The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  The final glimpse Raybould had of the fighting on top of that mountain was of Chinese soldiers tackling the last remaining Americans. Raybould tried to take some men with him, but most of them wanted to follow a softer part of the incline that led down the mountain. Raybould was sure that was where the Chinese would be waiting, so he slipped over to a place where the drop was much steeper. The key to surviving, he kept telling himself, was to take his time, not panic, descend slowly, and never give an enemy soldier a silhouette. He eventually met up with some stragglers from King Company and made it back to the Chongchon.

  Gene Takahashi was trying to get down the hill when four or five Chinese soldiers surrounded him and took him prisoner. First they took his watch and his cigarettes. He tried to argue for the watch, a graduation present from his mother, but one Chinese soldier put a gun to his head, ending the argument. Then they indicated through sign language that he was to shout out to bring in other prisoners. Takahashi did—shouting in Japanese for others not to come in. Next they took him back to their battalion headquarters. There everyone seemed fascinated by a man with Oriental features wearing an American uniform. He seemed to make them nervous; perhaps he represented a sign that Japan was entering the war. By that time they had also captured Clemmie Simms, the company master sergeant, a strong, highly professional NCO, the very core of a professional Army, who had, Takahashi remembered, only three months to go before retirement.

  Later, it would strike Gene Takahashi that he was the rarest of men, someone who had been imprisoned in wartime by two of the greatest nations in the world, the United States and China, though the Chinese imprisonment was quite brief. The Chinese started marching Simms and him away from the battle, probably heading them north. Fearing they might be shot at the foot of the hill, they tried to work out signals for an escape. He started singing a recruit’s cadence song, a kind of early rap song, substituting for the usual words instructions on how and when to break away from their captors. At the right moment Simms jumped his man, Takahashi pushed his, and they made their break. As he ran, Takahashi heard gunfire near where Simms had been. He did not see Simms again. Eventually, long after the war was over, Simms’s name did show up—on a list of men who had died in a Chinese prison camp in March 1951.

  Gene Takahashi was confused and frightened because he was behind Chinese lines—and he was ashamed of himself as well because he had lost so many men and then had been captured. He moved cautiously and carefully, only at night, until he finally bumped into American troops near Kunuri two days later. There he found the rest of his unit, but there was almost nothing left of it.

  WHAT BRUCE RITTER remembered from those days was how the sheer terror of the Chinese assault could open up and reveal what was inside a man in a way that no man should ever be opened up. It was like peering inside another man’s soul: all the bravado and the veneer were gone, and all the things that most men like to hide from those around them were all too nakedly there for inspection. Some men he fought with behaved with valor and honor in those crucial moments, far beyond what anyone had a right to expect, risking their lives, for instance, to carry off wounded men they had never met before; while a platoon leader who had seemed a perfectly decent officer melted down right in front of him, in a moment of total cowardice.

  Ritter was a radio operator with Able Company of the First Battalion of the Thirty-eighth Regiment, which was also part of the Second Division. His was a difficult, exceptionally dangerous job. The North Korean snipers liked to single radiomen out; they had killed three in his unit in a short space of time. The radio had a long antenna, a beacon of sorts for the enemy, invented, it seemed to Ritter, only to signal to their best shots exactly where fire ought to be concentrated. His fellow soldiers always tended to keep their distance from him. Ritter was sure that he was not put on this planet to carry a radio; he was five-ten and weighed 120 pounds at the time. The 300 radio he carried was heavy—it weighed, they liked to say, thirty-eight pounds at the beginning of the day and about sixty by the end. Ritter was twenty-three at the time, having celebrated his birthday a few weeks earlier, during the battle of the Naktong, and still a lowly PFC; promotion had come all too slowly, in part, he suspected, because he was so skinny that he just did not look like much of a soldier. He had done an earlier tour in the country, spoke some of the language, and could be thrown into the breach as a minimalist interpreter. But about the time a company commander discovered how valuable he was, the officer would either be killed or promoted.

