The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The Glosters were in pretty bad shape on the morning of the twenty-fourth. The enemy had been at them all night long. Baker Company, which, like the three other rifle companies in the battalion, had a normal strength of a hundred and fifty men, was down to one officer and fifteen other ranks. It was nearly impossible to move out of a foxhole anywhere along the battalion line without drawing machine-gun fire. The Glosters nevertheless reassembled around a hill on which the battalion command post had been established. The line had shrunk from four miles to six hundred yards, but it still hadn’t been breached. The Glosters begged several times that day for a helicopter to come and evacuate their more seriously wounded. The enemy, however, was so close on all sides that no helicopter could be sent out with any real hope of accomplishing this mission. That morning, Colonel Carne was asked if he thought a relief column could get through to him. He said no. (Communications with him had been spotty for some hours; artillery fire had knocked out all the telephone wires, and only two gradually fading radios linked the Glosters with the rest of the brigade.) That afternoon, in disregard of the Colonel’s opinion, the first of three attempts to rescue the Glosters was made. A battalion of Filipino infantrymen and some supporting tanks got to within fifteen hundred yards of them, and then, in a defile, the lead tank was set afire, and the entire column was blocked and had to withdraw. Neither of the two subsequent relief columns—one composed of Belgian, Filipino, and Puerto Rican infantrymen and elements of the 8th Hussars, and the other of tanks and infantrymen from the American 3rd Division—got even that close. When the third try had failed, the Glosters, by that time seven miles deep in Chinese, were on their own.

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  Early on the morning of the twenty-fifth, the brigade was finally instructed to pull back to new defensive positions. It had held up the Chinese long enough to disrupt their timetable all across the front. Those of the Fusiliers and Rifles who could walk managed to withdraw in fairly good order. The non-walking wounded from these units were worse off. Some two hundred of them were loaded onto the backs and sides of eight Centurions, which started off toward the rear through a narrow mountain pass. They were ambushed by the Chinese. The wounded, lying exposed on the tanks, couldn’t do anything about it, and the tank crews were almost as impotent. Their vehicles were so slippery with blood and so jammed with sprawled bodies that it was impossible to traverse the gun turrets. On the way out, two tank commanders were wounded. Both remained standing in their hatchways, one fainting there and reassuming command when he came to. An officer riding on the outside of one Centurion, who while aboard ship en route to Korea last fall had entertained at a troop show by putting on a fake mental-telepathy act, was startled when one of the wounded men raised his head and said, “Beg pardon, sir, but there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. How’d you do that bloody trick?” The driver of another Centurion, one that had no wounded on it and was, accordingly, buttoned up tight, was surprised to hear a thumping noise overhead. Looking up through his periscope, he saw a Chinese soldier perched above him, pounding on the hatch cover in an effort to open it. Without slowing down, the driver swerved to one side, drove the tank clean through a Korean house, brushing the interloper off, and then resumed his course.

  Before daylight each morning during the battle, the Chinese had been sounding the bugle calls with which they customarily herald their armed approach. Before dawn on the twenty-fifth, the three hundred or so Glosters who were still fit to fight counterattacked in just about the only manner left to them: their bugler blew a long reveille. It rang out, clear and astonishing, and it was followed by a series of other calls—short reveille, half-hour dress, quarter-hour dress, cookhouse, and, just for the hell of it, the American variation of reveille. It was an amazing concert. For the few minutes it lasted, both sides stopped firing. Then the Glosters cheered, and the fighting started up again. At five minutes past six, shortly after daybreak, the Glosters were advised by brigade headquarters that they had permission to break out. At six-twenty, the Glosters reported that they were surrounded and couldn’t break out. But they still wanted air support, and they got it. By almost split-second coordination between air and artillery, a flight of dive-bombers swooped on the enemy just one and a half minutes after the artillery lifted a barrage it had been laying in. The Glosters by then were down to one small yellow air-ground recognition panel, and it was hard for the diving aircraft to know exactly where to strafe and bomb. But the Glosters threw a couple of smoke grenades out from their perimeter—thirty-five yards is a fair throw with a smoke grenade—and the planes aimed their machine guns where the grenades landed. Then bombs were dropped, at a somewhat, but not terribly much, more circumspect distance. The Chinese were hurt, and momentarily relaxed their pressure.

