This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  At 0900 on 16 September, H-Hour for the breakout, there was little change in the battlefront. Under dark skies and heavy rains American divisions and People's Army were still locked in close combat, and in many places the North Koreans were yet attacking. Instead of jumping off in assault, many American units were on the defensive, repelling assaults of the enemy.

  Then, suddenly, the front began to break apart.

  George B. Peploe, a few weeks from being fifty, commanded the 38th Infantry, the 2nd Division's Rock of the Marne Regiment. Stemming from a family of fruit farmers near Waterport, New York, Peploe was a graduate of the Military Academy in 1925. In Europe he had served as G-3 of XIII Corps in Simpson's 9th Army, and he was within fifty miles of Berlin when the war ended.

  A medium-sized, soft-spoken officer with thin gray hair and blue eyes, Peploe was still a colonel in 1950. He was unassuming, without the slap and dash of some professionals—but he had a consuming belief in the importance of hard training for soldiers.

  Peploe felt soldiers should train in peacetime exactly as they trained in wartime. For an army has only two functions, to fight, or to prepare to fight. But Peploe faced the basic problem all officers who thought his way faced in the postwar years—hard, realistic training was unpopular, and it sometimes resulted in injuries.

  While everyone admitted realistic training resulted in fewer dead upon the field of battle, a man injured or killed by accident on the training field soon had Congress down about an officer's ears. And the people up above showed no willingness to back their juniors up. Many a general who would have walked up a hill blazing with enemy fire without thinking twice quailed in his polished boots on the receipt of a congressional letter.

  Under the Constitution of the United States, Congress holds the power of life and death over the military, and no one would have it otherwise. History has shown very clearly that for democracy to continue, the people, and not the generals or even the executive authority, must have control over the military. The people must dictate its size, composition, and its use—above all, its use. But control does not imply petty interference.

  The problem seems to fall eternally upon the ground forces. While few men, legislators or otherwise, have felt down the years that they could command ships of the line or marshal air armies without specialized training, almost any fool has felt in his heart he could command a regiment.

  And throughout history, the men in the ranks have been the ultimate victims of such philosophy. In the eighteenth century, when the British Navy, hard-bitten, professional, and competent, ruled the waves, His Majesty's regiments—"The thin red line of heroes, led by fools"—left their bones scattered across the world.

  In the summer of 1950, while 80 percent of the officers of Peploe's 38th Infantry had seen combat in World War II, many of his new fillers had never so much as thrown a live grenade. Some of them were not even infantry by branch. Immediately and energetically, Peploe went to work. He put his men in the field, and he was always in the field with them.

  The Division CG, General Keiser, was frequently annoyed because he could not find Peploe in his office or near a phone.

  The 9th Infantry went to Korea first, then the 23rd, and the 38th had an opportunity for a few days' additional preparation. When they sailed, the 38th had been told they would stage in Japan, but they arrived in Pusan instead, bound for Naktong. Here Peploe abandoned a mountain of baseball bats, footballs, and other peacetime athletic equipment, and marched for the Perimeter. In late August he relieved the 34th Infantry, 24th Division, on the northern edge of the Nakton Bulge.

  The front was 30,000 yards, many times that which a regiment could adequately hold. Peploe put all three battalions on line, kept only his regimental tank company in reserve. Fortunately the 2nd Division, unlike the first-committed occupation units, came over at full strength.

  In August and early September, the 38th missed the desperate fighting that engulfed its sister regiments. 1/38 had a few scraps, and the tank company helped pull a battalion of the 23rd out of a hole, but on the whole the regiment went through the worst of the Naktong battles unscathed.

  And 16 September, when the orders came to move west, the 38th was ready.

  At this time the Air Force was not flying planes out of Korean bases—they had withdrawn their fighter squadrons to Japan. This meant that the supporting aircraft could remain over the front for only limited times—and Peploe figured that the man who asked first got the air support.

  The Air liaison officer with the 38th became resigned to being kicked out of the sack an hour before dawn. But when the planes arrived over the Naktong, he was ready with his requests, and the strafing, rocketing, and napalming ahead of the 38th cleared the way for its advance.

