The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  By February 10, the small patrols that Freeman was sending out had determined that the area was swarming with Chinese and his terrain was shrinking by the hour. That Paul Freeman is now considered one of the three or four most distinguished regimental commanders of the Korean War, his reputation based largely on his performance at Chipyongni, is not without considerable irony. For in the days immediately preceding the battle, he wanted badly to pull back, fearing the immense buildup of Chinese all around his perimeter. By February 12, it was clear to him that his men were soon to be encircled by an overwhelming force. That was bad enough. Worse yet, American forces in two of the Thirty-eighth Regiment’s battalions were being cut up just north of Wonju, and it was possible that the rest of Tenth Corps might not be able to hold the town itself. Already two relief forces sent out to reinforce Freeman, one of them the British Commonwealth Brigade, had been hit hard and found themselves unable to break through. To Freeman, his lonely salient facing what seemed to him like all the Chinese ever sent to Korea was “sticking out like a sore thumb.”

  When he asked for permission to pull back, he was told that Ridgway wanted him to stay put. As the moment when the Chinese would attack grew even closer, all the senior officers of the Twenty-third knew that some kind of argument was going on at a pay level far above theirs. All the other UN units in the area were pulling back—but not the Twenty-third. Their orders on February 12, as recorded by the regimental operations officer, were to stay put: “We are to remain. By order of Scotch.” (Scotch was the code name for Ridgway.) On that same day, Major John Dumaine, the regimental operations officer, told Captain Pratt that Freeman wanted to pull back, but he was doubtful they would be able to get out now, partly because of the masses of Chinese moving in around them: “I don’t think we could withdraw now if we wanted to. The latest report by Shoemaker [Major Harold Shoemaker, the regimental intelligence officer, who would die at Chipyongni] is that the road south, our only avenue of escape, is already swarming with Chinese and is closed. Even if we got permission to withdraw, we would have to fight another gauntlet to get out. I think we are going to stay and fight it out.” That seemed to seal it; a siege was already on and airdrops of supplies already taking place. For those at Chipyongni, their destiny, they now knew, was something they would have to determine themselves. They were on their own.

  But Freeman and Ruffner at Division still hoped to get their orders changed. Even Almond agreed, in part because of the growing failure of other units under his command. Almond had flown in to meet with Freeman around noon on February 13, aware that the battle around Wonju was going very badly, which placed Chipyongni in even greater jeopardy. He found Freeman anxious, talking about the possibility of losing his entire regiment in this battle. Freeman asked for permission to withdraw on the morning of the fourteenth. He wanted to retreat to Yoju, about fifteen miles south, even though there was an increasing likelihood that the Chinese had cut the road. His position, he said, was very fragile. He had the approval of Ruffner, the division commander, to move back, and now Almond seemed to agree as well.

  Inside the Twenty-third perimeter, word got around very quickly that they were going to pull back. In fact the commander of the RCT (Regimental Combat Team) antiaircraft battery, sure that they were soon to retreat and believing he had too much ammunition to take out with him, asked for permission to fire some of it into the distant hills. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Meszar, the regimental executive officer, told him to wait another day just to be sure. By the time Almond got back to his corps headquarters, Freeman had changed his mind—he no longer felt he could wait an additional day and wanted to go out on the thirteenth. Right after his meeting, Freeman sent a message to Division headquarters: “Almond here about 11?2 hours ago, asked my recommendation when I could move back to Yoju. I told him in the morning. I have changed my recommendation to as early as possible this evening…. Pass this request to CG Xth Corps and relay answer to me as soon as possible.” Now the decision belonged to only one man, the man who had wanted this particular battle in the first place. Ridgway remained immune to additional pleas from inside Chipyongni. What he did promise was that, if Freeman stayed and fought, he would make sure a relief force punched through. If need be, he said, he would send the entire Eighth Army to rescue them.

