On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  This was the hallowed occurrence General Smith was determined to observe—and not just here in Hamhung. Smith had made sure that his regiments, scattered in their encampments out in the field, had taken a moment to recognize the day with a few solemnities and a freshly baked cake—or at least the best approximation the cooks could improvise from their mess tents.

  Smith cut the cake with the rusty sword he’d been handed and distributed the pieces according to custom: the first slice to the oldest Marine in the room, the second slice to the youngest. He recited passages from the Marine Corps Manual and then read greetings that had been sent in from various dignitaries, including this one, from Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, commander of naval forces in the Far East: “On the occasion of your 175th Anniversary I consider it indeed an honor to salute your courageous comrades in arms. You can justly be proud of your past record, and of your present gallant and heroic exploits in the Korean Campaign.”

  Then the cake and glasses of punch were served. The ceremony was finished in a half hour, and Smith and his staff scattered to their bunks.

  * * *

  One hundred seventy-five years of the United States Marines: It was a trivial thing, perhaps. But celebrating the day was one of the rituals by which Marines reminded themselves of their peculiar place in the world and their sometimes tenuous perch within the U.S. military. The Corps had long possessed a strain of elitism. The Marines believed they could do more with less than any other fighting force on earth. At times they seemed almost like a cult. “We’re a ferocious little confraternity…a violent priesthood,” wrote James Brady, a Korean War Marine. “You aren’t simply enrolled, but ordained.” The Marines were steeped in lore, having led such legendary campaigns as the Battle of Belleau Wood, in World War I, and Iwo Jima, in World War II. They were bullish about their props and mottos, their traditions and regalia—the bulldog mascot, the anchor-and-globe insignia, the mawkish anthem, which they loved to sing at every opportunity.

  The Marines had their own structures, their own slang. They were jarheads, leathernecks, devil dogs. Just don’t call them soldiers. They made an odd grunting noise—Oorah!—which was their battle cry. They were proud and boastful, and disparaging of rearguard Army troops, whom they called “doggies” and other derogatory terms. From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, the Marines believed they were imbued with special traits, a special mystique. They were the first to fight, and they were always faithful: Semper fi.

  Outsiders could find their bragging insufferable, but Marines had good reason to think and talk this way. Company for company, platoon for platoon, the Marines had established a long track record as the most effective—and the most lethal—troops in the United States armed forces. It was hard to say why this was so, hard to identify the exact quality or set of qualities that made the Marines so efficient in the heat of combat.

  Martin Russ, a Korean War Marine who later became an accomplished writer and historian, put it this way: “It was not because they were braver or had God on their side; it was because Marine recruits were inspired from the beginning with the conviction that they belonged to a select and elite legion, and because of a tradition of loyalty which meant in practical terms that the individual trusted in and relied on his comrades to an extraordinary degree, and that he himself was trustworthy and reliable. Most Marines of that day believed it was better to die than to let one’s comrades down in combat. The ultimate payoff of this esprit de corps was a headlong aggressiveness that won battles.”

  It was Marines serving in China during World War II who took a local industrial expression and popularized it, creating what became the definitive adjective capturing the special quality Marines were supposed to have: gung-ho. Its Chinese characters literally meant “work together.”

  Perhaps in part because the Marines had no elite academy to define and foster their officer class, the ethos of the Corps tended to be egalitarian, from top to bottom. This was best reflected in their most fundamental mantra: “Every Marine a rifleman.” The expression meant that all Marines, no matter their rank or specialty or job description, were supposed to know how to wield a weapon and fight with the lowliest grunts. Marine bakers and Marine radio operators were first and foremost riflemen—and so were Marine generals. An “I am Spartacus” camaraderie was at work here; when the fighting was fiercest, every Marine was supposed to be interchangeable, and equal before the exigencies of battle.

  The Marine style was no-frills, nothing showy. Their uniform was a basic forest green, without embellishment. This was a point of confusion for some people who saw them only in formal garb, on ceremonial occasions: Marine Corps bands strutting to John Philip Sousa, or those immaculate creatures who guarded embassies—white-gloved mannequins with high-and-tight buzz cuts, their dress blues edged in blood stripes. But most Marines said they preferred to be at the front lines, in foxholes, fighting “our country’s battles,” as the hymn put it, and keeping “our honor clean.”

  For all their esprit de corps, the Marines also suffered from a persecution complex, a sense of wounded pride, a feeling that the military-political hierarchy in Washington misunderstood and underappreciated them. At times the Marines wondered if they were the redheaded stepchildren of the military. They were neither fin, nor fur, nor feather. Though formally attached to the Navy, they weren’t sailors. One could think of them as infantry, but they were emphatically not of the Army. They had their own cadre of excellent aviators, but they were not Air Force. Nor were the Marines considered “special operations forces,” like the Rangers or the Green Berets, or any other units schooled in stealth and the raiding arts.

  The point was, the Marines were their own tribe, a breed apart. This made them outcasts of a sort, a status they begrudged but also savored. They thrived on the very thing they resented. They felt they were constantly having to prove their worth, that in the public’s eye they were only as good as their latest exploit. On the battlefield, they tended to adopt an orphan’s mindset: No one can save us but ourselves.

