The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Lyndon Johnson knew nothing of the subtle strength of this small but fierce country, still fourth-rate to him, how it had managed to hold off mighty China in the past and defeat mighty France so recently. Yet in Vietnam history was fate. The men and women on the other side were the same people who had driven the French out, the heroes of the revolution, a revolution the United States chose not to see as a revolution; comparably, most of the top people in the South Vietnamese Army, fighting as it were on the pro-Western side, had also fought alongside the French during a revolutionary war. The other side’s leaders were skilled, brave, and had their form of political-military tactics, very similar to those of Mao and his compatriots, down pat. No one who had fought them would ever underestimate either their ability or their patience—only powerful men in Washington who had no experience in this new kind of war would mock them for their lack of traditional battlefield organization. In the early war games that the top Americans had played back in Washington—a group on one side playing for Hanoi, their rivals playing for America, each making countermoves against the other—it always turned out that Hanoi had more options than the United States did, and could keep coming without paying an exorbitant price. In time they stopped playing the war games because they always ended so badly.

  In 1964, as Johnson edged closer to the final decision on the war, there were three factors that tended to make him hawkish. The first was the nature of the man himself, his own image of himself, the need to stand tall, not to back off when he was challenged, and to personalize all confrontations and to see them as a test of manhood. Pierre Salinger’s job, Johnson told the principal Kennedy press officer when he first became president, was to sell Johnson as a big Texan who was both tall and tough in the saddle. Of a rebel leader in the Dominican Republic Johnson had told McGeorge Bundy, “Tell that son of a bitch that unlike the young man who came before me I am not afraid to use what’s on my hip.”

  The second factor was an innate, almost unconscious American racism, the kind that had bedeviled so many officers in the field at the beginning of the Korean War, the notion that because Asians were smaller and from a lesser part of the world with lesser industrial and technological accomplishments, they were a lesser people and could not stand up to American technology and American troops. Certainly miscalculations of that kind had been costly in Korea, at the very beginning of the war, when everyone had underestimated the ability of the North Korean troops, and even more later on, when MacArthur had miscalculated what the Chinese would do and how well they would fight. Vietnam, when Johnson spoke about it at NSC meetings, was often “a raggedy ass little fourth rate country.” On occasion, like Ned Almond, he used the word “laundrymen” to describe the combatants.

  Sometimes too, as he came close to the final decision on whether to send combat troops to Vietnam, Johnson’s racism showed in the way he spoke of the Vietnamese as being like Mexicans, the kind of lesser people you had to show some strength to before they got the message and gave you the respect you deserved. The Vietnamese, he would say, were not going to push Lyndon Johnson around, because he knew something about people like this, because back home he had dealt with people just like them, the Mexicans. Now, Mexicans were all right if you let them know who was boss, but “if you didn’t watch they’ll come right into your yard and take it over if you let them. And the next day they’ll be right there on your porch, barefoot and weighing one hundred and thirty pounds, and they’ll take that too. But if you say to ’em right at the start, ‘Hold on, just wait a minute,’ they’ll know they’re dealing with someone who’ll stand up. And after that you can get along fine.”

  And finally, and probably most important of all, there was the politics of it, because he was always a political man. That was what mattered most, and this time he got the politics wrong—he went to the politics of the past, not the future as it might have been if he had kept us out. Beneficiary of a landslide victory over a seemingly much harder line candidate, Barry Goldwater (in part because he had said he would not send American boys to do what Asian boys should do for themselves), Johnson misread the politics of his own victory. His sense of the war’s politics and the price of losing Saigon led him back to the fall of China and to the ferocious political forces that had been unleashed domestically. Johnson was immensely sensitive to those forces, because they had been unusually important in the two places he knew best: Washington, where he had seen senators who opposed Joe McCarthy destroyed, and Texas, where the local McCarthyism had been unusually virulent and very well financed by oil interests. It was in Texas, where, as Johnson made the mutation from liberal New Deal congressman to U.S. senator, he had gradually become politically closer and quite dependent upon some of the same powerful right-wing figures, the men of oil who had backed McCarthy.

