On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  A few minutes later, General Almond crawled into a Marine helicopter and buzzed over to the east side of the reservoir, to get a quick look at the besieged Army units that had been so ferociously attacked the previous night. He sped up the eastern shore, over the weave of icy inlets and coves. Ten minutes later, the chopper landed in a field by the road, and Almond marched over to the command post of Colonel MacLean, commander of the Thirty-first Infantry Regiment. Dead bodies, Chinese and American alike, littered the surrounding hills.

  Almond spread a crinkly map over the warm hood of a jeep and reviewed the previous night’s fighting with MacLean’s immediate subordinate, Lieutenant Colonel Don Carlos Faith. Faith was a golden boy, a graduate of Georgetown University and the son of a general—a handsome young man, and brave to boot. Faith, who had served in China during World War II, had a good grasp of the battle situation here, and in his view it was bleak. He estimated that two Chinese divisions had fallen upon the Thirty-first Infantry the night before.

  “That’s impossible,” Almond countered. “There aren’t two Chinese divisions in the whole of North Korea!”

  Faith tried to press his view of things, but Almond smothered him. “I want you to retake the high ground you lost during the night,” he insisted. Almond railed at the tentative behavior he saw around him, all this worry and deliberation and timidity. This was not how an American fighting force was supposed to face what he considered a crude bamboo army, a medieval clan of rice farmers. “The enemy delaying you,” Almond told Faith, “is nothing more than the remnant of units fleeing north. We’re still attacking, and we’re going all the way to the Yalu.” Then Almond uttered a line that would live in infamy. He said, “Don’t let a bunch of goddamn Chinese laundrymen stop you!”

  Maybe Almond felt bad for castigating this resolute young man, Faith. Or maybe he was instinctively trying to mimic his own boss, General MacArthur, who had a soft spot for ceremony. But what Almond did next was a priceless bit of misplaced theater. He decided it was time to award Faith a medal—here and now, with corpses lying around them, in the midst of a crisis. Almond had a Silver Star in his pocket. After running through the usual military rigmarole, he pinned the medal on Colonel Faith’s parka.

  “Now you retake that hill,” Almond reiterated. Then he turned and bounded back to the idling helicopter.

  “What a damned travesty,” Faith said under his breath. He was disgusted by the whole charade. As the helicopter rose into the sky, Faith ripped his Silver Star from his parka and tossed it into the snow.

  * * *

  Almond made his way back to Hagaru and that afternoon took off in the Blue Goose, climbing away from the reservoir country. Most people in Hagaru were happy to see him go—General Smith especially. He could now spend the rest of the afternoon without further distraction, getting ready for the fight he knew was coming that night. In leaving so quickly, Almond seemed to have sensed that Chosin was Smith’s realm now, Smith’s problem to solve. On some level, the X Corps commander must have also sensed that he was neither liked nor needed here.

  Smith sucked at his pipe in his dungeony quarters and studied the topographical maps of Hagaru. He was especially concerned about fortifying the new airstrip. He assumed that the Chinese would do everything in their power to attack it, hoping to destroy the five Caterpillar tractors that had been clawing at the frozen turf, night and day. He would put some of his best companies there. Another point of concern was East Hill, a promontory that loomed over the edge of Hagaru. Doubtless the enemy would try to seize this strategic eminence, which afforded a commanding view of the town. Smith didn’t have enough regular infantrymen to defend it; he knew his army of bakers and clerks would be critically needed to flush the Chinese from East Hill’s slopes.

  Through the afternoon, along the perimeter, the men readied themselves for battle. They strung strands of barbed wire. They blasted foxholes with putties of C3 explosive. They planted mines and booby traps. They loosened pins on grenades and taped them to stakes fastened to trip wires. They sharpened their bayonets and cleaned their rifles, wiping off the Cosmoline and other oils that tended to congeal in the freezing cold. Possibly every single person in Hagaru was armed now—even General Smith, who had a .45 sidearm tucked away in a holster.

