Hart said nothing, because he didn’t trust himself to speak.
His immediate reaction had been that the whole public relations business was bullshit, and he didn’t have time to fool with it.
But he was a captain, and captains do what majors want.
After he had had his breakfast, he had accustomed himself to the picture-taking and the parade to the railroad station. The men seemed to like the attention, and it really didn’t do any harm.
When he came back from Kramer’s Kafeteria, he saw— because he had failed to officially “discourage” it—that the men—and three of his officers—had arrived with wives, mothers, children, cousins, and four rather spectacular girlfriends.
There were a number of things wrong with that, starting with the presence of the civilians interfering with what they had to do before they left, and that most of the wives, mothers, children, and cousins and two of the four spectacular girlfriends had wanted to meet “the skipper.”
Plus, of course, he had made Louise stay at home. And she was sure to hear that the families had been at the center. If by no other way than on the pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, whose photographers had shown a good deal of interest in the spectacular girlfriends.
He had finally decided to hell with it, he’d call Louise and tell her to come to the Center, and while she was at it, to get the kids out of school, and bring them, too.
“Oh, all right,” Louise said. “But I’ll have to call Teddy back and tell him not to pick us up here.”
Lieutenant Theodosus Korakulous, now Acting Chief, Homicide Bureau, had called Louise and offered to take her and the kids to Union Station.
“If you’re with me,” Teddy had told Louise, “we can get through the barriers. Traffic told me it looks like a lot of people are going to be there.”
He had not wanted to go back into the main room to try to smile confidently at one more wife/mother/spectacular girlfriend and assure her he would take good care of the Family Marine now going off to war.
He wasn’t at all sure that he could do that. He was a Marine captain, he had thought at least a dozen times that morning, but he really knew zero, zip, zilch about being a Marine Infantry company commander.
So he’d been more or less hiding in his office when Lieutenant Paul Peterson had come in to show him a story in the Post-Dispatch he “thought he’d like to see.”
THE MARINES ARE COMING!!! BUT IN TIME??
By Jeanette Priestly
Chicago Tribune War Correspondent
With the 24th Infantry Division in Korea
Taejon, Korea—July 16—(DELAYED) The Eighth United States Army provided a Jeep for this correspondent to cover the war. Two Marines, saying they needed it more than I did, stole it from me. Within hours, on the front lines of the 34th and 19th Infantry Regiments of the battered and retreating 24th Division, I was glad they had.
When Marine captain Kenneth R. McCoy and Marine Master Gunner Ernest W. Zimmerman commandeered my Jeep, they told me bluntly that this was no place for a woman, and only with great reluctance agreed to take me with them wherever they were going. Their only other option was to leave me on the side of the road. The Marine Corps code of never abandoning their dead or wounded was extended in this case to include a female war correspondent.
Where they were going was the front lines of this war, sent to see how the Eighth U.S. Army and particularly the 24th Division was handling the North Korean invasion.
The Marine Corps sent two experts to investigate. Both McCoy, a lithe, good-looking officer in his late twenties, who is known as “the Killer” in the Marine Corps, and Master Gunner Ernest W. Zimmerman, a stocky, muscular man a few years older, served with the legendary Marine Raiders in World War II.
What they—and this correspondent—saw was not encouraging. Within minutes of arriving at the command post of the 34th Infantry, we learned that in the previous 48 hours, the 21st Infantry, one of the two other regiments making up, with supporting units, the 24th Division, had lost over half its strength in combat.
Worse, their breakup and retreat in the face of the North Korean onslaught had been so quick and complete that the enemy had been able to overrun the 65th Field Artillery Battalion, which had been in their support. Almost a thousand officers and men, and their intact cannon and a large supply of ammunition, fell into the hands of the North Koreans.
There were three North Korean prisoners at the 34th Infantry Command Post. An American patrol had captured them on a reconnaissance mission. They had not been interrogated, as no one in the 34th Infantry spoke Korean, and calls to division headquarters to pick up the prisoners had gone unanswered.
McCoy and Zimmerman—both speak Korean—not only uncovered that one of them, who was wearing a private’s uniform, was an officer, but got from him the enemy’s intentions for the rest of the day, including the units that would make the attack.
Taking the officer with us, we moved to the 19th Infantry command post, where the attack was supposed to take place at three the next morning. McCoy and Zimmerman went to the regiments’ most forward outposts to see if they could take another prisoner.
This correspondent was taken to an artillery forward observer post by a major, who promised to have me tied up if I tried to go farther forward. From there I could see Zimmerman and McCoy making their way to a machine-gun outpost, beyond which was only the enemy.
Through powerful, tripod-mounted binoculars, I could clearly see a half-dozen North Korean soldiers wading across the Kum River. When I asked why the enemy was not being fired upon, the major explained that it apparently had been decided to conserve artillery and machine-gun ammunition for the expected attack.
“And they’re out of rifle range,” the major added.
At that moment, through my binoculars, I could see McCoy un-limbering the .30-caliber Garand rifle he carried slung from his shoulder. Most Army officers arm themselves with the .45 Colt pistol or the .30-caliber carbine.
