This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  He and his men had been without water for many hours; their weapons were dirty and jammed; all were in almost trancelike exhaustion. Yet, under Clemons' command, they were still a disciplined body, and still had the will to remain. Small-arms fire plucked at them all afternoon, and the Chinese artillery sought them out. Only fourteen of these men would survive.

  At about 1700, Joe Clemons, after fighting off a couple of snipers with a rifle, got on the radio to Battalion. He said, "… about twenty men here who are still unhit. They are completely spent. There is no fight left in this company. If we can't be relieved, we should be withdrawn."

  Trudeau was in Battalion CP. Immediately he got into his copter, and flew to his phones at Division HQ. He talked to I Corps Commander Major General! Bruce C. Clark. He wanted one promise: that if he threw more troops into the Pork Chop affray, the hill would not be given up at a later time.

  It was at this time that the United States Army began to win its battle of wills. It might seem a nightmarish children's game, with ghastly stakes—but the United States Army was going to have to show the CCF who was King on the Hill, if it wanted success at Panmunjom.

  Lieutenant Denton, of Love Company, was ordered to attack onto Pork Chop. He brought his men into Clemons' area when Clemons had just sixteen men left. And Denton, and the remnants of Love, would have as bad a time as Clemons, before the night was out.

  Just before 1800, the 2/17 was attached to Colonel Kern's 31st Infantry, giving him two fresh rifle companies. Withholding E, 17th, he ordered King's Fox to assault Pork Chop and relieve Clemons. Sometime after 2100, Fox Company mounted the back slopes, and Clemons' survivors started to the rear.

  Under the artillery pounding, and the desperate Chinese attempts to batter down all resistance on the hill, Fox Company was not enough. Easy, 17th Infantry, had to be committed, too.

  Everywhere else along the line the front was cool. At Panmunjom prisoners were being exchanged. But around Pork Chop the life of a rifle company was measured in hours.

  At dawn, Able Company, 17th Infantry, was committed.

  In retrospect, both Easy and Able should have been committed earlier; the haunting fear of committing too many men, of taking too many casualties, which had begun with the terrible civilian pressure after Heartbreak, had resulted in piecemeal commitment and, ironically, more losses than were probably necessary.

  For Able of the 17th, fighting beside the remnants of Fox and Easy all day of 8 April, against company after company of reinforcing Chinese, finally turned the tide.

  Love, Fox, and Easy, relieving Clemons' King on the hill, each took almost as many casualties. But when the CCF finally understood that they could not have the hill—would not get it, even if they killed a thousand Americans, or fought it out all summer along this line—their assault ceased as quickly as it had begun.

  After sunset 18 April, the sound of guns ceased, and the stars came out once more through the fading smoke.

  The United States Army had expended more than 130,000 rounds of artillery ammunition within twenty-four hours, and had expended several hundred men. It was King on the Hill.

  Sometimes the cost of games is high.

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  39

  Cease-fire

  It was very easy to start a war in Korea. It was not so easy to stop it.

  — From the Russian of N. S. Khrushchev, speech before the Bulgarian Party leadership.

  LATE IN THE 1952 presidential campaign, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican candidate, said, "If elected, I will go to Korea." The effectiveness of this pledge, though it had little of promise in it, was adjudged by the agony of Eisenhower's opposition. While the pledge was immediately attacked as cheap politics, it undoubtedly swayed the votes of thousands of families with men in Korea. And it was a simple acknowledgment of a fact the incumbent Administration wished to avoid—that the Korean War was at the heart of the campaign and that its continuance under present terms was becoming politically impossible.

  It was not the entrance of the United States into the war that came back now to haunt Harry Truman and his picked successor, Stevenson, but the continuing military and diplomatic standoff since 1951. The 2,500 American casualties per month the stalemate was costing were insignificant, except on the conscience of the American people.

