This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Meanwhile, China had been humbled by one foe after another. Japan and the Western powers took from her what they wanted, as they pleased.

  On! 1 August 1927 the newly formed Communist Party of China began the fight against Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang. This date is still carried on CCF battle flags as the date of the Communist Army's founding.

  For decades the battle raged across China. In 1934, when it seemed that the Nationalist Army had the CCF ringed, approximately 100,000 CCF soldiers retreated north for Kiangsi Province into Shensi, to far Yenan. It was a march without parallel in history, and one almost without parallel for hardships.

  One year later, after crossing 6,000 miles, eighteen mountain ranges, twenty-four rivers, and twelve provinces, 20,000 survivors under a general named Lin Piao made juncture with other Communist forces in Yenan.

  During the actual time of march, Lin Piao's forces had averaged twenty-four miles per day, on foot.

  In Shensi Province, far removed from the Nationalists and the eyes of the world, the Communist Chinese began to rebuild their base of power. They began to wage guerrilla warfare against the Nationalists.

  They were led by men who were now hardened soldiers, men who wanted above all else for China to be again a great power, and who felt that Marxism held out the only hope for its accomplishment.

  The vast areas of China were still feudal; there had never been any true capitalism except that administered by foreigners in the coastal cities. And the pattern of Sinic culture had frozen five thousand years earlier.

  The new Communist military leaders understood clearly that the pattern of Chinese culture must be thoroughly broken before China could again assume authority in the world. With cunning, courage, and great skill, aided by a centuries-old tradition of corruption that lay across China like a gray shadow, they began to break it.

  During the time of war with Japan, the Communists sought not to drive out the Japanese, but to survive. When the Japanese departed, they had an army of 600,000 entrenched across North China. Now they began to war in earnest, fighting not only the Nationalists but also for the peasants' minds. From the first, the Communists understood that in a nation almost wholly peasant, only peasants have any political importance.

  Within two years, they won not only the war but the peasants' minds. For the peasants would not understand, until too late, that the Communists want-ed not justice for them, but to overthrow the entire fabric of Chinese life.

  The popular morality of what the Communist Chinese have done will probably be judged only in the light of whether or not they made China a great power, and only the future will tell that. If they fail, history will condemn them for the enormous suffering they inflicted upon their land; if they succeed, their own history will largely regard them as heroes, even as Soviet history regards Peter the Great of Russia as a hero, or as the French revolutionists or the Irish Sinn Fein, who resorted to naked force and political murder, are looked upon favorably by millions of their countrymen.

  In June 1950, the CCF Fourth Field Army, some 600,000 men, Lin Piao commanding, marched to the Korean border to stand ready for any eventuality. During the summer and early autumn, other field armies followed.

  Shortly after United States troops crossed the 38th parallel at Kaesong, on 13 or 14 October, elements of the Fourth Field Army began to move south across the Yalu.

  The 39th and 40th armies—the Chinese term "Army" is roughly equivalent to the U.S. Corps; a CCF Army contained three divisions of approximately 10,000 men each—crossed from Antung, Manchuria, to Sinuiju. The 38th and 42nd crossed from Chi-an to Manp'ojin. Over these armies Lin Piao placed the CCF XIII Army Group Headquarters. Artillery and horse cavalry regiments crossed behind them in support.

  Three of the Chinese armies deployed in front of the Eighth Army; the fourth took a position in front of the Changjin Reservoir to the cast.

  Thus, on 15 October, when MacArthur and President Truman conferred at Wake, 120,000 Chinese veterans were already inside North Korea.

  Ten days later, two more CCF armies crossed the Yalu, adding six divisions to Lin Piao's forward forces. Five armies were in the U.S. Eighth Army zone, one to the east in X Corp's zone.

  Night after night, all during October and November, CCF armies continued to stream across the Yalu, moving into the deep Korean valleys south of the river.

  By rail from Shantung Province came the IX Army Group, Third Field Army, comprising nine divisions. It was reinforced with three extra divisions, giving it a strength of 120,000 men. The IX Army Group moved across the mountains to the Changjin Reservoir area.

