This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

But the United Nations Command had no authority to put massive pressure on the enemy along the whole line. They had no authority to reopen the wholesale fighting; the United Nations did not want military victory; they wanted truce.

  And the enemy was perfectly willing to fight to the death over a small piece of ground, seemingly forever. The fought-over hills assumed propaganda and political values out of all proportion to their military worth.

  It was a case of the children's game of King on the Mountain, played with blood and bullets.

  Whoever lost a hill lost face.

  After weeks of fighting for Heartbreak, it was clear to 2nd Division that the ridge would have to be flanked. The 2nd Engineers worked day and night, clearing a route through a blocked defile north of the hill mass over which the 72nd's tanks could pass. On 9 October the trail was ready.

  At 0600 on 10 October, the M-4A3E8 tanks of Baker Company, the old Shermans, workhorses of World War II, fitted with new high-velocity 76mm cannon, broke through the hills into the clear, and raced for Mundung-ni.

  The 23rd was kept on Heartbreak, still fighting for pieces of the ridge. The 9th Infantry moved left, and the 38th struck behind Heartbreak to get a grip on the hill from which the NKPA reinforced.

  This hill, called Kim II Sung Ridge, the division struck in mass, from 5 through 15 October, and overran it. Now the enemy could be reinforced on Heartbreak only through the passes around Mundung-ni.

  The tanks of Baker Company, 72nd Tank, meanwhile had raved up the Mundung-ni Valley, running a gauntlet of fire. The hills and defiles swarmed with NKPA, and every available gun was turned on them.

  But the tanks went through Mundung-ni, and four thousand yards beyond. From 10 October to 15 October, the 72nd ran two excursions per day through the hostile valley, ripping up the enemy rear as they passed. They branched out on the meager dirt roads, blasted dumps and concentrations of troops and bunkers, and then withdrew before dark.

  They destroyed more than 600 troops, one SP gun, 11 machine guns, 350 bunkers—with uncounted casualties—three mortars, and several ammunition dumps, at a total cost of three killed, five wounded, and eight tanks lost to enemy action.

  By 15 October both maneuvers had broken the back of the defense of Heartbreak Ridge.

  The NPKA Corps that had held Heartbreak would not again be fit for action. There, with those lost on Bloody Ridge, it had suffered more than 35,000 casualties. The 2nd Division had leaned on the enemy, heavily.

  But atop Heartbreak, the men of the 23rd Infantry could see ten miles to the north. They could see mile after mile of dark hills, growing gradually higher, hills in which lurked hundreds of thousands more Chinese and North Koreans. It was a long way to the Yalu and the Tumen, and these men knew in their hearts they were not going there, no matter how many hills they took.

  On 25 October, at a new site, Panmunjom, the truce talks had begun again in earnest.

  An officer writing in a battalion history, which was published in Japan, summed up their feelings: "The heart to fight though not gone, was not the bright light it had once been."

  On 25 October the men who had taken Heartbreak came down off the hill, replaced by the United States 7th Division.

  Their real heartbreak lay not in their dead and maimed, 5,600 of them, some of whom the men of 7th Division found still wedged in bunkers and crevasses, but in what had been accomplished by it all.

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  32

  Stalemate

  A diplomat's words must have no relation to actions—otherwise what kind of diplomacy is it? Words are one thing, actions another. Good words are a concealment of bad deeds. Sincere diplomacy is no more possible than drywater or iron wood.

  — From the Russian of Josef V. Stalin.

  ON 22 AUGUST 1951, the Communist negotiators had broken off the talks at Kaesong on the pretext that the U.N. had dropped bombs in the demilitarized zone declared about that town. For two months there were no plenary sessions, but the proceedings did not wholly end.

  Liaison officers from the two camps met continually, to try to find a basis for new negotiations.

