The Korean War (4 page)

It was during the withdrawal of Task Force Smith that its imperfections as a fighting unit became apparent. There is no more testing military manoeuvre than disengagement in the face of the enemy. The Americans were softened by years of inadequate training and military neglect, bewildered by the shock of combat, dismayed by the readiness with which the communists had overwhelmed them, and the isolation in which they found themselves. As men saw others leaving the hills, they hastened to join them, fearful of being left behind. ‘It was every man for himself,’ said Lieutenant Day. ‘When we moved out, we began taking more and more casualties . . . Guys fell around me. Mortar rounds hit here and there. One of my young guys got it in the middle. My platoon sergeant, Harvey Vann, ran over to him. I followed. “No way he’s gonna live, Lieutenant.” Oh, Jesus, the guy was moaning and groaning. There wasn’t much I could do but pat him on the head and say, “Hang in there.” Another of the platoon sergeants got it in the throat. He began spitting blood. I thought sure . . . For the rest of the day he held his throat together with his hands. He survived, too.’
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The retreating Americans abandoned arms, equipment; sometimes even helmets, boots, personal weapons. Cohesion quickly vanished. The debris of retreat lay strewn behind them as they went. In ones and twos and handfuls, they scrambled southwards through the fields.

C Company, first off the positions, fared better than B in holding its men together. Captain Dashner reached Taejon after two
days’ hard marching with more than half his men still under command. Floyd Martain and the little team in the Battalion Command Post struggled to burn their confidential papers, but found them too wet to catch light. They dug a hole and buried them, then started walking, following the railroad tracks south. After some hours, Martain’s little group saw some trucks, and hastily took cover. Then, to their overwhelming relief, they found that these were American vehicles, carrying some gunners – who had blown up their pieces rather than attempt to get them out, an action which infuriated some officers – and Colonel Smith himself. After a night of nerve-racking hide-and-seek with enemy tanks as they crossed country, they reached positions of the 34th Infantry at Ansong. Corporal Robert Fountain never heard any order to withdraw – he simply saw men streaming past him who glanced an answer to his shouted question about what was happening: ‘We’re pulling back.’ Fountain joined them. He scrambled past an American sitting upright against a dyke wall, stone dead. Suddenly, he found himself face to face with two baled-out North Korean tank crewmen. The next man shot one, Fountain killed the other as he ran towards a house. Then the American stumbled away through the waterlogged paddies amid machine-gun fire from the positions the battalion had abandoned. In a wood, he met a group of sixteen other Americans. He took out a knife and cut off the tops of his combat boots so that he could get the water out. Two sergeants organised the group. They set off again, attempting to carry the wounded among them. One man, a Japanese-American, was shot in the stomach. When they reached a deserted village, they left him there, dying. Fountain found a turnip root and ate it. They walked on through the darkness for many hours, following a group of South Korean soldiers they encountered. They reached a Korean command post in a schoolhouse where they slept for a while. Then somebody shouted: ‘Tanks coming!’ They piled into a truck, and drove for some miles until the truck blundered into a ditch and stayed there. They began walking again, and eventually found themselves in the lines of the 34th Infantry.

Lieutenant Carl Bernard was still on the hill with his platoon of B Company when he sensed the fire from the other American positions slackening, and sent a runner to find out what was going on. The man returned a few minutes later in some consternation to report ‘They’ve all gone!’ Command and control frankly collapsed in the last stages of the action. Bernard, wounded in face and hands by grenade fragments, hastily led his men to beat their own retreat. At the base of the hill they found the medical orderlies still coping with a large group of wounded. They took with them such men as could walk, and left the remainder to be taken prisoner. The lieutenant divided the survivors of his platoon into two groups, sending one with a private soldier who had been a scout, and taking the other himself. He had no compass, but in an abandoned schoolhouse he found a child’s atlas. He tore out the page showing Korea, and used it to navigate. In the hours that followed, his group survived a series of close encounters with enemy tanks. Bernard bartered a gold Longines watch that he had won playing poker on the boat from San Francisco for an old Korean’s handcart, on which to push a wounded NCO.

