by Neil Sheehan
The rats defied the best efforts of the Army exterminators to get rid of them with traps and poisoned bait. Mary Jane tried to ignore them, because she did not want to leave the house, but they disturbed her peace of mind. She could hear them scurrying inside the walls in the daytime. She walked warily whenever she got up at night or again at dawn, and she was watchful of Patricia and John Allen at night too to make sure neither of them would be bitten.
One of the Japanese maids set the house on fire in the spring of 1950 while melting some floor wax in a pan on an electric hot plate. The blaze started as John was coming home from a game of golf. He seized a fire extinguisher and tried unsuccessfully to put out the flames as Mary Jane grabbed the children and their family papers and ran to the nearby house of another Army couple to summon help. Although the local Japanese and Army fire teams arrived quickly, much of the house was damaged or ruined by smoke and water, as well as by the fire itself, and the fire fighters chopped great holes in the walls to soak them and prevent the fire from creeping through the entire structure. The holes exposed the nests of dozens of rats.
The division engineers inspected the house the next day and decided it was not worth repairing because of the extent of the damage and the infestation of rats. The Vanns moved closer to the center of Osaka to a house that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed for a wealthy Japanese family before World War II. This house was even larger, three stories. It had fine wood paneling, a sunken bathtub of blue tile large enough for four, and a kitchen tiled throughout—floor and walls and counters. There was also a small swimming pool in the garden. The opulence of the place kept Mary Jane from complaining, but she did not like the severity of the architecture, and the house tended to be dark. She missed the banks of azaleas and the Japanese light and charm of her house on the hill.
Then, in the middle of the night, John went off to war. Ninety thousand North Korean soldiers, their columns led by Soviet-built tanks, crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded South Korea in the predawn of another historic Sunday, June 25, 1950. Patricia was old enough in the summer of 1950 to remember her mother waking her and John Allen to say goodbye. Her father was carrying his helmet and wearing a pistol on his belt. Her mother was crying. He crouched down to take her and John Allen in his arms and kiss them. He said he was going to be away for a while. Patricia laughed. She felt happy that he was leaving, because this figure of authority who demanded perfect behavior would be gone. Her mother asked why she was laughing. Patricia did not answer. In later years, when she realized that he might not have come back, she had a sense of guilt about her reaction.
Trains and ships were John Vann’s preoccupation during the first weeks after the 25th Infantry Division was ordered to move to Korea as rapidly as possible and join the forces Douglas Mac Arthur was assembling there to stop the advance of the North Korean Army down the peninsula. First Lieutenant Vann was appointed assistant supply and evacuation officer—i.e., the man in charge of transportation. Overnight he found himself coordinating the train and ship schedules and expediting the loading and unloading of 15,000 officers and men and the artillery, trucks, tanks, armored half-tracks, and sundry other combat gear of the 25th Infantry. The capacity to refresh himself in an hour or two of sleep was to prove helpful, for he was to get no more than that a night for the next two months. Eighty trains were required to move the three infantry regiments and the associated division units from their occupation bases dispersed around the southern third of the island of Honshu to the ships at Yokohama. The task was not simply one of loading men and equipment onto trains and then ships. The logistics section of the division staff, G-4, to which Vann was assigned, had to load enough ammunition, food, and other supplies with the troops to sustain them during their initial days in combat. Once across the Korea Strait, Vann again had to help keep order amid seeming chaos during the unloading at the port of Pusan at the bottom of the Korean peninsula. Everything had to be done on the run, and everything had to be improvised, because no one in authority at MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo or in Washington had anticipated the North Korean invasion.
Vann’s job as trainmaster and stevedore-in-chief was more important under the circumstances than the leadership of a company in battle that he immediately craved. (He knew a staff assignment would not look impressive on an infantry officer’s record when the war was over, regardless of how vital it might be.) The problem was to get American troops into South Korea while there was still a South Korea to save. Mac Arthur’s field commander, Lt. Gen. Walton Walker, was racing the tank-led columns of North Koreans to try to organize a defensive perimeter above Pusan before the enemy overran all of Korea. Vann won his first Bronze Star Medal for the imagination and drive he displayed in hurrying the division on and off the trains and ships and into the war during those initial all-or-nothing weeks. Although the 25th Infantry received its movement order on June 30, the day after Mac Arthur flew to Korea to see the fighting and reported to Washington that the South Korean Army was falling apart, it took a week of planning and assembling units before Vann was given his first trainload to send to Yokohama and then two more weeks until the last elements of the division unloaded at the Pusan docks on July 19. The next day the North Koreans seized the town of Taejon, halfway down the peninsula from the 38th Parallel.
The war in Korea was to cause the deaths of 54,246 Americans and to take millions of Korean and Chinese lives. An estimated 120,000 civilians were to die in South Korea in the first year of the war alone. Ironically, the leaders of the United States had not wanted to keep South Korea until they saw they were going to lose it. They had also helped to bring on the war by communicating their lack of interest to opponents they did not understand.
