Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  Only once did the Rangers make use of their amphibious capabilities, in the 4th Ranger Company’s assault on the Hwachon Dam. In April 1951, the 1st Cavalry Division sent the Rangers to the dam to close the gates and destroy the hoists after the Pukhan River, which twisted through bridges, military headquarters, and supply depots in the UN’s rear, rose seven feet in a three-hour period. During the black of night, the Rangers crossed the reservoir at the top of the dam by boat and marched to within half a mile of the gates, at which point a Chinese machine gun opened fire. The bullets punctured two Rangers and convinced the others to dive to the earth. Ranger forward observers called in mortar and artillery fire while Lieutenant Michael D. Healy and five other Rangers slipped around the enemy’s flank. Healy’s team, designated the company’s “killer” element, knocked out enemy heavy weapons and reached the summit with a speed that astonished the other Rangers. Before the Americans could go farther, however, several hundred Chinese soldiers attacked. The Rangers repulsed the onslaught, but by the time the Chinese relented, the Rangers had exhausted most of their ammunition, necessitating the termination of the raid short of its objective.

  American division and regimental commanders assigned a miscellany of regular infantry missions to the Ranger companies. Because the Rangers had been handpicked for their combativeness, smarts, and physical prowess, commanders often assigned them the most difficult infantry missions, such as spearheading an assault or defending an especially vulnerable point. Other common uses of the Rangers were patrols and ambushes in the no-man’s-land between friendly and enemy lines. The Rangers were better prepared than other units for most of the tasks they performed, but they were tasks that regular units could perform nonetheless. As Ranger units accumulated casualties in conventional clashes, complaints mounted among Ranger officers that the Rangers were being misused, their special capabilities squandered. The complaints seldom went anywhere, for the Ranger units were led by captains and lieutenants who lacked the rank, combat experience, and resources to hold sway on matters that were decided by generals.

  More influential than Ranger officer complaints about this state of affairs were conventional officer complaints about it. In the spring of 1951, several division commanders concluded that the tactical benefits arising from occasional exploitation of the Rangers’ behind-the-lines capabilities were not commensurate with the harm to regular units arising from the diversion of human capital to the Rangers. They recommended dissolving the Ranger companies and sending their men back to regular units.

  To buttress the point, conventional officers cited US Army historian S. L. A. Marshall’s landmark 1947 study Men Against Fire, which had found that less than 25 percent of US infantrymen in World War II had actually fired their weapons. If only one-quarter of infantrymen were tough enough to shoot, then taking men out of the infantry for elite units was liable to tear the martial spirit out of the regular Army. “In each squad, you may have only one man who really wants to fight,” one general remarked. “You need him there to influence the other men.” With “that one man volunteering to be a Ranger,” it “leaves that squad bare of inspiration to fight.”

  Such arguments resonated with General Matthew Ridgway, the US Army airborne officer who assumed command of all UN forces in Korea in April 1951 after Truman sacked MacArthur. One month into his tenure, Ridgway informed the Army that the Ranger units in Korea were not providing enough tactical bang for the buck that they were costing the rest of the Army. He recommended the deactivation of all Ranger units in Korea.

  AS THE RANGERS were sputtering out, a different set of special operations forces was taking shape in Korea. These forces were like a younger brother to the Rangers, as they, too, were sired by Lieutenant Colonel John H. McGee. In character, though, they bore greater resemblance to a more distant relative, the OSS special operations forces, for they had support of resistance movements as their primary mission.

  North Korean resistance fighters had been waging guerrilla war against the North Korean government even before the Korean War erupted in June 1950. The resistance was concentrated in Hwanghae, a coastal province whose fishermen provided North Korea’s population with much of its protein. Culturally, the 1.8 million residents of Hwanghae were closer to the residents of South Korea than to those in the North. In October 1950, word arrived in Hwanghae that the US Eighth Army was pressing north toward the province, inciting a wave of violence against Communist Party officials and policemen. Communist security forces responded with bitter reprisals across Hwanghae in which hundreds of rebels and their supporters perished. A cycle of atrocity and counter-atrocity followed, until finally the steamroller of the Eighth Army induced the North Korean policemen, soldiers, and apparatchiks to pack their suitcases and flee northward.

