Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  “I’m selecting volunteers for an extremely dangerous mission behind enemy lines,” Lieutenant Colonel John H. McGee told the young lieutenant.

  “Sir, I volunteer,” Puckett said.

  Surprised at the short-circuiting of his pitch, McGee asked, “Don’t you want to know what the mission is?”

  “Yessir,” Puckett responded, “but I volunteer.”

  Lieutenant Colonel McGee probed Puckett with questions about his background and character. He seemed especially interested in Puckett’s captaincy of the West Point boxing team. Later, Puckett would learn that McGee himself had been on the West Point boxing team in his day. Puckett’s recent completion of jump school, a mark of superlative physical fitness, also appeared to make a positive impression on the lieutenant colonel. At the end of the interview, McGee said he had to do some more thinking about whether Puckett could join the Rangers, adding that he had already selected the lieutenants for the Ranger company.

  “Sir,” Puckett pleaded, “I want to be a Ranger so badly that I volunteer to take a job as a squad leader or a rifleman if you’ll take me into that Ranger company.”

  Puckett was dismissed. For several hours he awaited the decision that could change, and possibly end, his life.

  That evening, McGee informed Puckett that he had been selected to command the entire Ranger company, designated the 8th Ranger Company. Command of a company was normally reserved for a captain, but McGee was so impressed by the eager lieutenant that he rated him above all the captains he had interviewed. The two other lieutenants whom McGee selected for the new company, also recent West Point graduates, became the leaders of the unit’s two platoons.

  Puckett was given responsibility for finding enlisted men to fill out the unit, with the stipulation that he could not take riflemen from other units. Riflemen were in short supply, and senior infantry officers were in no mood to surrender any of them to an upstart unit commanded by a boyish lieutenant with no combat experience. Puckett fished for volunteers among the clerks, cooks, typists, and mechanics who were transiting Camp Drake. Screening personnel records, he tracked down the most promising men and interviewed those who showed an interest in the Rangers. Each interview began with the statement, “If you are not willing to volunteer for anything dangerous, you are free to leave the room now.” One-third of the interviewees left at that point. From those who stayed, Puckett culled seventy-three enlisted men.

  Lieutenant Puckett gave the volunteers a crash course in soldiering before the company was attached to the 25th Infantry Division in Korea. Joining the division in October 1950, they became the first Rangers to set foot on the Korean Peninsula. By this time, the North Korean Army was reeling from General Douglas MacArthur’s surprise landing at Inchon, and the forces of the United Nations Command were driving into northern Korea. For its first big mission, the 8th Ranger Company would serve as an advance infantry element of the US Eighth Army in MacArthur’s “Home by Christmas” offensive, scheduled for late November.

  MacArthur had concluded that North Korean forces were in such sorry shape that a new offensive would wipe them from the North Korean map in a month’s time. Unbeknownst to him and the rest of the UN high command, Mao Zedong had begun pouring Chinese Army forces into northern Korea to save his Communist allies from annihilation. Moving men and equipment at night, the Chinese Army had eluded the American reconnaissance aircraft that were flying back and forth over North Korea. US forces had captured soldiers who resembled and spoke like natives of China, but MacArthur and his staff decided that the Chinese Army had sent only token forces, if any at all. Some surmised that the Chinese captives belonged to the Chinese immigrant communities of North Korea. “We should not assume that Chinese Communists are committed in force,” said Lieutenant General Walton W. Walker, the commander of the Eighth Army. “After all, a lot of Mexicans live in Texas.”

  In actuality, Mao had committed 200,000 men of the Chinese Thirteenth Army to northern Korea. Their mission was to launch an offensive against the forces of MacArthur’s United Nations Command, scheduled to begin at the same time and in the same area as MacArthur’s “Home by Christmas” offensive. The Chinese Thirteenth Army and the US Eighth Army were on course to collide along the Chongchon River.

