The Korean War (17 page)

Even for the better American regiments, the first encounter with the communist manner of making war in Korea was disturbing, confusing, demoralising, brutalising. It was a common experience to see a herd of refugees shuffle towards an American position, swept aside at the last moment to reveal the North Korean infantry sheltering among them. Even for GIs who had seen combat against the Japanese in the Pacific in World War II, it was a frightening experience to meet a North Korean enemy willing to hurl away his life in suicidal ‘human wave’ charges at point-blank range. Later, when the Chinese came in, these tactics would be translated to a vastly greater scale, even more unnerving in its fanaticism. The communists acknowledged no claim of treachery or breach of the rules of war in their use of soldiers in civilian clothes, or pretended surrenders to mask attacks. Most shocking of all to American sensibilities in Korea and at home in the United States, the communists proved ruthlessly indifferent to the taking of prisoners. A shudder of revulsion ran through the American nation at the discovery, in Korea, of the first groups of American prisoners shot dead by the roadside, their hands tied behind their backs with barbed wire. It rapidly became apparent that the North Koreans served prisoners in such fashion whenever they had no explicit need for them alive, for propaganda or intelligence purposes.

Bleakly, American commanders perceived a certain advantage, when news of communist atrocities spread through their formations. Some soldiers who had hitherto made little show of wanting to fight were now brought face to face with the likely consequence of capture. There was no salvation to be sought in a comfortable
PoW compound. Yet, conversely, fear of being outflanked and cut off became an obsession in many units. ‘Bug-out fever’, the urge to withdraw precipitately in the face of the slightest threat from the flank, was already a serious problem. ‘I saw young Americans turn and bolt in battle,’ wrote Marguerite Higgins of the New York
Herald Tribune
, ‘or throw down their arms cursing their government for what they thought was embroilment in a hopeless cause.’ Americans trained and conditioned to fight as part of a large army of mutually supporting elements were deeply ill at ease holding isolated positions with their flanks in the air, with the knowledge of perhaps twenty or thirty miles of mountain between themselves and the next Allied formation in the line.

Beyond this, the terrible shocks of the first weeks of war, the sense of facing a merciless Asian enemy, caused many Americans to extend their fears and suspicions to the entire people of Korea: ‘the gooks’ meant not merely the communists, but all Koreans. Communist atrocities provoked callousness in many Americans, fighting a desperate struggle for survival, towards the Asians around them, creatures from another planet whose language they could not understand, whose customs bewildered them, whose country seemed most vividly represented by the universal stench of human excrement manuring the fields.

Yet whatever the shortcomings of the American military performance in those weeks, it narrowly sufficed. And for all the bitter criticisms of the South Korean army, the ROK, whose battered and demoralised remnants were falling back alongside the Americans, its struggle had not been in vain. Amid the pain of withdrawal and defeat in July, America and her allies were disposed to dwell upon the sufferings of their own armed forces. Yet in those first weeks of fighting, surprised and facing overwhelming odds, the South Koreans and their American allies inflicted heavier losses upon the communists than was understood at the time. It later emerged that the North Koreans suffered some 58,000 casualties between 25 June and early August. At the moment when the confidence of Walker and his army was at its lowest ebb, when they saw defeat
staring them in the face in south-east Korea, the UN forces in Korea by now outnumbered their communist enemies.

The 25th Division held its positions in the centre of the country until 30 July before being compelled to begin falling back. The 1st Cavalry, outflanked around Yongdong, began retreating on 29 July towards Kumchong. And even as the Americans fought the threat from the north, in the west an even more dangerous communist movement was under way. A North Korean division had hooked around Taejon, and hastened through the defenceless countryside southwards. By 1 August, its leading elements were near Masan, just thirty miles short of the south-eastern port of Pusan. If the North Koreans could reach Pusan, the Americans would be encircled with little chance of escape. Their predicament was desperate. Walker was able to rush units of the 25th Division down to Masan with hours to spare, to block the advance. By now, Eighth Army’s commander knew that both his men and the North Koreans had run out of room for grand manoeuvres. The defenders must stand and fight. On the high ground behind the great loop of the Naktong river, they would command positions of great natural strength. In the first days of August, the long files of dusty, exhausted Americans and their overloaded vehicles trudged doggedly south and east, to the new line. Here, on the last mountain mass before the sea, the fate of Walker’s army, of the United Nations in Korea, would be decided.

