Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (17 page)

One of “our boys,” the chief supplier of-war stories to the Martin family was a brother of my mother. Ed-ward O’Neal Logan had enlisted in the Alabama National Guard at sixteen, lying about his age, and had fought across a wide swath of the South-west Pacific during World War II with an infantry regiment and Sixth Army staff, as a guerrilla warfare and behind-the-lines intelligence officer. Slightly Oriental in appearance himself, he looked a little like Mao Zedong; he had inherited his distinctive looks from my grandfather, who occasionally cited a family legend that one of our ancestors was a Cherokee.

Logan was all fighting man, focused on his job of killing the enemy; cultural sensitivity was not, at the time, his strong suit. In one 1944 note home, accompanied by a photo showing him as a tanned and confident young island warrior, he had passed along a survival tip he evidently was obeying: “The only good Jap is a dead Jap.” Promoted to major at age twenty-two, he had signed up after the war to stay in the (much-reduced) regular army. From the Twenty-fourth Division’s base in Japan, Ed Logan got to Korea a few days ahead of his unit and headed for Taejon. The bulk of the undermanned, under-equipped Nineteenth Infantry Regiment, whose commander he served as operations and training officer (S-3), disembarked at the Pusan docks July 10 and headed north-west. Its assignment: try to hold the enemy at the Kum River north of Taejon.

Kim Il-sung wanted to “put the U.S. imperialists’ nose out of joint” by taking the city, according to an official biography. So Kim “mapped out a careful and meticulous operation to free Taejon, and led it in person.”
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That biography lies shamelessly about some verifiable aspects of the war, and other
sources do not mention Kim’s alleged role in leading the Taejon battle, which suggests it is just one more prevarication. Indeed, Yu Song-chol said Kim kept his headquarters in an underground bunker near Pyongyang—and during the entire war, as far as Yu knew, the premier visited the frontline command only once, when it was headquartered in the capitol building in Seoul.
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Nevertheless, if there was a time for homegrown tactics, such as those the anti-Japanese fighters, including Kim, had learned in Manchuria and elsewhere in China, one such time was mid-July of 1950. Yu said the Russian invasion planners were sent back home after their failure to match eastern front tank movements to the actual terrain.
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And the Chinese “volunteers” had not yet entered the war, with their own ideas of strategy and tactics. Recall further that, according to Kim’s memoirs, attacking the enemy’s rear while keeping the pressure on at the front had been a favorite tactic of his as early as the defense of Xiaowangqing in Manchuria, back in 1933. That tactic played an important role in the Korean People’s Army’s assault on Taejon—regardless of-whether it was Kim himself or one of his old partisan colleagues who personally came up with the battle plan.
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The Nineteenth Infantry Regiment had to defend forty-two miles of riverfront, a sector so large it normally would be assigned to the three regiments that comprise a full infantry division. Like the South Koreans, the Americans at first were literally and figuratively blown away by the North Koreans’ Soviet T-34 tanks. The behemoths destroyed all before them, were impregnable to most weapons the Americans had on hand and created “fear and frustration that is difficult to describe,” Logan would recall. “I used a 2.75-inch rocket launcher fired at less than fifty feet. Five rounds. They bounced off the wheels and the tank kept moving.”
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Air power helped, for a time, to bolster the thin line of Americans, in which there were wide gaps. On July 15, in an attempt to ward off an enemy night crossing of the river, American mortar and artillery fire and air strikes set ablaze a North Korean–held village on the other side, illuminating the riverfront. After the loss of a three-man U.S. Air Force radio team handling ground control of the pilots, however, there was no more close air support.

On July 16 and 17, the Americans got a sample of-what many of them came to describe as the North Korean forces’ “disregard for human life”—or, as the Northerners themselves would have put it, their fighting spirit. “We blew the bridge but they kept coming, over dead bodies,” an incredulous American machine gunner told Logan. “There must be three to four hundred bodies in the river at the major crossing and we are out of ammo.”

