The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  The timing of the Tenth Corps offensive in the east was important. It began on November 27, two days after the massive Chinese assault against the Eighth Army. The Marines had heard some of the early reports, but did not know the scope of the disaster. The essential plan in the east nonetheless was bizarre—the work, said Bill McCaffrey, of madmen. The Marines in Tenth Corps were to drive west to Mupyongni, some perhaps forty or fifty miles away, but each mile likely to be impassable, on roads that might or might not exist. Mupyongni was a village high up on the Chongchon, and thus in the Eighth Army sector; getting there would allegedly link them up with Walker’s men. This way they would theoretically encircle any Chinese troops in the area and cut off their escape, and, in the minds of the Dai Ichi architects, cut off all Chinese supply lines as well. Given the thinness of the American forces, and the absolute harshness of the terrain, some mountains reaching seven thousand feet, and the cruelty of the weather, often twenty degrees below, it was pure insanity. The people in the Dai Ichi simply did not understand that those being cut off would be the UN forces themselves, completely isolated in the most unreachable place in the country, that in the unlikely event that the Marines with all their vehicles actually tried to make it through to Mupyongni on what would turn out to be an ox trail really, by then sure to be ice-covered, over mountainous peaks, they would be the perfect target for the Chinese. But for MacArthur this linkup of Tenth Corps and the Eighth Army was a symbol of victory, the crowning moment of a career-crowning campaign, proof that he had conquered the country and the enemy. It mattered nothing to him that even if the Marines managed to get through to Mupyongni, it would have no military value, because they would barely control the land they stood on. No one could talk him out of it. “The plans bore no resemblance to the country. In those days it was like complete insanity in the command,” Bill McCaffrey said years later. “From the time we headed to the Yalu it was like being in the nut house with the nuts in charge. You could only understand the totality of the madness if you were up there in the north after the Chinese had entered in full force, and we were being hit and hit again by these immense numbers of troops. And what we were getting from Tokyo was madness—absolute madness. The only real question was whether we could get any of our people out of there, and yet the orders were still to go forward.” MacArthur, after Inchon, he added bluntly “was nutty as a fruitcake.”

  The lead regiment was supposed to be Ray Murray’s Fifth Marines, already too isolated for their own good. Of the projected attack west, Murray later said, “It was unbelievable. The more you think about it, the more unreal it becomes. Well, anyhow those were the orders, and that’s what we started to do.” It was, as Almond’s own chief of staff, Nick Ruffner, put it, “an insane plan.” It ranked, Clay Blair wrote, “as the most ill-advised and unfortunate operation of the Korean War.”

  ON BOTH coasts of the peninsula, the recognition of the sheer size and scope of the Chinese offensive was delayed because the Tokyo command remained loath to admit its tragic miscalculation. Johnnie Walker was slow to react, neutralized by conflicting forces and feelings—and by the time he understood the full gravity of the situation, he had little leverage. In the first few days Walker thought there was still time to pull his forces back and establish a line at the narrow neck of Korea, near Pyongyang. By contrast, his opposite number on the east coast, Almond, remained an enthusiast for the attack.

  With the great offensive, Ned Almond had gotten his last career command, the one he had so badly wanted, and he had been slow indeed to come to terms with the hopelessness of it, and to tell his superior that it was in effect a failure. As late as November 28, three and a half days into the great Chinese attack, Almond was still refusing to admit the catastrophe it had become and still pushing the Tenth Corps forces to advance. At noon on that day, he choppered up to Smith’s headquarters at Hagaru to give one of his patented pep talks. Smith paid as little attention as he could. He was busy consolidating his Marine division, already dangerously close to being entrapped, for what he hoped would be a breakout to the south. To the Marines, there was something almost crazed about Almond then, as if he were commanding an Army still on a great victory march, when in fact it was facing total annihilation. Part of it, they were convinced, was his own subconscious racism, which blinded him to the ability of the enemy. “There was a disrespect for them as soldiers, a belief that they had been fleeing from us because they should be fleeing from us not because they might be setting a trap—whereas we who were fighting them and had been fighting them from early November knew how good they were—that’s where the phrase ‘laundrymen’ came from. It was pure racism. It was as if the only person in Tenth Corps who did not know how good they were and how dangerous our position had become was the Tenth Corps commander,” said Major Jim Lawrence, a battalion executive officer in those days.

