This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

Home > Nonfiction > This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History > Page 35
This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History Page 35

by T. R. Fehrenbach

Because the guns were undeniably lost, there were men who cried discredit upon the artillerymen. But the men who came through with them, of whatever arm or service, are firm in the belief that the guns were served with honor until the last.

  The last men of the division to come through, arriving within the British lines of the moring of 1 December, could remember very little of what they had experienced. There comes a time when the conscious mind accepts no more; as with women experiencing childbirth, even the memory of pain is blotted out.

  On that morning, thousands of allied wounded filled every field aid station and hospital even beyond Sunch'on. British and American surgeons worked until they dropped, then got up and worked again. Men lay on the frozen ground for hours, waiting for treatment.

  But aside from the dead, there were still men more unfortunate than these.

  All of 2nd Division did not come out.

  One of the persistent myths of American arms in the middle of this century is that technicians somehow are not and should not be soldiers. But when a man dons the uniform whether he wears crossed muskets, the wheel, of the caduceus, events are apt to prove the falseness of such belief. For any man who wears his country's uniform, of whatever service, should be prepared to Suffer, and if need be, to fight.

  Sergeant Charles B. Schlichter, 2nd Medical Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division, had been soldiering most of his life. At eighteen, in 1939, tall, slim, and green-eyed, he had enlisted in the Pennsylvania National Guard. Later, during the war, he had served forty-three months overseas with the Coast Guard, as part of a beach party with the Fleet Marine Force. He had seen Kwajelein, Eniwetok, Saipan, and Tinian, among others.

  But, somehow, after the big war, he found himself married and selling furniture for a living. The service, he figured, was nothing to inflict upon a new wife. But some men are fortunate in their choice of mate—Elizabeth Schlichter had been raised in the Army, and day by day, month by month, she knew what ailed her man.

  One night, while Charles was sitting in the bathtub, washing his long brown hair, Elizabeth lay on their bed, reacting the evening paper. Suddenly she said: "I see here the Army needs men. Why don't you go back into the service?"

  Schlichter washed soap from his ears. "What?"

  She repeated her question.

  He said, "I'd love to—but it's not fair to you—"

  "I like to travel, anyway."

  The next morning, Schlichter called at an Army recruiting office. Looking at his records, the Army gave him sergeant's stripes on enlistment. In June, 1950, he was a surgical technician at Madigan General Hospital. When the news of the outbreak in Korea came over the air, Charles Schlichter had a premonition. In the middle of the night he told Elizabeth: "Something is going to happen to me—I don't know what, but something is going to happen. No matter what, stay where I leave you—because I'll be back." Neither he nor Elizabeth slept much that night.

  In a few days, something did happen. He was diverted to the 2nd Division on 16 July, and restricted to post. He asked about a chance to make arrangements for his wife, and was told, "After you leave for Korea, she can find a place to live."

  The 9th Infantry, his new unit, went aboard ship for the Far East. It was a ship diverted from civilian trade, and N.C.O.'s had staterooms, with bath and clean linen. But at sea, Schlichter and the medics of his unit received no real briefing on the Korean situation. Korea was described to them as a minor police action, which might be cleared up before they arrived. But listening to the radio, Schlichter visualized the vanishing American Perimeter.

  When the regiment debarked at Pusan, the medics were issued rifles. As Schlichter put it later, this caused a certain amount of consternation in the ranks. For here they were told that the North Korean enemy considered any man in uniform fair game, whether he wore medic's armband or the chaplain's silver cross, and they should govern themselves accordingly.

  Soon, in the fighting that followed along the broiling Naktong, Schlichter went to the division collecting company. He followed the division from the Naktong to the Ch'ongch'on. And here, on Thanksgiving Day he wrote his wife, like many others, that he would be back in time to buy Christmas presents in the States.

  Then, suddenly, the medical collecting company was busy along the Ch'ongch'on. And just as suddenly, Major Bert N. Coers, the C.O., told the men: "We're withdrawing south. This is not a retreat, but an organized withdrawal."

  In the confusion that was overwhelming the division on 30 November, Schlichter figured the medics were lucky to be told anything.