North Korean soldiers waded across the river and passed through gaps between positions held by the overextended Americans. Then the Northerners circled around behind the Nineteenth and blocked the main high-way—the Americans’ supply and exit route—three miles to the rear, where the road hugged a steep mountainside on one side, a precipice on the other. His
superiors wounded, Logan took command of an operation to try to break through or bypass what proved to be a mile-and-a-half-long roadblock enforced by North Korean soldiers firing down from the highlands above. A squad of North Koreans jumped the major, and four men with him were killed. He fell into the guts of one of his dead soldiers, head in the man’s bloody belly and played dead as enemy soldiers stuck bayonets in his rear to check his condition.

Rescued by some of his men, Logan got past the roadblock and found the division commander, Maj. Gen. William F. Dean. Dean sent Logan farther to the rear to establish a new position closer to Taejon, then organized an attempt to break through the blockage with two light tanks and four antiaircraft vehicles. The attempt failed. Some five hundred American infantrymen trapped between the roadblock and the river could escape only by climbing the mountains above the road. Some able-bodied men, detailed to carry the seriously wounded in litters, could not get far with them in the punishing terrain and had to abandon them on a mountaintop. North Korean troops soon came along and killed the wounded men.

The North Koreans who had jumped Logan made off-with his wallet, with pictures of my aunt Glennis and cousins Eddie and Dennis. A couple of days later, when the regiment was withdrawing south of Taejon for regrouping, war correspondent Marguerite Higgins of the New York
Herald Tribune
saw the major. “Thought you were dead,” she said. Higgins told him that “Seoul City Sue,” a former missionary who was broadcasting North Korean propaganda to the American troops, had announced the previous day that Glennis, Eddie and Dennis Logan would never see their husband and father again.

In late July and early August additional American ground divisions as well as air force units arrived to reinforce the beaten-up Twenty-fourth Division. The North Korean troops, having occupied most of the South, finally were halted at the Nakdong River in the southeast, paralyzed by U.S. air power. “Indiscriminate bombing created a situation in which the KPA could neither fight nor move during daylight,” recalled Yu Song-chol. Support from the rear became almost impossible. “As soon as the aircraft sound was heard, one could see the serious neurotic state in which the soldiers were terrified out of their wits. This carpet-bombing strategy struck a fatal blow to the KPA. However, it also inflicted tremendous damage on innocent civilians as well.”
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Despite the turn the war was taking because of air power, Kim Il-sung pressed his troops to capture Pusan, the southeastern port and South Korea’s second city. In an August 15 radio broadcast, he gave them a deadline, the end of August, explaining that “the longer this is delayed, the stronger UN defenses will become.” The ensuing ferocious attacks resulted in horrendous casualties on both sides before the North Koreans’ supplies ran short and they had to pull back.
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The Nineteenth Infantry Regiment was assigned to defend a western area of the Pusan perimeter. Casualties had reduced manpower of the regiment to only thirty or forty percent of what it should have been, as Logan recalled. Around the time Kim was goading his troops into renewed assaults, the Nineteenth got some four hundred replacement troops. American military personnel lists in Japan had been combed for anyone with any background in infantry armored or artillery units. So urgently were replacements needed, the army had not been able to divide those soldiers into the usual racially segregated units. Receiving them in a village schoolyard that was coming under sporadic artillery and mortar attacks, “we lined them up with the words, ‘This group to Company so-and-so,’” Logan told me. Guides took them to their companies, and thus occurred one of the earliest recorded cases of genuine black-white racial integration in an American combat unit.
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Within days, many of the replacements were dead. As in World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, “we had no records, just a name in the notebook.”

If the Lord was answering the prayers of Ken Pitts and others by watching over the Americans, the North Koreans were still “fighting for the leader,”
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Kim Il-sung, who by then had begun assuming deity status himself.

