The Korean War (29 page)

For many years, it was believed that the reinforced 4th Field Army which entered North Korea a week later was under the command of Mao’s close associate, Lin Piao. The Chinese today assert most firmly that this was not so. And while Lin’s political disgrace might provide a motive for deceit on the issue, there is sufficient corroborative evidence to take seriously the modern Chinese claim about Lin. Military sources in Peking say that, in the autumn of 1950, Lin was indeed urged by Mao and the Central Committee to accept command of a Chinese army to fight in Korea, and was their first choice to do so. Yet he himself argued strongly against immediate military intervention. He believed that the PLA was not yet ready to take on the army of the United States. He urged delay, if necessary for a year or more, until the army could be retrained and re-equipped. He was especially concerned about the impact of US air power on an unprotected Chinese army. Marshal Peng Te Huai, on the other hand, declared that he could not see that China would be any better placed to fight in 1951, or for that matter in 1952, than in 1950. He believed – to resort to contemporary cliché – that ‘imperialists could be shown to
be paper tigers’. A big, forceful, talkative man, Peng told his staff robustly that will and motivation could compensate for any shortcomings of equipment. One of his former officers says that Peng, from beginning to end, treated the struggle in Korea merely as an extension of the Liberation War against the Kuomintang.
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According to a memoir published under Peng’s name in 1981, on 4 October he found himself suddenly summoned from his headquarters, as commander-in-chief in north-west China, to fly to Peking to attend a conference, and arrived to discover the Central Committee already in session, debating the dispatch of troops to Korea. At the next session the following day, he was appointed to command them. The simple fiction of describing the Chinese forces in Korea as ‘volunteers’ was designed to prevent all-out war with the United States, above all to diminish the danger of massive American retaliation against the mainland.

China’s initial force in Korea was organised as XIII Army Group, and comprised four armies, each of three 10,000-man infantry divisions, a regiment of cavalry, and five regiments of artillery. They crossed the Yalu bridges by night. Their first objective was to establish a wide enough bridgehead on the south bank to give themselves room to deploy. Had they permitted the United Nations to close up to the Yalu border along its length, they would have been confronted by the intolerable initial task of conducting an opposed river crossing before they could join battle. The 42nd Army came first, to block the road running north-west from the Chosin reservoir. The 38th Army was to deploy across the road north from Huichon. The 40th Army advanced from Sinuiju towards Pukchin. The 50th and 66th Armies followed.

It was an extraordinary achievement of modern warfare: between 13 and 25 October, the intelligence staffs of MacArthur’s armies failed to discern the slightest evidence of the movement of 130,000 soldiers and porters. A combination of superb fieldcraft and camouflage by the Chinese, together with their lack of use of any of the conventional means by which modern military movement is detected – wireless traffic, mechanised activity, supply
dumps – blinded the UN High Command to what was taking place on its front. Above all, perhaps, the generals were not looking for anything of this sort. They had persuaded themselves that the war was all but over. Their senses were deadened to a fresh consideration.

On the night of 5/6 November, after the disaster to the 8th Cavalry and the crumbling of so many major ROK units, the UN Command was briefly sufficiently disturbed by the situation to consider a major withdrawal. Yet on the morning of 6 November, it was found that it was the communists who were disengaging all along the front. After ten days in which they had dramatically seized the initiative and forced back UN forces in a succession of battles, they chose to break off the action. Once more, their motives and intentions are not entirely clear. Military sources in Peking today declare that there were problems of supply and co-ordination; that having thus warned the Americans of their will and capability to intervene, the Chinese were prepared to linger for a time, to discover whether their message was needed. Both these assertions seem at least plausible. The Chinese also claimed that their purpose in withdrawing was ‘to encourage the enemy’s arrogance’.
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But it became immediately apparent that MacArthur, far from being deterred by the first Chinese offensive, considered that the communists had striven their hardest to overcome his forces, and failed. Peking, he believed, had shot its bolt, and most unfrightening this had proved. The UN offensive, the drive for the Yalu, would resume forthwith. The Chinese, in their turn, prepared to meet it.