  Anti-Communist organizers ran local affairs in Hwanghae for just a few months before the massive counterstroke of the Chinese Thirteenth Army sent them fleeing to islands off the coast. On January 8, 1951, the US Eighth Army learned that 10,000 North Korean guerrillas had gathered on the islands adjacent to Hwanghae. A South Korean Navy report described the refugees as “desperate, hungry, poorly armed, and mad as hell.” McGee convinced Eighth Army headquarters to create a new organization for supporting the resistance forces, which was called the “Attrition Section.” Becoming the organization’s first commander, McGee sent American officers to the islands to train the partisans along with American weapons and ammunition to provision them.

  The partisans began raids on the coast of Hwanghae in March 1951. Inserted by boat, the first team advanced on foot to villages known for their hatred of communism, where they recruited some of the male population into their ranks. They scored an early success with an attack on a police station where Communist Party leaders had convened for a meeting. While the officials were discussing party business, the guerrillas cut the telephone line to the building and placed small blocks of C3 explosive at the windows and doorways. Detonating the explosives simultaneously by means of Primacord, they then threw grenades into the building before storming inside to kill anyone who was not yet dead.

  Over the next four and a half months, the partisans killed a reported 280 Communist officials and several hundred North Korean security personnel. They blew bridges, severed telephone wires, and plundered enemy supply warehouses. In response, the enemy beefed up security forces in the region from 2,000 to 30,000.

  Encouraged by the early returns, the Attrition Section sent more partisan units to raid coastal Hwanghae. To deposit partisans ashore inconspicuously, the Americans put them in fishing junks, which were outfitted with hidden diesel engines to enable a quick getaway. Radio antennae were concealed inside masts, and recoilless rifles inside collapsible walls.

  On paper, the American officers were only “advisers” to the partisans. In practice, they were commanding officers. The first Americans assigned to lead the partisan units knew little about Korea or its people, so their ability to lead depended heavily on their aptitude for understanding new circumstances and cultures. The culture of Hwanghae proved different from American culture in a multitude of ways, some highly pertinent to the development of resistance forces. Adviser Archie Johnston developed a list of five rules he considered vital to American leadership of the partisans: “1. Never allow the partisans to question an order from an Advisor. 2. Never ask a Korean to do anything; tell him. 3. Never lie to a Korean. 4. Never get drunk in front of a Korean. 5. Never make a ‘pass’ at a Korean woman.”

  In September 1951, the Communists extended their tentacles toward the islands where the partisans were based. US ships and planes had shot up most of the seacraft in North Korea, so the enemy decided to cross on foot at low tide, when the islands were connected to the mainland by a mud landbridge for several hours. American officers, having anticipated such sallies, had directed the partisans to seed the landbridge with mines and booby-trapped napalm drums. Using railroad ties and sandbags, the partisans had built bunkers facing toward the coast and stocked them w
ith machine guns and crates of bullets. The first North Koreans who attempted to cross the mud were obliterated by streams of machine-gun rounds and orange blossoms of napalm. The partisans reported burying 286 North Korean corpses. After another foiled North Korean attack, US Air Force photos corroborated a partisan claim that 3,000 enemy soldiers had died. The enemy kept up the attacks in the months to come, and in a few cases were able to take islands by sheer numerical superiority, but partisan counterattacks ensured that the resistance retained control of its main island bases.