  During the last years of Napoleon's reign, his ministers calculated that the French nation could afford 100,000 casualties per month in the emperor's wars. The figures were based on the total French population, and the number of men coming of military age each year. What was not taken into account was that the French people, having left the bones of two million men from Lisbon to Moscow, were becoming completely unenthusiastic about stepping "into the breach" however valid the reasons.

  Professional soldiers have been and may be used as pawns on the table of diplomacy. Impressed American citizens may not, without vast consequences. In November 1952, General Eisenhower carried the election by a landslide.

  On 21 November General Clark in Tokyo received word that the President-elect was flying to Korea in early December, and wanted no receptions, diplomatic teas, and the like. He would make a tour of the front, which presented Clark with an enormous security problem. Eisenhower's movements in a hostile theater had to be kept secret as far as possible, and he must never be permitted to come within each of enemy guns.

  The news of the President-elect's coming had a palpable effect on the men engaged in Korea. Ranking general and private alike, many of these men had been haunted by the sense of being forgotten. It had seemed to them that the United States was slowly adjusting to a situation in which Eighth Army held the far-off battle line forever, while life in the homeland went on as before. While public opinion was hostile to the war, there was also evidence that many people preferred to put the unpleasantness out of mind.

  There was now very little of the hero's welcome for returnees of the Korean War. The American people did not quite know how to regard a war they had not won.

  With news of Eisenhower's coming, generals began to speculate if soon they might be released from the restrictions that bound them to stalemate, while privates wondered if it meant they might soon go home.

  Clark, who in company with most of FECOM generaldom, had felt deeply the same frustration as MacArthur, had prepared a detailed list of forces needed and planning required to achieve military victory in Korea. Clark was particularly sanguine about employing Chiang Kai-shek's idle and aging divisions on Taiwan—which had not been used primarily because of European repugnance to the idea.

  Eisenhower flew into Suwon early in December 1952, bringing with him a large entourage—Charles E. Wilson, the Secretary of Defense Designate; General Omar Bradley, Chairman of the JCS; Admiral Radford, COMINPAC; Generals Ramey and Persons, Herbert Brownell, and his press secretary, Jim Hagerty.

  He made a whirlwind tour of the areas in back of the battlefront, and met briefly with Syngman Rhee. He discussed very little business, and in that sense his trip seemed what his political opponents claimed—a cheap gesture, to pay off a campaign promise in even cheaper coin. But from this visit two highly significant facts stood forth.

  Ike never saw Clark's list of requirements for winning the war. The matter was not even broached, and it was immediately apparent to Clark that the new Administration intended to press for an honorable peace rather than to broaden the fighting. In this sense, Eisenhower's trip seemed to solve nothing, accomplish nothing, except to inform the generals that there would be no immediate change of policy.

  The other significant matter that was discussed lay buried under a cloak of security. For two years the enemy had battered the U.N. with a propaganda war, while the U.N. attempts to strike back had been somewhat fumbling. Now Eisenhower showed himself keenly interested in psychological warfare as it was being waged from Japan. For two years and more, the U.N. Command had shouted its every intention to the world—and to the enemy; now this was to change.

  Eisen
hower, and the men around him, rightly or wrongly, were of the opinion that the Soviet Union wanted no big war, and it was time for the United States to take a certain amount of initiative—to keep the other side off balance, if possible. This tactic had been discussed before, and always discarded as too dangerous. Consequently, the policy had been always to tell the Communists exactly where the United States stood, while the Communists said nothing of their own intentions.

  The new Administration was determined to step up the psychological pressures that could be applied to the enemy. The Communist world had many vulnerable areas. Some of these, like the captive European peoples, the Administration would find too sensitive; the United States could meddle behind the iron curtain only at the certain risk of war.

  But there were other areas, such as the situation in Korea, that might be exploited. Now, certain measures were planned that would have an important bearing on the ending of the war.