  This chronic grievance had recently been reinforced by none other than President Harry Truman, no fan of the Marines. In a letter leaked to the press only a few months earlier, Truman had belittled the Corps as “the Navy’s police force,” adding that “as long as I am President that is what it will remain.” The Marines, Truman went on to say, “have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s.” Truman had roundly apologized, but his remarks were taken as a deep insult by many Marines, including Smith. Before the outbreak of the Korean War, it had been bruited about that the president (an Army man all the way) wanted to decimate the Marines as a fighting force—or disband them altogether. Many Marines in Korea had the sense that they were not only fighting the enemy, but fighting to save themselves as an institution. The perception was that their very existence was on the line.

  * * *

  That night, after the cake was eaten and Smith and his staff had gone to bed, winter arrived with a vengeance. There was an old saying, apropos of cutting cakes with swords, that the calendar year in North Korea had no swing seasons: When summer ended, winter fell “like a samurai’s blade.”

  Perhaps the Indian summer of the past week had made the men apathetic, had caused them to forget the warnings they’d all heard. Of course, they’d been told that Old Man Winter was no joke in this part of the peninsula. The weather was supposed to be like that of upper North Dakota, or Saskatchewan. But the men weren’t prepared for such an enveloping chill, neither its intensity nor the abruptness of its descent. Overnight, temperatures went into free fall. Within a few hours, the mercury plummeted forty degrees, to nearly ten below zero Fahrenheit. Then came the winds—flaying, buffeting, straight from the steppes of Manchuria. The gusts built in waves until they measured thirty knots.

  The effect on Smith’s men was devastating, particularly for those in the Seventh Regiment, who were now garrisoned high in the mountains,
in the village of Koto-ri. Litzenberg’s camp was as bleak as a Siberian ice station. One Marine journalist described the cold there as “wet, raw, devouring…a howling beast.” The chill was powerful enough, said an official history, “to numb the spirit as well as the flesh.” It stole into men’s nostrils, took away their breath, froze the phlegm in their sinuses. Spitting resulted only in “a disappointing crackle” upon the ground. “The cold was a physical force you had to reckon with,” said a Marine MP from Massachusetts. “It got down into the marrow of our bones.”

  The chill altered people’s personalities, too—it made chipper guys brood and tough guys cringe. It was so frigid, said one account, that braggarts could “find no breath to boast in.” It made people daft. They stopped talking, said Lieutenant Joe Owen, “except to blaspheme the goddamn fools who sent us out into this miserable, cold country.” “If I’d known what the temperature was,” said a truck driver from North Carolina, “I probably would have died.”

  At the mess tent, a cup of scalding coffee would accumulate a skim of ice within minutes. Canteens and C rations froze solid. Fingers stuck to metal. Helicopters refused to rise. Truck engines balked. Rifles seized. Batteries fizzled. The cold seemed to come with only one upside: It had a cauterizing effect on wounds. Blood from bullet holes or shrapnel tears simply froze to the skin and stopped flowing.

  The quartermasters had already issued the men warm winter clothing—windproof trousers, alpaca-lined parkas, heavy woolens, mountain sleeping bags—but the gear was inadequate to combat this kind of cold. In Koto-ri, warming tents were set up, with kerosene heaters roaring night and day. Some men, however, needed more than simple warmth; they needed to go straight to the infirmary. Dozens of Marines had collapsed as though from exhaustion. They seemed to be in shock. They were dazed, semiconscious. Their vital signs became erratic, and their respiratory rates dropped to dangerously low levels. Others suddenly transitioned from this catatonic state into a hysterical sadness, sobbing uncontrollably. The Navy medical corpsmen developed a term for these extreme cold casualties: They were “shook,” they said, a description that seemed to get at both the physical and the psychological aspects of their condition. General Smith noted in his log that “stimulants were required in addition to warming in order to restore the men to normal.”

  “The Marines’ Hymn” boasted that the leathernecks had fought “in ev’ry clime and place where we could take a gun,” including in “the snow of far-off Northern lands.” Wintry North Korea qualified as such a place, but in his substantial reading, Smith could not recall the Marines having fought a battle in conditions quite like this. General Smith, a Californian in every sense, had spent his life in sunny places whenever he could help it. He never mentioned it to anyone, but he had a long-standing physical aversion to cold weather: When the temperature dropped, he experienced tremors in his hands and a numbness in his feet. The symptoms, he thought, dated back to a nearly fatal case of influenza he contracted in 1918. Those symptoms, in turn, had become exacerbated during a long winter he served in Iceland early in World War II. Ever since then, he’d tried his best to avoid getting chilled. Peleliu and Okinawa, where he later fought, were both horror shows in the extreme—but at least they were warm.

