The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Later, after they were hit by the Chinese, Richardson believed that Johnson had been trying to warn him of his concern that the Chinese were in the area and that the approaches to the Eighth Cav were open. Perhaps it was as much of a warning as you could give at a moment when to utter the magic word “Chinese” to an NCO might trigger panic. If Johnson had still been their battalion commander, Richardson was sure, he would have tightened up their positions, moved them to higher ground, and made sure that their firepower was mutually supportive and much more concentrated. Ormond might become a fine officer someday, Richardson thought, but this was neither the time nor the place to make your combat debut.

  Major Filmore McAbee, the S-3, or operations chief, of the Third Battalion, like Johnny Johnson, was uneasy with the way the regiment was dispersed, but he would not get a chance to discuss it with Johnson for a long time, because he spent the next two and a half years in a prison camp. McAbee, an experienced combat officer from World War II, had been a company commander with the First Cav from the moment it arrived in country. He was considered an excellent combat leader, but at the moment the Chinese struck he was mainly a frustrated officer. Both Ormond and his exec, Major Veale Moriarty, were new in command, and their experience, as far as McAbee could tell, was primarily as staff men at the regimental level. They knew each other well and left McAbee, the more combat-tested officer, feeling crowded out. “I was the uneasy one, but I was the outsider,” he would later say. He had tried to alert Ormond about the battalion’s poor positioning, to no avail. Nor did he like the mood of the unit, and he blamed that on the senior officers: too many of the men were becoming far too careless and cocky. There was too much talk about where they were going after Korea. All they talked about was their next two stops—the Yalu and then home. Later, when McAbee found out that some Chinese prisoners had been captured and units like his, up on point, had not been warned, he felt that the decision at headquarters to conceal, if not suppress, this information was one of the most appalling acts he had ever heard of—a complete abdication of military responsibility. After he came to learn much more about Chinese military tactics, it struck him that his regiment, spread out as it was, had presented a particularly enticing target.

  WHAT NONE OF them, including Ormond, knew was that, before the Chinese hit, a debate was under way at higher headquarters. The commander of the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, Colonel Hal Edson, wanted to move his troops back. His unit was too exposed, he believed—and there had been enough warnings by then to make a man pay attention. On November 1, when he woke up, the skies were thick with smoke from forest fires. Edson and others suspected that the fires were set by enemy troops eager to shield their movements from American air observation. Major General Hap Gay, the First Cav Division commander, who took the reports of the Chinese in the area more seriously than some of his superiors, was also becoming edgier by the hour. On that first day of November, he had set up his division command post, or CP, at Yongsan-dong, south of Unsan. For some time Gay had been disturbed by the way his division was being split up, with different battalions being shipped off to other divisions, based on the whims of the people at Corps, and not on the integrity of the division itself. He particularly did not like the way the Eighth Regiment was sticking out so nakedly, open to the enemy on all sides.

  His aide, Lieutenant William West, believed that Gay had been smoldering all along over the way the Army had been handling the Korean War. Gay, General George Patton’s chief of staff in World War II, believed that he had been taught how to do things right and how not to do things wrong, and in Korea they had been doing things wrong from the start. He had been shocked by the terrible state of the Army when the war began; and bothered as well by MacArthur’s initial failure to respect the ability of the enemy, his belief that he could handle the North Koreans, as he had said, “with one hand tied behind my back.” Gay seemed to think his superiors in Tokyo had little feel for the enemy, or for the terrain, and surprisingly little curiosity about either. “Those goddamn people don’t have their feet on the ground—they’re living in a goddamn dream world,” he told West once after he left MacArthur’s headquarters. Nothing angered him more, however, than the way the most talented officers, the kind of men he badly wanted as battalion commanders, always seemed to be siphoned off to staff jobs at MacArthur’s headquarters. He was appalled as well by how much larger it had grown than comparable headquarters in the previous war. He would mutter about how Third Army headquarters back in 1945 had only a few hundred officers to deal with thousands of men in the field, but how Tokyo in this war had thousands of men at headquarters to support hundreds of men in the field. There was an officer whose main job, it seemed, was just to fly in from Tokyo to Gay’s headquarters periodically to see what he needed. At one point, Gay gave him a list of officers from World War II then assigned to Tokyo whom Gay wanted to command his troops. When the officer next returned, Gay asked where his potential battalion commanders were. “General MacArthur says they’re too valuable to be spared,” the officer replied.