So who were they, the men of these ‘fanatical hordes’ who were about to force upon the United States Army one of the most humiliating retreats in its history? It is sometimes forgotten that after twenty years of war, many Chinese soldiers were men of exceptional military experience. ‘My first memories as a child were of the Japanese burning and destroying,’ said Li Hebei, a
twenty-two-year-old infantry platoon commander who crossed the Yalu with the 587th Regiment on 25 October. Li had served first with local guerrillas, armed only with a home-made rifle, then graduated to the PLA and a captured Japanese weapon when a unit passed through his devastated village when he was sixteen. Like thousands of politically aware young Chinese, he called the PLA ‘the big university’, for it was in its ranks that he learned to read and write. Between 1943 and 1947, he saw his family just once. He learned to march . . . forever. Mile upon mile he and his unit could walk or even trot, in their quilted cotton uniforms and tennis shoes, up mountain tracks hauling all that they possessed in the world: personal weapon, eighty rounds of ammunition, grenade, spare foot rags, sewing kit, chopsticks, and perhaps a week’s rations – tea, rice, a little sugar, perhaps a tin of fish or meat. Thirty-five years later, Hebei grinned at the memory: ‘We had a saying – Red Army’s two legs better than than Kuomintang’s four wheels. Life was very hard, but the atmosphere was very good, because we were full of hope.’
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A Chinese soldier required just eight to ten pounds of supply a day, against sixty for his UN counterpart. Thus, to sustain fifty divisions in combat, Peking needed to move only 2,500 tons of supplies a day south across the Yalu. This compared with 600 tons for a single US Army division, 700 tons for 1st Marine Division. Each of the tens of thousands of porters supporting the Chinese drive into Korea could carry 80–100 pounds on his shoulder pole or A-frame. Thus did the impossible become possible.

Yu Xiu was one of the men who stormed the 8th Cavalry’s positions on 1 November, exulting to discover the success of their techniques of hard-hitting night assault. Yu was a twenty-nine-year-old from Chungsu province, brought up in the French sector of Shanghai, who joined the 4th Field Army when his father was killed by a Japanese bomb in 1937. A deputy political commissar of his regiment, he said that the overwhelming lesson the PLA learned from its first brushes with the Americans was of the need for speed. ‘In the Liberation War, one might take days to surround
a Kuomintang division, then slowly close the circle around it. With the Americans, if we took more than a few hours, they would bring up reinforcements, aircraft, artillery.’
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Li Hua was twenty-three, from Shandung province, a veteran of 8th Route Army since he was sixteen, a peasant’s son who had been trained at one of the PLA’s officer schools. On the train south to the Yalu in October, he and his comrades were told nothing of their destination, ‘but everybody guessed: we were going to support the Koreans against their invaders. We felt pretty confident, because we had just beaten the Kuomintang, with all their support from the Americans. We expected to do the same to Syngman Rhee’s people. We weren’t very wrong. They were a pushover compared with the Japanese.’ They walked across the Yalu bridge by night in their long files, then fifty miles onwards to their initial contact near the Chosin reservoir. Li, the propaganda officer of his company, examined his unit’s first American prisoner at much the same time, and with much the same curiosity, as Eighth Army were studying its captives from the PLA: ‘This young American, he fell on his knees and begged for mercy. We felt sorry for him. He obviously didn’t want to fight.’
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Americans who found North Korea an alien land might have reflected that it was almost equally so to the Chinese. The men of the PLA found the Korean peasants at first cold and unfriendly, the weather and the mountains unyielding and vicious. They were guided across country only by a few old Japanese maps – one to a regiment. Yet this initial wave of PLA veterans, in the months before massive casualties caused their replacement by less promising material, possessed some notable advantages over the Americans. For all their lack of equipment and sophistication, these Chinese soldiers were among the hardiest in the world. Many had known no other life but that of war since their teens. Most were genuinely enthused by the spirit of revolution, the sense of participation in a new China that seemed to offer brighter promise than the old land of tyrannical landlordism and official corruption. In Korea, in the months to come, the PLA would suffer its own
difficulties with shaken morale and growing disillusionment in its ranks, matching those of its enemies. But in the winter of 1950, the spur of early success outweighed the impact of high casualties in Peng’s divisions.

On 15 November, the
Korea Times
described life in liberated Seoul as ‘returning to normal’. Food queues were said to be fading. The government had just declared ‘Epidemic Prevention Week’. A statement from ROK Army headquarters declared: ‘Our army is continuing its exterminating drive against the enemy, who are taking refuge (remnants) in the mountains.’ Over 135,000 communist PoWs were said to be in UN hands. Total North Korean casualties were estimated at 335,000.