  As an old airborne man, he was convinced that Freeman’s troops, well dug in and with a good deal of firepower, could be resupplied with ammunition and other needs by air. This then was the test battle he had been hoping for; imperfect perhaps, but one never got the perfect battle. It pitted, if things worked out, superior U.S. firepower against superior numbers, in a venue more or less chosen by the Chinese rather than by us, and as such ought, Ridgway hoped, to be a litmus test for the rest of the war.

  Sometime in the late afternoon of the thirteenth, Sherman Pratt visited Freeman and found him fatalistic. Freeman showed Pratt a map that reflected their complete encirclement by perhaps four divisions of Chinese troops, he said. He told Pratt simply, “If they [the Chinese] want it, they are going to have to come and fight for it. I think we are ready—that we can fight well where we are now.” Early on the evening of the thirteenth, Freeman called his commanders together. There had been a lot of talk about pulling back, he said, but it wasn’t going to happen. “We’ll stay here and fight it out.” He wanted every commander to check each foxhole and each field of fire one last time. The attack, he said, might come that night.

  He had placed the First Battalion on the northwest sector, the Third Battalion on the northeast and east sectors, the French battalion to the west, and the Second Battalion to the south. He had some fifty-four hundred men under his command, a beefed-up regiment, a regimental combat team. The Chinese, it was believed, had elements of five divisions, a force of perhaps thirty to forty thousand men. Chipyongni was to be not just a battle but a siege. The only way for Freeman’s forces to get more ammo and food was by parachute airdrops.

  43

  EVEN AS THE defenders at Chipyongni were digging in, the battle of Wonju was coming to a climax. The Wonju battle plan, Operation Roundup, had been pure Ned Almond and it had been a curious one, especially at this stage of the war. Almond’s assault was part of a larger Ridgway-planned offensive—in effect, the right flank of Operation Thunderbolt. But it was significantly less cautious than that of his commander, even though his assigned terrain was more mountainous and so better tailored for the tactics of the Chinese. Almond once again ignored warnings from his senior intelligence people that the Chinese command had shifted the core of its forces into the area and the Chinese were up to something big. The fiasco along the Chosin, so much of it his responsibility, it was believed, had not created a new, more tempered, and wiser Ned Almond. Now, ten weeks later, given another chance to engage the Chinese, he was still far too aggressive, still careless about his incoming intelligence, still given to sending out units that could readily be isolated by the Chinese and thus destroyed, still underestimating the professionalism and the tactics of his enemy. All of this ended up, as Clay Blair wrote, “evoking memories of Almond’s operations in northeast Korea.” “Almond’s Folly,” Jim Hinton, who had made it out of Kunuri successfully but who was seriously wounded in the coming battle, called it. What Hinton remembered was the fury of Colonel Robert Coughlin, the new commander of the Thirty-eighth Regiment. Almond had effectively taken over command of his regiment, Coughlin told Hinton, breaking it up into smaller units, separating the battalions from one another, isolating them, and making each battalion that much more vulnerable. That was in contrast to the force moving north on the western front, where the different units were quite tightly bound to one another. If the Chinese struck, it would be hard for these weakened units to defend themselves. As far as Coughlin could tell, it was the exact opposite of what they were supposed to have learned from the first go-round with the Chinese.

  For those Americans who admire the military, the remarkable presence of a great military force within a working democracy, Almo
nd’s role in this war remains, more than half a century after he left the battlefield, singularly disturbing. Almond was old school, but it was a dubious old school. In the ultimate democratic institution where men were supposed to be judged only on their battlefield performance, and their willingness to die if need be, he refused to judge them on merit and instead preferred to hang on to his prejudices. To the end he held on to the racism of his early years. In 1971, six years into the combat phase of Vietnam, when he was long retired, he was still saying as forcefully as he could that integration weakened combat units.

