Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader
Page 12
By 1950, conspiracy theorists in a kill-the-messenger frenzy were questioning the loyalty of a host of officials who had doubted Chiang’s viability. Only four and a half months before the North Korean invasion, on February 9, Senator Joseph McCarthy had begun his Red-baiting campaign by announcing in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he held in his hand a list of 205 Communist Party members working in the State Department. For Truman to let the Korean invasion stand—and thus preside over the “loss” of yet another country—-would have made him instant grist for McCarthy’s mill.
Although Truman certainly-was aware of the compelling domestic political factors as he decided on a response in Korea, publicly he stuck to international, Cold War reasoning when he set out to rally Americans and allies to take a stand. “If we let Korea down,” Truman told members of Congress, “the Soviets will keep on going and swallow up one piece of Asia after another.” After Asia, it would move on to the Near East and, perhaps, Europe. The United States must draw the line. Here was an early enunciation of-what came to be called the Domino Theory.18
It was not long before additional evidence began appearing that suggested the Truman-Acheson assumption about Stalin’s expansionism was off the mark.19 Korea bordered the Soviet Union, so Stalin naturally preferred a like-minded state there for security reasons. But Stalin’s policy apparently did not call for the unlimited expansion into nonbordering states that many in the West feared—not, at least, for the time being.20
On the other hand, there has never been much doubt about the accuracy of another Truman assumption: Without swift American intervention, the invaders would overrun all of South Korea. The president acted quickly and decisively. A United Nations resolution, engineered by Washington just two days after the invasion, demanded that the Northern troops go back behind the 38th parallel. Wrapped in the UN mantle, Truman committed not only air and sea support but ground troops to help the beleaguered South Koreans. Lead units of the U.S. Army Twenty-fourth Division, stationed in Japan, landed on July 1, just six days after the invasion, signaling a full American commitment to the war. A UN command ultimately combined the combatant troops of sixteen nations, with thirty-seven others contributing money, supplies and medical aid.
Acheson’s successor as secretary of state, Dulles, later explained the decision this way: “We did not come to fight and die in Korea in order to unite it by force, or to liberate by force the North Koreans. We do not subscribe to the principle that such injustices are to be remedied by recourse to war. If indeed that were sound principle, we should be fighting all over the world and the total of misery and destruction would be incalculable. We came to Korea to demonstrate that there would be unity to throw back armed aggression.”21
Kim Il-sung could point his finger at underlings for misleading him regarding the Southern response, and for letting the People’s Army troops stop to rest after taking Seoul. However, miscalculating American capability and intent was a higher-level responsibility. Yu Song-chol said some ranking North Korean officials had warned that the United States might intervene— but Kim had dismissed their warnings as defeatism.22
With the North Korean attack, and Truman’s decision to defend South Korea, Americans who never had thought much about far-off Korea and were not even quite sure how to pronounce it were suddenly hearing a great deal about it. I was among them, a third-grade elementary school pupil at the time the war broke out. Comic books quickly began featuring GIs in the John Wayne mold fighting ferocious communist “gooks.”23 By the third year of the fighting Ken Pitts, a fellow pupil in my Georgia Sunday school class, had made a weekly ritual of praying: “Lord, be with our boys in Ko-rea,” drawling out the first syllable for an extra beat or two.
One of “our boys,” the chief supplier of-war stories to the Martin family was a brother of my mother. Ed-ward O’Neal Logan had enlisted in the Alabama National Guard at sixteen, lying about his age, and had fought across a wide swath of the South-west Pacific during World War II with an infantry regiment and Sixth Army staff, as a guerrilla warfare and behind-the-lines intelligence officer. Slightly Oriental in appearance himself, he looked a little like Mao Zedong; he had inherited his distinctive looks from my grandfather, who occasionally cited a family legend that one of our ancestors was a Cherokee.
