Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War

by Tsouras, Peter

  The air strike momentarily stalled the communist tank thrust. Their Soviet instructors had drummed into them the lesson that rapid exploitation against a disorganized defender produced startling results. Accordingly, dedicated junior officers quickly reorganized their units and the T-34/85s resumed their advance along the highway. Their haste almost proved their undoing.

  Unbeknownst to the attackers, the US forces possessed some armor assets of their own. Two reduced platoons of M24 Chaffee light tanks occupied a reserve position in a gully adjacent to the highway. The Chaffees waited until the enemy were only 400 yards away before firing. Unfortunately, the American tankers had also been victims of deep budget cutbacks. For two years they had been requesting recoil oil so they could fire their main guns on the practice range. Instead, the first time the guns spoke came on July 25. Since their firing buttons did not work, the gunners relied on old-fashion lanyards. Two guns misfired so badly that they blew the turrets off. Several other tanks achieved hits that failed to penetrate. Realizing that they had no hope of penetrating the T-34/85s’ frontal armor, the remaining US tankers skillfully maneuvered to achieve enfilade shots. They managed to disable one North Korean tank at the cost of all their remaining Chaffees.

  Backstopping the Chaffees were three medium Pershings that had just arrived in Korea. The lieutenant commanding the Pershings ordered the tanks forward to just below the crest line. Drivers engaged the transmissions. The wet ground made for heavy going and a new problem emerged. The tanks lacked adequate fan belts. After one tank’s belt shredded, the motor quickly overheated and the tank skidded helplessly to a stop on the steep slope. The remaining pair reached the designated location. They now enjoyed a textbook defilade firing position with the NKPA tanks moving from right to left across their front. Twin reports from the Pershings’ 90mm guns rent the air. Two T-34/85s slewed to a stop and caught fire. The Pershings knocked out three more tanks before the enemy located them.

  Typically, when confronting the unexpected, NKPA units lacked the command flexibility to adjust quickly. Even the well-trained crews of the 105th Tank Division revealed this flaw. They were primed to fight American bazooka teams but their recently rehearsed tank–infantry battle drills had not prepared them for fighting enemy armor. So the confused communist tankers reacted haltingly. They provided easy targets to the Pershings. Even the immobilized Pershing managed to take out two enemy tanks. Indeed, had more Pershings been present, the NKPA armored spearhead might have been blunted. Instead, sheer weight of numbers swamped the American tankers. After an exchange that left 15 T-34/85s burning, the communist gunners managed to knock out the last Pershing and thereby eliminate the last barrier before Taegu.

  Adequate reserves also might have stopped the North Koreans in Taegu itself. But the pressure all along the front had consumed General Walker’s resources. When the 25th Division’s last reserve, a combat engineer battalion, tried to move north along the highway to man a delaying position, it was ambushed by NKPA infiltration teams. Then the T-34/85s caught the engineers while they were still trying to fight their way clear and easily rolled over them. By now the GIs were badly infected with “tank fright.” They failed to heed their officers’ pleas to rally. On the road between Taegu and Pusan one fleeing soldier spoke for them all when he told a reporter: “Just give me a jeep and I know what direction to go in. This mama’s boy ain’t cut out to be no hero.”18

  Truman Folds his Hand

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave the President the situation report:

  “Mr President, I have an emergency message from General MacArthur. Our troops are fleeing back toward Pusan. Fortunately the weather has cleared so our planes are pounding the Commies again. But the forecast is not good. Besides the ground fog in the morning a weather front is moving in and we are not too sure if we will be able to put in another maximum air effort. Consequently, General MacArthur is again requesting major reinforcements. He believes that it will ultimately take two field armies with eight divisions.”

  Truman interrupted. “What do we have in the pipeline?” “We’ve already combed out all available manpower in Japan and flown them over as individual replacements. A Marine regimental combat team and the 2nd Infantry Division are en route and are the closest major formations. ”

  “When can they get there?” “We estimate August 7 or 8, if the port at Pusan is still open.” “Hell,” Truman growled. “Anything else?”