  By the middle of November, 1950, approximately 180,000 Chinese waited in front of the Eighth Army, while 120,000 lurked in the mountains surrounding Changjin Reservoir on X Corps' flank. From Mukden, in Manchuria, Peng Teh-huai, Deputy CCF Commander, assumed direction and control.

  While China broadcast to the world that Chinese "volunteers" would enter the Korean fighting, under Kim II Sung, the leaders of the CCF never relin-quished control of their forces. And it would have been considerable news to the 300,000 Chinese soldiers massed in the cold valleys of Korea to learn that they had volunteered. Many of them did not even know in what part of the world they waited.

  Lin Piao, and the major leaders of the Chinese Communist Forces, were not simple peasant leaders. The vast majority of the CCF generals were grad-uates of Whampoa Military Academy or of Russian schools. They had studied Clausewitz and Jomini and the battles of Cannae and Tannenberg as thoroughly as any West Pointer, and they had been engaged in war for all their adult lives. But if they did not act upon the field of battle as Western generals did, it was because they did not command a Western army.

  The hordes of the Red Army were tough and battle-hardened, but they could not read or write. They had no radios, nor did they have much tele-phone equipment. They had no air force, or any massive artillery. They were weak in motor transport. Their arms were a miscellany of United States, Japanese, and Russian equipment. They had very few of the things a European or Western army required for war.

  But the hordes of the Chinese Communist Forces were deployed on an Asian battlefield, not Europe. Peng Teh-huai and his field commanders Lin Piao and Sung Shih-lun proposed to use their forces in a manner calculated to take advantage of their own strengths while discounting those of the enemy.

  They had three immense advantages: their own minds, trained to war in the vast reaches of the Middle Kingdom, which instinctively thought in terms of fluid maneuver, without regard to battle lines: the hardihood and sturdy legs of their peasant troops, who could travel long miles on very little; and the enemy's complete lack of belief in their own existence.

  Many have found it incredible that American Intelligence would never accept the fact that the Chinese were in Korea in force during October-November 1950. There were reasons. Neither MacArthur nor Willoughby believed the Chinese would intervene in force; both believed the Chinese threats were purely diplomatic blackmail. All evidence that they were in Korea broke against this preset belief. Nor was it easy for subordinate officers to go against the ideas of the FECOM commander.

  More important, no concrete evidence that the Chinese were in Korea could be put forth. Americans believed it incredible that any army of significant size could cross the Yalu and deploy in Korea without observation by their air forces. Daily American aircraft flew over all North Korea; and no armies were ever sighted.

  Above all, in formulating his plan of maneuver to the Yalu, MacArthur believed his air cover could destroy the Chinese if they tried to intervene. This belief dominated his thinking; he expressed it many times. Upon this foundation he laid his whole campaign. Too late, he would find out what Lin Piao already knew—against a Communist army, in primitive terrain, air power could be important, but not decisive.

  The example of one Chinese army, which marched from Antung, Manchuria, to its assembly area in North Korea almost three hundred miles away, explains much: after dark, not sooner th
an nine o'clock, the Chinese troops began to march. Singing and chanting in the manner of all Chinese, they plod-ded south, night after night, for eighteen nights.

  And each night, between nine and three, they covered eighteen miles.

  When light came, every man, every gun, every animal, was hidden from sight. In the deep valleys, in the thick forests, in the miserable villages huddled on the forlorn plateaus, the Chinese rested by day. Only small scouting parties went ahead by day, to reconnoiter the night's march, and to select the bivouac for the morrow. If aircraft were heard, each man was under orders to halt, freezing in his tracks, until the noise of the engines went away.

  In bivouac, no man showed himself, for any reason. Discipline was firm, and perfect. Any man who violated instructions in any way was shot.

  It was not only cunning and hardihood, but this perfect march and bivouac discipline that caused U.N. aircraft to fly over the CCF hundreds of times without ever once seeing anything suspicious. Even aerial photography revealed nothing.

  It was a feat that Xenophon's hoplites, marching back from Persia to the sea, could have performed. Julius Caesar's hard legions could have done it, and more—the Roman manuals stated that the usual day's march for a legion was twenty miles, to be covered in five hours.

