The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (60 page)

The date was first pushed back to November 20, then to November 24. On that morning, Walker joined MacArthur as the latter visited the different Eighth Army headquarters, but he had none of the optimism of his superior, who, in front of the various wire service reporters accompanying him, made one of several home-before-Christmas statements. The most memorable was at Ninth Corps headquarters, where John Coulter, the corps commander, told him how little resistance his troops were meeting. MacArthur answered: “You can tell them that when they get up to the Yalu, Jack, they can all come home. I want to make good my statement that they will get Christmas dinner at home.” Then he flew off, telling his pilot to pass over the Manchurian border and let him survey the area.

When MacArthur flew off, he left Walker behind on the airstrip. It was not a good moment for the Eighth Army commander. His forces were going forward, and he was very unhappy about it—they were cut off from Tenth Corps on the east, they were spread too thin, and the farther north they ventured, the thinner they were. Only a ROK Corps protected their eastern flank. It was a very good time to be nervous. Walker watched MacArthur’s plane take off, and then in front of both Tyner and Lynch, he simply said, “Bullshit.” It stunned them both, first because Walker never challenged MacArthur, and second because he
never
used profanity. They were about to fly back to Pyongyang when Walker suddenly decided he wanted to visit the nearby Twenty-fourth Division headquarters. There, he sought out Major General John Church, the division commander, and took him aside. His message was for Colonel Dick Stephens, the commander of the Twenty-first Infantry Regiment, a unit that would be leading the division in the drive north, “You tell Dick the first time he smells Chinese chow to pull back immediately.”

But the euphoria only grew in Tokyo. When elements of the Seventeenth Regiment of the Seventh Division reached the Yalu on November 21, there was a celebratory moment—a curiously innocent one. All the senior officers, including Almond and the Seventh Division commander, Dave Barr, the old China adviser, got to piss in the river. MacArthur, victory obviously at hand now, sent Almond a radio message. “Heartiest congratulations, Ned,” it said, “and tell Dave Barr the Seventh Division hit the jackpot.” To the men in the Seventeenth Regiment who were on point, and who spent their first night along the Yalu dealing with temperatures that dipped to thirty below, it was a horror. In the rush to the Yalu, Lightning Joe Collins, the Army chief of staff, later wrote, “MacArthur seemed to march like a Greek hero of old to an unkind and inexorable fate.” Or as Matt Ridgway put it, employing the most tragic analogy any American officer could use, “Like Custer at the Little Big Horn [MacArthur] had neither eyes nor ears for information that might deter him from the swift attainment of his objective—the destruction of the North Korean People’s Army, and the pacification of the entire peninsula.” For Geoffrey Perret, the MacArthur biographer who wrote that the Inchon landing had been the general’s greatest stroke of genius, the rest was pure tragedy. “The most fitting conclusion to MacArthur’s life would have been to die a soldier’s death in the waters off Inchon at the height of his glory, with his legend not simply intact, but magnified beyond even his florid imaginings. There was only one way it could go from here—down.”

SO THE MEN
of the Dai Ichi had doctored the intelligence in order to permit MacArthur’s forces to go where they wanted to go militarily, to the banks of the Yalu. In the process they were setting the most dangerous of precedents for those who would follow them in office. In this first instance it was the military that had played with the intelligence, or more accurately, one rogue wing of the military deliberately manipulating the intelligence it sent to the senior military men and civilians back in Washington. The process was to be repeated twice more in the years to come, both subsequent times with the civilians manipulating the military, with the senior military men reacting poorly in their own defense and thereby placing the men under their command in unacceptable combat situations. (The title of a book by one talented young officer, H. R. McMaster, studying how the senior military had been snookered by the senior civilians’ pressures during Vietnam, was
Dereliction of Duty
.) All of this reflected something George Kennan warned about, the degree to which domestic politics had now become a part of national security calculations, and it showed the extent to which the American government had begun to make fateful decisions based on the most limited of truths and the most deeply
flawed intelligence in order to do what it wanted to do for political reasons, whether it would work or not. In 1965, the government of Lyndon Johnson manipulated the rationale for sending combat troops to Vietnam, exaggerating the threat posed to America by Hanoi, deliberately diminishing any serious intelligence warning of what the consequences of American intervention in Vietnam would be (and how readily and effectively the North Vietnamese might counter the American expeditionary force), and thereby committing the United States to a hopeless, unwinnable post-colonial war in Vietnam. Then in 2003, the administration of George W. Bush—improperly reading what the end of the Russian empire might mean in the Middle East; completely miscalculating the likely response of the indigenous people; and ignoring the warnings of the most able member of the George H. W. Bush national security team, Brent Scowcroft; and badly wanting for its own reasons to take down the government of Saddam Hussein—manipulated the Congress, the media, the public, and most dangerously of all, itself, with seriously flawed and doctored intelligence, and sent troops into the heart of Iraqi cities with disastrous results.

