Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War

by Tsouras, Peter

  Orlov smiled again. His tankers were responding exactly according to their battle drill. The hidden anti-tank gun had been a surprise to test their mettle. Undoubtedly the keyed up crews believed themselves to be imperiled by this foe. In fact, the obsolete Japanese Model 01 47mm weapon could only penetrate the T-34/85’s armor with a lucky shot. But the major did not want luck to interfere with this final training exercise. Accordingly, unbeknownst to either the gunners or their targets, his technicians had removed 80 percent of the propellant from each anti-tank round.

  The gunners managed another two shots before the tanks methodically gunned them down. Meanwhile, the supporting company rolled over the shallow infantry trenches to crush the handful of still writhing survivors. Orlov fired his flare pistol. The exercise was over. The tanks dutifully formed a semi-circle and the tankers dismounted to stand at attention. Orlov entered the circle to provide his post-exercise critique. “You bastards are good, very good. You will now be assigned to new cadres and teach them the lessons you have learned here. Dismissed!”1

  That evening most of the regiment received promotion to officer grade. It was a welcome reward for two years of hard service. Then they transferred to the newly activated 105th Tank Brigade. This unit mirrored the organization of a World War II era Soviet tank division except that it lacked a heavy tank regiment, rocket launcher battalion, and anti-aircraft and mortar regiments. Still, the 105th featured some 6,000 men distributed into three tank regiments with some 140 T-34/85 tanks and 16 SU-76 self-propelled guns supported by a mechanized infantry regiment, reconnaissance battalion, and engineer battalion.2 Observing strict radio silence and using superb camouflage, in the early spring of 1950 the élite unit, redesignated the 105th Tank Division, marched south to take up positions near the 38th Parallel. They were supremely confident because they knew that the enemy, the capitalist puppets belonging to the Republic of Korea Army, had neither tanks nor modern anti-tank weapons.

  Washington, DC: January 1949 to June 1950

  The formative military experience of the 33rd President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, came in World War I during his service with a Missouri National Guard artillery unit. He rose from a humble private to be elected lieutenant on the eve of the unit’s departure for France. He ably led his unit in combat and received promotion to captain. The experience of war taught him several things, including a deep contempt for professional military men and an awareness that the military seemed unable to manage itself without enormous waste. This bothered Truman greatly, because he prided himself on his thrifty nature. He wrote that West Pointers could not be trusted “with a pair of mules” because they would either lose the mules, or sell them and use the cash to buy whiskey.3

  His keenness to root out waste received a forum during World War II. The then Senator Truman founded and ran a subcommittee that investigated waste and fraud in military procurement. The investigation confirmed his biases. His work attracted so much praise that President Roosevelt selected him to run as his vice-president in 1944. Roosevelt’s death saw the one time Missouri National Guard private become commander in chief of the entire American military.

  As soon as World War II ended, Truman set to work. He demanded a balanced federal budget and a reduction in the staggering national war debt. To achieve these goals he imposed strict budget ceilings on the American military. When the Pentagon recommended a minimum austerity budget of some $ 15 billion a year, Truman promptly cut it by a third. The result was a dramatic decline in the size of the standing military force and a reduction in the quality and quantity of its weapons. In 1945 the army had numbered six million well-trained, well-equipped men organized into almost 100 divisions. Three years later it numbered 677,000 men in ten under strength, poorly prepared divisions.

  When Truman won his upset victory in the 1948 presidential election, he felt unbound from Roosevelt’s towering legacy. To help implement his budget-slashing policies Truman selected Louis Johnson to serve as Secretary of Defense. Johnson brought two major attributes to this position: loyalty to his boss—he had been Truman’s chief fund raiser during the 1948 election—and near total ignorance of military strategy or weapons systems. So, under Johnson’s unenlightened supervision, the reduction in the military accelerated.

  Simultaneously, Truman maintained a very tough policy toward communism. He saw international communism as a monolithic force controlled by Moscow and bent on world domination. He was determined to hold it in check. The discontinuity between his foreign policy and his evisceration of the US military never occurred to him.