  “As you recall sir, we had ten divisions when the communists attacked. The four in Japan went to Korea and the 2nd Infantry is en route. The 1st Infantry Division is of course committed to Germany. We didn’t think Korea was good tank country so we kept the 2nd Armored here in our General Reserve. Candidly sir, neither the 3rd Infantry nor the 11th Airborne Divisions are anywhere close to ready for action. They are terribly under strength. That leaves the 82nd Airborne. But if we send it then we have nothing left to respond quickly if something else happens. Besides, the paratroopers aren’t really equipped for sustained ground combat.”

  “So what do we do?” Truman asked. A glum silence followed. The Secretary of the Air Force cleared his throat loudly. The Chairman hesitated and then nodded. “Well sir, given the situation, General MacArthur is requesting freedom of action up to and including using atomic weapons.”

  The predictable explosion came immediately.

  “I’ll be damned if I’ll risk atomic war with the Russians to save a bunch of Koreans who couldn’t be bothered to fight to defend themselves. Is MacArthur nuts? Does anyone here think that that’s a good idea. Does anyone here have any other idea?”

  Truman fixed his advisors, one by one, with a steely glare. Some shook their heads from side to side. Others simply looked down at their briefing papers. Only brash Matt Ridgway, the Deputy Army Chief of Staff spoke:

  “Sir I agree. We have already dangerously depleted our reserves. We shouldn’t yield now to the temptation to give General MacArthur a book of blank checks, just because he is presently front stage in what may after all prove to be a mere affair of outposts.”19

  Emboldened by this speech, Ridgway’s boss, Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins added: “And sir, just like in 1941, we still put Europe first, the Pacific second.”

  A long pause ensued. It was now clear that the hasty decision to intervene on the Korean peninsula was a mistake. What to do now was far less clear. No one saw an easy solution. President Harry Truman fully recognized that the decision was his alone to make. The painful silence continued. Finally Truman spoke. He had always enjoyed poker so the analogy came naturally to him:

  “Gentlemen, I have learned from long experience that it’s how you play your poor hands rather than your good ones which counts in the long run. We took a gamble and it has failed. To continue is to throw good money after bad and I won’t do it. Tell MacArthur to order Walker to evacuate the troops. This, at least, is something MacArthur ought to be good at.”

  The Reality

  With the exception of the story’s beginning and end, almost everything described did indeed happen. The initial training exercise is my invention. However, as explained, the 15th Tank Training Regiment did provide the nucleus for the 105th Tank Division. Regarding the sacrifice of the prisoners, recall that the NKPA killed both American and South Korean prisoners of war (as shown by numerous, gruesome US army photos of dead American soldiers with their hands tied behind their backs) and conducted “People’s courts” in the streets immediately upon capturing Seoul. A regime that did these things was certainly capable of acting as described in the introduction.

  To “liberate” South Korea, the Soviets apparently planned a Blitzkrieg to capture the whole peninsula and present the West with a fait accompli. At first it appeared that the tank-led spearheads would accomplish this mission. However, the tanks suffered from a crippling lack of mobile maintenance units. Numerous tanks broke down alongside the roads and were then destroyed by air strikes. The 105th—with an initial tank strength of between
120 and 140 T-34/85s—received only some 30 replacement tanks during the campaign. Yet the total almost proved sufficient because Truman’s crippling budget had failed to deliver needed weapons and ammunition. At a minimum the GIs urgently required the new 3.5-inch bazookas, HEAT shells for the artillery, modern tanks, and 90mm anti-tank guns. Even if they had been fully equipped, it is impossible to know how they would have fared. A regimental commander wrote: “There was no incentive for our men to fight well… They saw no reason for the war… [and] had no interest in a fight which was not even dignified by calling it a war.”20

  My NKPA staff officer is also an invention, except for the name. The real Colonel Lee Hak Ku was chief of staff of the 13th Division. He surrendered on September 21, 1950, the highest ranking North Korean prisoner of the war. He later became notorious as the leader of communist prisoners in the riots on Koje Island in 1952.

