No matter where I moved among the dispirited troops I heard the story: ‘We should’ve dug in, but nobody gave the order.’
I was spared the embarrassment of having to interrogate the officers responsible for this abject performance, because by the time I reached the front they had been moved to the rear in obedience to stern orders from the Pentagon: ‘Report immediately to field headquarters Pusan,’ from where they had been flown to MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo for a real chewing out.
During the first two days I was with the fleeing unit it was commanded by the young West Pointer, who tried his best to establish some kind of order. He failed, but not for lack of determination. He was too young and he lacked what might be called presence, but the man who flew in on the third day to assume command suffered from neither of these deficiencies.
Lt. Col. Bedford Cobb, from a distinguished army family in the little town of Jefferson in northeast Texas, was a hundred and forty pounds’ fighting weight, five feet six, with a jutting lower jaw that asserted: Soldier, I mean business! But the thing about him that I and everyone else remembered best was his prematurely snow-white hair, which he wore cropped close, military style, but combed straight forward over his forehead so that he looked like some Roman emperor leading his legions on the frontiers. I had often remarked, before I met him, that some men of athletic build are fortunate when their hair turns white in their twenties, for it lends them not only distinction but also an impression of being sagacious and therefore extra good at whatever they attempt. And when the man had an erect posture and a jutting jaw, the effect ensured attention. Colonel Cobb was such a man, a tough little fighting machine. In a raspy voice he started the moment he arrived to give orders: ‘All officers in my tent, immediate.’ When he came to me he asked, machine-gun style: ‘Who are you—no uniform?’ When I replied: ‘Shenstone. Press, sir,’ he snapped: ‘Tell it as it is, you’ll have no trouble from me.’ Then he added: ‘But this is war, young man. Censor to clear everything before it leaves headquarters.’
His use of that last word was ridiculous, for headquarters consisted of one dirty tent only slightly larger than the other tattered shelters we had, and it had to be moved each night as we continued to retreat. But within a day of his arrival he had that forlorn tent cleaned up and organized so that it resembled, in orderliness at least, an office in the Pentagon. And from it he issued a chain of rapid-fire orders: ‘No artillery pieces to be abandoned. If you won’t stand fast to defend them, call for me. In this outfit, if a gun has to be lost, I and two other officers are lost with it.’
He was especially tough on the cooks: ‘You will be at your stoves oh-four-hundred every morning. And I do not care what you have to use, pisspots if that’s all you can find, but I want my men to have hot coffee. That’s an order.’ But his major contribution was to the ordinary soldiers who had fared so poorly when led by officers with no sense of command, no appreciation of the oldest of military maxims: ‘Respect down begets respect up.’ He was tireless in moving among them, no matter how difficult the terrain over which they were retreating, and his constant aim was to help them stay put, to make the enemy’s forward progress as costly as possible. In this tactic he achieved miracles, and I said so in my dispatches, but what I didn’t feel required to point out was that for each hundred yards the Communists chased us, their supply lines lengthened and ours shortened until the day came, as the colonel had known it must, when their job of getting food and ammunition and gasoline down from their base in China was just as difficult as ours had been in getting our supplies north from our base in Pusan.
On the day that balance was attained he announced: ‘No more retreating. Now we’ll have them on the run,’ and he was prophetic, for with the insertion into American lines of fighting commanders like him, our lines did begin to stabilize, and when the new year dawned Colonel Cobb had his segment of the front ready to defend itself, even though it would have been insane to try to counterattack. ‘That begins next week,’ he told his men, and they cheered. It was the first hopeful sound after two months of despair. The panic bailout from Hungnam would be recorded as one of the bleakest events in American military history.
But once the line was stabilized he intensified his demands on his men: ‘Hot water is now available. All hands will shave. There will be no more gypsies in this outfit.’ He also wanted his men to sit at some table while they ate their meals; any substitute, especially an ammo crate, would do: ‘We are no longer camping out.’
