The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  The World War II veterans were gone. They had been replaced by troops who, as T. R. Fehrenbach, a commander of a company in Korea, noted, were fighting a war they did not understand. They knew neither their ally nor their enemy, and hated the country they were in. The men volunteering for the military in the period right after World War II had enlisted, in Fehrenbach’s words, “for every reason known to man except to fight.” The Army the United States sent to Korea in those early days was, Ned Almond thought, about 40 percent combat effective. That estimate, Clay Blair noted, was on the rosy side. Like most American units in Tokyo, instead of having three battalions to a regiment, the Twenty-fourth Division had only two. Worse, the division commander, disrespectful of his enemy, initially sent in only two regiments, both of them badly understrength—a third was on maneuvers elsewhere in Japan, and instead of feeding all his troops into one area where they could concentrate their efforts and their fire, he broke them down into three smaller units and placed them so that they would almost instantly find themselves badly outnumbered, easily encircled, and incapable of holding off the massive In Min Gun assault. Given the force they were up against, despite some moments of exceptional bravery, they were bound not only to fail but to fail quickly, their battles all too often turning into routs—something that greatly encouraged the North Koreans and discouraged other American units just then starting to arrive.

  None of this was by happenstance. It was the direct product of the great victory that had taken place five years earlier and the desire to disarm overnight. When Bob Eichelberger turned the Eighth Army over to Walton Walker, he was all too aware of its weakness—“it is already nothing but a supply organization with no combat soldiers, just a cadre.” Whatever hard-won respect for an Asian army that had been gained while fighting against the Japanese during World War II had disappeared. Duty in Tokyo had been considered a very good deal, with all the pleasures of being a victor and living exceptionally well in a very poor Asian country, and little in the way of military responsibility. Newcomers arriving from the States were welcomed, told that Japan was a great place, that if you knew how to play the game, you could get laid easily and cheaply, and you could make a nice bit of change on the side dealing in the black market. Each GI was living much better than he ever had at home. Most had, in the vernacular of the time, a “shack girl.” In a devastated, impoverished, burned-out Japan, everyone, even the lowest private it sometimes seemed, could find a houseboy who took care of his uniforms and shined up his boots. The imbalance of personal power in Japan, of an American private or corporal who was momentarily rich (or at least richer than he had ever hoped to be back in Ohio or Tennessee) living among Japanese who were now all supplicants, seemed only to underline an innate American racism and prove that the white world was superior in all ways. The men of the white world won wars; the men of the non-white world shined their shoes, and the women of the non-white world became their girlfriends. In this army of easy occupation, soldiers did not necessarily show up for roll call on a Monday, and it was often the responsibility of the company clerks to work wonders to make sure that units still appeared combat effective.

  That these troops were not battle ready was hardly a great secret. Major General Tony McAuliffe, who in 1945 had been the commander at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, had been given the command of the troops in southern Japan in 1948 and he had hated every minute of it. Keyes Beech had visited him and asked him if he liked the duty. McAuliffe answered that he liked it fine, “but they [the troops] don’t like me. In fact, I’m just about the biggest sonofabitch in these parts. The only excuse for an army in peace or war is that it be ready to fight. This army here is no damn good…. I’m turning the place upside down and seeing that all the men get out in the field on maneuvers. I want them to sleep on the ground and get their feet wet.” His tour did not last long, and his spirit, as Beech added, was not contagious.

  These were the troops who first set foot in Korea so sure they would readily defeat the In Min Gun. Colonel John (Mike) Michaelis, the first regimental commander to lead his troops well there, was appalled by the performance of most of them in those early months. He told Robert (Pepper) Martin from the Saturday Evening Post in early October: “When they started out, they couldn’t shoot. They didn’t know their weapons. They had not had enough training in plain old-fashioned musketry. They’d spent a lot of time listening to lectures on the differences between communism and Americanism and not enough time crawling on their bellies on maneuvers with live ammunition singing over them. They’d been nursed and coddled, told to drive safely, to buy War Bonds, to give to the Red Cross, to avoid VD, to write home to mother—when someone ought to have been telling them how to clean a machine gun when it jams.” They were, he added, so roadbound that they had almost lost the use of their legs—“Send out a patrol on a scouting mission and they load up in a three quarter ton truck and start riding down the highway.”