C
APTAIN JIM HINTON,
the commander of the Thirty-eighth Tank Company, which was part of the Second Division, and which contained twenty-two tanks, had been nervous from the start. The difference between reality as headquarters in Tokyo imagined it and the North Korea he saw as the Second Division moved north stunned him. In the Dai Ichi Building, Korea was a distant, somewhat orderly, generally manageable place, a map that you could pin to the wall, where the distances were not that great and divisions were only a half inch or an inch away from each other; whereas out here, as he led the Second Division toward the Chongchon River, it was more like an unmanageable military hell, hills turning out to be mountains, winds blowing ever harder, temperatures dropping almost by the hour, every day bitterly cold, except that the next day would be even colder, and make you long for the cold of yesterday. Keeping his tanks alive and functioning in this weather was a job in itself. He had a terrible fear that the cold would get his machines, that at the moment they were most desperately needed the engines would simply refuse to start. His unit had what they called a Little Joe, a generator that could keep the tank batteries charged. But its operation made a hell of a lot of noise, noise that seemed to carry forever, and so Hinton did not like to use it if he could help it. He decided instead to have someone start each engine once an hour, just to keep them all charged. God, it was cold! Sometimes, even when the engines started, the tank wouldn’t move because the treads were frozen right to the ground. Then, you would have to get another tank to give it a friendly little tank-shove. He wondered if the big boys whose lives were centered around the Dai Ichi Building and who had sent them up here ever imagined anything like that back where the weather was always cool enough in summer and warm enough in winter, controllable, with the lightest flick of a finger. Certainly, their commander knew nothing about the world they had been plunged into. MacArthur—as many of the troops who specialized in ironies knew—had never spent a night in the field in Korea. The men at the Dai Ichi, Hinton thought, were men of maps, fighting a different war in a different place. The maps had their own
distortions, and they were almost invariably benign ones to the men looking at them, making their orders look more doable—more rational—than they really were. Nothing in the Army, the men in the field liked to say, moved as quickly as a Dai Ichi grease pencil across a Dai Ichi map. Communication links from headquarters down to the division level might seem reasonably good, especially given that this Army represented the most technologically advanced nation on the planet, but the actual equipment proved relatively primitive and shockingly unreliable to the men who were in the smaller units, so isolated from one another.

It had just been too quiet, Hinton thought as they moved up. There had been a few little firefights, but they were always followed by the silence, and the silence had its own corollary of fear—it was the almost unnatural silence of complete isolation. Hinton, a veteran tanker, had been going up in a small L-19 spotter plane for several days looking for signs of the enemy, but he could never see a thing. Gradually the quiet and the emptiness came to bother him, as it had bothered some of the more experienced men just before the Eighth Cav was hit at Unsan. The most important question the night before the Chinese actually struck in late November, he remembered, was whether it was a boots-on or a boots-off sleeping period. Boots-on, he decided. “We were more and more isolated, more and more cut off every day,” Hinton recalled, “and thus more and more vulnerable. Each day that we went out we were more spread out, and further from other units. The isolation was from our own people—not just from other divisions supposedly on our flanks but from the people in our own division, from regiment to regiment, and in the regiment, from battalion to battalion, and company to company. We knew we were at someone else’s mercy, that is, we had to
hope
the Chinese were not coming in. It was an eerie feeling—the terrain seemed to be swallowing us up. As a division we seemed to be disappearing into the vast landscape.” If the enemy struck, Hinton and many others were aware, it was going to be exceedingly hard to close and form a tight defensive fist. It was an offensive, he later decided, that might well have been planned for the Americans by the Chinese themselves.