  The Chicks’ first fight in Korea came on July 16 when about 900 men faced an attack at the Kum River line. The battle was a debacle. Only about half the Chicks could be found the next day. The l/19th lost 43 percent casualties including 17 officers killed. In contrast, at Chickamauga the l/19th entered battle with 194 officers and men and lost only one officer and six men killed. However, the unit reported many missing, for an overall loss rate of 70 percent.

  Taegu was probably the most embattled city of the entire war. It was the anchor for the whole Pusan Perimeter. The North Koreans launched two major offensives to capture Taegu. By the narrowest margin both failed. Without a doubt, the NKPA made a huge strategic blunder around July 23, the time of my conference. Instead of massing to administer what could very well have been the coup de grace, the communist high command sent the 4th and 6th Divisions on a wide envelopment south to the coast; the option discussed but not chosen in my story.

  Bibliography

  Appleman, Roy E., South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu, June–November 1950, Department of the Army, Washington, DC, 1961.

  Blair, Clay, The Forgotten War, Times Books, New York, 1987.

  Futrell, Robert F., The United States Air Force in Korea, 1950–1953, US Air Force, Washington, DC, 1983.

  Matloff, Maurice, ed., American Military History, US Army, Washington, DC, 1969.

  Robertson, William Glenn, Counterattack on the Naktong, 1950, US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 1985.

  Sandler, Stanley, ed., The Korean War: An Encyclopedia, New York: Garland Publishing, 1995.

  Truman, Harry S., Years of Trial and Hope, Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1956.

  Notes

  *1. Colonel-General Vladimir Ivanovich Orlov, Tank Commander! My Experiences in Three Wars (Red Hero Press, Moscow, Kim II Sung City, Ho Chi Minh City, 1976), p. 230.

  2. Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr., “Korean People’s Army,” in Sandler, The Korean War, pp. 182–88.

  3. Blair, The Forgotten War, p. 5.

  4. Ibid., p. 61.

  *5. Sergei V. Ushakov and Vasili G. Golitsyn (Kutuzov Artillery Academy), An Analysis of the Preliminary Bombardment Preceding the War for Korean Unification (Red Artillery Press, Sevastopol, 1962), p. 18.

  6. Blair, The Forgotten War, p. 77.

  7. Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, p. 341.

  8. Appleman, South to the Naktong, p. 60.

  9. Blair, The Forgotten War, p. 102.

  10. Robertson, Counterattack on the Naktong, p. 6.

  *11. General Pak Ho San, Memories of Comrade Mu (Veterans’ Collective Press, Kim II Sung City, 1972), p. 283.

  *12. General Lee Hak Ku, Planning for the Final Victory (Unified People’s Army Press, Kim II Sung City, 1958), p. 15.

  *13. Ibid., p. 17.

  *14. General Pang Ho San, War and Reunification (Unified People’s Army Press, Kim II Sung City, 1963), p. 780.

  *15. Orlov, Tank Commander!, p. 383.

  16. Sandler, The Korean War, p. 160.

  17. Appleman, South to the Naktong, pp. 207–08.

  18. Blair, The Forgotten War, p. 107.

  19. Ridgway actually used the phrase “affair of outposts,” in a memo cited in Blair, The Forgotten War, p. 123.

  20. Blair, The Forgotten War, p. 113.

  3

  VIETNAM

  The War That Nobody Noticed

  Paddy Griffith

  The Pentagon: December 1, 1963

  Sir Robert Thompson1 entered the office of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, in a pugnacious frame of mind. He knew that the campaign in South Vietnam had been going very badly and that he, as a counter-insurgency (COIN) advisor to the late President Ngo Dinh Diem, could credibly be blamed for some of the failures. Nevertheless he was more than ready with his counter-attack, because he sensed that now, at the start of December 1963, there was a unique opportunity to shake up both Vietnamese and American attitudes, and to make policies stick that in the past had not been properly pursued.