  In the mess tents, the cooks ladled hot chow in rotations and put out five-gallon vats of fresh coffee. Everyone took their positions around Hagaru and settled down for the night. A 50 percent alert order was upgraded to 100 percent. A fine, powdery snow began to fall, coating everything, dampening the miscellaneous noises of the valley. Then the night grew silent. The snowflakes made tiny ticking sounds as they accumulated on rifle barrels. Everyone could sense that the Chinese were close at hand.

  Then they appeared—as they had the previous night at Yudam-ni and Toktong Pass. Here came the smashing cymbals, the blatting bugles, the shrilling whistles—an “exotic concert,” as one Marine put it. And then masses of men, moving through the night, throwing themselves at the Americans. Said one Marine: “It was as though a whole field got up on its feet and walked forward. I never saw anything like it.” Said another: “A hell of a lot of Chinese went down, but a hell of a lot more kept coming. You got the impression the waves were endless, like surf lapping on a beach.”

  The cooks and the bakers, the stenographers and the clerks, nobly acquitted themselves on East Hill. And the engineers at the airstrip tossed aside their implements and crawled down from their earth-moving machines to pick up rifles and drive the Chinese away.

  Smith seemed calm throughout the fighting, suffused in the blue smoke of Sir Walter Raleigh, working beneath the gaze of Joseph Stalin. This was what he lived for—combat on a grand scale, a complicated panorama of interlocking details. In a letter he later wrote to his wife, he rhapsodized about the “chattering of machine guns, the cough of mortars, and the booming of artillery.” During the night, bullets perforated his bungalow walls. Smith described “unusual sound effects” as the unwanted missiles plunked off the galley pans, creating a “witch’s clatter,” as one account described it. Smith was thrilled by it all. He had vowed to give the Chinese a hot reception, and that was what he’d done.

  25

  THE WAR COUNCIL

  Tokyo

  On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, upon returning to Hamhung from his visit to the reservoir high country, General Ned Almond received an urgent summons from MacArthur’s headquarters. He was to fly at once to Tokyo for an emergency meeting. The message was marked top secret. Almond was to tell no one.

  The X Corps commander went straightaway to Hamhung’s Yonpo Airfield and boarded a C-54 Skymaster with a few close aides. At nine thirty that night, the plane arrived at Haneda Army Air Base, where Almond was met by a Far East Command colonel who escorted him to MacArthur’s residence in the American embassy.

  The occasion for the summons immediately became clear: MacArthur had assembled a war council, a conclave of his most reliable chieftains from the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, as well as close aides from his immediate staff. Not only had MacArthur summoned Almond from Korea; he had also called General Walton Walker, whose Eighth Army, on the peninsula’s west side, had been thoroughly surprised and overwhelmed by another massive force of the Red Chinese, and were now in headlong retreat.

  There was no mistaking the dolorous mood that had descended over MacArthur’s world in Tokyo. “This headquarters is in a terrible slump,” wrote intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel James Polk. “When a gambler pulls one off he is hailed as a genius, and when he fails, he is a bum. This time [MacArthur] failed, and he has to take the consequences. Per always, he made his mind up all by himself, he gambled on his intuition, and the plain fact is that he lost.” Now, said Polk, “this whole house of cards [will] suddenly fall down with a resounding smash.”

  The reports that had filtered into MacArthur’s headquarters over the past twenty-four hours ha
d left the supreme commander in a nearly catatonic state. It was as though he were frozen, unable to think or act. He was moody, irritable, depressed—in a blue funk, it was said. He paced the floor. He couldn’t sleep or eat. He couldn’t believe this turn of events—to have been checkmated by a primitive army of serfs in tennis shoes.

  MacArthur was already lashing out in various directions—first at Mao and the Red Chinese, who had double-crossed him, hoodwinked him, broken the conventions of civilized warfare. Their entry, he said, amounted to one of the most treacherous sneak attacks in history, worse even than Pearl Harbor.

  The supreme commander lashed out at Washington as well—at Truman and Acheson, at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At every turn, he contended, they had hamstrung him. If they had only let him bomb the Chinese in Manchuria, bomb their bases and roads and installations, this debacle would never have occurred. The appeasers in Washington, with their fatuous concerns about keeping the war “limited”—they were the ones who had made this happen.