  In March 1951, the Attrition Section started parachuting Korean partisans and American officers into North Korea. Many of the men disappeared immediately. Most North Korean civilians were less supportive of the anti-Communists than were the residents of Hwanghae, and hence more likely to report infiltrators to the authorities. A few of the airborne teams, the most successful of the lot, were able to sabotage railroad tracks for a short period before the partisan headquarters stopped receiving radio transmissions from them. The largest team to be inserted by air had ninety-seven men, it being one of two teams whose purpose was to establish a permanent base area in North Korea. For six months, this group maintained intermittent radio contact, but under circumstances that suggested it had been compromised early on. None of its men ever returned.

  The disappearance of American officers during the first airborne missions led the Attrition Section to discontinue the parachuting of American personnel, leaving only Koreans to participate in subsequent airborne drops. The fact that Caucasians stuck out amid the Korean population and could not speak the language were the main reasons cited for the new policy, though this explanation came increasingly into question as more and more Koreans disappeared without any interruption in the program. Of the 389 partisans parachuted by the Attrition Section and its successor organizations into North Korea over the course of the war, only a handful came back.

  In the business of fomenting resistance in enemy-held territory, the Eighth Army’s Attrition Section faced stiff competition from the Central Intelligence Agency. Breathed into life by the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA laid claim to most of the functions that had formerly belonged to the Office of Strategic Services, including not only intelligence collection and analysis but also covert operations. General MacArthur, wary as ever of intrusions into his theater, was no more inclined to cooperate with the CIA in Korea than he had been with the OSS in the previous war, and therefore the Army avoided providing the military assets the CIA wanted and needed for operations behind North Korean lines. The CIA returned the favor by paying off US Army personnel clerks at Camp Drake to divert Americans with resistance experience to the CIA.

  The CIA found the other armed services distinctly more receptive to its requests for assistance. Marines and Navy Frogmen helped train the CIA’s Korean personnel and, in some cases, led them ashore on coastal raids. Air Force aircraft dropped hundreds of the CIA’s Korean operatives behind enemy lines. The survival rate of those men was not much better than that for men parachuted in by the Attrition Section. As word spread that few of the operatives were making it back, the Air Force began equipping cockpits with a switch that dumped out the entire cargo compartment, parachutists and all, in the event that second thoughts kept the men from jumping at the appointed hour.

  The Korean partisans controlled by the US Army claimed to have inflicted 69,000 casualties on the enemy. In addition, the partisans gave themselves credit for the sinking of 195 boats, the dropping of 80 bridges, the destruction of 3,800 tons of food, and the ruination of 2,400 farm animals. A large percentage of the reported tallies came from operations for which Americans were not present, encouraging the view among American officers that the partisan numbers were grossly inflated. A study conducted by the Johns Hopkins University Operations Research Office shortly afterward concluded that “the figures for casualties inflicted probably are 3 to 10 times too high, and further, many of the killed and wounded were civilians.”

  The partisan operations never caused the Communists serious supply problems, for 94 percent of operations took place in western and southern Hwanghae Province, far to the west of the main enemy supply routes. Partisan operations did exert some strategic influence by compelling the Communists to divert forces to deal with the partisans and guard against the possibility of seaborne invasion that their presence might portend. Between 20,000 and 50,000 enemy troops were tied down on the western coast at any one time. In a war where the combined strength of North Korean and Chinese forces reached 1.5 million men, such a diversion could not be strategically decisive, but neither was it insignificant.

  For the South Korean government of Syngman Rhee, the US Army’s management of the partisan units engendered more concern than contentment. South Korea’s leaders were skeptical about the value of guerrilla operations in North Korea, and wary of dealing with an autonomous armed force over the long term. As a result of their opposition, the United States halted recruitment in February 1953, by which time the partisans had grown to 22,000 men, and at war’s end Rhee’s government persuaded the Americans to evacuate the partisans to the south of the negotiated armistice line, which was well below Hwanghae.