  If troops like this were an all too accurate reflection of the mood of the country back home, then so were the North Korean troops a reflection of their country—trying to make the jump overnight from an oppressed, colonized society to instant modernity by using their own crude replica of the Soviet model. They were tough, angry, battle-hardened, elite troops. They carried very little extra gear, were in much better physical shape than the Americans, and could live far better off the land than their American adversaries. Roy Appleman, the studious Army historian, estimated that nearly one-third of them, and certainly most of their officers and NCOs—had fought with the Chinese Communists in the difficult battles against the Nationalists. In their mind this war was an extension of the war that they had been a part of earlier, the war against the Japanese. They were exceptionally well—in fact frighteningly well—indoctrinated; there was an almost robotic quality to their certitude and the way that many of them, when captured, voiced their political beliefs; it exceeded even that of their Chinese Communist colleagues, even some of those Chinese who were true believers.

  They came from peasant backgrounds, had hated the Japanese colonization of Korea, and believed that the Americans and their proxies in Seoul were agents of the past, not enablers of the future; the Americans were now the allies of the Japanese, as well as the old Korean ruling class, and thus this was a continuation of the struggle that had forced them to leave their native soil years earlier. The leadership of the South Korean Army was in their minds a reflection of those Koreans who had fought alongside the Japanese, and in the upper-level ranks this was often true. The North Koreans troops had trained hard and were extremely well disciplined and motivated. They camouflaged themselves exceptionally well, stayed off the roads, and often moved over the harsh terrain by foot, as the Americans did not. Like the Chinese Communists who had trained them and with whom they had fought, they tended to avoid all-out frontal battle. They preferred to make early contact, then slide along the flank of their adversaries, hitting the badly outnumbered South Koreans or Americans from the side or the rear. They also sent small parties ahead, disguised as peasants fleeing the In Min Gun, to recon American positions and call in strikingly accurate artillery fire.

  They were absolutely sure in the beginning of whom they were fighting and why. They were fighting white foreigners, imperialists, and capitalists, the children of Wall Street, and of course their puppet allies in the South. The Americans were not so sure, despite periodic lectures on the evils of Communism, whom they were fighting, or for that matter why they were fighting them. They might be soldiers stationed in Japan, but they’d had no expectation of going to war, especially in a place called Korea. “When word reached my unit that Sunday,” a corporal in the Thirty-fourth Infantry Regiment named Larry Barnett said, “the reaction in my company was ‘Where is Korea?’” The next, he added, was “Let the gooks kill each other off.” That was too bad because the Thirty-fourth, and its sister regiment the Twenty-first, were slated to be the first units to fight in Korea. They were both part of the ill-fated Twe
nty-fourth Division. The Twenty-fourth was ordered to get to Korea as quickly as possible and move up the west side of the peninsula, until it met up with the onrushing enemy. That appeared likely to happen near the village of Suwon, just south of Seoul. But then the Twenty-fourth Division commander, Major General William Dean, made his critical mistake and, instead of concentrating his limited forces in one strong position where they might be able to maximize their firepower, unwisely decided to split his units. In this, his orders once again reflected the cavalier attitude of the American commanders toward their new enemy. The lead unit, the first to leave Japan and go into battle in Korea, was Task Force Smith, led by Lieutenant Colonel Brad Smith. Transport planes brought the men to Pusan, a port at the southeast end of the country. Because of bad weather and the limited number of planes available, the airlift took two days. The last of Smith’s men landed in Pusan on the morning of July 2. On the evening of July 2, the men of Task Force Smith boarded a train, and they arrived at Taejon, a little more than halfway between Pusan and what was believed to be the front, on the morning of July 3. At Taejon, Lieutenant Colonel Smith met with Brigadier General John Church. Church was an elderly officer hardly known for his vitality who had been put in charge of the survey team sent to Korea by MacArthur to find out what was needed, and where.

