The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Davis knew that the handful of men around him had a limited amount of ammo and thus a limited amount of time left. The Americans fired and fired—often at point-blank range. They had, Davis later figured, an hour, at best two, before they ran out of ammo or the machine guns overheated. About 2 A.M., his platoon sergeant came to get him. Davis destroyed his machine gun with his last thermite grenade, and the two of them managed to make it back to a point where their mortars, firing air bursts against the Chinese, offered them some protection. The first thing was to make it through the night. Then when dawn came, they tried to regroup, somewhat surprised to still be alive. They were completely surrounded.

  AT THE HASTILY created perimeter near the battalion CP, Lieutenant Giroux had emerged as the de facto leader of the encircled men, even though he was seriously wounded. He was a World War II veteran, an experienced infantry officer, and he seemed to have a sense of how limited their possibilities were—and how to act as best they could on them while there was still time and still any degree of choice. Working with him were Lieutenant Peterson and his friend Walt Mayo, along with Bill Richardson, who was not an officer but had become in the long trek north from the earliest days of the war a very experienced NCO. From the first hit, they had all understood that it was the Chinese, and that their entire regiment had become the point unit in what was becoming an entirely new war. The men thrown together inside the perimeter had managed to make it through the first night, but it looked very bleak. If help was on the way, as higher headquarters kept saying, there was no sign of it yet. That day a helicopter tried to land to take out some of the wounded, but the fire from Chinese positions was so lethal that it had to fly away after dropping off some medical supplies, mostly small compresses.

  The desperate men inside the perimeter now faced a double dilemma: how to get out and how to deal with all their wounded. They were also in danger of running out of ammo. In addition, they did not have enough weapons, but a cold, hard estimate told them that that was probably the least of their problems. Enough men were going to be killed that there would soon be weapons for all. Their tiny defensive perimeter was about seventy yards—seventy very flat, very open yards—away from the battalion CP, where most of the wounded had been moved. On midday of November 3, Peterson, Mayo, Richardson, and Giroux went over to the CP for a final doomsday kind of meeting. Because he was not an officer, Richardson did not attend the meeting, but he knew what it was about. All the officers, many of them wounded themselves, were talking about a forbidden subject—what to do with the wounded in the terrible final moment that everyone knew was coming. The wounded officers were going to have to decide whether to leave themselves behind to the mercies, such as they were, of the enemy. Bromser and Mayo went over to Lieutenant Kies and said they were going to try to get out. They asked if he could make it, and Kies answered no, they had to forget about him; he couldn’t walk, and he wasn’t going to slow the others down.

  What heartbreaking decisions for young men to make, Richardson had thought at the time and still pondered half a century later. He volunteered to take some men, stay behind, and protect the bunker with the wounded for as long as he could, but the offer was turned down by the wounded officers. No one who was mobile, who might be able to lead, was to be wasted, if that was the word, defending the wounded and the dying. They all knew time was short, that the next hit would be even harder. They could hear the Chinese digging a trench from the riverbed directly into their perimeter, which would allow them to come up right on top of the Americans before they became targets. With Richardson was a particularly tough noncommissioned officer whose name Richardson never learned. Richardson went around collecting grenades from everyone, gave them to the sergeant, and told him that his job was to stop the Chinese dig. The sergeant crawled out there—it was one hell of a brave performance, Richardson thought, the kind of act you’re more likely to see in movies than in real life—and personally slowed down the creation of the trench.

  But the noose was tightening, and talk of relief missions was dying down. They had gotten an air strike that day, Australians flying B-26s, but time was working against them. There had been one resupply attempt; a small spotter plane had dropped a couple duffel bags about 150 yards beyond the perimeter. Richardson had crawled out and gotten them, but there wasn’t much inside, and not what they needed: lots of ammo and lots of morphine.

  Relief was not going to come. Hap Gay, the division commander, who had been arguing for a regimental pullback for days, had sent additional forces north to relieve his men, but they had been hammered by the Chinese, who had picked near perfect ambush positions to intercept the inevitable relief forces—it was a basic part of the Chinese MO, to wait for and destroy relief forces. The relief forces were short on both artillery and airpower, the two instruments that might give them an advantage when they assaulted the Chinese positions. One of the units sent to try to break through was Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Johnson’s Fifth Regiment of the Cav, and one of his battalions took 250 casualties. On November 3, knowing it was hopeless, Gay, under orders from Milburn at Corps to pull his division back, made what he later called the hardest decision of his career. He ended all relief operations and left the men out there alone.

