Retreat, Hell!

by W. E. B Griffin

  There are annual inspections of every organization in the Army, ending with a conference during which the inspectors point out to the commander where he is doing what he should not be doing, or not doing what he should be doing.

  It is very difficult to imagine any officer, even one with a galaxy of stars on his epaulets, pointing out to General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Allied Powers, and Commanding General, United States Far East Command (FECOM), where he was doing something wrong, or where he had failed to do something he should have been doing.

  And none did.

  Because of the International Date Line, when it is Sunday in Korea it is Saturday in New York City and Washington. The first word of the attack reached the Pentagon about eight o’clock Saturday night, and at about the same time, the United Nations Commission in Korea managed to get UN Secretary General Trygve Lie on the telephone at his estate on Long Island.

  Lie blurted, “This is war against the United Nations.”

  President Truman learned of the attack at his home in Independence, Missouri, early Sunday morning and immediately boarded his airplane, the Independence, to fly back to Washington.

  Lie convened an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council at two o’clock Sunday afternoon. The Soviet Union, trying to force the UN into seating Red China—and expelling Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalists—was refusing to attend Security Council meetings and did not participate.

  This was a blunder on their part. Had they attended, the Soviet Union could have vetoed the resolution the UN passed. The resolution stated that the attack constituted a breach of the peace, ordered an immediate cessation of hostilities and the immediate withdrawal of North Korean forces from South Korea, and called upon all UN members to “render every assistance to the UN in the execution of this resolution.”

  At about six o’clock that evening, in Washington, in Blair House—across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, which was being repaired—President Truman met with the more important members of his staff.

  They quickly and unanimously agreed with Truman that the interests of the United States demanded that immediate action be taken to stop Communist aggression in Korea.

  A little after ten-thirty Sunday evening, two teletype orders from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were sent to the Far East.

  The first, to the Commanding General, FECOM— MacArthur—authorized him to send ammunition and military equipment to Korea, to prevent the loss of Seoul; authorized him to provide ships and aircraft to evacuate American citizens from Korea; and directed him to send a “survey party” to Korea to see what was going on.

  It is germane to note that until MacArthur got that teletype order he had no official role in Korea. The former Japanese Protectorate of Korea, now the Republic of South Korea, was an independent nation.

  The second order went to the United States Seventh Fleet. It was to immediately sail from its several major home ports—the largest were in the Philippines and Okinawa—for the U.S. Navy Base at Sasebo, Japan. On arrival, the warships would come under the operational control of the Commander, U.S. Naval Forces, Far East.

  Since Commander, Naval Forces, Far East, was under FECOM, that meant they would be under MacArthur’s command.

  MacArthur immediately ordered the U.S. Far Eastern Air Force—already under his command—to Korea to protect the evacuation of American civilians and dependents from Inchon and Pusan.

  Over Inchon, the American jets were fired upon by three Russian-made YAK fighters, which the Americans promptly shot down.

  It was the first American victory in the Korean War, and much time would pass before there was another.

  Outnumbered, outgunned, and in many cases poorly led, most of the South Korean Army simply began to disintegrate in the face of the North Korean attack.

  The Survey Party—thirteen officers and two enlisted men under Brigadier General John H. Church—took off from Tokyo as soon as it could be formed. While in the air, they received two messages, the first saying it would probably be wiser not to try to land at Seoul’s Kimpo Airfield, and suggesting the field at Suwon, thirty miles or so south of Seoul, as an alternate. The second said that the Pentagon had given MacArthur command of all U.S. Forces in Korea, and the Survey Party had been rather grandly redesignated as “GHQ Advance Command and Liaison Group in Korea.”

  ADCOM landed at Suwon about 1900 27 June. Colonel William H. S. Wright, the KMAG Chief of Staff, who met them, suggested that it probably would be better to wait for morning to drive into Seoul than to try to do so in the hours of darkness.

  At 0400 the next day, two KMAG officers drove into Suwon and reported to General Church that the bridges across the Han River had been blown and that Seoul was in the hands of the enemy.

  Church radioed MacArthur that U.S. ground troops were going to be necessary if the United States intended to push the North Koreans back across the 38th Parallel. The reply was a query: “Is Suwon safe for a high-ranking officer to land there tomorrow?”

  Church replied that it was.

  The “high-ranking officer” turned out to be General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who took a quick look around, then radioed the Pentagon that U.S. troops were going to be necessary.

  While this was going on, the United Nations, realizing that the North Koreans had no intention of obeying the UN resolution to cease, desist, and get out of South Korea, issued—on 27 June—another one:

  “. . . recommends that the members of the UN furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack. . . .”

  Resisting the Communist attack would be an action of the United Nations, rather than a unilateral action by the United States.

  Just before 0500 30 June, President Truman got MacArthur’s assessment of the Korean situation and his request for authorization to use American ground troops. Truman immediately authorized the deployment of one regimental combat team, and after thinking it over for two hours, authorized the deployment of two infantry divisions.

  At 0800 1 July “Task Force Smith”—400 officers and men from the 21st Infantry, 24th Infantry Division, under Lieutenant Colonel Charles B. Smith—boarded USAF C-54 transports at Itazuke Air Force Base in Japan and were flown to Korea.

