This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  To make a war, sometimes it is necessary that everyone guess wrong.

  In the South of Korea, the economically impossible, democratically imperfect regime of Syngman Rhee struggled with massive problems. In the North, the Chosun Minjujui Inmun Kongwhakuk struggled only to overthrow Rhee. It used border raids, sabotage, guerrilla action, and propaganda, plus economic pressure.

  One irrefutable measure of the success of cantankerous, autocratic, and Christian old Syngman Rhee was that the North failed. In spite of massive infiltration, treason, and chaotic political turmoil in South Korea, the majority of the people south of the parallel wanted no united nation that would be a tool of the Soviets.

  On 1 January 1949 the United States recognized the new Republic of Korea. Special Representative to Korea John J. Muccio became the United States' first ambassador; the last American occupation forces were quickly withdrawn, though the United States by treaty agreed to help train ROK security forces. And economic aid continued; the Republic of Korea could not exist without it.

  On 12 January 1950 Secretary of State Acheson spoke to the National Press Club in Washington. During the speech it came to public light that neither Korea nor Taiwan were within the United States' security cordon in the Far East. This was nothing new. The Korean decision had been made prior to 17 September 1947, when the United States had informed Russia of its intention to place the Korean problem before the United Nations. And the United States was still cautiously waiting for the "dust to settle" on the Chinese question.

  Mr. Acheson neither blundered nor gave away state secrets. In global war—which was the only kind American policy makers contemplated or for which any service was preparing—neither Taiwan nor Korea was of much use. But neither Mr. Acheson nor his colleagues, who understood the European situation very well, quite knew or understood what was happening in Asia.

  Europe could no longer be lost without a big war, but Asia had begun to teeter on the brink. There were plenty of farsighted men who were uneasy at the prospect, but in each case the dichotomy of the Truman Administration kept them hamstrung. Pragmatists and conservatives might be willing to put ground troops in Asia to fight "agrarian reformers and starving peasants"—but American liberal opinion was not.

  The bulk of the people, indifferent as they were, might have been convinced, but the intellectuals, never. And the Democratic Administration did not feel it could completely circumvent its liberal spokesmen at home.

  Dean Acheson drew his soon famous line, but he told the Russians nothing. By their process of reasoning, the United States had abandoned any real interest and power position in Korea when it had sent the question to the United Nations. Even as Mr. Acheson spoke, Russian and Chinese and North Korean leaders conferred in Peiping, agreeing that if the waters were muddied further in Korea the United States would stand aside, as it had during the fall of Nationalist China. They agreed that there would be no resort to atomic war if Korean attacked Korean; and observing American armed strength in the Orient, they correctly assumed that the United States had no other capability.

  The United States could not be bought, or even intimidated, but it had a long history of looking the other way if not immediately threatened.

  A war is made when a nation or group of nations is frustrated in political aims or when ends can be achieved in no other way. Communism was receding from its high-water mark in Europe, and the Atlantic Treaty Organization promised new stability there. It was succeeding in Asia, but the United Nations-sponsored Taehan Minkuk stood in its way. The Republic of Korea was not vulnerable to subversion, but it was vulnerable to armed force. And if it fell, the Russians saw, as the Americans did only imperfectly, that Communist control of the peninsula would soon become disastrous to the American presence and prestige in Japan.

  Clausewitz, whom the majority of Americans read only to try to refute, had written: War is not pastime, no mere passion for daring and winning, no work of a free enthusiasm; it is a serious means to a serious end. War always arises from a political condition and is called forth by a political motive. Beside this passage, Lenin had drawn a marginal line.

  A war is made when a government believes that only through war, and at no serious risk to itself, it may gain its ends.

  Even before Dean Acheson spoke and told the Russians what they already knew, the Communist leaders were agreed. Soon, Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku and his brother staff officers would receive orders, in Cyrillic script, to be translated into the Korean Hangul.

  It was to be a bold stroke, with every chance of success.

  It would almost succeed.

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  4

  The Plan of General Chae

  Surprise may decisively shift the balance of combat power in favor of the commander who achieves it. It consists of striking the enemy when, where, or in a manner for which he is unprepared.