2. Dressing Ranks

Even as the men from that soft, ill-prepared American occupation army struggled to improvise a perimeter against the communist assault, the Western powers were gathering forces to reinforce them. From the outset, it was apparent that MacArthur would need
every man who could be spared from the democracies’ worldwide commitments if he was to hold the North Koreans. At the Pentagon, the War Office in London, the war departments of Canada, France, Australia and New Zealand, Turkey and a clutch of smaller countries, politicians and staff officers pored earnestly over orders of battle and staff tables, seeking to determine what could be spared for Korea. From far and wide, reservists were being recalled from civilian occupations and tranquil domestic lives; draftees hustled through basic training; cadre formations built up to strength with whatever men could be found to fill their ranks, and equipment to stock their inventories. Only five years after the end of World War II, the victors found themselves embarrassingly pressed to find the means with which to fight a limited war in Asia.

MacArthur’s initial optimism about the scale of resources required to halt the communists in Korea was replaced, by mid-July, with demands for men on a scale that thoroughly alarmed the Joint Chiefs in Washington. On 5 July, he sought – and received agreement for – the commitment of the 2nd Infantry Division, a regiment of the crack 82nd Airborne, and the 2nd Engineer Special Brigade. On 20 July, four National Guard divisions were activated. Within days of the outbreak of war, Congress rushed through a one-year extension of the newly lapsed Selective Service Act. The Defense Department declared a requirement for 50,000 conscripts in September, the same again in October, 70,000 in November. Caught in the contemporary mood of war fever, Congress voted the President an $11 billion emergency defence appropriation. Yet even the vast economic strength of the United States did not make it possible, by a mere national act of will, instantly to transform a demobilised, almost decayed military machine into an instrument of war capable of fighting effectively in Korea, while maintaining combat readiness for a greater struggle elsewhere in the world. For months to come, as America mobilised, her military effort in the Far East would be a patchwork of expedient and improvisation.

Some young Americans, matching the mood of the time in their country, saw the war in genuinely idealistic terms, as an opportunity to take an heroic part in the crusade against communism; that – and perhaps a hint of boredom with post-war life in a small town. Bill Patterson was the tall, lanky, twenty-year-old son of an industrial worker in Stillwater, New York. He and a group of friends became passionately excited by the cause – forty-five of them marched in a group to enlist: ‘They had a problem over there. We wanted to do something about it. And I guess I didn’t have a lot to do at home. We started preaching around the town, saying – “Come down to Albany! Join the service!” I remember driving one kid of seventeen home to his parents to sign the papers.’
⁷

Private Warren Avery was a bus driver’s son from Virginia, a high school drop-out who had ‘bummed around’ for a year before joining the army in June 1949. He volunteered for Korea because the war sounded exciting. He was issued with a brand-new M-1 rifle, pushed on to a Pan Am airliner to make the first flight of his life to the Far East, and posted to the 29th Infantry on line on the Pusan Perimeter just ten days after he put in his name for Korea.
⁸

Corporal Selwyn Handler was called to active duty with the 1st Marines after two years as a reservist, a few days after returning from summer camp. He found the intense, purposeful bustle at Camp Pendleton entirely romantic: ‘To me, it was a great adventure.’
⁹
A few reservists with young families were unhappy, but most exulted in the intensive training that continued every day on the ships on which they sailed for Japan. Marine Bill Sorensen had always bitterly regretted missing World War II, not least because his idolised elder brother had won the Congressional Medal of Honor as a sergeant. He was thrilled to be recalled from the reserves and shipped to join the 7th Marines. As they practised firing their rifles over the fantail of the transport in mid-Pacific, the young man from Michigan enthused like a schoolboy about the prospect of combat. But an old sweat said to him: ‘Sorensen, as
soon as that first shell goes over your head, you’ll wish you’d never seen a war.’
¹⁰
And, of course, it was true.

