Still, the CIA report spoke with the clarion voice of authority: “This pattern of events and reports indicates that Communist China has decided, regardless of the increased risk of general war, to provide increased support and assistance to North Korean forces.” Smith suggested that the “Chinese Communists probably fear an invasion of Manchuria despite the clear-cut definition of U.N. objectives.” The possibility cannot be excluded, he warned, “that the Chinese Communists, under Soviet direction, are committing themselves to full-scale intervention in Korea.”
This was the first time the president had seen it definitively stated in writing: Mao’s army was in Korea, clashing with Americans. The intelligence was real, and it was official—tens of thousands of Chinese Communist soldiers on North Korean soil.
* * *
Late that morning, Truman stepped outside the West Wing and made his way over to the Rose Garden in time to preside over a Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony. The president was bestowing the prestigious award on a Marine colonel named Justice Chambers, who had fought heroically at Iwo Jima. The day was gorgeous, and the lawn shimmered a radiant green against the white latticework.
The audience was a hive of military dignitaries, including Secretary of Defense George Marshall and General Clifton B. Cates, commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. Whether the president took a moment to confer with either of the two men is not recorded. This was a celebration, not a time to brood or strategize, but the official news of Mao’s entrance into Korea would have been a subject of much interest to both Marshall and Cates—the latter especially, since his First Marine Division was worming into the very frontier where increased Chinese activity had been reported.
Truman, who loved military ceremonies like this, realized that the atmospherics were a bit sullied by the major construction project that was making a ruckus just beyond the garden. The White House was little more than a Potemkin facade—gutted on the inside, its outer walls held up by an extensive network of girders. Earth-moving equipment clanked away, and workmen could be heard drilling and pounding deep within the mansion’s cavernous hole.
When the president and his wife, Bess, had moved into the White House after FDR’s death, they thought the place was haunted. Certain rooms, it seemed, were trying to talk. Floors heaved. Ceilings slumped. Crystal chandeliers tinkled overhead. In June of 1948, one leg of their daughter Margaret’s piano broke through the rotted floor in her sitting room. Teams of engineers found crumbling masonry, sagging foundations, and fire hazards everywhere. One report noted that a number of beams “were staying up there from force of habit only.”
So the Trumans moved out, and construction crews moved in. Deep in the bones of the building, contractors uncovered a bewildering palimpsest of old wiring, defunct plumbing, and ventilation ducts that hadn’t been used in more than a century. The White House’s “structural nerves” were seriously damaged, said one report. “Heroic remedies” would be required.
When it was learned, in 1949, that the Russians had successfully detonated an atomic weapon, the White House basement was dug deeper to accommodate a new hermetic bunker designed to withstand a nuclear blast. The modern world was changing at a frightening clip, and America, still new to her superpower status, struggled to retrofit herself for the perils of the role. For the time being, the most powerful man in the world’s most powerful country, the man who had ushered in the atomic age, lived in what was little more than a glorified guesthouse across Pennsylvania Avenue.
After the Medal of Honor ceremony, Truman was driven over to Blair House for a simple lunch with Bess. Afterward, he went upstairs, stripped to his underwear, and opened the window. Then, as was his midday custom, he lay down for a nap.
* * *
At 2:20 p.m., a White House policeman named Leslie Coffelt was pulling guard duty on the west side of Blair House when a twenty-five-year-old Puerto Rican man named Griselio Torresola snuck around the corner of the sentry booth, clutching a German Luger. Another Puerto Rican man, Oscar Collazo, armed with a Walther P38 semiautomatic pistol, approached Blair House from the other side of Pennsylvania. The two young conspirators wore chalk-striped suits and snap-brim hats. Neither of them bore President Truman any personal ill will—they hardly knew a thing about him, or his politics. But they were determined to murder him anyway.
