On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  Eventually the word sifted through the ranks: The North Koreans, working with Russian experts, had mined the waters off Wonsan. Having anticipated that the U.N. forces might land here, they had gone out into the harbor in diverse local craft—barges, junks, tugboats, fishing sampans—and sown the waters with explosives, mostly Russian-made. The harbor was infested: Thousands of contact mines and magnetic mines bobbed just beneath the surface.

  So American minesweepers, along with teams of Navy frogmen, were brought in to clear the approaches to the harbor. More than two dozen of these peculiar vessels went to work, often with helicopters buzzing overhead to serve as spotters. Minesweepers had elaborate wire structures, extending far out from the bows, that were equipped with various floats, depressors, and cutters strong enough to sever the steel cables that often moored mines to the seabed. The sweepers plied the harbor, clearing one long channel at a time, even as North Korean artillery shelled them from shore.

  It was tedious but also perilous work: On October 10, two American minesweepers missed their quarry and were blown apart. Twelve men died in the explosions, and dozens more were wounded. A week later, a South Korean minesweeper was also destroyed. The men found one mine—also Russian-made—that had a particularly diabolical design. A dozen ships could pass over it without incident, but the thirteenth ship would cause it to detonate. “It took a curious sort of mind to come up with a notion like that,” wrote one Marine, wondering if the number thirteen had a “sinister connotation for Russians as it did in the States.”

  Given the dangers in the harbor, the X Corps landing obviously would have to be delayed until the sweepers had completed their painstaking task. And so the troopships churned back and forth along the coast—changing direction every twelve hours. The Marines dubbed this endless backtracking the “Sail to Nowhere” and “Operation Yo-Yo.” For nearly two weeks, they remained at sea with little to do but watch the dull landforms slide by. As food supplies dwindled, the galleys served mustard sandwiches, glops of fish-head chowder, and other highly dubious fare. Joe Owen, of the Seventh Marine Regiment, called it an “ordeal of misery and sickness, malaise and dreariness. The holds stank of unwashed bodies and sweaty clothes.” As one Marine account put it, “Never did time die a harder death.”

  What made their seaborne imprisonment more difficult to take was their discovery, by radio, that Wonsan had already been pacified. Republic of Korea troops, working their way overland from Seoul, had arrived in Wonsan and quelled all enemy resistance there. The First Marine Air Wing had set up shop at a nearby airfield, and planeload after planeload of men and supplies had safely landed. The zone around Wonsan was deemed so peaceful, in fact, that the entertainer Bob Hope had already dropped in to perform one of his USO comedy routines for the aviators—during the show, he boasted of how he and his dancing girls had beaten the famed leathernecks ashore.

  * * *

  Finally, on October 26, the harbor was declared more or less safe, and the ships bearing the Marines and the other troops of X Corps moved into the inner harbor. It was a cool autumn day, with a dusting of snow on the Taebaek Mountains. Wonsan appeared to be a cheerless industrial city of oil refineries and factories, many of which had been bombed. But it was a strategically important place, a provincial capital, blessed with an excellent natural port. In the distance, to the south, rose Mount Kumgang, a misty crag of granite that for centuries had been a sacred place of pilgrimage for artists and poets. The mountain had a different spirit name for each season. Now it was known as Phung’aksan, “Great Mountain of Colored Leaves.” But soon, with the coming of winter, it would be called Kaegolsan, “Stone Bone Mountain.”

  General Oliver Smith waded ashore and hastily established his command post in Wonsan. The more than twenty thousand men of the First Marine Division (additional Marine units had become attached since leaving Inchon) soon began to stagger onto the beaches as well—and after them came their tanks and personnel carriers, their ambulances and artillery pieces, and their other rolling stock. Apart from the harbor mines, the enemy had put up almost no resistance. What Smith had planned as an amphibious assault was officially demoted to an “administrative landing.”

  Although the Red Koreans had quit the place, they’d left booby traps everywhere. After coming ashore that day, a pair of Marines marched down the beach, scavenging for driftwood to build a bonfire. In short order they found a pile, but as they started to rummage through the stuff, they triggered a terrific explosion. According to an official report, the two young men were “literally blown to pieces; it was impossible to identify the remains of either and they were buried in a common grave.”

  Significant swaths of the beach, X Corps also discovered, were laced with buried land mines. But South Korean troops, newly arrived in Wonsan, came up with a brutal solution to the problem: They press-ganged a group of North Korean prisoners and, working in a grid, systematically marched them along the beach. “It was a surrealistic scene,” recalled Alexander Haig, who witnessed it, “with men stepping on mines and being blown to bits and the others closing the interval and marching stolidly onward.” Eventually, nearly every one of the prisoners had been killed by their own army’s explosives.

  Despite having left these grim calling cards, the North Koreans were hardly a force to be reckoned with anymore. The battlefield situation was fluid, but so far, the North Korean soldiers whom patrols had encountered out in the provinces seemed disorganized and demoralized. They could be tough fighters when cornered, but they were little more than bands of starving guerrillas at this point, hiding during the day and foraging for food at night as they limped toward the north. An intelligence report from MacArthur’s Far East Command in Tokyo was almost boastful in its tone: “Organized resistance on any large scale has ceased,” the report asserted. “North Korean military and political headquarters may have fled to Manchuria. The enemy’s field units have dissipated to a point of ineffectiveness.”

