This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Dean himself was worn down. For fourteen days he had lived from crisis to crisis without a breathing spell. He did not plan to make a last ditch stand in Taejon, though he did plan to delay there.

  But on 18 July General Walton Walker, commanding Eighth Army, flew into Taejon. Walker had been assembling a great deal of data on the Korean situation, and was becoming nervous to know when and where the enemy was going to be stopped. Back home, the Pentagon was still putting out sweetness and light over the intervention and "police action," but Johnny Walker's own pants were beginning to burn, however confident the Pentagon remained.

  On 11 July, an official communiqué reported "65 enemy tanks damaged or destroyed." On the same date Tokyo claimed that the "morale of North Korean troops was reported cracking under the steady hammering from the air."

  On 13 July 1950 the New York Times, reporting the request of the Army for 20,000 draftees, said, Draftee duty set—none will go to Korea soon, "and not many at all," Army says.

  On 14 July the Times also carried the following dispatch, datelined 13 July, Tokyo:

  Front dispatches have greatly exaggerated American losses in one of the most skillful and heroic holding and rearguard actions in history although outnumbered at times more than 20 to 1, and the casualties inflicted on the enemy have been immeasurably greater than they have sustained.

  On admitting the loss of the Kum River Line, the Times quoted the Pentagon as saying: Enemy said to use 150,000 men in the onslaught, led by Russian tanks, some weighing 60 tons— though the attack had been mounted by less than 20,000 NKPA, and the largest tank sighted in Korea had been the 34-ton T-34. Bad news was always offset by the mention of insuperable odds.

  The Times, widely quoted by other newspapers across the land, reported 16 July 1950 that "General Collins (J. Lawton Collins, Chief of Staff) spoke well of American troops and their equipment. 'In spite of their greenness,' the Army Chief said, 'the troops had done an exceptionally fine job.' "

  The same day Tokyo commented that "morale and combat efficiency remained excellent despite the necessity of withdrawals and holding actions."

  There was constant talk of air power and air attacks and the damage air was doing to the enemy. Gradually, the reports became almost plaintive, as air power remained unable to stem the North Korean advance.

  Side by side with the official Pentagon and Tokyo communiqués, however, there were stories by men such as Richard J. S. Johnston and Hanson Baldwin, of the New York Times. Johnston reported troops as saying, "I never saw such a useless damn war in my life," and wrote: In the last few bloody days of fighting the bravado and self-assurance have given way—

  One of the problems, in 1950, was to recognize the problem.

  Walker had decided that he could hold along the Naktong River in southeastern Korea with the divisions and troops now on the way. Already, his boss, MacArthur, had developed plans for taking the enemy in the rear by amphibious assault—but such a plan was worthless unless the enemy advance could be stopped short of the Naktong.

  Talking with Bill Dean at the 34th Infantry CP, Walker told Dean he needed two more days' delay in Taejon, so that the 1st Cavalry and 25th divisions could deploy to the city's east. Then he flew back to his own HQ at Taegu, above Pusan.

  His chief of staff asked Walker how much rope he had given Dean, and Walker replied, "I told him that I had every confidence in him, and that if it became necessary for him to abandon Taejon earlier, to make his own decision, and I'd sustain him. Dean is a fighter. He won't give an inch if he can help it."

  Johnny Walker was right.

  General Dean was to be much criticized for remaining inside the city as it fell. The majority of the men complaining did not comprehend the situation on the ground in Korea. They could not understand that a senior commander, issuing orders for a last-ditch defense from a safe position in the rear, was apt to be trampled in the rush.

  The United States Army, understandably, has been reluctant to discuss the problem, even among its own. Once it had returned to the bosom of a permissive society, and tried to adopt that society's ways, its own hands were tied. Once it had gone on the defensive to its critics, it would never regain the initiative. When the answer to a problem is not immediately at hand, the better part of valor is to ignore it.

