The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  In mid-January, when Joe Collins came through Asia to see MacArthur and Ridgway, he told Ned Almond he would soon be getting his third star. That was like a last tip of the hat, a final courtesy for MacArthur. Collins had come out with another member of the Joint Chiefs, Hoyt Vandenberg of the Air Force. Their first stop had been with MacArthur on January 15. Just a few weeks before, his dark cables might have struck terror in them. Now he was just an old man they had to check in with but whom they no longer feared and whose estimates and projections they no longer trusted.

  When Collins and Vandenberg left Tokyo to see Ridgway in Korea, they found him in a significantly more optimistic mood than they expected, sure, as he had written Haislip, that the job was doable and he could do it. His confidence was contagious—and those who did not share it would soon find themselves at other jobs. He was changing the Eighth Army as quickly as he could into an effective fighting force. He understood something that few others realized at the time. The Second, the Twenty-fifth, and the Seventh divisions had taken heavy casualties, but the physical damage to the Eighth Army was less than everyone imagined; the real damage had been psychological or emotional. Those divisions had lost a great deal of equipment, yes, but that could be replaced. The surprise that had resulted from stumbling into a giant Chinese trap and fighting a brand-new enemy in such poorly chosen terrain had magnified the sense of damage, and the resulting defeat had crushed his army’s morale. That was what had to be rebuilt—the spiritual or psychological side of his force.

  Collins cabled Bradley that night with a fairly positive view of the visit. It was, noted J. D. Coleman, who both fought in the war and then became a historian of Korea, the first good news anyone had gotten back at the Pentagon in almost two months. Bradley later called it “a turning point. For the first time we began to think the Chinese could not throw us out of Korea, even with the self-imposed limitations under which we were fighting.” When Collins returned to Washington, he briefed Truman on how well Ridgway was doing and how the morale of the Army was improving. He and Vandenberg had found MacArthur to be a querulous old man, dreaming of a war they had no intention of fighting. Ridgway by contrast was unintimidated by those early Chinese victories and the awesome size of their force; he seemed to have his finger on the strength and weakness of every unit and was full of confidence about what his forces could do. That was the way he had commanded in World War II, up front with his lead unit so that he could have as immediate a sense as possible of what was happening and which units might need help—an airborne division, after all, was not a place where you lingered back at your own CP. He was, his talented World War II deputy Jim Gavin, a famed airborne commander in his own right, once said, always drawn to the cutting edge of battle. “He was right up there every minute. Hard as flint and full of intensity, almost grinding his teeth with intensity; so much so that I thought that man’s going to have a heart attack before it’s over. Sometimes it seemed as though it was a personal thing: Ridgway versus the Wehrmacht. He’d stand in the middle of the road and urinate. I’d say: ‘Matt, get the hell out of there. You’ll get shot.’ No! He was defiant. Even with his penis he was defiant.”

  As Ridgway began to change the command structure and get rid of some of his division and corps commanders, the great question among many senior officers was what he was going to do about Ned Almond. A number of senior officers in the Eighth Army (and, of course, Marine officers) regarded Almond as a co-conspirator in the disastrous events up north and had hoped that he would be quickly moved aside. But Almond was not going to be relieved. He was aggressive at least, and Ridgway had a serious need for aggressive commanders, but from now on he was going to have to play it straight—there would be no gamesmanship nor end runs around Matt Ridgway. He would for a time be allowed to keep command of a corps—Ridgway was appalled by how weak his other corps commanders were—but he would have to give up his job as chief of staff. Neither Ridgway nor Joe Collins (for somewhat different reasons) wanted the look of a bloodbath at the top, and neither wanted to cross MacArthur unnecessarily. Almond was still MacArthur’s boy. If there was to be a major confrontation, let it be over something more important. So Almond remained in place, the officer everyone was watching. He would get his third star—MacArthur had lobbied hard for that—but his wings were going to be partially clipped. Bill McCaffrey had accompanied Almond on the day he met with Ridgway for the first time. It had been a long meeting and hardly a happy one. Almond had gone inside alone with Ridgway, with McCaffrey waiting outside. McCaffrey could tell from Almond’s mood afterward that he was badly shaken. He had emerged quite deflated, still a corps commander, but that and nothing more: a man who had just been told in a very tough way the new rules of the headquarters and that he was no longer going to play games with the Eighth Army commander.