  His racism had always been a critical part of the problem. His prejudices did not necessarily set him apart from other senior officers in the Army at that moment, but there was an intensity—a passion—to them that disturbed younger officers around him, not to mention the black soldiers and officers who were the victims of his racism. He thought of blacks, some of whose first victories as full American citizens were about to take place in this war, as an inferior species. If they served at all, it should be in some servile way, what was called “ash and trash.” Harry Truman and now Matt Ridgway were trying to desegregate the Army, and Ned Almond in his own way was trying to resegregate it, trying as best he could to create separate black units.

  In mid-January 1951, during an early battle around Wonju, a black captain named Forest Walker successfully led a bayonet and hand grenade charge against some well-dug-in North Koreans. His battalion commander, Butch Barberis, greatly admired and by then a lieutenant colonel, whose word was never doubted by his peers, told Ridgway about Walker’s valor a day later, and Ridgway, visibly impressed, ordered the Silver Star for him. Eventually Almond found out about the medal, stopped it, and had Walker relieved of his company command. When one of his favorite officers from World War II, Bill McCaffrey, finally got a regiment in Korea, a command expedited by his connection to Almond, the general was furious with his old friend for integrating it. McCaffrey had placed three black soldiers in every squad. “You didn’t,” Almond said.

  “Yes, sir, I did,” McCaffrey replied.

  “You of all people should have known better than that,” Almond shot back—a reference to their days together with the Ninety-second.

  “But, General, it’s working,” McCaffrey insisted.

  Almond just shook his head. To him, it was like a betrayal by a member of his family.

  What was important about Almond’s prejudice, loathsome as it was in itself, was that—in addition to being extremely painful for the black soldiers serving under him—there were serious professional consequences to it. For there were men who fought under him and studied him, who believed that his racism did not stop there. As J. D. Coleman noted, Almond saw the Chinese in much the same way. One of the reasons he pushed his troops forward so recklessly in the Chosin Reservoir fighting was that he did not take the Chinese seriously as an opponent. He believed that even if they showed up on the battlefield, they would flee from American forces, because they were a lesser people. That was what was so important about the laundrymen phrase; he saw this talented enemy not as they had become on the battlefield. Instead, they were still, in his eyes, the kind of people who should be back in America, doing the laundry of white people.

  Coleman, who had fought with the 187th Regimental Combat Team under Almond, believed his lack of interest in the way the Chinese fought, his failure to learn from earlier battles against them, was but one more reflection of what he called Almond’s “incipient racism.” In the weeks that followed the battles in the north that had gone so badly, none of his commanders was ever summoned to discuss what had been learned so far about the Chinese. “Post-Korea we did a lot of studies on their tactics,” Coleman said years later, “but at the time we did very little—there was no attempt to put together as quickly as we could in those first few weeks what we had learned about them, their tactics, their strengths, weaknesses, logistical limitations, how they tried to panic you and then set up an ambush south of you. There was a lot to learn and we didn’t learn it. It was as if we didn’t need to—they were not seen as a foe worthy of study. And it cost us badly at Hongchon and Hoengsong and Wonju [all part of the greater battle for Wonju]. I’ve always put it off to a kind of innate, unconscious American racism. Almond failed to learn quickly enough from the first defeat and I think it was because his prejudices blocked out his intelligence.” As late as mid-February, Almond seemed to think all he had to do was hit the Chinese a little harder, Coleman believed. “His racism tainted every decision he made in battle,” Coleman said.

  Operation Roundup was the name that Almond gave to his battle plan for the Wonju area. It looked like a perfect Fort Leavenworth plan. There was even a certain grandeur to it. It was large scale and involved much coordination between different units. If it had been done at Leavenworth, a theoretical battle in a theoretical country (preferably a much flatter and warmer one) against a theoretical enemy (that made its approaches down major roads, easily identifiable from the air), it might have been impressive. There were lots of arrows driving ever so relentlessly on critical enemy positions, an envelopment here, another there, all ending wondrously in a double encirclement of the village of Hongchon, which lay about twenty-four miles north of Wonju, by then in American hands. Naturally, the success of this assault was based on perfect coordination between the participating units and the willingness of the Chinese to let the Americans do pretty much what they wanted to do, rather than smuggling four or five divisions of their own into the area and thus knocking the arrows askew.