In the four enthusiastic reports of the transformation I had witnessed—demoralized fugitives converted into a disciplined fighting unit—I stressed the contribution that could be made by one man of courage, enthusiasm and the capacity to lead. He was, I said in one of my dispatches, ‘an 1870 Texas Ranger transported to Korea with two revolvers, guts and drive.’ That lucky combination of words was widely quoted in Stateside papers.
Our headquarters were no longer in tents; the moment we stabilized the lines, he had the men put together, from whatever materials they could find or steal, a respectable building in which everything had its place. I was present one morning when he stood rigidly erect, his favorite stance to create the appearance of height, before a desk made of ammo boxes on which his typing clerk had a mass of papers in disarray. Speaking quietly, as if pleading for enlightenment—he never swore—he asked: ‘Pritchard, where are your porkers?’
‘My what, sir?’
‘Your pigs, your swine.’
‘I don’t understand, sir.’
‘You’re obviously not operating an army desk. Obviously you’re running a pigsty. Where are your pigs?’
Pritchard, flustered by this approach, mumbled something about getting things cleaned up right away, at which Cobb patted him on the back: ‘I would like that, son. I would appreciate it very kindly,’ and he saluted his scribe.
He took us by surprise—me certainly—with an innovation that made our outfit more professional. Addressing his entire command, he issued an order: ‘From this point on you will refer to the Chinese in only one of two ways, he or the enemy. First thing you’ve got to do when trying to best an enemy is to respect him. To accept the fact that he’s just as clever as you, just as determined to win.’ Allowing some moments for this to register, he continued: ‘I do not need to remind you that your present enemy kicked your butts right out of the Reservoir and ten miles down the mountains. This was easy for him to do, since it was downhill all the way so you could get up a good head of steam as you ran away from him, leaving nine of our big guns in his hands.’ Again he paused, then resumed in his battle voice, hard and crisp: ‘Now we stand and fight, and as we face him he is to be called the enemy, and a damned tough enemy he has proved to be.’
So his troops, and we reporters, stopped calling them slopes and slant-eyes, and gooks and yellow-bellies, for if there was one thing these big meat-fed men from northern China were not, it was yellow-bellied. Morale stiffened, attitudes became constructive and the enemy was at last stopped in his tracks. Cobb told me, when the line was stabilized: ‘Respect for your enemy is the first step in discipline.’ But he added: ‘Shenstone, I still need some visual symbol to consolidate the transformation. I’ve found that the proper arm patch can do wonders in binding a unit into a real fighting force. You got any ideas?’ And I could see that he was disappointed when I replied: ‘I’m not big on military embroidery.’
One afternoon he invited me to accompany him to the chaplain’s hut. When we were there he asked: ‘Any good books arrive in your last shipment?’ and the padre, who had the additional role of librarian, pointed to an unopened parcel from chaplains’ headquarters in Tokyo. Cutting the cord, Colonel Cobb shuffled through the new arrivals and to my surprise stopped at a most unlikely subject. Holding the book before him, he told me: ‘Book listing all the saints. I’m not Catholic but I do envy them their parade of saints, one for every day of the year, a special guardian in heaven to sponsor every human activity or duty. Quite consoling.�
�� It was symbolic, I felt, that he would insert the word ‘duty’ in a spot that I would never have thought of using it. With Cobb, I was discovering, duty was a word that often surfaced. He handed me the book, and I saw that it was handsomely illustrated, the pictures apparently more important than the text. Some of the lady saints were especially appealing, women of great piety who had been horribly tortured in defense of their faith, always with a beatific smile that would make an ordinary man with a toothache ashamed of himself for complaining.
Retrieving the book, Cobb leafed through the appendix: ‘Interesting list here. Seafarers? Saint Elmo is their patron. France? Saint Denis. England? Saint George.’ He suddenly stopped his aimless riffling and focused sharply on one entry: ‘Artillerymen? Santa Barbara.’ Quickly he turned to the entry for this saint and found himself confronted by a handsome woman in medieval dress standing beside a torture wheel on which she had apparently been broken by her pagan persecutors, and with her left arm embracing a cannon, whose role in the affair I could not decipher.