  On that first day of the offensive, most of the division was back at Kunuri, and he figured his reinforced company, perhaps 230 men, was about twenty-five miles to the north. Their jumping-off place had been a village called Unbong-dong. They were supposed to go about six miles over two days to Hill 1229, more a mountain actually. But they had been taking fire from the middle of the first day and that had slowed them down. They had been short a rifleman, and so Ritter had been turned into a rifleman, not a radio operator, and his chances of living had increased exponentially. About a third of the way to their objective, the incoming fire got so heavy they stopped and took up a position on the back side of Hill 300. The ground was frozen hard and their foxholes were neither deep nor well dug. They began rotating in one-hour shifts—an hour’s sleep, if you were lucky, followed by an hour on watch. They were the extreme edge of the division, with the battalion strongpoint about three miles behind them.

  When the Chinese struck near midnight—shocking them with the blowing of bugles, the shrillness of whistles, so many enemy soldiers suddenly right in their midst—the company managed to hold for about forty-five minutes before the retreat began. Moving back was hard; it was the worst of conditions—nighttime, with a great many wounded to carry out. Ritter remembered slipping back to another hill and someone trying to set up a perimeter, but there were too many Chinese, and once again they had to pull back. He thought perhaps another forty-five minutes had passed, and their losses were grievous.

  They began to straggle back after that to where they hoped the battalion was. By then he was part of a makeshift unit, perhaps twenty or twenty-five men from different companies. Ritter knew no one in his new group, and it was unclear if anyone was in charge. Scenes like this were taking place throughout the Eighth Army that night. In the chaos, stumbling back in the dark, the sounds of the Chinese weapons ever closer, Ritter found himself with an even smaller group, four Americans and two KATUSAs, carrying one wounded soldier on a blanket with no handles and thus no good way to grip it in the terrible cold.

  Ritter remembered a great deal about that day and night of horror, but he had witnessed one scene of utter cowardice that was stamped into his brain, the defining memory of that time. Ritter could still remember the wounded man’s name—Willard Smith from Anderson, Tennessee. Smith was badly hit, but Ritter was sure he would live, if they could just get him out. Their own retreat was badly slowed down by Smith, but that was what you were supposed to do, carry out your wounded. There was an officer with them, a young lieutenant, but he was not really in charge—no one was. They were all exhausted, perhaps an hour of sleep in over a day, and no food. They had no time to think about how scared they were. They could hear the Chinese in the distance, and the firing seemed to be getting closer.

  Finally, around dawn, they reached the bank of the Peang Yong Chon, a tributary of the Chongchon. That was where the young lieutenant broke. “We’ll leave him here,” he said. “We can send a helicopter for him tomorrow.” It was that awful moment, when a man undressed himself in front of the men he was nominally supposed to be leading. The four other American carriers looked at the lieutenant, and they knew he was lying, that there would be no helicopter, not to carry out a dead, frozen body from a place no one would ever find. It was about bugging out and leaving Smith there to die. None of them was thinking straight, they were all exhausted, but they knew that his suggestion was dishonorable, throwing away another’s life to save their own. “You’re going to leave him to die,
aren’t you?” Ritter said. The lieutenant never answered. He didn’t have to. He was offering them a chance to save themselves.

  The hell with it, Ritter thought. You’re supposed to do the right thing, even when it all seems hopeless, even if you die doing it. Nothing had ever seemed clearer to him: it was like declaring what kind of man you were. So the four men agreed to carry Smith out, orders or no. The two Koreans came with them. Looking back, many years later, Ritter was surprised by the fact that they had all agreed so readily. He often pondered that. They all assumed they were going to die, and so in some way it was as if the decision carried a judgment with it, perhaps a final one, and you defined your life in the way you responded. With that the lieutenant left Ritter and the three others alone to carry out Smith.

