Retreat, Hell!
( The Corps - 10 )
W.E.B. Griffin
It is the fall of 1950. The Marines have made a pivotal breakthrough at Inchon, but a roller coaster awaits them. While Douglas MacArthur chomps at the bit, intent on surging across the 38th parallel, Brigadier General Fleming Pickering works desperately to mediate the escalating battle between MacArthur and President Harry Truman. And somewhere out there, his own daredevil pilot son, Pick, is lost behind enemy lines--and may be lost forever.
From Publishers Weekly
Megaseller Griffin (Honor Bound; Brotherhood of War; Men at War) musters another solid entry in his series chronicling the history of the U.S. Marines, now engaged in the Korean War. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, nicknamed El Supremo by his subordinates, is taken by surprise when the North Korean Army surges south across the 38th parallel. After early losses, he rallies his troops and stems the tide, but not for long. Intertwining stories of literally an army of characters reveal how MacArthur and his sycophantic staff overlook the entire Red Chinese Army, which is massed behind the Yalu River and about to enter the war. Brig. Gen. Fleming Pickering attempts to mediate the ongoing battles between feisty, give-'em-hell Harry Truman and the haughty MacArthur, while worrying about his pilot son, Malcolm "Pick" Pickering, who has been shot down behind enemy lines. The introduction of the Sikorsky H-19A helicopter into the war by Maj. Kenneth "Killer" McCoy and sidekick Master Gunner Ernie Zimmerman details the invention of tactics that will become commonplace in Vietnam. Readers looking for guts and glory military action will be disappointed, as barely a shot is fired in anger, but fans of Griffin's work understand that the pleasures are in the construction of a complex, big-picture history of war down to its smallest details: "There were two men in the rear seat, both of them wearing fur-collared zippered leather jackets officially known as Jacket, Flyers, Intermediate Type G-1." Veterans of the series will enjoy finding old comrades caught up in fresh adventures, while new-guy readers can easily enter here and pick up the ongoing story.
Retreat,
Hell!
THE CORPS is respectfully dedicated to the memory of
Colonel Drew James Barrett, Jr., USMC 19 April 1919-1 May 2003
Second Lieutenant Drew James Barrett 111, USMC
3 April 1945-27 February 1969 Died of wounds, Quang Nam Province, Republic of Vietnam
Major Alfred Lee Butler III, USMC
4 September 1950-8 February 1984
Died as the result of terrorist action, Beirut, Lebanon
Donald L. Schomp A Marine Fighter Pilot
who became a legendary U.S. Army Master Aviator RIP 9 April 1989
PROLOGUE
Until August 1945, when General Order Number One, the protocol for the surrender—and occupation—of Japan was being somewhat hastily drafted in Washington, the 38th Parallel, which runs across the Korean Peninsula, had been just one line on a map of the globe.
At the time, World War II was just about over. Nagasaki and Hiroshima had been obliterated by atomic bombs, and Japan was willing to surrender. The Soviet Union had just—somewhat belatedly—declared war on the Japanese Empire, and had already started to move troops into the Japanese "Protectorates" of Manchuria and Korea.
President Truman, who had already learned not to trust the Soviet Union, realized that to keep the Red Army from occupying all of Korea, a border— "a demarcation line"—between the northern part of the Korean Peninsula and the southern, where the United States planned to station troops, was needed.
If Korea was divided—about equally—at the 38th Parallel, the United States would control Seoul, the capital, and the major ports of Inchon—near Seoul—and Pusan—at the southern tip of the peninsula.
The division at the 38th Parallel was proposed to the Soviets as the demarcation line, and they raised no objections. The seeds for what became the People's Democratic Republic of North Korea and the Republic of South Korea were sown.
Four years and eleven months later, the Inmun Gun—the Soviet-trained North Korean Army—invaded South Korea across the 38th Parallel with the announced intention of "unifying" Korea.
The attack officially—and in fact—came as a "complete surprise" to the United States. United States intelligence agencies at all levels had failed to perform their basic duty to warn of an impending attack on the United States or its allies.
It was hard then—and still is, more than half a century later—to understand why we didn't see the attack coming.
Immediately after World War II, Stalin had managed to establish surrogate governments in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia—and North Korea. On 5 March 1946, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, British Wartime Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill said, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. "
President Harry S Truman had become very suspicious of Soviet intentions even before he ordered the use of atomic weapons against Japan, and he had acted to foil them.
For example, Truman had courageously dispatched American advisers—actually the first special forces/operations soldiers, long before anyone even thought of wearing a green beret—to Greece, where they successfully thwarted Soviet intentions to take over the birthplace of democracy.
And when the Soviets tried to force the Americans, French, and English from Berlin, Truman had ordered the Air Lift, which saw U.S. Air Force transports landing round the clock at sixty-second intervals to keep Berlin fed, and the Western Allies in the former German capital.