  In a serial of some twenty vehicles, the company formed up on the Sunch'on road south of Kunu-ri. It was the last element of the regimental convoy, and here there was some argument. The vehicles already held 180 wounded men. Should the medics be last, so as to aid future wounded, or should they proceed out early, to take care of those they already had?

  It was finally resolved that the medics would go last. After all, Coers had been told it was to be an orderly withdrawal, and no one expected trouble.

  At dusk on 30 November, the medical convoy was still stopped on the road miles north of the pass. Sitting in a truck with Kenneth Beadke, the company field first sergeant, and Sergeant Wright, Schlichter could hear heavy firing ahead, see the pink and red tracers bouncing off the hills. All three wondered what was happening, and why they were stopped, but they were not really worried. They felt that the combat units ahead of them would fight through and clear the way.

  It grew darker, and the thermometer fell. The firing reverberated among the hills, and in the convoy men became tired and cold and scared.

  "What's the matter? Why don't we move out?"

  There were many young men in the company who had come to Korea with no concept of war. Panic began to sprout.

  Then an officer—for there were young men wearing bars among this convoy who were never soldiers, either—ran along the stalled line of trucks, shouting: "It's every man for himself! We're trapped! Get out any way you can!"

  Men got down from the trucks and began to run for the circling hills—and the officers and sergeants followed. Here, thought Sergeant Schlichter later, we committed a grievous error. Here we broke faith with our fellow soldiers, and fellowmen.

  There were 180 wounded men in the trucks, and no one said anything to these men as they were abandoned.

  The two hundred-odd men of the company spread all over the hills. Schlichter and Ken Beadke were in one small group. All knew they had to move south to reach safety—but now none of them knew where south was, in the dark. No one had any idea of how to move, or how to orient themselves. Men ran into the hills until they dropped from exhaustion; they ran as long as the panic held them and their legs would carry them.

  Others climbed hills, to try to see about them. Some saw moving men in the dark, and opened fire with their rifles and carbines. Sometimes agonized voices answered the shots in English.

  All night the medics, none of whom possessed any infantry training, wandered aimlessly through the hills fringing the road.

  At dawn of 1 December, Schlichter's small group of fifteen men rested on a cold plateau three hundred yards in length. Looking over the lip of the ridge, Schlichter could see Chinese on horseback riding through the valley. Hugging the ground, Schlichter and the men with him realized the Chinese were all around them in these hills.

  To Schlichter's hill came an infantry officer named Hill; he was a major or lieutenant colonel from the 9th Infantry. This officer tried to organize a defense of the ground, positioning the half-frozen men about. He had an air panel, and as an American plane flew over, searching the ridges for Chinese in the dawn, he waved this up and down, trying to attract the pilot's eye.

  The pilot saw, and radioed for help—but the Chinese also saw Hill as he exposed himself. A rifle bullet struck him in the belly, passed through, and tore a hole in his lower back.

  Hill fell down and said softly, "Oh, my God!"

  Schlichter ran to him, tore open his bulky winter clo
thing. Hill said, "My God, boy, get down—they'll kill you!"

  "Hell, the SOBs can hit me," Schlichter muttered. He put a bandage across Hill's wounds, gave him morphine. There was nothing else he could do.

  As he treated the officer, the Air Force roared in, slamming the ridges and valleys with rockets and machine guns. They drove the circling Chinese cavalry away.

  Now, in the strengthening light, Schlichter could see he was on a ridge only a little way from the abandoned vehicles on the road—during the night his party had circled about like a running hare, ending up almost where they had begun. And here, suddenly, Charles Schlichter decided that those wounded men down below belonged to him. With the men about him, he held a short powwow.

  There were Chinese moving on ridges to the far side of the road; but the senior soldiers with Schlichter's party—but not all of those senior in rank—agreed that their wounded had to go out with them.

  They started back down the slope toward the vehicles standing forlornly beside the debris-littered road. But the decision of what to do for those hurt men was taken from them.

  Undamaged, the vehicles stood starkly by the road, in column, easily visible from the air. Before Schlichter's party reached them, Air Force planes screamed out of the south, shooting, bombing. It was standard practice for the Air Force to destroy abandoned equipment before the enemy could profit from it. The pilots could not know what cargo those deserted trucks still held.