  Later in the day, another spotter plane dropped a message telling the besieged men to try to get out as best they could. It was not exactly a comforting message, but Richardson and most of the other men had already assumed they were on their own. When night finally fell, the Chinese again attacked in full force. The besieged Americans fired their bazookas at some of their own stranded vehicles along the road to the south and southwest, setting them afire. It was like creating your own long-lasting flares, and it helped the defense immensely. Once a vehicle was lit up, it burned for a long time. The number of able-bodied men holding the perimeter continued to drop throughout the night, however. They had started with no more than a hundred men, and there were fewer men by the hour, and little ammo. By November 4, Richardson estimated that a quarter of the Americans still fighting were using Chinese burp guns scrounged off dead bodies. The second full night had been another horror. That night the last tank had departed—some of the men said it had been ordered out, but others believed it had just taken off—and with it, all radio contact with anyone outside the perimeter ended. That in itself was terrifying; somehow it symbolized the fact that they had been abandoned. One thing that Peterson remembered vividly from that day was how American bodies piled up around their last machine gun as the Chinese concentrated their fire on it.

  Early on the morning of the fourth, Richardson, Peterson, Mayo, and another soldier were chosen to lead a patrol to see if they could find a way out. Rank did not matter very much. Mayo and Peterson were officers, but they were artillery men, forward observers, and Richardson had been reminded by Giroux that, though he was an NCO, he probably had the most experience in infantry tactics and to trust his instincts. Peterson remembered a terrible moment before they left. As he crawled past his radio operator, who was lying there, badly wounded, the man had said, “Lieutenant Peterson, where are you going?” Peterson answered that they were looking for a way out, so they could get help. “Lieutenant Peterson,” the man began to plead, “please don’t leave me! Please don’t leave me! You can’t leave me here to them!” A glance at the man and Peterson knew it was only a matter of hours before he would be dead. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but we have to go and get help,” he said, and crawled off to join the search party.

  Richardson was sure that there was a way out to the east because the Chinese assaults were all coming from the other three directions; and, moving very slowly, they eventually found a riverbed littered with wounded Chinese, and knowing how close so many of their own men, especially the wounded, were to becoming prisoners, Richardson told the men with him: Don’t even look like you’re thinking of pointing a weapon at them, let alone shooting one. Don’t think about it. Those are the truest orders you’ll ever get. They stopped at one house where Ameri
can supplies had briefly been stored. Now it was crowded with wounded Chinese. The wounded Chinese in the house kept whispering something eerie that sounded like “Shwee, shwee.” The word was shui, Richardson was later told, their word for water. They finally reached a riverbed, only to find even more Chinese, perhaps four to five hundred bombing victims, most of them dead but some alive or barely alive, holding out cups and begging for water. The Americans were now convinced that they could get through by heading east, and they slipped back to join the other men at the perimeter.

  For Bill Richardson, the decisions they made after he returned to the perimeter proved the most painful he ever experienced. Nothing that happened in the next few days, or for that matter in the rest of his life, measured up to it. There were perhaps 150 wounded men there by then, and there was no way any of them could take the dangerous trip out at night under enemy fire in mountainous terrain, at least not without compromising the able-bodied men. All of the wounded in the perimeter knew what was up. None of them wanted to be left behind for the Chinese. Soon after his return, some of them who were still partially ambulatory, started coming up to Richardson, crying, telling him not to leave them, please, dear God, not to leave them, not for the Chinese, please dear God take them, don’t leave them there to die. Was it possible, he wondered, to do your duty, to follow the orders of your superiors, orders you agreed with in the end, and get as many men out as best you could, and yet feel worse about yourself as a human being? Do you ever forgive yourself for some of the things you do in life? It was a question he would still be asking himself a half century later. He was abandoning so many men he knew—who had fought so well.

  Giroux had been very good in those first few days, helping create some kind of order, taking care of the more seriously wounded, but he would die in a prison camp. Kies had waited with the other wounded for the Chinese to arrive, sure that it was all over. When the Chinese finally showed up, and one of their men ordered him to stand up, he had tried and fallen over. His legs were useless. He had already cut off his combat boots because his feet were swelling up so badly. He remembered that the Chinese separated the prisoners, putting men like Dr. Anderson and Father Kapaun, who were ambulatory, in one group and the others, men like him who could not walk and needed to be carried—he estimated that there were about thirty such men—in the group to be borne on litters. Five of the men in his group died from their wounds the first night. Over the next few weeks they kept moving the group from house to house. There was almost nothing to eat, and they had to scrounge to get water—one of the men could crawl, and he brought back a little foul-tasting water in a helmet. They got no medical care, not even a Band-Aid or iodine, Kies remembered, for sixteen days, and even then it was the most primitive kind of care. They moved slowly and at night. His memory was of the Chinese taking them north for about two weeks, and he believed after about two weeks he heard the sound of a river, and he was sure it was the Yalu. Then one night, to his surprise, they turned south and headed toward the American lines. Perhaps they were tired of carrying American prisoners, he later thought. They left their prisoners in a house a few miles north of American positions in late November, and one of Kies’s group, a newcomer who could walk, managed to go farther south to connect with the Americans, who finally sent vehicles to pick them up. All told, Kies had been a prisoner for just under a month. He was one of the lucky ones, he knew. The men who were ambulatory spent the rest of their time in Korea, more than two years, in brutal captivity, and many of them died. He thought that his original group of thirty men had shrunk to about eight before they were rescued. His left leg was broken in four places and he had fifty-two wounds from a mortar round below his waist. “You look like shit,” one of the men who rescued him said. But he went through Army hospitals, got most of his health back, and eventually spent two years as an adviser in Vietnam.

