The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  On the thirtieth as on the twenty-ninth, Corps continued to withhold permission to go out west, while continuing to feed Keiser illusory reports on the alleged strength of the Chinese on the road south and on the British relief force, code named Nottingham, supposedly fighting its way north. No one mentioned to Keiser that the road was now actually in much worse shape because it was littered with the carcasses of the vehicles that the Turks had been using, clogging up what had been a rather narrow pathway in the first place. Corps thought the Chinese positions were some six miles south of where they actually were. Division thought the same thing. Corps thought the British relief team was making progress, when it had been completely stopped. So did Division. Worse, Division thought on the morning of the thirtieth that the Chinese block was relatively thin and that a strong party could smash through. “The hope was that [the Chinese] were in a relatively small place far down the road, and that when we got there we could suppress their fire there, drive them off, or just barrel through” was the way Captain Alan Jones, the Ninth Regiment intelligence officer, put it. Neither Corps nor Division knew whether the road west to Anju was open. Henry Becker, the division provost marshal, and thus in charge of its MPs, had erroneously reported that it was blocked. But even if it were open, Keiser was not sure he had permission to go out on it.

  NOTHING SHOWED JUST how vulnerable they were and how little time they had left more clearly than the first Chinese attack on Division headquarters on the night of the twenty-ninth. Early that evening the headquarters commandant visited various units clustered around the schoolhouse that served as headquarters, to warn them of a probable attack that night. Captain Malcolm MacDonald, the young assistant G-2, took his telephone and some of his other equipment and moved them outside the schoolhouse to a nearby building foundation. Sure enough, about 8 P.M., the mortars and the machine gun fire began. MacDonald watched, fascinated. He could see the flash of the Chinese weapons about three hundred yards away. One of the first mortar rounds landed on a nearby tent, igniting it and thereby giving the Chinese an exceptionally good look inside the perimeter. There had probably been a company of Chinese involved—undoubtedly just a probe—and it took about an hour to drive them back. But it underlined how dangerous the division’s status was, how little buffer there was between them and the enemy, growing stronger by the hour. It was not a comforting thought for MacDonald. You might expect enemy troops to slip up to a regimental headquarters. But to a division headquarters? He had never heard of it before.

  At one point during the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, Major General Milburn, the First Corps commander and a close personal friend of Keiser’s, had called in to see if he could offer any help. His sector was to the west of Keiser. He had heard about the Sunchon road being cut. How was it going? he asked.

  “Bad,” Keiser answered. “We’re getting hit in my CP.”

  “Well, come out my way,” Milburn said, meaning the road to Anju.

  It was a tempting invitation, but it would have to be cleared through the people at Ninth Corps. Earlier on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, with Corps’ approval, the division had sent some of its trains of heavy equipment out by the road to the west, that convoy linking up with men of First Corps moving south. But that was a very different thing from committing the entire division to the road. In the meantime there was a swirl of rumors about what was open and what was closed—and Division headquarters seemed effectively blind. Very late on the twenty-ninth, after the mortar attack on headquarters, Keiser called Corps one more time suggesting they take the Anju road out, and was turned down. Thus, at about 1 A.M. on November 30, he summoned his top staff and told them that Coulter had just ordered him to attack down the Sunchon road at dawn. Coulter had flown over the road that afternoon and did not think the Chinese block was very strong. He was confident, he had added, that the Second Division should be able to break through. With that, the argument was over. The road south might be narrow, with high banks on both sides, just perfect for an ambush; it might be cluttered with American vehicles, which would slow down traffic, all of it a prescription for a retreat through hell—but they now had their orders.

  ON THE MORNING of the thirtieth, the Second Engineers were waiting for their place in the convoy slated to head south. The convoy was moving at a pathetically slow pace. None of the battalion’s senior officers was happy with the decision to go south. They all knew, in the way that soldiers always know, that it was very bad on the road, and getting worse; the reports coming back were ever more ominous, and the engineers were well aware that their exceptionally heavy gear would be a prime target. Captain Larry Farnum was acting as both the S-2 and S-3 (intelligence and operations officer—in a division it’s G-2 or G-3; in a regiment or battalion it’s S-2 or S-3) of the battalion because his superior did not trust the nominal S-3. On his own, because the engineers were so burdened with heavy gear, he had been running recon units, trying to figure out which way out was best, and he was convinced that the road to Anju was still open and the road south effectively closed—that any attempt to push a force as clumsy as a division down it would meet with disastrous results. He knew that a number of attempts to remove the Chinese blocks along the road had already failed. The situation, he believed, was clearly out of control.

  On his own, Farnum went to Division headquarters early on the afternoon of the thirtieth and pleaded for the right to go out west. At least, he pleaded, let’s send our heavy gear out west. But Colonel Maury Holden, the division G-3, kept saying he had his orders and could not change them. When Farnum pushed him hard, Holden, widely regarded as the ablest officer at Division, resisted him and kept repeating that it was orders, and orders were orders.