  China weighed heavily on him as he made his ultimate Vietnam decisions. He talked about it all the time. In private he would often go on about how China had destroyed the Democratic Party back in the early 1950s, and how the country might be engulfed in a resurgence of McCarthyism if Vietnam went under. Truman and Acheson had lost China, he would say, and it was like a mantra, and when they lost China they lost the Congress, because the Republicans in the Congress had finally found their issue. When he was alone in private moments with close friends and assistants like Bill Moyers and George Reedy, it would all pour out, his fear of losing what he prized most, the Great Society, which would be his signature accomplishment as president, losing it because he had been weak on Vietnam.

  He had been there the last time it happened, he would say. Hell, he would add, Truman and Acheson had even been accused of appeasement, could you believe that? “You boys are young,” he told Moyers and some of the other young men, “and you don’t understand the connection of the Congress to Asia. They won’t give me the Great Society and Civil Rights if Ho is running through the streets of Saigon.” The Congress, he said, did not care about that kind of legislation. “They’ll push Vietnam up my ass all the time. Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. Right up my ass.” He was, Moyers thought, far more than Kennedy, caught in the recent past. He did not see the country as changing, especially as Kennedy had in the final few weeks of his life, which gave Kennedy a sense that peace might now be an issue. Oddly enough Johnson did not think the American people wanted the war, but he did not know how to get around the political system in Washington, which he thought did. He did not see the possibility that easing tensions in the Cold War at that moment might have new political benefits, or that the country might be changing, and a new generation, less a prisoner of the worst of the Cold War tensions, emerging.

  What he did not see and could not see, in no small part because in the end there was a large part of him that was a bully, was that on the eve of battle with the forces of North Vietnam in 1965, America’s military and political strengths were on the surface, in some ways self-evidently awesome, while its weaknesses for a war like this were hidden away. Those weaknesses were basic; America’s inability to adjust to a distant war that was more political than military, its innate impatience, and the inability of its troops to become Vietnamese were far greater than any policy maker realized. Comparably the Vietnamese weaknesses were on the surface, and were self-evidently considerable—their lack of a great deal of modern military hardware—but their strengths were formidable, just beneath the surface. Those strengths were in their own way for this kind of war far greater than America’s, because in the end it was their country.

  SERGEANT PAUL MCGEE got out of the Army in June 1952, a little more than a year after he had held off the Chinese at McGee Hill on the south side of Chipyongni. McGee had wanted to stay in, because he liked the Army, and felt that he was a good and perhaps even a skillful soldier, but he was forced to take a hardship discharge to help out his family back in North Carolina. His father had started a small machine shop where he repaired parts for the machines used in the cotton mills, but then his father’s health had slipped badly, and Paul was needed at home. When he had
fought in Korea he had never had any doubts that he was doing the right thing. He had volunteered for it, and even during the worst of the battle of Chipyongni he did not doubt the decisions that had brought him there. The ensuing half century did not change his mind. It had not been a popular war, he thought, and most of the country seemed to have forgotten about it long ago. But it mattered to him and some of his friends who had also fought there, and he thought that they had done the right thing, and it had been worth it for all the hardship and the loss of life. He thought the fact that the Communists had not tried anything like Korea again showed that America had been right in fighting there. He had missed being in the Army when he came back to Belmont, and on occasion in those years after Korea, the Army seemed to miss him; sometimes it sent recruiters down to see how he was getting along, and to see if he had any second thoughts about coming back in. When they were trying to start the Special Forces at nearby Fort Bragg in the late 1950s, someone had looked at his records and decided he would make an ideal Green Beret, and they had put a good deal of pressure on him, but his family obligations outweighed his personal feelings that it was exactly the right kind of job for him. If he had gone back in he might have gotten a third war, he thought, the one in Vietnam, and he wondered if he would have made it back from Vietnam.

  He did not know anyone who had gone to Korea who felt differently about that war. He was on occasion filled with sadness when he thought of the men he had known there who had not made it back. Sergeant Bill Kluttz, his buddy from that battle, had died recently, and they had stayed close to the end. McGee did not go to many of the veterans reunions anymore because the men were all getting older and fewer, and fewer of them were able to attend, and it made him sadder when he showed up and the ranks had thinned. He was still in touch with Cletis Inmon, who had been his runner up on McGee Hill, and they talked about once a month. They were able to communicate in those phone calls without actually saying things—he knew what Inmon was thinking when they were on the phone together, without many words passing between them—they had been there, had shared those dangers, and that set them apart from almost everyone else for the rest of their lives. They did not need words to bind them together; their deeds were the requisite bond. All in all, he thought, he was glad he had gone and fought there. It was a job to do, nothing more, nothing less, and when you thought about it, there had not been a lot of choice.