  The amazing thing about combat, Ritter came to believe, was how it stripped men down to their essentials. Some men looked strong and tough, and even more important, sounded strong and tough, and then you were in combat and it all changed. Some of them weren’t so tough at all, and by contrast, someone who was skinny and mild would turn out to be a very good soldier, strong inside instead of outside. Who could know in advance who the truly brave were? It was a puzzle Ritter never solved, because the answers were always so different.

  Burdened by Smith, they retreated slowly. They were as hungry as they were tired. At one point, Ritter slipped off to a tiny village hoping to find some food. A young Korean girl came out of a hut and he asked for some rice. Instead she gave him a hot meal of ground corn, or at least that was what he thought it was. It might have saved them, he decided. They kept being hit by different small Chinese patrols, probably forward units. At the bottom of one hill, they ran into a small group of Chinese who started firing. One of the four bearers, George White, was hit in the foot. Now they had to move even more slowly because of White’s wound. The Koreans helped carry Smith, and Ritter dropped back and pulled rearguard duty, armed with the group’s only BAR, or Browning Automatic Rifle, a valued weapon because it threw out so much firepower. That was how bad it was, he thought, he was there to hold off the entire Chinese Army with a weapon he had never fired before.

  He wondered if any group of soldiers had ever moved so slowly. Finally they went through a long valley and they found a corpsman and got both Smith and White out. For a long time Ritter heard regularly from White, who would always sign off his letters saying, “Thanks for the ride.” He tried to contact Willard Smith, and wrote him twice, but he never heard back. The lieutenant who had left them did not fare well. Two days afterward he was captured by the Chinese, and later died in one of their prison camps.

  Ritter joined up with men from other fragmented units, and they retreated and fought over two days, finally coming together with survivors of a battered battalion. He knew no one he was with. He remembered at one point that there were some tanks in the middle of a village engaged by Chinese mortars. They were all going to leave the village, and the foot soldiers were told to get on top of the tanks. Ritter climbed on one, remembering that it would feel good because the engine would be running and it would be warm. The Chinese mortar rounds were getting closer and closer, and Ritter was looking out and thinking how good they were with their mortars, when a round landed very close by and he took a piece of shrapnel in the forehead and started bleeding badly. At first, he was blinded by the blood. He had also suffered a concussion, he later decided. Being blinded, he began to panic, sure that he was going to die. Just then he stumbled into a friend, Corporal Seldon Monaghan, who told him, “Well, I see you haven’t learned to keep your silly head down, have you?” It was the perfect thing to say, and it calmed him. Monaghan then bandaged him, so that he could see a little, and helped get him back up on a tank, which took him to a MASH unit. He was supposed to go to Pyongyang, but the plane couldn’t land and so he flew to a hospital in Japan and missed the heartbreaking retreat from Kunuri. He had used up a lot of good luck in that short span of time, he decided. He also won the Silver Star for helping to bring White out.

  ON THE NIGHT that the Chinese hit, Sam Mace, the veteran tanker, had taken his boots off—which was always the big decision in terrain like that: boots on or boots off. He had just taken his jacket off and wrapped his pistol in it, to keep the moisture off the pistol. He had just gotten into his own homemade sleeping bag, a simple bedroll with no quilting—some Army blankets—no feathers, no comfort, no warmth. Just then the first Chinese round landed, a white phosphorous shell. Mace checked his watch: 12:10 in the morning on the twenty-sixth of November. His initial thought was that it was a 4.2 mortar, and he wondered why American troops were firing 4.2 mortars and doing it so carelessly. Then he realized it was the enemy. Mace grabbed his boots and jumped into his tank in his stocking feet. Even in the darkness, he could see people running in the village; then he heard two of his tanks crank up on the other side of town and, along with other battalion vehicles, start south.