Many historians now believe that the reason Stalin authorized his surrogate North Korean Army to invade South Korea is that the United States had actually led him to believe we would raise no objections.
On 12 January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson outlined President Truman's Asian policy in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D. C. Ache-son "drew a line" of countries the United States considered "essential to its national interests, "a euphemism everyone understood to mean the United States would go to war to defend.
Acheson placed Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines within the "American defense perimeter. " Taiwan and Korea were not mentioned.
The United States was then "completely surprised" five months later when, in the early morning of 25 June 1950, the North Koreans invaded across the 38th Parallel.
Not that twenty-four hours'—or ten days' or six months'—advance warning of the attack would have been of much real use: The Inmun Gun was well trained, well disciplined, and well armed. The South Korean armed forces were not.
The South Koreans had been denied, for example, heavy artillery because some of Truman's advisers believed they might use it to invade North Korea. South Korea had also been denied modern aircraft, tanks, and other military hardware by the same reasoning. And, of course, for reasons of economy.
There were only several hundred American troops in South Korea on that Sunday morning, assigned to the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG), and they were armed only with their individual weapons.
The Eighth United States Army was scattered among the islands of Japan, but it was not prepared to fight a war.
Blame can fairly be laid for this:
The President of the United States, under the Constitution, is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. The authors of the Constitution wanted to make absolutely sure that the armed forces were firmly under civilian control, and gave that control to the President.
With that authority, of course, came responsibility. It is the responsibility—the duty—of the President to ensure that the armed forces are prepared to wage war when called upon to do so. In practical terms, this means the President ensures that the uniformed officers in co
mmand of the armed forces meet their responsibilities to keep their forces in readiness. In turn, that means that the armed forces are trained and equipped to go to war.
There is little question now that the senior American officer in the Pacific, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, failed in his duty to make sure that the Eighth Army under his command was both trained and equipped to go to war. On 25 June 1950, it was neither.
That it was not adequately trained is entirely MacArthur's fault, but to place blame for the literally disgraceful lack of equipment in the Eighth United States Army, it is necessary to go all the way to the top of the chain of command.
United States Forces, Far East, were under the command of the Joint Chief of Staff. MacArthur repeatedly advised them of the sorry state of his equipment, and requested to be supplied with what he believed he needed.
The Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs—there were several during this period—repeatedly requested of their superior, the Secretary of Defense, that the U.S. Armed Forces worldwide (not only MacArthur's forces in Japan) be adequately supplied with the necessary equipment.
Truman's Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, openly boasted at the time that he had first cut military spending to the bone, and then cut some more.
He had. At Johnson's orders, there were two battalions (instead of the three considered necessary) in most of the U.S. Army's regiments. And there were two regiments (instead of three) in all but one of the divisions.
The Secretary of Defense is, with the advice and consent of the Senate, appointed by the President. Once Louis Johnson had been confirmed, President Truman was responsible for his actions, good or bad.
The blame for the inadequate equipment in the Eighth U.S. Army—and just about everywhere else—has to be laid on the desk of President Harry S Truman, right beside the small sign reading "The Buck Stops Here" that he kept there. There were, of course, extenuating circumstances.
Congress, for one, was not in the mood to appropriate the billions of dollars it would have cost to bring the armed forces back to the state of preparedness they had been in five years before, when, on 2 September 1945, MacArthur had accepted the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Empire on the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor.
And Korea was almost at the bottom of the list of problems with which President Truman had to deal on a daily basis. Most of these problems had to do with thwarting Soviet mischief in Europe, the Near East, and even Africa.
The Soviets hadn't done nearly so well in the Far East, and the credit for that unquestionably belongs to Douglas MacArthur, who had flatly refused to permit the Soviets to participate in the occupation of Japan.
MacArthur had also successfully sown the seed of democratic government in the mind of the Japanese people, and taken wide and generally successful steps to get the war-ravaged Japanese economy moving.
As far as the disgraceful condition of the Eighth United States Army in Japan was concerned, one has to remember that all armies are rank conscious.
General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was not only the senior officer on active duty, but he had been Army Chief of Staff when the general officers in the 1950 Pentagon had been captains and majors. In World War II, MacArthur had been a theater commander, commanding more men of all services than there were now in 1950 in all the armed forces of the United States.
There are annual inspections of every organization in the Army, ending with a conference during which the inspectors point out to the commander where he is doing what he should not be doing, or not doing what he should be doing.
It is very difficult to imagine any officer, even one with a galaxy of stars on his epaulets, pointing out to General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Allied Powers, and Commanding General, United States Far East Command (FECOM), where he was doing something wrong, or where he had failed to do something he should have been doing.
And none did.
Because of the International Date Line, when it is Sunday in Korea it is Saturday in New York City and Washington. The first word of the attack reached the Pentagon about eight o'clock Saturday night, and at about the same time, the United Nations Commission in Korea managed to get UN Secretary General Trygve Lie on the telephone at his estate on Long Island.
