This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  So that when IX Corps, concerned with the ROK collapse, sent the newly arrived Turkish Brigade up the Kunu-ri road to Tokch'on to guard 2nd Division's flank, the Turks were left dangling. Their mission required close contact and coordination with 2nd Division, at the very least. Furthermore, the Turks, seeing their first action in Korea, had at this time no idea of which side was up or down, or even where the ball park was.

  Beset by the crisis within his own front, the 2nd Division commander left the Turks to shift for themselves; no ranking American officer visited them or briefed them.

  Floundering about in a morass of uncertainty and a fog of ignorance about everything that was happening, the Turkish Brigade, 5,000 strong, marched east. Near the village of Wawon the Turks became engaged in battle, and ringing reports soon came back that they had routed the enemy, taking many prisoners.

  But, tragically, they had blundered into fleeing ROK's, and the "victory" was over these miserable, panic-stricken remnants of II Corps.

  Then, still at Wawon, the main strength of the Chinese burst over them. The detail of what happened will probably never be reported; the essence has been: The Turkish Brigade was destroyed.

  Tall, pale-eyed men with dark faces, in heavy greatcoats, wielding long bayonets, the Turks refused to fall back. There were observers who said some officers threw their hats to the ground, marking a spot beyond which they would not retreat, and, surrounded by the enemy, died "upon their fur." There were others, all else failing, who threw cold steel at the enemy in bayonet charges. Rarely has a small action, dimly seen, sketchily reported, sent such intimations of glory flashing across the world.

  But the Turks died. On 28 November, when the Turkish Brigade at last fell back southwest and linked with the 38th Infantry, only a few of its companies were combat-fit.

  It was deeply ironic later, when the American Government, badly concerned with Turkish public opinion concerning their losses, sent quiet apologies to Turkish authorities. The Turks hardly knew what the Americans were talking about. The Turks, however badly used, had come to fight, and above all else Turks were proud of what their men had done.

  Americans had forgotten that only a generation before one of their own generals, Pershing, could stand on the soil of France and say to Clemenceau: "We are here to fight and be killed. Do with us as you will, without counting."

  Colonel Peploe, meanwhile, sooner than Division HQ, had seen the way the tide was running. The first of battle he had four line companies broken, and a reserve company badly battered. His only real error as to the gravity of the situation was that he thought his 38th was standing off the enemy's principal strength. He did not really understand that the ROK's and Turks were meeting that, or that the Manchu Raiders were suffering far worse in the middle of the division zone than was his Rock of the Marne.

  Only gradually he learned that he had no right flank at all and that the Chinese were south of him.

  He wanted to rearrange his units so that his right flank was refused to the enemy, and concerning this he again called Keiser. Unless Peploe pulled back to the southwest, the Chinese would be in position to cut the American main supply route running south.

  Keiser, though not really understanding the seriousness of the situation, told him to use his own judgment. Peploe's move, while it could not break the web of fate closing in about 2nd Division, diverted complete disaster.

  Rolling with the punch, fighting a battle royal, the men of the 38th pulled back astride the Ch'ongch'on during the night. As Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall put it, writing of this night of battle, "It is … a pity that young Americans have to die bravely but inconspicuously on a foreign hillside in a national cause and have no better words than these spoken of them."

  Slowly, the 2nd Division was contracting back toward Kunu-ri. While the 38th was being pushed back on the right and south, the 9th, across the Ch'ongch'on, was also being sprung backward. Strung out along the river and road, the division hourly neared being taken by a double envelopment, a fact that was only slowly being appreciated in higher headquarters.

  To the north and east, 25th Division, also bloodied, though not to the extent of the 2nd, was falling back toward the Kunu-ri junction.

  For once, things were actually worse on the ground up front then on the maps at Division HQ.

  When the mortars started falling 'round the CP tent,

  Everybody wondered where the high brass went.