  If it is true that a fish rots from the head down, then MacArthur did not know it. His organization in Tokyo, which had put so many American troops in harm’s way, was a nearly perfect reflection of himself. Yet the man was incapable of accepting blame, or assuming responsibility, for the mistakes that had been made. Already he was beginning to cover his tracks, to write his own posterity papers. He had started to formulate a defense for himself, a counter-narrative that, in many ways, would appear to be delusional. He would argue that he had known all along that the Chinese were going to intervene en masse. He had seen it coming for many weeks.

  MacArthur claimed that he had sent his armies north expressly to learn the size and disposition, the content and intent, of the enemy troops. His advance had accomplished precisely what he had planned from the start: It had triggered a Chinese assault, had forced them to show their hand. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, articulated the spurious thinking this way: “We couldn’t just passively sit by. We had to attack and find out the enemy’s profile.”

  MacArthur had “not been taken by surprise,” insisted his close aide General Courtney Whitney. “His troops did not rush blindly north into a massive ambush. The push north had been carefully designed…as a reconnaissance in force”—and, as far as Whitney was concerned, it had worked brilliantly.

  The sophistry emanating from Tokyo was dazzling in its desperation. MacArthur, wrote journalist and historian David Halberstam, had “lost face not just before the entire world, but before his own troops, and perhaps most important of all, before himself.” And so, to preserve the illusion of omniscience, MacArthur had spun an elaborate retroactive fiction. Reconnaissance in force—that was Tokyo’s new incantation.

  * * *

  At the war council, such talk was ambient noise, static in the air, bile festering in the bowels of the Dai Ichi Building. These were early versions of arguments and recriminations that would be sent across phone lines and telex wires in the weeks ahead. The real reason MacArthur had summoned General Almond and General Walker on this night was that he wanted to hear from them. He wanted to know what they had seen on the battlefield, that very day. It was a rare moment for MacArthur. He was genuinely asking them: What did they think? What did they know? What would they do?

  General Walker was the first to speak. His Eighth Army was now withdrawing toward Pyongyang. He was worried that the Chinese would outflank him. He thought he could hold a line somewhere around Pyongyang, but he wasn’t sure. The situation on the west side of the peninsula looked hopeless. Some of his U.N. units were performing valiantly—especially a brigade of Turks, who had surprised everyone with their resilience and ferocity. But overall, the west side was devolving into a rout.

  Almond, predictably, was feistier. He didn’t want to abandon the grand plan. He thought his X Corps could keep going. His men had suffered momentary setbacks, but they would recover, and they would carry on to the Yalu. And in doing so, they would sever the Chinese lines of supply and communication. Like an overeager acolyte, Almond still held MacArthur’s torch.

  While no written record of the meeting exists, what is known is that MacArthur categorically rejected Almond’s sanguine assessment of the battle. The supreme commander’s earnest lieutenant could be forgiven for his zeal, but the campaign to reach the Yalu was over. Even MacArthur understood that. It was time to switch over from the offensive to the defensive. MacArthur told Almond that the new strategy was for his X Corps to concentrate in the plains around Hamhung-Hungnam. Maybe they could hold on to the twin cities for the winter, or maybe they would have to quickly evacuate, with Navy ships taking advantage of Hungnam’s deepwater port. That question could be decided later. The bigger point was this: General Douglas MacArthur had finally come to see the futility of the advance. The mirage had evaporated; the dream had been extinguished. The Home for Christmas campaign had shriveled down to a dire exercise in self-preservation. X Corps was turning around and marching for the sea.

  In the morning, a chastened Almond climbed back onto a plane at Haneda Airport and returned to a different battlefield.

  26

  AN ENTIRELY NEW WAR

  Washington, D.C.

  At six fifteen on the morning of November 28, President Truman received a disturbing phone call at Blair House from General Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. MacArthur had cabled earlier that morning with what Bradley called a “terrible message.”