  Dean had almost no communications. If he wanted to know what was happening to the front-line troops, he had to be on the front lines. He had found, sadly, that it was much easier to get a message to the rear than it was to get one carried forward.

  In the chaotic situation along his front, with units continually breaking contact and moving south, Dean could never be sure of the real situation. This was one reason he would stay so long in Taejon.

  He had three basic reasons for remaining inside the beleaguered city; one, to keep up the crumbling morale of the 34th Infantry and the other defenders by the sight of their commander moving shoulder to shoulder with them; two, to set an example for the ROK officers and staffs fighting alongside the Americans, who by now had all virtually climbed on the Pusan Express; and three, Bill Dean wanted to see close up just what kind of fighting cat the North Korean was.

  As he would write later, he was too close to the forest to see the trees.

  The North Korean assault on Taejon was like all other North Korean attacks—they crashed into the defenders head on pinning them down, forcing them back, while at the same time they flanked or infiltrated to the rear and blocked the defenders' retreat. At any given moment, it was impossible for Dean or any other commander to know what the situation was to his rear; this was a kind of tactic that the Europe-trained American officers, who liked to keep tidy lines, could not grasp until too late.

  As it developed, Dean kept what he wanted of the 34th in the city, and sent other elements of the division, including his own HQ, to the east. As he would say much later, what he did afterward could have been done by any competent sergeant—but in saying this, Dean was thinking of the old Army, not the forces of 1950.

  There is no point to detailing the day-by-day and street-by-street actions during the next three days. They were repetitions of what befell the Americans earlier. The NKPA attacked. The defenders fought, then fell back. The enemy got into their rear, and cut them off. The Americans disintegrated and saved what they could.

  On the morning of 20 July Dean awoke to heavy gunfire as the ragged line drawn around Taejon continued to shrink. The city was now afire in many places, the stench of smoking thatch competing with that of gunpowder and the underlying filth of the Orient. And by the morning of the 20th, Dean realized that his hope that help might arrive if he held two days was fading. The dispirited defenders were beginning to straggle back into town, and the ring of gunfire was drawing tighter.

  Then, just after dawn, Dean heard that North Korean tanks were in the town. Dean was at the CP of the 34th Infantry. The 34th had now no further contact with its two battalions—as usual; it did not know where the flanks were, or even where the war was. For the first time in days Bill Dean had no command decisions to make.

  He decided to go tank hunting. He did not know it, but Colonel Beauchamp, to whom he had just given command of the 34th, was doing the same. Like Colonel Martin, Beauchamp had found everyone deathly sick of the T-34's, but now things were just a bit better, for a few of the new 3.5-inch bazookas, designed to stop any known armor, had been flown in from the States.

  With Beauchamp guiding and directing a team, the 3.5's knocked out one tank west of Taejon.

  Inside the city, Dean, with his aide, Lieutenant Clarke, and his ROK interpreter, Kim, found a soldier with one of the new rocket launchers and went tank hunting.

  The little party found two on a street, just behind a burning American ammunition carrier. The tanks opened fire with machine guns, forcing the hunters into buildings along the street. But the smoke lay so heavily over the city now that Dean and his men were able to creep up closer, and to the rear of the tanks.

  The tanks turned aroun
d, and started to come back toward them. The bazooka man took aim, but he was shaking too badly to hold true. When he fired, he blew up the street a few yards in front of him.

  He had only one round of ammunition.

  Arrogantly, like all the tanks of the Inmun Gun, the T-34 waddled on past Bill Dean and party. Dean lost his temper. Pulling out his .45 automatic, he emptied the magazine at the monster as it clanked past.

  Then Dean and party got the hell out of there.

  Meanwhile, hundreds of North Korean soldiers, disguised in the white robes of farmers, were infiltrating into the city. Once inside, they threw off the misleading civilian attire and opened fire on American troops. Soon snipers were everywhere.