  — Field Service Regulations, Operations, United States Army.

  THE ONLY AMERICAN soldier on the 38th parallel on Sunday morning, 25 June 1950, awoke at daylight to the sound of cannon. Captain Joseph R. Darrigo, Assistant Adviser to the 12th Regiment, 1st ROK Division, had quarters in a house just northeast of Kaesong. Half awake, he lay in bed, listening; it had been raining, and the sound he heard could have been thunder. Then he heard the whine of shell fragments through the air and the slap of small-arms fire against the house.

  Captain Darrigo came awake. He found his trousers, and with his shoes in one hand and his uniform shirt in the other, he rushed from his bedroom. He ran into his frightened Korean houseboy on the stairs.

  Darrigo's jeep was parked just outside the house, and the two of them made a dash for it. Outside they saw no one, but the sound of firing was continuous, reverberating from the bare hillsides and amplified by the low clouds. Darrigo started up the jeep and spurted southward toward Kaesong.

  Arriving at the traffic circle in the center of the city, he stopped and looked around. He saw the railroad station, less than half a mile away, and noticed that a dozen railway cars had just pulled into it. As he watched, what seemed a full regiment of men in mustard-colored brown uniforms began leaping from the train.

  Darrigo knew that the rail line, which had been torn up across the demarcation zone just north of Kaesong when the bamboo curtain crashed down, must have been relaid during the night by the Inmun Gun. Then they had loaded a train with troops, and while their artillery and frontal assault crashed against the thinly held position along the parallel, this train had puffed calmly into Kaesong to take the ROK's in the rear.

  Men began advancing toward the traffic circle, and rifle fire slashed near Darrigo's quarter-ton. Captain Darrigo saw that there was nothing he could do in Kaesong; he could not even rejoin the 12th Regiment beyond the town. He put the jeep in gear and roared south, speeding across the Imjin River to Munsan-ni.

  The assault of the North Korean People's Army—the NKPA, in United States Army terminology—while completely coordinated did not fall everywhere at once. Rather, it came in a series of blows, beginning at exactly 0400 in the west and continuing eastward for more than an hour.

  Since the South had been heavily infiltrated with line crossers and Communist agents, the NKPA without exception knew the location of every South Korean defense unit, and sent superior forces against it. And almost without exception, the assault took the ROK units by complete surprise.

  Many officers, most American advisers, and a large number of enlisted men were absent on pass to Seoul or other towns. And while the ROK's had deployed four divisions along the border, only one of the three regiments of each division was actually occupying its preplanned defensive position. The remaining regiments generally were in reserve areas from ten to forty miles south of the parallel.

  The armored fist of the NKPA, then, struck not only against an utterly surprised ROK army, but a ROK army not deployed for battle. This factor, even more than lack of equipment or status of training, was to be decisive.

  At
approximately 0600, KMAG HQ in Seoul received a radio message from the advisers of the ROK 17th Regiment on the Ongjin Peninsula west of Seoul. They reported: "Regiment under heavy attack, about to be overrun." They requested instructions. No orders had been issued to KMAG to cover the situation developing on Sunday morning. Were the American officers to fight alongside the ROK's, or merely to continue their advisory duties, or to withdraw, since this was a war of Korean against Korean?

  Ambassador Muccio's feeling was that KMAG should stand aside, following the precedent set earlier in China's civil war. Two volunteer aviators from KMAG HQ flew the five Americans on the Ongjin Peninsula back to Seoul in light L-5 liaison planes.

  The Ongjin Peninsula west of Seoul had been considered defensible, but within hours the remnants of Colonel Paik In Yup's 17th Regiment were evacuated by LST's to Inch'on.

  Farther east, the assault that had awakened Captain Darrigo rolled up the defenses north of Kaesong. Only two companies of the ROK 12th Regiment were able to flee south across the Imjin River; the others were killed or captured. The remaining regiments of the ROK Ist Division, the 13th and 11th, were at Korangp'o-ri, fifteen miles east of Kaesong, and in reserve just north of Seoul. They were commanded by Colonel Paik Sun Yup, a very young but able officer.

