The Korean War (36 page)

Astley-Cooper’s tank cast a track on the rough ground. His crew bailed out and escaped. Their commander was never seen again. Lieutenant Bill Cooper and his platoon of the Northumberlands marched out alongside the unit’s Oxford carriers, all of which had been christened with names beginning with ‘D’. Someone with an advanced sense of the macabre had decreed that the carrier loaded with the unit’s frozen corpses should carry, neatly white-painted on its flank, the word DEATH. The Royal Ulster Rifles suffered a total of 208 casualties in the Happy Valley battles, while five tanks were lost. The rest of the British brigade made good its withdrawal across the Han, and thence to Suwon, blowing the bridges behind them.

Major Tony Younger, the British sapper charged with some of the demolition tasks, was dismayed to see a train jammed with refugees, sitting on carriage roofs and clinging to every projection, halt just south of one railway bridge. He urged them to move. They refused. He fired the charges, and watched the spans collapse into the river. Scores of Koreans leapt from the train and ran towards the little engineer party, who feared that they were about to be attacked by a furious mob. Instead, the refugees seized them and shook their hands in strange gratitude. The train at last puffed away, and Younger’s squadron followed the infantry towards Suwon.

When the North Koreans held Seoul in the summer of 1950, thirteen-year-old Suk Bun Yoon’s father had a miraculous escape. Denounced as an anti-communist, he was taken to a hillside outside the city along with a group of others, and shot. But the wound was not fatal. He crawled away and eventually found his family, and convalesced with them through the winter. His son became the most important male in the household, which did not cost his education much, since by the end of the year almost all his teachers had been recruited or taken prisoner by one side or the other. But his father was still a sick man on 3 January 1951, when the family determined that they must flee Seoul. That evening, they made their way among thousands of Koreans on a similar mission, towards the frozen Han river. It was a terrible spectacle, a terrible night. Shellfire broke the ice in some places, and the boy watched struggling refugees sink helpless into the river, while thousands more ran hysterically past them. Somewhere in the darkness and the panic-stricken crowds, their grandfather disappeared: ‘We simply lost him. We never saw him again. Maybe he froze to death.’ In the days that followed, the family crawled south with their possessions. They had gone only twenty-five miles when they were overtaken by the Chinese. That night, in an abandoned house, they held a family conference. It was decided that as they were, they stood no hope of breaking through to the UN lines. They left their grandmother and Suk’s three younger brothers and sisters aged ten, seven, and three, in the village, reliant upon the charity of the peasants. Suk and his parents struggled on through the darkness, amid the gunflashes and refugees and wailing infants, until at last they crossed into the ROK lines.

To a Westerner, the decision to abandon the very old and the very young seems almost fantastic. But as the UN armies so often observed, the people of Korea seem to draw their character from the harsh environment in which they live. This was the kind of parting, the kind of decision that was commonplace in hundreds of thousands of Korean families, that created the legions of
starving orphans and infant beggars that hung like flies around every UN camp, supply dump, refuse tip. Behind the UN lines, for the next two months Suk and his parents lived with an aunt deep in the countryside. Only when Eighth Army at last moved forward again did the boy return to the village in search of the rest of the family. They found the children. Their hair was dropping out. They were in rags; their bodies were lice-ridden; they could not readily digest food. But they were narrowly alive. Thanks to canned food begged and stolen from the armies, they survived. Their grandmother was dead. The surviving family was ruined, destitute, homeless. But like millions of other Koreans that winter, they clung tenaciously to the margins of existence and waited for better times.