  Few members of the resistance were especially eager to pull out, given that they had been seeking the liberation of a province that was now being conceded to North Korea. During a meeting of top resistance figures, one man was adamant that they should stay, but several others recommended withdrawal as the most pragmatic solution. They asked the lone American attendee to leave so they could continue the discussion in private. As the American was cooling his heels outside the tent, the Korean voices grew louder and angrier. Then the American heard a gunshot. A few minutes later he was invited to come back in. The man who had opposed withdrawal was no longer present. “We are now unanimous,” said one of the remaining men. “We will withdraw.”

  IT WAS DURING the Korean War that Army special operations forces entered into marriage with Army psychological warfare. In early 1951, the Army formed the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, under the command of Brigadier General Robert A. McClure, to improve the Army’s capabilities in what was variously termed psychological warfare, information warfare, and propaganda. Hiring artists, journalists, and technicians from the private sector, McClure organized a Loudspeaker and Leaflet Company for deployment to the front lines in Korea. The unit fielded vehicle-mounted and man-pack loudspeaker systems that blared carefully scripted messages at the trenches of the North Korean and Chinese armies. Dubbed “bullet magnets” by the grunts, the loudspeakers attracted enemy attention that their crews did not want, but that combat commanders found useful in locating enemy weapons.

  McClure did not receive ownership of the Ranger companies or the Eighth Army units that worked with the Korean partisans, but the Army did authorize him to form a new Special Warfare Division, to be focused primarily on guerrilla warfare. This arrangement derived from the quite tenuous argument that guerrilla warfare undermined the enemy’s will and thus was a component of psychological warfare. McClure filled the upper ranks of his Special Warfare Division with veterans of World War II special operations, including Colonel Aaron Bank of the OSS, Lieutenant Colonel Marvin Waters of Merrill’s Marauders, and Colonel Wendell Fertig and Lieutenant Colonel Russell W. Volckmann of the guerrilla campaigns in the Philippines.

  Once the new staff had arrived, McClure informed them that he intended to create a new and permanent organization for special operations. Volckmann proposed a “Special Forces Command,” which would include the Rangers and all other special operations forces. McClure liked Volckmann’s concept, and was inclined toward filling the prospective command with Ranger or Ranger-like light infantry units. The Army’s familiarity with the Rangers, McClure reasoned, would make the top brass more amenable to these units than to other special units, such as those resembling OSS forebears.

  Colonel Bank argued for the creation of a different type of special operati
ons force patterned on the Jedburghs. Called Special Forces, they were designed for supporting guerrilla forces in Europe in a future war with the Soviet Union. As Bank saw it, these forces should avoid involvement in raids, amphibious landings, and other types of operations associated with the Rangers, because those operations were less valuable strategically and could be undertaken by infantry units whose cultivation was less costly and time-consuming.

  General Maxwell Taylor, who had attained worldwide fame as the commander of the 101st Airborne Division in World War II and who was now the US Army’s chief of operations, convened a meeting on August 23, 1951, to determine the future of Army special operations forces. The meeting began with Taylor and his staff remarking upon dissatisfaction with Rangers among the senior commanders in Korea. They noted that lack of language capabilities and the nature of the conflict had restricted the Rangers to shallow penetrations of enemy lines. Bank and McClure, seated in the audience, relished each jab at the Rangers. Every negative word increased the likelihood that the Army would shut down the Rangers, thereby freeing up troop spaces for new special operations forces and bolstering the case for omitting Ranger-type operations from their repertoire.

  When Taylor’s staff raised the question of employing special units in deep-penetration operations and guerrilla warfare, McClure nudged Bank and whispered, “Here’s your golden opportunity. Go to it!” Bank came forward to present his Special Forces concept. He explained that the new forces would be modeled on the Jedburghs and Operational Groups of the OSS, emphasizing the achievements of the OSS special operators to show that he was not just floating in abstract theory. The Special Forces units would have fifteen men apiece, and each unit would be capable of organizing indigenous guerrilla forces of up to 1,500 men.