  The changes in the fighting force began, of course, with the commanders. Major General John Coulter of Ninth Corps, who had performed so badly along the Chongchon, was seemingly promoted, given a third star, and sent off to a staff job in Tokyo; it was part of the code of the Army that when a senior officer failed in combat, great effort should be taken to protect his reputation and any sense of disgrace minimized, in no small part to show that the Army did not make mistakes. Ridgway did not immediately relieve the First Corps commander, Shrimp Milburn, who was an old friend. But there was a widespread belief that Milburn bore some of the responsibility for the disaster at Unsan, so Ridgway moved his own headquarters up to Milburn’s, as a means of prodding him to be more aggressive.

  There, his presence dominated the scene. Among headquarters officers, he became known as “the man who came to dinner” and “an honor we didn’t deserve.” In contrast to MacArthur, who never spent the night in Korea and who saw the war primarily in theoretical terms, Ridgway was there all the time. He wanted the fighting men in the field to know that he shared their knowledge and their hardships, and he wanted field commanders to know that he could not be fooled. His presence put everyone to a constant test of excellence. The corps chief of staff later said of that period, “Oh God! He came to every briefing every morning…. He’d go out all day with the troops, then when he came back at night I’d have to brief him again—on everything, even minor things like which way the water drained in our sector.” Though Milburn was kept on for a time, Ridgway relieved proxies as a means of delivering his message. Ridgway sat in on an early briefing with the corps G-3 Colonel John Jeter, and promptly made his displeasure with Corps known. During the briefing, Jeter went through a list of fallback positions. Ridgway asked what his attack plans were. Jeter answered that there were no attack plans. The next thing anyone knew, Jeter was gone, and word of it spread throughout the entire Eighth Army. It was probably not fair, relieving Jeter instead of Milburn, but nothing in Korea was fair then. Soon three division commanders were on their way home. They would be praised for what they had done, given medals and honorable new jobs, but the Eighth Army was not going to retreat anymore. Ridgway intended that they move forward whether they liked it or not. With that came a grudging nickname: “Wrongway Ridgway.”

  The other thing they were going to do was know their enemy—one more sign that the days of grandiose contempt for an Asian enemy, so racist in its origins, were over. More than most senior American commanders of his era, Matt Ridgway had a passion for intelligence. The American Army had always taken its intelligence functions somewhat casually; the men assigned to intelligence duty tended to have been passed over in their careers, not quite good enough for the prized command positions. Often the lower ranks in the Army’s intelligence shop were very good, but their superiors were not respected by their peers. Perhaps it was the nature of the modern American Army—it had so much force and materiel that when it finally joined battle, intelligence tended to be treated as a secondary matter, on the assumption that any enemy could simply be outmuscled and ground down.

  There were a number of reasons for Ridgway’s obsession with intelligence. Some of it was his own
superior intellectual abilities; he was simply smarter than most great commanders. Some of it was his innate conservatism, his belief that the better your intelligence, the fewer of your own men’s lives you were likely to sacrifice. A great deal of it was his training in the airborne, where you made dangerous drops behind enemy lines with limited firepower and were almost always outnumbered and vulnerable to larger enemy forces. Certainly, his wariness about joining Marshal Badoglio in taking Rome reflected an airborne officer’s insistence that his intelligence be the best. George Allen—who as a young CIA field officer in Vietnam briefed Ridgway daily for several weeks as the French war in Indochina was coming to its climax in 1954, later said he had never dealt with a man so acute and demanding, not even Walter Bedell Smith, who had been Dwight Eisenhower’s tough guy in Europe and later took over the CIA. Ridgway’s sense of the larger picture was so accurate, Allen believed, because of his determination to get the smallest details right. It was Ridgway’s subsequent report on what entering the war in Indochina would mean—five hundred thousand to one million men, forty engineering battalions, and significant increases in the draft—that helped keep America out of the war for a time.