  They were buggin' out

  —

  Just movin' on

  …

  While the men of the rifle companies had no idea of the enemy's grand scheme of maneuver, or what their own leaders planned, they could look about them, see the missing faces, and know the extent of their hurt. Battalion and regimental staffs, looking for fresh units with which to plug the gaps left by broken ones, were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

  East of the Ch'ongch'on and after its first savage night of battle, 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry, did its best to recoup. Easy Company, Lieutenant Joe Manto, was in bad shape. Fox was down. Frank Muñoz's George was a mass of doll rags. Only the Weapons Company, How, was more or less intact.

  But hearing that the enemy had slipped into his rear, establishing blocking positions west of the river, Colonel Sloane had to send the battalion back across the Ch'ongch'on opposite Kujang-dong.

  Sloane ordered Major Barberis to move George, How, and Fox into a blocking position against the Chinese, and to try to make contact with the 24th Infantry, 25th Division, which was supposed to be wandering about on the division left.

  Muñoz's men moved west of the river again, and took a small hill, driving away a squad of Chinese. But they saw neither hide nor hair of the 24th Regiment. In these hills, across the valley was the same as being in the next county. And the men of the 2nd Battalion, shivering in ten-degree cold, hungry, without sleep for several nights, were reaching the point of exhaustion.

  Worried, Sloane called Division HQ. He wanted to know what the further mission of the 9th Infantry would be. "I can't keep these men going till dark, then give them orders to consolidate ground where they stop. They need a decent chance."

  The officer at the other end of the line told Sloane not to get his bowels in an uproar; Division had problems, too.

  After dark, what was left of Lieutenant Colonel Hill's 1st Battalion was hit and pushed back across the icy river. The wet, freezing men were given dry clothing, then put back on line immediately.

  The 3rd Battalion, 9th Infantry, fighting a die-hard action, was driven back into Major Barberis' battalion. All at once, some of the supporting 105's were running short of shells. Painfully, a new day passed.

  Frank Muñoz, on the hill west of the river, received a radio message from the battalion exec, Pete Birmingham. "Go to Easy Company CP where we can talk by phone."

  Muñoz walked back to Manto's command post, which had wire, a more secure means of communication, strung back to Battalion HQ. Here Birmingham ordered George Company to come back across the river and to take up new positions. "We're beginning an organized retrograde movement."

  Muñoz could figure that out. For a great many hours, as far as he was concerned, all signposts had been pointing south.

  After dark, he moved back across the river, and with Easy on his right, Fox on his left, began leapfrogging back some two miles toward Kunu-ri. And on this movement began the next-to-final act of the continuing tragedy.

  Retreating toward Kunu-ri to the southwest, the companies heard the ring of Chinese bugles from the direction of the river, five hundred yards away. The enemy was already across, in regimental strength.

  Something went into the air, bursting redly like Roman-candle balls. Exactly sixty seconds later, behind heavy firing, long waves of Chinese charged frontally against the retreating 2nd Battalion.

  Working their weapons desperately, Muñoz's boys knocked the onrushing Chinese back. Just short of his line, the Chinese charge was broken—but some of Muñoz's men were beginning t
o get the shakes. He saw several get up to try to run to the rear.

  "Hold it! Hold it!" he bellowed. At his side, Lieutenant Hernández was trying to help, but Hernández had had it. A brave man, the lieutenant had been commissioned in the field, but he was so worn down by cold and exhaustion he was almost through.

  Then the weirdest experience of Muñoz's career took place—suddenly, the battleground was lighted with a brilliant white light, much more intense than that of an artillery flare. He never knew where the light came from, but in it both he and his men had a panoramic view all the way to the Ch'ongch'on. And framed in the white light were more Chinese, in coffee-colored quilted tunics, then Muñoz could count.

  The low ground along the river was swarming with thousands of enemy, all headed toward him. It was the most terrifying sight Frank Muñoz was ever to see.

  He saw some of Easy's people start to run from their positions. Later, he learned that Joe Manto had been hit, and was left to be captured. The two tanks supporting Muñoz had seen the Chinese sea, too. Now, their engines roaring, they took off to the rear.

