But men are not ciphers, nor do the battles always go to the big battalions.
The correspondents saw, and were often quick to report, the command failures—which were many. Stories did spread of ranking officers removed from command, or put on planes for Japan in states of nervousness and collapse. Since the occupation divisions had been at full peacetime stance, a certain number of officers with no aptitude for leading men in combat had been assigned to them, as is inevitable in any peacetime army.
But few correspondents saw that officers, giving crucial commands, could never be sure if their orders would be obeyed. A colonel who sends men to hold a vital hill, and who sees them again and again "take a vote on it with their feet" by marching to the rear, is soon apt to be a straitjacket case.
One highly decorated colonel, known to his men as "Cash Pays the Rent" Corley, wrote HQ: "I want double the to of officers with each unit—one to lead and the other to drive."
Or if they saw, their stories were not printed. A free press is equally free to print the truth or ignore it, as it chooses.
On 22 July, the 1st Cavalry Division (Infantry) went into action at Yongdong, east of Taejon. The 25th Infantry Division moved into line in the Sangju area, to the southeast.
Yongdong was lost. The 25th moved south.
The fighting was confused, hellish, and bloody. In the main, it repeated the actions earlier in the month. The new divisions repeated the same weaknesses of the 24th, and did no better.
The front continued to move south.
Many men and units, unprepared for combat, fought creditably and more than creditably when unexpectedly thrown into battle. But even these could not stem the tide. From Okinawa, two battalions of the 29th Infantry Regiment were diverted to Korea. Unready for combat, the 29th was promised six weeks of training in Japan in the middle of July. But the front kept moving south, and the promise could not be kept. On 25 July, the two battalions found themselves on the front line at Chinju. In their ranks were four hundred brand-new recruits. Their newly issued rifles were not zeroed; their mortars were yet untest-fired; their new machine guns still oozed cosmoline.
Lieutenant Colonel Harold W, Mott, commanding 3rd Battalion, 29th Infantry, received orders to move forward to seize the town of Hadong.
In Chinju was a ROK major general—Chae Byong Duk. Chae talked to the Americans about the deteriorating situation, and although he had only a few soldiers of his own, begged permission to join the Americans. They agreed to let him come along, but with the understanding that the ROK general was to serve only as interpreter and guide to Colonel Mott. The former chief of staff of the Republic of Korea agreed.
At Hadong Pass the next day, Chae and the American command group saw a group of soldiers approaching their newly prepared defensive positions. Many of these men seemed to be in American uniforms, though some wore the Communist mustard-brown. When the motley group was only one hundred yards away, Chae stepped forward and called to them.
"What unit?"
The group rushed into the ditches. The Americans along the pass opened fire with machine guns. And enemy fire blazed into the pass from the men in the ditches and some who had walked onto high ground to the north.
Chae Byong Duk, struck in the head, fell dead in a great pool of arterial blood. Two of his aides, loyal to the last, picked up his body under fire and took it to a truck. Chae Byong Duk, whatever his failings and whatever his mistakes, died a soldier.
In the same burst of fire Colonel Mott and several of his staff officers were wounded. Immediately, the battalion was under heavy fire, and heavy attack from two sides.
It fought well until enveloped by the enemy. Ordered to withdraw, the battalion experienced the same weakness of many American units; weakened by casualties, particularly among officers, it came apart.
Leaving more than three hundred dead behind it, a hundred prisoners, and most of its officers, the remnants of the battalion reached Chinju. Many men had retained only their boots and shorts by the time they reached safety.
Shortly afterward, the battalion was reorganized, and its companies sent to fill the gaps in the 19th Infantry, 24th Division.
The front continued to move south and cast.
Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, with HQ at Taegu, was aware that Eighth Army was approaching crisis. He was unhappy with the performance of General Kean's 25th Division at Sangju, and he let Kean know about it.
He saw the 1st Cavalry Division falling back on the Taejon-Taegu axis with alacrity. He made known his disappointment to General Hobart Gay, the division commander.
Gay, who had been Patton's chief of staff in Europe, admitted he did not know how to conduct a retreat—thus far in this military experience he had never been involved in one.
In addition to the problems of understrength units and missing batteries and battalions, lack of communications, and poor equipment, shaky morale and weak discipline, Eighth Army faced another problem, one that grew as summer lengthened.
July and August of 1950 were abnormally dry for Korea; the monsoon ended early, in blazing heat and droughts. The temperature soared to unusual heights, reaching 120 degrees at times.
The hillsides of South Korea are steep; often slopes of 60 degrees are found on low ridges. Under the sullen sun, the ridges shimmered like furnaces, and there was almost no shade in the scrubby brush that covered them.
And there is very little drinking water, outside the brownish stuff in the fecal paddies.
The land viewed from afar is beautiful, rolling terraces and rice paddies, each a subtly different shade of green. But each paddy is a humid, stinking oven, and the bare hills are like broiler plates.
When they left their trucks and moved up onto the hills and ridges, American soldiers, as one officer put it, "dropped like flies." Their legs, unused to hard pulls, gave out. The heat and exertion gave them throbbing headaches. During these weeks exhaustion and heat knocked out more men than NKPA bullets.
