The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Nothing during his two-year tour of Korea had given him pleasure, and when his time was up he was thrilled to be going home. But then, in June 1950, newly married, his wife pregnant, he got orders to return to Korea as a combat engineer in a war that did not have a good feel to it. He was heartsick about going back, and the condition of the American units, his own included, made him feel far worse once he got there. Just as they were shipping out, his superiors had opened the doors to the stockades back at Fort Lewis, with a onetime fight-in-Korea-or-be-tried-at-home offer, and he had ended up taking in some men charged with serious crimes. Still, his company as it moved up to Yongsan was at about two-thirds strength, only 150 men in place. (There was one moment, during the brutal fighting at Yongsan, when a young private, grimy and exhausted, who had distinguished himself during a North Korean attack, thanked Beahler for getting him out of the stockade. Such is the complex journey of modern warriors, Beahler had thought.)

  The Ninth Regiment, which was supposed to be holding Yongsan, was in terrible shape at that moment. Some of its men, under orders from higher headquarters, had launched an ill-advised probing attack against the North Koreans just as the greatly superior Communist force was starting to cross the Naktong. The assignment, Operation Manchu—the Ninth was known as the Manchu regiment—called for them to cross the river and harass the Communists, and had apparently come down from Keiser’s headquarters. Later, many of the people in the division thought it nothing less than a demented order from an officer trying to be aggressive for aggression’s sake—under pressure from above. After all, early intelligence reports had already confirmed the considerable size of the North Korean force. The vulnerability of the Americans maximized—for there was nothing more difficult than a river crossing—they had been caught completely off guard when the North Koreans crossed first. Instead of being hit while holding strong defensive positions, many of the frontline troops of the Ninth had been caught in the open, and those elements of the Ninth up along the Naktong were already small and scattered—like the elements of the Twenty-third.

  Lee Beahler had been wary of Operation Manchu from the start. He knew from World War II how difficult any river crossing was. The entire business had only confirmed something he had suspected almost since he arrived in country: that he was working with superiors who in all too many instances did not know as much as they were supposed to about combat. When the assault was first discussed, he had asked the regimental commander, Colonel John G. Hill, if his men had been trained in river crossings. Hill had replied that they didn’t need special training. Beahler insisted that they did; that he knew because he had been involved when the Thirty-sixth Division had tried to cross the Rapido in Italy, one of the great disasters of the war, the Rapido being fast and high, and the Germans well dug in on the other side. Hill had brushed away Beahler’s objections. He had no idea how difficult it was, all the men in the boat made so vulnerable, especially if they had not practiced a comparable assault. He seemed to think, Beahler decided, that crossing a river was like calling a taxi. Hearing Hill reject his warnings, which were primarily about the safety of the men, Beahler’s respect for him fell away. He wondered then, and not for the first time, about some of the commanders whose job it was to know so much, but who knew so little and never listened to those who might know more. So the North Koreans had caught the Ninth exposed, on the water itself or at the river’s edge. A number of Hill’s regimental staff, including his S-3, were killed almost immediately, as was Keiser’s aide, Tom Lombardo, a famed West Point football player. Fifty-four years later, Lee Beahler could say of that moment when he first saw the torches of the North Korean troops coming down to the river and preparing to cross, “That’s when I began to get a very shaky feeling about what was going to happen, how brutal it was going to be for our forces—and I’ve still got that shaky feeling, still have it today when I think back to those days.” Beahler immediately sent most of his own men back to Battalion headquarters to keep them from being overrun at the riverbank. That night and the next morning, terror was in the air.

  On that second day, Beahler was a reluctant witness as the top echelon of a large American unit experienced something akin to a nervous breakdown. Beahler did not know of the angry exchange that had taken place between Walton Walker and Dutch Keiser, but on the morning of September 2 he did watch the relief of Hill, the regimental commander. Brigadier General Sladen Bradley, the assistant division commander, who was out in the field far more than Keiser, showed up at regimental headquarters to find out what was going on. Bradley was clearly enraged by the lack of control he found around him. “Colonel, where’s your First Battalion?” he asked. Hill answered that he did not know, that he had not heard from it since midnight.

