The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  For Walker, the war was turning into a bitter culmination to a surprisingly rich military career in which, like many other gifted officers, he had defied his academic background and class standing. He had grown up in Belton in central Texas, one more of those boys, in an era when there was so much less choice, who had decided soldiering was his way of getting out of a small town and having a life with some greater measure of meaning. He had gone to a local military academy, and on graduation had wanted to go to West Point. But he was too young at fifteen and had entered VMI instead. He had hardly been brilliant there—fifty-second in a class of ninety-two—but in June 1907 he managed to get a congressional appointment to West Point anyway, and he entered the academy with the class of 1911. But times in Texas were hard; his father wrote him a letter asking him to come home and assist in running the family dry goods store. In October, he left West Point, then reentered with the class of 1912. Again he was more plodder than comet; he graduated seventy-first in a class of ninety-six, into a tiny Army about to become larger because of World War I. In the years just before that war, he was part of the Nineteenth Regiment, which spent a good deal of its time sparring with only marginal success against Pancho Villa during a series of skirmishes on the Mexican border.

  In World War I, as a young captain, Walker had led a machine gun company against the Germans and won two Silver Stars in the Meuse-Argonne fighting. It had jump-started what had seemed until then a rather ordinary career. Walker had been an intense, aggressive line officer. His superiors were impressed; they thought of him as a man who was never going to let them down, not brilliant but a damn good man, one you could always rely on. You could build a fine army with men like him. Class standing, what had seemed so important back at West Point, mattered so much less on the battlefield, where it was all about instinct and courage and a sense of duty. He was good with his peers, one of whom was Leonard (Gee) Gerow, himself the best friend of a rising young star of that era named Dwight Eisenhower. In 1925, Walker was picked to attend the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, established after the war to help the Army choose which officers were destined to become generals, and if need be to expedite their careers. In those days, no one talked about something called the fast track, but if there was one in a peacetime institution with a snail-like career pace, it began at Leavenworth. With him at Leavenworth were Gee Gerow and Eisenhower, first in the class of 245, and just beginning to break out of the pack. Walker was 117th, but he was getting good assignments. In 1935, even as the Army was thinning out its officer ranks, Walker was admitted to the Army War College. Graduating in 1936, he received what seemed a very ordinary assignment, executive officer of the Fifth Infantry Brigade at Vancouver Barracks in the state of Washington. In reality, he had lucked out, because the commanding officer there was a young brigadier named George Catlett Marshall. The cerebral, austere Marshall, seemingly the quintessential staff officer but quite possibly a superb combat officer as well—no one knew because he had not been given a chance—seemed to take to the intense, aggressive, obviously fearless Walker. Out of that grew a genuine friendship, and in 1939 when Marshall, about to emerge as the single most important officer in the entire Army, arrived in Washington to take up his job as head of War Plans, he stayed for a time with the Walker family. That was both a plus and a minus, a plus for Walker’s career, because he was something of a Marshall man, but a minus later when he arrived in Japan and Korea, because of MacArthur’s phobic feelings about Marshall left over from World War II.

  Whatever else Johnnie Walker was, he was not charismatic. He was about five-five, short and stubby. “He’s a little fat, isn’t he?” someone once said to George Patton, under whom Walker had served with distinction in World War II. “Yes he is,” Patton answered, “but he’s a fighting little son of a bitch.” His chin was soft and round, his face and body in no way sculpted. He was always more than a little overweight, 165 pounds on a short frame. He looked, noted one British writer, all too much like the man from the Michelin tire advertisements. If Hollywood had been doing the casting, it would have added several inches to his height or, failing that, slimmed him down and broadened his shoulders. The Army, all things considered, prefers its generals to be tall, believing that helps command function, that taller is always better, but failing that, its generals should at least be feisty little gamecocks, out to even the score with all those bigger, taller men who had once made the mistake of lording it over them. In full battle rig, Walker looked nothing like a commander, more like someone just pulled from civilian life and destined to be the company misfit.