“He’s wasting his time,” the major said.
McCoy opened fire, dropping three, possibly four, of the North Koreans in less than a minute, and sending the survivors scurrying for safety on the far bank of the river.
Darkness fell then, and the major insisted we go back to the regimental CP. Two hours later, when McCoy and Zimmerman hadn’t shown up, I grew concerned. The major, without much conviction, told me he was sure they would be all right.
An hour after that, they appeared, calmly leading two North Korean prisoners.
At three in the morning, the North Korean artillery barrage—the terrifying prelude to the attack to follow—began.
We were all then sitting on the floor of the command post. McCoy calmly took a long black cigar from his pack. Zimmerman looked at it hungrily. McCoy took a lethal-looking dagger from its sheath, strapped to his left arm, calmly cut the cigar in half, and gave half to Zimmerman.
The artillery and mortar barrage lasted an hour. The only thing McCoy had to say, a professional judgment, was that some of “the incoming sounds like 105,” which meant the North Koreans were using the 105-mm howitzers captured from the 65th Field Artillery against the 19th Infantry.
Shortly afterward, McCoy went outside the CP, listened in the darkness to the sounds of the battle developing, and returned to announce that it was time for us to go.
Taking the North Korean officer prisoner with us, we drove—using blackout lights only— back to the 24th Division headquarters. McCoy learned that he could not turn the prisoner over to the POW compound there because there was none. The military police who would normally run the compound had been pressed into service as replacement riflemen. The provost marshal himself had been pressed into service as an infantry officer.
We then drove back to Eighth Army headquarters in Taegu, where McCoy was finally able to turn the North Korean officer over to the military police. They exchanged salutes and shook hands.
Communications at Eighth Army headquarters were overwhelmed by high-prio
rity messages reporting to Tokyo the disaster that was taking place all over the peninsula. McCoy realized that he could deliver his report to his superiors in Tokyo quicker if he went to Japan, rather than waiting for Eighth Army to find time to transmit it, and announced he was going to Pusan to see if he could find a plane.
There was zero chance that this reporter’s dispatches could be transmitted from Taejon, so I went with him. We drove to Pusan and flew out for Tachikawa Air Base, outside Tokyo, just after midnight on an Air Force C-54.
In Tokyo, we learned not only that the 19th and 34th Infantry Regiments had been forced to “withdraw” to new positions farther south, but that the 24th division commander, Major General William F. Dean, had not been seen since he had personally gone out with a bazooka to use against North Korean tanks, and it was feared that he had been captured or killed.
McCoy and Zimmerman are by nature taciturn men, and they certainly were not about to offer their opinion of what they saw to a war correspondent. But it wasn’t at all hard, during the time we spent together, to read their faces. And what their faces said—the individual courage of the officers and men aside—was that the Eighth United States Army was not prepared for this war, is taking a terrible beating, and may not be able to halt the North Koreans.
The Marines are coming.
The question is, will they get here in time? And will they be able to do a better job than the Eighth Army has so far?
“What do you think, sir?” Lieutenant Peterson asked when Hart had finished reading the article.
“I know the two Marines she was with,” Hart replied, thinking out loud. Then he looked at Peterson. “I don’t know what to think, Paul.”
“You know them, sir?”
“In the last war, they called people like that ‘the Old Breed,’ ” Hart said. “I wonder what they call them now.”
[TWO]
OFFICE OF THE SENIOR INSPECTOR/INSTRUCTOR EL TORO MARINE CORPS AIR STATION, CALIFORNIA 1025 21 JULY 1950
Brigadier General Lawrence C. Taylor, USMC, whose promotion to flag officer rank had occurred shortly before his graduation from the U.S. Army War College on 30 May, had elected to take thirty days’ leave before reporting for duty at Headquarters, USMC.
For one thing, the year had been a rough one, and there hadn’t been much time to spend with his family. For another, unless he took some leave, he was going to lose it, as regulations dictated the forfeiture of leave in excess of sixty days. Finally, he suspected that as a brand-new one-star, there would not be an opportunity to take much—if any—leave in the next year.
Both he and Margaret, his wife, had Scottish roots, and had always wanted to see Scotland, so they talked it over, decided that they could afford it, and that it was really now or never, and went.
It was not as easy for him as he first thought it would be. It was necessary for him, as a serving officer, to get permission to leave the country. There were forms to fill out, listing where he wanted to go and why, and permission didn’t come when he expected it to, and he had to spend time on the phone to Eighth & Eye to make sure he would have permission in time to leave.
Permission came seventy-two hours before they were scheduled to leave. That just about gave them enough time to leave the kids with Margaret’s mother in upstate New York and get to New York for the TWA flight to Scotland. They flew on a Trans-Global Airways Lockheed Constellation, which was really very nice, and on the way decided all the paperwork was worthwhile. It was going to be sort of like a second honeymoon.
On 28 June, when he learned of the North Korean invasion in the Glasgow newspaper, he had—with more than a little difficulty—managed to get through on the telephone to Eighth & Eye and asked if he should report for duty. He was told that would not be necessary.
