This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  Cannon and machine guns lashed the stumbling Glosters, and six of them fell.

  An American liaison plane, directing air support over the escapees, knowing them for British, went into aerial convulsions. The pilot swooped low over the tanks, waggling his wings at them, waving. The lieutenant, puzzled, continued to direct fire at the ragged men trying to close with his tanks.

  Harvey, lying panting on the ground, found a stick. He tied his kerchief to this, stuck his cap on it, and crawled forward, waving it like a pitiful flag. The stragglers of his column, their ammunition gone, were screaming as Chinese slipped down from the ridges and bayoneted them.

  The liaison pilot, sensible now, flew low and dropped a frantic note. At once, the Shermans ceased fire.

  The remnants of the Gloster Battalion crawled into their line and crouched behind the meager protection of the armored hulls.

  Together, then, the tanks sweeping the hostile hills with fire and steel, they retreated down the valley until the protection of the ground allowed the British to climb up on the tanks.

  The American crewmen were frantic at their error. One, almost in tears, took off his shoes and gave them to an English soldier who came up on the tanks with bleeding feet.

  The American officer said over and over again to Harvey, "My God, how many of your people did we hit?"

  None of the Glosters would say.

  For more than three miles, still surrounded by the CCF, the tanks fought back, bringing the remnants of the Glosters through. The tank lieutenant was hit, but they kept the swarming enemy off the Glosters' backs. They came out.

  At the end, in the American lines, there were only thirty-eight men with Harvey. His was the only party that came through.

  To the right of the 29th British Brigade, the American 3rd Division had dropped back to the Imjin River at the start of the CCF offensive. It had good positions and, better yet, it had confidence.

  The Chinese, many of whom wore new, clean clothing, and carried bright new weapons, hit them.

  On an outpost one N.C.O. yelled: "They're coming! They're coming! Millions of 'em? They're going to banzai us!"

  They came, and they were met with fire and steel. When outposts and rifle companies had to give ground, they gave it in good order, and at high price. Men, ordered to hold and fight, showed what soldiers who have learned new discipline and know how to wield their weapons can do.

  One triumphant shout from a fire-swept, bloody hill that was recorded 25 April 1951 sums up the actions of many brave men:

  "We're holding them! By God, we're holding them!"

  Farther east, in the Marine and ROK Zone of IX Corps, Chinese poured into the perimeter of Lieutenant Colonel L. E Lavoie's 92nd Armored Field Artillery Battalion, a self-propelled 155mm howitzer outfit supporting both the ROK and 1st Marine Division.

  The CCF had burst through the weaker firepower of the ROK's, scattering a ROK regiment, then turned to strike the United States Marines in the flank. Two ROK artillery units were in their way and were overrun, losing all equipment.

  On 24 April the CCF found the 92nd Field in their way. They struck while the battalion was still at mess.

  Colonel Lavoie's first warning was the sudden appearance of a bullet hole in his mess tent. He leaped outside, yelling, "Man battle stations! Man battle stations!" to HQ Battery, and ran to his CP to get in touch with his firing batteries.

  All the batteries were under close attack. But Lavoie had made each officer and man spend long hours on dry runs, and men sprang to the guns. With both small arms, machine guns, and heavy howitzers, the battalion fought back with viciousness and enthusiasm.

  The commander of Charlie Battery reported to Lavoie, "Sir, Battery C has Chinks all through its area."

  "Dead or alive?" Lavoie asked.

  "Both!"

  "To hell with the dead ones—take care of the live ones and make every bullet count!"

  The initial, freezing panic of being attacked lasted only minutes. The artillerymen, well trained, tightly disciplined, and superbly led, suddenly realized they could hold their own, and they fought almost cockily, as Lavoie walked about the perimeter, dodging bullets.

  One very young soldier saw some Chinese crawling toward the fire direction center. "Look at those sons of bitches! They think they're going to make it—"

  He jumped up, fired. "I got one!"

  Other men joined him, and the Chinese died.

  Within a few hours, the battalion, intact, pulled back to safer positions beyond sniper range, as Marine tanks growled in to relieve them. They hadn't asked for help; they hadn't needed it.

  Lavoie, all told, had lost 4 men killed and 11 wounded, and no equipment. Around the battalion perimeter the Marines reported they found 179 Chinese dead.

  The First Step, Fifth Phase Offensive, was failing.

  It was a long, long way from Kunu-ri, not in time or distance but in the hearts of American fighting men.

  Because of British hearts and bayonets, the thrust at Seoul had failed. At least fifteen thousand Chinese were killed along the Imjin; the best their offensive could achieve was a realignment of U.N. lines.

  In the west, U.N. troops pulled back, and more units were sent to reinforce the vital Seoul corridor. Ridgway was not interested in real estate; he gave up ground to ensure that no units would be exposed or trapped.

  A new line was formed, still north of the parallel in the east, but running just above Inch'on, Seoul, to south of Ch'unch'on in the west, It was heavily fortified.

  But by dark of 30 April, the CCF, exhausted, turned and crept north once more. This time, the CCF had met the tiger.