As Eighth Army retreated, mile by mile and day by day on the road southwards, as men abandoned equipment and lost their officers, allowed themselves to be washed along with the great tide of American and Korean humanity fleeing south away from the communists, the withdrawal became ‘the big bug-out’. The impulse to escape not only from the enemy, but from the terrible cold, the mountains, from Korea itself became overwhelming. In December 1950, most of Eighth Army fell apart as a fighting force in a fashion resembling the collapse of the French in 1940, the British at Singapore in 1942. 45 Field Regiment RA were reduced to hysterical laughter by an American intelligence report announcing that the Chinese were employing large numbers of monkeys as porters. Rumour of every kind, the more dramatic the better, held sway over the minds of thousands of men. ‘Everything the Chinese were showing they could do, their aggressiveness, was strange to us,’ said Major Floyd Martain. ‘What we knew of the Chinese in America was so different – they were so submissive.’
¹⁴
Most Americans expected Chinamen to be dwarves. They found themselves assaulted by units which included men six feet and over. Yet the enemy wreaking such havoc with Eighth Army was still, essentially,
fighting a large-scale guerrilla war, devoid of all the heavy firepower every Western army considered essential. It was a triumph not merely for the prestige of communism, but for that of an Asian army.

From Walker’s headquarters, to Tokyo and on to the Joint Chiefs’ offices in the Pentagon, there was bewilderment and deep dismay about the collapse of Eighth Army. For public consumption, the sheer surprise and weight of the Chinese offensive were emphasised. But professional soldiers knew that these were not enough to explain the headlong rout of an army that still possessed absolute command of sea and air, and firepower on a scale the communists could not dream of. The Chinese victories were being gained by infantry bearing small arms and regimental support weapons – above all, mortars. The Americans had been subjected to very little artillery fire, and no air attack whatever. The mobility of the Chinese, moving across mountain ranges without regard for the road network, was achieved at the cost of carrying very limited supplies of arms and ammunition.

Chinese peasants might be better attuned to hardship than Western soldiers, but they were not superhuman. The men of the UN complained of the difficulty of fighting the ferocious cold as well as the enemy. But the winter was neutral. The Chinese were far less well equipped to face the conditions than their opponents, possessing only canvas shoes and lacking such indulgences as sleeping bags. Marshal Peng’s casualties from frostbite dwarfed those of the Americans. And the Chinese could expect no ready evacuation or medical care. UN soldiers told terrible stories of taking prisoners with whole limbs blackened and dead in the cold. Chinese veterans later declared that 90 per cent of the ‘volunteers’ in Korea suffered from some degree of frostbite in the winter of 1950. Their 27th Army suffered 10,000 non-combat casualties: ‘. . . A shortage of transportation and escort personnel makes it impossible to accomplish the mission of supplying the troops,’ declared a 26 Army document of November 1950, later captured by the UN. ‘As a result, our soldiers frequently starved . . . They ate
cold food, and some had only a few potatoes in two days. They were unable to maintain their physical strength for combat; the wounded could not be evacuated . . . The firepower of our entire army was basically inadequate. When we used our guns, there were often no shells, or the shells were duds.’
¹⁵

The Chinese could achieve great shock power, but only the most limited ability to sustain an attack, whether at company or army level. They missed dazzling opportunities to annihilate, rather than merely drive back MacArthur’s army in Korea in the winter of 1950, because they could move only as fast as their feet could carry them, and their radio communications were so poor that they could not co-ordinate large-scale movements effectively. Some PLA units were out of contact with their higher formations for days on end. The key to tactical success against the Chinese was to create all-round defensive perimeters, and not to allow panic to set in when it was discovered, as it so frequently was, that the communists had turned a unit’s flank. If UN firepower could be brought to bear in support of a counter-attack, this was almost invariably successful. But in those weeks of November and December, Peking’s armies achieved psychological dominance not only over UN units at the front, but over their commanders in the rear. After the first battles of November, the flimsiest rumour of the men in quilted jackets being observed on a main supply route behind the front was enough to spark fears of encirclement, and often outright panic. The undoubted Chinese skills as tacticians, night-fighters, navigators, masters of fieldcraft and camouflage, caused even many senior officers to forget the enemy’s huge disadvantages in resources and firepower. Worse, the leaders of the UN forces in Korea found themselves facing the stark fact that, man for man, most of their troops were proving nowhere near as hardy, skilful, and determined upon the battlefield as their communist opponents. It is difficult to overestimate the psychological effects of this conclusion upon strategic and tactical decision-making.