Ezra Burke came off the hill with four of his medical team, two stretcher cases, and one walking wounded. As they staggered onwards with their burdens, they kept halting and glancing back, hoping to have outdistanced their pursuers. But all that afternoon, they could see files of North Koreans padding remorsely behind them. At last, they decided to split. Burke headed south-westward with two others. They were soaking wet, exhausted, and above all desperately anxious to be reunited with their unit and their officers, with anyone who could tell them where to go and what to do. They huddled miserably together through the hours of darkness, and at first light began to walk again. On a hill above Pyontaek, they met Lieutenant Bernard and his seven-strong group, and continued south with them. Thenceforward, they hid most of the day, and walked by night. Starving, they risked creeping into a village and bartering possessions with a momma-san for a few potatoes. They met two Korean soldiers, with whom they walked for a time. Then
a South Korean lieutenant who talked to them declared his conviction that the men were communists. The two ran off across a rice paddy. Burke fired at them with a carbine and missed. Bernard caught them with a BAR just before they reached a wood.

They reached American positions on 10 July, five days after the battle at Osan, utterly exhausted, their feet agonisingly swollen. The next day Burke was found to be suffering from a kidney stone, and was evacuated by air from Taejon to Osaka. Carl Bernard spent some painful hours in a field hospital, where the grenade fragments were picked out of his face and hands. Then he slept the sleep of utter exhaustion for an entire day.

Most of Task Force Smith trickled back to American positions in something like this fashion in the week that followed their little action at Osan. 185 men of the battalion mustered after the battle. Some made their way to the American lines after epic adventures, like Sergeant William F. Smith, who escaped by fishing boat a fortnight later. Lieutenant Connors received a Silver Star for his brave endeavours with the bazooka by the roadside on 5 July. The official figures showed that Task Force Smith had suffered 155 casualties in the action at Osan. By the time they returned, they discovered that any shortcomings in their own unit’s performance on 5 July had already been outstripped by far less honourable, indeed positively shameful, humiliations suffered by other elements of the American 24th Division in its first days of war, as the North Korean invaders swept all before them on their bloody procession south down the peninsula. And all this flowed, inexorably, from the sudden decision of the United States to commit itself to the least expected of wars, in the least predicted of places, under the most unfavourable possible military conditions. Had the men of Task Force Smith, on the road south of Suwon, known that they were striking the first armed blow for that new force in world order, the United Nations, it might have made their confused, unhappy, almost pathetic little battle on 5 July seem more dignified. On the other hand, it might have made it appear more incomprehensible than ever.

1 » ORIGINS OF A TRAGEDY

Seldom in the course of history has a nation been as rapidly propelled as Korea from obscurity to a central place in the world’s affairs. The first significant modern contact between ‘The Land of the Morning Calm’ and the West took place one morning in September 1945, when an advance party of the American army, in full battle gear, landed at the western harbour of Inchon, to be met by a delegation of Japanese officials in top hats and tail coats. This was the inauguration of Operation Black List Forty, the United States’ occupation of South Korea.

These first American officers found the city of Inchon, fearful and uncertain of its future, shuttered and closed. After a hunt through the streets, glimpsing occasional faces peering curiously at their liberators from windows and corners, they came upon a solitary Chinese restaurant bearing the sign ‘Welcome US’. Then, from the moment the Americans boarded the train for Seoul, they met uninhibited rejoicing. A little crowd of Koreans stood by the tracks in every village they passed, waving gleeful flags. At Seoul railway station, the group had planned to take a truck to their objective, the city post office. Instead, on their arrival, they decided to walk. To their bewilderment, they found themselves at the centre of a vast throng of cheering, milling, exultant Koreans, cramming the streets and sidewalks, hanging from buildings, standing on carts. The Americans were at a loss. They had arrived without any conception of what the end of the Japanese war meant to the people of this obscure peninsula.
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Throughout its history until the end of the nineteenth century, Korea was an overwhelmingly rural society which sought successfully to maintain its isolation from the outside world. Ruled since 1392 by the Yi Dynasty, it suffered two major invasions from Japan in the sixteenth century. When the Japanese departed, Korea returned to its harsh traditional existence, frozen in winter and baked in summer, its ruling families feuding among each other from generation to generation. By the Confucian convention that regarded foreign policy as an extension of family relations, Korea admitted an historic loyalty to China, ‘the elder brother nation’. Until 1876, her near neighbour Japan was regarded as a friendly equal. But early that January, in an early surge of the expansionism that was to dominate Japanese history for the next seventy years, Tokyo dispatched a military expedition to Korea ‘to establish a treaty of friendship and commerce’. On 26 February, after a brief and ineffectual resistance, the Koreans signed. They granted the Japanese open ports, their citizens extra-territorial rights.