  While in Korea, Eisenhower was briefed by Clark on the reported ammunition shortage, which had become a major scandal in the American press. It was true that certain calibers of artillery and mortar ammunition were in short supply, and Clark had rationed them. But the line itself had never been hampered.

  Part of the shortage was real. Rear-area ammunition dumps had been depleted by the unprecedented expenditure along the line; in the commendable effort to save lives American artillery had taken to hurling enormous quantities of metal during the hill battles. The barrages fired exceeded anything in either of the two world wars, and by 1953 more shells had already been fired during the limited war in Korea than in all of World War II. While the enemy had an estimated number of field guns equal to those of the U.N., it was the American volume of fire, hurled without stint or counting, and its superior placement, that enabled the U.N. to win almost all the hill battles from Heartbreak to Pork Chop.

  The rest of the shortage lay in mismanagement by FECOM ordnance. A new ordnance officer was installed; accounting methods were improved; shipments from the States speeded up, and front-line troops ordered not to discuss any restrictions with reporters—and the question of the ammunition shortage died a natural death, while some divisions went on burning up as many as ten thousand rounds per night.

  The briefings and discussions ended, Ike flew home; Christmas came. The war went on as before, and the expectations of troops and generals dulled.

  But everywhere new pressures were mounting, and events were marching toward conclusions.

  While hills along the uneasy battle line were disputed, now in the eastern mountains, now in the Marine zone near the estuary of the Imjin on the west, the American people's impatience with the war was matched in other places. And the impatience was colored by rising fear, for the longer the guns in Korea exploded, the greater the danger of a bigger conflict. The smaller countries of the U.N. had never ceased to explore ways out of the prisoner-of-war deadlock.

  It was a difficult task. Steadfastly, the United States refused to order men to return to tyranny at gunpoint; here the moral issue was clear-cut. And just as adamantly, the Red Chinese and North Koreans declined to accept anything less than full repatriation.

  This was the only deadlock preventing truce. The other questions, such as unification of Korea, and guarantees of its independence, the U.N. had put by the board in its resolution of February 1951, when it was decided that these problems were to be solved "through peaceful means" at a conveniently unspecified time following cease-fire.

  At first, owing to the extravagant claims of Nam II and the Communist leadership at Panmunjom, world opinion had remained confused on the POW issue. Among the neutrals, particularly, there had been much doubt that the United States told the truth, that there had been no coercion used on the POW's at the time the prisoners were rioting by the thousands on Koje. If a mass breakout had occurred, the United States would never have been able to convince these peoples of its truthfulness and morality.

  But with the POW's under tighter control, and inspected by neutral teams, the truth of the American position slowly became self-evident.

  And inevitably, from the time Haydon Boatner had control of U.N. POW Camp 1, the Communists began to lose the POW propaganda war. After all, their camps had never been opened to anyone, including the Red Cross.

  Whether the Communists could publicly admit that many of their captured soldiers refused repatriation or not, the world was becoming aware of it. And more and more of the world, from Mexico to India, was becoming annoyed at Communist intransigence.

  In November 1952, Indian Delegate V. K. Krishna Menon, avowedly no friend of the United States, proposed to the U.N. that the POW's of both sides be released to a neutral repatriation commission completely outside the control of either combatant, in agreed numbers and at agreed exchange points in Korean demilitarized zones. The commission would screen them, and if there were any POW's whose return was not provided for, these should then become the responsibility of the U.N.

  The proposal was greeted with anger by the Communist side.

  In December, with slight modifications, it was passed as a resolution by the U.N. Lester Pearson of Canada, Assembly President, presented the resolution to China and North Korea, requesting their acceptance in order to facilitate "a constructive and durable peace in Korea."

  The two Communist governments termed the proposal "illegal, unfair, and unreasonable," and promptly rejected it.

  South Korea, which was holding a large number of now decidedly anti-Communist POW's, also angrily denounced the Indian resolution.

  The United States was cautiously—it had no great trust in Menon—agreeable.