  Then Almond flew to the headquarters of Colonel Allan MacLean’s Thirty-first Infantry Regiment, part of the Army’s Seventh Division, the other critical element of Tenth Corps engaged by the Chinese. Almond had earlier issued orders that had dangerously fragmented the Seventh Division, at the same time creating a gap between the units of the Seventh Division and the Marines. Those orders, as Clay Blair noted, would have tragic consequences. By the time of Almond’s visit, Colonel MacLean’s regiment was already being hammered badly on the eastern side of the Chosin Reservoir by large numbers of Chinese troops. If there was ever a time to retreat and try to link up with the Marines to the south, this was it. But Almond wanted them to press on. MacLean, who was killed there the next day while trying to lead the Thirty-first Regiment out, was not at the CP but was out with his badly endangered unit, known as Task Force MacLean. But Lieutenant Colonel Don Carlos Faith, a battalion commander in the Thirty-second Regiment, was there. Almond seemed oblivious to the fact that a critical part of his command was being annihilated. Faith, who himself would be killed three days later while leading his badly battered Task Force Faith out of its hopeless position and would receive a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor for his leadership, tried to explain how desperate their position actually was: they were being hit by two entire Chinese divisions. “That’s impossible,” Almond said. “There aren’t two Chinese divisions in all of North Korea!” The enemy who was attacking them, he said, was nothing more than remnants of Chinese forces fleeing north. “We’re still attacking and we’re going all the way to the Yalu. Don’t let a bunch of goddamn Chinese laundrymen stop you!” He thereupon ordered Faith to retake the high ground he had lost the previous night.

  Then—for Almond loved nothing more than on-the-spot medal presentations—he announced that he had three Silver Stars he wanted to give out—one to Faith and two to whomever Faith chose. Faith was appalled, but he thereupon chose a wounded lieutenant and asked him to come and stand at attention to get his medal. Just then the mess sergeant of Headquarters Company, George Stanley, walked by. Faith ordered him over. In front of a few men of Headquarters Company, the pathetic little medal ceremony took place. With that, Almond flew off in his helicopter. A moment later, Faith’s operations officer, Major Wesley Curtis, walked over. “What did the general say?” he asked. “You heard him, remnants fleeing north,” said an angry Faith as he ripped the medal off and threw it in the snow. One of his officers heard him say, “What a damned travesty.”

  When Almond got back to his headquarters later that day, he found a message ordering him to return to Tokyo. Johnnie Walker received the same message. In Tokyo, they quickly went into a somber meeting with MacArthur, who was slowly beginning to comprehend what had happened. “The wine of victory had turned to vinegar,” in Clay Blair’s words. MacArthur “had been outsmarted and outgeneraled by a ‘bunch of Chinese laundrymen’ who had no close air support, no tanks and very little artillery, modern communications or logistical infrastructure.” His post-Inchon commands, Blair added, had added up to “an arrogant, blind march to disaster.” On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth he had sent the Joint Chi
efs a message. They now faced, he said, “an entirely new war.” “This command,” he wrote, “has done everything humanly possible within its capabilities but is now faced with conditions beyond its control and its strength.” In that sentence was the first surfacing of what would become known in Washington as MacArthur’s Posterity Papers. He was already pulling back from any responsibility for the catastrophe taking place, blaming it instead first on the fates, and then on the civilians in Washington.

  ALMOST TO THE end Ned Almond had wanted to drive to Mupyongni. It was, thought Bill McCaffrey, as if he had become a prisoner of not just the orders from Tokyo, but also the myth of MacArthur. Bill McCaffrey had almost lost his own life in the foolishness. Just before the Chinese struck, he had been ordered by Almond to take a small number of men and set up what they called a “jump command post,” a small, temporary one, about a couple hundred yards from the Marine headquarters at the Chosin Reservoir. McCaffrey had been ordered by Almond to keep his small CP separate from the Marines, but to use it to pass on Corps orders to the Marines, to push them harder to attack to the west, because Smith now absolutely refused to move—he believed the orders were murderous. McCaffrey would be there as a presence from Corps and a means of goosing the Marines. My job, McCaffrey had thought to himself, is to pass on orders that are crazy to men who know they are crazy, and will surely be killed if they follow them.

