Read On Hallowed Ground Online
Authors: Robert M Poole
On Hallowed Ground (29 page)
“The march of another soldier is ended,” said Maj. Gen. Luther D. Miller, chief of Army chaplains: A few more words, a barking
of rifles, the solace of Taps, and they lowered General Pershing into the ground, where he was surrounded by the simple tombstones
of regular soldiers who still keep him company on the prominence now known as Pershing’s Hill.
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SINCE HIS BURIAL BENEATH the amphitheater terrace in 1921, The unknown of World War I had held the heights of Arlington in
undisputed solitude, representing the war to end all wars, as well as the hope that the first great clash of the twentieth
century would be the last. It was not, of course, but merely a forerunner of worse to come.
After Japan’s surrender in August 1945, belligerents emerged from the ruins of World War II, shook off the dust, and commenced
the hard work of recovery. Maps were redrawn, armies of occupation marched into place, schools and factories were painstakingly
rebuilt. War trials began, memorials were erected across Europe, and search parties went forth to find and retrieve the dead
from distant lands. It was a time for contemplating the enormity of what had transpired, a time for setting things right again.
In the United States, that meant welcoming returning veterans, heading back to work, starting families, and planning suitable
honors for the unlucky ones who never made it home.
Following precedent from the First World War, legislation was introduced in September 1945 to have an unknown serviceman from
World War II brought to Arlington, where he would rest beside his comrade from the earlier conflict. The measure, signed into
law by President Harry S. Truman in June 1946, called for this Unknown to be installed at Arlington no later than May 30,
1951, for Memorial Day celebrations. Given the global reach of the recent hostilities and the devastation they produced, the
secretary of war allowed five years for recovery missions, an act of devotion barely begun before it had to be called off.
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A new war had intervened, forestalling efforts to clean up from the last one. On June 25, 1950, some 90,000 North Korean troops
plowed across the 38th parallel in a surprise assault on South Korea, a U.S. ally. The offensive against the Republic of Korea,
encouraged by Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, raised fears in Washington that Communists intended to fill the Asian power vacuum created by the collapse of Japan.
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This prospect caused President Truman to divert occupying troops from Japan, mobilize forces at home, ask for reinforcements
from the newly established United Nations, and rush them to defend South Korea.
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Thus began the three-year conflict described by historian S. L. A. Marshall as “the century’s nastiest little war,” fought
on forbidding mountain terrain, often in freezing conditions, against a numerically superior enemy. While keen to answer the
Communist thrust in Asia, President Truman worried that all-out war in Korea might spark a larger conflict with the Soviet
Union, which had just exploded its first nuclear weapons. He hoped for a short, limited war on the Korean peninsula—so limited,
in fact, that he preferred not to use the three-letter word for armed conflict; the Korean intervention was not a war but
a police action, Truman announced, embracing the polite language of the United Nations, even as he summoned thousands of Americans
for combat.
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Whatever one called the Korean adventure, it proved costly: by the time a truce suspended hostilities in July 1953, more than
36,576 American service members had been killed,
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along with 415,000 South Korean combatants and an estimated 1.5 million North Korean and Chinese soldiers.
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Despite its steep cost in lives, the Korean war resulted in a stalemate: After North Korea’s dramatic opening assault, which
left UN forces and the 8th U.S. Army teetering on the southeastern edge of the peninsula, the allies rallied; in September
1950, they launched a daring amphibious assault behind enemy lines at Inchon, while the 8th Army broke out of the Pusan Perimeter
and ground its way toward North Korea. By October 26, the allies had overrun Pyongyang; just before Halloween they reached
the Yalu River on the Chinese border. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commanding the combined allied forces from headquarters in Tokyo,
assumed that the war would end then and there. He was wrong.
By November 1950, China had joined the fight, sending hundreds of thousands of its soldiers into North Korea near Unsan. These
forces, combined with those from North Korea, made up in numbers what they lacked in modern equipment. They pushed south,
driving allied troops before them, regaining Pyongyang, overcoming fierce Marine resistance around the Chosin Reservoir, and
breaking across the 38th parallel by the end of the year. They retook Seoul in January 1951.