  Even worse, this was the beginning of a peculiarly severe weather pattern that would lead to one of the coldest North Korean winters on record. More than Smith realized, the weather would not only be a factor in the coming conflict; it would be, in effect, the third combatant, an omnipresent force that would color his every decision and follow his every move. The farther his men traveled from the coast and the higher they climbed into the mountains, the stronger this third combatant would become. “It seemed with each step,” said one account, “the air was changing, cooling, closing its grasp on the earth.” Few American armies—few armies from any nation—had ever conducted extended operations in such harsh, sub-zero conditions—in an alpine landscape, no less. Wrote Martin Russ: “General Winter, having won many a campaign down through the centuries, was about to reap a heavier harvest of casualties at the reservoir than the armies themselves with their bombs and bullets.”

  * * *

  General Almond, working mostly in the warmth of his X Corps headquarters in Hamhung, was unfazed by the arctic weather the troops were experiencing in the mountains. On November 11, the day the temperatures dropped so precipitously, he passed down an extraordinary order. The old plan, which had momentarily been put on hold, was reinstated: All the men of the X Corps were to resume their drive to the Yalu, with the goal of reaching the river as quickly as possible. This included Smith’s Marines. The attack at Sudong was discounted now, an unfortunate but inconsequential speed bump on the way to certain victory. The idea of merely halting at the Chosin had been cast aside—Smith’s Marines were to quickly pass by the reservoir and then keep on going to the Manchurian border. Almond assigned Smith a specific swath along the river, forty miles in length, that was to be his ultimate objective.

  Once again, Smith and his staff were shocked by Almond’s intemperateness. His plan, especially given this polar weather, seemed to them not merely ill-considered; it was crazy. When Smith met with Almond on November 14, he tried again to voice his doubts. Smith was still concerned primarily with how diffuse his division had become—his units were spread over far too many miles of terrain. Almond consented to let Smith concentrate his forces a bit but remained adamant about the haste with which they were to move toward the Yalu. “We’ve got to go barreling up that road,” he said at one point. Upon hearing this, Smith blurted an involuntary response: “No!” Almond pretended not to hear him—otherwise he would have had to call Smith out for insubordination. The conference abruptly adjourned and Smith marched outside, hot as a hornet, saying to his staff, “We’re not going anywhere until I get this division together.”

  For the first time, Smith was starting to see the situation whole: the terrain, the weather, the pressures from below and those from above, the enemy before him and the enemy within. As the pieces slowly came together, he could intuit the battlefield for what it would become—a perfect trap. It was starting to feel reminiscent, he thought, of Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 campaign into Russia, in which the French Grande Armée pushed ever deeper into hostile country, distancing itself from its supply lines as winter steadily approached.

  Smith recognized that he would be facing not one but four different foes: the mountains, the winter, the Chinese, and his own superiors. He would have to come up with ways to stall his division’s advance without blatantly disobeying orders. He would have to figure out how to create depots along the route, and he would have to establish a central stronghold, a self-sustaining bastion in the wilderness. He knew he was not going to receive much help from Almond or X Corps. His Marines would have to rely upon their own wits and resources. No one can save us but ourselves.

  What most concerned Smith was that his Marines were heading into a situation that, on the grand strategic scale, seemed conspicuously flawed. He recognized, of course, that matters of larger strategy were not properly his realm—he was only a field general—but he’d been in this place before, and he had seen the pointless carnage that could result from muddled strategy. Six years earlier, at the Battle of Peleliu, where Smith was assistant commander of the First Marine Division, the Marines suffered 6,525 casualties, including 1,252 dead, in a brutal two-month engagement that, in the end, served little purpose. The Marines had come to the tiny coral island to seize a Japanese airfield in support of MacArthur’s planned invasion of Mindanao, in the Philippines. But then, in a late reversal, MacArthur decided to bypass Mindanao in favor of Leyte, thus obviating the need to take the Peleliu runway. The battle forged ahead anyway, and the airstrip was indeed taken, but it would play no significant role in any future campaigns.

  Peleliu proved to be one of the costliest battles of the Pacific war, yet, tragically, the island could have been avoided altogether. S
mith came to realize, said a biographer, “that all of that blood and sacrifice and pain had been for no strategic gain.” Peleliu hung over him like a curse. He did not want to go down that road again. Losing Marines was one thing; losing them in the service of a dubious and ill-conceived strategy, he thought, bordered on the obscene.

  On November 15, Smith sat down and wrote a long letter to General Clifton Cates, the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, in Washington. In a firm but even tone, he laid out the fix he was in and confessed his trepidations about the coming battle. At times, his words had a haunting quality, a note of “may this cup pass from me.” But his letter proved to be profoundly prescient.

  “Although the Chinese have withdrawn to the north,” he said, “I have not pressed Litzenberg to make any rapid advance….I do not like the prospect of stringing out a marine division along a single mountain road for 120 air miles from Hamhung to the [Manchurian] border.” Smith told Cates that he had “little confidence in the tactical judgment of the [X] Corps or in the realism of their planning….There is a continual splitting up of units and assignment of missions which puts them out on a limb….Time and again I have tried to tell the Corps Commander that in a marine division he has a powerful instrument, but that it cannot help but lose its full effectiveness when dispersed.”