On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  General Smith, from his Hamhung headquarters, pondered the battlefield situation anew. He had no illusions about the foe he was facing—“we are fighting a sizeable unit of the Chinese Communist Army,” he wrote. But where were they now? The spotter planes were able to glean little solid information from the air. It seemed the 124th had evaporated into the mountains. (“It was the quiet that worried them,” said one Marine account. “An army as big as the Chinese ought to make noise.”) Smith took a helicopter to Sudong to confer with Litzenberg. The two men found it cryptic. “It was very difficult to obtain an accurate picture of the enemy situation,” Smith wrote. The Chinese, he said, were “like a will o’ the wisp.”

  * * *

  Whatever had happened at Sudong, whatever larger lessons might have been learned, Ned Almond didn’t consider the engagement worthy of contemplation or analysis. The X Corps general didn’t mention the battle in the command diary he regularly kept. Still, Almond went up to Sudong and, with an interpreter, interrogated some of the Chinese prisoners himself. To him, they seemed pitifully trained, poorly equipped, and scared—a band of amateurs. They weren’t anything to worry about. He described the enemy as merely a “bother.” However, there was no doubt in Almond’s mind that these were, in fact, Chinese, and he radioed Tokyo to alert MacArthur of their presence. MacArthur, in turn, dispatched his intelligence chief, General Charles Willoughby.

  Willoughby was a strangely formal native of Prussia. Born Adolf Karl Tscheppe-Weidenbach, he was a secretive man, and much about his German past was shrouded in mystery. MacArthur affectionately called him “my pet fascist.” (An extreme right-winger, he later became an adviser to Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.) General Willoughby ran his intelligence shop in a spirit of splendid intrigue, and always with the goal of pleasing the supreme commander. “Anything MacArthur wanted,” said one Army colonel, “Willoughby produced intelligence for.” Subordinates described Willoughby as a sickly, misanthropic loner who spent inordinate amounts of time at the movies and devoted most of his energies to currying favor with MacArthur. “He has no wife, no family, and lives for himself alone,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel James Polk, an intelligence officer who worked directly beneath Willoughby in Tokyo. “I don’t think he has a real friend in the world.”

  Willoughby quickly concluded that the Chinese prisoners at Sudong were merely “volunteers,” part of a token force of zealous Communists, probably from Manchuria, who had picked up their weapons and, in piecemeal fashion, streamed down of their own free will to help the North Koreans. This, in fact, was the story that Peking Radio had been broadcasting and that representatives of the Chinese government, through various channels, had announced to the world.

  It was a fiction that MacArthur seemed entirely willing to believe, one that provided sufficient cover for him to continue advancing toward the Yalu. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had given him carte blanche to keep on going—unless and until he saw evidence that the Chinese had officially entered the war. And here it was, evidence as clear as one could ever expect to find. MacArthur’s response was to accept Beijing’s propaganda at face value.

  Tokyo’s failure to fully recognize the Chinese presence was all the more extraordinary given the critical events that had simultaneously occurred on the west side of the Korean Peninsula: While the Marines were engaged at Sudong, another massive Chinese force had attacked South Korean units, as well as the U.S. Army’s Eighth Cavalry Regiment, at Unsan, in northwestern North Korea. United Nations forces suffered more than a thousand casualties at Unsan. Here was further proof that the Chinese were truly committed—proof that Charles Willoughby preferred to ignore.

  A number of intelligence people in Tokyo would later allege that Willoughby suppressed field reports to conform to the strategic picture MacArthur preferred to believe. “We had the dope,” insisted Lieutenant Colonel James Polk. “The fault lies in that Willoughby didn’t insist on the truth of his dope. He bowed to the superior wisdom of his beloved boss and didn’t fight him as a good staff officer should.” Instead, thought Polk, Willoughby was more concerned with feeding MacArthur’s ego and “vying for the favor of the most high.”