  To anyone with a sense of what it was actually like to fight in Korea, the flaws of Almond’s plan were painfully obvious. Wonju was an extremely large, dangerous area, one that threatened to swallow up his somewhat limited UN forces. The weather was erratic, with great banks of clouds coming over each day, limiting any ability to make good use of American air superiority; and finally, Almond’s forces were once again far too dependent on the professional skills of the South Korean forces. In this battle, Almond had done something that other officers found absolutely inexplicable: he had placed some American units under the command of ROK officers, which meant if things unraveled, which they were quite likely to do, the Americans would not have complete control over their own forces. Of the many strange things that Ned Almond did during this war, this was probably the most bizarre. The assumption of other officers was that Almond, who did not respect the ROK performance any more than most Americans, meant this as a confidence builder, as George Stewart noted, to show the ROKs he had more confidence in them than he really did, in hopes that they would therefore fight better. As for the South Koreans, they were in no way happy with the plan and thought in their own way that it was racist. General Paik Sun Yup, the best of the ROK commanders, in his memoir of the war, suggested that Almond was planning to use the Koreans as cannon fodder meant to absorb the heaviest punishment in the initial Chinese attack.

  So Operation Roundup started with two ROK divisions, the Fifth and the Eighth, in the lead, participating with elements of two of the Second Division’s regiments, the Thirty-eighth and the Ninth, as well as the 187th Regimental Combat Team, an airborne unit. On the other side, yet to show their hand, were four Chinese divisions from the 100,000 to 140,000 Chinese troops now in the central corridor region immediately above Wonju, readying themselves, with many more obviously available. At first, all seemed to go well for the UN forces, in no small part because the Chinese wanted them to go well—the more they succeeded in the first stage of the drive, the more isolated they were going to be when the Chinese struck. So the Chinese and the North Koreans pulled back, letting the American and South Korean forces push ever deeper into alien terrain. As J. D. Coleman noted, “The movements of the ROK and American units could not have been more favorable for the Chinese if General Peng had personally been in the X Corps Command Post and drawn them up himself.” By February 10, the UN/ROK position was, in Coleman’s words, like “an indefensible balloon inflated into enemy territory.�
� On February 11, at 10 P.M., three Chinese divisions suddenly hit the ROK Eighth Division and it simply vanished, some seventy-five hundred men and officers gone like that, although three thousand men would eventually show up back at UN command posts.

  The Chinese attack did not come as a complete surprise to Ridgway’s headquarters, which was increasingly uneasy over intelligence reports indicating the gathering of an enormous Chinese force in the greater Wonju area. In fact, the intelligence coming from Ridgway’s G-2 shop was surprisingly accurate. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Fergusson, the Eighth Army deputy G-2, who back in November had had a much more realistic sense of the Chinese threat to the Eighth Army than had his superiors, turned out to be quite prescient about what was going to happen. Only on the likely date of the Chinese attack was he off—by four days. Ridgway took the G-2’s report seriously: on the eve of the start of the battle, his foot was already on the brake, and he was telling his forces not to move farther north. But Almond’s foot was not—despite warnings from his own G-2, Lieutenant Colonel James Polk. Polk would later note that although he had issued serious warnings about the number of Chinese in the area, he had not paid enough attention to the word of one very important prisoner, a former Chinese Nationalist doctor who had given stunningly accurate estimates of the Chinese force about to attack—they simply had not believed that a doctor who was only a captain would know so much. Although Almond’s Corps headquarters received an order from Ridgway to hold its positions on February 11, no comparable message went out from Corps to subordinate units for hours—and when it finally did, it was two hours after the Chinese struck.