  Charles Willoughby, one colleague said, would have lasted about an hour on Ridgway’s staff. The CIA, blocked from the Korean theater by MacArthur and Willoughby, was soon welcomed back. Starting at Eighth Army headquarters and running through the command, there was going to be a healthy new respect for the enemy. The Chinese had identifiable characteristics on the battlefield. They also had good, tough soldiers. Some units were clearly better than others, some division commanders better than others, and it was vital to know which these were and where they were. Now Ridgway intended to study them. There would be no more windy talk about the mind of the Oriental. The questions would be: How many miles can they move on a given night? How fixed are their orders once a battle begins? How much ammo and food do they carry into each battle—that is, how long can they sustain a given battle? Ridgway was going to separate battlefield realities from theoretical discussions about the nature of Communism. The essential question was: How exactly can we tilt the battlefield to our advantage?

  Ridgway now intended to play at least as big a role in the selection of the battlefield as his Chinese opposites. For a time, he started his day by getting in a small plane and, with Lynch at the controls, flying as low as they could, looking for the enemy. With that many Chinese coming at his army, there had to be signs of them, evidence that they existed, but he saw almost nothing. That he found nothing did not, as had happened in November after Unsan, create a lack of respect for them—rather it brought greater respect for the way they could move around seemingly invisible. Gradually Ridgway began to put together a portrait of who the Chinese were and how they fought—and so, how he intended to fight them. The Chinese were good, no doubt about that. But they were not supermen, just ordinary human beings from a very poor country with limited resources. Not only did the Chinese operate from a large technological disadvantage, they had significant logistical and communications weaknesses. The bugles and flutes announcing their attacks could be terrifying in the middle of the night, but the truth was that, with only musical instruments, they could not react quickly to sudden changes on the battlefield. If they had a breakthrough, they often lacked the capacity to exploit it immediately. That was a severe limitation; it meant that a great deal of blood might be shed without their getting adequate benefits. In addition, certain logistical limitations were built into any attack they made—the ammunition and food they could carry was finite indeed. The American Army could resupply in a way inconceivable to the Chinese and so could sustain a given battle far longer.

  Ridgway spent his first few weeks in country pressing everyone for information about the Chinese fighting machine. By the middle of January, he felt he knew much of what he needed to know. This war, he decided, was no longer going to be primarily about gaining terrain as an end in itself, but about selecting the most advantageous positions available, making a stand, and bleeding enemy forces, inflicting maximum casualties on them. The key operative word would be “pyrrhic.” What he now sought was an ongoing confrontation in which every battle resulted in staggering losses for the Chinese. At a certain point, even a country with a demographic pool like China’s had to feel the pain from the loss of good troops. He wanted to speed up that moment, to let his adversaries know that there were no more easy victories out there for the picking, no second shot at a big surprise attack. If the war was to be a grinder then the great question was: which side would do the more effective job of grinding up the other?

  The first thing Ridgway realized was that it was a disaster to retreat once the Chinese hit. The key to their offensive philosophy was to stab at a unit, create panic, and then, from advantageous positions already set up in its rear, maul it when it retreated. All armies are vulnerable in retreat, but an American unit, because of all its hardware, condemned to the narrow, bending Korean roads, was exceptionally so. What the Chinese had done at Kunuri, Ridgway learned, matched their MO when they fought the Nationalists in their civil war. But no one, it appeared, had been paying much attention. The disaster at Kunuri, he believed, had not been writ so large because the Chinese were such magnificent soldiers or even had such an overwhelming advantage in manpower. Even as far north and as vulnerable as they were, if the American units had been well buttoned down at night, if each unit had had interlocking fields of firepower with reliable flanking units (and had not counted on the ROKs to protect them), the outcome of the battle might have been different. Even at Kunuri, the military had had the capacity to resupply the troops by air until the Chinese were exhausted. Ridgway’s long training as an airborne man was critical to the strategy he sought now. He meant to create strong islands of his own, sustain unit integrity with great fields of fire, and then let the enemy attack. It was, he believed, why Colonel John Michaelis, with his Twenty-seventh Regiment Wolfhounds, had been so much more successful than other regimental commanders in the early part of the war. Michaelis was an airborne guy, and he did not mind if his men were cut off as long as unit integrity was preserved. He knew he could always be resupplied by air.

