The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  CHAPTER 11

  O. P. Smith succeeds at Chosin

  One of the little-known aspects of the Chosin Reservoir Campaign was that Maj. Gen. O. P. Smith, the commander of the Marines there, was far more of a Marshall man than were the Army generals to whom he reported. Ned Almond, the Army general over Smith, “was a MacArthur man, and anything MacArthur said, nothing could change it. . . . MacArthur was God,” recalled Smith.

  Smith, rail-thin and white-haired, seemed to have been cut from the Marshall cloth. When he was seven years old, Smith lost his father, a Texas lawyer. His widowed mother took him to California and raised him in penury. As a young man, Smith arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, with just five dollars in his pocket and worked his way through school, often as a gardener. He joined the Marines at the outset of World War I but spent the war in Guam, a setback to his career that would help keep him at the rank of captain for almost two decades during the interwar period.

  In the early 1930s, though it was unusual for a Marine officer, Smith attended the Army’s Infantry School, then run by Lt. Col. George Marshall. There, he and his classmates Bedell Smith and Terry Allen were instructed in the use of machine guns by Omar Bradley, and in tactics by Joseph Stilwell. “Colonel Marshall was pretty definite in his ideas,” O. P. Smith remembered admiringly. “He was a pretty tough hombre.”

  Like Marshall, Smith disliked military sentimentalism or romanticism, even about his own Marine Corps. During the 1930s, he wrote a paper that debunked the bayonet as a weapon. For his evidence, he researched the use of the bayonet by Marines against German soldiers in Belleau Wood in World War I. “But when you run down the history,” the bayonet lacked the shock value often attributed to it, he found. “Where I got the dope was from the medical officers, how many bayonet wounds they treated, and there weren’t many.”

  As a general, the quiet, pipe-smoking Christian Scientist hardly fit the gung-ho popular image of a Marine, which may be one reason his name is hardly known today. On the eve of landing for the Battle of Peleliu, in World War II, for example, he passed the time by reading, among other things, a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Peleliu proved to be a bloodbath for the American landing force, which according to Adm. Chester Nimitz suffered the highest casualty rate—nearly 40 percent—of any amphibious assault ever by American forces. This experience surely helped steel Smith for the carnage he would see during the hardest days of the Chosin fight.

  It is said that the essence of generalship is what one does before the outbreak of fighting. That is certainly the case with O. P. Smith at Chosin. The three most important decisions of the campaign may be those Smith made before it even began. First, he insisted on consolidating his regiments so they could support one another. This meant bringing the 5th Marines in from the east side of the reservoir and turning that area over to the Army. Second, he made it a top priority to have his engineers scrape out two airstrips in the frozen ground, enabling the Marines in the following days to fly in supplies and reinforcements and move out their wounded, unburdening their units and enabling them to move faster through the frozen roads and mountains. A total of 4,312 wounded or frostbitten Marine and Army personnel were flown out in the mere five days that the northernmost airstrip, at Hagaru-ri, was operational, from the afternoon of December 1 to the evening of December 6, 1950, when the retreating Marines abandoned that base. Third, he put himself at what he believed would be the key point of the battle. The American forces around Chosin Reservoir were essentially in a giant formation resembling the letter Y, with the Marines on the left arm, to the west of the reservoir, and the Army on the right, to the east. Smith understood that if the Marines held their position west of the reservoir but lost the outpost to the south of it, where the forks met, they would be doomed. So on the morning of November 28, he left his rear headquarters and flew to that junction, where the two branches came together and the single road out of the mountains, south to the sea, began. This spot, he had determined, would be the decisive point geographically in the coming battle. “Hagaru-ri had to be held at all costs,” he later explained. “Here was the transport plane airstrip. . . . Here was accumulated the wherewithal to support the subsequent breakout from Hagaru-ri. Here was a defended perimeter where the 5th and 7th Marines [who were isolated to the northwest] could reorganize, resupply, reequip, and evacuate their casualties preparatory to the breakout therefrom.”

  • • •

  In the American system, every general has a boss. A seldom-discussed aspect of generalship is understanding the person to whom one reports, whether that is a president, a prime minister, or another general. What are that superior’s concerns, his skills, his shortcomings? Gen. MacArthur, for example, was poor at this, whether in grasping FDR’s mastery of politics or sensing the threshold of Truman’s temper. A significant aspect of the Chosin campaign, by contrast, was that Smith soberly assessed the combat skills and judgment of Lt. Gen. Almond, the Army general to whom he was reporting.