  Almost as soon as he set up the CP, he was ordered back to Hungnam. As he drove his jeep out of the area, one of the Marines at the last outpost waved him through and yelled out, “Sir, you watch your ass going on from here—there’s Chinks all over these mountains.” He made it back to Hungnam, got a bite to eat, and, absolutely exhausted, went to bed. Around midnight he was awakened—the lieutenant colonel he had left in charge of the small CP was on the phone, his voice more desperate by the minute: The Chinese were attacking in strength…. The CP was about to be overrun…. What should they do? McCaffrey told the officer to try to make it to the nearby Marine headquarters, but even as he told him, the radio went dead. None of the men who had manned the small outpost was ever heard of again. I might have been the last man out, McCaffrey later thought.

  THE MEETING OF principals took place in Tokyo on the night of November 28, three days after the Chinese struck. It began just before 10 P.M. and lasted almost four hours. MacArthur did most of the talking, and as Blair noted, he was still underestimating the sheer size of the Chinese force by perhaps as many as a hundred thousand men. He seemed to think that only six Chinese divisions, or some 60,000 men, were engaged with Tenth Corps, when by then the more realistic number was twelve divisions, or about 120,000 men, with another eighteen or twenty divisions, and close to 200,000 men, engaged in the west. Walker was considerably more realistic than either Almond or MacArthur. He believed that they had to retreat but with luck should be able to hold a line at the narrow waist of the peninsula, near the North Korean capital. Almond, a prisoner of his earlier miscalculations, still wanted to continue the offensive, but it was far too late for that. It was time to save what remained of both commands—if possible. The word to pull back finally came from headquarters on November 29—very late in the battle, during which each day and each hour that passed had worked for the Chinese and against, in particular, the Second Infantry Division.

  If there was one symbolic moment that reflected how disconnected the Dai Ichi headquarters was from the battlefield, it took place at that meeting when Pinky Wright, who was the acting G-3 for MacArthur, suggested, in the midst of this crisis, that the American Army’s Third Division, relatively new in country and essentially used as a reserve so far by Almond, set out to cross the Taebaeks and link up with Walker’s force. It was a truly astonishing suggestion—a senior in ROTC at an American high school might well have come up with a better idea. That, even Almond noted, simply could not be done—there were no roads going west. Any American unit trying to cross on whatever trails existed would be easy prey for the Chinese.

  31

  ON THE WESTERN side of the peninsula, the decision to pull back the UN forces brought little relief for the Second Division. Dutch Keiser still had his division up front, in effect offering protection for other American units that were then retreating, but the division itself was in mounting danger. If November 30 was to be the tragic day in which Keiser’s division was torn apart, then November 29 was the wasted one, during which he failed, despite numerous appeals, to get his superior at Corps to understand the desperation of his position and begin the breakout, or at least discover what the possibilities were. On the morning of the twenty-ninth, Corps finally gave Keiser permission to go south on the road to Sunchon, about ten miles south of Kunuri. Corps assured Keiser that the road was open. A Turkish brigade, they said, was moving up the road at that moment as a relief column.

  John Coulter was greatly enamored of the Turks, even though he knew almost nothing about their fighting abilities. The Turks, striking-looking men, especially with their immense mustaches, simply appeared to him to be fierce warriors, and without much of an initiation process, he had made them his Corps reserve. Now he was throwing them into battle at a critically important moment. They were in general, it turned out, very green troops, led by poorly trained officers, and they suffered from serious language problems in dealing with both the Americans and the Koreans. Early in the fight against the Chinese they had allegedly captured two hundred Chinese soldiers, a wonderful moment at a bad time, which had given everyone a lift—except that the prisoners had turned out to be two hundred fleeing ROKs, who were quite humiliated because they had surrendered to their comrades. Now, sent north to hold a sector to the southeast of the embattled Second Division, the Turks were not exactly the relief force that Keiser needed. The Chinese, already waiting, promptly hammered part of the unit, and many of the troops, reported Paul Freeman of the Twenty-third Regiment, simply fled: “The Turks had been committed, but they had taken a look at the situation and they had no stomach for it and they were running in all directions.”

