The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (68 page)

By the time Keiser sent out his weakened battalions of the Ninth Regiment to help clear the sides of the road south, the Chinese had moved to within a mile of his headquarters and had fire positions over a full six-or seven-mile stretch of the road. They were already dug in on the high ground and would have been hard to dislodge even by fresh troops with plenty of fire support. The Chinese might not have heavy weapons, just mortars and machine guns, but they were good with those mortars, and their burp guns threw out a lot of fire at close range—it was, by the testimony of a good many American officers, the best basic infantry weapon in Korea. It lacked the accuracy of the M-1 rifle or the carbine, but it provided a lot more firepower a lot more quickly. The burp gun was a formidable weapon in that war: it sounded, said Captain Hal Moore (eventually a three-star general), “like a can of marbles when you shook them, but on full automatic it sprayed a lot of bullets and most of the killing in Korea was done at very close range and it was done quickly—a matter of who responded faster. In situations like that it outclassed and outgunned what we had. A close-in patrol fight was over very quickly and usually we lost because of it.”

Keiser had started the day by trying to clear the ridges on both sides of the road, assigning two battalions from the Ninth Regiment to do the job (one for each side of the road). But he overestimated the strength of the now ravaged Ninth—both units, according to Alan Jones, were at less than half strength, at most 300 men in a battalion that should have had at least 800 to 850 men—and quite likely fewer who were truly able-bodied. No one was sure of the numbers, but it was possible that they had started the day with a division of Chinese covering the road, and more arriving as the hours wore on.

The Second Battalion of the Ninth Infantry Regiment, commanded by Major Cesidio (Butch) Barberis, had been hit repeatedly by the Chinese since the twenty-fifth, probably harder than any other infantry battalion in the division. By the end of the first day of the Chinese attack, George Company of the Second Battalion, which normally had around two hundred men, had had seventy-three either killed or wounded, while E Company was down to a handful of men. All
of Barberis’s men were exhausted—in the first three days of fighting his men had crossed the Chongchon four times. He had received a significant whiskey ration before the Chinese struck, and each time his men made it across the river, he would insist that they change their socks and then he would give them a shot of whiskey right then and there, and a second one for their canteens. By the time Barberis and his men had reached Kunuri, Barberis, though still commanding, had been wounded, and had about 150 of his original 970 men—the number he’d had when he had first crossed the Chongchon—available to fight. That pathetic little unit was now designated to drive a large, well-entrenched Chinese force off one of the ridgelines.

It wasn’t going to happen. Long before he reached his assembly point, Barberis looked up and saw movement on the high ground in the distance. He got on the radio and asked who was up on the ridgeline. The ROKs, he was told. He looked through his field glasses and noted two machine guns, as he put it, “looking down my throat.” Colonel Sloane, the regimental commander who had sent Barberis to the ridgeline, had been told earlier in the day that there might be two Chinese companies up there. Instead, according to Malcolm MacDonald, the intelligence officer, it was minimally two regiments, around six thousand men. Now Barberis called Sloane and told him, “I’m four thousand yards from my assembly area and I see enemy positions. I think I’ve got my tit in a wringer.” Then the Chinese machine guns opened up. “All hell broke loose,” Barberis said. His unit was quickly attacked from the other side of the road as well. He called Sloane, who told him to come back for a conference. Then the Chinese struck with mortars, and Barberis was wounded for the second time. The retreat down the road south had barely begun, and the road was already littered with the dead and with disabled vehicles.

IT WAS DUTCH
Keiser himself who told Captain Jim Hinton, the company commander of the Thirty-eighth Tank Company, to take his tanks and lead the way south. Hinton had his tanks lined up at the very head of the column when Keiser walked up to him and said, “We’ve got a little roadblock down there, about two hundred or four hundred yards deep. Do you think you can get through?” Hinton answered—thinking almost the moment the words were out of his mouth what a smart-ass he was, thirty-five years old and cocky as hell. “Well, General, I’ve been running roadblocks for five days, so I guess I can run another one.” Privately, Hinton had grave doubts about going south. He had done his own recon two or three miles down the Anju road, the one that went out west, that many of the officers wanted to try, and it looked open to him. It was, for a Korean road, not bad, if anything even a little wider than most. The one thing he understood in the midst of all the uncertainty was that
the men giving the orders that day had no earthly idea of what they were doing. The roadblock that Keiser had mentioned to him, allegedly about two hundred to four hundred yards long, was in reality several miles long.