LIEUTENANT PAUL O’DOWD
was a forward observer with the Fifteenth Field Artillery; most of the time, though, he was moved back and forth to different units, and he had been attached to the Ninth Regiment of the Second Infantry Division. He was one of the few American officers who knew what had happened at Unsan, that the Chinese had whacked an elite American regiment. Now, as the Americans moved north of Pyongyang, O’Dowd was flying regularly in a tiny observation plane looking for signs of the Chinese, trying to
answer the question of where they had gone after their first strike at Unsan. One day they had hammered the Americans, and then they had disappeared. O’Dowd liked to pride himself on his eyesight. You needed good vision to be a forward observer; but his pal, Valdez, who flew the spotter plane and was a captain, had even better eyesight, vision like a hawk. Valdez was as idiosyncratic as he was gifted: if they took ground fire and a couple rounds hit the plane, when Valdez got back to base he would check out the plane for bullet holes, and whenever he found one, he would paint a purple heart around it. Later, Valdez could spot the Chinese at a great distance at moments when O’Dowd could see nothing. Yet right after Unsan, day after day passed as they scoured the countryside without a trace of them. Their little plane had no heat, and for better visibility they would sometimes open its door, so they were constantly stone-cold frozen—and still they saw nothing. It was amazing, O’Dowd thought; an entire army had disappeared. Sometimes Valdez would see what looked to him like footprints in the snow, and they would come down really low and there
were
footprints, which seemed to lead to a hut. So they would call in fire on the hut, but when the shells came in there would be no one there. Later they would find out from their intelligence people that the Chinese had white parkas, and on the rare occasion that the Americans flew over Chinese soldiers, they would lie down on their stomachs, not move, and the spotters in the plane would miss the sighting, great eyesight or not. In those days, Colonel Charles (Chin) Sloane, the Ninth Regiment’s commander, was very involved in their aerial recon, very much aware of how dangerous it was. When they came in from three or four hours of spotting, he would often have some hot chocolate for them as he anxiously awaited news of the Chinese. Long, cold days, O’Dowd thought, and not a single Chinese soldier to show for it. Yet O’Dowd was absolutely sure they were out there. They had to be. It made men like Sloane very nervous: an army that has just torn one of your best units apart vanishes from the very face of the earth.

It was getting on the nerves of people back at Division headquarters too. John Carley was a young captain in G-3, operations; just five years out of West Point, he had become an officer too late to be part of World War II. Now he was getting his own much smaller war, but it was as much war as any man might want. Though the Second Division had not had any significant encounters with Chinese troops, there was a steady flow of information coming into its G-2 shop about other units meeting up with them. The questions on his mind and that of so many intelligence officers were: Where had they gone to? If they had appeared once in such large numbers so suddenly, might they not do it again? They were moving into what the Koreans called Tiger Country, presumably because tigers had once actually lived there. The mountains surrounding them
were enormous. In late November, the cold cracked the windshield on the small observation plane Carley often used for reconnaissance. Worse, sometime in late November, probably around the twentieth, a constant blue haze obscured the landscape and never seemed to lift. Carley was no weather expert, but he had seen a comparable haze as a young man in Richton, Mississippi, when he had gone hunting with friends on cold mornings and they had set fires to keep warm. He later decided that Chinese patrols had been setting massive fires all over the region to limit American air surveillance. He and the other younger officers in the G-2 and G-3 shops were painfully aware of how fragile their supply lines were, and that the division was moving north on a narrow gravel road with sharp curves that twisted and turned. Such roads were perfect sites for ambushes. “You had to know how vulnerable we were,” he said years later, “that we were way out on a limb and seemed to be getting further out every day, the limb less able to support us each day.”