  It was not the regimental combat team Truman had authorized. It was all the men the 24th Division could muster on short notice.

  On the morning of 5 July, Task Force Smith was in place on the Suwon-Osan Highway, south of Suwon. The “crew-served” weapons with which it was supposed to halt the North Korean Army consisted of two 75-mm recoilless rifles; two 4.2-inch mortars; six 2.36-inch rocket launchers; and four 60-mm mortars. The 52nd Field Artillery—six light 105-mm howitzers—had been assigned to them.

  When the North Koreans’ Russian-built T-34 tanks attacked, they were engaged by Task Force Smith’s 75-mm recoilless rifles. The projectiles bounced off the Russian armor. So did the 2.36-inch rockets. So did the shells from the 105-mm howitzers.

  On the morning of 6 July, Colonel Smith was able to muster only 248 officers and men of the original 400. The artillery had lost five officers and twenty-six men and most of its cannon.

  And they had managed to delay—not stop—the North Koreans for less than seven hours.

  More troops were going to be needed, and quickly. The problem was, there were no more troops.

  The Marine Corps was ordered to furnish a division. There were two Marine divisions: The First, in California, was at less than half wartime strength, and the Second, on the East Coast, was in even worse shape. At Headquarters, USMC, Major Drew J. Barrett, Jr.,1 a junior G-1 staff officer, marched into the office of the Commandant of the Marine Corps to report that there was no way the Corps could meet the requirements laid on it by the Commander-in-Chief except by mobilizing the entire reserve. This was done.

  The Eighth Army, under General Walton H. “Johnny” Walker, who had served with distinction under Patton in Europe, began a series
of delaying actions—in other words, retreated—down the Korean Peninsula.

  On 4 August, the Pusan Perimeter was established. This was a small enclave at the tip of the peninsula. The alternative to the perimeter was being pushed into the sea.

  Reinforcements began to arrive from Japan, Hawaii, and the continental United States. By gutting the 2nd Marine Division on the East Coast, the Marine Corps was able to form from the 1st Marine Division the First Marine Brigade (Provisional) and send it to Korea.

  General Walker immediately made the Marines his “Fire Brigade,” moving it around within the perimeter to reinforce whatever Army units seemed most vulnerable to the continuing North Korean attack.

  MacArthur, meanwhile—while there was still genuine doubt that Walker could hold the Pusan Perimeter—was planning a counterattack. He was later to claim he’d first thought of it when he’d made his first quick visit to Korea.

  It is a matter of record that MacArthur, in early July, had ordered his chief of staff, Major General Edward M. Almond, to plan for a landing on the west coast of the peninsula.

  When he finally revealed his plan—to make an amphibious landing at Inchon, the port near Seoul—it was greeted with reactions ranging from “grave doubts” to mutters of “absolute insanity” from just about every senior officer made privy to it.

  It was the worst possible place to stage an amphibious landing. There was a long list of things wrong with the plan, primarily the “landing beach” itself.

  To get to the “landing beach” the invasion fleet would have to navigate the narrow Flying Fish Channel, which was not navigable except at high tide, and then only for two hours. When the thirty-plus-foot tides receded, the landing area was a sea of mud.

  There was no beach. Men would have to climb a seawall when they left their landing barges.

  Army Chief of Staff Collins sent General Matthew B. Ridgway, recognized as one of the brightest officers in the Army, to Tokyo to “confer” with MacArthur about the Inchon plan. Everyone understood that Ridgway’s mission was to talk MacArthur out of his plan.

  He failed to do so.

  President Truman was faced with the choice of listening to the senior officers in the Pentagon, who wanted him to forbid the operation, or letting MacArthur have his way.

  Political considerations certainly influenced Truman to some degree. It was a given that if Truman supported the Pentagon and forbade the invasion, MacArthur would logically conclude that the President had no faith in him, and retire.

  If he did so quietly, fine. But that was unlikely. It was more likely that the “firing” of the legendary national hero would see MacArthur as the Republican candidate in the upcoming presidential election.

  Whatever the reasons, Truman decided not to interfere with MacArthur’s plan to invade at Inchon on 15 September.

  MacArthur gave command of the invasion force—X Corps—to Major General Ned Almond. He did not, however, relieve Almond of his assignment as his chief of staff. While this was perfectly legal, and certainly MacArthur’s prerogative, the Pentagon establishment was outraged.

  Some of their rage, MacArthur’s supporters claimed, was because they could not now give MacArthur a chief of staff who could be counted on to provide them a window into MacArthur’s thinking.

  Eighth Army Commander Walker bitterly protested the loss of the Marines to X Corps. He said he could not guarantee holding the Pusan Perimeter without them. MacArthur was unmoved. The First Marine Brigade (Provisional) came off the lines in Pusan, boarded the ships of the invasion fleet, and en route to Inchon, reinforced at sea by a third regiment, became the 1st Marine Division.

  The invasion was a spectacular success.