  In June 1950, Secretary of Defense Johnson and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, undertook a two-week inspection of the Far East. They visited military installations and met with senior leaders including General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of US occupation forces in Japan. The head of the Korean Military Assistance Group, General Lynn Roberts, gave a briefing. Roberts enumerated the many daunting obstacles he had confronted, but asserted that training was progressing. Roberts assured his audience that the South Koreans were more than a match for the communists. Someone asked Roberts whether the NKPA possessed an armor capability. Roberts replied: “Korea is not good tank country.”4 Everyone accepted his judgment. After all, Roberts had commanded an armored combat command during the Battle of the Bulge and so presumably knew what he was talking about.

  Johnson and Bradley concluded that everything seemed to be in order. There were no threats on the horizon. They returned to Washington on June 24. President Truman was on vacation at his home in Missouri. Late that evening Johnson learned about an Associated Press report that North Korea had launched a major attack. Johnson was skeptical. He replied that he had not heard any such thing, and that he had just returned from the region and no one had warned that such an attack was likely. Soon Johnson went to bed.

  In contrast, the incomplete reports alarmed Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He telephoned Truman and the two men discussed the implications of the shocking news. Up to this point, the Kremlin had fought the Cold War without resorting to overt military action. Truman and Acheson agreed that clearly Joe Stalin had to have ordered the attack. But why now and why Korea? Was it a feint to draw American forces into a fight on the Asian mainland or to divert attention from a Chinese invasion of Formosa? Regardless of the answers, the event itself angered Truman. He had worked hard to build the United Nations into a forum to address international disputes. The UN, in turn, had sponsored and then supported South Korea. The communist attack was both a blow against the UN and a personal slap in the face to Harry Truman.

  Truman Ups the Ante

  Following a carefully detailed script written by their Soviet advisers, at 0400 on June 25, NKPA artillery and mortars had opened fire in a softening up bombardment.5 Shortly thereafter, seven NKPA infantry divisions swarmed over the border. Tanks belonging to the 105th Division spearheaded the advance. Surprise was complete. Only four of the eight Republic of Korea (ROK) divisions were deployed near the frontier. They lacked modern equipment. There were no pilots qualified to fly combat missions. Their heaviest weapons, 105mm howitzers, had been used in US infantry cannon companies during World War II. They were so worn that they could not fire full charges. The ROK armored force consisted of 27 obsolete armored cars. Most importantly, the army had no effective anti-tank weapon to fight the T-34/85s. Their 140 anti-tank guns were all 37mm weapons, a type proven already obsolete by 1941. ROK infantry had to rely upon their 2.36-inch bazookas to have any hope that they would stop the communist tanks. The first encounters obliterated that hope. Seoul fell on the third day of the North Korean offensive. The NKPA unit that contributed most dramatically to the capture of the city, the 105th Tank Division, earned the honorific “Seoul Division” for this victory.

  When North Korea ignored demands to withdraw, the US persuaded the United Nations Security Council to help South Korea. It marked the first time in UN history that it reacted to aggression with militar
y force. Nonetheless, the American response to the unfolding disaster in Korea was one of gradual escalation. Misled by confident reports about the fighting capability of the ROK troops, at first only two ships, escorted by air and naval forces, were sent to deliver emergency ammunition supplies. The American role expanded to allow Air Force and Navy planes to fly ground support missions but to remain south of the 38th Parallel. Meanwhile, the head of an American survey team arrived in South Korea on June 27. A quick inspection tour revealed the truth. ROK soldiers were in full rout. Fleeing soldiers and thousands of refugees clogged the road south from Seoul. General MacArthur decided to visit the scene himself.

  Looking exactly like he did in World War II—battered campaign hat, corncob pipe—MacArthur flew to Korea on June 29. He briefly toured the ROK defensive line at the Han River just south of Seoul. His judgment was harsh: “I haven’t seen a single wounded man yet.”6 Then and there MacArthur concluded that South Korea could only be saved by the introduction of US ground forces. A generation of American fighting men had grown up believing that American soldiers should not become involved in fighting Asian hordes on the Asian mainland. MacArthur’s snap decision reversed this long standing policy.