  Each year, for the decade following the Korean conflict, on St. George's Day units of the British and Australian armies have sent telegrams of thanks and appreciation to certain units of the United States Army.

  Each of the units so honored helped the British in a sticky place.

  Each year, a telegram comes to one American tank battalion that gained great tradition and prestige in the bloody hills, whose men, like those of the Glosters, learned to walk the hills with confidence and pride. Because of them, certain men now living in England and elsewhere are still alive.

  When the message comes to this battalion, however, the people in the Pentagon do not know what to do with it. On the rolls of the Pentagon, where slowly human hearts and the legends men live by are being replaced by computers, this unit no longer exists.

  The Gloucestershire Regiment, now with forty-five battle honors and an American citation, will never understand.

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  27

  Death Valley

  The United States does not claim to have the key to human wisdom or success. But we do claim the right to be judged on facts and not on fiction.

  — General of the Army George Catlett Marshall.

  FROM THE TIME man first raised fist to man, the lot of prisoners of war has been hard. The ancient peoples sometimes crucified captives; they invariably enslaved them, for life. From the time of Peter of Dreux, who burned out the eyes of prisoners, with hot irons, to the captives of Stalingrad and the hell camp of Cabanatuan, it has often been better for men to die fighting than to be taken by the enemy.

  No nation, no culture has an unblemished record in what is merely a part of the long story of man's inhumanity to man. Germans have starved Russians; Russians have worked Germans to death. Napoleon's seamen rotted, chained like beasts in English prison hulks. A Swiss-American in the uniform of the Confederacy turned other Americans into snarling animals at a place in Georgia called Andersonville.

  In recent years Western Civilization has begun to give the moral and ethical questions of the treatment of prisoners of war agonized consideration. The Geneva Conventions, as part of the hopeless task of making war more humane, specified that a prisoner of war must be treated in the same fashion as a nation's own prisoners.

  But while Western Civilization has tended to grow more humane in the treatment of
its prisoners of all kinds, the balance of the world has not. In World War II it was found that the Geneva Conventions did not adequately cover the subject. The problem was one of culture and chemistry.

  An American, or other Westerner, will starve and die on a diet that Japanese peasants or prisoners may live on almost indefinitely. And it is patently impossible to force a belligerent to treat foreign prisoners of war better than, say, its own political detainees.

  The question of toughness or decadence aside, American body chemistry has undoubtedly changed in the past two hundred years. A by-product of the rising Western standard of living has been larger bodies, the need for more food, and a psychological inability to readapt easily to the animal-like existence normal to much of the world.

  In postwar Japan, Americans imprisoned by the Japanese Government for various reasons have been given a special diet, heated cells, and recreation facilities—none of which are given to Japanese prison inmates.

  This has been done because the Japanese Government, since the signing of a peace treaty in 1952, has been peculiarly sensitive to American opinion and pressures.

  During World War II the Japanese handled Americans and Britons in the same brutal fashion with which they treated their own miscreants and other Asians. Thousands of Americans and English died or went mad in the POW camps. Almost all the lives of the men in the bamboo camps were shortened, even if they survived.

  Yet, in many cases, putting aside the unmistakable brutality of the Japanese guards, the Japanese were able to demonstrate that they had fed the pow's as well as they had fed their own Korean laborers.

  The Germans had a peculiarly defined system of standards in handling their own POW's, based on Nazi notions of race. Westerners, including British and Americans, were not coddled, but were generally well treated. Other races, particularly the Eastern European, were handled in a way to suggest that the Germans felt extermination was the final solution.

  Americans treated their own POW's, Japanese, Italian, and German, as they vainly hoped they themselves would be treated. The Soviets treated the Nazis and Japanese in kind. Most of the men who were taken in Russia disappeared behind the iron curtain and were never heard from again. Survivors have written of the wholesale degradation and death in Communist prison camps.

  The problem is one of chemistry, and culture.

  Americans who felt, and still feet, that their soldiers taken by a power of different culture and lesser standards of humanity should be, or will be, treated in accordance with decent Western standards are naïve.

  They were naïve in 1950, since no American fighting men were prepared in any way to face what they could be expected to face. The Army, as well as government and society, was at fault. All had known for some years of Communist methods of indoctrinating POW's—the world knew of Colonel General Paulus' experiences after Stalingrad—and knew what Asian Communist culture was like. But just as they had not prepared their young men to fight, they had not prepared them to go into captivity.

  In the first six months of Korea, American arms faltered on the battlefield because of a lack of American material and psychological preparation for bloodletting, and in those first six months almost all the American POW's were taken.

  Whatever failures there were, in the bleak and dreary prison camps of North Korea, were no more than a continuation of the failures on the battlefield, by the same men.

  For some reason, the POW camps have been much more widely publicized than the battlefields. What happened in them has become an emotional issue, and for that reason will probably never be clarified.

  Let one thing be clear, however.

  What happened in those camps was not unique. It had been known to history before. If it was new to Americans, who pride themselves on being informed, the fault was their own.

