Some otherwise puzzling mistakes by American intelligence—the relative rebound in confidence about Chinese intervention after the First Phase Offensive, the dramatic underestimate of Chinese divisional strengths, and the complete failure to sense Chinese preference for offensive operations—may be explicable by deliberate Chinese deception. Such efforts would be completely in character with both the Chinese style of war and Soviet practice in World War II—and the Soviets, if not the instigators of Chinese intervention, certainly aided and abetted it in a variety of ways. Signal intelligence may, therefore, have both aided and betrayed UN intelligence.
The above is, of course, pure speculation. We know for a fact that FEC and the Eighth Army ignored one valuable and freely available source of intelligence until December 1950. S. L. A. Marshall observed that G-2 had elaborate procedures to gather all kinds of intelligence, neglecting the possibility that “perhaps more is to be learned of the enemy from what has been seen, heard and felt by our own soldiers in the line.”
There is [however] no steady winnowing of this field of information. There is no machinery for adding it up, analyzing it across the board, and then deducing its lessons. . . . Infantry, being the body which under the normal situation in war maintains the most persistent contact with the fighting parts of the enemy, is the antenna of the mechanism of combat intelligence. . . . During field operations, infantry should be the most productive source of information pertaining to the enemy’s tactics, use of weapons, combat supply system, habits and general nature.55
Marshall put his belief to the test, and produced the remarkable studies to which we have earlier referred, “CCF in the Attack,” which quickly found their way into American Intelligence reports and thereafter into American tactics. He gained his insight into the Chinese mode of warfare chiefly through extremely detailed interrogation of American infantry companies fresh from the winter battles. Had he, a civilian contractor (albeit a reserve lieutenant colonel) not done this, we might even today lack a coherent picture of Chinese small-unit tactics in that early period of the Korean War.
The Fragile Army
We will return later to Marshall’s investigations, which have more than a passing significance. To complete our preliminary analysis of the failure in Korea, we must look at the forces on which the blows fell, at the American units, which numbered at least 175,000 all told, not counting 250,000 ROK and some 20,000 Allied troops. That the ROKA, pummeled by the North Koreans and almost superstitiously fearful of the Chinese, fell back is understandable. These were scratch forces, underequipped and hastily raised—the underofficered and ill-trained ROKA of July 1950 had doubled in size in five months, despite heavy losses. With some notable exceptions, its quality was poor. But what of the Eighth Army and X Corps, which had had over five months to shake themselves into fighting shape, which had rebounded from the calamities of June and July, endured the hard slugging of August and September, and participated in a triumphant advance in October and November? Why, with the enormous firepower ranged above and behind them—the average American infantry division had a third more artillery than its World War II predecessor—did American forces fall back? And why were some units, in particular, the Second Infantry Division in the west and parts of the Seventh Infantry Division in the east, broken by an army of peasant light infantrymen?
The Eighth Army was a hollow force. If we look behind the ample machinery of war it possessed, we find that at the sharp end, in the small fighting units at the front, its forces had suffered crippling losses. When MacArthur reviewed the first American unit to enter Pyongyang, “He asked all men in the company who had landed with it in Korea ninety-six days earlier, when it numbered nearly two hundred men, to step forward. Only five men stepped forward; three of them had been wounded.”56 As in World War II, infantry units at the lowest levels had born the brunt of the fighting: thus, a division that suffered “only” 10 percent casualties might have infantry platoons and companies at barely half strength. The Japan-based divisions that had entered the fray in June and July were a third or more understrength to begin with, and the flow of replacements did not catch up throughout this period. At the end of November, Far East Command reported that the U.S. forces in the entire theater (including Japan), numbering 220,000 men, were fully 80,000 under authorized strength.57 Part of the problem lay with the simultaneous expansion of the army in Europe, and the determination of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assign equal (and in some cases higher) priority to forces there. Part of the problem, however, seems to have come from the same lack of attention to the problem of replacements that had bedeviled the army in World War II. Given the shortage of replacements (which did not begin to outnumber losses until January 1951), army planners faced a cruel dilemma. On the one hand, the heaviest losses fell in infantry units; on the other hand support units (engineers, for example) had started off with the greatest peacetime shortages. Where combat units in prewar Japan had about half their authorized strength, support units had barely a quarter.58 By November 1950 support troops numbered less than a third of the total force in Korea, at precisely the time they were most needed to repair the damage done by heavy fighting and to maintain lengthening lines of communication.59 UN service units reached their Korean War nadir in the month of November—31 percent of the total force, as compared with the 45 percent they would number at its end.
