This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  And the storm broke across America, violent, emotional, and as indecisive as the one that had whipped the Korean front. Where MacArthur went, millions cheered him. But even those who screamed in the crowds were not sure what they were screaming for, or against.

  Men wrote Congress by the thousands, but from the letters came mostly emotion, and not much sense. Sometimes it is necessary for men to scream against a world they never made, and cannot control.

  The general went before the houses of Congress, and there he spoke. Men from Fresno to Piccadilly, who had never heard MacArthur speak, who knew him only as a legend, stood transfixed at his eloquence, as it was broadcast across the world.

  It was here, perhaps, that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, soldier, aristocrat, man of God, had his greatest moment. He spoke, and he stated his case, but he did not sound the tocsin of revolt. What might have been public disgrace to a lesser man he turned into personal triumph.

  There are such things as great men. Some are born, or make themselves, as Douglas MacArthur, and some, like Harry Truman, are made by the Constitution.

  The storm broke, and then, like MacArthur, it faded away.

  Power, after all, still stood on Pennsylvania Avenue. There was never any real possibility of congressional revolt centering around the general. The President, after all, was leader of the Democrats. They might gleefully slaughter his domestic program—after 1948 Truman got not one Fair Deal measure through Congress—but these same men had no desire to tear their party in shreds, however they felt about China.

  And the leaders of the increasingly powerful Republican opposition—Bob Taft, Wherry, and Joe Martin—could hardly rally behind the general, even had he raised the standard of revolt. More than anything else, these men really wanted to get out of Korea entirely, not to expand the war into Central Asia.

  It was ironic that those who screamed the loudest on MacArthur's relief were the former isolationists, and those who had consistently voted down or pared every military budget.

  There was frustration in the spring of 1951, but no change of policy. The world had changed, and America was being forced to change with it. Containment, as developed by the Truman Administration, was not a satisfying answer. Millions disliked or distrusted it, but could put forth no better course. There were frustration and trauma.

  The majority could no longer accept isolation as a way of life. And only the paranoid saw a true solution in atomic war.

  There was nothing left but to return to the checkerboard, and to play the dangerous game.

  MacArthur faded away in retirement; Ridgway soon proved, bluff paratrooper that he was, that he would not be a bull in the China shop of the Dai Ichi.

  In the soggy, just-turning-green hills of Korea, the war went on.

  First Lieutenant Leonard F. Morgan, of the Army 1st Base Post Office, arrived at Hungnam, North Korea, 12 December 1950. Morgan was an Adjutant General's Corps officer who had enlisted in 1938 and worked his way through the ranks. And over the years he had come to regard the flowing of the mails as seriously as any postman.

  But at Hungnam, with the Marines and soldiers of X Corps streaming down out of the frozen hills for evacuation, Morgan was told politely but firmly that this was no time to set up in business. And just as firmly, he was ordered onto an LST for shipment to Pusan.

  At Pusan, the 1st Base Post Office was billeted at the old Agricultural College Building, called universally by the troops "Pusan U." And here the P.O. had to wait until the lines got straightened out once more, and the mails could flow.

  Then, on 5 February, Morgan, a small, dark, serious officer, at thirty-eight a bit grizzled for his rank, was told to take twelve enlisted men up to Suwon by air. He was to take tents and stoves and a minimum amount of postal equipment, mostly fixed credit—postal stamps.

  He got into Suwon seventy-two hours after the Chinese had cleared it. It was cold as hell, with snow all over the ground, and now Morgan found out what it was like to be in what the Army called a bastard unit.

  He arrived with a few tents but no mess facilities, no vehicles, or anything else. And there were no combat men in the Army Postal Unit; it strained their ability to get the tents up.

  Fortunately for Morgan, he ran into Captain Bond of the 25th Division Quartermaster Company, in whose area the new APU was to be located. And Bond was a good man to know.

  "I've got a big squad tent for your men, and I can feed you," Bond said. "We'll get you some litters from the Medical Company to sleep on."

  Shivering in their borrowed tent, the boys of the APU decided war was hell. But as Leonard Morgan told them, "The mail must go through."

  Morgan himself carried $5,000 worth of postage stamps, which he kept chained to his cot post.

  But at Suwon, he dragged out some fifty-five-gallon oil drums, made a platform, and put up a sign that he was open for business. There were some 88,000 American troops in the area, from the 2nd, 3rd, 1st Cavalry, and 25th divisions, plus the Air Force. The mail came in, in truckloads.

  Day and night now, handling mail and the Stars and Stripes, Morgan's men were kept busy. Things might be tough in the rear areas, but the mail went through.

  For several hours after capture at Kunu-ri, the troops guarding Sergeant Charles B. Schlichter and the other men from his medical company marched the exhausted prisoners north. Finally, they herded them into a North Korean farmhouse, where they were allowed to rest till dark.