  At 1700, Washington time, June 29, Truman and his senior advisers met secretly at the presidential guest quarters at the Blair House to ponder MacArthur’s request. The outlook was grim. ROK forces were apparently running as hard as they could. It seemed that the best the United States could hope for was to establish some kind of defensive perimeter around the port of Pusan. Everyone worried about making too great a commitment to Korea and then being unable to react when the Soviets made their main push. The President wanted to take every step possible to push the communists back to the 38th Parallel. But he firmly kept in view the larger threat posed by the Soviet Union. Accordingly, the formal policy statement explained: “The decision to commit United States naval and air forces and limited army forces to provide cover and support for South Korean troops does not constitute a decision to engage in war with the Soviet Union.”7

  Among the conferees at the Blair House this seemed unambiguous enough. But in public Truman found he had some trouble articulating the US strategy. He emphatically stated that the nation was not at war. A reporter, searching for an appropriate headline-length description of the American involvement in Korea asked Truman if the situation could be described as a United Nations’ “police action.” The president agreed.

  The Destruction of Task Force Smith

  The first American soldiers sent to fight the police action belonged to the Eighth Army in occupied Japan. They had been enjoying a soft garrison life and were neither physically nor mentally prepared for battle. Yet on paper the Eighth Army seemed strong. It possessed four of the ten active divisions in the entire US Army. Because the 24th Infantry Division was based on the Japanese island of Kyushu, nearest to South Korea, MacArthur’s chief of staff chose it to move first. Even the official readiness statement rated the division as only 65 percent combat ready. In fact, it was the least prepared division in the army. It was so under-strength that MacArthur’s General Headquarters stripped 2,108 non-commissioned officers from the army’s other three divisions and attached them to the 24th. A separate levy added some 2,600 more men. While these actions gave the division a strength of nearly 16,000 men, they ignored the fact that none of the new personnel had trained with the parent unit. Throughout history, corporals and sergeants have been the essential leaders who guide fighting men in combat. They provide the iron backbone that allows soldiers to face the horrors of war. As the men of the 24th walked up the gangplanks to board the transports for the quick trip to Pusan, they met these leaders for the first time.

  The soldiers belonging to Task Force Smith had even less time to get squared away. General William F. Dean, the division commander, met Lieutenant Colonel Charles Smith at the airfield in Japan. Dean issued his orders: “When you get to Pusan, head for Taejon. We want to stop the North Koreans as far from Pusan as we can.”8 Dean had little doubt that when the North Koreans encountered American soldiers they would melt like snow. Unfortunately, the heavy C-54 transport planes carrying Smith’s men tore up the flimsy runways at Pusan. Consequently, the Air Force halted transport operations. About half of Task Force Smith’s heavy equipment remained in Japan. Nonetheless, the task force immediately headed to the front.

  Early on the morning of July 5, Task Force Smith’s 406th Infantry Regiment was dug in astride the Seoul–Pusan Highway. A mile behind it was a supporting 105mm field artillery battery commanded by Miller Perry. It numbered another 134 soldiers. At 0730 the morning fog lifted to reveal a NKPA tank column advancing along the highway. It was in route formation, apparently unaware of the Americans’ presence. When the tanks closed to within a mile of the US infantry, the six 105mm howitzers opened fire. Truman’s budget cuts had restricted the number of high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) rounds available to the Eighth Army. On all of Kyushu there were only 18 and Miller Perry’s battery had one-third of this total. Perry decided to hoard these rounds and begin the fight with regular high explosive ammunition. The rain of shells seemed to have no effect on the enemy tanks.