  Colonel Carne summoned his company commanders to a hollow near his headquarters, where fifty or sixty stretcher cases were lying on the ground. He told them that all hope of carrying on as a unit was gone. He said he was going to stay where he was, and he gave them the option of surrendering or fighting their way out in separate groups. The commanders of Able, Baker, and Charlie Companies and their remaining men headed south, toward the United Nations line. It was the commander of Dog Company, Captain Mike Harvey, a twenty-eight-year-old officer from Portsmouth, who led out the group of thirty-nine that got back. He was in charge of Dog Company only by chance; its regular commander, a major, had gone to Japan on April 22nd for a rest. When the major arrived there, he heard that the spring offensive had started and caught the first plane back to Korea. Despite several tries, he was never able to make his way far enough forward to reach his unit. Harvey, a pink-cheeked man with horn-rimmed glasses and an unkempt mustache, is a Reserve officer who was in the Hampshire Regiment during the Second World War; up to April 22nd, he had thought of himself as a Hampshire man on loan to the Gloucestershire Regiment. Now he thinks of himself, without reservation, as a Gloster. He is unusually abstemious for a soldier, forgoing both tobacco and alcohol, principally because he has been interested in judo since the age of twelve and holds one of the highest ratings in the art. After he had assembled his withdrawal party, consisting then of twelve officers and ninety-two other ranks, he let the remnants of the three other companies start off ahead. “I stood on a hill watching them to see if they were really going,” he said afterward. “It was unbelievable that things had come to this pass.” He decided not to go south himself but instead to try the unexpected and proceed due north for a mile, straight toward the Chinese rear, and then swing west a couple of miles, in an outflanking movement, before turning south. He warned his group that they would have to travel fast, exhausted though they were, and that there could be no stopping to aid anybody who might be wounded.

  Proceeding cautiously, Harvey and his men didn’t see a single Chinese for the first three miles. His scheme was working fine. Then, just as they were veering south, they ran into a few Chinese. The Glosters shot them and moved on. When only a few miles from a point where they thought friendly troops would be, they were heartened by the appearance overhead of a Mosquito plane, generally used as liaison between ground forces and fighter aircraft. The Mosquito circled above them and wagged its wings encouragingly, and they waved back. The Mosquito began to guide them homeward through the hills. Harvey was keeping his men on low ground whenever possible, knowing that the Chinese habitually congregate on ridges. Ultimately, they came into one valley, two miles long, that was almost a canyon, with precipitous walls on both sides and a floor about a quarter-mile wide. A stream flowed through it, and they waded along this for a mile or so, until it dwindled away. As they came out on dry ground, thirty or forty machine guns opened up on them, from both flanks. The Glosters made for a ditch about a foot deep and dived into it. By then, the Mosquito had radioed for fighter planes, and they had come buzzing along and were working over the slopes as energetically as they could. But the machine guns didn’t let up. The Glosters crawled forward, keeping their heads below the level of the ditch,
since raising them as much as an inch above it had already proved fatal to several. The ditch, like the river bed before it, was full of stones, and the soldiers’ arms and legs were lacerated. One man’s shoes had fallen apart in the river, but he kept going, first in his socks and then, as those disintegrated, barefoot. Every so often, the men came to a four- or five-yard stretch where the ditch petered out, and in the stumbling race for the next ditch more were hit and dropped.