  “Jesus Christ, what in the hell is more valuable than battle-tested officers leading American troops in combat?” Gay muttered.

  He was bothered as well by all the talk about being home by Christmas. “Which Christmas—this year or next?” he would say. “That’s stupid talk. All it does is get the troops too excited about going home, and they get careless.” Now, fearing the possibility that one of his regiments might soon be encircled, he was pushing hard to pull it back and consolidate the division. But his superior, First Corps commander Frank Milburn, was reluctant to do it. The Army did not like to use the word “retreat” unless it had to; the proper phrase was “retrograde movement”—and Milburn did not want to make a retrograde movement, not after almost six weeks of steady advances and, above all, not with the mounting pressure coming in from MacArthur’s headquarters to go all the way to the Yalu as quickly as possible. Gay, West knew, was becoming more and more fearful about losing a regiment to an enemy that Tokyo still insisted did not exist. There was a fault line in this war. On one side was the battlefield reality and the dangers facing the troops themselves, and, on the other side, the world of illusion that existed in Tokyo and from which all these euphoric orders emanated. The fault line often fell between Corps and Division, with Corps feeling the heat from the general in Tokyo, and Division sensing the vulnerability of a regiment of badly exposed troops. More than once when there was still time to move the Eighth Regiment back, Milburn refused to give the order.

  On the afternoon of November 1, Hap Gay was in his CP with Brigadier General Charles Palmer, his artillery commander, when a radio report from an observer in an L-5 spotter plane caught their attention: “This is the strangest sight I have ever seen. There are two large columns of enemy infantry moving southeast over the trails in the vicinity of Myongdang-dong and Yonghung-dong. Our shells are landing right in their columns and they keep coming.” Those were two tiny villages five or six air miles from Unsan. Palmer immediately ordered additional artillery units to start firing, and Gay nervously called First Corps, once again requesting permission to pull the entire Eighth Cav several miles south of Unsan. His request was again denied.

  With that was lost the last real chance to save the Eighth Cavalry and especially its Third Battalion. In some ways, the battle that followed was over almost before it began. Two divisions of elite Chinese Communist regulars, among the most experienced men in their army, were about to strike units of an elite American division that was ill-prepared and ill-positioned for the collision, and commanded in too many instances by men who believed the Korean War was essentially over.

  UNITS OF THE Fifth Cavalry under Johnny Johnson, which had been moving north toward Unsan on a relief mission, soon ran into a major Chinese roadblock. Not only would they not be able to help the Eighth Cavalry, but it was touch and go whether they could extricate themselves from a vicious battle without being destroyed. As Roy Appleman, an exceptionally careful historia
n of the Korean War, has pointed out, by nightfall of November 1, the Eighth Cav was encircled on three sides by the Chinese forces. Only on its east, if the Fifteenth ROK Regiment actually stayed in place and fought, might it have any protection.

  2. FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH CHINESE COMMUNIST FORCES, NOVEMBER 1, 1950

  Lieutenant Ben Boyd was the new platoon leader in Baker Company of the Eighth Cavalry’s First Battalion. The First Battalion—with its attached unit of tanks and artillery, in reality a battalion task force—was the most exposed of the regiment’s three battalions, positioned about four hundred yards north of the town of Unsan. Boyd’s battalion commander, Jack Millikin, Jr., had been his tactical officer at West Point, and Boyd thought him a good, steady man. As far as Boyd knew, their battalion was up there alone—they had been the first of the three battalions out of Pyongyang, and he had no idea whether the rest of the regiment was following. That first afternoon, right after they arrived, they registered their mortars on some surrounding targets, and there were even brief exchanges of fire with the enemy, but the action was light, and everyone had assumed it was North Korean stragglers. That night, though, Boyd was called over by his company commander, who had just been briefed at Battalion. The word Boyd got was: “There are twenty thousand laundrymen in the area.” Boyd knew what that meant—twenty thousand Chinese near them.

