The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  After the battles along the Chongchon, Mao was ever more confident; Marshal Peng on the other hand was aware that much of his success had stemmed from the fact that the Americans had stupidly stumbled into a trap. He was concerned as his troops headed south; he had no air cover, and his logistical limitations were clear to him from the start. In Mao’s mind, however, the Americans had behaved as he had predicted, as capitalist pawns pressed reluctantly into an unwanted war. There were times now, as the Chinese moved south and Mao pressed for a more aggressive strategy, that Peng would shake his head, turn to his aide, Major Han Liquin, and complain about Mao becoming drunk with success. In Peng’s much more conservative view, there had already been serious signs of the difficulties ahead. Just feeding his vast army was a problem—in much of December they had gotten by subsisting largely on rations that the Americans had left behind, but their troops were now, he felt, half-starved. If they drove even farther south, the problem of feeding, and supplying his army with ammo, would be even worse.

  When his forces had caught the Americans utterly ill-prepared at the Chongchon River, even when they had isolated an American unit, they often found it difficult to finish that unit off, especially given the U.S. control of the skies. (That complete control had occasioned a certain droll humor among the crews of American antiaircraft guns. When fighters or bombers flew overhead, the men would identify them as “B-2s.” As yet there was no B-2 bomber in the Air Force inventory, so some soldier not yet clued in would ask in surprise, “What’s a B-2?” And the answer would invariably come back, “Be too bad if they weren’t ours.”) U.S. firepower was, as advertised, exceptional, and because of the Americans’ airpower and the mobility of their ground forces, they had a capacity to come to the rescue of isolated units that the Chinese had never seen before.

  Even at Kunuri, far more of the American fighting force had escaped than Chinese planners had imagined possible given the total surprise the Chinese achieved and the incompetence of the senior American command. But it was during what the Chinese called the Fourth Campaign, or Fourth Phase, that their vulnerabilities became fully apparent and tensions between the field commanders and the political men making the decisions broke into the open. The First Campaign had lasted from October 24 to November 5 and focused on the destruction of the ROK forces leading the advance north and then of the Eighth Cav at Unsan; the Second Campaign was the assault along the Chongchon and against the Marines at the Chosin Reservoir in late November and early December. The Third Campaign took place in early January after much debate between Mao and Peng, who wanted to delay it, sensing that his exhausted troops were being pushed too hard for political reasons. It involved a quick push south behind the retreating Americans, during which Seoul, the Southern capital, changed hands for the third time in six months. As the campaign ended, the lead Chinese armies found themselves deep in the South, at the thirty-seventh parallel. The Fourth Campaign, presumably to start in January, would be the big one, the one that Mao hoped would take them perhaps another hundred miles farther south and leave them ready to strike at Pusan.

  But as the Americans retreated down the long, thin peninsula, the Chinese began to experience some of the very problems that had frustrated their enemies—most particularly the problem of extended supply lines in a country with primitive roads and rail systems. Because they lacked air and sea power, this was a significantly more serious problem for them. When the Americans had moved north, they had been able to use trucks and trains without fear of being attacked from the air. They could, if necessary, transport badly needed ammo and food by air and sea. Not only did the Chinese have far fewer motorized vehicles to supply a vast army, but the trucks and trains were a perfect target for the ever stronger American air wing. It was Mao’s turn now to be distanced from the battlefield, and to see it, as MacArthur had, not as it actually was, but as he wanted it to be in his mind. Mao had misread the easy early victory up north, even as some of his commanders understood why it might not happen so readily again. As the historian Bin Yu noted, Mao now “encouraged by China’s initial gains began to pursue goals that were beyond [his] force’s capabilities.” That placed the burden of dealing with reality squarely on Peng’s shoulders.

  In a way Peng was an almost perfect counterpart to Ridgway—they could not have been more similar in what drove them and the way they saw and handled their own men. It would not be hard to imagine some switch in ancestry and an American version of Peng commanding the UN forces, and Ridgway, in a Chinese incarnation, the Chinese. Like Ridgway, Peng was a soldier’s soldier, unusually popular with his men, because he was sensitive to their needs. The more successful he became, the truer he remained to what he had been. Sometimes when his troops were moving long distances on foot, and other peasants, or coolies as Westerners called them, were serving primarily as bearers, carrying heavy loads strung over poles, he would take the pole from one of them and take a turn himself, which greatly impressed the troops and served to remind everyone—his men and himself—where it had all begun and, perhaps equally important, why it had begun. He was a man absolutely without pretension, which endeared him greatly to his troops. During the Long March, out of personal devotion, his men had twice carried him for long distances on a litter after he had been struck down with a severe fever. On one occasion when he was very sick in Sichuan, his men had refused to leave him behind; nursing him and carrying him along was their way of thanking him for the humane way he had always treated them.