  Finally, rounding a bend, they saw some American tanks down the valley, just half a mile away. They crawled ahead eagerly, and got to within five hundred yards of them. The tanks opened up with machine guns and 76-mm. cannon, and the six Glosters in the lead fell. The Mosquito pilot, horrified by this case of mistaken identity—the tank men had no idea any friendly troops were still that far north—flew frantically toward the tanks, diving almost on top of them, but they kept on firing. Harvey’s single file of men, on their bellies in the ditch, were receiving fire from the front and both sides, and the men at the rear of the column, most of whom had exhausted their ammunition, were being stabbed by Chinese who had rushed down the valley behind them. Harvey tied his handkerchief and scarf to a stick, put his cap on it, and waved it at the tanks. Simultaneously, the Mosquito made another pass at the tanks and dropped them a note. The tanks, suddenly aware of their error, ceased firing. The remaining Glosters reached the tanks and crouched behind them. Using them as a partial shield against the continuing enemy fire, they withdrew another five hundred yards, to the reverse slope of a small hill. There they climbed on the tanks and rode out, for three more miles under steady enemy fire. The tank men were heartsick over their mistake. One of them took off his shoes and gave them to the Gloster who’d lost his. The lieutenant in command of the tanks kept asking how many of the Glosters his people had wounded. The Glosters, not wanting to make him feel any worse, wouldn’t tell him; indeed, they didn’t know for sure. The lieutenant was wounded himself getting them out.

  As soon as Harvey got to a telephone, he called brigade headquarters. “I thought we had better get back, in case they wanted us again,” he explained later. “Then I learned that we were the only survivors and that everyone else was missing. And everyone else is still missing.” A week after the battle, the Glosters he had led out invited him to stop by for a beer. He hadn’t touched the stuff in over three years, but to please them he drank a glass. “It tasted pretty awful,” he said. “Being a judo man, it doesn’t suit me.”

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  The 1st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment began reorganizing the day after the Battle of the Imjin ended. A few days after that, the handful of men from the old battalion and the new replacements lined up in a green Korean field for a simple memorial service. Massed around a table covered with a white cloth and bearing a cross and two candles, they stood with heads bared as their new battalion chaplain walked toward them in a white robe. Captain Harvey, now the battalion’s new adjutant, distributed hymnals. The Glosters sang two hymns and, snapping to attention, a stanza of “God Save the King.” After a few words from the battalion’s new commander, who himself had been shot in the wrist during the Battle of the Imjin, the chaplain recited the names of the known dead, and the names of Colonel Carne and Sergeant Major Hobbs, as symbolic of, respectively, the officers and other ranks listed as missing. Then the chaplain told a story from Ecclesiastes about a city under siege, and how, after all hope was seemingly gone, a good and wise man had saved it. And yet, in spite of that, the chaplain said, the poor wise man was very soon forgotten. “In England, they’ll remember for a little while,” he went on. “The soldier does have his day. I want to remind you this afternoon that it is not enough to remember now. We’ve got to show what we think of their sacrifice in the way we conduct ourselves in the days ahead. We are, as it were, a link between our past and the future, and if we are to be faithful to our past, we must hand on to future generations some of the heritage of the past. Having handed it on, we will be in some measure worthy of those who died that we might live.”

  Joseph Wechsberg

  AUGUST 29, 1953 (ON AN UPRISING IN EAST GERMANY)

  T HALF PAST six on the morning of last June 17th, Friedrich Schorn, a gaunt man of thirty-nine with a bony face and deep-set eyes, left his three-room apartment in Merseburg, a city of forty-five thousand, ten miles west of Leipzig, in the Soviet Zone of Germany, and boarded a streetcar that would take him to his job in the suburb of Leuna. Schorn, a married man and the father of two children, was employed as an accountant at the Leunawerke Walter Ulbricht, which is Soviet Germany’s largest chemical concern. The evening before, he had heard rumors that the workers on East Berlin’s much publicized housing development on the Stalin-Allee had gone out on strike, and he couldn’t help wondering what that might mean. It was well known in the Soviet Zone that the men working on the Stalin-Allee project were Aktivisten, hand-picked by the German Communists for their industry and efficiency. Schorn’s first thought had been that things must really be bad when even the men on the Stalin-Allee weren’t satisfied. But it certainly hadn’t occurred to him that evening that for more than seven hours the following day he would be leading a substantial part of the first big known popular uprising against Communist domination, an uprising that Mayor Ernst Reuter of West Berlin has since said ranks in historical significance with the storming of the Bastille.