  A broad waterway running from the Rangrim Mountains in central Korea into the Yellow Sea, the Chongchon had long ago been the site of an epic battle between imperial China and the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo. In AD 612, China’s Sui Dynasty sent an army of 1 million troops into the Korean kingdom to compel its submission to imperial authority. While the Chinese hordes were wading across the river, the Goguryeo opened a dam, unleashing a flood that swept away every man and horse in its path. An estimated 300,000 Chinese men drowned or were cut down by Goguryeo cavalry during the consequent retreat.

  Of the eighty-five men in the 8th Ranger Company treading toward the Chongchon on November 25, 1950, none was aware that he was headed for one of Asia’s most historic battlefields. Nor did any of them realize that this same strip of water would that night become the fault line for another great clash of empires. The fear of imminent maiming or death, the surging adrenaline of mortal combat, the witnessing of ghastly wounds, all were presumed to be a few days distant.

  During the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, the Rangers approached Hill 205, their main objective for the day. A sudden zipping of bullets revealed it to be guarded by a small contingent of hostile soldiers. Although the resistance took the Rangers by surprise, they did not flinch or recoil, but instead pressed forward in methodical attack. The Rangers became entangled in a vicious struggle with men who were more numerous than they had at first appeared, and who were as intent as the Rangers to kill before being killed. Nearly half of Puckett’s men suffered injury or death in a period of a few hours.

  A more cautious commander might have broken off the attack after sustaining losses of such magnitude, but Puckett was not the type to relent on account of unanticipated difficulty. It would be the Chinese, late that afternoon, who decided to quit the battlefield. Ascending the hill, Puckett ordered the evacuation of the wounded and directed the remaining forty-seven Rangers to occupy the hill for the night. The forty-seven young men, buoyant from surviving and passing their first major test, carved foxholes into the frozen tundra.

  With a commanding vista of the Chongchon’s shallow waters, Hill 205 would be a key terrain feature in any contest for control of the river. No American, however, expected the Chongchon to be the main battleground, so the Eighth Army had sent no one but the lightly armed Ranger company to hold the hill, and it dispatched no reinforcements toward the Rangers after the debilitating afternoon skirmish with the Chinese. The thirty-eight casualties sustained by Puckett’s unit might have seemed high to the 8th Ranger Company, but at army-level headquarters it was penny ante.

  The Chinese Thirteenth Army, which was planning to make the Chongchon the place of decision, valued Hill 205 much more highly. Peering through the twilight from concealed positions, Chinese scouts counted the unsuspecting US soldiers as they shoveled dirt from the hillside. The scouts quickly sent their findings to a nearby headquarters, where staff officers were already making final preparations for the seizing of the Chongchon. The Chinese commander directed a battalion of six hundred soldiers to take up attack positions around the hill after dark and then assault it frontally.

  At 10 p.m., a cacophony of drums, bugles, and whistles penetrated the dark silence on Hill 205. Like a brisk autumn wind pulling leaves from their branches, the sound carried a wave of Chinese soldiers up the hill’s forward slope. Lieutenant Puckett immediately called for flares, while dozing Rangers bolted awake and pointed their weapons toward the ruckus. Soon the sky was alight with flickering white incandescence, and on the ground could be seen bunches of Chinese figures scrambling up the hill. As the Rangers fired their small arms into the enemies nearest at hand, Puckett directed artillery fire onto the approaches to the hill. Chopped up by the American weaponry, the assault
force soon lost its momentum, and within fifty minutes it had stalled out.

  The Chinese attacked the Rangers again at 11 p.m. After the first thrusts faltered, Chinese reinforcements joined the attack. In the hillside foxholes, the former cooks and typists of the 8th Ranger Company held their ground, with few casualties. Puckett spent most of his time darting from one foxhole to another to talk with the Rangers. “I saw that my main task was encouraging my soldiers, giving them what I call a lot of ‘attaboys,’” Puckett recalled. “We can do it,” he would tell the young men. “We’re depending on you.” A few members of the Chinese assault force came within grenade range of the Rangers, but none survived long enough to rupture the Ranger perimeter.

