This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  His surrender so impressed General Walker that, when he heard the news, he phoned Tokyo from Taegu. Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku was the highest- ranking Communist prisoner to be taken by the U.N. during the Korean War.

  And in captivity, he would do more damage to the U.N. cause than he had ever accomplished while serving in the Inmun Gun.

  Opposite the old Naktong Bulge, three NKPA divisions, the 2nd, 4th, and 9th, streamed westward in retreat. And streaming after them, like hounds in full cry, came the United States 2nd Division.

  On 23 September the 2nd Division reduced the stubborn roadblocks the fleeing enemy had thrown up about the town of Ch'ogye. And then, on 24 September, the 38th Regiment swept north, the 23rd circled south, and both regiments linked up beyond the old NKPA command post at Hyopch'on. Northeast of Hyopch'on, Peploe's infantrymen erected a roadblock while two enemy battalions still held the city. Then the 23rd fought into Hyopch'on from the south, driving the defenders out and north.

  Running into Peploe's roadblock, the North Koreans met a storm of fire. That afternoon, after the killing ceased, Peploe's men counted more than 300 corpses along the road. The survivors, sloshing across the paddies in panic, were struck by American planes and shot to pieces. The few who got away ran into the hills without arms, ammunition, or food.

  Now, in late September, it was North Koreans instead of Americans who straggled through the hills, broken, demoralized, shoeless, and hungry. And grimly, without exultation, American soldiers found the taste of revenge sweet and good.

  On the 25th, on order, the 38th Infantry moved northwest toward Koch'ang. In a few hours it had broken through the thin defensive crust of the enemy 2nd Division and was in the NKPA artillery areas, overrunning guns, vehicles, and heavy equipment.

  General Choe, commanding the enemy division, was sick and worn out. He ordered all his vehicles and artillery abandoned, and then, his men carrying him, Choe and the remnants of the NKPA 2nd melted into the hills, where they became guerrillas.

  On 25 September the 38th Infantry killed more than 200 enemy soldiers, captured 450 more. They amassed a total of 10 motorcycles, nearly 20 trucks, 9 mortars, 14 AT guns, 4 howitzers, and 300 tons of ammunition.

  At dusk, 2030, the regiment had advanced thirty miles.

  The American forces, well supplied with vehicles, with many good roads in this part of Korea, were advancing faster than the enemy could flee. General Walker's orders for the pursuit and exploitation had instructed the divisions to forget about their flanks, to press ahead against a beaten enemy, and this tactic was paying off.

  Tanks rolling ahead, moving over an open road, with encircling hills far to either side, the 38th again and again overran the now desperate enemy. At Koch'ang the regiment captured a North Korean field hospital. Now Peploe received orders to strike across the peninsula to Chonju, a town near the west coast.

  The 2nd Battalion leading, the 38th entrucked at 0400 28 September. Nine and one half hours later, after advancing 72 miles, the regiment closed in on Chonju. Here there was a brief fight. One hundred North Koreans were killed, and twice as many surrendered.

  Inside the town, Peploe threw up a perimeter defense. He was far inside enemy territory; thousands of North Koreans had been bypassed along the road.

  But the enemy was also confused by the slashing American movements. During the evening a North Korean truck tried to pull into the town. It was loaded with crates, and seemed to carry about twenty soldiers.

  An outpost of the 38th along the road fired a single bazooka round at the truck as it approached. Then the men of the outpost cowered in the ditches as the truck disappeared with a horrendous explosion, raining fire and fragments over a wide area. The crates had been filled with ammunition.

  Concerned by the terrific detonation, Peploe came out to see what had happened. Viewing the reeking crater in the road, he could find no remnants of either the truck or the men who had been upon it.

  Coming into Chonju, the regiment had exhausted its motor fuel. Fortunately, a far-ranging 2nd Division liaison plane passed over them before dark. The pilot was confused, and incredulous. "Are you 2nd Division troops?" he kept asking over the radio.