The U.S. army therefore sent as many service replacements as combat replacements to Korea.60 As in World War II, the infantry replacement problem suffered not only from their scanty numbers, but from their method of handling before they entered the line. Men died under the command of lieutenants (themselves often new to the units) who had not had time to learn their names.61 To remedy the shortage of infantry replacements, in August 1950 Far East Command instituted the practice of fleshing out American units with ROK troops. The Korean Augmentation to United States Army (KATUSA) program failed in all of its many variants, which included the use of Koreans as individual replacements or in small units such as squads or platoons. In early November the commanding general of the Second Infantry Division expressed a common view: “There has been no change in the low combat efficiency of the ROK personnel.”62 Not surprisingly, barriers of language and culture prevented the ill-trained KATUSAs from become full-fledged members of their host units. The lack of mutual trust proved disastrous, particularly in night combat, when American troops and KATUSAs had no confidence or, indeed, intelligible conversation with one another. In November 1950 the KATUSA program had reached its Korean War peak: 39,000 Korean troops served in American units.63
It should be noted that only one American division stood at full authorized strength and had no KATUSA: the First Marine Division. Army divisions, for the most part, were at approximately 80 percent strength, which translated into 50 percent or less strength in the infantry companies. Why did undermanning make a difference on the battlefield? The answer lies chiefly with the hilly terrain of North Korea and the tactics of the Eighth Army, which scattered isolated infantry companies in overnight positions. As the most powerful combat narrative of the war puts it: “Back of the regiment was a division, and back of the division an army, but the issue rested on how long a lone infantry company could stand unaided in defense of a solitary hill.”64 S. L. A. Marshall judged that the Army needed battalion-sized perimeters to hold off the Chinese, a practice common among the marines. A company at near full strength—some two hundred men—might have just enough strength to set up an all-around defense founded on foxholes, wire, obstacles, and well-sited automatic weapons. It could do all this and still send out patrols to link up with neighboring units and set up listening posts to detect an approaching enemy. Most of the infantry companies Marshall interviewed, however, averaged one hundred twenty-five men (one or more out of ten were flight-prone KATUSAs) when the Chinese hit.65
The shortage of service troops not only worsened a shortage of combat replacements but contributed to a debilitating logistical problem. The devastation
wrought by hard fighting, North Korean scorched-earth tactics, and repeated U.S. air force attacks on the roads, rails, and bridges of Korea would have made it hard to keep a motorized and prodigal army on the march in the best of times. The lengthening supply lines brought about by the UN advance, the drain on American logistical support from mushrooming ROK and Allied forces, and the decision to withdraw X Corps through Inchon harbor further choked the logistical system. As a result, at the end of November 1950, the Eighth Army faced a logistical crisis: According to official records it began its advance with barely a day’s worth of ammunition, one and a half day’s ammunition, and only four days’ food.66 Enormous waste (the allocation of aviation gas as fuel for jeeps and trucks, for example) compounded the problem.
Laboring under manpower disadvantages they could not overcome, and subject to logistical pressures they did not fully confront, the Eighth Army commanders needed tactical skills of a high order to beat back the Chinese. Yet all the evidence suggests that despite many individual cases of courage and determined leadership, the average fell far short of what was required. A post-Korea study by the Infantry School at Fort Benning made scathing criticism of tactics in the 1950 campaign: It began by declaring that there were few new lessons to be learned—but very many to be relearned from experience in World II and before.67 It mentioned in particular the lack of familiarity with night operations, insufficient patrolling, failure to coordinate such patrolling as did occur with artillery support, and improper use of the terrain. The River and the Gauntlet paints a harrowing picture of a 60-percent-strength company of the Second Infantry Division moving north on November 24, a day and a half before the Chinese onslaught:
All but twelve men had thrown away their steel helmets; the pile cap was better insurance against frostbite and the steel helmet wouldn’t fit over it. Only two men—new arrivals—carried the bayonet. The grenade load averaged less than one per man. Some rifle and carbine men carried as much as two extra bandoliers or six full clips. Others had as little as sixteen to thirty rounds on their persons. About one half of the company had dispensed with intrenching tools. . . . only a few men bothered to carry tinned rations on the march. Bedrolls and overcoats had been left behind.68
Throughout that chilling narrative S. L. A. Marshall describes units led in battle by men like the platoon leader who had “joined the company that morning. He didn’t know the men, and he was having his first try at judging a tactical situation.”69 It is a story of units who have no cleaning supplies for their weapons, who get into their sleeping bags for the night without digging in, who give up trying to establish communications with units on their left or right because they run out of field telephone wire. Marshall tells of battalions like the one that
had ceased issuing grenades to its individuals except as an emergency arose. When pressure slackened, the men tended to discard grenades into the unit trucks. Movement shook the pins loose, and equipment had been lost because of this carelessness.70
There was, as Marshall declared again and again, no lack of individual courage in army units. But, he wrote to a marine friend,
On the other hand, I am not defending the Army—its training, disciplines, morale programs or anything else. I think we need reform until hell won’t have it. The system directly contributes to the breakdown of men. . . . I think we could take over your methods and make them work in the Army on a broad scale. In fact, I have no doubt of it.
Men are men. At base, the average American is still good; he wears testicles, though you would never think so, judging by what the Army does to condition him.
It isn’t necessary—nor has it ever been so—to tell a Marine to have faith in his service.
But today, the average American just holds on and hopes that his Army is better than it looks—which it isn’t.
Even the ranks are aware of the dry rot in the system.