  Muñoz knew it was hopeless. He shouted for his people to move down from their high ground, and to move back through the valleys. His commo was out. fire had no idea where Battalion HQ was.

  The Chinese hordes did not press them as they fell back, though they drew some fire. Stumbling through the dark, Muñoz led his men back more than two miles, and at last came into his Regimental post, quite by accident.

  Here he reported to the regimental adjutant. He told him what was happening, and Muñoz said that it looked as if the whole line was gone. He then went back into the tent to report to the S-2, the Intelligence Officer, Captain Murphy.

  Regiment began to talk with Division via radio, one phrase Muñoz overheard being that "the situation is fluid all over."

  Then men started to take the big CP tent down.

  "What are my orders?" Muñoz wanted to know.

  He was told to attach his command to the 23rd Infantry, "just down the road."

  Muñoz went back to his company, seething. What the hell was this, every man for himself? He located some ambulances and put his wounded aboard; he found he had about a hundred men still with him. He moved down the road until he located a battalion command post of the 23rd. The battalion commander ordered him to hold his men there until morning.

  At 0400 he was able to get breakfast for his people—dry cereal and black coffee—from the 23rd. The night before the battle began west of the river, Muñoz's men had ambushed and butchered a Korean steer. Rangy and tough as the animal had been, it was their last good meal for a long time.

  Muñoz reported to Colonel Paul Freeman, C.O. of the 23rd, at daybreak. Freeman said, "Take up a position on our right flank." But then a staff officer from 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry, bumped into some of George's people along the trail, and this officer ordered George Company to rejoin.

  The 2nd Battalion CP was just up the road.

  Muñoz went back to Freeman, who accepted the loss of these unexpected reinforcements cheerfully. "Go on, rejoin your outfit," Freeman told him. Moving up the frozen dirt road, Muñoz saw Major Barberis standing beside a clump of vehicles. The tall, slim battalion commander's eyes lighted as he saw Muñoz lead George by.

  "God, Frank, I'm glad to see you! I thought you were gone."

  Barberis, one of the most capable infantry officers in Korea, had somehow got most of his battalion back together—all that was left of it. Now he started these men on the final march back toward the road junction at Kunu-ri.

  That day, while the 23rd held the door, the shattered 9th pulled back around Kunu-ri. When night came, it was bitterly cold, but the men were allowed to light no fires. When ordered to stop, men fell down on the frozen earth and lay stiffly in little clumps, unmoving. Most of them had been fighting incessantly for more than forty-eight hours.

  That night the firing on all flanks died away, and after midnight it grew strangely peaceful across the frozen wastes. Gratefully, the cold and exhausted survivors did not question the peace and quiet.

  But had they remembered the history of the United States Army in their own West, they might have guessed the next step in this anachronistic war. Taking a leaf from the Cavalry's book, the enemy was flowing past the 2nd Division, to cut them off at the pass.

  The final horror was yet to come.

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  20

  Into the Valley of Death

  Just as in classical Greek tragedy events move toward their predestined course, so the actors in this drama, however courageous and selfless were powerless to change the result.

  — S. L. A. Marshall.

  IN THE BITTER, foggy dawn of 29 November, while the 2nd Division was locked in battle across the endless hills and corridors along the Ch'ongch'on, a Turkish motor convoy drove north from Sunch'on, some thirty road miles below Kunu-ri, bound for the division rear. The trucks carried supplies intended for the Turkish Brigade, already smashed, and it proceeded north on the single road into the division area.

  The convoy never arrived. Near the straggling little village of Yangwan-ni it met a storm of fire from both sides of the road. Trucks exploded and slued off the road. Others stopped, burning. Men fell from the cabs, riddled by machine-gun bullets fired at close range. Some died in the ditches beside the road; a few ran or crawled north into the 2nd Division lines.