  In the early morning, the Rangers repulsed the third and fourth attacks. The base of the hill was now crowded with dead soldiers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. But the Chinese commander, calculating that the Rangers would run out of ammunition before he ran out of men, ordered yet another attack. Commencing at 2:45 a.m., the fifth assault was the most intense yet, with more Chinese mortar rounds and grenades finding the hill than in any of the preceding onslaughts.

  Puckett, who was crouched inside a two-man foxhole with one of the platoon commanders, picked up the radiophone. Wrapping his hand around the mouthpiece to muffle the booms and shrieks of exploding ordnance, he called the artillery fire-direction center and requested another dose of howitzer shells.

  “We’re firing another mission,” an officer replied to Puckett. “We’ll give it to you as soon as we can.”

  “We really need it now,” Puckett countered. “We’ve just got to have it.” Before the conversation proceeded further, two mortar rounds landed in Puckett’s foxhole. The blasts killed the platoon commander and left Puckett with severe wounds in both of his feet and his left shoulder and arm.

  The fifth Chinese wave failed to evict the Rangers from the hill, but by its end the Rangers were desperately low on ammunition. In the dark quiet that followed, somebody hollered, “Fix bayonets and prepare for counterattack.”

  At 3 a.m., before any counterattack could take place, the Chinese initiated their sixth assault. Puckett, still capable of talking, told the artillery officer that the Chinese were coming in from two directions and the Rangers needed artillery immediately. The officer replied that the guns were still fixed on another sector where Americans were under attack. Peering over the lip of the foxhole, Puckett saw Chinese soldiers inside the perimeter. He asked the artillery officer to pass word that the Rangers were being overrun.

  Exhilarated that the American defenses had at last been breached, Chinese soldiers swarmed over the hill, bayoneting and shooting Rangers in their holes. Once the hopelessness of the situation became clear, the remaining Rangers fled off the hill in the direction of the American rear. One Ranger picked up Lieutenant Puckett and carried him to a small draw. Too tired to carry Puckett farther, the Ranger dragged the company commander down a ravine with the help of another man, reaching the bottom of the hill at daybreak. Other Rangers took Puckett to an aid station, from which he resumed the direction of artillery fire onto Hill 205.

  Headcounts determined that only twenty-one of the forty-seven Rangers returned from Hill 205 alive. Seventeen of the twenty-one survivors had been wounded. Eleven men were missing, their bodies never recovered.

  THE US ARMY had begun the Korean War devoid of special operations forces and any other forces trained in what were commonly considered special operations. President Truman did not share Roosevelt’s fascination with special units or secret warfare, and even had he shared it, he would have been handicapped by want of manpower and funds in a period of mass demobilization. Special operations forces came into existence in Korea because of tactical requirements identified by military commanders, requirements that in some cases would disappear before they could be met. As in World War II, special units would have to contend not only with enemy forces, but also with friendly forces who doubted that the returns justified the investment.

  The impetus for the creation of Puckett’s 8th Ranger Company, and the other Ranger companies that followed it, had its roots in the opposing side. During the North Korean Army’s summertime advance, fifteen-man teams of North Korean commandos had disguised themselves as civilian refugees and infiltrated behind South Korean lines to ambush convoys, raid command posts, and demolish bridges. The effectiveness of these commandos convinced a number of well-placed Americans that the United States needed similar forces.

  Among those Americans was Lieutenant Colonel John H. McGee, who at the time was serving on the Eighth Army staff. McGee had been captured in the Philippines in 1942, then had escaped when a US submarine torpedoed the Japanese ship that was moving him to a new camp. Swimming from the sinking ship to the nearby island of Mindanao, McGee was found in a bedraggled state by curious natives. They took him to Colonel Wendell Fertig, an American engineer who had eluded the Japanese at Corregidor and organized guerrilla forces on the island. McGee joined the guerrilla effort, gaining on-the-job training and experience that would make him one of the few men in the Eighth Army in 1950 who knew much of anything about special operations.