I could see that Cobb was deeply moved by this accidental discovery of his patron saint, for he studied Barbara’s brief biography—fictional, I suspected—and read aloud the concluding sentence: ‘She was revered by medieval artillerymen, who believed that her intervention kept their dangerous cannon from exploding in their faces when fired.’
‘Check me out for this one,’ he told the surprised padre. ‘You Catholics have always known how to identify with people.’ He said this admiringly, and when we were back in his headquarters among the big weapons he commanded, he opened the Book of Saints to Barbara and studied her portrait.
‘Damn!’ he said as he slapped the page. ‘There’s everything in here to inspire a gunner. A woman he can respect. A reminder of the tortures she suffered, worse than any he’ll ever know. And that’s a real cannon. Santa Barbara is my kind of symbol.’
I could see that the idea captivated him, for at his officers’ mess that night he asked his junior staff: ‘Men, do you know who the patron saint of gunners is?’ When no one responded, he turned to me: ‘Tell them, Shenstone,’ and I gave a quick rundown on Santa Barbara.
Before anyone could comment, Cobb said reflectively: ‘I remember reading that in the good old days military units often identified themselves with religious figures under whose protection they fought. Englishmen went into battle shouting: “Saint George and England!” With Spaniards it was “Spain and Santiago!” And in France it was: “Saint Denis!” ’ To my surprise he was able to cite several other instances of the emotional relationship between military men and their patron saints: ‘Like the sailors’ Saint Elmo. When they see his fire dancing on the top of their mast they know he’s guarding their ship.’
‘If I may, sir,’ a young officer said. ‘I don’t understand. What fire on the mast?’ and patiently, like a father, he explained: ‘An electrical discharge in a storm. Finding the highest point to discharge. It must have been quite reassuring to men long at sea and far from home,’ but when he detected that his junior officers were not interested in this arcane tradition he dropped the subject.
But that night, when I checked into his quarters to verify a few facts for my article, he did not wish to focus on my interests: ‘Shenstone, what this unit needs to bind it together, to give it a forward purpose … Give a group of men a rallying focus, an inspiration, and you can accomplish wonders with them.’
‘You’ve already done that, and I’m saying so in my story.’
‘Shenstone! I’ve only begun! This outfit is going to be tops in the line. Generals are going to fly out here from Washington to inspect what we’ve accomplished with this team,’ and before I could react he thrust at me a piece of thin white paper about three inches by two on which he had drawn in black, blue and red ink a proposed arm patch for his unit. It was a neat job, and showed Santa Barbara with her shield and cannon standing beneath the carefully printed words ‘For God and Santa Barbara.’
‘What do you think?’
‘You’re an artist!’
I mean, does it catch the military spirit we’re after?’
I noticed that he had enlisted me in his grand design. It was our plan, not his, and I indulged him: ‘It does what’s necessary.’
‘I’m glad you approve.’
‘The artwork, superb. But those words? Don’t they sort of fly in the face of recent Supreme Court decisions?’ When he gasped I explained: ‘Separation of church and state?’
‘Good God, Shenstone! That’s how men fought in the old days. For God and country! For God and Saint George! And they ought to fight that way now!’ He would accept no part of my caution and surprised me by concluding: ‘When you fly back to Tokyo with your story, stop in one of those embroidery shops and ask them to whip me up two or three samples of what they can do in various effective colors. Let them choose whatever makes the boldest display. In the design they can drop the wheel if they wish, but the cannon must be prominent.’
‘Then what?’
‘Rush them back to me. Use the pouch, and I’ll take it from there.’ Satisfied that I would discharge my commission adequately, he dismissed me, but ran after me: ‘Get me cost figures by the hundred and five hundred.’
Tokyo, in those days in the early fifties, had experts who could do anything, and the bartender at the Press Club on Shimbun Alley had no difficulty in finding a shirtmaker named Nakajima, who assured me as soon as he saw Cobb’s design: ‘My top seamstress, she can do.’
When I asked: ‘That word “seamstress.” Where’d you learn that?’
