“Organized resistance will be terminated by Thanksgiving,” the supreme commander predicted. “The North Koreans are pursuing a forlorn hope. They are thoroughly whipped. The winter will destroy those we don’t.” For a moment, MacArthur seemed to rue the coming bloodbath. “It goes against my grain to destroy them,” he said. “But they are obstinate. The Oriental values ‘face’ over life.”
The general was so confident in his prognostication that he thought many of his troops would be out of Korea by year’s end. Battalions of French, Dutch, and other nationalities that had been requested from the U.N. were no longer needed. He was sure they would never see action.
Then Truman returned to the question he and MacArthur had touched on earlier in the morning. “What will be the attitude of China?” Truman asked. Driving to the Yalu might provoke Mao; it might even spark a world war. “Is there any danger of Chinese interference?”
MacArthur brushed away Truman’s question just as he had in private. “We are no longer fearful of their intervention,” he replied. “The Chinese have 300,000 men in Manchuria. Only fifty to sixty thousand could be gotten across the Yalu River. China has no air umbrella. There would be the greatest slaughter.” The Yalu, he suggested, would run red with Chinese blood.
Astonishingly, neither Truman nor anyone else at the table had a follow-up question to this. Everyone present appeared to agree with MacArthur’s analysis. They seemed not to have the slightest concern about the Chinese—or if they did, they didn’t raise it. They were dazzled and dazed. The rapture over the war’s imminent end, and the magnetic force of MacArthur’s delivery, had blunted their thinking.
MacArthur, wreathed in tobacco smoke, nibbled on his pipestem. “He was the most persuasive fellow I ever heard,” said one Truman aide. MacArthur’s sanguine view was the one Truman and his men wanted to believe. With victory so close, all other scenarios were inconvenient distractions. A critical moment passed them by—and a fraught and nettlesome question on which many lives might depend was put to rest.
* * *
At the Wake Island airstrip, in the tropical glare, Truman offered MacArthur a box of candied plums for his family and then, with cameras clicking, he awarded the general a fourth oak-leaf cluster for his Distinguished Service Medal. He lauded MacArthur for “his indomitable will and his unshakeable faith.”
The two men vigorously shook hands. “Goodbye, sir, and happy landing,” MacArthur said. “It has been a real honor talking to you.”
At 11:35, the Independence whirred off for Hawaii and points east. A few minutes later, MacArthur’s plane climbed into the air as well, bound for Tokyo. Their parlay had lasted only a few hours. The two men would never meet again.
8
THE TIGER WANTS HUMAN BEINGS
Beijing
At the Zhongnanhai, the former imperial palace in Beijing, Mao Zedong was in secret deliberations with his advisers about the Korea situation. Mao was eager to enter the war. “Another nation is in a crisis,” he reportedly said. “We’d feel bad if we stood idly by.” His foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, having recently returned from a series of meetings with Stalin at his dacha on the Black Sea and gaining his tacit support, concurred.
Mao decided to assign the command of China’s armies to Peng Dehuai, a veteran officer of the civil war and an old comrade from the days of the Long March. Peng accepted. “The U.S. occupation of Korea, separated from China by only a river, would threaten Northeast China,” he argued. “The U.S. could find a pretext at any time to launch a war of aggression against China. The tiger wanted to eat human beings; when it would do so would depend on its appetite. No concession could stop it.” In characterizing the prospect of an American presence on the Yalu, some of the Chinese commanders employed a hypothetical analogy: The United States would not countenance a scenario in which the Chinese invaded Mexico and marched right up to the Rio Grande and the Texas border. That, in reverse, was precisely the situation here.
Peng and Mao agreed on a strategy to entrap the Americans—an enemy that, they fully realized, had far greater firepower. Peng wrote, “We would employ the tactic of purposely showing ourselves to be weak, increasing the arrogance of the enemy, luring him deep into our areas.” Then Peng’s far more numerous armies would “sweep into the enemy ranks with the strength of an avalanche” and engage at close quarters. This strategy, Peng thought, would render “the superior firepower of the enemy useless.”