  Kim’s troops might attempt small-scale delaying actions and scattered ambushes, but X Corps would make quick work of them—General Almond was sure of it. It was going to be a walkover.

  When General Smith went to see Almond at the X Corps headquarters in Wonsan, he thought the atmosphere hovered somewhere between giddy anticipation and triumph. Almond seemed to be feeling invincible—he had just been featured, as Smith had several weeks earlier, on the cover of Time magazine. As far as Almond was concerned, the war was nearly over. Already he was talking about which units he would be sending home from Korea. But now he wanted Smith to organize his three regiments as quickly as possible and get them out in the field to clear the coastal corridor. Then he wanted Smith to keep going north.

  The new plan was for most of Smith’s division to hasten forty miles up the coast, then turn toward the northwest, across the plains and into the Taebaek Mountains—the extensive range that forms Korea’s spine, the so-called dragon’s back. They would move up a narrow road that twisted for more than seventy miles into the highlands, toward a large man-made lake that, according to the old Japanese maps the Americans were working from, was called the Chosin Reservoir. Upon reaching its shores, Smith’s men were to keep marching for the Yalu, which was another hundred miles to the north by way of a patchwork of roads. Almond called for maximum speed, much as he had during the battle for Seoul.

  From the start, Smith was suspicious of Almond’s plan. Among other things, it meant that his division would be strung along a narrow mountain road for nearly one hundred miles, in a long train of men and vehicles. They would move along this single artery, relying on a supply chain that the enemy could sever at any point. In this desolate country, there were no airstrips, no functioning rail lines, no other ways to receive reinforcements or evacuate casualties. They had only one road in, and, should anything happen, only one road out. The more they progressed, the more they would stretch themselves—and the more their survival would depend upon this fragile umbil
ical cord. Over the millennia, countless battles had been won or lost solely on the question of supply: An army, went the old saying, marches on its stomach. A clear understanding of how to provision one’s troops was the sine qua non of any offensive maneuver, the most obvious question that any general would raise before considering an advance. But Almond had given the matter little thought.

  As far as Smith was concerned, diffusion of this sort was a cardinal sin for any moving army. It violated most everything he’d learned in military school in France, and it violated what he’d taught his own Marines at Quantico and Pendleton. Generally speaking, the goal, the watchword, was to concentrate, not disperse. A commander never wanted to put himself in a position where his division was spread thin over long distances of hostile country—such a disposition made it virtually impossible for his various units to support and defend one another. Smith told Almond that the First Marine Division would be weakened by dispersion. Almond ignored him.

  * * *

  The forbidding nature of the terrain was the other compounding factor, of course. It was hard to tell by the old topos they’d been given, but the way to the Chosin Reservoir seemed to Smith like classic ambush country: narrow passes, blind curves, bottlenecks everywhere. On the maps, it looked like a nest of tapeworms. He understood that his men would be nudging into the unknown, a mountain fastness where the enemy could lie in hiding just about anyplace. For Smith, certain aspects of the terrain brought to mind the ancient Battle of Lake Trasimene, where Hannibal’s Carthaginian forces surprised and devastated the Romans along the shores of an upland lake in central Italy—resulting in the largest ambush in military history.

  Smith could certainly work his way up that road, but he wouldn’t want to do it in a hurry. The usual technique for moving into mountainous country, he knew, was to throw out flanking patrols to secure the highlands along the route. These flankers, forming a kind of perimeter from above, would leapfrog ahead on the ridges while the main body of men and vehicles advanced along the road below. That way, all the units progressed as an interlocking whole. But maneuvering like this took a lot of time. It would be slow going—much slower than Almond cared for.

  Almond discounted this talk as so much priggish pedagogy. Underlying Smith’s fretting was the supposition that the Marines might encounter any viable foe at all. It was nothing but wide-open country up there, a land of desolation dotted with a few piddly-shit towns. The Marines probably wouldn’t see a soul in those mountains. Smith was worrying about an enemy that didn’t exist. If his Marines would move quickly and get to the Yalu, the war would be over, and everyone could go home.

  The First Marine Division was only one of three grand prongs Almond planned to launch toward the Yalu. These three columns were to advance as distinct lines—each one physically separate from the others and, given the difficult terrain, each one in a poor position to help the others should any one of them encounter trouble. Progressing along the east coast was the I Corps, an assemblage of South Korean divisions. The next prong to the west was the U.S. Army’s Seventh Infantry Division; Almond wanted this unit to pass by yet another hydroelectric impoundment, the Fusen Reservoir, en route to the Yalu. Smith’s Marines would be X Corps’s westernmost column advancing toward the Manchurian border. Then there was the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division, which would be held in reserve, behind the other prongs. Finally, Almond planned to create a number of smaller “task forces” that would splinter from the various entities and march in different directions to pursue special errands, large and small.