  He was straightforward and no less blunt than Ridgway. It amused him when some of his former colleagues in what had been in the beginning a peasant army began to take on airs once they defeated the Nationalists. Peng still preferred to bathe in cold water, even when hot water was available, because he had always done so, and because this was what peasants did. In his lifestyle he preferred an almost monastic simplicity, and was uneasy with unwanted creature comforts. He preferred curing illnesses with herbs rather than modern medicines prescribed by doctors, and he always ate very slowly, deliberately so, he said, because he liked to think of the days when they had first started out, always hungry. Now that he had enough food, he intended to savor it.

  Peng was a good deal shrewder than some of the other people in the politburo gave him credit for. He had never been fooled by his early success up along the Chongchon. Even before the war began, he had believed that, given the unusual nature of the Korean peninsula, the opposing armies would have a terrible time getting supplies to either end of the country. “Korea,” he had told his staff before the war began, “will be a battle of supply.” That was why he argued successfully with Mao that when they hit the Americans all-out for the first time, they should do it from positions as far north as possible.

  But he also knew in what were for him the heady, good days of November and December how near the bad days might be. In the period after the success of the Second Offensive in late November, he was quite shrewd in sizing up the residual strength of the defeated American forces, and the price his troops had already paid, especially around the Chosin Reservoir. The Marines had fought back with a ferocity that belied Mao’s convictions about how the soldiers of a capitalist army would perform. When Peng spoke with his senior people, he would on occasion let a certain sarcastic note enter his voice about Mao—“some self-proclaimed experts on the art of war,” or “some military experts,” or “some people who see the conduct of war in dogmatic terms.” He was furious when both the Russians and North Koreans argued strongly in December that his troops should pursue the Americans more aggressively. The Russians were not putting their men into the field, and as for the North Koreans, he was bailing them out from their own incredible mistakes and poor leadership. He hated the pressure they put not so much on him, but on Mao, to move more rashly, the implication being that the Chinese were showing the world that they were not as good Communists, or as brave as Russians might have been in the same circumstances.

  19. THE FIGHT FOR THE CENTRAL CORRIDOR

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bsp; Peng’s constant mantra with his staff was the need for supplies. He had, at the start, commanded an army of some three hundred thousand men, and it grew even larger as he prepared for future battles. As he had predicted, the logistics were a nightmare: in December, he had at most three hundred trucks to ferry supplies to his men, and those trucks had to travel in the dark with their lights off, making at best a total of twenty to thirty miles a night. Resupply of both ammunition and food became the great vulnerability of his army. On the Chinese side much of the logistical support was done not by trucks but by Chinese bearers, who carried food and supplies south to Peng’s men, often on foot over enormous distances, and who, that part of the journey done, carried the wounded back north. Under these circumstances, much of his army existed, once it neared the thirty-eighth parallel, on a diet that was just a bit above starvation levels. Foraging was unpromising: as they moved back and forth across the Korean peninsula, both sides destroyed land and crops, something that weighed more harshly on the Chinese forces than on the Americans, who did not have to eat off the land. A cruel, arctic winter ensured that there was no abundant local food source for the Chinese troops; if Mao’s soldiers had, to use his famous phrase, been the fish swimming in the ocean of China’s peasants not so long before, now they were swimming in more hostile waters. The Korean peasants turned out to be just as dismayed to see them as they were to see the Americans or the ROKs, for almost nothing good happened once the war arrived in your village. As a result, malnutrition was a serious problem. Peng’s soldiers had, in the phrase used in those days, to fight their hunger with “one bite [of] parched flour and one bite [of] snow.” When their buddies were killed, they often scavenged their bodies for extra bullets and any extra food they could find.

  When the Chinese launched their Third Campaign on New Year’s Eve 1950, food from China met only a quarter of the army’s minimum needs. Because of the American bombing campaign, casualties among truck drivers were higher than among the combat troops. The troops themselves were in a constant state of exhaustion. By February, they had been fighting continuously under difficult conditions and essentially living off the land for more than two months, but UN airpower left little chance to rest, even in safe areas removed from the front lines. The cold was very hard on the Americans and their feet, and American commanders issued warning after warning about care of socks and feet, but it was much worse for the Chinese: their men traveled in high-top sneakers, and that made frostbite a constant problem for them. In time, many Chinese soldiers could not get their swollen feet into their sneakers and so simply wrapped them in rags to go forth to battle.

  Thus, even before the Third Campaign began, with his vast army still north of Seoul, and Mao badly wanting them to recapture the Southern capital for its propaganda value, Peng was lobbying to slow the offensive down so his men could rest and regroup. On December 8, 1950, he cabled Mao requesting a pause until the spring; in addition, he wanted to keep the battle area above Seoul. He believed that the American and UN forces had not been that badly damaged in the fighting in the North, and were now increasingly well dug in. It might simply be too costly to assault them and their wall of firepower south of Seoul. To Peng it made little military sense to risk so much for the small political victory that would come with the liberation of Seoul. Mao felt quite differently; so did the Soviets and Kim Il Sung. If originally Mao had seen the decision to enter this war as a way of serving notice on the rest of the world—especially a Communist world so long under the hegemony of the Russians—that this was a new China, now he was slowly becoming a prisoner of his own pride and vanity.