A few days later, on October 19, large formations of Chinese troops, the People’s Volunteer Army (PVA), secretly crossed the border into North Korea. The word volunteer was a calculated political fiction that gave Mao the rhetorical wiggle room to suggest that he was not sending his regular army, and thus had not formally declared war on the United States; this, Mao coyly suggested, was an organic public uprising to defend China’s Communist brethren in neighboring North Korea, and he would not stand in the way of it. To further the deception, he ordered his soldiers to strip their uniforms of any insignia that might identify them as being officially Chinese. He seemed to think that American forces might even be stupid enough to mistake his men for North Korean troops. “We all have black hair,” he said. “No one can tell the difference.” A week later, Mao ordered 200,000 more troops to enter North Korea.
From Mao’s perspective, this was a confrontation decades in the making. American imperialism, which the Chairman viewed as merely an extension of the old imperialism of the European colonial powers, had been thwarting China’s progress and intervening in her internal affairs for more than a century. He viewed American meddling as a pernicious force, going back as far as the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, and the disruptive role of American missionaries deep in China’s hinterlands. The United States had actively and openly subverted Mao’s revolution, supplying arms and assistance to Chiang Kai-shek. Now, from their base in occupied Japan, the Americans appeared to be expanding their sphere of influence throughout Asia. When the defeated Chiang decamped to Taiwan and Mao threatened to attack him there, President Truman had sent the Seventh Fleet to guard the Strait of Taiwan—an action Mao viewed as an affront. Now, by crossing the thirty-eighth parallel and pushing toward China’s border, the United States, Mao insisted, was showing an old, consistent pattern.
Yet, privately, Chairman Mao was surprisingly enamored of much about American culture, and in some senses he wanted China to mimic America’s energetic spirit of innovation and technological prowess. Although he reluctantly relied on the Soviet Union in important ways and paid lip service to the ideology of world Communism, Mao also hated, feared, and distrusted Stalin. China’s alliance with Russia, seemingly ratified by the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of February 1950, was largely a political sham—the two nations were quite wary of each other and had a delicate relationship. In no way did Mao want China to directly emulate the Soviet system. His vision of Communism took into consideration authentic Chinese thought, Chinese history, and Chinese culture, organically superimposing certain aspects of Marxism-Leninism over a unique national identity. It rankled Mao that neither the United States nor the U.N. would accept Red China’s nationhood. On some level he had concluded that perhaps the only way he could get the Americans to take him and his revolution seriously was for China to confront them head-on. It would be a way of validating the People’s Republic in the world’s eyes. And so it was decided: China would strike.
Besides, Mao reasoned, China had already issued a fair warning to the United States, and to the world, that she would strike. In Beijing two weeks earlier, Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai had personally told India’s ambassador to China, K. M. Panikkar, that if American troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, China would certainly intervene. Zhou’s ultimatum could not have been stated in more emphatic language. India was one of the few non-Communist countries that had formally recognized Mao’s regime as the legitimate government of China, so Panikkar served as a crucially important dipl
omatic channel. The ambassador immediately cabled Zhou’s words to Prime Minister Nehru in New Delhi, who forwarded the statement straight to U.S. and U.N. authorities. But in the end, MacArthur, and Truman’s top advisers as well, dismissed the warning as mere Red propaganda, filtered through an unreliable source. China, Mao believed, had been clear in communicating her intentions. But the United States had chosen to ignore the message.
* * *
The fifty-six-year-old paramount leader of the newly minted People’s Republic of China, having triumphed over Chiang Kai-shek the previous year, was anxious to consolidate his power and flex his muscles on the world stage. Ruthless, paranoid, a devotee of the ancient military philosopher Sun Tzu, and a cunning strategist himself, he was a powerfully charismatic man with odd habits and obsessions. To the alarm of his security police, he was infatuated with the idea of swimming in all of China’s major rivers, including the mighty Yangtze, as a way to imbibe the spirit of China. Otherwise, Mao rarely showed himself to the public and conducted much of his state business by his pool, deep inside the palace complex, often wearing a terry-cloth robe and slippers.