  Almond’s record might give any colleague pause. A 1915 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, he rose quickly during World War I, commanding a machine-gun battalion in the fighting late in the war. His record was less distinguished during the next big war. One of George Marshall’s biggest mistakes during World War II stemmed from a certain misperception about race. Marshall believed that white Southerners best understood how to work with black soldiers, so he officered the Army’s segregated units with white Southerners. One of the most prominent of his picks was Almond, a proud Virginian steeped in the traditions of the Confederacy, who was given command of the 92nd Division and led it in Italy during World War II—with notably poor results. Marshall was to write to Eisenhower that the 92nd’s “Infantry literally dissolved each night abandoning equipment and even clothing in some cases.” When the Army concluded that the 92nd Division’s performance had been “unsatisfactory,” Almond blamed his black soldiers, who, he said, were unwilling to die for patriotic reasons. He claimed his background gave him special insight into the race issue: “People think that being from the South we don’t like Negroes. Not at all. But we understand his capabilities. And we don’t want to sit at the table with them.” Almond’s unhappy troops developed reciprocal feelings, at one point booing their commander. One anonymous member of the division denounced it as “a slave unit for white masters.” Despite the 92nd Division’s weak combat record in World War II, Almond manned his corps headquarters in Korea with six veterans of its staff. Ridgway, who would take over command of the war from MacArthur, had a very different view of the black soldier, commenting later that “there was nothing wrong with him if he had the right surroundings, the right officers, the right training and the right leadership.”

  It was said of Gen. Almond that “when it pays to be aggressive, Ned’s aggressive, and when it pays to be cautious, Ned’s aggressive.” Chosin Reservoir was developing as one of the latter cases. When Almond visited Smith’s headquarters, he told the general and his Marine division staff, “We’ve got to go barreling up that road.” Smith bit his tongue until Almond left and then said to his staff, “We’re not going anywhere until I get this division together and the airfield built.” Before the battle, Smith also wrote a personal letter to the commandant of the Marine Corps, putting his unease on the record. “Our left flank is wide open,” he noted. “I have little confidence in the tactical judgment of X Corps or in the realism of their planning. There is a continual splitting up of units and assignment of missions which puts them out on a limb. Time and time again I have tried to tell the Corps Commander that in a Marine Division he has a powerful instrument, and that it cannot help but lose its effectiveness when dispersed.” At one point in mid-November 1950, Almond had spread his five divisions (three American and two South Korean) across a five-hundred-mile front. Smith’s Marine division had a gap of eighty miles on its left and 120 miles on its right. “We went cautiously,” he said later. “We never sent our
patrols out of the range of artillery. . . . That meant they could get out to six or seven miles.”

  Smith so distrusted Almond’s judgment that, expecting that his forces eventually would be compelled to retreat, he established along the road back to the sea three fortified base camps, about one day’s march apart, loaded with supplies and well protected by infantry units. “In effect, 1st Mar Div stood in column on a line of strong points within enemy country,” wrote Army historian S. L. A. Marshall in a 1951 report that was classified as secret and published only three decades later. When the Chinese force attacked, he continued, it “proceeded to impale itself upon this line of strong points.” Gen. Smith would tell the historian that he felt he had “the upper hand” throughout the campaign.

  The tactical layout of the strongpoints and other outposts also was distinctive, reflecting Smith’s calculations about the fight he was facing. As long as his perimeters held, he figured, he could keep his artillery and mortars in operation, which meant the Marines could keep fighting even while heavily outnumbered. This led to the conclusion that it was preferable to have guaranteed close-in kills than just good chances far out. He wanted to prevent as much as possible having handfuls of Chinese soldiers slip inside his lines to suicidally attack machine gunners and artillery and mortar crews. So Smith drew his units together, sacrificing some tactically significant positions atop hills in order to establish extremely tight perimeters. “Instead of going to positions which might improve the prospect for an effective kill at long range, 1st Mar Div built its defenses so as to be certain of stopping CCF [Chinese Communist Forces] at short range,” S. L. A. Marshall explained.

  As for Almond, his account of what happened at Chosin frequently rings false. The evidence indicates that Almond lied in his official oral history and elsewhere, repeatedly claiming that he had all but forced Smith to build the landing strips that would prove so vital. “The airstrip was ‘ordered prepared’ by the X Corps and repeated supervision was necessary to insure the speed with which it was constructed,” he insisted in his oral history. “The Marine division commander either was not especially in favor of it or thought little of its advantages.” Almond held to this account for decades, asserting in writing to the official Army historian, Roy Appleman, in 1975, “Yes, I did order the construction of this airstrip.” But Almond’s assertions run contrary to both logic and the documentary record. He was urging the Marines to charge a hundred miles northward, so why would he want them to pause to establish an airfield just a short way from the sea? As Matthew Ridgway later wrote, “Almond seems to have remained optimistic, but Smith and the 1st Marine Division anticipated trouble and began to prepare for it with measures which later proved to be the salvation of a good part of his command.” Also, as it happens, Smith, in a letter to his wife weeks earlier, had mentioned that among his concerns, he considered building airstrips absolutely necessary for supporting any combat operations around the Chosin area. Also, when Smith asked for the help of Army engineers to build the airstrips, X Corps staff refused his request. As Smith put it in an interview decades later, “The [X] corps at the time [early November] wasn’t interested in any field up there. I told Almond that we ought to have a field that would take transport planes to bring in supplies and take out casualties. He said, ‘What casualties?’ That’s the kind of thing you were up against. He wouldn’t admit there ever would be any casualties. We took 4,500 casualties out of that field.”