  Using HQ and service personnel, American officers were having very poor success in rooting them out. Most American boys no longer knew how to play cowboys and Indians, particularly with live ammunition.

  By afternoon, Dean had located another bazooka man, this time with an ammo bearer.

  Dodging sniper fire, shooting a few snipers on the way, his party hunted up another tank. But this target was covered by North Korean infantry, and rifle fire kept them from getting close. Dean and the bazooka men sneaked back through a Korean courtyard, and climbed up to the second story of a house facing the street.

  Here, cautiously looking out the street window, Dean saw the muzzle of the tank's 85mm gun pointed at him, not more than a dozen feet away.

  The bazooka man aimed where Dean pointed, and fired. The blowback from the rocket shook the whole room. The shaped charge burned into the tank at the juncture of turret and body.

  From the tank came a shrill, horrible ululation.

  "Hit 'em again!" Dean said.

  After the third round, the screaming ended abruptly, and the T-34 began to smoke.

  Somehow, the long day drew to an end. Dean knew now that it was time to pull out of the city, and at the 34th's CP he also found that there was a roadblock across the escape route east. While he was preparing to shoot his way out of Taejon, several light tanks from the 1st Cavalry fought their way into town to assist Dean's withdrawal.

  Dean sent the HQ of the 34th out with them, and soon heard them firing from the edge of town.

  It was now dark. Colonel Pappy Wadlington, who had remained with Dean, suggested it was time for Dean to get out himself. He wanted to send a message asking for more tanks to assist the general's retreat.

  Dean didn't buy it. It smacked too much of asking for help personally. He did send a message for armor to reduce the roadblock east of Taejon, and then he and the remaining men around him got into their vehicles and started down the street the tanks had gone.

  Soon, they reached the earlier convoy. It had been ambushed, and burning trucks filled the streets. The buildings on both sides of the streets were afire, and American infantry was engaged along the side in a vicious battle with enemy troops.

  Dean's jeep hurtled through, screeching around the stalled and flaming trucks, while the heat seared him and the men with him. The driver poured it on, and a block farther on, roared through an intersection. Lieutenant Clarke, Dean's aide, shouted, "We missed our turn!"

  But sniper fire was smacking the pavement all around; it was impossible to turn the jeep about. Dean ordered the driver to keep straight ahead; they would take the long way around to safety.

  It was the long way around indeed. Because he took the wrong turn, Bill Dean would not rejoin the American Army until September, 1953. Thirty-five days later, after wandering lost in the hills, after making heroic attempts to reach his own lines, Bill Dean was betrayed to the Inmun Gun by Koreans. When they jumped him, he tried to make them kill him, but they put ropes around his wrists and dragged him to a police station. There they threw him in a cage, the sort reserved for the town drunk.

  Only much later did the Inmun Gun realize that the old-looking, filthy, 130-pound emaciated soldier they had captured was an American general.

  General Dean once said that he wouldn't award himself a wooden star for what he did as a commander. His country saw more clearly.

  It gave him the Medal of Honor.

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  10

  Retreating

  There is no one but yourself to keep your back door open.

  — Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, commanding Eighth Army, to Major General Hobart R. Gay, CG 1st Calvary Division, July 1950.

  AT NOON 22 JULY, the units of the 24th Division holding at Yongdong east of Taejon turned over the front to the 1st Calvary Division. At the same time General Walker ordered Major General John H. Church to assume command in the absence of General Dean.

  In seventeen days of combat, the 24th Division had been driven back one hundred miles. It had lost enough matériel to equip a full-strength infantry division. Its losses in personnel had amounted to more than 30 percent, of which an unusually high portion had been senior officers. More than twenty-four hundred men were missing in action.

  But had it not been committed, the balance of the United States Forces could never have established themselves in Korea. Without the extra days General Dean gave Walker at Taejon, the final defense of Pusan probably would have failed.

