The hungry men of Litzenberg’s Seventh Regiment, far up in Hagaru, were about as far from the distribution points as anyone. When the raw turkeys reached Hagaru, they were frozen rock solid, and the cooks had to figure out how to thaw them. Finally a solution was devised: The kitchen details piled the cold birds into a small mountain atop a pair of burning stoves, then covered the mass with tent canvas weighted down with snow. The frozen fowl baked in this makeshift sauna through the night, and by morning they were sufficiently thawed for the cooks to roast.
Most of the men in the field savored this turkey dinner as they had no other. They would talk about it the rest of their lives: A Thanksgiving feast on the far side of the planet, in the snowy shadow of Manchuria. But the awareness that the Chinese were nearby crept into their thoughts. Perhaps it was gallows humor, but as they tucked into their plates of food, an unsettling thought did occur to more than a few of the Marines. As one of Litzenberg’s men put it: “We kind of wondered: Were we just being fattened up for the kill?”
16
NEVER TOO LATE TO TALK
New York City
At a little past six o’clock on the morning of November 24—the day after Thanksgiving—the Chinese delegates marched off the plane and onto the tarmac at New York’s Idlewild Airport. No emissaries from the People’s Republic of China had ever visited the United States before, and now here were nine—seven men, two women—who’d come to speak for Mao’s fledgling government at a special session to be held at the United Nations. They had flown across Mongolia, across the Soviet Union and Europe, then on to London, where they had caught this British Overseas Airways flight to America. They were ambassadors from the world’s most populous nation, but, because Truman had refused to recognize the Communist regime as China’s legitimate government, they walked onto American soil as aliens, denizens of a country with no standing—and a country with whom America was now on the precipice of full-scale war. Their modest welcoming party included a protocol officer from the U.N., several Russian dignitaries, and a pack of journalists. Not a single United States official deigned, or dared, to show up.
The leader of the delegation, Ambassador Wu Xiuquan, emerged from the plane to sniff the air of what he called the world’s “most arrogant imperialist state.” Wu was a contentious, sinewy man with a high-pitched voice, whose face had been scarred by a bullet during the Chinese Civil War. Educated in the Soviet Union, forty-two years old, he was a trusted colleague of Zhou Enlai, Mao’s foreign minister. Wu was understandably wary. He had come to the lion’s den, to the coruscating metropolis that was at the beating heart of American capitalism, to lodge an official complaint with the United Nations Security Council about the U.S. naval presence in the Strait of Taiwan and its rapid drive in Korea toward the Yalu River.
“A heavy responsibility had been placed on our shoulders,” Wu later wrote. “We had moved from the military battlefield to the debating platform to wage a tit-for-tat struggle.” It would be, said Wu, a “face-to-face struggle against the number-one imperialist state on its own turf.”
Although Wu insisted that the United States had committed an act of “armed aggression” against China, he met reporters at the airport with a salutation to all Americans. “A profound friendship has always existed between the Chinese people and the American people,” Wu said. “I wish to avail myself of this opportunity to convey my greetings to peace-loving people in the United States.”
Wu and his fellow delegates were driven to Manhattan, where they checked into a block of nine adjoining rooms on the ninth floor of the Waldorf-Astoria. Though they were impressed by the opulent appointments, they balked at the exorbitant rates and found the room service fare nearly inedible. Wu and his comrades secured a stash of hot Mexican chiles to enliven the nauseatingly bland dishes.
A detail of New York police guarded their rooms around the clock—their U.N. hosts feared that perhaps some overly patriotic vigilante, or some embittered gold-star parent, might try to break into their rooms and cause an international incident. The Chinese were certain their quarters had been bugged. They kept a radio blaring in their office suite day and night, Wu said, to create a “constant din that might interfere with attempts to eavesdrop.” Whenever they had sensitive material to discuss, they met in a nearby park.