‘I make many shirts British embassy.’ While we spoke his best seamstress studied Cobb’s flimsy drawing and started immediately to improve it, using her crayons with impressive speed and skill. Before I left the shop she had simplified the design and highlighted it with her own choice of bright colors.
‘Come back three hours,’ Nakajima said. ‘Finish.’
‘Colonel Cobb wants firm quotations. Hundred copies. Five hundred.’
‘Wilco. But for samples, five dollars now. Give you credit, your order.’
That seemed a modest price for three samples, but things were cheap in Japan in those days, and later that afternoon I put in the pouch for Dog-Seven, code for the colonel’s base, three of the finest arm patches I’d seen. The third impressed me, for Nakajima’s seamstress, of her own volition as an artist, had modified Cobb’s design by dropping the first word for and eliminating the torture wheel. The result was a compelling bit of embroidery in gray, gold and blue that any artilleryman would be proud to wear on his left shoulder as a badge of his profession.
By return pouch Colonel Cobb sent me his personal check to cover an order of five hundred copies of the seamstress’s third version bearing the four words ‘God and Santa Barbara,’ but he added a note to me: ‘The word “for” must be reinstated. If a man is to fight well, he must fight for something, and there could be no higher goal for an artilleryman than the majestic combination of God and his patron saint.’ When Nakajima accepted the money I handed him, he promised: ‘Word you like will be there. Pick up tomorrow. Five in afternoon,’ and when I came for the patches I understood why the British embassy patronized this man. He was truly an artist, or at least his head designer was.
It has always grieved me to reflect that in acting as Cobb’s emissary in acquiring and distributing these beautiful patches I was instrumental in bringing on the disaster that overtook his military career.
As soon as they were sewn on the men’s jackets in the winter of 1951, they began to accomplish miracles. When the grunts, as we called our enlisted men, saw the colorful patches on the sleeves of their uniforms, they seemed to undergo a transformation. The disorganized unit that Colonel Cobb had whipped into a good fighting force now became a superb one, as if each of the improvements initiated by the colonel had been not only securely locked in but also given special meaning. The men became a cohesive unit, each proud of his companions, each determined that his team give
a manly account of itself. They had adopted the word ‘manly’ from Cobb, who judged behavior on a rigid scale: it was either manly or it wasn’t, and he would not tolerate the latter.
On my return from Tokyo I was privileged to watch the alchemy. A slouching oaf from Missouri suddenly became a true artilleryman, inheritor of a great tradition. A petty thief from San Francisco who had been on the verge of being court-martialed became almost overnight a reliable private with a good chance of becoming a corporal. The men marched better, took better care of their personal gear and the unit’s big guns. The alteration was so dramatic that I was inspired to draft a report on the affair that was reprinted widely in the States under the heading given it by an enthusiastic wire-service editor: ‘The Power of a Patch.’
The title was suggested by a remark made by a foot soldier from Alabama: ‘We was a sorry lot, but now we stand for somethin’ powerful.’ The articles showed a reproduction of the patch, often in color, and that was the source of the trouble. It was precipitated by the arrival of a six-foot-two, hundred-and-forty-pound private with bedraggled whitish hair and the infuriating habit of taking a bouncy step that made his ugly head jut far above the others in the outfit when we marched. He was from Los Angeles and everyone in the outfit knew his name by the end of the first day, for the sergeants kept yelling: ‘Debbish! Keep in step!’ In a high, whining voice he would reply: ‘I am in step!’
‘Silence! Keep in step.’
‘I am in step.’
He was correct. When I heard about the problem, I checked him out, and he was certainly in step, but his unbreakable habit of that extra bounce, plus his above-average height, made him stick out like an unruly lock of hair. He was a sad case, this Max Debbish from Los Angeles, but I never doubted that Cobb’s patient, firm way with men could whip even this unlikely prospect into line. For example, I was encouraged when Cobb went out to the drill field to watch the sergeant trying to discipline Debbish, and when the colonel saw the preposterous extra lift the man gave his heels whenever he stepped forward he halted drill and summoned both Debbish and the sergeant to him.
Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature Page 27