  “Well, Colonel Hill, where’s your Second Battalion?”

  Hill had not heard from it either. Then Bradley gave him a cold, hard look, one that Beahler remembered all too well. “Colonel, apparently this situation is out of control, and I am assuming command of this regiment.” A few minutes later Bradley turned to Beahler and informed him that his company of engineers was now going to fight as infantry and assigned it to move up to Yongsan immediately. It would be the job of the Second Engineers to hold Yongsan for twenty-four hours, he said, until the Marines could arrive and take over. In the process, Beahler would learn that he had a new battalion commander, Major Charley Fry, because the old one, Lieutenant Colonel Joe McEachern, had, like Colonel Hill, not appreciated how fragile the situation was. During World War II, McEachern had apparently worked as an engineer on the Pan American Highway and therefore had no combat command background. He still thought he was there to build roads, not to shoot at North Korean Communists. He had made the mistake of arguing with Bradley over a change in his orders, when Bradley had told him that his men were to stand and die if need be to stop the North Korean advance. “But, sir, these men are specialists,” McEachern had protested, “they’re not infantrymen. You have to understand that they’re technicians.”

  “Colonel, do you not understand me? Am I not making myself clear? I said stand and die and I meant stand and die, and they will fight as infantrymen.” Bradley had answered, and lest there were any other officers who did not understand how critical the situation was and had their own private doubts, he relieved McEachern on the spot, replacing him with the battalion executive officer. “Major Fry, do you understand the order?” Bradley asked him. “Yes, sir,” Fry replied instantly. General Bradley then sent the newly relieved Colonel Hill to help Beahler set up his defense at Yongsan. There, Beahler decided, Hill was still not a great asset. Recently defrocked as a regimental commander Hill might be, but he was still a colonel and an infantryman, and Beahler was a first lieutenant and an engineer, which made the relationship chancy. But Beahler was the more experienced combat officer; his unit had led the landing at Salerno in Italy, which meant he had been in some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II. The Italian campaign had been a hard one, and not all those battles had ended up in American glory and victory. Some were defeats, and in defeat, he believed, you often gained the most wisdom; Beahler had learned that one of the keys to successful leadership is knowing an enemy’s strengths as well as his weaknesses. That wisdom had, in the few short weeks they had served together in Korea, helped earn him the respect of his men. “Why are some officers better than others?” one of his squad leaders, Sergeant Gino Piazza, once wondered. “Well, they have a feel for it, they anticipate well and they respond well. They see danger points before they happen, and they’re good with the men. You have a feeling that what they do is not just about themselves and getting promotions and medals but about the men in their command as well. On that scale, he was one of the best. One of the very best. We were very lucky to have him.”

  Colonel Hill had immediately wanted to set up a defensive line right smack in the flat paddy land fronting Yongsan. Beahler was all too aware of his own limitations—he might be a good engineering officer, but he was hardly an expert
in infantry warfare. Nonetheless, he knew immediately that Hill’s plan was a prescription for a disaster, which might cost him his entire company. He did not know who had taught John Hill about infantry tactics, but fighting from an open stretch of rice paddy, with no natural contours to help your individual defensive positions, was madness. What made it even worse was the fact that there would be no flanking American units on his right or left, against an enemy whose favorite tactic was first to flank and then to encircle a defensive position. “If you wanted to pick the perfect place for the North Koreans to mow us down, this was it,” Sergeant Piazza said.