Everyone at the U.N. seemed aware of the official purpose of the Chinese visit—to protest American doings in Korea and Taiwan—but in back of that awareness floated an ardent wish that the parties might still negotiate a settlement before the world slipped into full-blown war. Though the Chinese were putting up a bellicose front, a number of optimists clung to the hope that perhaps Mao’s emissaries had secretly come to negotiate an agreement. After so many years of civil war, the Chinese surely could not afford a conflict with the United States and her allies.
It was widely reported that the American, British, and French governments had reached a tentative agreement to propose a ceasefire and a buffer zone along the Yalu. This no-man’s-land could include all the North Korea–based hydroelectric plants that supplied power to Manchuria, as this was thought to be one of the major points of Chinese contention. Throughout the U.N., there was hope that a settlement could be worked out. The Chinese presence here in New York, many felt, was the world’s last chance for sanity to prevail. One Far East delegate expressed the attitude this way: “It is never too late to talk; it is always too early to fight.”
In truth, a shroud of mystery hung over the Chinese visit. Why had they come so far, with such a large entourage? If all they wished to do was issue a complaint, they could have done it by cable. Their sojourn to New York would seem to be an unnecessary and expensive bit of diplomatic theater. Trying to divine their true purpose in New York, said one U.N. delegate, was “like flying blind through an uncharted mountain range.”
The nine Chinese delegates, holed up in their posh rooms at the Waldorf and guarded around the clock, waited for their chance to address the U.N.
* * *
The same day the Chinese delegation arrived in New York, an unusually powerful storm system began to form across the eastern third of the United States, one that would temporarily divert the attention of the Truman administration from the looming conflict with China. The storm started with an Arctic cold front that fingered down through Ohio and eastern Kentucky. Across Appalachia, the mercury dropped from the fifties to the teens within a few hours. By the next day, as the cold air mass barreled toward the east, a vast pocket of warm, wet Atlantic air from the Carolinas began to wrap underneath it. The storm had become an “extratropical cyclone.” Huge amounts of snow began to fall across Ohio, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. In one town, deep in the hollows of West Virginia, fifty-seven inches of snow fell in just over a day.
On the east side of the front, gale-force winds began to buffet New York and New England, cutting electricity from more than a million households. Manhattan recorded a peak gust of nearly a hundred miles per hour, and surging seas breached the dikes at LaGuardia Airport, flooding the runways. The nasty weather forced the Chinese delegates to stay inside their Waldorf-Astoria rooms for two days.
The event, which continued to rage through Thanksgiving weekend and beyond, would affect twenty-two states and would kill 353 people. On some of the worst-hit highways, National Guardsmen were brought in to remove snow with tanks and flamethrowers. Newspapers called it the Storm of the Century. Whatever it was, the cyclone was an anomaly that would be studied for decades. “The Great Appalachian Storm of 1950,” as it would officially become known, was the costliest and most destructive storm then recorded in U.S. history—a wintry vortex that few saw coming, and few understood even after it had arrived.
17
NEVER A MORE DARING FLIGHT
Over the Yalu
The day after Thanksgiving, Douglas MacArthur decided it was time to set foot on the battlefield and breathe the air of North Korea, time for the world to be remi
nded that he was the architect behind momentous events that were about to transpire. So the supreme commander gathered his favorite journalists and his favorite aides and brought the entourage over from Tokyo aboard his favorite Air Force plane, the Bataan. A few hours later, the four-propeller Lockheed Constellation touched down at Eighth Army headquarters on the Chongchon River—over on the west side of the peninsula.
MacArthur stepped out into the bitter weather wearing a sprightly checkered scarf and, his thespian sensibilities fully aroused, sent a message to the troops in which he laid out his plan for the final offensive. In a communiqué he sent to the troops, MacArthur spoke again of pincers and vises and other dashing movements. The United Nations was initiating what he called a “massive compression envelopment.” The remaining terrain of North Korea had been organized into “sectors” in which the enemy would be systematically “interdicted” by air. By his description, what was about to be unleashed upon the enemy in this final phase sounded like some intricate convergence of military science and the occult.