Lie blurted, "This is war against the United Nations."
President Truman learned of the attack at his home in Independence, Missouri, early Sunday morning and immediately boarded his airplane, the Independence, to fly back to Washington.
Lie convened an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council at two o'clock Sunday afternoon. The Soviet Union, trying to force the UN into seating Red China—and expelling Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalists—was refusing to attend Security Council meetings and did not participate.
This was a blunder on their part. Had they attended, the Soviet Union could have vetoed the resolution the UN passed. The resolution stated that the attack constituted a breach of the peace, ordered an immediate cessation of hostilities and the immediate withdrawal of North Korean forces from South Korea, and called upon all UN members to "render every assistance to the UN in the execution of this resolution."
At about six o'clock that evening, in Washington, in Blair House—across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, which was being repaired—President Truman met with the more important members of his staff.
They quickly and unanimously agreed with Truman that the interests of the United States demanded that immediate action be taken to stop Communist aggression in Korea.
A little after ten-thirty Sunday evening, two teletype orders from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were sent to the Far East.
The first, to the Commanding General, FECOM—MacArthur—authorized him to send ammunition and military equipment to Korea, to prevent the loss of Seoul; authorized him to provide ships and aircraft to evacuate American citizens from Korea; and directed him to send a "survey party" to Korea to see what was going on.
It is germane to note that until MacArthur got that teletype order he had no official role in Korea. The former Japanese Protectorate of Korea, now the Republic of South Korea, was an independent nation.
The second order went to the United States Seventh Fleet. It was to immediately sail from its several major home ports—the largest were in the Philippines and Okinawa—for the U.S. Navy Base at Sasebo, Japan. On arrival, the warships would come under the operational control of the Commander, U.S. Naval Forces, Far East.
Since Commander, Naval Forces, Far East, was under FECOM, that meant they would be under MacArthur's command.
MacArthur immediately ordered the U. S. Far Eastern Air Force—already under his command—to Korea to protect the evacuation of American civilians and dependents from Inchon and Pusan.
Over Inchon, the American jets were fired upon by three Russian-made YAK fighters, which the Americans promptly shot down.
It was the first American victory in the Korean War, and much time would pass before there was another.
Outnumbered, outgunned, and in many cases poorly led, most of the South Korean Army simply began to disintegrate in the face of the North Korean attack.
The Survey Party—thirteen officers and two enlisted men under Brigadier General John H. Church—took off from Tokyo as soon as it could be formed. While in the air, they received two messages, the first saying it would probably be wiser not to try to land at Seoul's Kimpo Airfield, and suggested the field at Suwon, thirty miles or so south of Seoul, as an alternate. The second said that the Pentagon had given MacArthur command of all U.S. Forces in Korea, and the Survey Party had been rather grandly redesignated as "GHQAdvance Command and Liaison Group in Korea."
ADCOM landed at Suwon about 1900 27 June. Colonel William H. S. Wright, the KMAG Chief of Staff, who met them, suggested that it probably would be better to wait for morning to drive into Seoul than to try to do so in the hours of darkness.
At 0400 the next day
, two KMAG officers drove into Suwon and reported to General Church that the bridges across the Han River had been blown and that Seoul was in the hands of the enemy.
Church radioed MacArthur that U.S. ground troops were going to be necessary if the United States intended to push the North Koreans back across the 38th Parallel. The reply was a query: "Is Suwon safe for a high-ranking officer to land there tomorrow?"
Church replied that it was.
The "high-ranking officer" turned out to be General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who took a quick look around, then radioed the Pentagon that U.S. troops were going to be necessary.
While this was going on, the United Nations, realizing that the North Koreans had no intention of obeying the UN resolution to cease, desist, and get out of South Korea, issued—on 27 June—another one:
". . . recommends that the members of the UN furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack. ..."
Resisting the Communist attack would be an action of the United Nations, rather than a unilateral action by the United States.
Just before 0500 30 June, President Truman got MacArthur's assessment of the Korean situation and his request for authorization to use American ground troops. Truman immediately authorized the deployment of one regimental combat team, and after thinking it over for two hours, authorized the deployment of two infantry divisions.
At 0800 1 July "Task Force Smith"—400 officers and men from the 21st Infantry, 24th Infantry Division, under Lieutenant Colonel Charles B. Smith—boarded USAF C-54 transports at Itazuke Air Force Base in Japan and were flown to Korea-It was not the regimental combat team Truman had authorized. It was all the men the 24th Division could muster on short notice.
On the morning of 5 July, "Task Force Smith" was in place on the Suwon—Osan Highway, south of Suwon. The "crew-served" weapons with which it was supposed to halt the North Korean Army consisted of two 75-mm recoilless rifles; two 4.2-inch mortars; six 2.36-inch rocket launchers; and four 60-mm mortars. The 52nd Field Artillery—six light 105-mm howitzers—had been assigned to them.
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