Short of water, lacking water discipline, they drank from ditches and paddies, developed searing dysentery.
They sweated until their shirts and belts rotted, and their bellies turned shark-white. Salt tablets became such an item of priority that they had to be air-dropped on units, along with vital ammunition.
Korea is a land cut by multiple hills and valleys, lacking roads. It is no terrain for a mechanized army. The principal—and sometimes only—means of getting from one place to another through the hills is shank's mare.
But American troops, physically unhardened for foot marches, were road-bound. They defended on roads, attacked on roads, retreated on roads. If their vehicles couldn't go, they did not go either.
FEAF soon made the roads unpopular with the Inmun Gun. On the roads, tactical air strafed them, rocketed them, burned them. The Inmun Gun left the roads and went over the ridges, and it seemed to bother them not at all. They went stolidly up the slopes with the patient, sideways, Korean peasant tread, and they carried their machine guns, mortars, and mountains of ammunition with them.
They set their guns up on the high ground behind the Americans, interdicting their supply roads. Americans had trouble attacking up the hills to knock them off. And when their roads were blocked, Americans could hardly drag themselves over the hills to safety, let alone their heavy equipment. Second to the Soviets, the American Army became the principal supplier to the Inmun Gun of guns and ammunition.
The great problem was that in 1950, an infantryman in Korea was called on to do almost the same things Caesar's legions had done, and to suffer the same hardships. In twenty centuries, infantry warfare has changed but little in the burdens it puts on the men in the mud. But in 1950, while ground warfare had changed little, the American society and the American soldier had.
In American society the best weapon against a convertible may be another convertible, but in Korea it is apt to be a. good pair of legs.
Johnny Walker, a tenacious little bulldog of a Texan, seeing the poor performanc
e of his men, began to feel a certain warmth in his own britches area. He requested MacArthur to come to Korea, and they conferred, with only General Almond present. MacArthur said there was going to be no Korean evacuation, no repetition of Dunkirk. Walker agreed.
Walker moved among his divisions afterward and began to lay down the law. On 26 July he had issued a warning order for a planned withdrawal to defensive position behind the Naktong River, but now he put out an order that was promptly tagged by the press as "stand or die."
Walker knew Eighth Army would have to fall back more—he did not intend the order to be one to stand or die. But he was doing everything he could to slow the southward rush. A determination to stand—somewhere—had to be instilled in all ranks.
Walker's presence up and down the line was felt to good effect, though his order of 29 July had little effect other than in the press.
The front moved south. On I August, Walker commanded an orderly withdrawal across the Naktong, the last natural defense barrier to the port of Pusan. Once across, the bridges were to be blown, and all hands were to dig in for a final stand.
Behind the Naktong, Eighth Army would be only fifty miles from the sea.
The American and ROK divisions streamed back across the Naktong for several days, sometimes breaking contact with the NKPA, against Walker's instructions. By the evening of 3 August, all were across except a battalion of the 8th Cavalry, acting as rear: guard. This battalion was on the west side of the river at Waegwan, preparing to come across so that the bridge could be dynamited.
But this rear guard had a problem.
Thousands upon thousands of Korean civilian refugees were pressing upon these men, clamoring to be let across the bridge. Hundreds of thousands of South Koreans, frightened of the Inmun Gun, were fleeing south ahead of, with, and behind the fighting forces, complicating their job enormously.
As the rear guard came across the bridge to the east side, throngs of Koreans followed them, filling the bridge with jostling bodies. General Hobart Gay, who had ordered the bridge to be sent up only at his express command, instructed them to go back to the far side, and clear the bridge.
This they did, as dusk approached. Then, with the refugees pushed back onto the west shore, the rear guard turned and pelted across to the friendly bank—but the second they turned, the Koreans dashed madly for the bridge and soon filled it, even before the cavalrymen were across.
Three times, at Gay's order, they repeated the maneuver, without success. Short of shooting them there was no way to keep the Koreans from using the bridge. Even telling them it would be blown did no good.
Now it was growing dark, and the Inmun Gun was closing. As the rear guard recrossed to the east side for the third time, with the mass of Koreans close behind them, Hobart Gay, his face pale, said, "Blow it." He had no other choice.
Several hundred Koreans went into the river with the bridge.
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11
Perimeter
There will be no more retreating, withdrawal, or readjustment of the lines, or anything else you want to call it.
— Lieutenant General Walton H. (Johnny) Walker, to the staff of the 25th Division.
BY 4 AUGUST the entire United Nations force—the U.N. had now given the command of its effort over to the United States, and the Republic of Korea, though not a member, had placed its Armed Forces under U.N. command—had reeled into the Pusan Perimeter. So far only the ROK's and three occupation divisions from Japan had been engaged, and they had been blooded, knocked about, and pushed back. They had lost mountains of equipment and thousands of men. Staggering back into the small remaining toehold at the corner of the peninsula, the fighting men were exhausted, dispirited, and bitter.
Walton Walker reported to MacArthur that the 24th Division needed complete rehabilitation and that he had grave doubts as to the offensive capabilities of the 25th.
