Earlier that day, Acheson had given a sobering account of the Korean situation to an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I think it is impossible to overestimate the seriousness of this whole matter,” he said. “Not merely the immediate military situation in Korea, but what it means.” He said the United States was “very close” to world war. “We have got to face the possibility now that anything can happen anywhere at any time.”
Now, speaking in the Cabinet Room, drawing out his lockjaw locutions, Acheson struck the same apocalyptic tone. The president listened, riveted, blinking like an owl. With China’s incursion into the war, Acheson said he perceived the hidden hand of Stalin. “We must consider Korea not in isolation,” he warned, “but in the worldwide problem of confronting the Soviet Union as an antagonist.”
Acheson had trouble understanding how MacArthur had put U.N. forces in such a position, how his intelligence had been so wrong, and how he had delayed for so long before honestly confronting the situation he faced. The supreme commander had come close to digging “a hole,” Acheson said, “without an exit.” The secretary of state thought that, somewhere along the way, MacArthur had lost touch with reality—he seemed hysterical at times, even delusional. (In describing him, Acheson would later quote Euripides: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”)
Acheson said he would devote careful thought to how the United States might punish China for its actions. “We should see what pressures we can put on the Chinese Communists to make life harder for them,” he said. But at the same time, China was not a country that could be defeated. They would keep throwing more and more men across the Yalu—millions of them, if necessary. Mao placed scant value on human life. Said Acheson: “We can’t beat China in Korea. They can put in more than we can. Our one imperative step is to find a line that we can hold, and hold it.”
Then, he said, “we must terminate the fighting, turn over some area to the Republic of Korea—and get out.”
* * *
The full and frantic day had brought much for President Truman to ponder. He had to agree with Secretary Acheson: MacArthur had blundered badly. He had been outwitted and outflanked by a guerrilla army with no air force, crude logistics, and primitive communications, an army with no tanks and precious little artillery. He was responsible for one of the most egregious intelligence failures in American military history. Somehow he had missed the significance of a monthlong accretion of evidence—evidence that, when he finally recognized its import, he had either suppressed or ignored. In the process, he had put many tens of thousands of American lives in mortal danger. “I should have relieved General MacArthur then and there,” Truman wrote. “The reason I did not was that I did not wish to have it appear as if he were being relieved because the offensive failed. I have never believed in going back on people when luck is against them, and I did not intend to do it now.”
Increasingly, Truman had begun to see that Korea was only part of a much larger peril that his administration faced—one that had been summed up in a top-secret policy paper, called NSC-68, that the president’s staff had been revising over the past few weeks and months. Written by a committee of policy mavens under the direction of Paul Nitze, NSC-68 was a sweeping analysis that would become one of the most influential documents in American history. It would guide and define United States foreign policy for the next twenty years. Seeing the containment of Soviet expansionism and the hydra-headed Communist threat as the paramount concern of American statecraft, the highly classified fifty-eight-page paper advocated, among other things, a dramatic increase in the military budget of the United States, the development of the hydrogen bomb, and expanded military aid to allies, satellites, and puppet states around the world. Above all, NSC-68 captured the dire tone of the times: “The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.”
Margaret Truman would later point to this day as the start of one of the “grimmest” times in her father’s tenure. Truman had presided over the end of World War II. He had helped to rebuild Europe with the creation of the Marshall Plan and NATO. He had stood down Soviet aggression with the Berlin Airlift and checked the rise of Communist movements in Greece and Turkey. But this, he thought, was his steepest challenge yet.
“It looks like World War III is here,” he wrote. “I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.”
BOOK
FOUR
RED SNOW
Go, way-farer, bear news to Sparta’s town
That here, their bidding done, we laid us down.
—CYRIL E. ROBINSON
27
YOU WILL ALL BE SLAUGHTERED
Toktong Pass
Hector Cafferata, staggering in his stocking feet and dripping blood on the snow, finally made it down the hill to Fox Company headquarters. He found the medical aid tent, which had been set up in a stand of pines. Cafferata’s arm, in its makeshift sling, throbbed with pain, and he was having trouble breathing. His feet were swollen and icy. Inside the canvas tent, the scene was primitive: rows of badly wounded men curled on the bare ground, which was strewn with plasma bottles and morphine syrettes. The tight space stank of sweat and shit and the foul odors of exposed guts. Some of the less seriously wounded passed around a bottle of White Horse Scotch to relieve the pain. Just behind the tent lay the frozen stacks of the American dead.
At least it was halfway warm inside. A kerosene stove threw off welcome waves of fumy heat. Fox Company had no doctors, but three Navy corpsmen bustled about the tent, tending to the night’s casualties. One of the corpsmen, James French, guided Cafferata to the triage section to get him stabilized. French cut away Cafferata’s bloody sleeve, cleaned and dressed his hand and arm wounds, and gave him a shot of morphine. “Holy Christ, that was a weird feeling,” Cafferata said. “It seemed like in seconds my arm left my body. Or maybe it was my body that left my arm.”