Hinton decided to use Sam Mace to lead the convoy—an easy choice, for Mace was his best man. So he ordered Mace to take his five tanks and clear the road south to Sunchon. They started out, Mace up front, and Hinton in a jeep two or three vehicles back, followed by more tanks and then infantry loaded up on big deuce-and-a-half trucks. They had gone several hundred yards when the Chinese opened up from both sides. Hinton was immediately hit in the wrist. His exec officer called in and said that they were sitting ducks out there, and Hinton replied that no one had to tell a sitting duck that it was a sitting duck. So he amended his order to Mace. It was now How Able, or in translatable, basic English, Haul Ass. A roadblock of four hundred yards at most, the hell you say, Hinton thought bitterly. This one looked like it went on forever. They had walked right into one of the largest ambushes in American military history.

Mace thought the exact same thing. He had been told that when he headed south he was to clear the enemy out and then meet up with a British armored unit that was heading north. Well, a small roadblock, he could take care of that. But the road was a skinny one. It was immediately apparent that it could easily be blocked by just one disabled tank or overturned heavy truck. There was a high bank on the eastern side that might have been designed for a prolonged ambush. Mace’s five tanks were to lead a convoy interspersed with trucks and with some infantrymen riding on top of the tanks to help control the road and suppress, if need be, Chinese fire from the high ground. From the start, Mace’s tanks took heavy fire from the hillside. It was a slow, wildly dangerous start-and-stop process, of letting the infantrymen off the tanks and then firing back to suppress Chinese fire; Mace had a profound sense of foreboding that he and his men had somehow become bit players in a script written by the enemy.

Among the infantrymen was Lieutenant Charley Heath of the Thirty-eighth Regiment. About a quarter mile into the journey, Mace came upon an abandoned M-39 vehicle blocking the road. There had already been other vehicles in their way, and Mace had been able to tank-doze them off to the side. The M-39 was big and its tracks were locked. But Mace was one of those men who seemed to know how to do everything. He yelled out for someone to unlock the tracks, and Charley Heath suddenly appeared, a target for every Chinese soldier on the heights. That’s a good man, Mace thought, and he yelled out instructions on how to move the levers to release the tracks. Out of that moment came a lifelong friendship begun in what both thought was a curious place, on that god-awful, narrow road, the Chinese firing away from both sides, men getting killed all around them. Heath felt like bait for the Chinese until finally he got the levers
right and the wheels released, and Mace smashed the M-39 to the side. On the way back to his tank, Heath suffered a concussion when an American fighter-bomber dropped a rocket a bit too close, and soon he could barely see because his eyes began to bleed from the effect of the explosion. Still, he had made it to the M-39 and back alive. Lucky Charley, he had thought to himself, at least so far.

A little later, Mace swung his tank around a sharp curve and almost froze. There ahead of him, about three miles away by his reckoning, he could see the section of the road called The Pass. Here, for about five hundred yards, the road had been cut through what appeared to be one large hill. The banks on
both
sides were very sharp and steep—and the passage was exceedingly tight. As he got closer, it seemed as if any enemy soldier on either side could almost reach out and touch the American vehicles. If the Chinese knocked out even one or two of them in The Pass, Mace thought they might be able to stop this already cumbersome American convoy from getting out. As he finally drove his tank into The Pass, he wondered for an instant if it might not be the last thing he would ever do in his life. But to his surprise, the world did not explode.