  What made his way even more difficult was that he was terrible with the press, distrusting and wary, even with reporters who rather liked him and sensed that he was operating in unusually difficult circumstances. On occasion with a journalist he trusted, like Frank Gibney of Time, Walker would talk about how hard it was, about the poor quality of his troops—“what they’re giving me to fight.” The rest of the time he kept his anger and his frustrations buttoned up. He had complete control of his ego, which his son, Sam Wilson Walker (who was awarded a Silver Star in Korea as a young officer), once noted, “was a damn good thing—because he served under two of the greatest egomaniacs the American Army ever produced, George Patton and Douglas MacArthur.” He accepted the hand he was dealt, the battlefield as it was. He did not complain. In World War II, he had been first a division and then a corps commander in the Third Army under Patton—“Georgie” in Walker’s letters home to his wife, the only time he dared be sardonic about his famed superior. In fact the job as a senior commander under Patton was the one Eisenhower had originally wanted, but when Eisenhower—talented, gifted, charming—was pulled into the world of planning under Marshall, Walker had gotten the prized armored assignment.

  He had been a great Patton favorite, in no small part because of his aggressiveness. “Of all the corps I have commanded yours has always been the most eager to attack,” Patton, who was never known to be excessive with compliments, once wrote Walker. He had been fearless and relentless in command, his tactics as audacious as those of his superior, but he cut no wide swath, nor did he try to create a cult of his own. He was smart enough to know that there was room for only one superstar in the world of George Smith Patton, Jr. When members of the press showed up, looking to lionize him just a little as Patton’s Patton, he invariably blew them off. Nonetheless, Eisenhower had rated him almost on a level with Matt Ridgway and “Lightning” Joe Collins in the war, and when it ended, he was in line to get a major command in the Pacific. He had no illusions about himself; he was a good soldier who did his job, and he had excelled under a truly gifted superior.

  The Korean post had originally been ticketed for John Hodge, but he had offended Syngman Rhee and other Koreans with his almost unique insensitivity to their condition and the Japanese occupation. Instead Walker had arrived in Tokyo as Eighth Army commander in September 1948. Even before the Korean War began, he existed in Tokyo on a kind of sufferance. Because MacArthur and his top people considered the generals who had commanded in Europe (who had gotten the men and materiel they believed should have been ticketed for the Pacific) enemies, Walker had arrived with several invisible marks against him among the Bataan Gang. First off, he was not a MacArthur man. Then he had fought in the wrong theater. Then he had the wrong friends, Marshall as a sponsor, Gerow and Eisenhower as pals. He had been one of the few military men invited to the wedding of Eisenhower’s son John in 1947.

  In Tokyo he never fit in and was never accepted. The old-timers in the inner circle knew that they need not take him seriously. This was especially true of MacArthur’s new chief of staff, Major General Edward Almond, for whom World War II had been a distinct disappointment, and for whom this was undoubtedly the last major assignment. Almond was to be a major player in the Korean War, and his singularly unfortunate rivalry with Walker left an indelible stamp on what happened there. He too had not been a MacArthur man; if anything he had been closer t
o Marshall, and late in his career, he was trying to prove to the Pacific commander, and the men around him, that he was the ultimate MacArthur loyalist, like a convert to the Catholic Church trying to show that he was more Catholic than the pope. Almond was every bit as driven as Walker and far more of a gamesman. In addition he was trying to make up for lost time—he had had, in the way military men talked about these things, a bad war in Europe. For in World War II, he had commanded the Ninety-second Division, an all-black unit in a still segregated army, all of whose officers were white Southerners (because they were believed to know how to, as the Southern saying went, handle blacks). That had turned out to be one of the last great military manifestations of an archaic, feudal relationship in what was supposed to be a modern, egalitarian, democratic institution. Eleanor Roosevelt’s Running Riflemen, the men of his division had been called sardonically in the Army, after the then first lady who had a special interest in their welfare and performance. Treated as second-class citizens, more often than not by officers whom they saw as the bane of their existence back home, they had often performed as second-class soldiers.