  Author’s Note

  IN A WAY, the roots of this book go back to a series of long conversations I had in 1963 with Lieutenant Colonel Fred Ladd. He was the senior adviser to the ARVN (or South Vietnamese) Ninth Division, based in Bac Lieu, in the middle of the Mekong Delta, and was one of my favorite officers. We stayed friends until his untimely death in 1987 at the age of 67. Fred Ladd was a general’s son, a West Point graduate, a thoughtful, brave man of great honor. Once when his Vietnamese counterpart, the division commander, had given a very rosy-eyed portrait of how well the division was doing to a group of senior American officers, Fred had taken the American commander in Vietnam, General Paul Harkins, aside to tell him that things were not going nearly that well. For that bit of honesty he was sharply rebuked by Harkins for casting aspersions on a fine Vietnamese officer’s words. In a way, Vietnam became a great roadblock in Fred’s career, and he could never reconcile himself to reporting optimistically about a war that was being lost.

  Vietnam was, of course, the obsessive subject matter at hand, but as we got to know each other we talked more and more about the Korean War, where he had also served, with gathering interest on my part. It was only thirteen years since the Chinese had entered that war, and Fred spoke often of the tragic quality of a war, almost over, that had suddenly become infinitely larger and more violent as they came across the Yalu and caught most of the American units by surprise. He had been a general’s aide at the time, ironically to Major General Ned Almond, who is a prominent figure in this book. He spoke cautiously about Almond in those sessions, a discretion that was a compromise, I suspect, between high personal loyalty and considerable professional reservations. What I do remember from our talks was the terrible ordeal of the troops, some of the men only a year or two older than I was (I was sixteen when the Korean War started), caught in that freezing cold by this massive attack, surely the largest ambush in American military history. During those sessions in Bac Lieu and when Fred stayed with me at my house in Saigon, we went over the subject of those days again and again. What I did not realize at the time was that he was the teacher and I was the student, and the subject was not just Vietnam; it now included Korea as well.

  The images of that moment, when the Chinese struck, stayed with me. As when I had returned from Vietnam and I had needed to find out what had happened there and why, and thereupon had written The Best and the Brightest, I remained haunted by the images I had created in my own mind of those weeks in November and December 1950, and I was determined to write about it one day. Now, forty-four years after I first heard Fred Ladd’s stories, here is the book.

  A book like this does not have a simple, preordained linear life. A writer begins with a certainty that the subject is important, but the book has an orbital drive of its own—it takes you on its own journey, and you learn along the way. It became not just the story of the Chinese entering the war and what happened in those critical weeks. On the way there was a great deal of political history to be learned, all of which formed the background on both sides. And there were other battles to be studied—people kept telling me about the brutal fighting in the early Pusan Perimeter days, and so I had to learn about that. And then one day someone mentioned the Battle of Chipyongni to me—the battle where the American commanders first learned how to fight the Chinese.

  When I began The Best and the Brightest in 1969 it was a much easier book for me. Vietnam had been a central, dominating part of my life for seven years by that time. Thus I knew to an uncommon degree the overall map of it, the players, and the essential chronology. That was not true for me with Korea. So I spent much of the first two years not merely reading the existing bibliography and interviewing people but getting a feel for what had happened. I had very good teachers—most of them combat infantrymen who had survived it all. I am grateful for the kindnesses and courtesies extended to me by so many men and so many families in the homes I visited. To those whom I visited and interviewed, but whose stories did not make the book, I offer my regrets but my thanks, because all the interviews helped shape my sense of the war. I found many of the senior officials in the Korean Veterans’ groups, especially those of the Second Infantry Division, to be exceptionally helpful in guiding me toward veterans of those battles in which I was especially interested, or which they felt I had to master.

  One of the great pleasures of what I do comes from the constant sense of surprise of the reporting—how many people turn out during the interviews to give more than you expected and thus enhance the entire experience. That forms something I particularly prize in what has been a fifty-two-year journalistic career: a respect for the nobility of ordinary people.