  And in the meantime the U.N. Command carried out its line-straightening operations, leaning on the enemy. The U.N. Command, to the strident screams of the other side, refused to agree to the 38th parallel as a new line of demarcation, even though Secretary of State Acheson had mentioned this in a speech in June. The parallel was not easily defensible in most places, and the U.N. Command preferred the line of contact as a territorial basis for a cease-fire. In the meantime the Eighth Army proceeded to improve the line from the U.N. viewpoint, punching out bulges, knocking the enemy back off high ground, at heavy loss to both sides.

  The losses at Bloody Ridge, Heartbreak, and elsewhere had some result. On 22 October the enemy offered to meet in full plenary session once again, and to accept the U.N. preferred site of Panmunjom for future discussions.

  Panmunjom was not in Communist territory, but a tiny village of deserted huts along a dirty road in true no man's land, between the opposing lines. Here incidents or accidents, like the alleged bombing of Kaesong, could easily be avoided; the new neutral zone was tiny and easily marked by captive balloons; and the Communists could no longer gain propaganda value by bringing U.N. negotiators through their lines. Here no one was host.

  On 25 October 1951 Major General Lee Sang Cho, Inmun Gun, faced United States General Hodes across the bargaining table. Item Two—where the cease-fire line would be drawn—was still as they had left it in August, undetermined.

  "Now we will open the meeting," Lee said.

  "Okay," Hodes said.

  "Do you have any idea about the military demarcation line?"

  "We ended the last conference before the suspension by asking for your proposal. Do you have one?"

  "We would like your opinion first."

  Hodes said wearily. "We gave our opinion many times, and asked for your proposal based on our proposal. As it was your proposal to have the Sub delegation meeting, we expected you to have a proposal. Let's have it."

  "You said you had made a new proposal, but we have heard nothing new that would break the deadlock."

  "That's right," General Hodes said. "You haven't."

  After almost an hour of this, a recess for fifteen minutes was called.

  And finally, in desperation, the U.N. proposed a four-kilometer-wide demilitarized zone for the cease-fire line, to be based on the current battle line at the time of signing.

  The other side went into a propaganda tirade. They wanted the cease-fire line drawn now, before the firing ceased.

  "You … are trying to escape the righteous solution and trying to shirk the duty which has been specified in the agenda item. You use in these discussions and also in your press and radio the sophistic argument that the time of signing is unknown. By doing so you have truly revealed your true color.… I sincerely hope and think that you and we are bound in duty to show our sincerity to the peace-loving people of the world by your acceptance of our proposal of establishing a military demarcation line… ."

  What the enemy wanted was to fix the armistice line irrevocably before the remainder of the agenda was solved. This, of course, would effectively relieve the Communist powers of any further military pressure while the negotiations continued; the United Nations Command could hardly launch an offensive for ground it had already agreed to relinquish.

  It would enable the Communists, as Admiral Joy saw and mentioned, to talk forever if they chose, with freedom from the grinding pressure they had been experiencing at Bloody and Heartbreak ridges.

  He was loath to agree, unless he had to.

  The limited attacks of the Eighth Army during August, September, and October 1951 had unquestionably improved its military stance, and had unquestionably inflicted deep wounds on the enemy forces.

  But as Boatner said, "Everybody was sick to death of the casualties."

  Men die to make others free, or to protect their homeland.
They do not willingly die for a piece of real estate ten thousand miles from home, which they know their government will eventually surrender. Nor do the generals appointed over them, nor the governments they elect, willingly spend them so.

  As the thousands of notification telegrams to next of kin went out, so soon after the high hopes raised by the negotiations, Washington grew more and more concerned. The public had accepted the end of the war, but continued casualties were rapidly becoming unacceptable.

  In Tokyo, General Ridgway was so informed.

  And Matt Ridgway had to put his foot firmly on Lieutenant General James Van Fleet's neck.

  Now field commanders writhed under a new restriction: Fight the war, but don't get anyone killed. Such orders were never issued—but they were clearly understood.

  The United Nations Command had learned a great deal from Heartbreak and Bloody ridges. They had learned that, with the new enemy fortifications and the newer, greener troops in the Eighth Army, effective pressure on the enemy could be achieved only at a cost in blood unacceptable to Washington.