  It was only a month since Diem had been killed in a coup d’état, to be replaced by a new and more promising military government. Then only ten days ago President John F. Kennedy, had also been assassinated.2 New administrations had thus unexpectedly been installed in both Saigon and Washington within a few days of each other, and so the stage was suddenly clear for bold new initiatives, if only the moment could be seized. Thompson believed he knew exactly what those initiatives should be, and he was now about to sell them to the US government.

  Thompson himself was a British colonial civil servant who had risen to prominence in the 1950s during the successful British campaign against communist insurgency in Malaya, where from 1959 to 1961 he had served as the Secretary of Defence. He had then moved on to Saigon, where he had tried to explain British counter-insurgency methods and the ways they might be adapted to South Vietnam—which he recognized as being a significantly different and less promising theater of war than Malaya. Unfortunately under Diem he had experienced many frustrations, as his advice had been comprehensively diluted, distorted or simply misunderstood. He had found a corrupt government machine in which simple things were very difficult to achieve, and anything more complicated was quite impossible.

  Of particular importance was the chaotic lack of unity in the chain of command, since the government, the senior army generals, the younger army officers and the police had each established their own private fiefdoms which constantly plotted against each other, not always without exchanges of gunfire.3 On top of this there were conflicting pressures from a number of competing American agencies, and between their representatives in-country and those in Washington. It all made for a very fragmented governmental machine in which the implementation of any policy was infinitely complex and intractable. In Malaya, by contrast, the British had found it relatively easy to integrate all military and civil power within a single and unitary administration, and had quickly been able to centralize all aspects of the COIN campaign under a single hand.

  Nor was it as easy to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people as it had been to placate the majority of Malays. In Malaya the insurgents had emerged from an unpopular segment of the Chinese ethnic minority which could be identified and isolated, whereas in Vietnam the insurgents came from the ethnically Vietnamese majority numbering at least 13 million out of a total population of around 16 million. They enjoyed natural access to almost the whole country, especially outside the towns. Apart from anything else, this implied that the whole scale of the insurgency was far greater in Vietnam than it had been in Malaya, with the Viet Cong (VC) being able to mobilize a battalion or even a regiment of guerrillas for every squad that had been available to the Communist Party of Malaya. Equally the long land frontier with Laos and Cambodia offered many entry points into South Vietnam to supporters of the insurgency coming from outside, whereas in Malaya almost all of the access had been by sea, and therefore easy to close off by a naval blockade.

  In terms of political incentives, it was unfortunately not possible for the South Vietnamese government to offer any greater measure of inde
pendence to its population than they already enjoyed. An independent non-communist administration was already in power, so a promise of self-government could no longer be used as an inducement in the way that it had been by the British in Malaya. On the contrary, the VC’s popular appeal rested partly upon its call to reunify South with North Vietnam; but this was specifically unacceptable to both the Saigon and US governments.

  South Vietnam owed its very existence to the fact that it was the alternative to North Vietnamese communism; whereas, as far as the Americans were concerned, their main interest was defined as preventing all communists, including those in North Vietnam, from extending their rule or influence in any way at all. If the South should fall, it would represent the toppling of the first domino in a line that might stretch all the way to India, Indonesia, the Philippines, or even beyond. Reunification was therefore not a concession that the Americans could grant without admitting defeat, and so by extension they were not in a position to offer the nationalist majority the political solution that it desired.

  However, Thompson was only too well aware that the Vietnamese masses really wanted far more than reunification, which was surely little more than an abstract idea to most peasants. What was much more important to them was attentive, good and fair local government, combined with fewer arbitrary taxes and a reduction in absentee landlordism in favor of land ownership by the farmers themselves. These were all things that the VC promised to its followers, and actually delivered in several parts of the territory it controlled. They were also the things that the South Vietnamese government should have been able to deliver far more effectively than the VC, especially with the benefit of generous US assistance, even though it was unable to grant political concessions by reversing the split between North and South. Thompson clearly understood that reforms in local government and land ownership were precisely the things that the US should insist were central to winning hearts and minds, and therefore central to winning the war as a whole.