  There had been hundreds of acts of heroism in the 24th, as well as acts that reflected no credit on the service. But most of the heroic actions had been those of individuals, of single officer or men who fought bravely and well. Because without tight discipline their bravery could not be coordinated into a team effort, many of these men died in vain.

  Every American fighting man, seeing the decimated, dirty, exhausted, and weaponless 24th Infantry Division pushed back beyond Taejon, could only say to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I."

  For the 24th Division was certainly no weaker than the Army as a whole. The other divisions from Japan, the 25th, the 1st Cavalry, the 7th Infantry, displayed the identical weaknesses of the 24th as each was committed to action.

  None of them were equipped, trained, or mentally prepared for combat. For the first time in recent history, American ground units had been committed during the initial days of a war; there had been no allies to hold the line while America prepared. For the first time, many Americans could understand what had happened to Britain at Dunkirk.

  Almost subconsciously, Americans had come to believe there would always be someone else to hold the line at first.

  Once aroused, a democracy can match a totalitarian state in every facet of strength-it can be stronger, for totalitarianism has built-ill bureaucratic weaknesses. A Hitler can command, and men march—but a Hitler can go mad—and there is no one to say him nay.

  But the abiding weakness of free peoples is that their governments can not or will not make them prepare or sacrifice before they are aroused.

  The majority of the young men of the other divisions thrown into Korea now in late July were no more interested in being soldiers than the men of the 24th had been. They had enlisted for every reason known to man except to fight. They had no real antagonism for the enemy system, nor any desire to oppose it. They had no understanding of their nation's position in the world, or of the course their government must take. And their government was slow to waken to what its supposed legions had become.

  Lacking professionalism, the men and junior officers did not have even the dash and pride of standard and outfit that men like De Vigny had been able to restore to the defeated French Army. With this pride of unit and profession, and with iron discipline, they would have fought differently.

  The government, slow to understand, did nothing to remedy the situation. It did not seriously explain the world situation to the troops, or the United States' stake in it. Unquestionably, the government had hoped in the early days and weeks that the Korean conflict could be quickly contained, a hope the pitiful condition of its ground forces rendered forlorn from the start.

  Soldiers fight from discipline and training, citizens from motivation and ideals. Lacking both, it is amazing that the Americ
an troops did even as well as they did. For as Colonel Dick Stephens of the 21st Infantry said, "The men and officers had no interest in a fight which was not even dignified by being called a war. It was a bitter fight in which many lives were lost, and we could see no profit in it.…"

  And once they were committed, the Pentagon seemed to be living in its own dream world of optimism. It should have been clear from the start that America was entering a very real, if limited, war, and in war the outcome is usually in doubt. Day after day, the official briefings gave neither the public and the troops at home a real picture of the actual situation.

  Though a number of armchair strategists and second-year ROTC students with a map could figure it out, and did.

  Among those sickened by the official releases, which sometimes approached the dream world of the Imperial Japanese Government while being hammered to pieces by American might in World War II, was the New York Times military writer, Major Hanson Baldwin, who wrote, "…the Pentagon … has too often disseminated a soothing syrup of cheer and sweetness and light since the fighting began."

  Nor were all the newsmen, particularly those writing from Korea, clear as to the real facts. Rarely has any conflict been so badly reported. Again and again in late July, dispatches referred to "wave after wave of screaming North Koreans" crashing against American lines. Newspaper after newspaper printed the fact that "we are still outnumbered at least four to one." Some papers put the figure at ten to one. The New York Times carried one story in which a junior officer claimed, "We were doing good against odds of better than 15 to 1 until we ran out of ammunition." In this, the Army aided and abetted them, and did nothing to disillusion them. The Army commanders had their own problems without trying to help newsmen understand the war.

  In actuality, the NKPA held a slight superiority in men on 20 July. By 22 July, U.N. and North Korean forces were on a par, and by the end of July United Nations forces actually outnumbered the Inmun Gun, an advantage they never again lost.