  On 17 November 1951, the U.N. Command agreed to accept the Communist position on the cease-fire line, provided the armistice was signed within thirty days. The Communists eagerly assented.

  They had a thirty-day reprieve. They utilized it by reinforcing their defensive lines in depth until they were almost impervious to attack. With a flank firmly anchored on each side by the sea, in broken ground, it would now require an effort equivalent to that of the Somme, or Verdun, to dislodge them, short of use of nuclear weapons.

  Three hundred thousand French and British troops fell trying to breach the German fortifications at the Somme in 1916. No Western power had the heart for such useless slaughter, ever again.

  On 27 November the cease-fire line, the present line of contact, was formally ratified by each side. Initialed maps were exchanged.

  The Communists had a great part of what they had wanted from the first hour they had requested peace talks. They had dissipated the danger of a U.N. march to the Yalu, or a disastrous defeat in the field.

  From this time forward, smarting under the losses they had taken in the abortive attacks of later summer, having agreed to a firm line, and despairing of breaching the enemy lines anyway, the U.N. took no more large-scale offensive action.

  At the end of thirty days the enemy was no nearer signing the armistice than he had been in July. He now felt free to delay as long as he pleased, and it was soon apparent he intended to do so, reaping whatever propaganda coups he could.

  In Korea the U.N. had granted a sort of cease-fire, but there was no peace.

  It was now, not openly, but in mess tents and private gatherings along the brooding lines of entrenchments, that some men began to say, "MacArthur was right."

  Captain Arthur B. Busbey, Jr., a slightly built, dark-hazel-eyed advertising executive with thinning black hair and faint East Texas accent, was recalled to the Army in September 1950, at the age of twenty-eight. He had served from 1941 through 1946, before becoming a partner in an agency in Wichita Falls, and now, with his orders, Busbey decided the hell with it.

  He decided to try to stay in the service. He would be one of the more fortunate ones who took this course, since eventually he would be integrated into the Regular Army.

  He had always done Public Information Officer work in the Army, but had never particularly cared for it. When in March 1951 he received orders for Korea, he resisted all attempts of his commanders to keep him in this slot, insisting he be given a rifle company.

  Because Busbey had never had combat in World War II, like many such men, he had a faint feeling of guilt. In Korea, he was one of the few who asked for line duty.

  He joined the 7th Infantry Division in June, in the east-central sector north of the Hwach'on Reservoir, near Kurnwha. He took command of Baker Company, 32nd Infantry, just as the 7th Division was finishing Matt Ridgway's Operation Killer against the Chinese.

  And, like all newcomers, at first the hills bushed him. A man who has never climbed the thousand-foot slopes of the Taebaek Range cannot appreciate their steepness, or the difficulties they caused an army used to mechanization.

  Almost as soon as he arrived, there was rumor of peace talks. He spent July dug in, in a combat situation, while the Eighth Army marked time.

  Then, in August, Baker of the 32nd became involved in the line-straightening designed by the Eighth Army in the Punchbowl area.

  On 27 August, Lieutenant Colonel Woods, 1st Battalion C.O., briefed the officers for the operation: it was conceived as a battalion attack against light resistance, to erase a bulge.

  "A Company will jump off, take this first hill—then B Company will take the ridge line on its east, up to this high point on that larger ridge. After these are secured, A and B will furnish fire support for C, which attacks to seize the final ridge beyond."

  On its face, it was simple infantry operation. The 32nd Infantry had been doing things like it all spring, with great success.

  But Busbey, looking at the map, pointed to a huge hill mass just beyond his own objective: "Who will take care of that monster?"

  Woods said, "Division's worried about that, too."

  But intelligence estimates stated that few enemy were in the area and that the battalion would meet only weak resistance. Intelligence was not aware that these hills were held by five enemy battalions and that the easy days were almost over.