Yet even at this phase, the struggle was not entirely one-sided.
The Chinese were learning bitter lessons about the potential of air power. They discovered that their truck drivers could not move by day, because they could not hear the sound of enemy aircraft. Every infantry movement had to be completed before dawn, the men deeply covered by the snow into which they dug themselves, before the prowling Mustangs, Corsairs, Panthers found them. A nationwide system of air-raid precautions was created, sentries stationed at intervals of two hundred yards along every mile of the Chinese supply routes, ready by whistle and rifle-shot to warn of impending air attack the moment engines were heard. Hung She Te, the Chinese officer responsible for all logistics inside Korea, performed miracles with his legions of porters and oxcarts. But throughout that winter campaign of 1950, the overwhelming limitation upon the Chinese was not manpower, of which their reserves were almost unbounded, but supply. Chou En Lai exhorted every family in China to fry flour for the volunteers. Great columns of men and trucks moved south across the Yalu each night, backs bent and springs groaning under their burdens. They learned to place wide brooms on the front of vehicles to sweep aside the puncture nails dropped on the roads by US aircraft. They organised emergency repair parties to replace broken bridges and ruined roads within hours. But the Chinese were never able, in that first campaign, effectively to deploy artillery in support of their advance. Probably the most critical contribution of American air power in the Korean War was the interdiction of supply routes during the winter battles of 1950. This alone, it may be argued, prevented the Chinese from converting the defeat of the UN forces into their destruction.

How could Marshal Peng and his staff organise their own intelligence about UN movements effectively, when they lacked equipment to intercept American communications, or aircraft to conduct effective reconnaissance? Thirty-five years later, the face of Hu Seng, one of Peng’s secretaries, cracked into a craggy grin at the memory: ‘It was very easy to get intelligence, in the beginning. There was no censorship in the West at that time about troop
movements. We gained much vital information from Western press and radio.’
¹⁶
Daily from July, from the agency wires in Seoul clattered details of the landings of the Marines, the arrival of new foreign contingents, the assault on Inchon – ten hours before this took place – the deployment of the first F-86 Sabre fighters. At the end of December, Ridgway introduced censorship of all disclosures concerning the UN Order of Battle. Western correspondents introduced private codes to evade this. Eighth Army asked for a press blackout on the UN evacuation of Seoul until this was completed. The story was broken in the US within hours, by a correspondent who simply did not submit his copy for censorship. Restrictions on reporting were never, of course, enforced on the media outside the Korean peninsula.

The impetus of the Chinese advance could only be sustained into 1951 by the vast captures of arms and supplies on the drive south. Thousands of Chinese picked up new American weapons, learned to eat Crations and handle some American heavy weapons. ‘We quickly got used to American biscuits and rice,’ said Li Xiu, a regimental propaganda officer with the 27th Corps, ‘but we never cared for tomato juice. We were particularly glad to get carbines, because we found rifles so heavy to carry. Without the American sleeping bags and overcoats that we captured, I am not sure we could have gone on. Two-thirds of our casualties were from the cold that winter, against one-third from combat. The main difficulties were always: how to avoid American planes and artillery, and how to catch up with the Americans in their trucks.’
¹⁷

‘The chief problem was to gather all the prisoners,’ said Li Hebei of the 587th Regiment. ‘On New Year’s Day, an order was issued for our troops to compete to see which unit could collect most prisoners as a New Year gift for Chairman Mao. American prisoners at first didn’t understand the “lenient policy” of our volunteers towards them. But after a period of contact, they began to believe it. We gave them whatever we could offer to eat. One or two were very stubborn, and would not admit that their action was aggression. Because of our poor weapons and equipment, they
didn’t take us seriously. So we did some work to persuade them: we told them, “the US is far from Korea, but the Yalu river is the border between Korea and China. If you cannot accept this, let us settle it on the battlefield.” Always the problem was, how to win the battle with less advanced weapons than the enemy.’
¹⁸