Logan was all fighting man, focused on his job of killing the enemy; cultural sensitivity was not, at the time, his strong suit. In one 1944 note home, accompanied by a photo showing him as a tanned and confident young island warrior, he had passed along a survival tip he evidently was obeying: “The only good Jap is a dead Jap.” Promoted to major at age twenty-two, he had signed up after the war to stay in the (much-reduced) regular army. From the Twenty-fourth Division’s base in Japan, Ed Logan got to Korea a few days ahead of his unit and headed for Taejon. The bulk of the undermanned, under-equipped Nineteenth Infantry Regiment, whose commander he served as operations and training officer (S-3), disembarked at the Pusan docks July 10 and headed north-west. Its assignment: try to hold the enemy at the Kum River north of Taejon.
Kim Il-sung wanted to “put the U.S. imperialists’ nose out of joint” by taking the city, according to an official biography. So Kim “mapped out a careful and meticulous operation to free Taejon, and led it in person.”24 That biography lies shamelessly about some verifiable aspects of the war, and other sources do not mention Kim’s alleged role in leading the Taejon battle, which suggests it is just one more prevarication. Indeed, Yu Song-chol said Kim kept his headquarters in an underground bunker near Pyongyang—and during the entire war, as far as Yu knew, the premier visited the frontline command only once, when it was headquartered in the capitol building in Seoul.25
Nevertheless, if there was a time for homegrown tactics, such as those the anti-Japanese fighters, including Kim, had learned in Manchuria and elsewhere in China, one such time was mid-July of 1950. Yu said the Russian invasion planners were sent back home after their failure to match eastern front tank movements to the actual terrain.26 And the Chinese “volunteers” had not yet entered the war, with their own ideas of strategy and tactics. Recall further that, according to Kim’s memoirs, attacking the enemy’s rear while keeping the pressure on at the front had been a favorite tactic of his as early as the defense of Xiaowangqing in Manchuria, back in 1933. That tactic played an important role in the Korean People’s Army’s assault on Taejon—regardless of-whether it was Kim himself or one of his old partisan colleagues who personally came up with the battle plan.27
The Nineteenth Infantry Regiment had to defend forty-two miles of riverfront, a sector so large it normally would be assigned to the three regiments that comprise a full infantry division. Like the South Koreans, the Americans at first were literally and figuratively blown away by the North Koreans’ Soviet T-34 tanks. The behemoths destroyed all before them, were impregnable to most weapons the Americans had on hand and created “fear and frustration that is difficult to describe,” Logan would recall. “I used a 2.75-inch rocket launcher fired at less than fifty feet. Five rounds. They bounced off the wheels and the tank kept moving.”28
Air power helped, for a time, to bolster the thin line of Americans, in which there were wide gaps. On July 15, in an attempt to ward off an enemy night crossing of the river, American mortar and artillery fire and air strikes set ablaze a North Korean–held village on the other side, illuminating the riverfront. After the loss of a three-man U.S. Air Force radio team handling ground control of the pilots, however, there was no more close air support.
On July 16 and 17, the Americans got a sample of-what many of them came to describe as the North Korean forces’ “disregard for human life”—or, as the Northerners themselves would have put it, their fighting spirit. “We blew the bridge but they kept coming, over dead bodies,” an incredulous American machine gunner told Logan. “There must be three to four hundred bodies in the river at the major crossing and we are out of ammo.”
North Korean soldiers waded across the river and passed through g
aps between positions held by the overextended Americans. Then the Northerners circled around behind the Nineteenth and blocked the main high-way—the Americans’ supply and exit route—three miles to the rear, where the road hugged a steep mountainside on one side, a precipice on the other. His superiors wounded, Logan took command of an operation to try to break through or bypass what proved to be a mile-and-a-half-long roadblock enforced by North Korean soldiers firing down from the highlands above. A squad of North Koreans jumped the major, and four men with him were killed. He fell into the guts of one of his dead soldiers, head in the man’s bloody belly and played dead as enemy soldiers stuck bayonets in his rear to check his condition.
Rescued by some of his men, Logan got past the roadblock and found the division commander, Maj. Gen. William F. Dean. Dean sent Logan farther to the rear to establish a new position closer to Taejon, then organized an attempt to break through the blockage with two light tanks and four antiaircraft vehicles. The attempt failed. Some five hundred American infantrymen trapped between the roadblock and the river could escape only by climbing the mountains above the road. Some able-bodied men, detailed to carry the seriously wounded in litters, could not get far with them in the punishing terrain and had to abandon them on a mountaintop. North Korean troops soon came along and killed the wounded men.
