A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Sheehan, Neil

  Puckett found kindred spirits among the cooks, clerk typists, and mechanics of the Eighth Army. He was forbidden to recruit trained riflemen, because the fighting in the Perimeter was at its height and there was a severe shortage of replacements for the regular line companies. He therefore went around the service units back in Japan asking for volunteers to go to Korea for “a secret and dangerous mission involving operations behind enemy lines.” Puckett was surprised at how quickly he gathered the seventy-four enlisted men he was authorized. He enrolled two of his West Point classmates to be his platoon leaders. By the time he finished training the company near Pusan, the Inchon landing had dissolved the reason for its creation, and the North Korean Army was attempting to flee back across the 38th Parallel with the Eighth Army in pursuit. Puckett’s Rangers were then attached to the 25th Division. General Kean employed them on searches for North Korean stragglers trying to escape through the countryside as the Eighth Army moved north rapidly during the fall, seized Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and then regrouped on the edge of the mountain range below the Yalu River border with China. Puckett’s Rangers had been in a few skirmishes, but they had not seen any serious action prior to MacArthur’s order on November 24, 1950, to drive through the mountains to the Yalu and end the war.

  In retrospect, Inchon was the sign that MacArthur’s egomania had grown beyond tolerable bounds. An amphibious landing far in the enemy’s rear was an act of sound generalship taken from his World War II experience. His insistence on Inchon as the site was a grave and needless risk, a gamble with lives and the nation’s interest prompted by vanity. He chose Inchon because it was the port for Seoul, but a preliminary examination of the place showed, as one of the officers on the naval planning staff remarked, that Inchon had “every conceivable and natural handicap” to an amphibious assault. The approach channels were twisting and narrow and had a number of “dead-end” points where a ship disabled by shore batteries or a mine would block all those behind and trap all those in front. The Marines would be storming a city whose buildings and quays and high stone seawall made it more defensible than an open beach. Before they could seize the city they would have to secure a fortified island that fronted the harbor. The rise and fall of the tides is so severe at Inchon (approximately thirty-two feet on September 15, 1950) that the Marines would have to take the island at dawn and then wait until dusk before the water rose high enough again to carry their landing craft to the city. They would thus lose tactical surprise, and the attacking regiments would have just two hours of daylight to get ashore. The tides would then prevent reinforcement until the following dawn. If Inchon happened to be well garrisoned, or the North Koreans learned of Mac Arthur’s target and prepared a trap, the landing could be repulsed in a spectacular shambles.

  The Navy and Marine commanders involved and the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued with MacArthur to select an alternate site. The Marines found a place about thirty miles south of Inchon that had none of its risks, and the possible delay of a few days in reaching Seoul would be militarily insignificant. MacArthur would not yield. Having put his finger on Inchon, Inchon it had to be. He dismissed risks and obstacles with a theatrical mysticism. “I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny,” he said as he neared the end of a forty-five-minute soliloquy to a war council in Tokyo in August that included two members of the Joint Chiefs. “We must act now or we will die. … Inchon will succeed. And it will save 100,000 lives.” The success of the gamble on September 15 increased his sense of infallibility and inhibited those who might contradict him.

  The second hand of destiny was ticking again in November 1950. MacArthur could not hear it this time because it was ticking for him. He had long ago lost interest in the details of the battlefield, that compass by which all military leaders must guide themselves. His mind was on loftier things. Dean Acheson later observed that MacArthur had become “practically a chief of state … the Mikado of Japan and Korea.” The description was almost accurate. When Truman summoned him to a meeting at Wake Island that October, MacArthur did not salute his commander in chief as military courtesy said he should. Instead he shook hands as between equals. He was not simply the ruler of Japan, he was a ruler venerated by the Japanese people. There were other Mac Arthurs within this haughty five-star general of the Army. The MacArthur the Japanese saw was the civil libertarian and missionary for the American way of life. They had expected harshness in 1945 and he had given them magnanimity and wisdom, introducing the democratic government and social reforms they were eager to accept after the horrors that militarism had brought them. At seventy, he was determined to bring his life of glory to a culmination worthy of previous achievements. He was going to fulfill Acheson’s description by winning total victory and extending his beneficent rule to the whole of Korea right up to the frontiers of China and Russia.