  Because of language barriers, perhaps because of shock, the Turkish survivors were not able to get their story fully across—and one fact of extreme importance was omitted from their story altogether: two miles south of the area where they had been ambushed, the supply trucks had rolled by the corpses and burned-out vehicles of an even earlier ambush.

  The evidence, then, was that a vast area of the division's lifeline south was already interdicted, but the evidence did not get into the right hands. Such of it that did, in the fury and desperation of the moment, seemed to indicate only one more small pinprick among the proliferating wounds from which the division was already bleeding.

  Two squads of the 2nd Division MP's were dispatched south on the road. They never returned.

  However, a platoon of tanks, from IX Corps reserve, went down the road in complete peace. Near Sunch'on they joined elements of the British Brigade moving north—code name "Nottingham"—and radioed back that the road was clear.

  The 2nd Division Reconnaissance Company next went over the same route at midafternoon. Nearing the wreckage of the Turkish convoy, it drew heavy automatic-weapons fire, and radioed back to Lieutenant Colonel Foster, Division G-2, that it was unable to move. A platoon of tanks from the 72nd Tank Battalion and one company of the 38th Infantry was sent south to clear the area. This force was brought to battle along the road, and got nowhere.

  At dark, Division HQ ordered it to break off the fighting. From the evidence it now had, Division assumed approximately a thousand yards of the road were interdicted, around Yangwan-ni. The division staff was not unmindful of the threat, but felt it to be more in the nature of an annoyance than a disaster.

  Meanwhile, General Keiser had become fully apprised of the major surgery the Chinese had inflicted upon his rifle units. For five days he had been falling back slowly along the Ch'ongch'on, never breaking contact, never with a chance to straighten the division out or to get it back into a firm holding position. The division had been poised to attack against crumbling resistance—not to withstand the café-au-lait-colored hordes that poured out of the hills against it.

  Now, wanting to pull back a considerable distance, to reorganize and get a breathing spell, Keiser was forced to argue with IX Corps, who did not relish retreat at all. The point was not easily won.

  It was not until after the Turks' trucks were already flaming along the division's main supply route that Corps reluctantly agreed to 2nd Division's withdrawal to Sunch'on. Corps left it up to Keiser to come out on whatever route he chose.

  There were only two possibilities: the nor
th-south road between Kunu-ri and Sunch'on, and the lateral road leading west from Kunu-ri to junction with the main coastal highway at Sinanju.

  Keiser talked by radio with General Milburn, CG of I Corps, who was situated west near Sinanju. Milburn wanted to know how things were with Keiser, Bad, Keiser told him—the 2nd was even drawing fire on its CP.

  "Well," Milburn radioed, "come out my way." To the west, all was clear.

  But Keiser was not under Milburn's Corps, and he was concerned about becoming enmeshed with the 25th Division, which was retreating along the westward route.

  He then drove to the IX Corps CP, which was a few miles west of Kunu-ri, toward Sinanju. Here the Corps G-3 gave him the boundaries of I and IX corps, but again did not specify how Keiser was to bring his division out of the trap being formed about Kunu-ri.

  Debating how he was to move, Keiser flew back to his own CP in an L-5 liaison plane. From the plane's height he was able to see many miles across the low hills to the south. He saw hundreds and thousands of men moving southwest along the tiny trails and corridors, and he took these for Korean refugees.

  And he thought that if refugees were still fleeing from the enemy in that area, the enemy must still be considerably to the east. Seemingly, he had time to move the division due south rather than into I Corps' zone to the west.

  Only later was the evidence to show that these moving men, many wearing captured ROK uniforms, must have been Chinese hastening to block the division's withdrawal.

  Keiser was aware of the roadblock on the Kunu-ri-Sunch'on road, but did not consider it yet of major importance. However, after dark 29 November, most of the supply and service trains, including a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital with thirty female nurses, were sent along the west road to Sinanju. These trains passed just after the 25th Division, and experienced no difficulty. With them went the trains of the 38th Regiment, and most of the wounded.

  Other service elements, including those of 9th Infantry, went out by way of the lateral road to safety.