Perhaps even stranger than MacArthur’s baroque language was the extent to which he felt compelled to reveal his strategy: He was giving away his battle plan to the world, including the enemy. He was so confident in his success that he saw no reason for secrets. It was a bravura performance, even for him—the martial equivalent of Babe Ruth at the plate, pointing out the spot in the center-field bleachers where the homer was going to land.
MacArthur assured the troops that this final maneuver would “for all practical purposes end the war.” The Eighth Army would seize the western half of the border, while Almond’s X Corps would claim the eastern half. Hostilities, MacArthur predicted, would end in a matter of weeks. Then he made a pronouncement that would become infamous (though he later insisted he’d been misquoted): The boys, he said, would be home by Christmas.
MacArthur announced that a newly intensified air campaign was already causing devastation across much of North Korea and inflicting massive casualties on the enemy. Though MacArthur didn’t know it, these aerial attacks were inflicting considerable damage on Chinese troops, as well. (In fact, the very next day, a U.N. airstrike over North Pyongan Province, North Korea, would yield a prominent Chinese casualty: Mao Anying, Chairman Mao’s eldest son, was incinerated by a napalm bomb. He was twenty-eight years old.)
MacArthur met briefly with General Walton Walker’s officers, then wished his armies Godspeed and waved them off. Though he had spent only a few hours on the ground, he was ready to leave. It had been time enough for the newsmen to snap their shots and gather some quotes. MacArthur saw no point in lingering. What mattered was that the “compression envelopment” had commenced—though that phrase was too much of a mouthful for the journalists, who had already concocted neater descriptions for it. The Home for Christmas campaign, they called it. The end-the-war offensive.
After much vigorous saluting on the tarmac, the Bataan roared off. Once in the air, MacArthur did something odd: He instructed the Air Force pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Tony Story, to alter the flight plan. He didn’t want to head straight for Japan; he wanted to detour and fly over the length of the Yalu, to see the river with his own eyes. He wanted to peer down at the Manchurian border and hunt for signs of the much discussed but seldom seen Chinese.
Story was alarmed and puzzled by the request—so were the members of MacArthur’s staff. It seemed to them a gratuitously dangerous thing to do. The Russians, or the Chinese, might perceive such a flight path, skirting the international border, as a provocative act. Hewing to the bends of the river, the defenseless transport plane would stay in nearly constant reach of enemy antiaircraft batteries. MacArthur appeared to be tempting fate.
His staff tried to dissuade him, but MacArthur brushed them off, insisting that (shades of Inchon) the “very audacity of the flight would be its own protection.” One officer discreetly pleaded with Story to find some other North Korean river to fly over. MacArthur couldn’t possibly know the difference, he whispered. But Story demurred, saying, “I couldn’t lie to the chief.” Then his close adviser General Courtney Whitney suggested that, at the least, they should take the precaution of strapping on parachutes. MacArthur could only chuckle at these fuddy-duddies. “You gentlemen can wear them if you want to,” he said, “but I’ll stick with the plane.”
Story decided that it would be prudent to radio for a fighter escort. A couple of jets rushed over from Kimpo Field and caught up to the Bataan. Though Story felt safer, the presence of fighters circling above only made MacArthur’s flyover seem more provocative.
They headed north to the mouth of the Yalu, then turned east and followed the meandering course of the river at an altitude of five thousand feet. “At this height,” MacArthur wrote, “we could observe in detail the entire area of international No-Man’s-Land all the way to the Siberian border. All that spread before our eyes was an endless expanse of utterly barren countryside, jagged hills, yawning crevices, and the black waters of the Yalu locked in the silent death grip of snow and ice.”
* * *
When it came to the art of aerial reconnaissance, MacArthur had no particular expertise—though he seemed to think he did. As he later put it, he believed that merely by flying over the Yalu, he could “interpret with my own long experience what was going on behind the enemy’s lines.” But gazing into the sprawling wilderness, MacArthur could detect no trace of the Chinese: no movements, no supply depots, no columns of stick figures beetling over the ground. All he saw was “a merciless wasteland.”