  The men in Washington were willing to settle for four-fifths of Korea. They did see the country as an important way station now, and they wanted to repulse the challenge they perceived from the Soviets. Yet their main concern was Europe, where they had an unrealistic but genuine fear of a big military adventure by Stalin. The Korean War was providing the rationale for a huge rearmament program. By early 1951, aircraft production was to start returning to the World War II peak of 1944. The benefits of the program were going to a buildup of the NATO alliance rather than to Korea. MacArthur was warned that he would have to win his war with the equivalent of the eight divisions he had received by the time of Inchon. The Joint Chiefs instructed him to avoid provoking the Chinese and Stalin by halting at a line about fifty miles above Pyongyang. The northernmost fifth of the country, the mountainous provinces along the Yalu and the section on the northeast corner where Korea borders the Soviet Union, was to be left as a buffer zone.

  MacArthur ignored the restriction. He was convinced that he knew how to deal with the Chinese. During a press briefing aboard the command ship Mount McKinley on the way to Inchon, a reporter asked whether he feared China would enter the war. “If the Chinese do intervene,” he said, “our air will turn the Yalu River into the bloodiest stream in all history.” In mid-October at the Wake Island conference, Truman asked him what chance there was of Chinese intervention. “Very little,” he replied. He said that his air force could, in any case, prevent the Chinese from bringing more than 50,000 to 60,000 men south of the Yalu and that not many of them would survive subsequent air attacks. “If the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be the greatest slaughter,” he said. No one accompanying the president from Washington, including Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the other five-star general then on active service, contradicted MacArthur. He took their silence for agreement. He told Truman that “formal resistance” would end throughout Korea by Thanksgiving and that he hoped to bring the Eighth Army back to Japan by Christmas. He promised Bradley a division for Europe in January 1951.

  When the appearance of Chinese units within the once-contemplated buffer zone at the end of October prolonged “formal resistance,” MacArthur sent the B-29S of his Far East Air Forces to demolish the bridges from Manchuria and fighter-bombers to interdict the roads south. He ordered his air commanders to burn with incendiaries “every installation, factory, city and village” in northern Korea that might assist or shelter the Chinese. He held to the judgment he had given Truman at Wake Island, and no message came from Washington telling him to stop. On November 24, 1950, he flew to Walker’s command post on the Chongchon River along the southern edge of the mountain range to witness the launching of his final offensive to end the war. He assured his soldiers in a communiqué that they need not fear “the new Red Armies” facing them in Korea. They would be advancing to the Yalu as part of a “massive compression envelopment,” he said. “The isolating component of the pincer, our air forces of all types,” had essentially cut off the Chinese and prepared them for destruction. He was also not troubled at ordering his troops into these pine-covered mountains in the le
thal cold of a Manchurian winter. If everything continued according to plan, he said, they could be “home by Christmas.”

  By the late afternoon of November 25, 1950, Ralph Puckett and his company of Rangers were settled into the foxholes of a perimeter they had dug out of the frozen earth on Hill 205, a ridge about fifteen miles north of the Chongchon. (The U.S. Army designates hills by height in meters.) Their mission was a standard precaution during a phased movement forward. They were holding the high ground on the right flank of Task Force Dolvin, a two-battalion composite of tanks and infantry under Lt. Col. Welborn Dolvin that was the point element of the division’s advance. In the morning the task force was to secure a place called Unsan a bit farther up the road and then to press on in these deliberate stages with the rest of the division following until they reached the Yalu.

