Smith confessed that he did not know what to do next. “Someone in high authority will have to make up his mind as to what is our goal,” he said. “My mission is still to advance to the border. I doubt the feasibility of supplying troops in this area during the winter or providing for the evacuation of the sick and wounded.” Though Smith was prepared to carry out his mission, he saw what was coming and thought that what was being asked of his men was neither strategically necessary nor fair. “I believe a winter campaign in the mountains of Korea,” he said, “is too much to ask of the American soldier or Marine.”
“This letter may sound pessimistic,” Smith concluded, “but it is not meant to be so. Our people are doing a creditable job, [and] their spirit is fine.”
15
FATTENED FOR THE KILL
Hagaru
General Smith had found his spot, the place where, if it became necessary, he would build his fort and make his stand. It wasn’t much to look at, just an opening in the mountains, a broad, flat place at the tip of an inlet of the Chosin Reservoir. Hagaru-ri, the village was called, though the Marines would shorten the name to “Hagaru.” (The suffix, ri, meaning “town,” seemed superfluous.) Hagaru looked, as one Marine account put it, “like a mining camp transplanted from the Klondike.” It was a village of about five hundred souls—a snaggle of weather-scabbed shanties, mostly, though the place did boast a number of concrete buildings and one or two examples of what might euphemistically be called streets. The town had a little school and a church. Old telegraph wires danced on creosote poles. Oxen stamped the frozen mud, their heads wreathed in steam.
Around here, beside the many-fingered lake, the country offered little beneficence. The alkaline soil was stingy and full of stones. Gold had once been extracted from the surrounding mountains, but the old mine shafts were abandoned and boarded up. Most of the people around Hagaru lived in feudal poverty. On the town’s edges were dead fields of millet and barley, rustling in the wind.
The lake was quite lovely, though; it had not entirely frozen over yet, and it gave off an inviting sheen. Lieutenant Joe Owen’s mortar unit established a perimeter at the far north of the town, right on the shore. Owen remembered his first view of the lake. “It was sparkling blue against the thick pine forests that clothed the surrounding mountains. On that sunny day when we first saw it, the Chosin was a tranquil body of shimmering water, a scene of magnificent beauty.”
General Smith had picked Hagaru as his forward base for several reasons. First, at least some infrastructure existed here on which he could build. As tiny and dismal as it was, Hagaru was the biggest town on the reservoir—the biggest town anywhere in this mountain domain. Then, too, Hagaru lay at a strategically important road juncture. Here, the main supply route forked. By veering right, one headed onto a road that wriggled up the east side of the reservoir; by veering left, one wound into the mountains for a ten-mile stretch before spilling onto a road that fed along the west side of the reservoir. Hagaru was thus the gateway that controlled all traffic along the lake.
But the most important reason Smith chose Hagaru was basic topography: It was the only place anywhere in the reservoir country that was wide and flat enough to accommodate an airstrip. Smith had surveyed the maps and had inspected the terrain by helicopter. Then, on November 16, he rode up to Hagaru in a heated station wagon with Major General Field Harris, commander of the First Marine Air Wing. Smith and Harris had wandered out to a crusty expanse on the southwest edge of town and found what Harris thought would be the ideal place to build an airstrip. The two men did some crude measuring, then squatted in the field and rooted around in the soil, inspecting its quality. It was dark and crumbly and did not seem to drain well—the kind of substrate that, in summer, would turn into a soupy bog. But in this weather, the dirt had frozen solid, and for that reason it would probably work fine. At last, Smith had something good to say about the extreme cold. “This,” he quipped, “is one break we get from the winter.”
The project Smith had in mind was not some piddling airstrip for Cessnas and spotter planes. (The town already had a crude runway that could accommodate small craft.) What the general wanted was an airfield long enough to handle C-47s and other transports. He planned to bring in enormous amounts of cargo—ammunition, food, medicine, fuel—and he wanted to turn this tiny place into some mountain approximation of O’Hare. He envisioned the big planes coming and going from dawn to dusk.