  Church’s recon had not gone especially well in the face of the exceptionally well-coordinated, very cohesive North Korean attack, and the massive, chaotic South Korean retreat. But even the fact that he himself had instantly moved his headquarters back from Suwon to Taejon, a distance of some ninety miles, because the In Min Gun had been bearing down on him, had not diminished his personal cockiness. All they needed, Church told Smith, was a few GIs to make a stand, men who would not fear tanks. That would stiffen the spine of the ROKs. He pointed at a map and told Smith to make his stand near Osan, just south of Suwon. So Smith took his men and headed north by train toward Ansong. At the Ansong train station, they were cheered by Koreans, which momentarily made them feel proud, for it showed they were the good guys, heroes come to rescue a scared people. Later one officer, Lieutenant William Wyrick, decided that the Koreans—there were thousands and thousands fleeing south—were cheering not so much the appearance of the Americans but the arrival of a train, which they quickly boarded for a trip south toward Pusan.

  At almost the same time, Major General Dean arrived in Taejon and took command of American forces in Korea from Church. He thereupon assigned the Thirty-fourth Regiment to Pyongtaek, just south and west of Osan on the Seoul-Pusan highway. With that, the Thirty-fourth, its own resources limited, was split off from the men of the Twenty-first Regiment, some ten miles away. Others thought keeping the American troops together and concentrating them about forty miles farther south, using the natural barrier of the Kum River, made more sense. But Dean believed that his mission was going to be, in his own words, “short and easy”; that the North Koreans would not be anxious to fight Americans. Because of that he broke his force down into three groups, the fateful mistake.

  Back in Japan, the men of the Thirty-fourth Regiment, shipping out for Korea, had been ordered to pack their summer dress uniforms—for the victory parade that was soon to come in Seoul. Lieutenant Colonel Harold (Red) Ayres, who commanded a battalion from the Thirty-fourth Infantry, had told his men, “There are supposed to be North Korean soldiers north of us. These men are poorly trained. Only about half of them have weapons and we’ll have no difficulty stopping them.” The ordinary soldiers were equally cocky: they were on their way to fight some gooks, in the language of the time, teach them a lesson or two; and then get back to the good life in Tokyo. Again, there was, thought Captain Fred Ladd, then an aide to Major General Ned Almond, a deep and pervasive racism that ran through the American Army—“a belief that gooks could not stand up to Americans.” “It was hard,” he added, “to tell whether it ran from top to bottom, or bottom to top, or both.” (He would, he noted, see almost exact manifestations of it again when he was a division adviser in Vietnam thirteen years later.) As the Thirty-fourth Regiment moved toward its positions at Pyongtaek, it came across some ROK engineers about to blow bridges: the Americans scolded the ROKs for their lack of spirit and threw the explosives away.

  What was about to unfold, as the Americans and the North Koreans rushed toward their initial meeting, was an American disaster of the first magnitude, a textbook example of what happens when a nation, filled with the arrogance of power, meets a new reality. On July 4, Smith took about 540 men, what was effectively an understrength battalion—more like two reinforced companies—a few miles north of Osan. Most of their artillery support was still back at Pusan. They reached their positions about 3 A.M. on July 5. It was raining and they were all tired and cold. A little later the same morning, Sergeant Loren Chambers, an assistant platoon leader, spotted eight T-34 tanks moving down the road from Suwon. His platoon leader, Lieutenant Philip Day, asked what they were. “Those are T-34 tanks, sir,” he replied, “and I don’t think they’re going to be friendly to us.”