  How Tokyo had arrived at its conclusions, General Smith could not understand. These were no “volunteers.” The Chinese had fought strangely at Sudong, but they had fought well. They were regular army troops, all right—Mao’s troops. Many of them reported that they hailed from places deep in the hinterlands of China and that they had been lifelong professional soldiers. They had journeyed far, and at someone’s considerable expense, to get here. They had not come out of the kindness of their hearts to expel the imperialist invaders.

  The Chinese at Sudong had sent an important signal, but the American high commanders had missed it. Alexander Haig wrote that Almond found the Chinese behavior “puzzling…the enemy was too subtle for us, and we were too obdurate for them.” By evaporating into the ether the way the Chinese did, they enabled Almond to entertain a false sense of victory, fueling the illusion that his X Corps had caused the enemy to scatter. In this way, Sudong led to yet another miscalculation in a host of miscalculations.

  But with this difference: Americans had spilled blood and died on a battlefield at the hands of the Chinese. The stakes were no longer abstract; United States troops were committed now, not just strategically but emotionally. Much was made of the “Oriental” need to save face, but Americans were not immune to the phenomenon. They had to protect their investment, to guard the national prestige, to honor the men who had fallen.

  On November 9, Almond ordered Smith to start moving his Seventh Regiment from Sudong farther up the mountain, to a little place called Koto-ri. Almond’s ambition to reach the Yalu River remained undiminished, for now he wanted Smith to make for the Chosin Reservoir and assess the situation from there.

  Smith passed down the orders reluctantly, and in so many words told Litzenberg to ignore Almond’s call for haste. Contrary to his name, Blitzin’ Litzen was to proceed slowly and with maximum caution. Smith’s operations chief, Bowser, said Smith wanted the Seventh Marines to pull “every trick in the book to slow down our advance, hoping the enemy would show his hand before we got even more widely dispersed than we already were.”

  On the morning the Marines struck their camps and wound their way up through the pass and onto the plateau, most of them felt a tinge of apprehension, a dreadful tingle in the belly. The known presence of an officially nonexistent foe led some to utter a kind of tautological jest: If you are shot and killed by an enemy that is not there, are you still alive? Some tried to relieve the jitters with gallows humor and assorted vulgarities. “We joked and laughed as we marched,” said Lieutenant Joe Owen, “and made obscene comments about the things that were central to our lives: the chow, the terrain, the enemy, the lack of women.” When I get home to my wife, they’d say, the second thing I’m gonna do is take my pack off.

  As they rose into the mountains, the landscape turned as gray and somber as a Rembrandt painting. “Even at noon there was shadow,” said one Marine account. “Shadow and shade, a gloom, a darkness, over the snow and the land.” You could scarcely reach a summit, it seemed—the forbidding terrain rolled ever upward. Said Colonel Litzenberg: “Beyond each hill lay another hill, and that one always seemed higher.” This kind of real estate, said General Smith, “was never intended for military operations. Even Genghis Khan wouldn’t tackle it.”

  The narrow dirt road was badly rutted and did not seem to have a name, or even a number. The Marines called it the MSR—the main supply route. It corkscrewed as it climbed into the foothills, and in places it had been carved implausibly into the side of the mountain, in seeming rebuke of the forces of gravity. With every forward step into this stark domain, the men of the regiment felt they were getting more deeply enmeshed in a scenario they could not escape. Meat on a stick, they called themselves. Easy pickins. As they drove deeper into this “bandit country,” w
rote one Marine, “the risk of ambush grated and rasped and the men turned edgy.” The road, said another, seemed to be leading them into a “mysterious Oriental kingdom. I expected to see a giant ogre lurking on the sawtooth horizon.”

  13

  BROKEN ARROWS

  Washington, D.C.