  Schlichter was too far away to do anything, but close enough to hear the wounded men aboard the vehicles scream. Then the Air Force dropped napalm, the drums bouncing from the frozen ground and engulfing the dusty trucks in flame.

  In the zero weather, Charles Schlichter's face was suddenly wet with sweat. Some of the men with him closed their eyes.

  And then they all ran back into the hills. They went in small groups. There was no unity. The C.O. was unable or unwilling to do anything. Some of the men were now wounded from Chinese fire, and many had thrown their weapons away.

  Yet there were many who still walked as men. One, Captain Struthers, M.C.—to whom a general had offered a job in Japan, and been refused—died in a machine-gun burst, trying to aid a wounded soldier.

  But most were neither heroes nor cowards. They were ordinary men, and they went with the tide, wherever it carried them.

  Within a short time, a North Korean patrol had pinned them on a hill, holding them down with submachine-gun fire. Major Coers and a second officer talked. Coers said, "It's futile to resist." He stood up, and surrendered himself and his men. There were fifteen in the little group, including Schlichter.

  The North Koreans marched the captives over a ridge, then halted them before a long, narrow slit trench that had been dug in the hill. They turned the muzzles of their Russian-made submachine guns on the group, and in a blinding moment of fear Schlichter realized the Koreans were going to shoot them.

  In that moment, the men holding those guns cut his line to home. The power and the glory of the United States were suddenly far away, impotent, as he stood facing death on a frozen, windswept hill ten thousand miles from home.

  He had carried a small Bible in his jacket because his people had been religious, and they had brought him up in the same way. But until now he had hardly glanced at it. In the seconds he had left, Schlichter drew the book from his jacket, and it fell open at the Twenty-third Psalm.

  He did not have to read it, he knew it from childhood.

  The North Koreans did not fire. An officer, apparently Chinese, ran toward them, shouting orders in a high voice; sullenly, the troops lowered their weapons. The Chinese officer barked again, and with motions of their gun barrels the soldiers herded the captive Americans into motion. They headed north.

  They staggered north, numbed, silent, cold, and exhausted by their ordeal. But in the little group, Charles Schlichter suddenly felt he would never again be so afraid of tomorrow. And of these men, only he would live to see again his native land.

  | Go to Table of Contents |

  22

  Changjin Reservoir

  Easy Company holds here!

  — Captain Walter Phillips, commanding E Company, 7th Marines, on a hill above Yudam-ni.

  THREE DAYS after Walton Walker's Eighth Army found the hostiles along the Ch'ongch'on, X Corps met a Chinese buzzsaw in the east. Here again occurred some of the most savage actions in the long history of land warfare. In many respects, the fighting in the east resembled that in the west—U.N. forces were flanked, some brought to battle while others remained unscathed, and the whole position rendered untenable.

  But there were differences, too.

  While Eighth Army attacked on a broad front, Almond's X Corps advanced north in four main columns. On the eastern side of Korea there were no relatively flat valleys, only deep and tortuous corridors fingering their way through bare and brutal mountains. The roads—such as there were—were dirt. In many places the arteries of communication were only cliff-hanging trails leading along the mountainsides.

  Because of the terrain, contact even between the various units of X Corps was fragile. On the left, trying to close the gap with Eighth Army, advanced the American 3rd Division. Above them, the 1st Marine Division marched northwest, toward the Changjin Reservoir. The U.S. 7th Division, east of the reservoir, went straight north for the Yalu. On the far right, the ROK I Corps of two divisions moved along the coast.

  It was not a steady line advancing across the savage reaches, but rather four separate fingers thrusting upward into the narrow mountain corridors. The progress made during November by each column varied greatly.

  Attacking against crumbling remnants of the NKPA, the ROK Corps galloped freely toward the maritime province of Siberia. In the ROK zone no Chinese ever appeared.

  The 7th Division, on the ROK's left, met scattered opposition. By 21 November Powell's 17th RCT of that division reached Hyesanjin on the Yalu. The village's connecting bridges with Manchuria had been shattered by U.N. Air, and it was a ghost town. The wattle huts were deserted, and cold cattle, abandoned, lowed in misery in the frozen fields.