  Beahler protested vigorously to Hill. He wanted to take his men up a hill behind the little village on the other, or south side of the road to Pusan, backing it rather than fronting it, an infinitely superior place for a defense against a numerically superior enemy. Holding Yongsan meant nothing, control of five or six little huts—it was the road leading out of it that was at stake here, and the hill blocked the road out of Yongsan. As he confronted Colonel Hill, Beahler’s thoughts went back to Custer at the Little Big Horn. Had anyone protested to Custer about the sheer madness of what he was doing? Had the ordinary soldiers known that their commander was crazed and putting them all at risk? Had anyone in the command understood how the vainglory of their commander undermined their chances of surviving? At that moment, Beahler did not know what was going on around him or what the larger strategy was. The one thing he knew was that he was not going to place his men out in any open paddy, naked to North Korean artillery and mortars and tanks, and the In Min Gun’s superior numbers. But there was Hill, a full colonel, telling him he was to fight in the flat land. Only if the North Koreans hit hard enough could he break off and pull back up the hill, he was told. That’s absolutely demented, Beahler thought. The North Koreans almost always struck at night, and disengagement from a superior enemy in the midst of battle, even in daylight, is an especially hard military move. To do it at night would be much worse.

  The lives of all the men were at stake. What good would it do if Beahler lived to testify at a court-martial that he had opposed the decision that cost him his company? He decided there was no more time to waste arguing. He was on his own; the responsibility was his. Besides, Colonel Hill had just given him his excuse. “Sergeant Nations!” he yelled to his master sergeant, Kenneth Nations. “We’ve just been hit! Take the company up on the hill!” Colonel Hill said nothing.

  A little later General Bradley himself showed up. “What outfit is this?” he asked.

  “Dog Company, Second Engineers,” Nations answered.

  “I thought you were supposed to be out in front of the village,” Bradley said.

  “No, sir, the company commander said to take them up on the hill—it’s a much, much better position as you can see for yourself, General.”

  “All right, Sergeant, carry on,” Bradley replied.

  So it was that they had taken the natural protection offered by the hill and fashioned what was in effect a soft horseshoe defense facing the road. When the men finished digging their foxholes, Sergeant Nations came by, took one look, and told them to dig deeper. “We grumbled a lot then, but a little later I would have kissed his ass for making us do it,” Butch Hammel, a private first class in Beahler’s company, remembered. Across the road was Able Company from the Second Engineer Battalion, which, during the day, had been joined by some stragglers from other companies, but remained, like Dog Company, still badly understrength.

  IT WAS A very foggy night, and long before they saw the North Koreans, they heard their whistles and their voices, every command somehow amplified in the darkness, the language seeming harsh and staccato, and then they heard the terrifying rumble of enemy tanks. Just before the battle started, Lieutenant Beahler came over and warned them not to fire until they actually saw the Koreans; otherwise they might be firing on their own men. The First Platoon, the one closest to Yongsan, was hit first. The men in Hammel’s platoon could hear the fighting long before they had anyone to open up on. At one point the fog lifted; suddenly they could see the part of the hill where the First Platoon was engaged, and they were able to open up, catching the North Koreans by surprise. Then the battle shifted to Hammel’s positions. If there was one great truth to combat like this, Hammel believed, it was the constancy of fear—any man who says that he’s not scared in combat is a liar. Every soldier in a situation like that faced a terrible choice. You want nothing more than to live another day, nothing more than to bug out, but you also don’t want to be seen by your buddies as a coward. Only the dishonor of running, of letting your buddies down, keeps you from trying to slip away—because of that, he thought, and only because of that, do you stay where you are and keep fighting. All that other stuff they taught you, about fighting for your country and against the Communists, disappeared in the first moments of battle.

  Hammel remembered one of his sergeants being hit in the neck that night. It was not that bad a wound, but the sergeant panicked and started running right behind their positions. Someone in the next foxhole started shooting at him, and they had to scream at their buddies, “Friendly! Friendly!” The sergeant was lucky; he lived. They were all pretty lucky, Hammel thought, because they managed to hold off the North Koreans. Well, not all of them were lucky—twelve of them died and eighteen were wounded. Maybe three hours of pure, close, raw combat, he thought, and the price had been very high. But Lieutenant Beahler had placed the men perfectly, and never once during the entire battle had he taken cover himself. The lieutenant just moved calmly from position to position, making sure the men were okay and that they had enough ammo. “I never saw a braver man in my life; I never saw a man so cool under fire,” Hammel said more than fifty years later.