  In Andersonville, Americans fought each other for scraps of food, and let each other die. Tough panzer grenadiers of the Wehnnacht, whom no one has accused of being overly fat or soft, went listless in Communist pens, and died "for no reason." Americans and Britons in Japanese prisons retreated into dream worlds, and some informed on their buddies.

  A human being in a prison camp, in the hands of his enemies, is flesh, and shudderingly vulnerable.

  On the battlefield, even surrounded, he still has a gun in his hand, his comrades about him, and, perhaps the most important thing of all, leadership. If he has training, and if he has developed pride, he can stand as a man.

  In a POW cage, he is flesh, however strong the spirit. He has no gun, he has no leader, and his comrades are flesh, too.

  Americans often forget there are millions of brave men and women behind the iron curtain, living in virtual prisons. They have no love for Communism, yet they accommodate. The Roman Catholic primate of Poland—whom no man accuses of Communism—"collaborates."

  In a prison, most men, if their jailor wills, may be broken.

  Men there are like all men, everywhere, in that some will never do wrong, and some will never do right. The great majority will lean the way the wind takes them as most men have since the dawn of time.

  There were utterly reprehensible acts committed by Americans in the prison camps. These have been recorded, and punished. There were also acts of incredible courage, which have been rewarded, in some cases.

  The average man was neither courageous nor cowardly.

  Young, untrained, with the iron most men expect in soldiers not yet forged in him, he was forced to face the tiger as best he could.

  In the snow-covered bauxite mining camp they would call Death Valley, Sergeant Charles Schlichter and the other Americans taken at Kunu-ti were gathered into an old school building.

  Here a slender Chinese officer addressed them in broken English.

  He told them that the People's Volunteers had decided to treat them, not as war criminals, but under China's new Lenient Policy. Though the officer did not say it, the average Army POW would be treated much like an average Chinese felon or class enemy. No great pressures would be put on him, other than those of starvation, lack of medical care, and a certain amount of indoctrination.

  This was the Lenient Policy. All American POW's, however, were not subject to it. Airmen, in particular, who were bombing North Korea to rubble, rousing the hatred of both Chinese and Koreans, were criminals from the start. Later, when the typhus carried across the Yalu by the CCF hordes spread to the civil population, airmen would be accused of germ warfare, giving the CCF both an out and a chance at a propaganda coup.

  Airmen, and some others, would be put under acute stress to confess alleged war crimes. Some were put in solitary. Some were physically tortured. All were starved and interrogated until their nerves shrieked. They were treated in almost the identical way that political prisoners had been treated by Communists for a generation.

  Even under the Lenient Policy, no relief parcels were allowed to be delivered to Communist POW's, nor were any neutral observers, at any time, allowed to inspect the prison camps.

  Communists saw no reason why Americans should have special privileges not given to their own people.

  When he had told them of the Lenient Policy, the officer told the shivering, tired, fearful POW's one thing more:

  "Everybody here is the same. No officers, no N.C.O.'s here. Everybody is equal!"

  It has always been customary to separate officers from sergeants, and sergeants from other ranks, in POW camps. It is the most effective way of breaking down possible resistance and cohesion in any group of prisoners, American or Hungarian. But the Chinese tried a new twist.

  "No one here has any rank—you are all the same," the Chinese said. To Sergeant Schlichter's horror, this had an immediate appeal for many men.

  One soldier went up to an officer and slapped him on the back. "Hey, Jack, how the hell are you?" He thought it was very funny.

  The Chinese smiled, too.

  In this way, and in others, such as putting ranking POW's on the most degrading jobs, the Chinese broke wh
at little discipline remained in the POW ranks. The officers themselves did not quite know what to do. To many of them, it seemed self-aggrandizing, almost totalitarian, to insist upon their right to command, since they were only captives, too. Most of them did nothing.

  The officers and sergeants, as well as the young men, faced a new situation, for which they were wholly unprepared.

  Morale, among the captives, was already gone. Now the last shred of discipline went, and with it went many Americans' hope of surviving.

  There was no one to give the POW's direction, except the Chinese. Among the Americans, it could not be anything but dog eat dog, hooray for me, and to hell with you.

  The disciplines that hold men together in the face of fear, hunger, and danger are not natural. Stresses equal to, and beyond, the stress of fear and panic must be overlaid on men. Some of these stresses are called civilization. And even the highest of civilizations demands leadership. There has to be a Chief Executive of the United States, with the power to bully and chivvy both the Congress and the people, sometimes into doing what is necessary for their own good.

  In Death Valley, there was no one to bully and chivvy the wretched prisoners but the Chinese, who had no American's welfare at heart. Men did not hold together, but came apart, dissolved into individuals, governed only by their individual consciences. And as fear, cold, sickness, and starvation deepened, conscience shallowed.

  The controls of civilization make men, often against their will, become their brother's keepers. When the controls are taken away, it is but a step to becoming their brother's killers. The veneer of civilized decency is much thinner than most Americans, even after seeing Auschwitz and Belsen, think.

  Civilization is a fragile discipline, at best. In Death Valley it disappeared.

  The prisoners, in subzero weather, were huddled into filthy huts where there was not room enough even to sleep comfortably. Men lay on the odorous ground, pressed tight against each other at night, week after week.