  At the time Captain Darrigo was watching the NKPA detrain in Kaesong, Colonel Paik and several of his staff were in Seoul, beating on the door of the KMAG compound where Darrigo's boss, Lieutenant Colonel Lloyd Rockwell, was sleeping. As soon as they had got Rockwell awake, the Koreans told him of the NKPA assault. Colonel Paik then got in touch with his 11th Regiment by phone and ordered it to move north to Munsan-ni, south of the Imjin River, and to take up already prepared defensive positions alongside its sister regiment at Korangp'o-ri.

  In earlier discussions, both Rockwell and Paik had agreed that the 1st Division could hold against an attack from the north only on the south side of the Imjin. Now they and the staff proceeded immediately up to that river and ordered the bridges blown. But the NKPA was so close upon the rear of the retreating 12th Regiment that the order could not be executed.

  The 11th and 13th regiments, by midmorning, were heavily engaged with the NKPA 1st Division and the 105th Armored Brigade. Korean soldiers were as brave as any, but they soon found they had no weapons to halt the Russian-built T-34 tanks. The 2,36-inch rocket launchers furnished them by the U.S. Army could not be counted on to penetrate the Russian armor, and they were very weak in artillery. But the 1st Division held at Korangp'o-ri.

  ROK soldiers, seeing all else fail, seized packets of high explosive and threw themselves under tank treads, trying to disable the steel monsters. Others ran at the advancing tanks with satchel charges, or charges fixed to long poles. Still others leaped upon tank decks, and desperately attempted to pry open the turret hatches with iron bars and hooks, so that they might drop hand grenades inside. In open terrain, and against tanks deployed in number, such tactics were suicide. A tank or two slued aside or blew up, but the ROK soldiers died.

  They died chopped down by the tank machine guns, or shot by the supporting NKPA infantry. They died shrieking under the tank treads. When almost a hundred had been killed in this manner, the desire to fight tanks barehanded began to leave the survivors.

  Still the 1st Division held its ground. It was still holding, desperately, when disaster to the east forced it to withdraw.

  The main attack of the NKPA burst down the Ch'orwon Valley toward the Uijongbu Corridor, the main gateway from the north to Seoul. On the left the 4th Division, NKPA, attacked southward along the Yonch'on-Tongduch'on-ni road into Uijongbu; on the right the 3rd Division moved along the P'och'onKurwha road. In front of each division roared and clanked a regiment of forty tanks.

  A single ROK division, the 7th, with its 1st Regiment scattered along the parallel, its 9th Regiment at P'och'on, and its 3rd Regiment at Tongduch'onni, took the full force of the assault.

  At 0830 a staff officer of the 7th Division radioed the ROK Minister of Defense in Seoul: "We are under general attack and heavy artillery fire near the parallel. The enemy has already seized his initial objectives. We require immediate reinforcements. Our reserve is engaged."

  There were no reinforcements available, and there was no way to stop the onrushing tanks—no rivers, no ridges to bar the way. Fighting, the 7th Division fell back toward Uijongbu. By evening of 25 June, worried civilians there could hear the sound of guns, coming closer.

  If Uijongbu fell, Seoul was defenseless.

  Farther east, south of Hwach'on and the great Hwach'on Reservoir, near which NKPA II Corps had its headquarters, lay the ancient and lovely town of Ch'unch'on, atop whose Peacock Mountain was the most famous shrine in Korea, a building with bright-lacquered pillars and dull red roof tiles, which the South Koreans had turned into a library. Against Ch'unch'on II Corps threw its 2nd Division, without tank support.

  The 2nd Division was to take Ch'unch'on no later than Sunday afternoon, while II Corps' 7th Division, which had tanks, was to attack toward Hongch'on, which lay southeast of the Shrine City.

  The attack of the 7th Division south from Inje was immediately successful. What happened at Ch'unch'on, however, is significant.

  The ROK 6th Division's 7th Regiment stood in dug-in concrete pillboxes and bunkers on the high, pine-covered ridges north of Ch'unch'on. The positions on Sunday morning were fully manned by grousing ROK soldiers; Colonel Kim Chong O, the division commander, had permitted no weekend passes. The American adviser, Lieutenant Colonel McPhail, was at Wonju with Division HQ. The 6th Division artillery was well trained.