A few days earlier, when Smith had broached the idea of creating this airport in the middle of nowhere, Almond had failed to understand. Why was it necessary? Smith answered that, among other things, he imagined that Hagaru would become a triage hospital, with the wounded being brought in from the battlefields to the north. With a big airstrip, Smith could use large planes to haul out the casualties to hospitals on the coast or in Japan. An airstrip might save a lot of lives.
Almond was puzzled by this. “What casualties?” he said. He hadn’t given the matter any thought.
* * *
In the end, Almond granted Smith permission to do whatever he pleased on the matter of an airstrip, so long as the Marines built it on their own. And so Smith enlisted his best engineer, Lieutenant Colonel John Partridge, the same man who had improvised the rafts that ferried Smith’s heavy equipment across the Han River and later built the pontoon bridge that made crossing the Han a cinch for successive waves of X Corps units streaming in from Inchon. By November 20, Partridge’s engineer battalion had made it up from Hamhung with a fleet of dozers and other earth-moving equipment, and now they got to work.
But Partridge found that he had a knotty problem: Hagaru sat at an elevation of four thousand feet, and for that altitude his manuals advised a minimum runway length of 3,900 feet to get the C-47s safely aloft—the thinner air required a longer strip. But according to his measurements, his engineers didn’t quite have the available space to complete an airstrip of regulation length; a three-thousand-foot strip would have to do. As far as he knew, no aviator had ever tested these tight specs before. But Smith wanted him to take the risk.
So Partridge’s explosives experts began to blast at the earth, and his machines scraped the frozen sod. This supposedly level spot turned out to be not so level after all—and the deeper they dug into it, the more they ran into shards and boulders, sometimes striking bedrock. The Caterpillar drivers toiled through the days and nights in the acrid halo of the floodlights, at times harassed by snipers’ bullets. The machinery operators carried weapons—every Marine a rifleman—and were repeatedly forced to interrupt their work to fight off an enemy that most assuredly did not want to see an American airport built in this place. Partridge’s men used pneumatic drills and jackhammers to break up the hardest places, and welders affixed steel teeth onto the bulldozer pans to bite deeper into the frozen soil.
Partridge’s project had a quixotic quality: building an airfield where none should be, in a Siberian mountainscape, for a battle that the high command insisted would not happen, to placate the worries of a field general who believed otherwise and who had a sixth sense that big airplanes would be his salvation. It seemed grandly implausible, like Hannibal marching his elephants through the Alps. What made it more implausible was the tight deadline: Smith told Partridge he wanted the airstrip ready as soon as possible, but no later than December 1. And so, around the clock, the bulldozers kept grinding.
* * *
The airstrip was only one part of Smith’s plan to make Hagaru the central node of the coming battle. The village would serve as his command post, his communications center, his field hospital. The heart of the division would rest within the safety of its stoutly defended perimeter. Here Smith would establish his biggest supply depots and ammo dumps. Here he would crank his howitzers into position to rain terror upon the distant hills. Hagaru would be like a protected cyst embedded in a foreign body, impervious to all assaults that might be mounted against it.
&n
bsp; Litzenberg’s Seventh Regiment had marched and motored the nearly ten miles up from Koto-ri and taken possession of Hagaru on November 15. Most of the way, they’d had sporadic contact with Chinese troops. But the enemy seemed mischievous and at times chimerical. If you pursued them, they vanished. If you ignored them, they reappeared. For days, they stayed just out of reach; they were, said one account, “invisible and yet seemed to be so many they were stirring the air itself.” At times they caused real trouble, but mostly they pestered and harassed—playing, it seemed, an on-again, off-again game of cat and mouse. It was as though they wanted to remind the Marines that they were here, but at the same time wanted to encourage the Marines to keep on coming.
General Smith, who had made frequent trips up the road by jeep and by helicopter, was aware of this capricious behavior—and what he took to be the larger strategy behind it. Where it became most obvious to him was at an odd bottleneck called Funchilin Pass, a few miles west of Sudong.