The North Koreans who had jumped Logan made off-with his wallet, with pictures of my aunt Glennis and cousins Eddie and Dennis. A couple of days later, when the regiment was withdrawing south of Taejon for regrouping, war correspondent Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune saw the major. “Thought you were dead,” she said. Higgins told him that “Seoul City Sue,” a former missionary who was broadcasting North Korean propaganda to the American troops, had announced the previous day that Glennis, Eddie and Dennis Logan would never see their husband and father again.
In late July and early August additional American ground divisions as well as air force units arrived to reinforce the beaten-up Twenty-fourth Division. The North Korean troops, having occupied most of the South, finally were halted at the Nakdong River in the southeast, paralyzed by U.S. air power. “Indiscriminate bombing created a situation in which the KPA could neither fight nor move during daylight,” recalled Yu Song-chol. Support from the rear became almost impossible. “As soon as the aircraft sound was heard, one could see the serious neurotic state in which the soldiers were terrified out of their wits. This carpet-bombing strategy struck a fatal blow to the KPA. However, it also inflicted tremendous damage on innocent civilians as well.”29 Despite the turn the war was taking because of air power, Kim Il-sung pressed his troops to capture Pusan, the southeastern port and South Korea’s second city. In an August 15 radio broadcast, he gave them a deadline, the end of August, explaining that “the longer this is delayed, the stronger UN defenses will become.” The ensuing ferocious attacks resulted in horrendous casualties on both sides before the North Koreans’ supplies ran short and they had to pull back.30
The Nineteenth Infantry Regiment was assigned to defend a western area of the Pusan perimeter. Casualties had reduced manpower of the regiment to only thirty or forty percent of what it should have been, as Logan recalled. Around the time Kim was goading his troops into renewed assaults, the Nineteenth got some four hundred replacement troops. American military personnel lists in Japan had been combed for anyone with any background in infantry armored or artillery units. So urgently were replacements needed, the army had not been able to divide those soldiers into the usual racially segregated units. Receiving them in a village schoolyard that was coming under sporadic artillery and mortar attacks, “we lined them up with the words, ‘This group to Company so-and-so,’” Logan told me. Guides took them to their companies, and thus occurred one of the earliest recorded cases of genuine black-white racial integration in an American combat unit.31 Within days, many of the replacements were dead. As in World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, “we had no records, just a name in the notebook.”
If the Lord was answering the prayers of Ken Pitts and others by watching over the Americans, the North Koreans were still “fighting for the leader,”32 Kim Il-sung, who by then had begun assuming deity status himself.
Mao Zedong and his Central Committee, nervously following the war from Beijing, began to fear in early August that the North Korean troops had “advanced too far in isolation, leaving their rear area vulnerable.” The United States “might launch a counteroffensive.” Later in August, Mao sent word to Kim through the North Korean representative in Beijing that Inchon was a likely spot for a UN amphibious landing. Kim reportedly-was unimpressed.33 Sure enough, however, with much of the North’s manpower concentrated on the Pusan perimeter, U.S. forces on September 15 carried out their momentous landing at Inchon,far behind the KPA lines. They encountered little resistance. Caught between two American forces,the North Koreans retreated,the Americans chasing them.
While acknowledging that the retreat was “a sore trial,” North Korean official accounts describe it as a “temporary strategic retreat.” The “iron-willed, brilliant commander” Kim Il-sung, they explain, “made up his mind to lure and scatter the enemy, throwing them into the confusion of a labyrinth, not hitting them in front as before.” To ensure that the trap would succeed, the KPAs main units “retreated at exhilarating speed.”34
That is not the way Kim’s operations bureau commander, Yu Song-chol, would tell it. After Inchon, the North Korean high command ordered not that its forces around the Pusan perimeter hightail it all the way back to the 38th parallel and beyond; rather, Kim’s generals ordered a retreat only far enough to set up a new line of defense at South Korea’s Kum River Basin and the Sobaek Mountain range. However, according to Yu, “the entire KPA communications network was in ruins, and we could not pass the retreat orders past the division level.”35
Breaking out of the Pusan perimeter, the Nineteenth Infantry got the assignment as the lead unit to retake Taejon—this time supported by American tanks and air cover. As the Nineteenth’s lead tanks passed them, the North Korean soldiers—far from establishing a new defense line at the Kum, scene of their earlier triumph—rapidly changed into white civilian garb and discarded their weapons. Faced with this tactic as they chased the KPA forces day and night, the Americans shot “anything that moved,” according to Logan, who by then was the regimental executive officer.36
When the Nineteenth reached the outskirts of Taejon, a South Korean policeman flagged down Logan’s jeep and said, “Hurry! Hurry! Americans being killed—buried alive at police station.” Lead elements of the column, including a couple of tanks, rushed to the police station and found a ditch there with arms and legs of American prisoners of war sticking out, some moving. “We got some out alive,” said Logan.