  The attack of the NKPA stalled in the mountains north of Ch'unch'on. Well-placed artillery fire shattered the NKPA 6th Regiment. There was no panic, no confusion among the defenders, who had been ready.

  At midmorning, Colonel McPhail rushed up from Wonju to be on hand during the battle, and by late afternoon the reserve regiment of the 6th Division entered the town. Despite desperate attacks and bitter fighting, the NKPA 2nd Division could not force its way into Ch'unch'on.

  With the fall of dark, there was annoyance in the Operations Post of II Corps at Hwach'on. Senior Colonel Lee was ordered to divert the 7th Division from its push toward Hongch'on and bring it back to join in the drive on Ch'unch'on. The 2nd Division, in only one day's fighting, had been badly mauled. It had suffered almost 40 percent casualties.

  Fighting unsurprised, fully manned, and against troops without armor, the ROK Army was more than holding its own. For three days the ROK 6th Division would hold Ch'unch'on, retreating only when disaster to its east and west made its strongly held positions untenable.

  Far across the peninsula, on the other side of the rugged and almost impassable Taebaek Range, the ROK 8th Division, which was stationed in coastal cities along the Sea of Japan, had been fighting Communist guerrillas. Several of its battalions were detached for service in the mountains on Sunday, 25 June; the others were stretched out from the parallel down to Samch'ok.

  At first light on Sunday morning Korean staff officers burst in on Major George Kessler, adviser of the 10th Regiment. They told him, "We are under heavy attack across the parallel!"

  Before any moves could be made, reports by telephone said that enemy soldiers were landing on the coast both north and south of Samch'ok. Whatever might be happening along the parallel, this last was serious. Kessler jumped into his jeep, and with the commanding officer of 10th Regiment, drove east to the sea north of Samch'ok.

  Kessler stopped the jeep on a high hill overlooking the sea. Offshore, he and the regimental C.O. saw a vast flotilla of sampans and junks. Below them, on the beach, they saw a battalion-sized group of Inmun Gun coming ashore and spreading out. Kessler backed around and got out of there.

  Driving south of Samch'ok, they saw approximately the same scene. ROK gunfire opened up and sank two boats offshore, but at least a thousand armed men came ashore. These men, mostly guerrilla cadres, did not engage the ROK forces, but slipped into the
Taebaek Mountains and linked up with the guerrilla forces already fighting there.

  And north, along the parallel, the NKPA 5th Division, supported by the 766th Independent Unit, crashed against the spread-out ROK 8th, driving it southward down the coast. The division commander informed the ROK chief of staff before withdrawing, in good order. No matter what happened, the campaign would not be won or lost in the remote east.

  By midmorning on Sunday, General Chae Byong Duk and his principal advisers knew that the assault in progress was no rice raid.

  In ROK Headquarters at Seoul there was confusion, but as yet no panic among the rank and file. After all, plans had been laid for just such an eventuality as this attack of the Inmun Gun.

  In Seoul the officers knew that the key to the capital lay in the Uijongbu Corridor; any serious threat against Seoul must come that way, and if the enemy should get past Uijongbu, there was no feature, manmade or natural, that could hinder him short of the Han, on Seoul's south side. Obviously, and according to well-thought-out plan, the major ROK effort would be made in the Uijongbu Corridor, where now General Yu Hai Hyung's 7th Division was falling back under heavy pressure.

  General Chae Byong Duk, Chief of Staff, began nervously to issue orders. All reserves of the ROK Army were to move north toward Seoul, and through the city into the Uijongbu Corridor.

  The ROK 2nd Division was at Taejon, ninety miles south. The 5th was near Kwangfu far to the southwest, and the 3rd was across the peninsula at Taegu.

  The ROK 2nd was the first to receive its orders, and to move. Its lead elements, accompanied by their American advisers, departed north by rail at 1430. By nightfall on 25 June parts of the 5th were on the road, and some units of the 3rd were also in motion.