  The Leuna Works, once a segment of the I. G. Farben empire, were taken over in 1945 by the Soviets, as were several important steel and mining operations in the Zone, and made an S.A.G., which officially stands for “Staatliche Aktien Gesellschaft [State Stock Company]” but is more generally and more cynically known as “Sowjet Aktien Gesellschaft,” because the Soviet takes a more direct interest in the vital S.A.G. industries than it does in most of the state-owned enterprises. A vast industrial establishment covering five square miles and employing over twenty-eight thousand workers, the Leuna plant produces synthetic gasoline, fertilizers, and many other valuable chemical products, which are widely exported, making it an important earner of hard currency and one of the prizes of the Soviet regime in East Germany. It is the largest plant in the vicinity of Merseburg. The general manager and his principal aides are Russians; the second-echelon men are Germans. The S.E.D. (the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or Socialist Unity Party, as the Communist Party of East Germany calls itself) is tightly organized inside the plant, and the workers are under constant surveillance by spies, informers, and the Werkschutz, a heavily armed industrial militia. The Leuna plant is not the sort of place in which one would expect an outbreak of strikes and open rebellion. Still, it is an S.A.G. operation, so the authorities take a more sophisticated view of things there than in the ordinary state-owned factories. The Russians are more concerned about quantity and quality of output than about loyalty to ideologies. Though the chemists and technicians at the Leuna Works may not be politically reliable, they are highly appreciated—far more so, in fact, than the 100 percent Communist Party men who have no outstanding skills. Specialists at Leuna who earn more than ten thousand Ostmark (six hundred dollars) a year are given contracts and are never harangued about joining the Party or obliged to attend political-indoctrination meetings. As long as they deliver the goods, they are left pretty much alone.

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  During the streetcar ride out to the plant that morning, Schorn became aware that something was up. Even more than most people living under the pressures of Soviet Germany, he had developed the technique of listening without turning his head or showing any other indication of interest. Schorn learned to control his facial expressions during four years and two months, from 1946 to 1950, that he spent in the Soviet concentration camp at Buchenwald, an experience that may also account for his emaciated body, on which his clothes hang loosely, and the lines in his thin, ascetic face. So Schorn sat there on the streetcar deadpan while a stranger next to him told everybody within earshot that he’d kept his radio tuned in on RIAS, the American broadcastin
g station in West Berlin, all night long. “I heard an appeal by the leader of the West Berlin trade unions,” the man was saying. “It was a fine speech. He called on workers everywhere to join the strike of the Stalin-Allee workers. Transportation and railway workers in East Berlin have already joined, he said. The more the better was his idea.”

  A few people on the streetcar said, “He’s right,” or nodded approval. Two Vopos (members of the Volkspolizei, or People’s Police) were standing on the rear platform and presumably heard what the man was saying, but they did nothing. That seemed strange to Schorn. In East Germany, listening to RIAS is not forbidden, but repeating what one has heard over it is regarded as a crime against the state. Schorn never listened to RIAS. He was afraid to. His father-in-law is an old-time Communist, who joined the Party back in 1919 and always finds explanations and apologies for the Party’s difficulties in East Germany, or simply dismisses them as “children’s diseases that every new regime goes through.” Schorn’s wife, Lieselotte, who has been thoroughly indoctrinated by her father, is a leader in the S.E.D. in Merseburg. Schorn himself, who is the son of a minor official in East Prussia, was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1935; he then admired Hitler for “doing a lot for the simple workingmen.” During the war, Schorn was a flier in the Waffen S.S., the élite troops of the Nazi overlords, and after the fall of Germany he was sent to a British prisoner-of-war camp. He escaped and made his way back to Merseburg, where he found that his wife had excellent connections with the new Communist regime.

  It didn’t take Schorn long to reach the conclusion that the Communists were not for him. Within a couple of months he became embittered at the way they interfered with his life. Then, during an argument with his father-in-law, he announced that he didn’t want to bring up his children “in a Soviet swamp,” and a few days later he was arrested by the Soviet secret police and sent to Buchenwald. He doesn’t like to talk much about the time he spent there. “But Buchenwald did one good thing for me,” he told me not long ago, in West Berlin, to which he escaped after the June 17th uprising was forcibly put down. “It cured me of Nazism forever. Some of the well-known Nazis were prisoners there when I was—men I had once considered gods. I was shocked to see what a cheap, cowardly bunch they were close to.”