  It is extremely doubtful if any modern Western army, bred to wheels, could have matched it. It was almost impossible for Western generals, even those who knew of Xenophon and Caesar, to credit it.

  Half contemptuously, American military men spoke of "elusive" Lin Piao, and of the "poet" Mao Tse-tung. Mao Tse-tung, Premier of China, had already revealed to the world how his Communist armies operated—how they flowed from place to place, fighting when fighting was profitable, biding their time when it was not. What Mao Tse-tung had written was instructive, and intensely practical for a war in Asia—but because the Chinese wrote in poetic language, not in the military terminology popular in the West, no ambitious second-year ROTC cadet would have dared quote him seriously.

  After November 1950, many men would grudgingly learn that the thought behind words is more important than the phrases in which the thought is couched. The time would come when every leader in the world would read the writings of the Chinese Communists—for it was barely possible that the war they waged was not so anachronistic as Americans believed. Quite possibly, it was the pattern of all future land wars.

  In November 1950, then, one army, in open array, loudly proclaiming its every move to the world, marched against a phantom foe. For the CCF, all that month, was a ghost; now you saw it, now you didn't. It marched by night, under a foggy moon; it sideslipped into the mountains in front of the advanc-ing U.N., and lurked, hiding its time.

  When he was ready, the "elusive" Lin Piao would let the Americans find him.

  On 25 October, 1950, the 1st ROK Division captured near Unsan an odd individual. Unlike all adult Koreans he spoke neither Korean nor Japanese. But he was quite voluble, however, in a tongue that could only be a dialect of northern China. He was flown to Eighth Army Advanced HQ in P'yongyang, and the top Intelligence brass interviewed him. Within a few days, he was followed by more of his kind.

  Up to Thanksgiving, almost one hundred identified Chinese prisoners of war were taken. Yet their interrogation proved strangely unsatisfying.

  Only much later would Americans understand there had been something odd about many of the POW's. Some had been deliberately planted, with deliberately misleading tales. They spoke of being from this and that "unit"—which Americans identified as regiments rather than what they were in actuality: CCF armies.

  There was a great deal of confusion about the POW’s and the way in which they were captured, indicative of a certain confusion among the enemy. American Intelligence began assuming that the North Korean Army had been reinforced with certain small groups of Chinese from Manchuria. But in the face of Tokyo's steadfast refusal to accept any Chinese intervention in the war, neither Eighth Army nor X Corps openly suggested there could be any massive CCF units south of the Yalu.

  For the Chinese had slipped into the rugged land like phantoms, now creeping forward, now hiding from the light of day. Deliberately, Lin Piao was seemingly picking about in confusion, units here, units there, none clearly seen or identified. Chinese troops were deliberately misschooled on their own order of battle, so that, captured, they might tell weird tales. There were clashes between Americans and Chinese "volunteers" in odd places—obviously to draw American attention from where the Chinese planned to strike.

  Then, in late October, because the Americans were pushing forward too fast, before he was ready, Lin Piao struck, with what the Chinese called their "First Phase Offensive."

  Lightly armed but veteran and well-trained Chinese troops struck against the 1st Cavalry Division pushing northeast from the Ch'ongch'on bridgehead, toward the Chinese area of concentration. Others, in heavy strength, moved against the ROK 6th Division on the Cavalry's right.

  East of Unsan, the ROK Division broke. On 1 November the Chinese sprang a carefully prepared trap against the 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment. The battalion was surrounded, a roadblock thrown up in its rear. Chinese, fighting hand-to-hand, swarmed over the battalion's command post. Only 10 officers and 200 men escaped; all told, the 8th Cavalry lost more than 600 men. On the Cavalry's right, ROK II Corps losses were extreme.

  Along the Ch'ongch'on River, the 5th Cavalry ran into heavy opposition and had to fight sharply to hold the bridgehead across the river.

  To the east, X Corps was also struck by Chinese. Moving toward the Kot'ori plateau, 1st Marine Division was heavily engaged.