  The 38th began to push forward rapidly against crumbing resistance. South of them, the 23rd and 9th met heavy resistance and moved slowly, but in front of the Rock of the Marne the NKPA 2nd Division moved westward in disorder. Once a flight of Australian pilots flying American F-51's roared in so close to his leading company that Peploe was concerned. The lead company commander disagreed.

  "Leave 'em alone," he begged Peploe.

  With the fighters spreading havoc ahead of them, Peploe and the 38th suddenly found themselves at the Naktong. All along the roads they had passed abandoned AT guns and enemy dead.

  Looking at the wide, twelve-foot-deep Naktong before him, on 18 September Peploe called Lieutenant Colonel Swartz, Division G-3. "Where are the boats?"

  Swartz said, "There aren't any boats."

  Peploe ordered Skeldon's 2/38 to send patrols across the river and to secure a bridgehead on the west bank. A dozen of 2nd Battalion's hard, eager young men stepped forward, volunteering to swim across and secure the far shore.

  These men stripped, and under the guns of their comrades went into the muddy brown water. Halfway across, one of the volunteers floundered and had to be rescued by another soldier. Hauled gasping back to the bank, he admitted he didn't know how to swim.

  Moving cautiously along the west bank, the patrol found no enemy. And hidden in a large culvert beside the river, they found a cache of NKPA weapons, several collapsible boats, and one large boat capable of carrying thirty men.

  Two squads went across in the two-man rubber reconnaissance boats, while Peploe talked to Division HQ again: "Let me go across in force."

  At noon, Colonel Epley, Division Chief of Staff, gave him permission to cross one battalion.

  Within three hours E and F and 2/38 had crossed and had taken the high ground a mile west of the river. Behind them, combat engineers built rafts to float over the heavy weapons, then a bridge for the regiment's vehicles.

  Striking the disorganized enemy by surprise, the advance companies took more than a hundred prisoners, including a major and seven other officers. They also captured more than a hundred tons of ammunition, and many arms.

  After an ordeal of six weeks, American forces had at last broken out of the Pusan Perimeter.

  North of the Bulge, in I Corps zone, the 5th RCT moved against crucial Hill 268 on 16 September. In a vicious two-day battle, the hill was overrun, and the town of Waegwan flanked. Leaving hundreds of their dead on 268, and on the terrain between the hill and the Naktong, the NKPA 3rd Division showed signs of imminent dissolution.

  Like a rubber band that has been stretched one time too many, the People's Army suddenly began to go slack.

  In five days of savage fighting, the 5th RCT smashed the enemy's line in front of Taegu, and secured a crossing site on the Naktong for the 24th Division.

  On the phone to Tokyo, Eighth Army's Chief of Staff, General Allen, told MacArthur's HQ, "Things down here are ripe for something to break."

  Corporal James B. Mount, Medical Corps, was at Letterman General Hospital, San Francisco, when the Korean War broke. From Detroit, Mount had been a rifleman scout in the 10th Infantry in World War II, and he had seen enough fighting to keep him happy for the rest of his life. When the replacements for Ko
rea began to sail through the Golden Gate from Fort Mason, Mount went down to the Presidio of Sail Francisco and waved the boys goodbye.

  It was a nice gesture, but wasted. He beat most of them to Korea.

  For when he reported back to the hospital, his C.O. asked him, "Can you think of any reason why you shouldn't go to Korea?"

  For the first time in his life, Mount, a stocky, bespectacled man with thick sandy hair and a pungent manner of speech, regretted he wasn't faster on the draw. A few hours later, on 20 August 1950, he was on a Pan American clipper to the Far East.

  The Army was scraping up men from everywhere, but Mount wasn't particularly worried. He was thirty-five years old, and he figured he'd end up in a hospital in Japan, as a medical technician.

  Stopping at Hawaii, the replacements were fed in the Sky Room at Honolulu. Once, when Mount went to the door to take a look about, an MP tapped him on the shoulder. "You're going the wrong way, Corporal."

  He didn't see much of Hawaii.