  BACK AT THE small American perimeter, those who were going to try to break out made their move a little before 5 P.M. There were about sixty of them, and they made it to the riverbed before cutting south, but it was hard moving. They were behind the Chinese lines now, and the very size of their group made it more likely that they might be spotted. When they reached the main road, known as the MSR, or Main Supply Route, they had to cross it quickly, and Richardson managed to string them out so that they could all do so at once. At one point when they took a break, a sergeant from the intelligence section slipped over and whispered to Richardson that if the two of them took off and just slipped away, they would almost surely make it back to the American lines because they were pros and they would not be slowed down by all these others, some of whom were clearly amateurs. He was right, and probably one of the officers should have made them do just that, but Richardson knew that it was too late for that now, that he could not desert these men, not at this point, even if it cost him his life.

  On the morning of November 5, they stumbled into a Chinese outpost and there was an exchange of fire. Now that the Chinese knew where they were, they finally broke up. Richardson was the only soldier in his small group with a weapon, a burp gun. He told the others to take off, and just when he thought he had successfully slipped away himself, the Chinese found him and took him prisoner. He was not, as Tokyo had promised, going to be going home for Christmas. He would spend the next two and a half years instead in a series of brutal prison camps—as would Phil Peterson, who got picked up in a similar fashion.

  OF THE EIGHTH CAV when it was all over, there were some eight hundred casualties among the estimated twenty-four hundred men in the regiment; of the ill-fated men of the Third Battalion, eight hundred strong when the battle began, only an estimated two hundred made it out. It was the worst defeat of the Korean War thus far, doubly painful because it had taken place after four months of battle, when, it seemed, the tide had finally turned, when victory was in sight, and it had been inflicted on a much admired American unit. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, the Chinese Communists had appeared in force and shattered an elite regiment from an elite division. The Eighth Cav had lost half its authorized strength at Unsan, and a good deal of its equipment, including twelve 105mm howitzers, nine tanks, 125 trucks, and a dozen recoilless rifles. A spokesman for the Cav who talked to reporters two days after the Chinese attack was clearly shaken: “We don’t know whether they represent the Chinese Communist Government,” he said, but it was “a massacre Indian-style, like the one that hit Custer at the Little Big Horn.” It was a comparison that would occur to others.

  Pappy Miller, wounded, captured, and then carried by the chaplain, was in a small group of prisoners being moved farther north each night. During their trek to a prison camp, they arrived at a place the Chinese were using as a temporary base, and there he saw thousands and thousands of Chinese soldiers, perhaps twenty or thirty thousand. It was like seeing a secret city in North Korea filled with nothing but Chinese soldiers. Privy to a spectacular view of the enemy, he knew how completely the war had changed, but there was no one who mattered whom he could tell. He was on his way to more than two bitter years in a prisoner of war camp in which he would be beaten regularly, denied elemental medical care, and given the barest of rations.

  The UN forces, whether they liked retrograde movements or not, quickly moved back to positions on the other side of the Chongchon River. There they prepared for another hit by the Chinese forces. But the Chinese had vanished, as mysteriously as they had appeared. No one knew where they had gone. They had quietly departed the battlefield and become invisible once again. But they had not, as some people in Tokyo wanted to believe, left the country. They had simply moved into positions hidden away, farther north. There they would wait patiently for the Americans to walk into an even bigger trap, one even farther from their main bases. What had happened at Unsan was just the beginning. The real hit would come farther north in even colder weather in about three weeks.

  Unsan was a warning, but it was not heeded. In Washington the president and his principal advisers, who had been anxiou
s for weeks about Chinese intentions, became more nervous than ever. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, responding to President Harry Truman’s nervousness, cabled MacArthur on November 3, asking him to respond to what “appears to be overt intervention in Korea by Chinese Communist forces.” What followed in the next few days reflected the growing schism between what MacArthur wanted to do, which was to drive to the Yalu and unify all of Korea, and what Washington wanted to do, which was to avoid a major war with China.

  For the question of what the Chinese were up to had become the central issue before Washington, and once again MacArthur decided to control the decision-making by controlling the intelligence. Here again Brigadier General Charles Willoughby was the key player. He deliberately minimized both the number and the intentions of the Chinese troops. On November 3 he placed the number of Chinese in country at a minimum of 16,500 and a maximum of 34,500. (Some 20,000 men, or roughly two divisions, had hit the Americans at Unsan alone, and at virtually the same time a comparable number of Chinese had hit a Marine battalion on the east side of the peninsula, causing quite heavy casualties.) In truth there were some 300,000 men, or thirty divisions, already in country. MacArthur, momentarily shaken by the assault, tried to downplay it, and his response to the JCS cable reflected the Willoughby line. The Chinese, he cabled, were there to help the North Koreans “keep a nominal foothold in North Korea” and allowed them to “salvage something from the wreckage.”