THE ONE SENIOR
officer who seemed to share his anxieties was Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Foster, the Second Division G-2. Foster was a meticulous man, immune to pressures from those above him, and like Carley, his sense of anxiety was mounting daily. It had started in early November, and he had become, by the middle of the month, a kind of Division worrywart. Their maps showed the north side of the Yalu pockmarked with red flags for Chinese divisions, and then the Chinese had struck at Unsan. Dutch Keiser, the division commander, did not share his fears. Malcolm MacDonald, a young captain who worked in Foster’s G-2 shop, found his boss increasingly frustrated by his inability to reach Keiser. The men in the intelligence section were aware of the immense pressure on him from higher headquarters to push forward. But to Foster it felt as if someone was out there watching them and waiting for just the right moment to strike. “You could feel the tension in the headquarters,” he said. “We sensed something terrible was going to happen, but we couldn’t get anyone to act on it.”

IN EARLY NOVEMBER,
Second Lieutenant Sam Mace, who commanded the Fourth Platoon of the Thirty-eighth Tank Company in the Second Division, the unit under Jim Hinton, took his men, his tanks, and some extra infantrymen on a long recon patrol. By then they had moved well north of Pyongyang. Mace liked to remember it as the day of the music. It had begun in relatively routine fashion. There was a brief firefight with some North Korean soldiers, but the superior firepower of the tanks overcame the Koreans relatively easily. About eight Koreans were captured, all but one wounded. Mace’s men bandaged the wounded, tied up the man who wasn’t, left them all in a hut, and
headed north to complete their original mission. So far it had all been routine enough, but then two things happened that startled Mace and made someone normally cautious and careful even more so. Being cautious, Sam Mace liked to think, was why he was still alive. Jim Hinton, his company commander, thought Mace was a truly great soldier, quite possibly the best soldier he had ever served with. He could do anything, fix anything, and adapt to any circumstance. He was physically remarkable, and never seemed to tire, which was important because you could not turn yourself on and off in combat based on your body’s natural preferences. And he was as smart as he was strong. Mace was a lifer, and Hinton had been pushing him for several years to become an officer, but he always held back, fearing, Hinton was sure, having to compete with college graduates, while all he had was a fourth-grade education. He had been seriously wounded in the Naktong fighting, taken to a hospital where seventy-eight pieces of shrapnel were found in his back, so many that the nurses had held a pool betting on what the final count would be. He had been in a fetal position when the shrapnel hit and that, Mace decided, had been his good luck. While Mace was in the hospital, Hinton had just gone ahead with the paperwork to make him an officer, and when Mace came back to the unit, he found himself a lieutenant. He accepted the change in no small part because he was tired of dealing with officers, Hinton exempted, who did not know a goddamn thing about war and still looked down on you because of your rank—and then, of course, there were the benefits that officers got and enlisted men could only dream of. When the Chinese struck his unit on November 25, he had been an officer for thirty-six hours.

Sam Mace felt he had been through it all. As a boy during the Depression he had grown up in West Virginia, the poorest part of a country in a very poor time. His father had been hexed from the start, a West Virginian without an education, but even worse, a man who could not work in the mines, the one place where poor West Virginians could get work, because he was claustrophobic. He was always in search of work, an itinerant man forced to go from small town to small town with his family, taking the poorest-paying jobs available, if in fact anything was available. That was why Sam Mace’s schooling had stopped in the fourth grade; they had lived in too many towns too small to have schools. No wonder he had jumped at a chance to try the Army and had enlisted in 1939, at fifteen. In those days, he said, they would take anyone.

Mace had been a tanker in the days when the changeover from horses to tanks was just beginning. Being a soldier was something he had excelled at from the start, but he was also a bit wild in those early days and so his rank fluctuated constantly between sergeant and corporal, depending on his off-duty behavior. Sam Mace liked to say that he was one of the great American
authorities on ambushes, because he had been in three spectacular ones: the one up at Kunuri had probably been the granddaddy of them all, but the Battle of the Bulge in World War II was fairly close to being an ambush and, if so, was certainly a finalist, and he had been there, and there was a terrible one still to come at a place the Americans called Massacre Valley, in mid-February 1951. The Battle of the Bulge stayed with him: he had been with an American armored unit that had been fat and happy, about twenty miles northeast of a place called Bastogne, back in December 1944, all of the men around him sure the war was already over, when the Germans struck. He remembered how thick the fog was at the time. He was a corporal then, newly busted down from sergeant, and they were right smack in the way of the German Panzers.