  Then it was down at Wake, and Wake to Haneda. From Tokyo he was put on a train to Sasebo, and at Sasebo a ship bound for Pusan. After the usual Army milling about in Pusan, he was put on a train headed west, assigned for the 24th Division. By this time, he had given up all ideas about getting duty in a nice clean hospital.

  At 24th Division HQ, he was assigned to Item Company, 21st Infantry, as a company aid man. Unlike most of the other new men coming in with him, he knew what it was all about, and he wasn't looking forward to it one bit.

  Nobody knew what was going on in Korea, however. On the train from Tokyo to Sasebo, an officer had set up a blackboard and given a lecture trying to motivate the new men for combat. But it was a little too late for that; most of the men with Mount kept asking, "Why me?"

  At Pusan, Mount was able to get his hands on a San Francisco paper. He couldn't find anything on the front page about Korea, though there was something on Page 2. Apparently, the pennant race and the upcoming World Series were more interesting to the people at home. The men around him didn't like that one bit—if they were going to get killed, they wanted it done with bands playing, girls crying, and great men telling them how they were going forth to save the world.

  After all, that was the way war should be, wasn't it?

  At the 24th Division, all the new men heard was, "Naktong—Naktong, everybody killed on the Naktong."

  They also heard a new phrase, one Mount had never heard: "Bug out." "Bug out, bug out, everybody bugged out."

  The division was getting ready for a push to the west, out of the Perimeter, and the troops were a little less than eager. The 21st's C.O., Colonel Richard Stephens, assembled all the men for a pep talk.

  "There's only a shell of resistance in front of us," the bluff, rugged Dick Stephens told them, "When we break through that, we're on our way."

  Oh, brother, Jim Mount thought, that's the old rah-rah.

  But, as it turned out, the colonel was right.

  The 21st went forward, into a little town torn apart and taken by the 5th Regimental Combat Team on its way to the Naktong. As Item Company went through, Mount saw a ROK soldier lying deserted by the road. He fell out and went over to check the man.

  He knew from the smell even before he looked that the ROK had gangrene in a wounded leg. He gave the man a shot of morphine. "Nothing more I can do for you, fella."

  The ROK tried to smile at him, and said something, so he packed the wound with cotton, and went on. On the other side of town, wounded GI's were beginning to stream back. Mount went into business.

  But as soon as they saw his armband, or the red cross marking an aid station, Korean civilians came out of the ruins and the woods and the fields. There were crippled old men, and women with sick, wailing kids, begging for treatment. What the hell, they think I'm the International Red Cross?

  But he was a medic, and he did what he could, when he could. His first job was to help GI's—but it was soon apparent who the real losers of this war were going to be. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans had been torn from the land as each army marched through, fighting, killing, burning. Nobody really wanted to hurt the civilians, but they were in the way. Nobody could help it if they got hurt.

  When he could, Mount did whatever he could for them.

  The 21st Infantry pushed up to the Naktong and went across in assault boats. Artillery was falling in, and I Company lost a few men. Mount had four Korean KATUSA's assigned to him for litter bearers, and he put these men to work. He couldn't talk to them, but he could make do with sign language and a lot of cussing.

  Assembling to cross the river, Item had taken cover in an apple orchard. Mount, from his own experience, could have told them that apple trees splinter under shell fire. By the time he had dug out a few splinters, everyone in the company knew it.

  By the time the company was across the Naktong, Mount had his wounded all to the rear. He himself crossed, but ran into a GI hit in the leg. Taking this man back across the river, he returned to find Item Company gone.

  A new outfit came into the area, and Mount asked a lieutenant if he knew where Item was. The lieutenant took out a map and showed him where I should be. Mount took off, and followed a path across the hills for two hours before rejoining his company.

  A few minutes afterward, the company received orders to return to the river. But they had broken through the shell, and the enemy was retreating. Now, it meant a long march each day to make contact, if contact was made at all, and then up on the high ground at night to dig in.

  At dawn, it was up and away again.

  The enemy was on the run.