  Lieutenant Puckett wondered why the 25th Division was advancing. At a briefing for Puckett and the other unit leaders of the task force the previous day, an intelligence officer from one of the battalion staffs had warned that there were 25,000 Chinese soldiers “in the immediate area” of the division. If the intelligence officer was correct, then the 25th should be digging in and preparing to defend rather than going forward in an offensive. Puckett had been taught in the Basic Course for infantry officers at Fort Benning that you needed odds of two or three to one in your favor in order to attack. By the intelligence officer’s estimate the Chinese had two-thirds again as many men as the 25thDivision, which was running at about 15,000 men in November 1950 because of sickness and accumulated casualties. One of Puckett’s men owned a Zenith Transoceanic radio. The shortwave news broadcasts also kept reporting that hordes of Chinese “volunteers” were coming down from Manchuria to oppose Mac Arthur’s army.

  The Rangers had, nevertheless, occupied Hill 205 virtually unopposed on the afternoon of November 25. Dolvin’s tanks had carried them up the road and dropped them off at a point abreast of the ridge. While they were walking toward the slope across some iced-over rice paddies, scattered automatic-weapons fire opened on them from the crests of a couple of nearby ridges. They were able to sprint through it and climb the hill at a cost of a couple of wounded. There was no opposition amid the thin pines at the top where they dug their foxhole perimeter, Puckett carefully positioning the machine guns and the BARs to give them the best fields of fire. He did lose a platoon leader. The nerves of one of his West Point classmates cracked at the prospect of running across the paddies through the bullets. The man deserted to the task force command post in the valley and refused to come to the hill. No one shot at Puckett later in the afternoon when he walked back to the command post to see the artillery officer and arrange a fire-support plan just in case they were attacked that night. Nor was he fired at on the return trip to the hill. A fire-support plan was a routine precaution, but one that Puckett always observed.

  He was glad the afternoon’s casualties had been so light. Although Puckett’s Rangers had seen no serious combat, illness and the skirmishing on the way up the peninsula from the Pusan Perimeter had also taken a toll on his company, and it was down a third in strength. He had about fifty enlisted men left of the seventy-four he had recruited in Japan four and a half months earlier, along with the other lieutenant and classmate whose nerves were, like Puckett’s, those of a soldier. He would need them all for the hard fight with the Chinese that he felt was certain to come.

  Puckett was not frightened at the prospect of encountering 25,000 Chinese. After all, this was the U.S. Army, not Mussolini’s rabble, and there must be a sound reason for what they were doing. He merely felt a sense of wry amusement that the generals would order an offensive at these odds, in view of what the Army taught its lieutenants, and he was puzzled as to how this strange maneuver was going to unfold. As the last of the light disappeared on the ridges around him, he assumed from the token opposition they had received in the afternoon that the fight with the Chinese would come on some other hill farther up the road.

  ***

  Three hundred thousand Chinese soldiers, not the 60,000 of MacArthur’s imagination, were waiting in the mountains of North Korea to fall upon his army. As night came on November 25, 1950, the assault columns that had not yet reached their jump-off points were trotting down the trails along the stream beds to attack on time. The Chinese had not been seriously inconvenienced by MacArthur’s air force. One of the juniormost staff officers attached to the main headquarters group of Gen. Peng Teh-huai was a nineteen-year-old lieutenant from North China named Yao Wei. He was to become a specialist in American studies after the war and to come to Washington thirty years later on a research fellowship. Yao Wei remembered that the headquarters group suffered more casualties from truck accidents than from bombs. They were told before crossing the Yalu that the planes would not trouble them if they stayed out of the towns and villages and drove at night. This turned out to be true enough, but the drivers had difficulty steering on the twisting dirt roads with the headlights off.