And when he reported for duty, they didn’t seem to know what to do with him, except to suggest that it might not be wise “in the present circumstances” to plan on spending two years at Eighth & Eye, which was the original plan.
General Taylor was thus able to consider the possibility—slight but real—that, should there be a war and an expansion of the Marine Corps, he might find himself serving with a Marine division in the field, or in command of a base—Parris Island, for example, while the incumbent there went off to a field command—instead of shuffling paper at Eighth & Eye.
That fascinating prospect was shattered when General Cates, on 13 July, summoned him to his office and told him (a) that on the fourteenth he was going to issue a confidential order to the Corps to prepare for mobilization and (b) that he thought General Taylor could be of most use to the Corps by going to the West Coast and doing what he could to facilitate the mobilization of the Marine Corps Reserve.
General Taylor took a plane that night for Camp Pendleton, with Margaret and the kids to follow by auto. The West Coast assignment was temporary duty, which meant that their furniture would be stored, rather than shipped to California.
At Camp Pendleton, Brigadier General Clyde W. Dawkins, the deputy commanding general, told General Taylor he was glad he was there, as he expected there would be “administrative problems” in the mobilization of Marine Reserve Aviation, and anything that Taylor could do to “sort things out” would be a real contribution.
General Taylor had not met General Dawkins previously, which he supposed was because Dawkins was wearing the golden wings of a Marine aviator, and Taylor had come up through artillery. He also wondered privately why Dawkins, an aviator, was deputy commander of Pendleton, which was not a Marine aviation facility. Logic would seem to dictate that a Marine aviator would be more suited to “sort out” the “administrative problems” involved in mobilizing Marine aviation, and someone such as himself, an experienced ground officer, would be better suited to be the deputy commander of Camp Pendleton.
General Dawkins said that it would probably be best that General Taylor “pitch his tent” at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, not far from Pendleton, rather than on the Pendleton Reservation.
“Pendleton is going to be one huge Chinese fire drill when the mobilization starts,” Dawkins said. “You’ll be more productive there than here. There’s a light colonel there—John X. O’Halloran, good man—as inspector/instructor. You can use his office and people.”
At El Toro, General Taylor was given quarters in a small building set aside for visiting senior officers. As soon as he unpacked, he went into the small town of El Toro itself to find someplace for Margaret and the kids. He quickly learned that there was the opposite of an abundance of furnished rental houses or apartments in the area, and what was available was priced accordingly.
In desperation, he rented a small, unattractive apartment that cost 125 percent of his housing allowance, and one that he knew would disappoint Margaret and the kids. They’d had really nice quarters at the War College, and the apartment was a real comedown.
And then he went to work at El Toro to prepare for the mobilization, which was almost certain to happen.
Lieutenant Colonel O’Halloran, USMC, the inspector/ instructor, was a muscular, red-haired Irishman. He wore an Annapolis ring, which immediately made General Taylor feel confident in him, even if he was also wearing the gold wings of a Marine aviator. Five minutes into their first conversation, they were agreed that calling an immediate meeting of the commanding officers of the three reserve squadrons on the West Coast to bring them up to speed on what was very likely going to happen was the first thing to do.
Two of the three squadron commanders showed up as ordered at 0800 19 July. The third—the commanding officer of VMF-243—did not. His name was Major Malcolm S. Pickering.
Lieutenant Colonel O’Halloran was not at the meeting either. He sent word—which was not the same thing as requesting permission to do so—that he was going to spend the morning checking on enlisted housing for the flood of reservists soon to arrive at El Toro.
Since he could not ask O’Halloran what he recommended should be done about the officer who had not, i
n Marine parlance, “been at the prescribed place at the prescribed time in the properly appointed uniform” and was thus technically absent without leave, General Taylor inquired of Technical Sergeant Saul Cohen, the senior staff NCO of the I & I staff, if he had been able to contact Major Pickering.
“Not exactly, sir. I left word at his office to tell him as soon as he got back.”
“Back from where?”
“No telling, sir. Major Pickering travels a lot.”
“And the executive officer of VMF-243? Did you contact him?”
“Same story, sir. As I understand it, he’s with Major Pickering. Permission to speak out of school, sir?”
“Go ahead.”
“VMF-243’s the best of our squadrons. They just about aced the annual inspection. And I’m sure Major Pickering will be here when he’s really needed.”
“Just to remove any possible misunderstanding, Sergeant,” General Taylor said, “I have the authority to determine when the major’s presence is really needed.”
“Yes, sir.”
The meeting with the other two squadron commanders did not go well. Neither of them made much of an effort to conceal their opinion that they had developed a good working relationship with the inspector/instructor and the last thing they needed when they were about to get called back to the Corps was to have to answer dumb questions posed by some strange brigadier who wasn’t even an aviator.
General Taylor told Technical Sergeant Cohen to make sure there was a note in Major Pickering’s box at the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters instructing him to report to him, no matter what the hour, as soon as he got to El Toro.
“Sir, Major Pickering doesn’t use the BOQ. But I’ll try to get word to him at the Coronado Beach.”
Under Fire Page 29