  For the first three days of the United Nations offensive, with the exception of the 38th's crossing of the Naktong in the south, there were no material gains. Everywhere the NKPA battled stubbornly, and everywhere—in the 5th RCT, in the 1st Cavalry Division north of them, and the 1st ROK still farther north, friendly forces suffered heavy losses in desperate, seesaw battle.

  And then, suddenly, on 19 September, the day after Peploe's 38th crossed the Naktong, the Korean front began to fall apart. The single biggest factor, undoubtedly, was the knowledge of the Inch'on landing in the NKPA's rear. The North Korean High Command could conceal the disaster no longer; the news was out, spreading chaos and panic among the men around the Perimeter.

  During the hours of darkness 18-19 September, the enemy 6th and 7th divisions in the far south, the farthest from North Korea, began a precipitate withdrawal.

  On the cast coast the 3rd ROK retook P'ohangdong, while the enemy 5th Division retreated northward. Just west of the coast, in the rugged mountains, the ROK's suddenly found they could advance, and did.

  On 19 September the 5th RCT took Waegwan. On the same date General Paik Sun Yup's 1st Division discovered a gap between the lines of the enemy 1st and 13th divisions. The hard-fighting ROk 12th Regiment shot through thirteen miles into the enemy's rear.

  Only the 1st Cavalry, meeting stubborn, fanatical resistance in the hills around Taegu, could not advance. The Cavalry took frightful losses among its rifle units; but at the same time it was wreaking worse havoc on the enemy. And the enemy, with the knowledge that the 1st ROK Division had made a penetration, suddenly retreated north to Sangju.

  And, retreating, the enemy came apart. The 3rd Division went from 5,000 men to less than 2,000 in two days. Entire units were caught on the roads by American air, or ground to pieces by American infantry and armor. The retreat became a slaughter.

  The 13th Division, bled white in the hills by the 1st Cavalry, had already shown signs of internal distress. A regimental commander had surrendered voluntarily, claiming unfair treatment by the division commander. Faced with failure, the Communists were beginning to snap and bite at each other. Officers were being relieved; men were being summarily executed.

  Pushing ahead, the 1st Cavalry Division units passed scenes of terror and devastation, burned-out tanks, dead and bloating animals, cannon pushed off the roads into ditches, tons of abandoned ammunitio
n. Complete units of the enemy 1st, 3rd, and 13th divisions now fell prey to panic, and virtually disintegrated.

  By 23 September the Inmun Gun was everywhere in full retreat. And on 22 September Walton Walker issued an order long awaited by the Eighth Army: Pursue and destroy the enemy. The time had come for revenge.

  In the pre-daylight murk of the morning of 21 September, a senior colonel of the Inmun Gun walked down a narrow dirt road four miles south of the village of Tabu-dong. In full uniform, rank badges gleaming on his shoulder boards, a soft cap over his dark hair, the colonel quietly approached American lines and waited until daylight.

  The colonel's name was Lee Hak Ku, and his exact motives this dawn of 21 September will never be completely known. But behind him the 13th Division, of which he was chief of staff, was in utter dissolution. It numbered only 1,500 men. Its HQ had lost communication and control over its regiments. The division held no line, and its survivors were now fleeing over the hills toward Sangju. It was sauve-qui-peut, and the men were no longer waiting to be shot down by their officers. The officers themselves were throwing away their guns.

  The Koreans, North and South, are by any standard a brave people, but they are mercurial, rising one moment to extremes of exaltation, dropping quickly back into despair. They can be martyrs on any given day, and traitors the next. They have been called, not without reason, the Irish of the Orient. And in some cases, not even rigid Communist training, with its denial of basic human nature, can eradicate the nature of the Korean peasant.

  When it became daylight, Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku walked softly up into a small village held by the 8th Cavalry Regiment. Ironically, he had to awaken two sleeping American soldiers carefully in order to surrender. When they took him to the rear, the young, hard, square-faced North Korean was very cooperative with his interrogators.

  He supplied them with whatever information they desired about his division. It did not matter, whatever he told them, because the division had been destroyed as a fighting force. Other prisoners, though of lesser rank, had told the same story.