You might judge from this letter that I am clean fed up. If so, you judge rightly. I had not thought it possible that we could do so many things so badly.71
In public Marshall leaped to the defense of the GIs and their commanders in Korea. In private—in letters and classified reports—he scourged the army he held responsible for the needless losses of November and December 1950. For Marshall, as for others who knew the full story, the rout of the Second Infantry Division, and the annihilation of Task Force Faith—over three thousand men from the Seventh Infantry Division east of the Chosin Reservoir—were tales of peculiar horror. These men did not perish like Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, outnumbered but at least among comrades, as a fighting unit. Rather, they died as lonely individuals or in splintered, scrabbling groups, at the hands of a cruel enemy in a frozen waste. The bitterness of men like Marshall was deepened by a sense that it need not have happened so. And it is to that part of the story we must turn next.
DISASTER REDEEMED
We have mentioned a number of times the experience of the First Marine Division. Its retreat (together with several thousand army and Allied troops) from the Chosin Reservoir was an epic of courage, endurance, and loyalty to comrades—the fighting fit brought back not only the living wounded but the frozen dead. Some 1,000 marines died or were reported missing, and 3,500 were wounded. Almost twice as many were nonbattle casualties, chiefly to frostbite. The retreat from Chosin was, however, a victory and not just a chance to live to fight again. The forces that attacked it, the twelve divisions of China’s Ninth Army Group, Third Field Army, did not reappear in the field until March 1951. According to captured Chinese documents, some 25,000 men died at the hands of the Americans, another 12,000 were wounded, and tens of thousands more fell victim to the frigid weather that tortured even the well-clad and equipped Americans.72 When X Corps evacuated eastern Korea it did so under no significant enemy pressure: Its enemy lay prostrate in the hills to the north.
S. L. A. Marshall, working as an operations analyst for the army, obtained permission in December 1950 to study marine operations—about which, he found, the Eighth Army knew appallingly little.73 This in turn led to other studies, including a sketch for a companion volume to The River and the Gauntlet, which he never completed. From these and other sources we can learn, however, why the marines did so well, both absolutely and relative to the army.
Some elements of this success have to do with certain intrinsic advantages of the Marines. They were, as we have noted, at full strength, particularly in their rifle companies. No competing buildup in Europe drained their frontline strength. They had even closer and more ample air support from their own marine air wing than the army got from the U.S. air force (which, however, provided a great deal of close air support in the retreat). Most of the marines had seen less fighting than the army divisions. Aside from one brigade introduced into the Pusan perimeter in August, most of the division took part only in the ten days’ hard fighting of the Inchon landing and liberation of Seoul before being withdrawn for a repeatedly delayed landing at Wonsan on the east coast of Korea. Army divisions, by contrast, had been in the line more or less continuously since July and were feeling the strain.
All this said, the marines clearly coped far better with a challenge not too different from that which afflicted their army comrades in the west (and for that matter, in the east). They had in Major General Oliver P. Smith a commander of rare ability, who stubbornly refused to speed the northward advance (as ordered by X Corps commander Lieutenant General Edward M. Almond) until he had established adequate supply dumps and air strips along the Main Supply Route (MSR). Much of their success, however, can be attributed to very basic precautions: digging in every night, setting up barbed wire, noisemakers, and trip flares, aggressive patrolling, seizing the high ground. “[T]here was nothing radical or unorthodox. . . . It was war waged ‘according to the book’; but done with such precision and power as to reilluminate the ancient truth that weapons when correctly used will invariably bring success.”74 Discipline never broke. Battalion commanders checked that troops had dug foxholes before turning
in, even though they had to chip away at half a foot of frozen dirt. Company commanders watched each man perform the painful but necessary ritual of changing his sweat-soaked socks every evening despite the howling cold, in order to prevent frostbite. When the first battered units arrived at Hungnam
The men of our battalion were exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally. We received word we were going aboard ship. Everyone was instructed to clean weapons and all other gear before boarding. We used fish oil and rags to get the weapons in shape. This was in keeping with our basic training.75
By enforcing such drudgery the marines retained their fighting effectiveness.
To competent senior leadership and a solid grounding in the basics of warfare, the marines added appropriate tactics. After some initial setbacks in the Chinese First Phase Offensive at the end of October and beginning of November
the Marines established a tactical principle for coming weeks: that to nullify Chinese night tactics, regardless of large scale penetrations and infiltration, defending units had only to maintain position until daybreak. With observation restored, Marine firepower would melt down the Chinese mass to impotency.76
Unlike the isolated infantry companies of the Second Infantry Division, marine units did not retreat under the pressure of enemy attacks—which, contrary to newspaper accounts, did not swamp defending units by suicidal charges, but rather broke them by steadily increasing pressure. Moreover, on the whole, the marines hunkered down at night in perimeters larger than the company-size formations used by the Eighth Army. Where accounts of the fighting in army divisions usually feature the names of company and (rarely) battalion commanders, the marine histories talk more of the regimental commanders who coordinated the fight. Benefiting from carefully fostered contact with the local Korean population, marine intelligence kept the divisional commander and his subordinates aware of the Chinese buildup on their front and flanks. When the Chinese hit the marines were mentally and physically ready for them.
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