  What Ridgway wanted to do was start the Eighth Army moving north again—for reasons of morale as much as anything. In mid-January, he began the process, sending Michaelis’s unit toward Suwon. He named this first offensive action Operation Wolfhound in their honor. Michaelis had known Ridgway before Korea, but not well. Still, he had been struck by Ridgway’s fierce beetle-eyed glare—that was how he would later describe it—that went right through you. Ridgway had been in Korea only a few days when he called him in.

  “Michaelis, what are tanks for?” he asked.

  “To kill, sir.”

  “Take your tanks to Suwon,” Ridgway said.

  “Fine, sir,” Michaelis answered. “It’s easy to get them there. Getting them back is going to be more difficult because they [the Chinese] always cut the road behind you.”

  “Who said anything about coming back?” Ridgway answered. “If you can stay up there twenty-four hours, I’ll send the division up. If the division can stay up there twenty-four hours, I’ll send the corps up.” That, thought Michaelis, was the start of a brand-new phase of the war, the beginning of the turnaround. Without the Chinese leadership realizing it, a very different UN force was coming together in Korea.

  Part Nine

  Learning to Fight the Chinese: Twin Tunnels, Wonju, and Chipyongni

  38

  THE CHINESE WERE about to encounter a very different American command structure, and thus a very different American Army, in three battles in mid-February 1951, at Twin Tunnels, Chipyongni, and Wonju. But even before the two forces collided there, significant fissures had been appearing in the Chinese command structure. They had first showed up during the earliest discussions between China’s military and political leaders, in September and October 1950, when Mao was pondering the question of intervention. Back then Li
n Biao had opposed the coming war, fearing greatly superior American firepower that the Chinese could not possibly match. He argued that the firepower of an American division was roughly ten to twenty times greater than that of its Chinese equivalent. He and some of the other military men made an additional point: there was such a vast gap between U.S. capabilities, given the country’s awesome industrial base, and China’s limited ability to sustain a modern war, that replenishing equipment alone might prove a crisis in itself.

  The fact that Lin had even made the argument—before excusing himself from an unwanted command because of alleged problems with his health—reflected a deep uneasiness among many of the Chinese military men, as well as the almost complete supremacy of the political people. They were all political men, of course, even the military men understood that; their basic doctrine made clear that political realities came first, military ones second. This was how and why they had been so successful in their long, demanding civil war. Their lack of an ability to replenish their weaponry had not been a problem—they had always been able to capture additional weapons from Chiang’s forces. Their doctrines had all been based on almost unshakeable political truths in that war, but it had been waged on Chinese soil, where their ease in gaining and holding the loyalty of the peasants, long denied elemental dignity and basic economic rights, gave them an unassailable advantage. Whether the same dynamic would work in a foreign land was an open question, even if it was an Asian one with a comparably aggrieved peasant population and where in the North, at least, the Chinese represented an ostensibly fraternal Communist party. If politics, as Mao believed, had its special truths that they knew better than anyone else, then military men like Peng Dehuai, political though they also were, knew that the battlefield had its truths as well. The political and military truths had dovetailed perfectly during the Chinese civil war, but they would separate in Korea, where Chinese troops in the eyes of most Koreans would be simply another foreign army and where the appearance of Chinese soldiers would have its own colonial implications.