Collazo and Torresola were Puerto Rican Nationalists, tied to cells that were attempting to foment a violent insurrection and assert independence for the island. The two men believed that only a sensational act would bring attention to their movement. They were also angry about the Korean War, and the contradictions they saw in the fact that so many Puerto Rican soldiers had joined the U.N. effort to fight for freedoms they themselves did not enjoy on their home island. If some of the two conspirators’ grievances seemed reasonable, their plan was absurd. They had done no research. The plot had been hatched only a few days earlier. They’d taken the train down from New York the previous night.
Now Griselio Torresola wheeled on Officer Coffelt. In rapid succession, he shot the officer three times at point-blank range. Coffelt slumped in the chair of his booth, mortally wounded. Torresola then fired three shots at a plainclothes policeman, wounding him as well.
At another guard post, on the east side of Blair House, Oscar Collazo shot a policeman named Donald Birdzell in the leg, shattering his kneecap. Then a Secret Service officer opened fire, and bullets ricocheted off the pickets of Blair House’s wrought-iron fence. On the busy sidewalk, bystanders scattered for cover, and a stray round smashed through the plate-glass window of a drugstore just down Pennsylvania.
President Truman, roused from his nap, dashed to the open window to learn what the commotion was. Still in his underwear, he stood squinting in the hot glare and looked down at the gunfight in progress. Had either of the conspirators looked up at the right moment, their ultimate target would have been standing in plain view.
“Get back! Get back!” someone yelled at the president, and he shrank into the shadows of his room.
Seconds later, Collazo was shot in the chest and fell, his body splayed at the base of the steps. He was critically but not fatally wounded. Then Officer Coffelt, bleeding in his sentry booth, summoned the energy to rise from his death throes. Holding his Colt revolver, he propped himself against the guardhouse and fired a single shot at Torresola, who fell dead behind a boxwood hedge, a bullet in his brain.
As abruptly as it had started, the battle stopped, and an eerie silence fell over Pennsylvania Avenue. It was the largest gunfight in the history of the Secret Service. Two men lay dead or dying, and three others were wounded. Twenty-seven shots had been fired in less than two minutes.
* * *
An hour later, at the National Cemetery in Arlington, an assembly of dignitaries waited in the heat for the unveiling of a monument honoring a British field marshal who had been an influential adviser during World War II. Secretary of State Dean Acheson was sitting in the crowd when Treasury Secretary John Snyder hurriedly took a seat beside him. “An attempt has been made to assassinate the President,” said Snyder, alarm in his voice. “Shooting has been reported in front of Blair House.”
Acheson asked if Truman was okay.
“I don’t know,” Snyder replied.
Others around them had overheard the exchange, and now murmurs and gasps worked their way back through the crowd. Then the Marine Band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” The president’s limousine pulled up, with eight Secret Service agents following behind in a large open car. Truman stepped out, looking stern but calm in a dark blue suit. An extra detail of security officers was posted throughout the crowd, and other agents were seen lurking behind trees in the cemetery.
By the time Truman reached the assembly and took his seat, he wore a grin and looked, thought Acheson, as if “he had not a care in the world.” The secretary breathed a sigh of relief. “All of us in Washington,” he said, had
suffered “a bad scare.”
Later, when asked about the attempt on his life, Truman was pragmatic. “A president has to expect these things,” he said. “But it was a most unnecessary happening.” His thoughts were with the “grand guards” who had saved his life—and especially with Officer Coffelt, who had died in the hospital.
Truman could not hide his contempt for the would-be assassins. “The two men who did the job were just as stupid as they could be,” he said. “I know I could organize a better program than the one they put on. One of them faces the gallows, and the other one is dead.”
After the ceremony, Truman spoke briefly with George Marshall, then slipped into his limo and was whisked across the Potomac. By early evening, when Truman returned to the Blair House steps, a cleaning crew had scrubbed away the bloodstains.
12
WILL O’ THE WISP
Sudong Gorge
The village of Sudong was a tiny collection of mud-and-wattle huts on the main road leading up to the Chosin Reservoir. It was the gateway to the Taebaek Mountains, the place where the coastal plains petered out and the highlands began. The surrounding countryside was a patchwork of now brittle rice paddies and spindly persimmon trees. This late in the season, most everything had been harvested, and the farmers were hard at work preparing their foodstuffs for the winter. Oxcarts trundled along the berms that divided the fields. A crisp exigency informed the villagers’ movements. They seemed to be preparing for something—for the coming cold, and for the coming hostilities.