  The men who were wounded had received no medical treatment, except for the little they could give themselves. One of the surgeons with the party, an American major, declared he had been an administrator for so long he was not up on the latest treatment. He was able to do very little to help.

  With dark, the chilled, miserable men were forced outside. And now, from sundown to sunup, they were marched north. At dawn they staggered into another Korean farmhouse, where they were allowed to lie soddenly until the sun sank once more.

  They received one meal a day, a handful of corn boiled in water. But all of them had been eating good United States rations, and as yet the cold and hunger hadn't really bothered them.

  The single daily meal was fed to them in their canteen cups. Some men had lost or thrown their mess gear away. These ate out of their caps, or from their cupped hands, like animals.

  And each day at dusk they were forced out into the stinging, freezing wind, to march north until light broke in the east. The Communists moved them by night, because they feared the United Nations air power, which still ranged over the whole of North Korea despite the retreat of the land armies; and they kept the prisoners on the road because they had taken far more POW's than had been anticipated, and they did not know what else to do with them.

  For more than twenty nights, until Christmas 1950, they kept the POW's from Kunu-ri and other points marching over the hills, in circles, gradually bearing toward the Manchurian border.

  Under the terrible pressure of those night marches, the meager diet, and the brutal cold, some of the American soldiers began to give up. Soon all were exhausted; many were sick.

  On Christmas night, while people back home were recuperating from Christmas dinner and drinking eggnog, the men with Schlichter—now grown to several hundred—were marched over what seemed like the longest, highest mountain in Korea.

  Worn out, miserable, hopeless now, several of the American POW's started to cry. One young boy gave up completely. He told Schlichter, "Sergeant, I can't go on."

  Schlichter tried to argue him into continuing. But the boy refused to move. The guards came—and they were very considerate. They did not shoot or bayonet the boy, but brought a sled.

  All night long, up the mountain and down its far side, other men took turns dragging the man who refused to march.

  In the dawn, when the stooped, limping party halted under the harsh command of their guards, the face of the man who had been pulled on the sled was white with frost. He had frozen to death during the night.

  The
next day, the group of POW's arrived at a bleak, deserted bauxite mine. Here, in the little squalid huts that made up the old mining camp, the Americans were sequestered, some forty men to a hut. The valley was in no sense a true POW camp, with barbed wire, sentry posts, and the like. But it was surrounded by cruel mountains, and the guards stood about with ready guns.

  As the long, bedraggled, stubble-faced column weaved its way into the mining valley, men failing out at each hut a lean collie dog ran up and down the column, barking happily. As the dog came up to sniff the strange Americans, Charles Schlichter held out: a hand to the friendly animal, soothing it.

  That night, Schlichter and the men in his hut ate roast dog. The other men let Schlichter, who did the honors, have the largest piece.

  Later, huddled in the tiny huts, the Americans found they had to lie down twenty to a side, with their booted feet interlaced. There was so little room that they had to lie hip to hip, pressed tight against each other.

  Their hips and elbows became raw before the night was over—and they also discovered something else: if a man wanted to shift his position or turn over, he could not do so without waking every other man on his side of the room.

  They slept. Men who had been marched forty miles a night for almost a month, who had been fed only a ball of boiled cracked corn once a day, and who had had only fistfuls of dirty snow to drink as they stumbled along, fell down, pressed against each other, and went to sleep. Most of them were ill—with malnutrition, dysentery, untreated combat wounds. Most of them were hopeless. Some of them were already a little crazy.

  Still, they were Americans, and still men. It was here, in this dirty mining camp that came to be called Death Valley, that the Chinese accomplished a terrible thing.

  Here, little by little, the Communists took away their manhood.

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  25

  Proud Legions

  We was rotten 'fore we started— we was never disciplined;

  We made it out a favour if an order was obeyed.

  Yes, every little drummer 'ad 'is tights an' wrongs to mind,

  So we had to pay for teachin'—an' we paid!

  — Rudyard Kipling, "That Day"

  DURING THE FIRST MONTHS of American intervention in Korea, reports from the front burst upon an America and world stunned beyond belief. Day after day, the forces of the admitted first power of the earth reeled backward under the blows of the army of a nation of nine million largely illiterate peasants, the product of the kind of culture advanced nations once overawed with gunboats. Then, after fleeting victory, Americans fell back once more before an army of equally illiterate, lightly armed Chinese.

  The people of Asia had changed, true. The day of the gunboat and a few Marines would never return. But that was not the whole story. The people of the West had changed, too. They forgot that the West had dominated not only by arms, but by superior force of will.

  During the summer of 1950, and later, Asians would watch. Some, friends of the West, would even smile. And none of them would ever forget.