  "Yes, and we're out of gas," he was told. The plane buzzed back to its field, and soon both Division HQ and IX Corps had fresh gasoline trucks on the road.

  While Peploe marked time in Chonju, waiting for resupply, the assistant commander of the 24th Division flew in. He seemed disappointed at the sight of the Indianhead patches on the sleeves of the men holding the town; he had hoped to find the taro leaf of his own division in the vanguard. Rather unhappily, he asked permission for units of the 24th to pass through Peploe's lines.

  The next day, gasoline trucks reached Chonju, and once again the 38th Infantry moved north and west.

  This time they went to the south bank of the Han, in sight of Seoul.

  The hammer had fallen. It had met the anvil, and what had been in between was no more.

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  17

  The Taste of Triumph

  I see the most serious fault … to lie in … the legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems … the inevitable association of legalistic ideas with moralistic ones: the carrying into the affairs of states the concepts of right and wrong … whoever says there is a law must of course be indignant against the lawbreaker and feel a moral superiority to him. And when such indignation spills over into military contest, it knows no bounds short of reduction of the lawbreaker to the point of complete submissiveness—namely, unconditional surrender.

  — George F. Kennan.

  IN THE CLOSING days of September 1950, the Unites States seemed to be in an invulnerable position in the Far East. In the space of a few short days, the entire balance had turned; with almost shocking suddenness an American and ROK army that had been fighting for its life turned and destroyed its tormentors.

  Trapped between the anvil of X Corps on the north, and the hammer of Eighth Army smashing upward from the south, not more than 25,000 sur-vivors of the Inmun Gun were able to retreat north of the 38th parallel.

  And as American field commanders could at last relax, as the men under them could savor the sweet taste of chasing and killing an enemy that had chased and killed them earlier, in Washington, where early confidence had turned to concern and then apprehension, confidence returned, strongly.

  For a moment, the world had seemed to shake, to go awry—but now all was as it should be, as Americans felt it must always be. Men smiled, and vaguely wondered why they had allowed themselves to doubt the inevitable victory.

  And with victory, as it had always come to Americans after a war, came the determination to force their will on the enemy, to punish them for the crime of aggression, for starting the war. If the fighting, with its resultant death and destruction, its loss of American lives, resulted only in the return of the status quo, then almost all Americans would feel cheated.

  War could never be part of a system of checks and balances; the view seemed immoral. War must always be for a cause, a transcendental purpose: it must not be to restore the Union, but to make men free; it must not be to save the balance of world power from falling into unfriendly hands, but to make the world safe for democracy; it must not be to rescue allies, but to destroy evil.

  Americans have always accepted checks and balances within their own system of government, but never without, in the world. Because in the world such checks have never been achieved with votes or constitutions but with guns, and Americans have never admitted that guns may serve a moral purpose as well as votes.

  They have never failed to resort to guns, however, when other means fail.

  It was inevitable that the United States should take the position that the North Korean Communist State must now be destroyed for its lawlessness and that all Korea should be united under the government of the Taehan Minkuk.

  Actually, the Communist world had not broken the law, for one of the continuing t
ragedies of mankind is that there is no international law. The Communist world had tried to probe, a gambit, and had been strongly checked.

  And the Communists would regard an American move to punish the "law-breaker" not so much as justice but as a United States gambit of its own.

  The question was not whether the American desire to reunite Korea under non-Communist rule was a proper goal for the United States, but whether the Communist world could sit by as the United States in turn ruptured the status quo ante.

  The desire to join the two halves of Korea under Syngman Rhee was unquestionably proper, and in the best interests of the United Nations—if the U.N. had the power to accomplish it.

  On 27 September 1950 the Joint Chiefs of Staff instructed General MacArthur as follows:

  His primary objective was to be the destruction of all North Korean military forces.

  His secondary mission was the unification of Korea under Syngman Rhee, if possible.