The Pass was already littered with vehicles—the ruins of the Turkish convoy that had been torn apart the day before—the carcasses of jeeps, weapons carriers, two-and-a-half-ton trucks, a grand trail of useless metal that the Chinese could now use against the Americans. Mace did not know whether he was more scared or angry at that moment, because this wreckage clearly had been there some time and no one had said a thing about it. Where the hell had any aerial recon been? he wondered. Corps had lots of spotter planes. Why hadn’t Division known on its own? So he cleared the road as best he could. It was a miserable, dangerous job, but he was lucky, he thought later—though if there were such a thing as real luck, he wouldn’t have been in Korea at all—the Chinese had not yet filled in positions on either side of the road, and so the firing was lighter than it would be later in the day. Mace and another tank driver rammed everything in sight out of the way, maybe thirty or forty vehicles. If they hadn’t, the disaster that day might have been immeasurably worse. As he finished trying to clear the area, Mace wondered briefly why Keiser had not sent one of his own men along and used Mace’s tank as a recon vehicle, or at least had a light spotter plane flying overhead. When they finally pushed through, Mace and his men were the only members of the Second Division who knew just how dangerous the road south was—how many Chinese were already gathered there, with at least forty machine guns, he was sure, as well as countless mortars trained on the road. He knew as well that the British were not going to be of any help—but there was no way to get word back to Keiser’s headquarters because his tank radio did not connect with Keiser’s. It was the perfect preamble for the disaster still to come.

Mace found an American and British position just to the south of The Pass. Some of the Americans felt that the British had not tried very hard to fight their way through, and the British in turn felt that the Americans were expecting them to work miracles. An American colonel rushed over and told Mace to turn his tanks around and go back, but he answered no way, there was just no room on the road. He had done his best to clear it. Then he watched the convoy dribble through ever more slowly, the noise from the battle becoming louder as ever more Chinese manned The Pass with ever heavier weapons. Some of the Americans who emerged alive after coming through The Pass seemed so badly shaken that to Mace they appeared more like the living dead. What had been for a time a small hell was in the process of becoming a very big hell, he thought.

CAPTAIN ALAN JONES,
the Ninth Regiment’s S-2, had watched the day turn into a nightmare, almost minute by minute. The intelligence had been hopeless really. Communications between different units and the commanders had gotten worse throughout the day, especially after the senior officers left the CP and headed south. If the Americans named one particularly bad stretch The Pass, they came up with a fitting name for the entire cruel six miles from Kunuri to Sunchon. The Gauntlet, they called it—for they were men who had to run The Gauntlet. The first thing Jones was aware of as he moved through The Gauntlet was that he was witnessing the complete breakdown of order and hierarchy. In the Army, structure was believed to be everything, and this day the structure had simply disappeared. Once it was gone, it was very hard to get back. Altogether too many units had simply disintegrated, and there was less and less command structure all the time.

What he was witnessing was nothing less than the destruction of much of an American division right in front of his eyes, something he would never be able to forget. A vehicle would be hit, and it would block the road for others, and some brave soul would try to move it aside, and all the while the Chinese would be pouring fire down on them. Bodies lay right in the middle of the road—some possibly still alive, for all anyone knew—and the driver of the next truck or jeep would have no choice in that narrow passage but to run right over them. Sometimes a driver might hesitate, and if he did, his vehicle instantly became the next target, and the convoy would be slowed just that much more. The men themselves more often than not seemed numbed by it. Some of them just huddled along the side of the road, and sometimes it was hard for Jones to tell who was dead and who was wounded, and who was simply paralyzed—men whose bodies still functioned but whose spirits were broken.

It was hard to estimate the time of day, but Jones believed he had gotten onto the road about 2
P.M.
His orders were simple. Colonel Sloane had told him to get through to Sunchon and set up an assembly point for the rest of the regiment. Jones’s jeep was hit fairly early on, and his driver was wounded, but he managed to get the driver into another vehicle. When he got back to his own jeep, its engine had been hit and it had stopped running. He managed to push it off the road and began walking. From time to time he was able to gather some men, all from different outfits, around him in a hastily formed mini-unit, and they would return fire in quick little spasms of combat, and then in the confusion the group would disintegrate, and a little farther along another unit would form up around him. The men, beaten, emptied out physically and spiritually, and leaderless, were caught in something that was simply too big for them; a few were able to fight back, but as the command structure was gone, so was much of their will to fight.