  If the meaning of Sudong was lost on Almond and MacArthur, so also was it lost on President Truman and his advisers in Washington. Over the past four days, Truman’s attention had been diverted to other arenas. It had been an extraordinary passage, packed with consequential developments. On November 7, midterm elections were held across the nation, and Truman’s Democrats were deeply disappointed by the results. The Republicans gained twenty-eight seats in the House of Representatives and added five new seats in the U.S. Senate. In many campaigns around the country, the Korean War was a decisive issue—the Truman administration came in for widespread criticism for its prosecution of a conflict that was controversial and unpopular.

  Also looming over the election were the charges leveled by an obnoxious young senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy, who seemed to find the color red beneath every stone. Back in February, McCarthy had risen to national notoriety with a sensational accusation that Secretary of State Dean Acheson had knowingly permitted his State Department to become “infested” with more than two hundred card-carrying Communists. McCarthy warned that certain “enemies within” had undermined the nation’s security. Calling for loyalty tests and other extreme measures, he accused Truman of being in league with known Communists and charged that the Democratic-held White House had presided over “twenty years of treason.” McCarthy would say of Truman: “The son of a bitch should be impeached.”

  During the weeks leading up to the 1950 election, McCarthy had campaigned on behalf of Republican candidates all over the country. Although he was a divisive and often outrageous character, his Red-baiting fulminations often fell on receptive ears. America in the fall of 1950 was immersed in Cold War paranoia, swept up in nuclear hysteria, gripped by Russian fever. The Iron Curtain had descended, and it seemed as though every month yet another Eastern European country had buckled to Stalin’s Soviet Union—a Soviet Union that now had atomic weapons. In the binary world of Communism versus capitalism, Communism seemed to be winning. The environment was ripe for any demagogue sly and brazen enough to exploit it. Predictably, McCarthy inveighed against the Truman administration’s creation of a “Korean death trap,” saying that “we can lay [it] at the doors of the Kremlin and those who sabotaged rearming, including Acheson and the President.”

  Already, 1950 had produced enough political drama to leave the perception of a cumulative taint on Truman’s tenure. It was a time of fears and doubts; the country seemed to be jumping at its own shadow. American news was full of espionage scandals and charges of conspiracy. Earlier that year, Alger Hiss, an American diplomat who had been accused of being a Soviet spy, was convicted of perjury in a widely publicized trial. In England, a German-born physicist named Klaus Fuchs, who had worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, confessed to having supplied secret nuclear information to the Soviets. Then there was the controversial case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish American couple who had been indicted for treason back in August and were awaiting espionage trials that would lead to their executions.

  None of these developments had anything in particular to do with Truman, of course, but a pall of allegation and intrigue seemed to hover over his administration. The perception of dominoes falling, of containment policies failing to contain, of Reds permeating the halls of government, gave GOP contenders much ammunition with which to mount their 1950 campaigns against the Democrats, who were said to be soft on Communism.

  It deeply worried and saddened Truman that McCarthyism seemed to have had a national electoral effect. On some level, the senator’s reckless tactics and innuendos had worked. But if anything, the demoralizing results of the midterm election only made Truman double down on his commitment to winning in Korea—and to proving his critics wrong.

  * * *

  Two days after the election, on November 9, an incident over the Yalu River captured the full attention of the Truman White House, and the Pentagon as well. A U.S. Navy fighter pilot, flying a Grumman Panther, was on a mission to bomb several bridges near the river’s mouth, at a place called Sinuiju. The pilot of the jet, Lieutenant Commander Bill Amen, had taken off from the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea and was flying over the river when he encountered an enemy aircraft boring in on him: a Soviet MiG-15 that was piloted, it would later be learned, by a Russian captain, Mikhail Grachev.

  That argentine flash in the sky must have been a forbidding sight. At the time, American experts believed that the swept-wing, snub-nosed MiG outclassed any fighter jet the U.S. armed forces had in the air. But no one knew for sure, for no American jet had ever fought a MiG before. Now, over the Yalu, a genuine dogfight commenced, with the two sleek warplanes darting through bands of low, hazy clouds. Lieutenant Commander Amen, circling around and closing in on Grachev, scored a mortal wing hit on the MiG, which went into an inverted dive and crashed to earth. Amen safely returned his Panther to its carrier.