  He was to determine whether Soviet or Chinese intervention appeared likely, and to report such threat if it developed.

  With the third instruction appeared signs of an elementary weakness in American policy—a decision by the powerful Communist nations to intervene or not to intervene was a political question, on the highest level. The indications would be apparent—or nonapparent—not on military levels but through the channels of political intercourse.

  FECOM, a subordinate command, was a collective agency only, not an evaluative one. Yet throughout the fall of 1950 Washington continued to permit FECOM to evaluate not only its own intelligence but also that collected in other parts of the world as well. The eternally dangerous lack of insight into the aims and aspirations of hostile governments was to continue in Washington.

  Military intelligence, quite competently, can determine the number of divisions a nation has deployed. Military men can never wholly competently decide, from military evidence alone, whether such nation will use them.

  Such decision is not, and will never be, within the competence of military intelligence.

  Following the directive of 27 September, two days later General George C. Marshall, the new Secretary of Defense—Louis Johnson, who had given the public what it wanted, had been the scapegoat of the public's error—sent MacArthur a personal communication—JCS 92985—"for his eyes only"—that he was free both tactically and strategically to proceed across the parallel and that President Truman concurred.

  Meanwhile, the Republic of Korea had never seriously intended to halt at the old border. It is very doubtful if Syngman Rhee, who lived to reunite his country, would have obeyed a U.N. order to stop short of the parallel, any more than Abraham Lincoln would have favored an order from foreigners to stop the Grand Army of the Republic on the Potomac after Gettysburg. Rhee issued orders to his field commanders, now serving under American com-mand, to move north no matter what the Americans did.

  Whatever the ploy and counterploy of the great powers, it was in the vital interests of the Taehan Minkuk to expand to the Yalu.

  On 1 October, MacArthur demanded the surrender of North Korea. Kim II Sung made no reply.

  At noon, 7 October, American units of the Eighth Army went across the parallel at Kaesong. ROK troops had already gone north days before.

  On a clear, crisp October day, Captain Worsham Roberson, assistant surgeon of the 6th Tank Battalion, 24th Division, pulled his battered, dusty old jeep to a halt alongside the highway leading north. A hastily erected sign—the trademark of the passing of American troops anywhere in the world—told him that he was crossing the 38th parallel.

  He looked at Captain Harvey Phelps, battalion surgeon, sitting beside him, and the stocky, round-faced Roberson fumbled in his kit, removing a carefully hoarded bottle of Seagram's 7 Crown.

  Roberson and Phelps had arrived during the bad days, when the crumbling 24th held onto the Perimeter by a nail. They would never forget their arrival into the lines of the division with the new M-46 90mm-gun tanks, shipped hastily from Detroit Arsenal.

  It had been hell to get the big tanks to Oakland, aboard ship, and on land again at Pusan. At Pusan there had been no port facilities to handle a 92,000-pound tank; the ship's officers had groaned and turned pale while the ship's winches and cargo booms strained under the extreme load. But lives, after all, were more valuable than winches, and one by one the 76 tanks had crashed down on the dock.

  When the armor growled and roared up to the Naktong, men from the Taro Leaf Division ran forward to meet them, many of them openly sobbing. They crowded around the ugly steel monsters and patted them as if they had been blooded horses.

  Under Lieutenant Colonel John Growden, West Point 1937, who had been with Patton, the 6th Tank soon had its baptism of fire.

  To Growden came a radio flash from a leading tank: "We have sighted enemy. What are our orders?"

  Growden radioed back: "Are they definitely enemy?"

  "Affirmative!"

  "Then fire—that's why the hell we're here!"

  In each and every war, Americans must learn the hard way.

  It had been a long, hard road. And when they had broken out, and the shooting was good, they had passed a little knoll, on which had been dug fifteen or sixteen trenches. Hearing the men talk, Captain Roberson went up to look.