  5. TASK FORCE SMITH, JULY 5, 1950

  The tanks kept coming—followed by a long line of infantrymen and then an even more terrifying sight, another twenty-five North Korean tanks. When the lead edge of the enemy column, later estimated to be about six miles long, closed to within a mile, the Americans started firing their mortars. There were a few hits, but the tanks kept coming. The Americans waited until the tanks were only about seven hundred yards away and then fired their recoilless rifles, which scored several hits, but again the tanks kept coming. Then the bazookas failed. At one point Sergeant Chambers called on the phone for some 60mm mortar fire. The answer came back that they would not reach that far. “Well, what about the 81mm mortars?” he asked. “They didn’t come over with us” was the answer. He then asked for the 4.2 mortars. They couldn’t fire, he was told. “How about the artillery?” he asked. There was no communication with it yet. “What about the Air Force?” The Air Force didn’t know where Task Force Smith was. Well, Chambers finally said, what about a camera so he could at least take a picture of this? They were in grave danger of being surrounded, he warned. With that the Americans began to fall back as quickly as they could, many simply fleeing, some throwing down their weapons, some even taking off their boots because they could move more quickly through the rice paddies barefoot.

  The Thirty-fourth Regiment had established its headquarters not far from Smith’s forward unit. Now the North Koreans were moving down on them. Denis Warner, an Australian correspondent for both the London Telegraph and the Melbourne Herald, had managed to attach himself to the First Battalion of the Thirty-fourth Regiment near Pyongtaek, the unit commanded by Red Ayres. He was there with Ayres on the morning of July 5, when Brigadier General George Barth, who was supposed to be the division artillery officer, arrived. As they had no artillery up front, Dean had put him in charge of the forward areas. Warner watched Barth get out of his jeep, turn to the reporters gathered there, and say, “Well, boys, it’s on. I’ve got the first shell out there for General MacArthur.” Barth said he had given orders to fire when the North Koreans closed to within fifteen hundred yards. The American officers, Warner remembered, all seemed exceptionally optimistic about what was going to happen next. “Those Commie bastards will turn and run when they find they’re up against our boys,” Ayres said. “We’ll be back in Seoul by the weekend.” Warner wondered, like so many war correspondents before him in situations like this, whether to stay for the action still to come or race back and file a story that American troops were now engaged in battle with the North Koreans.

  He decided to stay around for the action. He watched a grim sight, an almost classic warning signal: an endless parade of peasants moving south on clogged roads, instant refugees fleeing the In Min Gun. The sight of the peasants fleeing south was a telltale one for anyone who knew something about combat, a kind of straw in the wind. What disturbed Warner even more was the fact that the number of South Korean tro
ops who were also fleeing far outnumbered the peasants. He started walking north with a few other correspondents, but they quickly ran into a South Korean cavalryman on what looked to Warner like a Shetland pony, shouting in Korean, “Tanku! Tanku!” Then Warner saw his first enemy tank, “moving steadily and majestically forward.” He immediately turned around and headed back to Ayres’s headquarters. But Ayres seemed to doubt what Warner had just seen with his own eyes. “We don’t have any tanks,” he said.

  “Not ours, theirs,” Warner answered.

  “The bridges around here wouldn’t take a tank of that size,” Ayres insisted. So back Warner went with a bazooka team sent by Ayres (“perhaps to humor me”). Soon, two North Korean tanks showed up. The American bazooka men moved as close as they could and fired away, only to see their shells bounce off the tanks.

  At that point, word had still not reached Ayres’s headquarters of the destruction of Task Force Smith. Only then did a few of the survivors begin to straggle in and report that most of the battalion had been lost. “Soon thereafter,” Warner wrote, “Ayres and his men were on the run. Barth’s headquarters also broke during the night, minutes before tanks burst through it. By dawn, July 6, the tanks were in Pyongtaek, five miles down the road. By breakfast they were in Songwan, and before the day was over, they had advanced to Chonan, 36 miles in 36 hours.” By the end of the next day, with the American troops still in precipitous retreat, General Dean had dismissed Barth as his forward commander and fired one of his regimental commanders as well.

  IT WAS A very bad beginning. Poorly prepared troops poorly deployed had barely slowed down the ferocious drive south of the North Koreans—at best by a few days. In the first week of combat the North Koreans had virtually destroyed two American regiments; some three thousand men were either killed, wounded, or missing in action, and enough weapons had been left behind to outfit one or two North Korean regiments.