  The Marines, marching northwest from Hungnam toward the Changjin Reservoir, met Chinese in force first week of November. But these Chinese, part of Lin Piao's First Phase Offensive, were defeated in sharp fighting, and pushed back. By 8 November they too had melted into the looming mountains to the north. But General Oliver Smith, of the Marine Division, and his regimental commanders, Litzenberg, Murray, and Puller, were now highly dubious of what might lie ahead of them in the mysterious north.

  Deliberately, the Marines slowed their advance, even though Ned Almond fretted at their lack of progress. The Marines felt that, strung out as they must be in such terrain, a pellmell rush to the Yalu was highly dangerous. The whole Corps plan of maneuver was ill advised, if more than broken, remnants of the NKPA faced it.

  But, like Walker, Almond had his orders from Tokyo: push on, and end the campaign. Under Almond's prodding X Corps, including the reluctant, exposed Marines, pushed on.

  North from the Korean port of Hungnam on the cold, gray waters of the Sea of Japan, a narrow, dirt and gravel road snaked into the hills. For some forty-three miles—the distance from Hungnam to Chinhung-ni—the road contained two lanes and moved across reasonably rolling ground.

  But at Chinhung-ni, the aspect changed. The remaining thirty-five miles north by west to the sordid little hamlet of Yudam-ni became a multiple nightmare.

  Beyond Chinhung-ni the road rose 2,500 feet into cold, thin mountain air. The second lane disappeared; now the road crept ribbonlike into the soaring wastes, a yawning abyss on one side and a precipice on the other.

  It climbed and climbed, struggling upward to the Kot'o plateau, on which sat the single, miserable village of Kot'o-ri. From Kot'o-ri the road crept through mile-high hills to the city of Hagaru, straggling near the southern tip of the thirty-mile-long Changjin Reservoir.

  Hagaru, an important center before the war, but now broke
n and blackened by U.N. Air, huddled in a bleak bowl of frozen earth some three miles across. Here the road forked.

  One fork, the right hand, passed north and east into equally miserable terrain. The other skirted the reservoir and turned west; it climbed the 4,000-footpeaks of Toktong Pass, and after fourteen miles through sullen gorges it devolved into a broad valley ringed by five great ridges.

  Here, in this valley, sat the lowly village of Yudam-ni, 3,500 feet above sea level, hardly sheltered from the bitter winds and snows of Siberia by its mile-high ring of peaks. Here, and along the whole length of the road from Hung-nam, the land is barren and bleak in winter. The grass dies, and rustles sere and brown in the sharp winds; snow falls repeatedly, and ice covers the gorges and craggy ridges.

  And here, in November 1950, winter came early, howling off the roof of the world, screaming across the frozen Yalu, the worst winter the world had seen for a decade. There was nothing on Marine and Army maps to indicate such weather—but Korea is not sheltered by the surrounding seas from the cold that sweeps the northern land mass of Asia. On a parallel with climes that are moderate in Europe or America, Korea is arctic when winter comes.

  Moving up this road, fighting sharply to reach the Kot'o-ri Plateau, winter struck the men of the 1st Marine Division the night of 10 November. The mercury dropped to ten below. At the first shock, men became dazed and incoherent. Some grew numb, others cried with pain. No amount of clothing, even good GI issue, could entirely keep the cold out.

  Many Americans were used to much worse weather—but not to fight in, without fires, shelter, or warm food. Water froze solid in canteens; rations froze in their cans. Plasma froze; medical supplies could not be stored more than eight feet away from a roaring stove at any time. Vehicles, once stopped, would hardly run again. Guns froze solid—all oil had to be removed from them; and many automatic weapons would fire but one shot at a time.

  While the first, worst shock of winter soon wore off, the problem of the cold continued. It was to be an enemy as much to be feared as the Chinese lurking in the dark hills and passes. Feet and hands of the men exposed on the ridges turned white with frostbite, and a man who was wounded suffered agonies. The cold, through the bitter days of December, would destroy as many American fighting men as enemy bullets.

 

‹ Prev