  Early in the misty morning, the attacks jumped off. A Company took its objective within the hour, and Busbey's crowd shoved off. For the first three hundred yards, moving along steep slopes, they encountered nothing, and they advanced in a column formation of platoons.

  They arrived at a very steep rise at the base of their objective. And halfway up, Lieutenant Petsche's leading platoon drew fire.

  It drew fire such as the battalion had not seen in Korea. The whole ridge was covered with artillery fire, an experience new to 32nd Infantry.

  Dirt from a near miss by a Russian-made 76mm covered Busbey, as he dived into a hole.

  Petsche's platoon was stopped cold. Approximately half its men went down The platoon leader's ankle was broken, and his messenger killed standing beside him.

  Busbey, just behind, ordered the company to advance. But he quickly realized he was stretched out along a long ridge, attacking into a "T"—the worst position possible for a rifle company. He could put little fire down on the enemy, while they could enfilade him from each side.

  He requested C Company be committed to assist him. Battalion wouldn't buy that, and finally told him to hold where he was, and to consolidate for the coming night. "Hold every inch you've got!"

  B Company was in a lousy position to form a perimeter, strung out along the sides of a steep rise. But Busbey dug in, deciding if he were hit hard he would have to pull back.

  Across the small valley from him, A Company dug in, also. So far, Able had had no troubles.

  Under shelling, Busbey held until nightfall.

  At 2300 the men of Baker Company heard firing and saw flares ascending from Able's ridge. Fire seemed to rush at Able's perimeter from three sides. Soon things in Able were a mess. The C.O. was killed, the perimeter broken. Then the firing died away, while Busbey's men waited tensely.

  At exactly 0200 it was his turn. The enemy rolled out of the night at him from three sides. He called his outer platoon to come in, and for the artillery to fire flares over him for the rest of the night.

  As the big artillery flares, throwing whitish light, popped over him, giving his men light to shoot by, someone at the artillery position complained that this was expensive.

  "Who the hell cares?" Busbey told them, by radio.

  With light and gunfire, Baker Company held off the attacks till dawn. Then someone wanted to know how many Busbey and company had killed.

  His answer was, "How the hell would I know?"

  With daylight, he was ordered to attack.

  But the big hill he had been c
oncerned about was feeding Chinese clown onto the ridges he assaulted, faster than the friendly artillery could destroy them. Baker took a very bloody nose trying to move up the T-bone, and finally, Busbey received orders to pull back before dark.

  He was lucky to get out. A sergeant from the supporting Weapons Company D, firing from a supporting finger ridge, realized his machine gun could not hold off the enemy long. This N.C.O. sent his crew back, while he fired to give them cover, staying on the gun.

  As the Chinese pressed in, the machine gun snapped empty. Unable to load a fresh belt in time, the sergeant emptied his .45 at them. His body was found later; the Chinese had left it and taken the gun.

  The sergeant, whose name Busbey thought was Henderson, got a posthumous D.S.C., while Bushey and his men, under heavy pressure, got out.

  Later, both the corps and division commanders came down to the battalion, apologizing for the operation. They had had no intimation that they were sending 1st Battalion into a buzzsaw.

  During September, Busbey replaced his casualties and held the MLR around Artillery Hill—so named because enemy shells always fell at chow time. Then, in October, a battalion of Colombians relieved his battalion, and the 32nd Infantry took over from the 2nd Division on Heartbreak Ridge.

  During the last days of October, the 7th Division tried to police up the litter left at the scene of that battle. Equipment and material lay everywhere; enemy dead were strewn across the hills. And even some American dead still lay in the ditches beside one road. How they came there Busbey never knew.

  Tied in with the ROK 7th Division, Busbey's company was given the mission of covering the valley beyond Heartbreak, a two-hundred-yard-wide defile through which flowed a small stream, and up which American tanks patrolled each day.

  By day Busbey could cover the valley by fire, but at night it was a matter of setting up ambush patrols near the stream and on the fingers of the covering ridge to prevent the enemy from mining the valley floor and stream bed.

  On the third night, one of Busbey's patrols hit the jackpot.