  The incident was not widely reported, but it made history: It was aviation’s first jet-on-jet kill. It also provided hints that the vaunted MiG was not invincible. But in Washington and in Tokyo, this isolated victory provided little cause for celebration. If an American pilot had won the opening round in a new hyper-adrenalized kind of aerial warfare, that was fine, but American commanders considered it a portentous day nonetheless. The Soviets had stationed a number of MiG squadrons at a Chinese air base in Antung Province, Manchuria, and now it was clear that they intended to use them. In the days ahead, encounters with Soviet jets would become so numerous that this stretch of the Yalu would acquire a new nickname: MiG Alley.

  While Stalin insisted that only North Korean pilots were flying the MiGs, American fighter pilots suspected otherwise. Among other telltale signs, they swore they heard Russian voices crackling over the radio waves.

  If this were true, then President Truman had larger implications to mull over. Not only had the Chinese actively entered the war; now, quite possibly, so had the Russians.

  * * *

  The following day, November 10, an even weightier event took place that would again disturb Truman’s concentration. That night, a Boeing B-50 Superfortress took off from Goose Bay Air Base, in Labrador, Canada. Flying over the St. Lawrence River, the heavy bomber ran into trouble. First one and then another of its four engines failed. Protocol required that the pilot immediately jettison his cargo—and so he did, right over the river, not far from the city of Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, 250 miles northeast of Montreal.

  The cargo in question happened to be a Mark IV atomic bomb, a revised version of the “Fat Boy” that had obliterated Nagasaki five years earlier. The crew set the squat, five-and-a-half-ton device to detonate at an altitude of 2,500 feet. Mercifully, the bomb was missing its plutonium core, so no nuclear reaction occurred. But the resulting explosion was massive nevertheless, and it rained more than a hundred pounds of moderately radioactive uranium over a wide arc of the Quebec countryside. The shuddering blast woke residents on both shores of the river for many miles. Soon afterward, the stricken bomber managed to land at Loring Air Force Base, in Maine.

  American and Canadian officials immediately moved to cover up the accident, telling reporters that what residents had heard was merely a five-hundred-pound “practice” bomb—conventional, not atomic—that had been intentionally and safely detonated. Not until the 1980s would the United States Air Force acknowledge that this was a case of a lost nuclear bomb—there would be several during the Cold War—an incident category known in military parlance as a “broken arrow.”

  For President Truman, it was yet another distraction, another twist, in a spectacularly nerve-racking week.

 
; 14

  A POWERFUL INSTRUMENT

  Hamhung

  On the night of November 10, in the mess hall of the division’s new Hamhung headquarters, a group of officers gathered around General Smith as he grasped an old samurai’s sword. With an air of precision and ceremony, Smith raised the blade in the air, then brought it down upon a birthday cake. The baked concoction was nothing special, a slightly misshapen affair the Marine cooks had spontaneously whipped up, slathered in chocolate icing. A stack of plates and forks was set nearby, along with a triad of votive candles and a pitcher of punch.

  The birthday this solemn party of men had come to celebrate was not Smith’s—nor was it the birthday of any officer now crowding around the table. Rather, it was the anniversary of the founding of the United States Marine Corps. In loopy lettering the bakers had squeezed from a piping bag, the top of the cake read U.S.M.C., 1775–1950. On this day, the Marines had turned 175 years old.

  The Corps was diligent about commemorating its natal day. The Marines may have had a reputation for being crabby warriors with hearts of iron, but they could be sentimental. There was an old tradition in the Marines, wherever they might be, whether at home or on the most trying battlefield, to commemorate the Marine birthday with a cake and a corny little ceremony like this one. As the story goes, the Marine Corps was established on November 10, 1775, in a tavern in Philadelphia—Tun Tavern, it was called. The details are sketchy, but that was when and where the first recruits of the Continental Marines were said to have formally enlisted during the Revolutionary War.