  McGee advised his Eighth Army bosses to create Ranger units in Korea in order to give the North Koreans a taste of their own behind-the-lines medicine. His proposal caught the attention of Army Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins during a visit to Korea in August. An approving Collins directed the Eighth Army to form a Ranger company “to infiltrate through enemy lines and attack command posts, artillery, tank parks, and key communications centers or facilities.” McGee promptly traveled to Japan to find leaders for the first Ranger company, the one that Puckett was to command.

  While Puckett was whipping his enlisted men into shape, General Collins ordered the creation of a Ranger training center in the United States to generate additional Ranger companies. Established at Fort Benning, Georgia, the new center was staffed by World War II veterans who had served in the Rangers, the First Special Service Force, or Merrill’s Marauders. The new Rangers were required to be airborne qualified, so recruiters sought volunteers mainly from the 11th and 82nd Airborne divisions, with preference for those who had scored well on intelligence tests, demonstrated initiative, or excelled at hand-to-hand combat. Trainees were put through fifty-mile speed marches, and any man who failed to keep pace was taken away in a white-flagged jeep. The course had a “Hell Week,” during which the trainees parachuted at low altitude, maneuvered in small groups across a forty-nine-square-mile area, and performed acts of sabotage.

  The revival of Ranger training captured the imagination of the home front. Newsmen catered to the public’s fascination with elite units, in a manner certain to nauseate other military personnel. In one article on the Rangers, dated November 12, 1950, the Ledger-Enquirer of Columbus, Georgia, asserted, “Each is a one-man gang who can sneak up to an enemy sentry, chop off his head, and catch it before it makes noise by hitting the ground.”

  On the very day that the Chinese attacked six times up Hill 205 against Puckett’s Rangers, the troop ship USNS C. G. Morton left the United States for Korea carrying the 1st Ranger Company and a variety of other military units. Soon after the ship left port, a voice announced over the ship’s loudspeaker that the North Koreans were on their last legs and the war would be over by the time the ship reached its destination. A large number of US servicemen cheered and clapped each other on the back in celebration. The Rangers, however, sat in quiet gloom, distraught that fortune had stolen their chance to prove their mettle and add their names to the nation’s registry of heroes. Several days later, after the unexpected guests from the Chinese Thirteenth Army had thrown back the Americans at the Chongchon River and spoiled the “Home by Christmas” offensive, the loudspeaker of the C. G. Morton shared the news that the Chinese had entered North Korea in force, and thus the war would be longer than anticipated. Now the Rangers jumped for joy while other soldiers moped about in dejection.

  Fort Benning c
hurned out a total of six Ranger companies for deployment to Korea, all of them reaching the Korean peninsula between December 1950 and March 1951. Each was attached to a division and assigned missions by the leadership of the division or its subordinate regiments. By the time these Ranger units reached the front, the huge north-south shifts in the location of the battle line had come to an end and the war had settled into a stalemate, with the combatants squaring off from trenches near the 38th parallel. Several major offensives were still to follow, but the resultant swings in the battle line were limited by the fact that both sides had built up several layers of defense, so that front-line penetrations were usually contained by secondary and tertiary lines of defense.

  The Chinese and North Korean forces were deployed so densely near the battle line that infiltrating Rangers into the enemy’s rear unnoticed was nearly impossible. Once detected, a Ranger company was likely to be engaged by bigger and more heavily equipped enemy forces, which would compel American division commanders to send their regular units to bail them out. As a consequence, conventional commanders rarely ordered their Ranger companies to conduct the behind-the-lines raids for which they had been created.

  While great time and effort had been invested in the airborne capabilities of the men who joined the Rangers, and many men had been injured or killed practicing their jumps, only once did the Rangers make use of their airborne training, in Operation Tomahawk. That operation, in which two Ranger companies were attached to the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team, largely failed in its intended purpose of trapping and destroying large enemy forces. The minor clashes between American and enemy forces during the operation, claiming just nineteen Ranger casualties, were less eventful than the preceding air drop, during which eighty-four Rangers were injured.