The now pleasantly medicated Cafferata found his platoon mate Ken Benson, who was still effectively blind from the blood and debris crusted in his eyes. Benson, fumbling a bit, got Cafferata’s icy socks off and rubbed his feet to try to coax some life back into them. The two shivering New Jersey boys shared a canteen cup of hot coffee and huddled for a while in the tent. At times Cafferata, in his narcotic haze, made little sense. He wondered what had happened to his boots. He wondered what had happened to the three Chinese prisoners he had taken. He wondered how he had survived the night. “I don’t know why I’m here,” he said. “Don’t know how the hell I didn’t buy the farm. I guess somebody was lookin’ out for me.”
Around midday, Benson had to say goodbye. The corpsmen had rinsed his eyes and had carefully tweezed out the grit and the shards and the clots of blood. His glasses had been shattered on the hill, but now he could see well enough without them to be sent back up to dig in and ready himself for the enemy’s return. Cafferata was another matter. He could barely move, and he began to sense that the pain wasn’t just in his ruined arm. It was somewhere deep in his upper torso—he felt as if he had a case of double pneumonia. He couldn’t understand why—there was no blood seeping from his chest, no wound that he could find. French and the other corpsmen were too busy dealing with more serious cases. And so, through the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, Cafferata could only lie back and listen to the cries and moans of the wounded.
* * *
Captain Bill Barber had been on the radio much of the day, trying to learn whether reinforcements could be brought in to Fox Hill. He had trouble getting a signal—the batteries in his radio had been drained by the cold. He knew the Chinese would be back after nightfall. Not that they had really gone anywhere: He could see them in the copses and thickets, lingering just out of range. They seemed to be taunting his Marines. If not for American air superiority, the Chinese would be attacking even now.
Against suc
h odds, Barber wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold. On the radio, there was talk of a relief party marching down from Yudam-ni, and talk of another relief party marching up from Hagaru, this one supposedly composed primarily of Marine cooks and bakers. But those plans had quickly been scuttled: The road was simply too dangerous. The Chinese had seized control of it and erected numerous roadblocks. Fox Company was on its own.
Barber summoned his officers and tried to explain the situation. “There’s no possible way we can be relieved right now,” he said. Litzenberg and Murray had all they could handle at Yudam-ni. General Smith had his hands full at Hagaru, too. It seemed that the First Marine Division was surrounded by as many as four or five divisions of the Red Chinese Ninth Army Group. For the foreseeable future, the men of Fox Company would have to fend for themselves.
“We can expect heavy attacks again tonight,” Barber warned. “But we have nothing to worry about, as long as we fight like Marines.”
The captain had some good news, however. He had been promised an aerial drop of ammunition and other crucial supplies. Sure enough, at around three in the afternoon, a Marine cargo plane came roaring over Fox Hill. The men on the ground let out lusty cheers as the hatch opened and a number of pallets emerged from the plane’s belly, dropping by parachute to the ground. Unfortunately, the load crashed in no-man’s-land, a good seventy-five yards outside the Fox Company perimeter.
Supply sergeant David Smith was the first to reach the pallets. He took out a knife and was beginning to cut the parachute cords when a Chinese sniper fired at him. The bullet struck Smith’s right calf, shattering his tibia, making a noise that sounded like the snap of a dry branch. Smith yowled in pain and collapsed into a ditch. A team of men ran out with a stretcher to rescue Smith, but one of them, too, was hit in the leg by a sniper. Machine gunners then laid down a fusillade of covering fire as a larger group of Marines fetched the two crippled men and recovered the supplies.
Captain Barber was more than pleased with the trove: He found grenades and mortar rounds and illumination shells and numerous boxes of .30 caliber ammunition. There were also blankets and stretchers and other medical supplies needed by the corpsmen. Even the parachutes would be put to good use—the silk would be ripped into strips to serve as clothing or bedding material.
Not long after the drop, the men of Fox Hill were surprised to be visited by yet another aircraft: a tiny two-seater helicopter. This was high country for choppers, a newfangled craft dangerously unreliable in thin air, especially in such cold weather. The pilot of this helicopter, Captain George Farish, was a brave soul. He had come from Hagaru to deliver fresh batteries for Barber’s field telephones and radios. Farish came buzzing over the treetops and hovered for a moment above Fox Hill, looking for a good place to land. But then a Chinese sharpshooter fired on him. One of the bullets tore into the chopper’s rotor transmission case, and it began to spew oil.
Farish was in serious trouble. He was losing control of the chopper—it careened and wobbled in the air. He gave a little salute, and as he tried to climb away, the rotor blades sawed at the tree branches. Farish managed to fly back to Hagaru, only to crash on the outskirts of town. Miraculously, he wasn’t seriously hurt—he climbed out of the mangled chopper and walked the rest of the way back to General Smith’s compound.
* * *
That afternoon, Ken Benson traipsed back to the place where he and Cafferata had made their stand the night before, beside the scattering of boulders. He scrounged for any useful items they may have left behind. He found their sleeping bags, but they were a mess—the Chinese had shot them and stabbed them with their bayonets, presumably thinking that Marines were snoozing inside.