24 November was Thanksgiving Day – bleak and blustery. Immense logistic efforts had been made to ensure that the men of Eighth Army enjoyed their turkey dinner. By truck and even by air drop, the traditional Thanksgiving trimmings were shipped to the army that was still assured by its commanders that it was victorious. The British and other allies mocked the idea of bringing domestic comforts into the forward areas. ‘I could not stop asking myself what on earth it had all cost,’ said one British soldier,
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faintly ashamed of his own small-mindedness. Yet he and his compatriots were also secretly impressed by a nation capable of such a feat in the midst of a campaign. The enemy were nowhere much in evidence. In the forward areas, the troops were uneasy, yet they clung to MacArthur’s promise: home by Christmas. In some units, work had begun to clean up vehicles and equipment, to crate surplus stores for shipment to Japan or Stateside. The cold was already intense, though not as bitter as it would become. In a thousand positions among the barren valleys and hillsides of North Korea, American soldiers huddled around flickering fires fuelled from the wreckage of local huts and imported packing cases, and made what seasonal cheer they could. Afterwards, they looked back on that day as a hollow echo of a celebration, when they had
seen what was to come. The clothes that Colonel John Michaelis of the 27th Infantry was wearing on Thanksgiving Day, he did not take off until 16 February.

On 25 November, Walker’s Eighth Army and Almond’s X Corps began to move forward once more. The men of B Company of the 1/9th Infantry, 2nd Division, were approaching the crest of yet another faceless, meaningless geographical feature – Hill 219, on the east bank of the Chongchon river on the road to Kanggye, when they were hit with fierce grenade and small-arms fire. By nightfall, fighting was in progress throughout the area. The 9th Infantry were in no doubt that they were engaged against the Chinese. But poor communications and extraordinary command lethargy hampered 2nd Division in rousing itself to meet a major new threat. In camps and vehicle concentrations along the length of the Chongchon Valley, Americans found themselves wakened in their sleeping bags by a terrifying cacophony of bugles, drums, rattles, whistles – and gunfire. Again and again, Chinese assault groups smashed through ill-prepared perimeters, overrunning infantry positions, gun lines, rear areas. By the night of 26 November, 2nd Division had been driven back two miles south-west down the Chongchon. The Command Posts of the 9th Infantry’s 1st and 3rd Battalions were overrun. Shortly before midnight, the 2nd Battalion was heavily attacked and forced back, losing most of its equipment. Some men waded the Chongchon in their flight, to find their clothes and boots turning to ice as they climbed the southern bank. Not that the Chinese possessed any magical means of walking upon water: that first night, the 23rd RCT captured a hundred communist soldiers, stripped as they forded the river. On the 2nd Division’s left, 25th Division was also under pressure. Amid individual acts of great bravery, the collective American response was feeble. From Army Command to the meanest hilltop foxhole, men seemed too shocked and appalled by the surprise that had overtaken them to respond effectively.

Eighteen-year-old Private Mario Scarselleta and other men of the mortar company, 35th Infantry, had been less than happy for some days – the cold, the shortcomings of their ‘shoepacks’, the jamming of their weapons, and the rumours of the Chinese had already eaten deep into their morale. When the shooting began around them on the night of 26 November, their first thought was to pull back. Their somewhat elderly lieutenant declared doggedly: ‘I’m not leaving until I get the word from battalion,’ which upset his men greatly. Then the shooting closed in around them, and somebody shouted ‘Every man for himself!’ ‘Then there was really chaos. Everybody just bugged out,’ said Scarselleta. They ran a few yards along the hillside, met a Chinese with a bugle whom they killed, then dashed for their trucks, and began to drive away. To their astonishment, they found that the Chinese appeared to be seeking to capture, rather than to kill them. There were some extraordinary hand-to-hand fights. Scarselleta saw a friend laid out by a blow on the jaw from a Chinese. The man rejoined the unit a month later. They abandoned the hopeless effort to load the vehicles, and started walking. They walked for four days, among a great throng of ill-assorted Turks, Koreans, fellow-Americans. ‘There was a complete loss of leadership,’ said Scarselleta. ‘It was a nightmare, really. Many times, I felt that we’d never make it out of there, that to survive this would be a miracle. Those Chinese were just fanatics – they didn’t place the value on life that we did. To this day, I still think about it – the bodies blown up, the Americans run over with tanks, the panic and shooting in the nights.’
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He and his comrades did not reorganise as a unit until they were a few miles north of Seoul.