  “We face an entirely new war,” MacArthur’s cable had said. “This command has done everything humanly possible within its capabilities but is now faced with conditions beyond its control and its strength.”

  “What’s the estimate of the Chinese troop strength?” Truman pressed.

  Bradley was somber. “MacArthur now believes it’s 260,000 men.” He said MacArthur would have to go on the defensive. He could no longer contain Mao’s attack; he could only try to escape from the trap the enemy had set. The Chinese, MacArthur said, were bent on the “complete destruction” of his forces. Not only were the Marines under attack at the Chosin Reservoir; the Chinese had also massively assaulted General Walker’s troops on the west side of the peninsula. His Eighth Army and assorted other U.N. forces under his command were scurrying southward.

  What a stunning reversal this was for the president. Only three days earlier, MacArthur had declared his “end-the-war” offensive. Now, in a jolting moment, the situation in Korea had been transformed, in Truman’s words, from “rumors of resistance to certainty of defeat.”

  Thus began one of his darkest days in office. Four hours later, at his staff meeting in the Oval Office, Truman broached the news with his closest aides. “We have a terrific situation on our hands,” he said. “The Chinese have come in with both feet.” He mentioned the astonishing number MacArthur had passed on to Bradley.

  One of his staff members couldn’t believe what he’d heard. Two hundred sixty thousand?

  “That’s right,” the president said. “They have something like seven armies in there.”

  His aides sat in stunned silence while Truman, his eyes magnified behind his thick glasses, struggled with his emotions. “His mouth drew tight, his cheeks flushed,” recalled one observer in the room. “For a moment, it almost seemed as if he would sob.” The president awkwardly shuffled papers and fiddled with a pair of scissors on his desk.

  But then he regained his equilibrium. “This is the worst situation we have had yet,” Truman said. “We’ll just have to meet it like all the rest.” He seemed to find solace in the making of concrete plans. He would declare a state of emergency. He would deliver a speech to the nation. He would triple the Pentagon’s budget. “I’ll have to ask you all to go to work and make the necessary preparations,” he said. His appointments, on that day and the days ahead, would need to be canceled.

  “We have got to meet this thing,” he repeated. “Let’s go ahead no
w and do our jobs as best we can.”

  * * *

  At three o’clock that same day, November 28, Truman met with the National Security Council in the Cabinet Room of the White House’s West Wing. The mood around the table was funereal. Omar Bradley shared his dour thoughts, as did George Marshall, Vice President Alben Barkley, Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg, and CIA director Walter Bedell Smith.

  Then it was Dean Acheson’s turn to speak. The magisterially mustached secretary of state was Truman’s most influential adviser. Elegant, eloquent, and arrogant, Acheson was a kind of super-WASP: Connecticut-born; son of an Episcopal bishop; product of Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law; an international attorney before rising into the inner sanctums of government. Critics found the debonair Acheson criminally out of touch—“an ancient mandarin,” thought one prominent newspaper columnist, “frigid, aloof…untempered by emotion,” though sometimes “forced by the vulgar circumstances of life to speak to those who never could understand the world of great affairs.”

  Acheson’s State Department had been embroiled in numerous controversies—most of them having to do with China, or with threats, real and imagined, concerning the spread of Communism. In a sense, Red China’s entrance into the war was only the newest wrinkle in a much larger saga that had preoccupied his days at Foggy Bottom. In 1949, when Mao’s forces prevailed over Chiang Kai-shek, hawkish conservatives widely castigated Acheson for being soft on Communism. Many Republicans, labeling Acheson an appeaser, personally blamed him for having “lost” China. When Kim Il Sung invaded South Korea, Truman administration critics recalled that Acheson, in an important speech he’d given at the National Press Club back in January, had failed to single out Korea as one of the Asian nations the United States was committed to protecting under its broader security umbrella. Some asserted that Acheson’s omission had so emboldened Kim that it may well have been one of the precipitating factors of the invasion. Once Kim attacked, it was Acheson, against the recommendation of many other Truman advisers, who had convinced the president to commit troops to the Korean Peninsula—scarcely guessing that this fateful decision would lead the United States into war with China.