  Buried waist-deep, hands wired behind their backs, agony imprinted on their stark faces, were 500 ROK soldiers and 86 GI's. Some had been bayoneted to death; some had been clubbed; some mercifully, shot.

  Doc Phelps, looking ill, determined the men had been killed the evening before the battalion passed.

  Now, thinking of the long, dusty, bloody road, Roberson pulled the stopper on the bottle. "Doc, this calls for a drink."

  Phelps was a teetotaler. Furthermore, he was married to the daughter of Dr. Godbold, famous pastor of the St. Louis First Baptist Church, who had strong opinions on alcohol. Doc Phelps hesitated, then took the bottle.

  "To heck with Dr. Godbold—this calls for a drink—"

  Worsham Roberson figured Dr. Godbold would understand, this once.

  When it had voted, 7 to 0, with 3 abstentions, 1 absence, to form a unified command in Korea, to permit the United States Government to appoint the U.N. commander, and to use the U.N. flag, the Unites Nations on 7 July 1950 had in effect given the United States something very close to carte blanche for the conduct of the war.

  The U.N. Commander, MacArthur, was requested to send, through his government, appropriate reports on whatever action he took.

  At this time, the majority of the United Nations were either Western nations or pro-Western; only a handful of the so-called neutrals had been admitted to membership. And, shocked by the overt Communist action, these nations realized that only the United States was capable of effectual opposition to Communist power.

  When the Inmun Gun collapsed, the U.N. was prepared to continue its backing of United States policy. The United States was riding a crest of suc-cess, and in October 1950 Americans were happily discovering that world opinion, for whatever it is worth, tends to follow power and success. Later, after Hungary and Tibet, they would again rediscover the fact, this time less happily.

  As long as the United States was winning, and its aim did not seem to lead to general war or to sacrifices for the war-weary friendly nations, the U.N. as then constituted was content to follow.

  But this was the last time the United States was to find general agreement.

  There is every indication that, just as they had not expected that the United States would intervene in Korea in June, the North Koreans did not anticipate the U.N. offensive over the parallel. The shattered Inmun Gun had not been reconstituted after its retreat, and the extensively prepared positions along the border were not heavily defended.

  When the Eighth Army smashed across Kaesong in the west, and the ROK's galloped northward to the east, formal resistance almost dissolved. Within a week, despite small pockets of violent resistance here and there, there no longer existed an organized
North Korean front, and only remnants of the North Korean Army fled toward the Yalu.

  Kim II Sung's broadcast to his forces 14 October is highly revealing. He stated that the new disaster was due to his government's expectation that the U.N. would not move north and that "many of our officers have been thrown into confusion by this new situation. They have thrown away their arms and left their positions without orders."

  Kim II Sung further proclaimed resistance to the last. Traitors and agitators were to be shot on the spot, regardless of rank, and a new "Supervising Army" of politically reliable veterans was to be formed.

  When it dragged its bleeding forces hastily back across the parallel, the Communist world had apparently been ready to accept a temporary defeat. It was Communist doctrine to exploit success, but it was also considered folly to support failure.

  The move in Korea had failed; now they would drop it, wait till a better day. In New York on 2 October the Soviet delegate to the Security Council proposed a cease-fire along the parallel, and a withdrawal of all foreign troops from the peninsula.

  Instead, he had a new American challenge thrown into his teeth.

  On a balmy Sunday, 15 October, just as the Korean War was turning into a sort of American fox hunt, a star-studded group conferred on Wake Island. Peppery, sharp-eyed President Truman had flown halfway across the Pacific to discuss the final phases of the action with his patrician proconsul of American power in the East, Douglas MacArthur.

  Oddly, a fact much noted, it was almost a meeting of two sovereigns rather than of Chief of State and field commander.

  The architects of American policy were represented, from homely, keen-faced Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, talking in the same Missouri Valley twang as the President but the finest Army group commander America had produced, to quiet, self-effacing Dean Rusk of the State Department.