The bridge at Funchilin Pass wasn’t a typical bridge, not a span over a river or a stream. The structure was a bit more complicated than that. At this spot, a subterranean tunnel carrying large amounts of water from the Chosin Reservoir emerged from the mountain. The torrent fed into four large steel pipes—penstocks, they were called—that then redirected the water over a cliff and down a thousand-foot slope toward a series of power stations in the valley. A concrete bunker, housing a network of valves and spigots, was built into the sheer hillside. Next to it, a cantilevered concrete bridge passed over the four penstocks as they dropped into the chasm below. This improbable installation, perched so precariously on the mountain, was part of the larger Chosin hydroelectric complex.
What worried Smith about the Funchilin bridge was this curious fact: It had not been molested. If the Chinese had intended to halt or hinder Smith’s advance, they would have blown it already. It was a gate governing entry into the reservoir high country, and it could easily be demolished. By leaving the bridge intact, they seemed to be ushering the Marines forward. Smith surmised that only after his entire division had passed safely over the bridge would the Chinese finally destroy it, thus sealing the Marines off from the safety of the coast. To Smith, it felt like a sly old trick, with shades of Moses parting the Red Sea waters just long enough to lure Pharaoh’s soldiers to their drowning deaths.
On this point, as with so many others, Smith would prove prescient. Said Brigadier General Edward Craig, the division’s assistant commander: “Smith was sure that they wanted us to come across, and that they were going to blow the bridge after we crossed, thus completely isolating us. It was shrewd of Smith to understand that.” When Smith pointed out the perils of the Funchilin Pass bridge to General Almond, it did not register a response. Almond, said Craig, “seemed to have so little respect for the Chinese as fighting men, it was as if he didn’t care.”
* * *
General Almond, in fairness, was a busy and distracted man during this particular week. He had been in nearly constant motion—in helicopters, on planes, in trucks and jeeps. The many units of his X Corps were spread over hundreds of square miles of terrain—Smith’s Marine division was only one of them—so Almond had a lot to keep track of. Whatever his shortcomings, he could not be faulted for lack of energy or enthusiasm or, for that matter, courage. “As far as I could tell, he was utterly without fear,” wrote Alexander Haig. “In combat situations, he exposed himself to mortal risks several times a day.” Almond’s habit of consciously placing himself in danger went back to his days in World War I in France, where, as a young soldier, he was wounded and won several decorations, including the Silver Star for heroism. Here in Korea, the hyperkinetic general would visit any forward command post and barge right into active combat zones.
Not that there was much action in the X Corps sector of North Korea. Aside from the Marines, few of Almond’s units had reported significant contact with the enemy—either the North Koreans or the Chinese. Some of Almond’s Army regiments were rushing for the Yalu, seemingly unimpeded. On the twenty-first of November, the leading battalions of the Army’s Seventeenth Infantry reached the river at the North Korean town of Hyesanjin, and Almond flew in for the historic occasion. He stood at the Yalu’s banks and posed for a triumphant picture with some of his commanders. Across the swirling waters, a few Chinese sentries could be seen, calmly going about their errands. “They made no effort to fire on us,” recalled Haig, who was traveling with Almond’s entourage. “Their breath vaporized in the frigid air.”
Almond got General MacArthur on the radio and told him the news. “Heartiest congratulations, Ned,” MacArthur’s voice squawked. He told Almond that he and his men had “hit the jackpot.” Almond and some of the others enthusiastically whipped out their equipment for a ritual piss into the stout waters of the Yalu. If this seemed to be flirting with fate, or conduct unbecoming of a general, Almond couldn’t resist the urge. General George Patton, whom Almond admired and viewed as a model, had urinated in the Rhine when his Third Army had reached that broad river; Almond felt compelled to do the same here.
Almond beamed with pride at what his men had accomplished—never mind that most of them had never seen the enemy. The drive to the Yalu, he believed, would go down in the annals of heroic martial feats. “The fact that only twenty days ago,” Almond wrote the next day, “this division landed amphibiously…and advanced 200 miles over tortuous mountain terrain and fought successfully against a determined foe in subzero weather will be recorded in history as an outstanding military achievement.”