  In this way, the exceptional success of the early battles was turning into a burden for Peng. Because the Chinese had done so well, ever more was expected. The Soviets, through their ambassador to Korea, continued to push Peng to race ahead. Given the fact that the Soviets had not even made good on their promise of air cover, Peng was underwhelmed by Russian exhortations. To him they suggested admirable Russian battlefield audacity—paid for with Chinese lives. But Mao wanted much the same thing as the Russians; with the entire world watching, he badly desired the symbolic political victory that would come with the capture of Seoul. Besides, he had become contemptuous of the American forces—the early defeats had convinced him they were even weaker than the Chinese Nationalist armies he had defeated. By then some of America’s allies and some senior members of the Truman administration were talking about negotiating a cease-fire at the thirty-eighth parallel, but Mao was dubious. That his enemies wanted a settlement was proof to him that they knew they were losing and wanted to prevent a total defeat. Such a precipitous settlement was a trick on their part. On December 13, he sent Peng a cable pointing out the political dangers of failing to pursue their enemy. If Peng slowed down now, he warned his commander, the rest of the world would become suspicious of Chinese strength.

  On December 19, Peng cabled back, warning against “a rise of unrealistic optimism for quicker victory from other parts,” a reference to the Soviets and Kim Il Sung and, implicitly perhaps, Mao himself. Instead he proposed a rest period to be followed by the next major campaign. Mao wanted that campaign to start in early January, some six weeks ahead of Peng’s preferred schedule. Some adjustment for Peng’s needs was made; but, as Bin Yu has written, the final compromise reflected Mao’s vision, and because of that, in his words, the “political goals defined by Mao tended to go beyond the CPVF’s [the Chinese People’s Volunteer Forces] capacities.”

  What Mao wanted, Mao got. On New Year’s Eve, Peng struck, and eventually his troops did reach the thirty-seventh parallel, but the American retreat this time was careful and they took relatively few casualties. Ridgway had been in country only a few days when the offensive began and he was furious with the ROK performance. “It was,” he wrote in his history of the Korean War, “a dismaying spectacle. ROK soldiers by truckloads were streaming south without orders, without arms, without leaders in full retreat. Some came on foot or in commandeered vehicles of every sort. They had just one aim—to get as far away from the Chinese as possible. They had thrown their rifles and pistols away and had abandoned all artillery, mortars, machine guns, every crew-served weapon.” If he was pleased about anything, it was that unlike what happened during the retreat from Kunuri, the Americans here lost very little equipment.

  The one important question was: could they hold a line above Seoul? Ridgway reluctantly decided that they could not ignore the kind of pressure the enemy could apply to the impermanent bridges built by the American engineers across the Han River. He could not risk isolating part of his army on the north side of the Han when the bridges behind them could be so easily destroyed. His choice was a difficult one—especially for a man who always wanted to attack and now more than ever wanted to infuse some positive energy into his men: but they had to give up Seoul and go south. On January 3, he told Ambassador John Muccio to inform President Syngman Rhee that he was going to have to take his government and head south yet one more time, and do it very quickly at that, because the bridges would be closed to all but military personnel by mid-afternoon of that day. On January 4, Seoul was burning again and the bridges over the Han had been blown.

  The Third Campaign now seemed like another great success, and inevitably created pressure on Peng for yet more victories, and a belief among some in the Beijing leadership that he was being far too cautious. The idea that the Russians might think the Chinese timid appalled Mao. The balance between the two countries might change significantly in the next decade—as Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev started a de-Stalinization campaign and the Chinese claimed the mantle of Communist purists—but at that point, China was still the untested junior partner, and the Russians still had the right to judge the Chinese. Thus, it was easy for the Russians to goad Mao. Russian representatives in Beijing kept pressuring Mao to pursue the enemy. So too did Kim Il Sung. He met with Peng at his headquarters and asked him to pursue the Americans more audaciously.

  Peng co
ntrolled his temper. The Americans were not actually defeated, he said. They had held their army together better than Kim realized. They might simply be trying to lure the Chinese too far south, so that they could strike back with another amphibious landing (a not so subtle reminder of mistakes made in the past). Still, the retaking of Seoul seemed like a significant propaganda victory, and there were huge rallies in China celebrating its recapture. In late January, Mao cabled Peng with his directives for the next campaign. In the process, Mao suggested, Peng’s forces would wipe out twenty to thirty thousand enemy soldiers. It was as if the chairman had not heard a word Peng had said in the last few weeks, caught up as he was in his own dreams of glory.

  39

  BY EARLY FEBRUARY, the Chinese and American armies were stumbling toward a defining confrontation in what was known as the central corridor of Korea. It was a confrontation Ridgway now eagerly sought and about which Peng remained somewhat uneasy, though if the two forces had to meet, he greatly preferred that the central corridor with its mountainous terrain be the principal battleground. If he won, there would be little the UN forces could do to stop him. He intended that his troops could once again move up the mountainsides on foot at night, leaving the Americans once again warm in their vehicles on the roads deep in the valleys. So the Fourth Phase offensive would be launched, with control over the Wonju-Chipyongni area as its goal.