  Then they heard musical instruments, like weird Asian bagpipes. Some of the officers thought for a moment that a British brigade was arriving to help them out. But it was not bagpipes; instead it was an eerie, very foreign sound, perhaps bugles and flutes, a sound many of them would remember for the rest of their lives. It was the sound they would come to recognize as the Chinese about to enter battle, signaling to one another by musical instrument what they were doing, and deliberately striking fear into their enemy as well. Boyd believed his men were in decent positions, though they were not a full platoon in his mind. Nearly half of them were KATUSAs, Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army, poorly trained Korean soldiers attached to American units who, most American officers believed, could not be relied on if there was a serious fight. They were there to beef up American units, to make the UN forces look larger on paper, if not in battle, than they really were. It was an experiment that no one liked, not the company commanders, not the American troops who fought alongside the Koreans but could not communicate with them, and certainly not the KATUSAs themselves, who more often than not gave every sign of wanting very badly to be almost anywhere else.

  At roughly 10:30 P.M., the Chinese struck. It was stunning how quickly something could fall apart, Boyd thought. The American units were so thinly positioned that the Chinese seemed to race right through their fragile lines, almost like a track meet, some of the men later said. What had once been a well-organized battalion CP (command post) quickly disintegrated. Some of the survivors from different platoons tried to form a makeshift last-second perimeter, but they were quickly overpowered. There were wounded everywhere. Millikin was handling the growing chaos as best he could, Boyd thought, trying to put together a convoy with about ten deuce-and-a-half trucks and loading as many wounded as possible onto them. At that moment, Boyd ran into Captain Emil Kapaun, an Army chaplain who was tending to a number of wounded. Boyd offered to assign the priest to one of the trucks, but Father Kapaun refused. He planned to stay with the wounded men who would not be able to get out on their own. They would have to surrender, he was sure, but he would do all he could to offer the wounded some modest protection.

  The battalion had two tanks, and when the convoy finally took off, it was with Millikin aboard the lead tank and the other tank bringing up the rear with Boyd on top of it. About a mile south of Unsan, the road split, one branch veering southeast, the other in a southwesterly direction, through the edge of the Third Battalion position and over the bridge that Bill Richardson and his weapons section were guarding. Millikin blindly headed them southeast. That any of the men made it out at all came from that choice.

  The Chinese had set up a formidable force on both sides of the road, waiting to ambush them. It was hard to measure distance or time in those moments when the enemy was striking with such force, but Boyd thought his convoy got about five or six hundred yards down the road before the Chinese opened up. Their firepower was overwhelming, and the convoy, with so many wounded, had almost no means of fighting back. In the confusion—the vehicles all had their lights off—the driver of Boyd’s tank panicked and began to rotate his turret wildly. The dozen or so men on top were all knocked off, and Boyd promptly found himself sprawled in a ditch. Later, he would decide that he survived only by the grace of God.

  He could hear the Chinese approaching. His only chance was to play dead. Soon, they started beating on him with their rifle butts and kicking him. Luckily, no one used a bayonet. Finally, they rummaged through his pockets, took his watch and his ring, and left. He waited for what seemed an eternity, hours at least, and then slowly started to crawl away, totally disoriented, suffering from a concussion, among other wounds. In the distance, he could hear artillery fire, and, assuming it was the Americans, he headed that way. He hobbled across a stream, probably the Nammyon, and discovered that his leg was in terrible pain. He realized that he had been badly burned, probably from the white phosphorous the Chinese were firing.

  Boyd moved cautiously in the next few days, at night, hiding as best he could during the day. He was out there at least a week, maybe ten days, trying to work his way back to American lines, in constant pain and voraciously hungry. He was helped by one Korean farmer, who fed him and, using primitive hand signals, directed him toward the American positions. He was sure he would not have made it without the farmer’s help. Around November 15, after a trek of almost two weeks, Boyd reached an American unit. He was immediately sent to a series of hospitals—his burns were serious indeed. His Korean War was over. He was one of the lucky ones. He had no idea how many of his platoon had died, only that the company commander had been killed. He never saw any of them again.