The embittered Koreans sought advice from their other neighbours about the best means of undoing this humiliating surrender. The Chinese advised that they should come to an arrangement with one of the Western powers ‘in order to check the poison with an antidote’; they suggested the Americans, who had shown no signs of possessing territorial ambitions on the Asian mainland. On 22 May 1882, Korea signed a treaty of ‘amity and commerce’ with the United States. In the words of a leading American historian of the period, this ‘set Korea adrift on an ocean of intrigue which it was quite helpless to control’. The infuriated Japanese now engaged themselves increasingly closely in Korea’s internal power struggles. The British took an interest, for they were eager to maintain China’s standing as Korea’s ‘elder brother’, to counter Russian influence in the Far East. By 1893, Korea had signed a succession of trade treaties with every major European power. The Japanese were perfectly clear about their objective. Their foreign minister declared openly that Korea ‘should be made a part of the
Japanese map’. Tokyo hesitated only about how to achieve this without a confrontation with one or another great power.

The Chinese solved the problem. Peking’s increasingly heavy-handed meddling in Korea’s affairs, asserting claims to some measure of authority over Seoul, provoked a wave of anti-Chinese feeling, and a corresponding surge of enthusiasm for the Japanese, who could now claim popular support from at least a faction within Korea. In 1894, Japan seized her opportunity, and landed an army in Korea to force the issue. The government in Seoul, confused and panicky, asked Peking to send its own troops to help suppress a rebellion. The Japanese responded by dispatching a contingent of marines direct to the capital. The Korean government, by now hopelessly out of its depth, begged that all the foreign troops should depart. But the Japanese scented victory. They reinforced their army.

The last years of Korea’s notional independence took on a Gilbertian absurdity. The nation’s leaders, artless in the business of diplomacy and modern power politics, squirmed and floundered in the net that was inexorably closing around them. The Chinese recognised their military inability to confront the Japanese in Korea. Tokyo’s grasp on Korea’s internal government tightened until, in 1896, the King tried to escape thraldom by taking refuge at the Russian Legation in Seoul. From this sanctuary, he issued orders for the execution of all his pro-Japanese ministers. The Japanese temporarily backed down.

In the next seven years, Moscow and Tokyo competed for power and concessions in Seoul. The devastating Japanese victory at Tsushima, a few miles off Pusan, decided the outcome. In February 1904, the Japanese moved a large army into Korea. In November the following year, the nation became a Japanese protectorate. In a characteristic exercise of the colonial cynicism of the period, the British accepted Japanese support for their rule in India in exchange for blessing Tokyo’s takeover of Korea. Whitehall acknowledged Japan’s right ‘to take such measures of guidance,
control, and protection in Corea [
sic
] as she may deem proper and necessary’, to promote her ‘paramount political, military and economic interests’.

Korean independence thus became a dead letter. In the years that followed, a steady stream of Japanese officials and immigrants moved into the country. Japanese education, roads, railways, sanitation were introduced. Yet none of these gained the slightest gratitude from the fiercely nationalistic Koreans. Armed resistance grew steadily in the hands of a strange alliance of Confucian scholars, traditional bandits, Christians, and peasants with local grievances against the colonial power. The anti-Japanese guerrilla army rose to a peak of an estimated 70,000 men in 1908. Thereafter, ruthless Japanese repression broke it down. Korea became an armed camp, in which mass executions and wholesale imprisonment were commonplace, and all dissent forbidden. On 22 August 1910, the Korean emperor signed away all his rights of sovereignty. The Japanese introduced their own titles of nobility, and imposed their own military government. For the next thirty-five years, despite persistent armed resistance from mountain bands of nationalists, many of them communist, the Japanese maintained their ruthless, detested rule in Korea, which also became an important base for their expansion north into Manchuria in the nineteen thirties.