  Smith also had problems with his own superiors in the Marine Corps. By putting his foot down and insisting on consolidating his troops and moving north carefully, he was bucking his Marine chain of command. At the beginning of November, he had met with Lt. Gen. Lemuel Shepherd, chief of Marines in the Pacific, and had expressed his concerns about Almond. Shepherd told Smith to get with the program. “I talked to him and said, ‘O. P., play the game; don’t get so mad with Almond, he’s trying to do the right thing,’” Shepherd said later in his official Marine Corps oral history. “I kept urging Smith to push forward more rapidly, as he had the North Koreans on the run. . . . Smith, as you know, wanted everything done right by the book. And in battle you can’t always do things by the book. You’ve got to take the initiative in combat—take chances when the opportunity to gain a victory appears probable.” Shepherd believed at this time—correctly, it would turn out—that he would be the next commandant of the Marine Corps, so he might not have wanted to rock the boat and make it appear as though he could not get along with the Army. He also was friendly with Almond: “Having been a schoolmate of mine at VMI, [he] always made me welcome at his headquarters, and he treated me with the greatest courtesy.” Almond’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Clark Ruffner, also was a Virginia Military Institute (VMI) man.

  But Smith saw mounting reasons to be careful. Even as Almond urged him to charge north to the Yalu, Smith and his Marines began to notice ominous signs around them. Korean children, normally eager to beg for candy, were nowhere to be seen. Deer were moving down from the ridges, as though displaced by something. When Smith learned that the Chinese had left a bridge intact over a chasm, he was alarmed, believing that it was part of an enemy plan to lure the Marines northward. History has revealed that Smith’s suspicions were correct: Marshal Peng Dehuai, the top Chinese commander in the war, had told his subordinates at a campaign planning meeting on November 13, “We will employ a strategy of luring the enemy forces into our internal line and wiping them out one by one.” The Chinese gambit of entrapment was exactly the right move to make against Almond, who was being overaggressive while underestimating his enemy.

  Chinese commanders in North Korea had explicitly been given the mission to “encircle and exterminate the U.S. Marines around the Changin [Chosin] Reservoir.” Sensing this, Smith’s plan “was to slow down the advance and stall until I could pull up the 1st Marines behind us and get our outfit together. I was unable to complete that until the 27th of November.”

  That Marine consolidation came just in time. The same night, November 27–28, the two Marine regiments isolated at the northwestern end of the Marine line were attacked by two Chinese divisions. A third division swept in behind them to try to cut off their line of retreat to the southern end of the reservoir. A typical comment from this time in the campaign came from PFC Peter Holgrun: “We spent the night shooting gooks as they approached, one bugle-blowing wave after the next. It was pure battle. You had no idea of who was winning and who was losing.” Lt. Col. Ray Davis, commanding a battalion of the 7th Marines, was surprised by the eerie sound a bugler would make when shot. “Their buglers sounding some kind of battle call would get hit right in the middle of a note, and it’d just die off,” he said.

  The confidence of the Marines’ response to these relentless attacks was striking—and infectious. They knew they had lavish and accurate close air support available. Army soldiers and Marines at Chosin alike would recall looking down from hillsides and waving at Corsair pilots flying in the valleys below them. At night, when those planes could not operate, the Marines had artillery batteries standing by, ready to fire at prearranged coordinates in the draws and gullies in which Chinese attackers were most likely to creep toward American lines. When Smith asked Col. Lewis “Chesty” Puller how he was doing, Puller responded, with no irony, “Fine! We have enemy contact on all sides.” Capt. William Hopkins reported that by the next morning five Marines had happily repeated Puller’s comment to him.

  Gen. Smith found out later that when the Chinese attack began, Gen. Omar Bradley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, concluded that the Marines would suffer the same terrible fate as the Army units on the east side of the reservoir. “The Army figured we were finished up there and we wouldn’t get out,” Smith recalled. “I found later that General Bradley, in talking to General McGee, who was at that time on the Joint Staff, told him that the 1st Division was lost.”

  But there was a key difference in leadership. Unlike Faith and those around him on t
he eastern shore of the reservoir, the two Marine regiments fighting on the western shore and the third regiment, trying to hold open the road to the south, were led by commanders who knew how to use communications, logistics, maneuver, and fire support. Because of that, they would bring out all their wounded and most of their vehicles and artillery pieces, as well as many of the wandering Army soldiers they encountered. When their infantry attacked, it generally could count on swift and effective supporting fire from mortars, artillery, and aircraft. Both the enlisted men and their officers had stored up hundreds of small combat ruses and ploys in World War II: When the enemy makes a noisy probing attack, he probably is trying to locate your machine guns, so respond only with grenades and rifle fire if possible. When withdrawing, buy a few precious moments by building a fire and throwing in some bullets as you depart, which as they cook off could make the enemy believe the abandoned position is still being contested. In icy weather, have soldiers and medics tuck morphine syrettes inside their mouths so the painkiller will not be frozen when it’s urgently needed.