By November 2, most of the three thousand Marines of the Seventh Regiment had moved up to Sudong. The troops, having bivouacked for several days in a rat-infested warehouse in Hamhung, were pleased to make this bucolic place their new home. To the south of the village was a deep gorge crowded with boulders, and it was here, beside a dry riverbed, that much of the regiment pitched camp. Most of the men seemed carefree—insouciant, even. They believed the scuttlebutt they’d been hearing: that they were headed home soon, that it was all sewn up, that this was just a final, rugged exploit in the country.
By now everyone had heard that the Chinese were supposed to be gathering in the hinterlands hereabouts. But so what if they were? After those two wretched weeks trapped aboard ship, many of the Marines were spoiling for a fight, spoiling for action of any kind. The prevailing attitude seemed to be: If the North Koreans had vanished into the hills, then bring on the Chinese. How disconcerting it would be to come all this way and never see an enemy.
The day was bright and full of promise, and the upland air smelled of pine. Perhaps the Marines had been lulled by the uneventfulness of their entry into North Korea. They had trucked and marched up from the coast without encountering anyone—save for the kids who lined the road, flashing wide smiles and fluttering little flags. Wrote one Marine: “Korea began to look like a phony war. A spirit of confidence, a false sense of easy victory, began to take hold.”
Lieutenant Joe Owen recalled the chipper mood on the day they made for Sudong. “There was great energy in the ranks,” Owen wrote—they were “healthy young men on the way to adventure.” Owen’s unit, Baker-One-Seven, happily bedded down in an apple orchard. He and his mates cleaned their weapons and whetted their bayonets, and the “old salts retold stories of Japanese ferocity on the Pacific islands.” The men sang “ribald songs” and went out to a meadow to play a game of football—in lieu of a pigskin, they used a squashed-up jacket cinched tight with a web belt. It felt almost like a hunting trip—young men camped in the boonies, smoking and bullshitting around fires, fiddling with motors and guns. A kind of Indian summer had come to North Korea, with unseasonably warm temperatures, and this put the men in a frisky mood—some even skinny-dipped in a nearby stream.
But the commander of the Seventh Regiment, Colonel Homer Litzenberg, scowled at this lightheartedness. He had a sense that something momentous was about to happen. Litzenberg, who went by the nickname Blitzin’ Litzen, was a gruff, no-nonsense, square-jawed Pennsylvanian of Dutch descent who, during World War II, had served at the battles of Tinian and Saipan. One officer who served with him in Korea called him a “very stubborn Dutchman” who was a “bit of a bully,” but it was also said that he could be moved to tears by stories of the suffering of his men. He was a “tall, ruddy-faced man, built all of rectangles and squares.” Like General Smith, Litzenberg had prematurely white hair, which gave rise to his other nickname among the Marines: the Great White Father.
Litzenberg took his regimental officers and noncoms aside and gave them a sobering talk. One day soon, he said, they might be fighting the first engagement of World War III. “We can expect to meet Chinese Communist troops,” he warned, “and it’s important that we win the first battle.” He told his officers to pass the message down through the ranks: Facing the Red Chinese would be nothing like facing the threadbare and skittish North Koreans. It wasn’t just that Mao’s troops would likely be better trained, better organized, more experienced; it was also the weight of the culture behind them, the might of an ancient society, the pressure of a virtually numberless people. Litzenberg was convinced that his regiment would see the opening salvo in the next global conflict, a collision of ideologies that would be felt across years and continents. “We want the outcome to have an adverse effect on Moscow as well as Peking,” Litzenberg said. “The results will reverberate around the world.”
The Great White Father’s words had the chilling effect he intended, and the essence of what he’d said filtered among his battalions. That night, under a starless sky, the men shimmied into their bags and fell uneasily to sleep.