  A veteran of Guadalcanal, Smith had been in tight spots before. He calmly ordered his 75mm recoilless rifle teams to hold fire until the tanks were within 700 yards. Meanwhile, his ten bazooka teams remained concealed along the highway. The T-34/85s advanced. The recoilless rifles opened fire at unmissable close range. Each team scored numerous direct hits. But many of the rounds were duds. Worse, even the effective shells made no impression. The bazooka teams opened fire at point-blank range. One team fired 22 rounds at the tanks’ weaker rear armor. Even at a range of 15 yards the bazookas had no effect. Just as they had done on the Sadong training grounds, the tanks rolled over the American infantry.

  Battery commander Perry ordered his gunners to engage with their HEAT rounds. Finally the defenders’ fire made an impression. The leading two tanks slewed off the road. One burst into flame. Three crewmen emerged. Two raised their arms in surrender. The third raised his sub-machine gun and killed a machine gunner, the first American loss of the war.

  In total the defenders managed to knock out four tanks. After shooting up the American transport, the remaining 29 simply continued south down the highway. Next came the infantry. Their training and tenacity astonished. A survivor wrote:

  “Instead of a motley horde armed with old muskets, the enemy infantry were well-trained, determined soldiers and many of their weapons were at least as modern as ours. Instead of charging wildly into battle, they employed a base of fire, double envelopment, fire blocks on withdrawal routes, and skilled infiltration.”9

  Task Force Smith held on until 1430 before Smith ordered a retreat but the withdrawal degenerated into wild panic. It would take five more days for Task Force Smith to reorganize. A total of 185 men had been lost. Far worse was the impact on morale. News of the disaster swept the 24th Division and later spread throughout the Eighth Army. Above all was the ominous intelligence that the communists possessed a killer weapon that could not be stopped.

  The NKPA Rolls South

  It took almost two weeks for US intelligence officers to figure out what type of tank the enemy was using in Korea. It took far less time for the officers in the field to clamor for something to oppose these tanks effectively. World War II had clearly shown that the best anti-tank weapon was a better tank. But a search of the American arsenal found a cupboard literally stripped bare. In June 1950 not a single tank was in production. As a stopgap measure workers removed some M26 Pershing tanks from their display pedestals around Fort Knox and began to refurbish them. The Army’s newest model, the M46 Patton, was merely a modified Pershing featuring a new turret atop a Pershing hull. Because Japanese bridges could not carry their weight, no Pattons were assigned to the Eighth Army. The only tanks immediately available were M24 Chaffees, light reconnaissance tanks armed with 75mm guns. Events soon revealed that the North Kor
ean tanks completely outclassed them.

  In the absence of effective tanks or anti-tank guns, there was one other alternative for the infantry. Recently a new 3.5-inch “super bazooka” had been developed. Ammunition production for this weapon had just begun. General MacArthur issued an emergency request for them on July 3. Until they arrived, the battle of men versus tanks was decisively tilted in the favor of the NKPA.

  During the ensuing days, the 105th Tank Division spearheaded the communist drive to overrun all of South Korea. The 24th Infantry Division rushed into position to establish a succession of blocking positions. The US Army post-mortem reported:

  “One by one, these positions… were outflanked or overrun, and the 24th Division reeled backward in retreat. After one week of fighting, the division had suffered heavy casualties, including 1,500 men missing in action.”10

  The next five weeks were little better as the NKPA rolled south at a very moderate cost. In sum, the six weeks following the initial North Korean invasion witnessed an unbroken string of ROK and American disasters.

  Command Decision

  On the evening of July 22, a captured American jeep carried the commander of the NKPA 4th Division, Major-General Lee Kwon Mu, north along the Taejon-Seoul highway. The jeep drove without headlights to evade detection by American planes. Mu was pleased with his unit’s performance so far. It had helped capture Seoul and thereby earned the honorific “Seoul Division.” Its great victory at Taejon brought it the title “Seoul Guards Division.” Now it seemed that the senior leadership had a new mission in mind. The jeep passed several truck convoys carrying troops and ammunition south. Mu also saw a surprising number of battle-scarred and abandoned tanks. The comrades in the 105th Division had paid a price, Mu reflected.11