  The problem, Holden told Farnum, was Tokyo. Talking to Corps, he said, was like talking to Tokyo because they were so fearful there. “But because I was such a brash young captain and because so much was riding on it,” Farnum recalled, he pushed Holden to try one more time. So Holden, with a shrug of resignation, got on the radio. “You and I know what the answer is going to be,” he added. He spoke to Corps briefly and shook his head again. Then he turned to Farnum and said he had to go, they were closing up headquarters; his jeep was already loaded, and he and the top division officers, surrounded by ack-ack guns and tanks, were heading south. And with that, as headquarters packed up and left, communications between different units of the Second Division, always bad, became even worse.

  So it was that the men of the Second Division began their retreat from Kunuri. They were beleaguered before they started, exhausted, many of their units already badly battered. Of the three regiments, the only one not already torn apart in the previous five days was Paul Freeman’s Twenty-third. It was assigned to hold the line against the vast Chinese forces gathering north of Kunuri.

  By the time Keiser sent out his weakened battalions of the Ninth Regiment to help clear the sides of the road south, the Chinese had moved to within a mile of his headquarters and had fire positions over a full six-or seven-mile stretch of the road. They were already dug in on the high ground and would have been hard to dislodge even by fresh troops with plenty of fire support. The Chinese might not have heavy weapons, just mortars and machine guns, but they were good with those mortars, and their burp guns threw out a lot of fire at close range—it was, by the testimony of a good many American officers, the best basic infantry weapon in Korea. It lacked the accuracy of the M-1 rifle or the carbine, but it provided a lot more firepower a lot more quickly. The burp gun was a formidable weapon in that war: it sounded, said Captain Hal Moore (eventually a three-star general), “like a can of marbles when you shook them, but on full automatic it sprayed a lot of bullets and most of the killing in Korea was done at very close range and it was done quickly—a matter of who responded faster. In situations like that it outclassed and outgunned what we had. A close-in patrol fight was over very quickly and usually we lost because of it.”

  Keiser had started the day by trying to clear the ridges on both
sides of the road, assigning two battalions from the Ninth Regiment to do the job (one for each side of the road). But he overestimated the strength of the now ravaged Ninth—both units, according to Alan Jones, were at less than half strength, at most 300 men in a battalion that should have had at least 800 to 850 men—and quite likely fewer who were truly able-bodied. No one was sure of the numbers, but it was possible that they had started the day with a division of Chinese covering the road, and more arriving as the hours wore on.

  The Second Battalion of the Ninth Infantry Regiment, commanded by Major Cesidio (Butch) Barberis, had been hit repeatedly by the Chinese since the twenty-fifth, probably harder than any other infantry battalion in the division. By the end of the first day of the Chinese attack, George Company of the Second Battalion, which normally had around two hundred men, had had seventy-three either killed or wounded, while E Company was down to a handful of men. All of Barberis’s men were exhausted—in the first three days of fighting his men had crossed the Chongchon four times. He had received a significant whiskey ration before the Chinese struck, and each time his men made it across the river, he would insist that they change their socks and then he would give them a shot of whiskey right then and there, and a second one for their canteens. By the time Barberis and his men had reached Kunuri, Barberis, though still commanding, had been wounded, and had about 150 of his original 970 men—the number he’d had when he had first crossed the Chongchon—available to fight. That pathetic little unit was now designated to drive a large, well-entrenched Chinese force off one of the ridgelines.

  It wasn’t going to happen. Long before he reached his assembly point, Barberis looked up and saw movement on the high ground in the distance. He got on the radio and asked who was up on the ridgeline. The ROKs, he was told. He looked through his field glasses and noted two machine guns, as he put it, “looking down my throat.” Colonel Sloane, the regimental commander who had sent Barberis to the ridgeline, had been told earlier in the day that there might be two Chinese companies up there. Instead, according to Malcolm MacDonald, the intelligence officer, it was minimally two regiments, around six thousand men. Now Barberis called Sloane and told him, “I’m four thousand yards from my assembly area and I see enemy positions. I think I’ve got my tit in a wringer.” Then the Chinese machine guns opened up. “All hell broke loose,” Barberis said. His unit was quickly attacked from the other side of the road as well. He called Sloane, who told him to come back for a conference. Then the Chinese struck with mortars, and Barberis was wounded for the second time. The retreat down the road south had barely begun, and the road was already littered with the dead and with disabled vehicles.

  IT WAS DUTCH Keiser himself who told Captain Jim Hinton, the company commander of the Thirty-eighth Tank Company, to take his tanks and lead the way south. Hinton had his tanks lined up at the very head of the column when Keiser walked up to him and said, “We’ve got a little roadblock down there, about two hundred or four hundred yards deep. Do you think you can get through?” Hinton answered—thinking almost the moment the words were out of his mouth what a smart-ass he was, thirty-five years old and cocky as hell. “Well, General, I’ve been running roadblocks for five days, so I guess I can run another one.” Privately, Hinton had grave doubts about going south. He had done his own recon two or three miles down the Anju road, the one that went out west, that many of the officers wanted to try, and it looked open to him. It was, for a Korean road, not bad, if anything even a little wider than most. The one thing he understood in the midst of all the uncertainty was that the men giving the orders that day had no earthly idea of what they were doing. The roadblock that Keiser had mentioned to him, allegedly about two hundred to four hundred yards long, was in reality several miles long.