  For several days fighting flared savagely—then, as suddenly as they had come, the Chinese broke contact and melted into the shrouding mountain masses ahead of the U.N. advance. For the "First Phase Offensive" had succeeded. The first contact between Americans and Chinese had been inconclu-sive and bewildering. No one knew what the contact foretold.

  Walker, of Eighth Army, in sudden alarm, as Chinese were positively identified as having entered the war, realized the extreme vulnerability of his strung-out divisions. The 2nd and 25th were to the south, beyond supporting range of the van of the army. The 24th had passed into the far northwest corner of Korea, near the mouth of the Yalu—where it could be cut off if the Chinese interdicted the main coastal highway near the Ch'ongch'on bridgehead. The ROK 7th Regiment was already on the Yalu north of Unsan—but significantly, the enemy had boiled up from the hill masses fifty miles south of the border, on the Eighth Army's flank.

  He ordered the advance halted, while the Eighth Army consolidated. The 24th Division and the ROK 7th Regiment were ordered to return south of the Ch'onghch'on. While the 1st Cavalry Division held the Ch'ongch'on bridgehead, the 24th returned without difficulty. The ROK'S, more exposed, ran into heavy weather getting back.

  The ROK outfit lost more than five hundred men, retreating, but they brought back a bottle of Yalu water for President Syngman Rhee.

  Walker ordered the 2nd Infantry Division to move north, onto line. He was now experiencing logistical trouble; the Army as a whole was far north of its permanent bases, and it was in difficult terrain.

  Tokyo was immediately on his neck for stopping the advance—but, reluctantly, Tokyo agreed to his consolidation and supply buildup before continuing the offensive.

  In the east the Chinese had not been so successful with their spoiling attacks—but the Marines, of their own volition, slowed their painful advance toward the Changjin Reservoir. General Almond expressed his dissatisfaction with Marine progress, but Marines, from General Smith down through the regimental commanders, Murray, Litzenberg, and Puller, were highly dubious of what they were marching into.

  Winter came early, in the second week of November, with subzero winds howling down from Siberia. Moving over tenuous, ill-defined roads, facing bitter weather, climbing thousands of feet into high hill masses, the Marine division, strung out in a long and vulnerable column, had trouble enough if they
never saw a Chinese. For the Marines were as roadbound in North Korea as the Army.

  Only in the far northeast corner of Korea did the advance push forward during November. Here there were no Chinese, and the ROK's and elements of the 7th Division marched against failing NKPA resistance to the Yalu.

  The Chinese, by attacking sharply, then disappearing, threw confusion into the U.N. commands on the ground in Korea. Eighth Army staff began to have grave doubts as to what lay hidden in the mountains on their right flank; 1st Marine Division wondered what lay in wait for them north of the Changjin Reservoir. But day after day passed, and no further action by the enemy was apparent.

  Air patrolling over the mountains revealed what it had always revealed—nothing. Only heavy, aggressive ground patrolling into the hills could have revealed that the main bodies of two massive Chinese army groups lurked in those deep valleys and forlorn villages, and this action the U.N. never attempted.

  In the frightful terrain such patrolling was dangerous. It could not be supported by wheels, and where wheels could not go, neither could sizable units of Americans. And in such horrendous terrain a vast army could be—and was—hidden in a very small area, observing perfect camouflage discipline, waiting.

  The weeks of November were a time for worry, snarling, and argument among the Eighth Army and X Corps staffs, whatever official face was put on. General Ruffner, Chief of Staff of X Corps, told General Willoughby, FECOM G-2, that he was increasingly concerned with the large numbers of Chinese units identified by ROK, Eighth Army, and X Corps troops. Willoughby insisted that no full divisions of Chinese were in Korea, but only elements of such divisions.

  On one occasion, General Willoughby, with General Doyle Hickey, Acting FECOM Chief of Staff, visited Almond's X Corps HQ in Wonsan. After hearing reports of POW interrogations, Hickey turned to Willoughby.

  "If, as General Almond says, these people turn out to be Chinese—"

  Ned Almond roared, "What do you mean, 'if'? They are Chinese!"