Behind the Naktong River the U.N. held only a rectangular box of terrain ranging one hundred miles from north to south and fifty miles across. On the west was the barrier Naktong. Across the north rose high and rugged mountains, difficult for an attacker to penetrate. On all other sides was the sea.
But at the bottom of the rectangle lay the major port of Pusan, now pumping renewed American strength into the peninsula. Working around the clock, transportation and technical-service people poured in ton after ton of supplies to replenish those the divisions lost. More important, men began to arrive in a continual stream. In Japan, Operation Flushout had separated thousands of American troops from their desks and other jobs, and thrown them into the fighting. Replacements were beginning to arrive from the States. All over the world, the Army had turned the vacuum cleaner on, and at its apex was Pusan.
Help was on the way.
And here, behind the Naktong, the tenor of the war began to change.
Within the box, from north to south, Walton Walker had eight divisions: the ROK 3rd, Capital, 8th, 6th, and 1st, plus ROK manpower to assimilate within the weakened American units; the 1st Cavalry, the 24th, and 25th infantry divisions, and 5th Regimental Combat Team from Hawaii.
Now, behind barriers, with a definite piece of ground to defend, Walker could form for the first time a continuous battle line. Eighth Army was spread margarine-thin across the land—but at last it had anchored flanks, refused to the enemy. There were great gaps in the line, but at least it was a line.
And slowly, painfully, reaching eagerly for every man, Walker was putting together a reserve. Each morning he demanded of his chief of staff, "How many reserves have you got me?"
For the first time, American commanders could plan for combat as they had been trained for it—with known friendly forces on either flank, and with help in the form of a reserve to their rear.
A great and continuing weakness of the United States Army fighting in Asia was its tactical and psychological dependence on continuous battle lines, such as had been known in Europe. In Asia, terrain and Communist tactics made such lines rare—Communist armies tended to flow like the sea, washing around strong points, breaking through places where the dams were weak. The "human sea" analogy picked up and headlined by the press was very real—except that the press always gave a misleading indication of the numbers of enemy involved.
Relatively small numbers of enemy flowed around the high ground held by American troops, went behind them, and interdicted their supply roads. Roadbound, the American commanders became understandably nervous. Invariably, both men and leaders began to think of retreat, falling back to form a new line. This was in many respects a frame of mind. The North Korean forces in the American rear were small, ill supplied, and in effect often cut off from contact with their own bases.
Able to live on three rice balls a day, capable of carrying guns and ammunition over the steepest slopes on foot, this isolation bothered the Communists not at all.
It drove the Americans, hating isolated action, dependent upon wheels, to desperation. Ironically, the Indian-fighting army of seventy-five years earlier would have understood the new form of warfare perfectly. On the plains and mountains of the American West, the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare. It had learned to ride hard and march hard, live light, and to operate in isolated columns, giving the enemy no rest.
But even hard lessons can be soon forgotten.
In August, however, within a tight little box, the United States Army could at last fight the way it had been trained, and it could finally bring its inherently superior firepower to bear. And its mechanization, a handicap when scattered over long supply lines vulnerable to interdiction, became an asset, since troops could be rushed within the interior lines from one spot to another as needed, faster than the foot-bound enemy could exploit a breakthrough.
Within the perimeter, the American soldier began to put up a better fight, a fight he could hardly have been expected to wage when committed a battalion or a regiment
at a time, with no friends to right or left, and his rear vulnerable.
And in August 1950, other factors took effect. After a month and more of battle, the first sense of incredible shock had worn off the green United States troops. They had now learned what to do the hard way.
They had also learned that they would not be withdrawn. Walton Walker told them, "A retreat to Pusan would be one of the greatest butcheries in history." If they did not hold along the Naktong, they stood to be slaughtered. There was, to say the least, an incentive to hold.
And finally, while most Americans can be pushed around a great deal, there comes a time when they will be pushed no more.
They had not been told why they were in Korea of why they must fight and die, but in many men a certain pride took hold. The "gooks" had pushed them around long enough.
Undisciplined, untrained, unhating, they had come to battle. They had been clobbered, as American citizen-soldiers had usually been clobbered in their first battles, from Bull Run to Kasserine. Only gradually did men understand the nature of the job they had to do.
Once they did, they would begin to do it.
It was the boast of the great Frederick that when he went to war neither the peasants of the fields nor the tradesmen of his towns should know or care. Because Frederick involved his small state of Prussia in wars too big for even his iron grenadiers, he was not quite able to live up to his boast—but it is an accurate statement of the conditions of warfare in the Age of Reason.
In the eighteenth century, men and rulers were sick to death of unlimited war. For almost two centuries jihad had been preached; armies had crossed Europe like ravening locusts; millions had died; and at the end of the savagery nothing had been accomplished. The survivors still insisted on being Calvinists, Catholics, or Lutherans, short of extermination.
In Frederick's time men were still men, and they must compete—but they no longer trusted the angel's trumpet, or would have heeded had it blown. Wars there still were, but they developed in a new, a limited, fashion: to snatch a province here, to defend one there, to place a friendly head upon some throne, or to remove an unfriendly one from it.
This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History Page 16