The conflict originated in the division of the country at the end of World War II along the 38th Parallel line into separate Soviet and American occupation zones. Japan had previously held all of Korea as a colony. The Soviets organized a regime in the North under Kim II Sung, an anti-Japanese guerrilla leader who had gravitated to Communism because the Chinese Communists and the Russians had been his natural allies. The United States set up a rival regime in the South under Syngman Rhee, a right-wing Korean patriot who had led an exile movement from Hawaii and the American mainland. While Rhee and Kim had antithetical ideas on Korean society, they were both fervid nationalists intent on reunifying the country. They constantly harassed each other with subversion and violent incidents and plotted civil war to decide who would rule a united land.
Korea has a tragic history because of its position as a way station between the Japanese archipelago and China and Russia on the Asian mainland. The proximity of northeastern Korea to Russia’s Far Eastern naval base at Vladivostok gave Stalin an interest in the country. The Truman administration, on the other hand, twice formally decided that South Korea was one of the few places on the rim of the “Soviet bloc” that the United States would not defend. The second decision was made by the National Security Council and approved by the president just fourteen months before the war began. It affirmed the original reasoning that American air and naval dominance was sufficient to protect Japan and that South Korea was thus of “little strategic interest.”
Although these decisions were made in secret, their content was publicized. Mac Arthur first placed South Korea outside the American defense perimeter in Asia in an interview with a British correspondent in early 1949. Acheson then did so in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington in January 1950. American actions spoke consistently, especially in contrast with Soviet behavior. The last of the U.S. occupation troops were withdrawn in mid-1949. Rhee’s army was left with secondhand infantry weapons, outmoded artillery, and a 482-man American military advisory group. Rhee asked for up-to-date artillery, tanks, and fighter-bombers, which the Russians were investing in his enemy in the North. He was denied them. He asked for a guarantee that the United States would come to the rescue of South Korea if it was invaded. He was denied that too. The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up a
secret contingency plan, again approved by the president, to withdraw all Americans if there was an invasion.
During the winter of 1949 and the spring of 1950, Kim gradually convinced Stalin that he could finish off his rival with minimal risk of American intervention. Kim was so certain the United States would not intervene that his military commanders were told they did not have to consider the possibility. Mac Arthur’s headquarters, which was responsible for intelligence in Northeast Asia, failed to take note of the increased skirmishing between the two sides that spring and the buildup of North Korean assault troops and tanks along the 38th Parallel. The surprise may have contributed to the complete reversal of policy in Washington.
The moment the invasion occurred, Truman and Acheson overlooked the local rivalry that was the immediate cause of the war and forgot about the signals they had been sending. They saw the attack across the 38th Parallel, as Acheson described their reaction in his memoirs, “in its worldwide setting of our confrontation with our Soviet antagonist.” Kim was a mere hireling and his assault on Rhee’s South Korea was the first truly bold move in a master plan by Stalin for world conquest. “To back away from this challenge, in view of our capacity for meeting it, would be highly destructive of the power and prestige of the United States,” Acheson wrote. “By prestige I mean the shadow cast by power, which is of great deterrent importance.” As events were to show, transforming shadow into substance was to prove more difficult than Acheson imagined, and at the moment the soldiers were struggling with the shortfall between ultimate capacity to meet the challenge and current preparedness.
That Kim II Sung was stopped before he achieved his goal demonstrated the resourcefulness in adversity of Americans like Vann whom World War II had lifted out of their obscure worlds and set to work at the cutting edge of the nation’s newest frontier. They had to hold the line until the higher echelons of the Army caught up with the needs of this war, and they had little indeed to hold it with during those first months. The experience forged Vann’s attitude toward war. Korea taught him that war was not an enterprise in which one neatly calculated applications of force. War was a hurly-burly of violence in which men prevailed through imagination and the fortitude to struggle on despite reverses.
Much of the unpreparedness of the Army was later to be blamed on the meager military budgets of the late 1940s and on the spending priority given to the Air Force and the Navy for an atomic striking force to annihilate the cities and industries of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China (added to the target list after the Communist victory there in 1949) in the event of a third world war. The Army had adequate weapons, however, and more than enough manpower in its nearly 600,000-man force of mid-1950 to have halted and smashed the North Koreans in a matter of weeks. The blame lay with the leaders of the Army. They had been neglecting their primary obligation of maintaining an Army that was ready to fight. The troops were not trained and organized. The weapons they needed were in disrepair or in warehouses and storage parks. Of the Army’s ten active divisions, only the one in Europe was up to strength. The other nine lacked the normal third battalion in their infantry regiments and also had just two instead of three firing batteries in the artillery battalions.