  The Chinese infantry did not have trucks. The trucks of the Chinese Army, other than a small number assigned to the senior headquarters groups, were reserved for hauling supplies and towing artillery. The Chinese infantry marched. Their pace was almost as fast as the twenty miles in five hours of marching time that Caesar’s legions set on an average day in Gaul, and the Chinese were traversing rougher country and doing it in the dark. Their day began at 7:00 in the evening. They marched, with time out for meals and rest breaks, until 3:00 A.M., when they made camp again. By 5:30 A.M., as dawn was approaching, every man, all the weapons and equipment, and the Manchurian ponies and horses and carts used to haul the mortars and ammunition were camouflaged against detection from the air. No one moved in daylight except small scouting parties sent ahead to select the next day’s bivouac. In this fashion, thirty Chinese infantry divisions, a total of about 300,000 men with the attached artillery and support units, marched into Korea and positioned themselves in front of MacArthur’s army by the end of the third week in November without being detected by the U.S. Air Force reconnaissance planes that flew overhead while the Chinese slept below. When Mac Arthur was telling Truman at Wake Island in mid-October that China could send 60,000 troops at most into North Korea, twice that number were already there or on the way.

  Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and the other leaders of the Chinese Communist Party had just completed a twenty-eight-year revolution to win China independence and freedom from foreign exploitation and to build their country into a modern nation. They regarded the United States as a grave menace to everything they had achieved. The failed champion of the Truman administration, Chiang Kai-shek, had fled to Taiwan with the remnants of his Kuomintang army and administration. The warships of the Seventh Fleet were protecting him there by blocking the Formosa Strait, and the United States was continuing to recognize his regime as the legitimate government of China. The CIA was smuggling spies and guerrillas into China. Periodically some prominent American politician spoke of having the U.S. Navy bring Chiang’s army back to reconquer the mainland. Now the Americans were sending an army up through the Korean peninsula toward the Yalu. A secret initiative the year before by Chou En-lai offering to resolve differences and asking the United States to help China preserve its independence from the Soviet Union had been rebuffed. Chou and his colleagues, like Ho and his associates, could fit into the American world vision only as tools of the Russian menace. To accept an American army on their frontier was more than the Chinese could bear. Stalin also encouraged them to resist because of his concern for the security of Vladivostok, secretly promising to back them with Soviet arms and matériel.

  The Chinese did not want war and tried to deter the Americans. Chou issued a warning at the beginning of October through the Indian ambassador in Peking. (The United States had no direct diplomatic relations with China.) The chief of staff of the Chinese Army passed an identical warning through a Dutch diplomat. The Chinese explained that they were not going to be intimidated into compromisi
ng their independence by the threat of atomic bombs. When the secret diplomacy brought no response, Radio Peking started to broadcast the warnings and, with the Chinese press, began to prepare its public for a war against the United States in Korea. Despite the failure of the aerial reconnaissance, there was also enough intelligence by late November to have sounded an alarm on the extent of the Chinese buildup in the mountains. The information came from the interrogation of prisoners captured during preliminary fighting with Chinese units and from the interception and decoding of Chinese communications.

  The warnings all went unheeded, and the intelligence was always misinterpreted or ignored. There was some worrying, never enough to change the attitude reflected in Acheson’s reaction to Chou’s October warning. “We should not be unduly frightened,” he told the British, who were frightened, “at what was probably a Chinese Communist bluff.” Afterward he and Omar Bradley said they and their staffs (Dean Rusk was Acheson’s assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs) concluded that Peking would not dare to seriously challenge the United States. Truman felt the same way. These American statesmen and generals thought that Chinese statesmen and generals would endure, because they were Chinese, what Americans would never have endured in like circumstances. As in Vietnam the American leaders also confused their venal Chinese on Taiwan with the Chinese they were facing. On the eve of the blow, Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, Mac Arthur’s chief of intelligence, cabled the Joint Chiefs that the Chinese in Korea were running out of food and ammunition. Willoughby did not expect Peking to do much to sustain its army. “The Chinese have always been, by Western standards, notoriously poor providers for their soldiers,” he said.