  One story will suffice along this line. When I was working on the book a number of people had suggested that I interview a man named Paul McGee who lived on the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina. I called him. The first call, the introductory one, was not a great success. He did not seem very enthusiastic about seeing me. But we made a date to get together on a Saturday, which was to be my getaway day after a week on the road. That had been a particularly hard week—five interviews in five days in five different North Carolina towns. On the morning of my scheduled visit with McGee it snowed heavily in Charlotte—a truly miserable day. My plane back to New York was scheduled for 3 P.M. I was staying at an airport motel. The temptation to bag the McGee interview and take an earlier flight was overwhelming; then I thought again, why not see him? I had come all this way and this was what I get paid to do. So I went out and found his home and for four hours it all poured out, what had happened in those three days at Chipy
ongni when he was a young platoon leader. It was if he had been waiting for me to come by for fifty-five years, and he remembered everything as if it had been yesterday. He was modest, thoughtful, and had total recall. The story of how his platoon had held out for so long came out in exceptional detail, along with the names and phone numbers of a few men who had made it out with him and who could confirm all the details. It was a thrilling morning for me, nothing less than a reminder of why I do what I do.

  Acknowledgments

  BECAUSE OF THE nature of this book, events that took place more than fifty years ago, my interviewing was different this time than for most of my books: fewer total interviews, but a great deal more time spent trying to decide which battles mattered and only then finding the varying surviving veterans. That meant I spent more time trying to figure out which veterans to interview; and when I did find what I thought were the right people, going back repeatedly to them. Here is the list of interviewees (I am not using military rank because in many cases the rank kept changing): George Allen, Jack Baird, Lucius Battle, Lee Beahler, Bin Yu, Martin Blumenson, Ben Boyd, Alan Brinkley, Josiah Bunting III, John Carley, Herschel Chapman, Chen Jian, Joe Christopher, Joe Clemons, J. D. Coleman, John Cook, Bruce Cumings, Bob Curtis, Rusty Davidson, James Ditton, Erwin Ehler, John S. D. Eisenhower, George Elsey, Hank Emerson, Larry Farnum, Maurice Fenderson, Leonard Ferrell, Al Fern, Thomas Fergusson, Bill Fiedler, Richard Fockler, Barbara Thompson Foltz, Dorothy Bartholdi Frank, Lynn Freeman, Joe Fromm, Les Gelb, Alex Gibney, Frank Gibney, Andy Goodpaster, Joe Goulden, Steve Gray, Lu Gregg, Dick Gruenther, David Hackworth, Alexander Haig, Dr. Robert Hall, Ken Hamburger, Butch Hammel, John Hart, Jesse Haskins, Charles Hayward, Charley Heath, Virginia Heath, Ken Hechler, Wilson Heefner, Jim Hinton, Carolyn Hockley, Ralph Hockley, Cletis Inmon, Raymond Jennings, George Johnson, Alan Jones, Arthur Junot, Robert Kies, Walter Killilae, Bob Kingston, Bill Latham, Jim Lawrence, John Lewis, James Lilley, Malcolm MacDonald, Sam Mace, Charley Main, Al Makkay, Joe Marez, Brad Martin, John Martin, Filmore McAbee, Bill McCaffrey, David McCullough, Terry McDaniel, Paul McGee, Glenn McGuyer, Anne Sewell Freeman McLeod, Roy McLeod, Tom Mellen, Herbert Miller, Allan Millett, Jack Murphy, Bob Myers, Bob Nehrling, Clemmons Nelson, Paul O’Dowd, Phil Peterson, Gino Piazza, Sherman Pratt, Hewlett Rainier, Dick Raybould, Andrew Reyna, Berry Rhoden, Bill Richardson, Bruce Ritter, Arden Rowley, Ed Rowny, George Russell, Walter Russell, Perry Sager, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Bob Shaffer, Edwin Simmons, Jack Singlaub, Bill Steinberg, Joe Stryker, Carleton Swift, Gene Takahashi, Billie Tinkle, Bill Train, Layton (Joe) Tyner, Lester Urban, Sam Walker, Kathryn Weathersby, Bill West, Vaughn West, Allen Whiting, Laron Wilson, Frank Wisner, Jr., Harris Wofford, Hawk Wood, John Yates, and Alarich Zacherle.