  Now the Communists, who cried over and over again their fervent desire for peace, were increasingly being backed into a corner in which it was apparent they preferred continued bloodshed to a propaganda defeat—and in so doing they were getting the defeat anyway.

  Trygve Lie, U.N. Secretary General, stated publicly that it seemed those who had commenced the aggression in Korea were simply not willing to end it. He was widely quoted.

  In late 1952, world opinion, for whatever it was worth, was turning slowly but definitely against the North Koreans and Red Chinese. Continued fighting by these nations could only intensify the swing.

  When Eisenhower departed the Far East in December, General Clark was certain that the new Administration would opt for a negotiated peace rather than intensified war. Shortly after the inauguration, he was formally notified to this effect.

  Then, on 19 February, he was advised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that on 13 December 1952 the Executive Committee of the League of Red Cross Societies meeting in Geneva had voted fifteen to two that sick and wounded POW's of the Korean War be exchanged even before a truce was negotiated. Only Red China and Russia opposed, and the JCS understood that a similar resolution was pending before the U.N. With concurrence from the State Department, they urged Clark to put such a proposal before the enemy, in advance of the U.N. action.

  This very thing had been proposed by the U.N. Command in December 1951; the Communists had rejected it.

  On 22 February 1953, Clark wrote to premier Kim II Sung of North Korea, and to Peng Teh-huai of the Chinese Volunteers: … The United Nations Command remains immediately ready to repatriate those seriously sick and seriously wounded captured personnel who are fit to travel in accordance with provisions of Article 109 of the Geneva Convention. I wish to be informed whether you are prepared for your part to proceed immediately with the repatriation of seriously sick and wounded personnel.… The United Nations Command liaison officers will be prepared to meet your liaison officers to make necessary arrangements.

  The appeal was delivered through Panmunjom. For thirty-six days there was no reply.

  During the first months of 1953, as the propaganda war began to turn against the Red Chinese, other pressures, both subtle and unsubtle, began to make themselves felt in Communist capitals.

  Communist leaders, without success, had tried to assess the meaning
of the American change of Administration. During 1952 it had been the Republican leadership that had cried the loudest for direct action against the Communists—which had threatened, in one way or another—the loosing of the lightning against the transgressor. It had been largely Republicans who proposed Douglas MacArthur for the Presidency; it had been largely Republicans who seemed to support him in the Congress.

  Now the Republicans, a general, at their head, were in power. And generals were as worrisome to the Kremlin, in one way, as they were to Capitol Hill, for the Communist leadership was essentially civilian. It had occurred to the Communist leaders, too, that generals were much more likely to regard war as inevitable than either politicians or diplomats.

  The Communist ruling circles knew that General MacArthur, oddly, had been idolized by the American "millionaire ruling cliques" and supported by Senator Taft, who was certainly at the very center of those cliques—and Communist rulers were now trapped by their own mythology, which they tended to believe more than the West gave them credit for. It was Communist dogma that capitalists desire war in search of profits, ignoring the fact that in any Western nation the wealthy probably wanted war less than any other group—since wars normally bring social upheaval.

  It may have been, in 1953, that the Republican leadership didn't know exactly what it was going to do about the Korean War. So far, it had not exactly enlightened the American people. But, more important, it had failed to enlighten the Communist world, too, and the Communist world, just now developing new problems, was deeply concerned, and far from convinced that the United States, in a fit of frustration, would not strike out.

  Certain pressures out of Tokyo fell on receptive ground.

  In Nevada, at Frenchman's Flat, a bright flash and ugly mushroom cloud had signified a gigantic change in the tactical battlefield—a change that had not come about at Hiroshima, despite statements to the contrary. In its early years the atomic device had remained a strategic weapon, suitable for delivery against cities and industries, suitable to obliterate civilians, men, women, and children by the millions, but of no practical use on a limited battlefield—until it was fired from a field gun.