But many men still believed that whatever was happening in Korea – and whatever Korea was – it would ‘never be any big deal’. Private Clyde Alton, an Indianan World War II veteran of thirty, found himself drafted to a battalion of the 2nd Division alongside the same top sergeant with whom he had gone through the North African campaign. He and Alton agreed that Korea was unlikely to amount to much: ‘This is going to be no war, ’cos these people are natives.’
¹¹

Until well into September, the British Chiefs of Staff remained gravely doubtful about the ability of the United Nations army to sustain its position in the peninsula. ‘Whether the Americans succeed in keeping a foothold in South Korea or have to go back again after a withdrawal,’ they noted on 20 July, ‘the subsequent campaign, if conducted on ordinary lines’ – a polite euphemism for eschewing the use of nuclear weapons – ‘cannot fail to be long, arduous and expensive in human life and material.’ They believed that it might take six to nine months to mobilise the resources for a full-scale combined operation to reinvade Korea, once the communists had been allowed to consolidate their hold on the country.

We may well be faced with the situation that the Koreans as a whole will urge us not to return. In any event, the people who would mainly suffer from any kind of normal campaign of ‘liberation’ would be the South Koreans, whose villages, roads and railways would be destroyed and their country turned into the usual squalid battlefield.

If the peninsula had to be evacuated, the British urged a sustained air offensive against North Korea’s communications and industry. They admitted that this might not be successful in bringing Pyongyang to the negotiating table, but

we shall be no worse off if it did not. We assume there will be no question of using the atomic bomb in Korea. This weapon must in our view be kept in reserve for use in the proper place in the event of a major war with Russia. Anyway there are no suitable objectives for it in North Korea. This is a United Nations police action, and we do not want to kill thousands of civilians and create a radio-active shambles, but with the minimum loss of life and expense on either side, to restore the
status quo
and the integrity of South Korea.

This assessment, cabled to Air Marshal Tedder in Washington, admirably exemplified London’s policy of cautious prevarication, which so greatly taxed the patience of the Americans in the months that followed. The British Chiefs of Staff, perhaps even more than their government, feared becoming engulfed in a bottomless morass in Korea, at great cost in men and treasure, only to discover the Soviets striking elsewhere in the world, at the moment of greatest Western weakness. To the Americans, on the other hand, whatever threats tomorrow might bring, Korea was the communist challenge of today. They sought to confront it with a wholeheartedness that was always lacking on the part of the British. The British decision that a token land force must be dispatched, at least a brigade in strength, was reached with the greatest reluctance. So too was the necessity, with manpower in such desperately short supply, to recall men to the colours to fill the ranks of units for the war.

Many British reservists were enraged to find themselves recalled to duty. Through thousands of British letterboxes that summer, unwelcome summonses fluttered: ‘In accordance with the terms of your reserve liability, it has become necessary to recall you to active military duty. You are accordingly required to report to duty on 9 August 1950 to OC 45 Field Regiment RA’; or it might be the 5th Fusiliers, the 1st Ulsters, the 1st Gloucesters. No hint of logic, far less compassion, was discernible in the manner in which the War Office selected men for service. Hundreds were former
wartime PoWs in Germany and the Far East. Some had not even been classified medically A1. A recalled Fusilier who had spent five years as a prisoner after being captured at Dunkirk went absent without leave from the depot at Colchester. His wife had urged him: ‘No one’s going to blame you.’ But they did. He was caught and sent to Korea. There were extraordinary scenes at the depot: an enraged housewife pushing three snivelling children before her into the orderly room, shouting at a bewildered young officer: ‘You’ve taken their father – you can look after this lot!’ One man was taken whose wheelchair-bound wife was entirely dependent upon him. He was later flown home from Hong Kong.