Mao Zedong and his Central Committee, nervously following the war from Beijing, began to fear in early August that the North Korean troops had “advanced too far in isolation, leaving their rear area vulnerable.” The United States “might launch a counteroffensive.” Later in August, Mao sent word to Kim through the North Korean representative in Beijing that Inchon was a likely spot for a UN amphibious landing. Kim reportedly-was unimpressed.
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Sure enough, however, with much of the North’s manpower concentrated on the Pusan perimeter, U.S. forces on September 15 carried out their momentous landing at Inchon,far behind the KPA lines. They encountered little resistance. Caught between two American forces,the North Koreans retreated,the Americans chasing them.

While acknowledging that the retreat was “a sore trial,” North Korean official accounts describe it as a “temporary strategic retreat.” The “iron-willed, brilliant commander” Kim Il-sung, they explain, “made up his mind to lure and scatter the enemy, throwing them into the confusion of a labyrinth, not hitting them in front as before.” To ensure that the trap would succeed, the KPAs main units “retreated at exhilarating speed.”
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That is not the way Kim’s operations bureau commander, Yu Song-chol, would tell it. After Inchon, the North Korean high command ordered
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that its forces around the Pusan perimeter hightail it all the way back to the 38th parallel and beyond; rather, Kim’s generals ordered a retreat only far enough to set up a new line of defense at South Korea’s Kum River Basin and the Sobaek Mountain range. However, according to Yu, “the entire KPA communications
network was in ruins, and we could not pass the retreat orders past the division level.”
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Breaking out of the Pusan perimeter, the Nineteenth Infantry got the assignment as the lead unit to retake Taejon—this time supported by American tanks and air cover. As the Nineteenth’s lead tanks passed them, the North Korean soldiers—far from establishing a new defense line at the Kum, scene of their earlier triumph—rapidly changed into white civilian garb and discarded their weapons. Faced with this tactic as they chased the KPA forces day and night, the Americans shot “anything that moved,” according to Logan, who by then was the regimental executive officer.
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When the Nineteenth reached the outskirts of Taejon, a South Korean policeman flagged down Logan’s jeep and said, “Hurry! Hurry! Americans being killed—buried alive at police station.” Lead elements of the column, including a couple of tanks, rushed to the police station and found a ditch there with arms and legs of American prisoners of war sticking out, some moving. “We got some out alive,” said Logan.

The previous day, while flying over the city in a light aircraft to recon-noiter, Logan had seen on hills north and north-west of Taejon the bodies of many other people, in multicolored clothing. He assumed that those were people the Northerners had killed as they retreated. It was impossible to get an accurate count from the air, but Logan estimated that the number of bodies exceeded two thousand. Later he heard a count of some five thousand victims of this massacre, mostly South Korean civilians.
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The UN forces retook Seoul on September 28. Fatefully but with little debate, Washington agreed to the proposal of the UN commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, not to stop there but to press on and take Pyongyang— a goal far beyond the original one of thwarting armed aggression. Reasons to keep going included the fear that Kim, if left to rule above the 38th parallel, would simply rebuild his army and strike again. Fatefully, the line that Beijing had decided to draw in the sand was the 38th parallel—not the Yalu River as was thought until Chinese documentary evidence clarified the matter in the 1990s. China tried to signal that it would fight if UN troops crossed the 38th. But the push north had gathered momentum and would not be stopped. MacArthur was golden after his brilliant coup at Inchon; hardly anyone was prepared to stand in his way now. Washington, in any event, would have been hard-pressed to stop Rhee from sending his South Korean troops north. Out to avenge their humiliation at the beginning of the war, the Southerners traveled night and day up the east coast in pursuit of the fleeing North Koreans. Two of their divisions took the port of Wonsan on October 10, way ahead of an invasion force that MacArthur was sending by sea.
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The UN forces pushed the North Koreans back above the former border
on October 1. MacArthur called on the North to surrender, and Kim Il-sung answered by ordering his troops to “fight to the end.”
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The Americans crossed the parallel in full force from October 9. Logan joined the pursuit, taking command of the Nineteenth Regiment’s Third Battalion a few days after his twenty-ninth birthday. With his battalion in the lead, the Twenty-fourth Division raced the First Cavalry Division north-ward. The first to reach a major road junction on the way to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, would become the lead division for the push north from there. Logan “missed it by about two hours.”