When he did go on trips, he did so in secrecy and often brought his own wooden bed with him—on trains, on boats, on airplanes. (He even brought it to Moscow on a trip to confer with Stalin.) Mao refused to pay attention to schedules or conventional expectations about time. He followed no rhythm, circadian or otherwise, and his staff was perpetually perplexed by his erratic habits and spasmodic bursts of energy.
Mao also had an apparently unslakable sexual appetite and believed that orgasms directly halted the aging process. To ward off impotency, he received frequent injections of an extract made from pulverized deer antlers. Although he was married, he had his staff secure him beautiful young women to sleep with—sometimes as many as a dozen liaisons in a single day. He had hideous teeth, rendered dingy brown from chain-smoking and his refusal to practice the most rudimentary oral hygiene—he would only rinse his mouth, once a day, with dark tea. His sour breath was made worse by an infected abscess that he refused to treat. He favored the spicy foods of his native Hunan, an oily diet that often made him constipated, requiring enemas every few days. “A normal bowel movement,” said his personal physician, was “cause for celebration among the staff.” He also suffered from a mysterious neurological malady that caused hot flashes, profuse sweating, and painful throbbing in his extremities.
Otherwise, Mao was a man of much strength and vitality, though he constantly worried about his health and was certain that his enemies were trying to poison him. A student of ancient Chinese history, an avid mah-jongg player, and something of a poet, he spoke in elaborate and sometimes cryptic metaphors. When trying to persuade Stalin to join him in ejecting the United States from Korea, Mao had warned the Soviet dictator that “if the Americans conquer all of Korea, both China and the Soviet Union will be threatened—like teeth getting chilled through broken lips.”
* * *
In sending his troops to Manchuria and then into North Korea, Mao had to consider the overwhelming dominance of American airpower as well as the constant overflights of American surveillance. But the simple fact was, Mao’s army, often lacking vehicles of any kind, was nearly impossible to spot from the air. It was a foot army, though some units did rely on Mongolian ponies and even, in some cases, Bactrian camels, to haul loads. The Chinese troops slept during the day and moved only at night. Just before dawn, crews would use brooms and pine boughs to smooth over their tracks in the dirt or snow. Many soldiers carried sheets that they pulled over themselves at the first sounds of coming airplanes. They were mostly supplied with rations of precooked rice balls and crackers so they’d rarely have to build fires that might send off smells or give away their position.
During the day, they hid in huts, caves, mine shafts, and railway tunnels. Other soldiers tied themselves to tree trunks so they could inconspicuously catnap during daylight hours. But at night, Mao’s armies kept moving south, along ridges, over mountain passes, down the spine of the Korean Peninsula. As they traveled, they were supposed to live off the land as much as possible, subsisting on whatever they could beg or steal from North Korean peasants. God help any living thing that dwelled in the path of this ravening army—deer, oxen, horses, cats, rats, and dogs quickly disappeared. Troops plundered gardens and root cellars in search of anything resembling food—in one account, a Chinese soldier spoke of savoring the supreme delicacy of a raw potato frozen solid; eating it, he said, was “like licking a rock.”
Most of Mao’s soldiers were powerless and desperately poor young men. They came from the lower echelons of an ancient society that did not particularly value the individual and had traditionally viewed warriors as an expendable class. (“As you do not use good metal for nails,” went an old Chinese proverb, “so you do not use good men for soldiers.”) If Mao regarded the legions he was sending into Korea as noble patriots, he also seemed to view them as cannon fodder, war trash, little more than slaves to do with as he pleased.