  All of this was of little help to Keiser, who had spent the twenty-ninth getting contradictory messages about whether or not the road south was open. At 4:30 P.M. on the twenty-ninth, with darkness falling, he had radioed to Corps that his situation at Kunuri was perilous. In that message, Keiser told Corps that the Turkish brigade that was supposed to reinforce his eastern flank had failed completely, and that his own badly battered Thirty-eighth Regiment, positioned on his east, could no longer hold. What was worse was his fear that his men could not break through on the main road going south to Sunchon, where the Chinese were already gathering, as evidenced by their destruction of the Turkish relief force. Keiser asked for permission to try an alternate route out, rather than the main road, which he feared was blocked by the Chinese. But he could never get any response, other than staff members telling him to stay with his existing orders.

  By the morning of the thirtieth, Coulter had had close to four days to understand accurately what the fate of the Second Division might be, even as the Chinese were gathering in ever-stronger units south of it, presumably ready to cut off the road. But he had done very little. Instead he had been busy moving his own headquarters to a safer location on the twenty-ninth and therefore had been difficult for Keiser to reach. It was his staff members—largely powerless—who had been forced to deal with Keiser’s increasingly desperate pleas. (Coulter, Paul Freeman bluntly noted later, had simply “fled the battlefield.”) His aides had passed on useless bromides indicating, for instance, that the British Middlesex Battalion was on its way north to help, when it was completely stalled out well south of what the Americans would eventually call The Pass, the critical bottleneck on the road out, about five and a half miles south of Kunuri. Perhaps more than anything else, the limited force sent in relief told it all in this sad tale of always too little and always too late. With as many as six Chinese divisions closing in on an American division trapped with marginal escape routes available, and other than untes
ted Turkish troops, Coulter had sent a British battalion.

  By the night of the twenty-ninth, Keiser was all too aware that a vast front was collapsing on him. Two of his three regiments, the Ninth and the Thirty-eighth, were no longer really combat-ready. He had three choices. The first would have demanded an exceptional anticipatory sense of what to do if the Chinese struck in force. That choice would be to consolidate the division, in effect circle the wagons, and use the awesome firepower of an American division against the Chinese, resupplying his own men by air, until the enemy was worn down. That would have meant turning the Second Division into an instant airborne division, momentarily isolated behind enemy lines, but still indefinitely resuppliable. That, one of Keiser’s artillery commanders, Lieutenant Colonel John Hector, suggested to a subordinate, Ralph Hockley, a few months later, was the way they should have gone. Eventually, based on some of the lessons learned at Kunuri, that would indeed become a critical part of the future American strategy, and under Matt Ridgway’s directions and Paul Freeman’s leadership, it was employed with great success at Chipyongni some two and a half months later. But no one had given it a moment’s thought before the Chinese struck, and by November 29, events had already outstripped this option.

  That left Keiser with two choices: go south to Sunchon as Corps had ordered, or go west, on the only other road out, to Anju. Whether that road was open no one was certain. The road to Anju ironically was mostly an American-made one, having recently been built up from little more than a trail by Hobart Gay, the commander of the First Cav. When the Cav had driven north after Unsan, Gay had become increasingly nervous about the Chinese presence, and at one point earlier in November when the division CP was positioned at Kunuri, he had ordered the engineers to work on the road to Anju to make it capable of servicing an American division, “just because you never know when you might need an extra way out, if they hit again,” as he told Lieutenant Jack Murphy, whom he was trying to recruit as an aide. But the Second Division’s intelligence remained shockingly bad. On the morning of the twenty-ninth, Keiser had jeeped over to Corps headquarters, still just a few miles west of his headquarters, and flown back in a light spotter plane because the road traffic was so heavy. His visit to Corps had not been a great help. Coulter had not been there. From the plane he had seen the roads choked with people moving south. At first, he had believed these were refugees. If that was true, there was hope that his troops too could get out. Later, he would decide that he might well have seen Chinese troops. Back at Kunuri the pressure was building as the Chinese forces closed in, and he kept getting conflicting reports about which route out might be safer and which he was permitted to use.