A few days later, another unit from Almond’s X Corps, Task Force Kingston, reached the Yalu at a place called Singalpajin, where they engaged in a brutal house-to-house fight, rooting out the remnant North Korean enemy. Then they, too, urinated in the Yalu—it was becoming a fad. Others filled bottles with river water to keep as souvenirs. The men of Task Force Kingston were the second group of American troops to make it to the brink of Manchuria; they would also be the last.
Along the way, they suffered a bizarre and unexpected casualty that was taken by some as a bad omen: One of their soldiers was mauled and killed by a Siberian tiger.
* * *
Thanksgiving arrived on November 23. General Smith had hoped to spend it at his command post with his immediate staff. Admiral Doyle had sent him a whole cooked turkey from the galley of one of the Navy ships docked in the harbor. But then Smith got a last-minute invitation to a formal dinner at X Corps headquarters with General Almond and a brace of high-ranking officers. It was about the last place Smith wanted to spend Thanksgiving, and the last person he wanted to spend it with. But he knew that declining Almond’s invitation would have been supremely bad form.
Almond, by this point, had truly made himself at home in Hamhung. He liked his creature comforts and made sure they were close at hand. His aide, Alexander Haig, had been put in charge of an effort to requisition a private home to serve as Almond’s residence. Haig had found a lovely Japanese-style villa and, after being given a budget to have it redecorated to Almond’s tastes, hired Korean artisans to build, among other things, a sunken bathtub set in mosaic tiles. Haig had also taken it upon himself to grace the villa’s reception halls with hand-painted vases that he’d bought in a Hamhung bazaar.
One day, South Korean president Syngman Rhee and his wife visited Hamhung to give a series of reassuring talks to the North Koreans, and while there, they stopped by to visit Almond’s new residence. Haig’s elegant vases were arranged with beautiful fresh flowers. Almond, pointing them out to Mrs. Rhee, gave Haig the credit for having located such beautiful objets d’art in a war-ravaged city. Wrote Haig, “Mrs. Rhee, a brusque and outspoken woman, fixed the general with a disdainful stare. ‘Then your aide should know for future reference,’ she said, ‘that in Korea vases of this kind are used as chamber pots.’ ”
When General Smith arrived at Almond’s headquarters, he found a lavish spread for a to
tal of twenty-eight guests. The dining room featured a cocktail bar, white linen tablecloths and napkins, fine china, polished silverware, even place cards at each seat. The best delicacies had been flown in from Tokyo, compliments of MacArthur. “It was a plush state of affairs,” Alpha Bowser recalled, with “all the appointments one would expect in, say, a formal function in Washington.”
Smith’s own tastes tended toward the Spartan—he was “as spare as the Marine Corps itself,” wrote one Marine historian. He felt a bit queasy about eating such a meal, with such splendid appointments, knowing that his regiments were freezing out in the field, and in harm’s way. The extravagance of the feast felt unseemly. Once again, he thought, Almond was tone-deaf to the true battlefront situation. To Smith, this Thanksgiving dinner had taken on the quality of a fete that anticipated the war’s end.
Almond, for his part, seemed to regard Smith as a wet blanket. They had so much to be thankful for, so much to celebrate. After all, Almond had gazed upon the waters of the Yalu only two days before. He had seen for himself that the talisman was within reach. Why couldn’t Smith loosen up and enjoy himself?
Smith’s Marines—indeed, all the men of X Corps—had been treated to their own version of a turkey dinner, albeit a less elaborate one. Across the battlefield, homesick young American men had enjoyed a reasonable facsimile of a holiday feast. The menu included shrimp cocktail, stuffed olives, roast young tom turkey with cranberry sauce, candied sweet potatoes, and mincemeat pie. How the cooks and the logistics people had pulled it off, no one could guess—the exertion and expense had to have been stupendous. “High in the bitter land, Americans ate Thanksgiving dinner,” wrote historian T. R. Fehrenbach. “Depending on their tactical position, they ate well or plainly—but most received turkey and all the trimmings, brought into this savage country at great effort.”
On Desperate Ground Page 13