  The shelling had gone on for about an hour, and he was in the turret, sweeping the hills in front of him with his telescopic sight, paying special attention to a nearby hill where troops from Lieutenant John Barbey’s First Platoon, Love Company, were positioned. Then his gunner tapped his knee, and he looked out and saw about fifty men coming down the spine of the hill, thin and narrow, like a goat trail, so steep that they had to hold on to one another to keep their balance—a human chain. They were already two-thirds of the way down, when Mace yelled out, “If you’re GIs, you better sound off!” There was no answer, so he told his gunner to wait until they got near the bottom and then put a round of high explosive from his 76mm cannon on them. At the same time, Mace opened up with his 50-caliber machine gun, and they wiped the chain out. When it was over, there was a huge pile of enemy bodies at the bottom of the hill.

  Mace then told the gunner to lock his cannon on that pass. Half an hour later, the gunner kicked him in the leg. “Look, here they come again,” he whispered. So they waited until the enemy—they did not yet know they were Chinese—neared the bottom for the second time, and they opened up again. The enemy came back a third time, and they wiped them out again. At one point Mace spotted what looked like a soldier crawling toward his tank, carrying something, perhaps a satchel of explosives, and Mace turned the machine gun on him and killed him. The next day he wondered why he had not been alerted by firing from Barbey’s position. Later, he learned that the Chinese had slipped up on the men posted on the hill and bayoneted many of them while they slept.

  When daylight broke, he checked the bodies, and they looked different from Koreans, bigger and darker, six feet tall on average. Manchurians, someone told him. They all had American weapons, and he had never seen weapons in better shape; and their packs were equally neat, tied together with a kind of rope that looked like it was made of a rice plant. He remembered the discipline with which they had come down the hillside, as if they had practiced it again and again. He knew the Americans were now fighting a very good, very professional army. The Chinese had knocked out one of his three tanks, and so Mace collected the men from it, most of them wounded, put them in a jeep, and they started moving west. For the next two days they were in constant combat with Chinese forces.

  By the end of the second day, Mace had managed to get his two remaining tanks near the village of Kujang-dong, where he had been told to meet up with some elements of the Thirty-eighth Regiment gathering there. By then he had picked up two more tanks. Just before he reached the village, he came upon around sixty-five very lost-looking American infantrymen, almost numb, he thought, trying to find their way out, most of them from the Thirty-eighth Regiment but representing different companies, even different battalions. In a world that had suddenly lost its coherence and security, safety seemed to exist only in the tanks. One of their officers, a tanker himself, begged to get inside, and Mace finally agreed, though he was uneasy about it.

  They came into Kujang-dong going very slowly, perhaps two miles an hour. Each tank was carrying about fifteen men. The village was su
pposed to be in American hands. Normally, Mace did not like to put riflemen on top of a tank, especially at night. It limited his vision and the turret’s movement. If you swept the turret and the gun all the way around, you would knock the riflemen off. But normal rules no longer seemed to apply. The village was completely silent when Mace drove in, which of itself was a warning. Suddenly, the entire area exploded on them. They had driven directly into an almost perfect ambush. Every house seemed to have Chinese soldiers with one or two automatic weapons firing away, with Mace’s column perfectly zeroed in. It was a monstrous moment, because rule number one for a tanker in combat was that you had to save your tank. Mace told his driver to push it and push it hard—and then he had to move the turret, even though he knew there were people up there. There was no other order he could give, but in giving it he knew that most of the men on top were going to be killed. They were flying now, maybe twelve miles an hour, and there was death all around him. Through his open turret, he could hear the screams of the infantrymen as they were hit, or fell off, some of them to be crushed by the tanks coming after him. In the morning, when he checked out the tops of his tanks, they were covered with a pink, frothy color, as if someone had painted the surface the color of blood, with flesh and even brains mixed in, all of it frozen instantly in the cold. The ambush had lasted perhaps two or three minutes, but it had seemed to last forever, and fifty years later he could still hear the screams of those men and visualize that color on his tanks.