Then the tide of war turned again: UN troops, reinforced from the United States, rallied, secured Seoul, fought their way
north, and pushed enemy forces back across the 38th parallel. This time the line held, but to what end? Neither side could
claim decisive victory: the North had been unable to unify the country as a Communist whole; the South had repelled the North,
but had failed to make it part of a fledgling democracy; the border between the two countries remained essentially where it
had been at the outset of hostilities, but with a demilitarized zone interposed between warring parties.
Summing up the Korean experience in
The Coldest Winter
, the late David Halberstam described the war as “a puzzling gray, very distant conflict, a war that went on and on and on,
seemingly without hope or resolution.”
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Opposing armies advanced, retreated, reappeared, and melted away. Positions were overrun and abandoned, only to change hands
again in the following months; some places shifted ownership two or three times in the course of the war, which not only changed
the way the United States fought through the unsettled, oscillating conflict but also revolutionized how the nation cared
for its war dead. In the two previous wars of the twentieth century, American forces had concentrated their fallen combatants
in temporary cemeteries within allied lines, with the understanding that the graves would be opened, its occupants identified,
and the dead properly reburied or repatriated as soon as the fighting stopped.
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This practice proved impossible in Korea. In some cases, enemy forces pressed forward so swiftly and in such overwhelming
numbers that the allied dead had to be hurriedly abandoned where they had fallen. In another instance, workers in Inchon unearthed
the UN cemetery, hustled more than 800 dead to a waiting ship, and steamed for Japan—and safety—just two hours before Chinese
forces swooped down on the city. Living soldiers sometimes competed for space with the dead on evacuation transports, which
were in short supply in the war’s early stages. “When they ran out of truck-bed space, they laid the dead on fenders, across
hoods, tied on the barrels of artillery pieces,” a marine private recalled.
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Even when circumstances allowed for orderly retreat and burial in temporary cemeteries, a number of these graveyards were
overrun as North Korean and Chinese troops pushed south, stripping the dead of boots and other equipment as they went. Dog
tags, taken as trophies of war, disappeared in the back-and-forth struggle for the Pusan Perimeter, where the number of unknowns
soared as a result. As the first months of war drew to a close, it was obvious that the United States needed to rethink its
recovery methods to meet realities in Korea.
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That rethinking, just under way as Christmas of 1950 approached, was jump-started by the sudden death of Lt. Gen. Walton H.
“Johnnie” Walker, commander of the 8th U.S. Army, on December 23, 1950. As allied forces edged their way back toward North
Korea that winter, the hard-charging Walker, known for racing around to check on his troops, had sped north of Seoul on icy
roads. He urged his driver into a passing lane and into the path of an oncoming truck. The general’s jeep swerved and flipped
into a ditch, killing Walker—just in time to rescue his reputation.
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Although credited with leading UN troops on their breakout from the Pusan Perimeter that autumn, Walker was also blamed in part for the enemy’s early success in Korea. Criticized for advancing too cautiously, he was second-guessed and undermined by MacArthur’s command in Tokyo; indeed, in the weeks before his accident, Walker had been convinced that his days in Korea were numbered and that he would be relieved of command. When death released him from the war at age sixty-one, it not only silenced his critics but also earned him a hero’s homecoming at Arlington.
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Promoted to four-star rank in death, Walker was showered with honors. A special Air Force Constellation was summoned to take
the general’s body to Washington. The lordly MacArthur turned out to pay respects when the funeral party stopped in Tokyo. Lt. Gen. James S. Van Fleet, commander
of the 2nd Army, met the plane in Philadelphia, where Walker’s widow came aboard and an honor guard of military police stood
vigil. Uniformed pallbearers took up the general’s flag-covered casket in Washington, bore him past a ceremonial guard of fifty soldiers with fixed bayonets, and saw him safely to Fort Myer on New Year’s Eve,
there to await services on January 2, 1951. That day broke clear and cold at Arlington, where many of Walker’s old comrades
came to see him off, their gathering constituting a who’s who of World War II luminaries: Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Secretary
of Defense George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff Gen. Omar N. Bradley—all marched behind Walker’s new four-star flag as his horse-drawn
caisson creaked down McPherson Drive, past the Confederate Memorial, past the graves of men of the U.S.S.