* * *
And then, just like that, it began. Close to midnight, the men heard a cacophony of bugles and horns, and the Red Chinese fell upon the gorge—“flights of them,” said one account, “like flocks of blackbirds.” They attacked the Seventh Regiment’s two leading battalions and infiltrated the gap between them. A battle raged through the night and, in fits and starts, for the next several days. By the time it was over, sixty-one Marines, and an estimated one thousand CCF soldiers, had been killed. Smith, often prone to understatement, called it “quite a fight.”
But almost as quickly as they had appeared, the Chinese vanished. They withdrew into the mountains to the north, and the Sudong Gorge fell silent. Colonel Litzenberg and General Smith were left to wonder why. What strategy were the Chinese employing? They appeared to be seeking intelligence of some kind, not terrain. And judging by the erratic way they had fought, and by their sudden withdrawal, they seemed less interested in achieving a battlefield victory and more interested in sending the Marines a message. But if so, what was it?
Was this attack merely a shot over the bow to issue a warning? We are here! Come no further! Was it an attempt to probe the Marines, to assess their strength and test their will to continue? Was it a blocking and delaying action, sacrificial in nature, to buy time for larger and more powerful Chinese units to arrive from Manchuria? Or was their appearance at Sudong a face-saving demonstration to fulfill a political promise the Chinese may have made to the North Koreans—a token effort to at least appear to help their Communist brothers to the south?
Another possibility occurred to General Smith: Did the CCF presence at Sudong have something to do specifically with the Chosin Reservoir itself? Perhaps they’d been sent down to guard the mountain gate that led to this important hydroelectric concern, which supplied power to grids that fed deep into Manchuria. This brought Smith back to a point he had puzzled over since the first time he heard about Almond’s plan to advance to the Chosin Reservoir and other hydroelectric installations to the north: Why, of all the places on the map, were they driving straight for the cluster of assets that the Chinese had indicated were of vital strategic importance to their economy? This seemed to Smith like a deliberatively provocative move on the part of the United States—or at least one that the Chinese could not help but perceive in that way.
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Then again, both Smith and Litzenberg wondered, maybe the Chinese generals were trying to accomplish something far more cunning at Sudong. The attack could have been a stratagem designed to make the Marines think they were weak, to coax them into advancing further and deeper into the mountain wilds, where the Chinese might more easily envelop them. Had Litzenberg been right from the beginning? Maybe this was the start of World War III, and the worst was yet to come.
It was possible that some combination of all these explanations was at play. The enemy’s true motives and objectives at Sudong remained a mystery that would be debated for decades. And yet the Chinese prisoners captured at Sudong were just as forthcoming as the ones the South Korean troops had taken a few days earlier. The Red Chinese readily told Marine interpreters that they were from the 124th Division, and that they had crossed the Yalu in mid-October. They wore quilted off-white uniforms, and seemed docile and eager to please. They hinted that many hundreds of thousands of troops were behind them: The 124th was only the first wave. The interpreters surmised that this could well have been a script the Chinese troops had been instructed to recite if captured—a tale to spook the Americans and make them think twice about continuing. On the other hand, the prisoners could have simply been telling the truth.
One of the Chinese prisoners caught near Sudong made a lasting impression on the Marines. He was “a tiny fellow who smiled continuously,” recalled one Marine battalion commander. “He was very hungry and wolfed down the C-rations we heated for him.” The Marines then offered the captive a sleeping bag, and he fell sound asleep in the middle of the battalion command post. When he awakened, the prisoner asked through an interpreter if he could return to the mountains and gather some of his company mates—who, he insisted, were most eager to surrender. A Marine officer assented to the request and lavished the young Chinese man with supplies of food, cigarettes, and other enticements. Escorted to the Marine perimeter, he seemed in a jolly mood as he scampered up the ridge. At the top, he turned and gave everyone a wave. Then he vanished into the fog. He was never seen again.
On Desperate Ground Page 10