  Almond, a Southerner born in December 1892 with all the traditional prejudices of both the region and the era, had ended the war even more racist than when he started. His command in Korea would later be marked by all kinds of gratuitous instances of racism on his personal part, as if he were some kind of political dinosaur in an Army otherwise just beginning to integrate. Before World War II had started, he had ironically enough been a Marshall short-list man, and the command of the Ninety-second had been a reflection of Marshall’s faith in him—that if anyone could take such a difficult assignment and make it work, it would be Ned Almond. He had started the war as a peer—at least in his own mind—of men like Bradley, Collins, Patton, and Ridgway and felt quite bitter about his fate when the war was over, that he had been sabotaged by the luck of the draw.

  His ego had always been enormous, right up there, friends thought, with that of Patton. In truth, he had never really thought anyone else was a better commander. To believe that you are among the best of the best, and then have such a troubled command at so critical a professional moment, was a profound disappointment, and he was sure he had been cheated. Whatever happened in Tokyo or Korea, he once told MacArthur, would never bother him, because he had already dealt with the worst situation that any commander in the Army had ever had—he had commanded the Ninety-second Division. Supremely ambitious men in the Army, graduates of West Point or, in Almond’s case, VMI, are always measuring themselves against their contemporaries: who gets to be bird colonel first, who gets a battalion first, who gets a star first, and, of course, who gets a division first. The others, his peers, had come of age in that epic war, gotten the great commands, performed as everyone expected, and become part of the collective memory of the nation’s proud victory, while he had commanded troops who were part of a social experiment, one that had failed badly, and he was embittered by it. He did not see himself sharing any blame with his troops—in his mind the fault was completely theirs.

  Almond was stoic, overly self-confident, absolutely fearless, a man who on occasion seemed to dare death to strike him, and in fact some of the men who served under him in Korea thought he had a death wish. There was, his friends believed, a certain deeply tragic quality to him by the time he arrived in the Tokyo headquarters. It was not just that his great hopes to be an important commander in World War II had crashed because of the nature of the command he had been given; it was something much more cruel, that he sealed away deep inside himself. For in personal terms, he had paid a terrible price during World War II. There had been one horrendous day in 1944 when he learned in a letter from his wife that he had lost both his son and his son-in-law in combat. Young Ned, class of ’43 at West Point, had been killed with the Forty-fifth Division in the Po Valley in Italy, and Thomas Galloway, class of ’42 at West Point, a fighter pilot married to Almond’s only daughter, had been missing over Normandy during the invasion, and the letter represented the confirmation of his death. The news was especially hard for Almond because he had always pushed his son so hard, first to go to West Point and then to go into the infantry. When young Ned had arrived in the combat zone, Almond had written his son’s commander saying don’t make him a staff officer, give him a rifle company.

  The night the letter had arrived, Bill McCaffrey, one of Almond’s top staff officers, had asked if he wanted a sedative. McCaffrey had dealt with a situation like this once before, when Townsend Crittenberger, the son of McCaffrey’s corps commander, Lieutenant General Willis Crittenberger, had been killed during the Rhine crossing. Crittenberger had closed himself off in his room for two days and let his subordinates run the unit. Perhaps, McCaffrey thought, Ned Almond would need some comparable break and perhaps something to help him sleep. “No, no sedative,” Almond had answered. “And, Bill, I’ll command the division tomorrow.” Under no circumstances was McCaffrey to tell Corps what had happened. He wanted no one monkeying with his division, and no sympathy for himself.