Maine
, past the tombs of Moses Ezekiel, James Parks, Thomas Selfridge, and all the nameless ranks from the old wars. The procession
came to a halt on Pershing’s Hill in Section 34, where Eisenhower and the old lions filed into position, formed an honor cordon,
and snapped off their salutes. Unseen howitzers, tucked away in the hills, pounded out a seventeen-gun tribute, just as an
Episcopal priest prayed for permanent peace and Gen. Walton H. Walker was settled into the ground.
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Because of Walker’s prominence and his recent promotion, his funeral was well covered by the press. Wire services had tracked
the Constellation’s progress from Korea. The
New York Times
prominently displayed a photograph of Eisenhower and other famous mourners at graveside.
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All hailed Walker as a hero. Few begrudged the tribute, but his high-profile treatment touched a raw nerve among ordinary
citizens whose wartime sufferings had passed without much notice. “I’d like to know if a soldier’s high rank made him better
to be brought home right away for a safe burial,” a sergeant’s widow wrote President Truman three days after Walker’s funeral.
“If I had my way, and could get to Korea, I’d accompany my husband’s body home … I’ve been very bitter about all this,
and there are a lot of others who feel this way … When I look around and see what little it matters to the big guys, that
my daughters have lost a father, I can’t help the bitterness.”
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More families chimed in, calling for the return of their loved ones.“I am one of the many mothers with a personal grudge
toward you,” Norma Potter wrote Truman from Cheboygan, Michigan. “My son is gone. I can do nothing about it,” she wrote. “But
I can and will find out somehow where his body is and if possible I will get his personal things.”
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Deara Eartbawey pleaded with Maj. Gen. Henry H. Vaughan, a military aide to Truman, to send her dead son from Korea. “I want
my boy buried where he was born in Boston with his father,” she wrote.“That’s the least I could do is to give him a decent burial and that’s the least the army could
do to help me find my boy.”
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If the nation could bring a general home, families argued, it could do the same for the privates and sergeants dying in Korea.
Prodded by this outpouring of public sentiment and faced with combat conditions which made American cemeteries vulnerable
in Korea, the United States quickly adopted a new policy of “concurrent return,” which meant that the nation’s war dead would
be collected on the battlefield, transported to Japan, and shipped home for timely burial. This new policy, announced by George
Marshall in March 1951, made the Korean conflict the first in which America’s dead were repatriated during active hostilities,
a practice continued with each subsequent war.
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In time, the image of flag-covered caskets arriving at bases in the United States would become the symbol of unpopular wars,
from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, but at midcentury the practice of concurrent return was lauded by the press and by families
alike.
The return of dead sons and husbands helped loved ones adjust to the loss. President Truman, excoriated for the government’s
laggard response early in the war, now was praised for bringing relatives home for burial.
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As the first funeral ships arrived in the port of Oakland in the spring of 1951, newspapers noted the historic nature of
the moment with approval. Not only were the dead being returned in wartime, but their treatment reflected the multiplicity
of America’s fighting forces: the caskets of enlisted men and officers were stowed side by side on shipboard without regard
to race or rank, proof that the nation had recovered its sense of democratic propriety, briefly undermined by the handling
of General Walker’s funeral.
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The Korean conflict, launched with broad public support, lost popular backing as the war of containment dragged on with no
clear sign that success was at hand. In the days after Walker’s funeral, a national survey showed that more than 60 percent
of Americans favored withdrawal from the peninsula. It was not the sort of war the United States was accustomed to fighting.
Truman’s popularity sank, and Korea became known as the forgotten war, fought on obscure terrain under restrictive conditions.
“It is murder to send boys to fight with their hands tied by your ‘limited police action,’” the mother of a dead airman scolded
the president in 1951. “Have you forgotten how America fights?”
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