Benson, watching the tufts of down and the tangled fibers rustle in the wind, realized how lucky he was to be alive.
But then he had an idea. Why not take the two sleeping bags, and any others that weren’t being used, and stuff them with snow? He could place the bags strategically in a fantail pattern on the hill, to make it look as though a Marine platoon was encamped together. These “sleeping” dummies would serve as perfect decoys. They would draw enemy fire, and the muzzle flashes would give away the Chinese positions.
The Marines, outnumbered as they were, had to be clever like this. Ruses and tricks were going to see them through their ordeal. Benson’s platoon sergeant liked his idea. After nightfall, Benson got to work, making snowmen and arranging the decoys on the hill.
* * *
That night at around ten, the men of Fox Company were roused by an eerie noise. They heard what sounded like electronic static, then a din of feedback. Then they heard a man’s voice, amplified through a loudspeaker. Though it was a Chinese voice, the orator spoke beautiful English, tinged with a British accent. He enunciated his words with pedantic precision. “Fox Company,” the man announced. “You are completely surrounded! You are greatly outnumbered!”
The Marines craned their necks to see where the amplifier was. A few of the men, equipped with field glasses, caught a glimpse of the Chinese orator. His face danced in the light of a bonfire. He looked to be an imposing man, wearing an officer’s cap and a quilted greatcoat. “Marines of Fox Company,” he went on. “You must know that the only rational course is surrender. Otherwise, you will all be slaughtered!”
The voice trailed off, and the trigger-happy Marines resisted the instinct to pump automatic fire in the direction of the hated voice. Then the strains of a familiar song, sung by a familiar voice, began to issue from the loudspeaker. “Where the treetops glisten and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow…” It was Bing Crosby, his sonorous baritone carrying on the wind, seeping through the trees, stabbing the men with homesickness.
Moments later, another Chinese voice broke the reverie. The speaker bellowed in pidgin English, chanting over and over again: “Marines, tonight you die! Marines, tonight you die!”
* * *
Around midnight, the onslaught began, much as it had the evening before. Only this time, the Marines were ready. The Chinese whistles and horns and cymbals did not seem so frightening this second night. The men of Fox Company, having tightened their perimeter and dug their foxholes deeper, did not waste their bullets. They waited patiently until the advancing figures stole into plain view. Then the Marines cut them down.
By the light of a flare, many of the men caught sight of a lone bugler on the hill. The Chinese man stood in perfect dignity as he brought his trumpet to his lips. “He was motionless,” Marine Robert Leckie wrote, “a heroic figure out of an antiquity when Mongol ponies trod the earth of Europe and yak-tails swung at the tents of the Golden Camp.” The bugler played a lugubrious note that resonated over the hillside. “Lemme fix the bastard!” one of the Marines shouted. He unpinned a grenade and threw it, and it landed at the bugler’s feet. But the dignified man didn’t run; he just stood there, implacable, blowing his horn as the seconds ticked off. Then the grenade exploded. Wrote Leckie: “There was a flash and a roar, intermixed with the long trailing wail of a horn—and the din of battle reclaimed all ears.”
Down the perimeter line, Ken Benson, vigilant in his foxhole, waited patiently for his ruse to pay off. It wasn’t long before a squad of Chinese came streaming up the hill. They reached the crescent of bulging sleeping bags Benson had prepared for them. The Red soldiers hesitated for a moment. Then they aimed their rifles and fired into the bags at point-blank range. The light of their muzzles gave them away. Benson and his comrades easily sighted in on the Chinese—and killed them all.
The fighting continued through the night and into the morning hours. The whole time, Captain Barber kept to the front lines, urging on his platoons as he had the night before. The man was fearless. He took crazy chances, he got right in the fray—just as he had at Iwo Jima. In some ways, he’d never been happier. Barber was a natural at this—not only a warrior, but a leader of warriors.
But around 2
:45, his luck ran out. The man who’d said, “They haven’t made the bullet yet that can kill me” was struck hard. A round from somewhere drove deep into his groin and shattered his pelvis. A red splotch bloomed high along his left thigh. At first, Barber thought little of it—he said it wasn’t much more than a bee sting. He jammed a swatch of cloth into the wound. He broke off a stick to use as a crutch and tried to move around. When someone called for a corpsman, Barber scoffed. He was so flushed with adrenaline, it took him some time to settle down. When he did, he saw that he was useless. Now the pain was excruciating. The captain agreed to report to the aid tent, but he would walk on his own power: He wouldn’t accept a stretcher. Barber found another wounded officer to lean on, and the two men lurched along the hill, trying to hold each other up.
From somewhere in the darkness, a Chinese voice cried out: “Captain Barber, will you surrender?” He would not.
* * *
As the combat raged outside, the wounded men in the medical tent were antsy and restless—Hector Cafferata especially. He felt he should be out there, fighting alongside Benson. He could hear the gunfire and the mortars, could hear the shouts of the men. Every so often, a bullet would rip through the canvas tent, clinking against the heater, letting in a draft of cold air or a wink of starlight.
On Desperate Ground Page 21