  Hinton decided to use Sam Mace to lead the convoy—an easy choice, for Mace was his best man. So he ordered Mace to take his five tanks and clear the road south to Sunchon. They started out, Mace up front, and Hinton in a jeep two or three vehicles back, followed by more tanks and then infantry loaded up on big deuce-and-a-half trucks. They had gone several hundred yards when the Chinese opened up from both sides. Hinton was immediately hit in the wrist. His exec officer called in and said that they were sitting ducks out there, and Hinton replied that no one had to tell a sitting duck that it was a sitting duck. So he amended his order to Mace. It was now How Able, or in translatable, basic English, Haul Ass. A roadblock of four hundred yards at most, the hell you say, Hinton thought bitterly. This one looked like it went on forever. They had walked right into one of the largest ambushes in American military history.

  Mace thought the exact same thing. He had been told that when he headed south he was to clear the enemy out and then meet up with a British armored unit that was heading north. Well, a small roadblock, he could take care of that. But the road was a skinny one. It was immediately apparent that it could easily be blocked by just one disabled tank or overturned heavy truck. There was a high bank on the eastern side that might have been designed for a prolonged ambush. Mace’s five tanks were to lead a convoy interspersed with trucks and with some infantrymen riding on top of the tanks to help control the road and suppress, if need be, Chinese fire from the high ground. From the start, Mace’s tanks took heavy fire from the hillside. It was a slow, wildly dangerous start-and-stop process, of letting the infantrymen off the tanks and then firing back to suppress Chinese fire; Mace had a profound sense of foreboding that he and his men had somehow become bit players in a script written by the enemy.

  Among the infantrymen was Lieutenant Charley Heath of the Thirty-eighth Regiment. About a quarter mile into the journey, Mace came upon an abandoned M-39 vehicle blocking the road. There had already been other vehicles in their way, and Mace had been able to tank-doze them off to the side. The M-39 was big and its tracks were locked. But Mace was one of those men who seemed to know how to do everything. He yelled out for someone to unlock the tracks, and Charley Heath suddenly appeared, a target for every Chinese soldier on the heights. That’s a good man, Mace thought, and he yelled out instructions on how to move the levers to release the tracks. Out of that moment came a lifelong friendship begun in what both thought was a curious place, on that god-awful, narrow road, the Chinese firing away from both sides, men getting killed all around them. Heath felt like bait for the Chinese until finally he got the levers right and the wheels released, and Mace smashed the M-39 to the side. On the way back to his tank, Heath suffered a concussion when an American fighter-bomber dropped a rocket a bit too close, and soon he could barely see because his eyes began to bleed from the effect of the explosion. Still, he had made it to the M-39 and back alive. Lucky Charley, he had thought to himself, at least so far.

  A little later, Mace swung his tank around a sharp curve and almost froze. There ahead of him, about three miles away by his reckoning, he could see the section of the road called The Pass. Here, for about five hundred yards, the road had been cut through what appeared to be one large hill. The banks on both sides were very sharp and steep—and the passage was exceedingly tight. As he got closer, it seemed as if any enemy soldier on either side could almost reach out and touch the American vehicles. If the Chinese knocked out even one or two of them in The Pass, Mace thought they might be able to stop this already cumbersome American convoy from getting out. As he finally drove his tank into The Pass, he wondered for an instant if it might not be the last thing he would ever do in his life. But to his surprise, the world did not explode.

  The Pass was already littered with vehicles—the ruins of the Turkish convoy that had been torn apart the day before—the carcasses of jeeps, weapons carriers, two-and-a-half-ton trucks, a grand trail of useless metal that the Chinese could now use against the Americans. Mace did not know whether he was more scared or angry at that moment, because this wreckage clearly had been there some time and no one had said a thing about it. Where the hell had any aerial recon been? he wondered. Corps had lots of spotter planes. Why hadn’t Division know
n on its own? So he cleared the road as best he could. It was a miserable, dangerous job, but he was lucky, he thought later—though if there were such a thing as real luck, he wouldn’t have been in Korea at all—the Chinese had not yet filled in positions on either side of the road, and so the firing was lighter than it would be later in the day. Mace and another tank driver rammed everything in sight out of the way, maybe thirty or forty vehicles. If they hadn’t, the disaster that day might have been immeasurably worse. As he finished trying to clear the area, Mace wondered briefly why Keiser had not sent one of his own men along and used Mace’s tank as a recon vehicle, or at least had a light spotter plane flying overhead. When they finally pushed through, Mace and his men were the only members of the Second Division who knew just how dangerous the road south was—how many Chinese were already gathered there, with at least forty machine guns, he was sure, as well as countless mortars trained on the road. He knew as well that the British were not going to be of any help—but there was no way to get word back to Keiser’s headquarters because his tank radio did not connect with Keiser’s. It was the perfect preamble for the disaster still to come.