  As it was, X Corps had almost no cohesion as a fighting force: It was an ad hoc ragbag of troops, now more than eighty thousand strong and growing, an administrative monstrosity made up of units from multiple services and multiple countries. To Almond’s dismay, X Corps was also composed of a farrago of ethnicities. He actively disliked having so many black troops under his command, and, when possible, he tried to limit their battlefield participation to driving and other menial noncombat tasks. But what most concerned Almond was a unit of Puerto Ricans, the Sixty-fifth Infantry, which, on the basis of no particular evidence, he regarded as thoroughly incompetent. “I don’t have much confidence in these colored troops,” he said of the islanders.

  Almond’s piecemeal, multilinear plan for advancing on the Yalu served only to fracture X Corps further. The maps in his headquarters showed confusing Gordian knots and crisscrossing vectors. Almond conceded that the projected battlefield was starting to look a bit complicated—“I got troops scattered all over Korea,” he said—but he was confident that his thrusting prongs would achieve their objectives, that out of this panorama of chaos some form of order would prevail.

  Smith and his officers were astounded by what they regarded as the haste and heedlessness of Almond’s plan—not only the Marine part of the puzzle, but all of it. A childish naïveté permeated Almond’s ideas, they thought. He tossed around divisions willy-nilly, as though he were playing a game of jacks. “I questioned his judgment,” Smith’s operations chief, Colonel Alpha Bowser, later said. “I think General Almond pictured this in his mind’s eye as a sweeping victory that was suddenly in his grasp.”

  At one point, Smith told Almond that with winter around the corner, it seemed imprudent to penetrate too deeply into the mountains. Even if they could reach the Yalu, Smith did not know how X Corps could hold positions across the snowy north country and keep them resupplied through a North Korean winter.

  Almond derided this. Smith, he felt, was being a worrywart. “It was abundantly clear to me,” wrote Almond, “that what General Smith was complaining about was the fact that his division happened to be the division [being] used to push into the forward area and meet an unknown force.” Smith, Almond said, “was overly cautious of executing any order that he ever received.”

  Almond was flying high now, and those who sat with him in meetings saw a man who had come to view himself, and the forward drive of his legions, as unstoppable. “He was the cock of the roost,” said Sam Folsom, a Marine aviation officer who took part in the daily briefings. “His operation was unspoiled by reality. Something in his manner, something beyond rank, told us in no uncertain terms that he was superior—superior to all of us. He was it. I don’t think he understood what was happening in the field. I don’t think he cared to understand.”

  * * *

  By now, however, rumors had seeped into Smith’s command post that a new enemy had entered the war. At first they were only that: rumors, whispers in orchards and alleyways, furtive looks, premonitions. But then, on October 31, five days after Smith had landed at Wonsan, the first hard report trickled in.

  Smith’s Seventh Regiment had begun to dispatch reconnaissance patrols to study the road leading up to the Chosin Reservoir. Upon reaching the village of Sudong, about twenty miles inland at the base of the mountains, one of these patrols met a unit of South Korean troops and found them positively rattled. They reported that they had just engaged in a firefight with the Red Chinese—more commonly referred to, among American commanders, as Communist Chinese Forces, or CCF. When asked how large a force they had encountered, the South Koreans would say only that there were “many, many.”

  But the South Koreans had captured sixteen prisoners and, upon interrogating them, had learned that they were from the 370th Regiment of the 124th Division of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—Mao’s army. They claimed they had crossed the Yalu River in mid-October. These Red soldiers were surprisingly forthcoming with information; they seemed to have nothing to hide. It was almost as though they wanted the U.N. troops to know who they were and where they had come from. They freely indicated that they were part of a much larger Chinese force, numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

  When this alarming report and several others like it were sent up the chain of command, Almond’s intelligence people reflexively disputed their accuracy. “This information has not been confirmed and is not ac
cepted at this time,” a X Corps intelligence memo curtly responded. Almond’s headquarters admonished officers in the field to stop conveying the “erroneous impression that CCF units may be engaged.”

  This strange refusal to believe credible ground intelligence was almost immediately echoed in an official G-2 document sent out from MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo. “There is no positive evidence,” this document insisted, “that Chinese Communist units, as such, have entered Korea.”

  General Smith was flummoxed by these conflicting signals—those coming from the field versus those coming from Tokyo. In a fog of uncertainty, Smith moved his headquarters north, to an abandoned engineering college on the outskirts of another important industrial city farther up the coast. The city was called Hamhung.

  10

  KING’S ENVOY TO HAMHUNG

  Hamhung, North Korea

  In their advance to the North, the soldiers and Marines of X Corps found that they needed raw South Korean manpower of all kinds. They needed cooks and stevedores, they needed runners and fixers, drivers and clerks. Perhaps more than anything, though, they needed interpreters. The language barrier was an exasperating problem—not only the gap between Korean and English but also the one that separated both languages from Japanese. As it turned out, all the maps and logistics manuals the Americans had to work with had been published in Japanese—they were documents dating back to the days of the colonial occupation. The commanders of X Corps recognized that maneuvering over this tortuous land involved a nearly constant filtering, back and forth and back again, among three different tongues.