  When they first took their places on the hill that night, some Korean bearers had helped them settle in, and Gino Piazza was furious about that. He was twenty-three at the time, and if he had not done well in school, he was shrewd about some things—in particular that you could not get something for nothing in a war zone. He did not trust the Koreans in situations like this when no one had really vouched for them. As far as he was concerned, American soldiers should carry their own damned gear up the hill. There were too many instances he knew of where the In Min Gun had infiltrated its men behind American lines, disguising them as civilians. It would be all too easy to turn them into bearers who might slip back across the lines with the exact coordinates of the American positions. Piazza had gotten into a shouting match with one of the junior officers, telling him to keep the goddamn Koreans away, and the officer saying it was all right, these were good guys, friendlies. Friendlies, my ass, Piazza thought. You know nothing about them, nothing! If one of them smiles at you and says two words in English, and does your lifting for you, you think he’s a good guy. Goddamn American innocents who go through life only wanting someone to do the heavy lifting for them. Piazza had chased some of them out, but the next day, despite the worst fog cover Piazza had seen in Korea, the enemy had been able to lob mortar shells with remarkable precision onto their position. A furious Piazza was convinced that those nice helpful Korean bearers had been spotters for the enemy, damned talented ones, and five of the men in his twelve-man squad were now dead.

  The battle itself had been hard on his platoon, and Piazza had fought in a rage, as if wanting to avenge any of his men who had been killed by the North Korean mortars. There had been a young man named Ronnie Taylor, barely eighteen, an enlistee from Oakland, Mississippi, whom Piazza felt it was his sacred duty to protect because he was so young, and here he was with a gaping wound in his chest, pleading with Piazza, “Don’t let me die! Don’t let me die! You’ve got to get me out of here!” Piazza had assured him they were trying, but he knew that no one was going to make it off the hill during that fight, and so Piazza had fired and fired while cradling Taylor in his arms, listening to his last gasps of life. In his own words, he snapped at that point, grabbed his M-1 and charged down at some advancing North Koreans, scre
aming out the name of one of the men in his squad who had died with each burst of fire. How men—himself included—reacted to combat like this, how some were overwhelmed by it and some could handle it, fascinated him. One of his men had received what to Piazza’s eye seemed like a rather minor wound, only a flesh wound really, but he had unraveled and kept insisting, “I’m going to die”—and he did. Such was the strange psychology of war, Piazza thought. The soldier had talked himself into dying.

  It was fortunate that they were on the high ground where Beahler had placed them, because at least two battalions of the Communist troops made three separate assaults starting in very early and continuing into the morning. “They came, and they came, and they kept coming. We laid down a lot of fire on them. It rained down on them,” said Corporal Jesse Haskins. “We kept killing them and I began to wonder if we could kill them fast enough. There seemed to be so many of them and they just kept coming, nothing stopped them, there were always more of them and it was as if we might as well not have been there, that what we did just didn’t matter.” If the engineers had not been perfectly positioned, Haskins was sure, they all would have died.

  There was one moment, with ammo running short, when they thought they were going to be overrun. But a kid from another platoon rushed over with a whole box of grenades, the perfect weapon just to roll down the hill. The Americans, without mortars or artillery, had used their bazookas as rockets and relied on their heavy machine guns, as well as their quad 50, which would turn out to be one of the most effective weapons of the war. It was essentially an antiaircraft weapon, capable of truly lethal firepower, and it would be used in this war to neutralize the superior manpower of the enemy; not just to kill, which it did handily, but to create fear. The meat chopper, the GIs called it. Later, when the battle was over, the hillside littered with North Koreans, Beahler thought the quad 50 had turned the battle in his favor. They had been lucky to have it, because they had gotten nothing in the way of artillery fire from headquarters. At one point Beahler had asked for artillery support, and a single shell had come in, far off the mark. Beahler had tried to telephone in some corrections, but word came back that the artillery men were just too green and didn’t yet know the fire-direction system.