Yet the Chinese were there, hundreds of thousands of them. They were masters of camouflage. Some had waded across the icy Yalu, while others had shuffled over prefabricated pontoon bridges that Chinese engineers had submerged six inches below the surface. Still others stripped down and swam the freezing waters, emerging, according to one Chinese historian, “with ice hanging on their bodies, like gods in silver armor.”
Mao’s army, wrote the combat historian S. L. A. Marshall, was a “phantom which casts no shadow. Its main secrets—its strength, its position, and its initiative—had been kept to perfection, and therefore it was doubly armed.” More than a quarter million Chinese soldiers had crossed into North Korea, while another half million were massed north of the border in Manchuria. Now they were waiting. Mao knew that the farther the Americans advanced toward the Yalu, the more stretched out they would become—their supply lines overextended, their communications interrupted, their lines too thin for defense.
Mao and Peng had decided to send one of their best armies, the Ninth Army Group, to the Chosin Reservoir to confront the First Marine Division, which they believed to be the strongest of all the U.N. forces approaching the Manchurian border. “It is said,” Mao wrote to Peng, “that the 1st Marine Division has the highest combat effectiveness in the American armed forces. Your generals should make its destruction their main effort.” The Chinese officers had passed down through the ranks the notion that the U.S. Marines were uniquely diabolical—bloodthirsty murderers and rapists and, according to one account, “highly competent criminals.” A rumor was passed around that to be inducted into the Corps, a prospective Marine had to kill a member of his own family; a distant cousin wouldn’t suffice—it had to be a direct relative. Another rumor said Marines were known to eat babies.
Now the Ninth Army Group, under the command of General Song Shi-lun, began to move into the mountains around the reservoir. The slopes were so steep and slick that many of Song’s shaggy ponies, burdened with ammunition, had refused to climb them. But the Chinese had improvised a solution: They laid down their sleeping mats and blankets along the path of the march, to give the animals traction. These men, most of them veterans of China’s civil war, were seasoned peasant fighters, adept at marching long distances on little food—often nothing more than a few balls of sorghum, millet, coarse rice, dried peas, and sesame. They carried primitive weapons, but they had the advantage of
a zealous indoctrination—they’d been taught to believe that the northward-marching Americans posed a true threat to the young People’s Republic. America seemed to stand in direct opposition to the revolution that Mao’s armies had fought so tenaciously to bring to fruition. Which was to say, many of the men of the Ninth Army Group had good reasons to hate the Americans.
Now the armies were well established in the highlands around the reservoir. On the eve of battle, at his headquarters not far from a tiny lakeside village called Yudam-ni, General Song told his troops, “Soon we will meet the American Marines in battle, and we will destroy them. When they are defeated, the enemy army will collapse and our country will be free from the threat of aggression.”
Then Song exhorted his men: “I want you to kill the Marines as you would snakes in your home.”
* * *
The Bataan droned along the borderland. With each bend in the river, MacArthur’s mood brightened. The Chinese were nowhere to be seen. And in his peculiarly self-referential mind, his not seeing them was proof that they weren’t there.
Much about the reconnaissance flight captured the idiosyncrasies of MacArthur’s personality: It was brash, extravagant, and unexpected. It had the feel of a stirring adventure, with an element of real (if also manufactured) risk. But in back of it was an undertow of vulnerability, a gnawing need to know what was down there, to size up his foe. He was a man who believed in destiny, in consulting the auguries. His aides would later praise him for his bravery—his chief intelligence officer, Charles Willoughby, would go so far as to say that “the air has never seen a more daring flight.” MacArthur would even earn a medal of valor for this dubious mission: The Air Force later awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross and the honorary wings of a combat pilot.
On Desperate Ground Page 14