The previous day, while flying over the city in a light aircraft to recon-noiter, Logan had seen on hills north and north-west of Taejon the bodies of many other people, in multicolored clothing. He assumed that those were people the Northerners had killed as they retreated. It was impossible to get an accurate count from the air, but Logan estimated that the number of bodies exceeded two thousand. Later he heard a count of some five thousand victims of this massacre, mostly South Korean civilians.37
The UN forces retook Seoul on September 28. Fatefully but with little debate, Washington agreed to the proposal of the UN commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, not to stop there but to press on and take Pyongyang— a goal far beyond the original one of thwarting armed aggression. Reasons to keep going included the fear that Kim, if left to rule above the 38th parallel, would simply rebuild his army and strike again. Fatefully, the line that Beijing had decided to draw in the sand was the 38th parallel—not the Yalu River as was thought until Chinese documentary evidence clarified the matter in the 1990s. China tried to signal that it would fight if UN troops crossed the 38th. But the push north had gathered momentum and would not be stopped. MacArthur was golden after his brilliant coup at Inchon; hardly anyone was prepared to stan
d in his way now. Washington, in any event, would have been hard-pressed to stop Rhee from sending his South Korean troops north. Out to avenge their humiliation at the beginning of the war, the Southerners traveled night and day up the east coast in pursuit of the fleeing North Koreans. Two of their divisions took the port of Wonsan on October 10, way ahead of an invasion force that MacArthur was sending by sea.38
The UN forces pushed the North Koreans back above the former border on October 1. MacArthur called on the North to surrender, and Kim Il-sung answered by ordering his troops to “fight to the end.”39 The Americans crossed the parallel in full force from October 9. Logan joined the pursuit, taking command of the Nineteenth Regiment’s Third Battalion a few days after his twenty-ninth birthday. With his battalion in the lead, the Twenty-fourth Division raced the First Cavalry Division north-ward. The first to reach a major road junction on the way to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, would become the lead division for the push north from there. Logan “missed it by about two hours.”
Kim Il-sung ordered soldiers defending Pyongyang not to retreat even “one step farther,” and assigned a squad to shoot deserters. This time his effort to whip up martial spirit was insufficient. Five days later, on October 19, American and South Korean troops were in Pyongyang, where they could check out Kim’s office and command bunker. Entered via four anterooms, a portrait of Stalin in each, the office contained plaster busts of Stalin and Kim. In the bunker, the former church organist had an organ.40
Losing their capital, the North Koreans continued retreating north. Logan’s unit proceeded north on a “mopping up” mission, cleaning out pockets of resistance and sending many POWs to the rear for other units to care for. It was a messy job, and many civilians were victims. One news correspondent, appalled when Logan’s battalion shelled villages and burned people’s homes, said it reminded him of Sherman’s march to the sea. Logan defended his actions, saying it was in those villages, in those houses, that North Korean soldiers changed from their uniforms into civilian clothes and fired on his men. If he should bypass the villages, they would then attack from the rear. There was that much truth, at least, to Kim’s later talk of a “labyrinth,” a “trap.” (Whether or not the thought had occurred to Kim, Mao as early as October 9 cabled the North Korean leader to propose trapping the advancing UN and South Korean troops by opening another front to their rear. “It will be very helpful to the operations in the north if 40,000 to 50,000 troops of the [Korean] People’s Army could remain in South Korea to undertake this assignment,” Mao said.)41