  AT THE SOUTHERN part of the Eighth Regiment’s defenses, at the moment just before the Chinese hit, Bill Richardson of Love Company was still guarding his concrete bridge, a span of about ninety feet over what was alleged to be a river but was essentially a dry creek. He and most of his section were in the flatlands on the north side of the bridge, which itself was technically the southernmost position of the regiment. The battalion headquarters was about 500 yards to the north, and the rest of Love Company about 350 yards to the west. When he first noticed noises coming from a hill just south of them, Richardson asked his pal Jim Walsh, the only other experienced man in the squad, “You hear what I’m hearing?” Richardson knew something was going on out there, but he couldn’t spare even the four or five men necessary for a recon. He put in a call to Company headquarters hoping to get some help. It took three tries before Company even picked up. He was furious—how could the people there be so casual? Company then called Battalion, and Battalion finally sent one soldier over from its intelligence and recon section. He came ambling down the road with no sense of urgency at all. Richardson explained the mission, and the soldier disappeared, only to reappear a while later with a squad of four men, who went up the hill making enough noise, Richardson thought, for an entire division.

  When the recon patrol returned—just as noisily—the lead soldier said, “There’s no one up there.” But one of his men was carrying an entrenching tool and a pair of padded gloves that were different from any gloves Richardson had seen so far. More important, they were dry, which, given all the frost and fog, meant they had been left there recently. “Well,” the soldier finally admitted, “there are some foxholes, but they’ve obviously been there a long time.” Richardson was quietly furious. The importance of the dry gloves was the kind of thing you were supposed to understand instantly, even if you weren’t from the S-2, or a battalion’s intelligence section. Richardson insisted he take the gloves and the tool to his boss and tell him that something might be up
. Obviously irritated, the soldier said, “Look, if you don’t like what we did, then get your own ass up there.”

  All of this was making Richardson edgier by the minute. Some time after ten that night, he got a call to send some men to Battalion for a recon patrol. That stretched his limits. He had only about fifteen men, and five were KATUSAs, none of whom could speak English. Richardson decided to keep the KATUSAs and send Walsh, his best man, up there with three other Americans. When they reached Battalion, Richardson found out later, they were told just to dig some prone shelters and get some rest. It was still quiet in Richardson’s sector, but both the First and the Second Battalions were already being hammered.

  3. THE UNSAN ENGAGEMENT, NOVEMBER 1–2, 1950

  Then, about one-thirty in the morning of November 2, it all exploded. The Chinese hit the Third Battalion of the Eighth Cav. Years later, Richardson read that they had slipped into the area wearing captured ROK uniforms, but he did not believe it. There was no need for disguise. They just poured in from the east, which was completely open. One moment the battalion headquarters was a center of American military activity; the next, it had been completely overrun and was filled with Chinese. At the same time, about 350 yards away on Richardson’s left, the Chinese hit Love Company and overran it. That meant that four Chinese machine guns could swing their fire back and forth across Richardson’s position, tearing it to pieces.

  From the south, a young lieutenant named Robert Kies, a platoon leader in Love Company of the Third Battalion, new to the unit, and Richardson’s friend Pappy Miller, the assistant platoon sergeant who had picked up warnings about the Chinese the moment he arrived in Unsan, were pulling back from a position two or three hills to the southeast of Richardson, a place called Hill 904. Richardson barely knew Kies—the Cav went through platoon leaders very quickly—but Kies arrived eager to use Richardson’s landline phone to try to find out what was going on. Because of the pathetic state of their communications, Kies and his men were completely cut off. By then Richardson’s landline phone was out—the Chinese, Kies decided, had already cut the wires. Kies decided to take his men up the road to Battalion. Miller shook Richardson’s hand and wished him good luck. (“The next time I saw him was fifty-two years later at a Cav reunion,” Miller said.) By that time, Richardson couldn’t even communicate with his own company. He had sent one of his men across the 350-yard gap to Love Company, but the soldier had been hit and had not been able to make it through. He had crawled back toward Richardson, apologizing repeatedly as he got near: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t make it.” When Richardson reached him and opened his jacket, it was completely soaked with blood; the man died in his arms. At that moment, the worst thing, Richardson would recall, was that he could not even remember the soldier’s name.