  Ned Almond had ended that war as a two-star, when most of the men he thought of as peers had three or four stars. Yet even then, at the lowest point in his career, no one dealing with Almond would underestimate him. He was, like it or not, a force. Everything he did had to be done quickly and perfectly. For the men working under him, there was always one more order to obey, one more squad to be moved, and one more piece of paper to be typed, and typed perfectly, or it would have to be done again. Each soldier in each distant squad had to be perfectly placed, and each commander had to know every soldier’s name, no matter how newly arrived the GI might be. Yet in 1945, that kind of drive and ambition had seemed almost pointless. The war was over, the Army shrinking; commands were few, and if an enemy aggressor threatened America, there was always the atomic bomb. What need was there for a used two-star who had already had his great chance? Though he was a man of Europe, in 1946 he had asked for an assignment to MacArthur’s headquarters. The alternative was to serve as military attaché in Moscow, which held little attraction for him. The slot in Tokyo was as the G-1, or personnel chief, not normally a springboard to power, but in that pathetically weak headquarters he proved a standout from the moment he arrived, a man of unusual competence in a staff of second-rate hacks. It did not take long for MacArthur to understand that Almond, Europe or no, Marshall man or no, was more effective than anyone else around, and also that he hungered for one last career boost. Almond was his for the taking, MacArthur realized, someone who could, even without Bataan, become a MacArthur man. In early 1949, when MacArthur’s chief of staff Paul Mueller was rotated home, Almond, who had already made himself incalculably valuable to his commander, got the job. A combat command it was not, but perhaps one day that too would come. The real job of the chief of staff in the Army is often to be the commander’s son of a bitch. Everyone should go away feeling that the commander was a good guy who would make fair (and favorable) decisions on matters both large and infinitesimally small, if only he could be reached. Thus a great chief of staff was there to say no to all the requests demanding things that MacArthur did not want to do or deal with, and make everyone feel that the more benign MacArthur would have approved them if only they could have gotten past the evil Almond.

  ALMOND WAS TO be an important player in the months to come. The politics of the command were very important as the war effort and the strategy unfolded, not just Tokyo against Washington, but the ferocious politics within the Tokyo command itself, the constant struggle to be the favored aide; and Almond turned out to be a vastly superior player of headquarters politics than Walton Walker was. In a way the constant struggle between him and Walker was a miniature of a larger struggle that was always taking place, the United States Army against Douglas MacArthur’s Army. Of Almond’s many nicknames (the Big-A, Ned the Dread), probably the most important among high-level officers in Tokyo was that of Ned the Anointed, which meant that MacArthur’s arm was always on his shou
lder and he was the commander’s principal man, never to be challenged, as he never challenged his superior. It was assumed that he always spoke for MacArthur—or at least spoke for him often enough that you did not want to be the one who discovered when he wasn’t speaking for him. Almond in time became MacArthur’s MacArthur, the man who took MacArthur’s vision of what was supposed to happen and brought it directly to Korea, where he employed it, whether it fitted the Korean reality or not.

  Almond was much shrewder and infinitely more political than Walton Walker. Walker was a representative of one American Army, commanded by Omar Bradley back in Washington, and Almond had in his time in Tokyo quite deftly become the number two figure in the other American Army, the more or less autonomous one commanded by Douglas MacArthur. He understood from the start that, given the lack of talent among his senior staff (viewed as a bunch of Humpty Dumptys by the rest of the Army), MacArthur needed at least one high-level professional to make the headquarters work. The headquarters was a hothouse of political cronyism and sycophancy, at the center of which was the general himself. Some relatively senior staff members literally used the phrase “Close to the Throne,” to designate one’s standing with the general. Within a year of his arrival in Tokyo, Almond was the man closest to the throne.

  Almond was smart enough never to get caught up in any of the many cliques, or to take one side against the other. Most important of all, he realized that a genuine connection to MacArthur could only be attained through complete devotion, loyalty, and obedience. MacArthur’s enemies had to become his own enemies. Nothing could be held back. Nothing. And every move had to be the right one. No doubt of his about MacArthur’s greatness could ever be revealed. He had to be a more perfect extension of MacArthur than MacArthur himself. He was ready for the test. “He had,” wrote J. D. Coleman, an officer and a historian who had served under him, “an instinctive knack of ingratiation.” By that Coleman meant that in addition to playing back to his superior what his superior wanted to hear, he had a brilliant ability to anticipate what MacArthur wanted even before the general himself knew that he wanted it.