  News reports in 1950 talked of vast numbers, overwhelming hordes of fanatic North Koreans, hundreds of monstrous tanks, against which the thin United States forces could not stand. In these reports there was truth, but not the whole truth.

  The American units were outnumbered. They were outgunned. They were given an impossible task at the outset.

  But they were also outfought.

  In July, 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What had happened to the widely heralded pushbutton warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who had never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen?

  In this unconsciously plaintive cry lies buried a great deal of the truth why the United States was almost defeated.

  Nothing had happened to pushbutton warfare; its emergence was at hand. Horrible weapons that could destroy every city on earth were at hand—at too many hands. But pushbutton warfare meant Armageddon, and Armageddon, hopefully, will never be an end of national policy.

  Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.

  The object of warfare is to dominate a portion of the earth, with its peoples, for causes either just or unjust. It is not to destroy the land and people, unless you have gone wholly mad.

  Pushbotton war has its place. There is another kind of conflict—crusade, jihad, holy war, call it what you choose. It has been loosed before, with attendant horror but indecisive results. In the past, there were never means enough to exterminate all the unholy, whether Christian, Moslem, Protestant, Papist, or Communist. If jihad is preached again, undoubtedly the modern age will do much better.

  Americans, denying from moral grounds that war can ever be a part of politics, inevitably tend to think in terms of holy war—against militarism, against fascism, against bolshevism. In the postwar age, uneasy, disliking and fearing the unholiness of Communism, they have prepared for jihad. If their leaders blow the trumpet, or if their homeland is attacked, their millions are agreed to be better dead than Red.

  Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. Because such wars are fought with legions, and Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even to allow them to be what they must.

  For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions—as its prophets have long proclaimed.

  Except that in this world are tigers.

  The men of the Inmun Gun and the CCF were peasant boys, tough, inured to hunger and hardship. One-third of them had been in battle and knew what battle meant. They had been indoctrinated in Communism, but no high percentage of them were fanatic. Most of them, after all, were conscripts, and unskilled.

  They were not half so good soldiers as the bronzed men who followed Rommel in the desert, or the veterans who slashed down toward Bastogne.

  They were well armed, but their weapons were no better than those of United States design, if as good.

  But the American soldier of 1950, though the same breed of man, was not half so good as the battalions that had absorbed Rommel's bloody lessons, or stood like steel in the Ardennes.

  The weapons his nation had were not in his hands, and those that were were old and worn.

  Since the end of World War II ground weapons had been developed, but none had been procured. There were plenty of the old arms around, and it has always been a Yankee habit to make do. The Army was told to make do.

  In 1950 its vehicles in many cases would not run. Radiators were clogged, engines gone. When ordered to Korea, some units towed their transport down to the LST's, because there was no other way to get it to the boat. Tires and tubes had a few miles left in them, and were kept—until they came apart on Korean roads.

  In Japan, where the divisions were supposedly guarding our former enemies, most of the small arms had been reported combat unserviceable. Rifle barrels were worn smooth. Mortar mounts were broken, and there were no longer any spare barrels for machine guns.

  Radios were short, and those that were available would not work.

  Ammunition, except small arms, was "hava-no."

  These things had been reported. The Senate knew them; the people heard them. But usually the Army was told, "Next year."

  Even a rich society cannot afford
nuclear bombs, supercarriers, foreign aid, five million new cars a year, long-range bombers, the highest standard of living in the world, and a million new rifles.

  Admittedly, somewhere you have to cut and choose.

  But guns are hardware, and man, not hardware, is the ultimate weapon. In 1950 there were not enough men, either—less than 600,000 to carry worldwide responsibilities, including recruiting; for service in the ranks has never been on the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's preferred list of occupations.

  And in these 600,000 men themselves the trouble lay.

  There was a reason.

  Before 1939 the United States Army was small, but it was professional. Its tiny officers corps was parochial, but true. Its members devoted their time to the study of war, caring little what went on in the larger society around them. They were centurions, and the society around them not their concern.

  When so ordered, they went to war. Spreading themselves thinner still, they commanded and trained the civilians who heeded the trumpet's call. The civilians did the fighting, of course—but they did it the Army's way.

  In 1861 millions of volunteers donned blue or gray. Millions of words have been written on American valor, but few books dwell on the fact that of the sixty important battles, fifty-five were commanded on both sides by West Pointers, and on one side in the remaining five.

  In 1917 four million men were mustered in. Few of them liked it, but again they did things the way the professionals wanted them done.

  The volunteers came and went, and the Army changed not at all.

  But since the Civil War, the Army had neither the esteem nor the favor of public or government. Liberal opinion, whether business-liberal or labor-liberal, dominated the United States after the destruction of the South, and the illiberal Army grew constantly more alienated from its own society.