The deterioration had been severe among the four divisions in Japan, with MacArthur focused on his proconsul’s task of restructuring Japanese society into a democratic mold. Walton Walker had headed MacArthur’s ground forces in Japan since 1948 as commanding general of the Eighth Army, but he had idled on his reputation as Patton’s best corps commander during World War II. His training program had not progressed much beyond the mimeograph machines at his headquarters. His troops had not been unduly distracted from what most, in these years without the draft, had enlisted to enjoy—submissive Japanese women and cheap whiskey—and many were now to die simply because they did not have the physical stamina to march and fight.
Vann’s division commander, Maj. Gen. William Kean, had been less complacent than some of his contemporaries. General Kean was one of those unsung workaday generals who rise to an emergency. The 25th Division suffered from all the equipment deficiencies typical of the Eighth Army—trucks that would not start, radios that would not transmit, rifles that jammed, no extra machine-gun barrels to replace barrels that burned out in combat, no maps for a country where no one had expected to fight. (Copies of old Japanese maps had to be airdropped to the troops after they reached Korea.) One of Kean’s battalions left Japan with only the battalion commander’s radio working; another battalion had exactly one recoilless cannon. Nevertheless, after he had taken charge of the division in 1948 Kean had insisted that his units do a minimum of training. His troops were in better physical condition than the average soldier in the Eighth Army and, with the exception of one regiment, they had some confidence in themselves and their officers.
The exception was the 24th Infantry, a black regiment. (Most of the officers were white.) The 24th might have been Kean’s best regiment but for the racist policies of the still-segregated Army of 1950. The regiment was the only one outside Europe that was up to strength in June 1950, with all three infantry battalions and a third firing battery in its artillery battalion. The Southerners who had dominated the Army officer corps since their return during the Spanish-American War had been denigrating black combat units for half a century. (Black fighting units had first been organized by the Union side during the Civil War and had performed well then and during the Indian Wars and the war with Spain.) Decades of forcing black soldiers into quartermaster and transportation units to fetch and carry for white warriors had exacted its price. Many of the troops of the 24th believed the myth of inferiority and repeatedly ran before the North Koreans. The regiment was finally disbanded in 1951. While numerous black Americans fought gallantly in Korea, black soldiers as a group were to have to wait for the changes brought about by integration and the civil rights movement to prove in Vietnam that courage has no color.
Kean’s two other regiments, the 27th and the 35th, steadied after their initial encounters. Vann’s superior, Lt. Col. Silas Gassett, a brisk, task-oriented artilleryman who was the division G-4, harassed the Eighth Army supply officers for more and better weapons and equipment. In the meantime the officers and noncoms made do with what they had. The companies and platoons without functioning radios fell back on the most ancient form of military communication—a runner with a message. The regiments were soon strengthened with third battalions stolen from another division in Eighth Army. The 27th Regiment performed so well under the leadership of Lt. Col. John Michaelis that General Walker made it the fire brigade for Eighth Army. He sent Michaelis rushing across the peninsula at the end of July to block a flanking move by the North Koreans that might have captured Pusan, severed the channel of supply and reinforcement, and driven the Americans to evacuate Korea. Marguerite Higgins was to turn “Mike” Michaelis and his 27th Infantry “Wolfhounds” into an Army legend in her dispatches to the New York Herald Tribune, and Michaelis was to leave the Army a general.
Walton Walker was as resolute as the bulldog he resembled. He was to redeem himself in Korea and to give a lieutenant an example to carry to Vietnam, an example of how a military leader stands and fights back when the battle runs against him. Mac Arthur’s plan was to have Walker keep a foothold on the peninsula while he got ready to cut off and destroy the North Korean Army with an amphibious landing far in its rear at Inchon, the port for Seoul. He flew to Korea in late July and told Walker there could be no question of an evacuation. Walker had, in fact, already chosen the ground on which he intended to stand. The day before MacArthur’s visit he had warned Kean and his other American division commanders, and the Korean officers leading the units of Rhee’s army that Walker had salvaged, to prepare for withdrawal to it soon. The ground was a rectangle that ran north up the peninsula for about a hundred miles and inland from the east coast for fifty to sixty miles all along its length. It was to become known as the Pusan Perimeter, because the port was its an
chor at the bottom. Walker had selected the ground because most of it is bounded by the Naktong River, a natural obstacle behind which he could maneuver his troops to mass and counterattack wherever the North Koreans penetrated in force.
At the end of July, as the time neared to fall back for a last time, Walker appeared at a dusty schoolhouse in a town called Sangju where the 25th Division had temporarily established a headquarters. He spoke alone to Kean first and then had him assemble the whole staff. One of the officers took notes of the general’s speech and wrote a summary afterward for the division’s war diary. Lieutenant Vann stood at the back of the room behind the majors and lieutenant colonels. “We are fighting a battle against time,” General Walker explained, and they had run out of space. “There is no line behind us to which we can retreat.” Nor could they contemplate escape or surrender:
