G-3 of X Corps, did not trouble to beg a place in a landing craft, as had some staff officers. He remembered the British officer who said to him before D-Day in 1944, when he was still an impatient young lieutenant: ‘When you get over there, you’ll find there’s enough war for everybody.’ Williamson had been wounded five times in north-west Europe: ‘By Inchon, I was no longer overly curious.’
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Until a late stage of planning, Almond had opposed the sacrifice of surprise for the seizure of Wolmi-do island. But the Marines insisted that they could not assault the main beaches with the approaches unsecured. Their will prevailed. Now, Litzenburger’s
5th Marines swept ashore at ‘Green Beach’ on Wolmi-do with almost contemptuous ease. Two Marine tanks smashed through a feebly defended North Korean roadblock on the causeway to the mainland. The Stars and Stripes was raised 300 feet up on Radio Hill, dominating Inchon Harbour, at 6.55 a.m. The entire position was secure an hour later. Marine bulldozers wrote a macabre footnote, by entombing a handful of defenders who declined to surrender, alive in the caves in which they had taken refuge. From the bridge of
Mount McKinley
, MacArthur signalled Struble: ‘The Navy and Marines have never shone more brightly than this morning.’

At noon, with half of the CHROMITE operational plan successfully completed and only desultory firing coming from the shore, the long, wretched interval began before the next act. As the tide swept back to reveal miles of dull, flat mud between the invasion fleet and the shore, the men in the ships waited, impotent, for the sea to return. The Marines on Wolmi-do, entirely isolated from the fleet, lay over their weapons, willing the enemy to maintain his silence. They requested, and were refused, permission at once to continue their advance across the causeway. They contented themselves by firing mortars and machine guns at the shore whenever they observed activity. Fighter-bombers roamed the roads for miles behind the coast, ready to strike at any communist attempt to reinforce their coastal positions. Yet astonishingly, none came. At 2.30 p.m., the cruisers resumed their fire upon the main waterfront.

The guns began erratically [wrote the British war correspondent James Cameron]: a few heavy thuds from the cruisers, an occasional bark of five-inch fire, a tuning-up among the harsh orchestra. At what point the playing of the guns merged into the final and awful barrage I do not know; so many things began to take place, a scattered pattern of related happenings gradually coalescing and building up for the blow.

All around among the fleet the landing-craft multiplied imperceptibly, took to the water from one could not see exactly where, because the light was failing now – circled and wheeled and marked time and milled about, filling the air with engines. There seemed to be no special hurry. We could not go in until the tide was right; meanwhile we lay offshore in a strange, insolent, businesslike serenity, under whatever guns the North Koreans had, building up the force item by item, squaring the sledge-hammer. The big ships swung gently in the tideway, from time to time coughing heaving gusts of iron towards the town. It began to burn, quite gently at first. What seemed to be a tank or a self-propelled gun sent back some quick, resentful fire, but it soon stopped. Later we found that one ship had thrown a hundred and sixty-five rounds of five-inch ammunition at the one gun: the economics of plenty.
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At 4.45 p.m., the first landing craft pushed off from the transports, laden with Marines, headed towards the smoke-hung skyline of the city of Inchon. At 5.31, the first Americans sprang up the ladders on to the seawall, covered by grenades from the men who followed. After a brief scamper, the British Consulate was taken, and a platoon reached the foot of Observatory Hill, overlooking the harbour. Amid the sharp firefights with pockets of defenders, it became rapidly apparent that most of the surviving communists were still stunned and dazed by the bombardment. In the industrial suburbs south of the city, where the 1st Marines were landing on Blue Beach, the regiment overcame difficulties with mud and natural obstacles, to establish themselves securely ashore in the first hours of the darkness.

The makeshift manner of the operation persisted even as the Marines descended into the landing craft. Major Ed Simmons, commanding the Weapons Company of the 3/1st Marines, was a twenty-nine-year-old from New Jersey who had seen action in the Pacific as an engineer, where every landing was intensely rehearsed and meticulously timed. Now, he found himself clambering aboard an amphibious tractor, as a young naval lieutenant pointed towards the shore and shouted almost hysterically through
a bullhorn: ‘There’s your beach! Go find it!’ A landing craft loaded with Koreans pulled alongside, and somebody called: ‘Here’s your interpreters!’ Two Koreans climbed on Simmons’ tractor as it got under way. Neither proved to speak English. The Marine asked the driver where the compass was. The man shrugged: ‘Search me. Two weeks ago I was driving a bus in San Francisco.’ Simmons set off towards the point on the shoreline where the smoke seemed thickest, aided by his own compass.
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The carefully planned landings by waves of craft were forgotten. They merely headed in columns for the beach, where they found a modest firefight in progress. Visibility was very poor, amid the smoke and drizzle. Most men’s clearest memory of Inchon was of struggling ashore in soggy clothing, which still hung clammily about them as the light began to fail. Officers and men hastened hither and thither, searching for headquarters and company positions in the darkness, broken by occasional gunflashes and the flames of burning buildings. As the sounds of battle died away, they were replaced by the insistent patter of operators murmuring into radio handsets, struggling to gain contact with straggling units. But already, the vital moves of the day were complete. The seal was set upon the American triumph when eight LSTs grounded side by side against the seawall on Red Beach. As the tide fell, they remained there, ‘dried out’, and from their cavernous holds poured forth a stream of tanks, trucks, jeeps, stores, laying vital flesh upon the bones of the beachhead.

Through the hours of darkness, the Marines dozed over their weapons, apprehensive of a counter-attack that never came. Astoundingly, two regiments were established ashore in Inchon at a cost of just twenty killed among a total of less than two hundred casualties. If the landing on the west coast of Korea was a makeshift, amateurish affair by the standards of 1944 or 1945, it had proved formidable enough to overcome the primitive legions of Kim Il Sung. In the days that followed, as the men of 7th Division and the 7th Marines followed the vanguard ashore, MacArthur and his officers exulted. The gamble had triumphantly succeeded. All
the Supreme Commander’s instincts about the conduct of the North Koreans had been justified. He had driven his spear deep into the flank of the enemy, who now reeled stricken before him.

First light on 16 September revealed Korean civilians picking their way among the shattered debris of the Inchon waterfront, among the fallen power lines and flickering fires and broken walls.

There was quite a lot of Inchon still standing [wrote James Cameron]. One wondered how. There were quite a number of citizens still alive. They came stumbling from the ruins – some of them sound, some of them smashed – numbers of them quite clearly driven into a sort of numbed dementia by the night of destruction. They ran about, capering crazily or shambling blankly, with a repeated automatic gesture of surrender. Some of them called out as we passed their one English phrase, as a kind of password: ‘Sank you!’ ‘Sank you!’; and the irony of that transcended the grotesque into the macabre.
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The 1st and 5th Marines linked up ashore early on the morning of 16 September. They began at once to drive eastwards, towards the capital, leaving the ROK Marines to mop up Inchon in characteristically ruthless fashion. Belatedly, a column of North Korean armour and infantry appeared, to be swept aside by air strikes and ground fire. The 5th Marines now led the advance on the north side of the Inchon-Seoul road, while the 1st took the southern side. Smashing through sporadic communist resistance, by the night of 17 September they held much of the big Kimpo airfield complex. By the evening of the 19th, the 5th had cleared the entire south bank of the Han river on their front. The 1st Marines had meanwhile seen some heavy fighting in more difficult country, meeting a regiment of the North Korean 18th Division deployed in their path. But on the 19th, they were on the outskirts of Yongdungpo, the suburb of Seoul on the south bank of the Han.