One of the many thousands of soldiers in Mao’s army was an eighteen-year-old illiterate peasant from Sichuan Province named Huang Zhi. Huang’s background was typical of the war-toughened men who made up the ranks of the Ninth Army Group. His upbringing had been tragic: A famine had separated him from his parents when he was only six, forcing him to forgo the possibility of even a basic education. “Growing up, I had no dreams or ambitions,” he said, “other than to keep myself from hunger.” After many years spent wandering the countryside, performing servile work for various feudal landlords, Huang joined the army and took up the fight, at the age of fourteen, against the Japanese. Later, during the Chinese Civil War, Huang fought on both sides. The Nationalists, the Communists—it didn’t matter to him, as long as he could eat. Constant upheaval had instilled in him a fatalistic sense that if he wished to remain alive, he would need to stay alert and learn to “bend like young bamboo.” In October of 1950, Huang’s unit, the Twenty-seventh Army, had been in the south, preparing to invade Taiwan, when he and his comrades were abruptly put on trains headed north.
Only when they had arrived in the northeastern province of Antung and begun to cross the Yalu River were they told they would be fighting the forces of the United States. “I didn’t have any idea about Americans,” Huang said. “I had never met one in my life. But my officers kept telling me never to underestimate the American imperialists. They were invaders; they were our enemies. Personally, I didn’t care about any of this. I was just a soldier. I was there to take orders.”
“They said imperialism was on our very doorstep,” said Yang Wang-Fu, then a twenty-eight-year-old soldier from Shaanxi Province. “That’s what we were told. The imperialist criminals were at our door—they were preparing to break into our house. We were told the Americans would invade China just as soon as they overtook Korea. So we had come to defend the homeland.”
Men like Huang Zhi and Yang Wang-Fu had been given precious little to fight with. Mao and his generals were keenly aware of this. They knew the American forces enjoyed every conceivable advantage: better weapons, better transportation, better communications, better logistics. But Mao believed that his armies had something the Americans lacked. Fighting spirit, he called it. Mao contended, with something like religious fervor, that his men possessed an innate martial quality that was uniquely potent—a zeal, a lust for battle, powered by an all-suffusing patriotism and the camaraderie of the revolution. The Americans depended on machines, he said, whereas the Chinese depended on people. If the Americans fought with planes and tanks and bombs, his army would rely on such human qualities as surprise and flexibility of movement. Of course, it would also draw on overwhelming numbers. Wrote Mao: “China, though weak, has a large population and plenty of soldiers.”
In the end, Mao scoffed at America’s supposed superiority—even its atomic weapons were no match for China’s fighting spirit. America, he thought, was but a pa
per tiger. “Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor,” he said. “It is people, not things, that are decisive.” The United States would fight in its way, and he would fight in his. “The enemy can use nuclear bombs, and I can use my hand grenades,” Mao reasoned. “I will find the enemy’s weakness and chase him all the way. Eventually, I can defeat him.”
BOOK
TWO
TO THE MOUNTAINS
Those who wage war in mountains should never pass through the defiles without first making themselves masters of the heights.
—MAURICE DE SAXE, Reveries on the Art of War
9
MANY, MANY
Wonsan, North Korea
The troopships of X Corps departed Inchon in mid-October and sailed down the coast through the Yellow Sea. The convoy of more than seventy vessels passed Kunsan and Mokpo and rounded the peninsular horn, swerving through a confusion of coastal islands and then turning into the Korea Strait. From the railings, off the port side, the men could see the liberated siege grounds of Pusan, site of so much brutal fighting only a little over a month earlier. Then the transports turned into the stormy Sea of Japan and worked their way up the east coast, past Yeongdeok and Samcheok, past Donghae and Yangyang. Finally they crossed into North Korean waters and steamed for Wonsan, a port city of 75,000 people tucked into a large bay a little more than a hundred miles north of the thirty-eighth parallel.
But as they approached Wonsan, to the men’s consternation, the ships turned around and started sailing back down the coast for Pusan. No one seemed to know why. Had their orders changed? Was the war over? Were they going home? Then the ships turned around once again, resuming their northward crawl—only to be followed by yet another turn. The Marines and soldiers of X Corps, crammed into their vessels, didn’t understand what was happening.
On Desperate Ground Page 7