  At 1200 29 September—two weeks after the landing— MacArthur stood in Seoul’s National Assembly Hall and told South Korean President Syngman Rhee,

  “. . . On behalf of the United Nations Command, I am happy to restore to you, Mr. President, the seat of your government. . . .”

  MacArthur then led the assembled dignitaries in recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

  The Eighth Army had broken out of the Pusan Perimeter. The North Korean Army was in full retreat.

  It was logical to presume that the Korean War was over.

  I

  [ONE]

  NEAR CHONGJU, SOUTH KOREA 0815 28 SEPTEMBER 1950

  Major Malcolm S. Pickering, USMCR, whose appearance and physical condition reflected that he had not had a change of clothing—much less the opportunity to bathe with soap or shave—since he had been shot down fifty-eight days before sat between two enormous boulders near the crest of a hill.

  He thought—but was by no means sure—that he was about twenty miles north of Taejon and about thirty miles south of Suwon. Where he hoped he was, was in a remote area of South Korea where there were few North Korean soldiers, lessening the chance that he would be spotted until he could attract the attention of an American airplane, and have someone come and pick him up.

  Those hopes were of course, after fifty-eight days, fading. Immediately after he had been shot down, there had been a flurry of search activity, but when they hadn’t found him the activity had slowed down, and—logic forced him to acknowledge—finally ceased.

  He wasn’t at all sure that anyone had seen any of the signs he left after the first one, the day after he’d been shot down. What he had done was stamp into the mud of a drained rice paddy with his boots the letters PP and an arrow. No one called him “Malcolm.” He was called “Pick” and he knew that all the members of his squadron—and other Marine pilots—would make the connection.

  The arrow’s direction was basically meaningless. If the arrow pointed northward, sometimes he went that way. More often than not, he went east, west, or south. He knew that he couldn’t move far enough so that he wouldn’t be able to see an airplane searching low and slow for him in the area of the sign left in the mud.

  He had left other markers every other—or every third— day since he’d been on the run. The fact that there had been Corsairs flying low over some of the markers—logic forced him to acknowledge—was not proof that they had seen the markers. The Corsairs, when they were not in direct support of the Marines on the ground, went on combined reconnaissance and interdiction flights, which meant that they were flying close to the deck, not that they had seen his markers.

  It was too risky to stay in one place, so he had kept moving. He’d gotten his food—and an A-Frame to carry it in—from South Korean peasant farmers, who were anxious to help him, but made it clear they didn’t want anyone to know—either the North Korean military or a local Communist—that they had done so. In either case, they would have been shot.

  He was, of course, discouraged. Logic forced him to acknowledge that sooner or later, he was going to be spotted by North Koreans, or by someone who would report him to the North Koreans. And if they found him, he would be forced to make a decision that was not at all pleasant to think about.

  It wasn’t simply a question of becoming a prisoner, although that was an unpleasant prospect in itself. Three times since he had been on the run he had come across bodies—once, more than thirty—of U.S. Army soldiers who, having been captured and after having their hands tied behind them with commo wire, had been summarily executed and left to rot where they had fallen.

  If the North Koreans spotted him, and he could not get away, he was going to die. Not with his hands tied behind his back, but very probably by his own hand, unless he was lucky enough to go down with .45 blazing, à la John Wayne. Logic forced him to acknowledge that was wishful thinking, that he couldn’t take the risk of going out in a blaze of glory, that he would have to do it himself.

  Major Pickering’s father was Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR, who was the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency for Asia. For obvious reasons, young Pickering could not allow himself to fall into North Korean hands.

  It was sort of a moot question anyway. With only five rounds left for the .45, h
e couldn’t put up much of a fight with two North Koreans, much less a platoon of the bastards, or a company.

  The hilltop was bathed in bright morning sunlight, the rays of which had finally warmed Major Pickering—it had been as cold as a witch’s teat during the night—but had not yet warmed the ground fog in the valley below enough to burn it off.

  That meant that Major Pickering could not see what he was looking for, even through the 8 × 35 U.S. Navy binoculars he had somewhat whimsically—if, as it turned out, very fortuitously—“borrowed” from the USS Badoeng Strait just before taking off.

  The rice paddy in the valley where he had stamped out the last marker in the mud was covered with ground fog.

  He set the binoculars down and went into the bag tied to the A-Frame. There was what was left of a roasted chicken carcass and the roasted rib cage of a small pig. Surprising Major Pickering not at all, both were rotten to the point where trying to eat any of it would be gross folly.

  After thinking it over carefully, he decided he would bury the rotten meat before breakfast. He dug a small trench with a K-bar knife and did so, and then went back into the A-Frame bag and took from it three balls of cold rice. The smell they gave off was not appealing, but it was not nausea-inducing, and he popped them one at a time into his mouth and forced them down.

  That was the end of rations, which meant that he would have to get some food today. That meant tonight. What he would do was come off the hill, very carefully, and look for some Korean farmer’s thatch-roofed stone hut. When he found one, he would keep it under surveillance all day and go to it after dark, entering it with .45 drawn and hoping there would be food offered, and that the farmer would not send someone to report the presence of an American the moment he left.

  So far, food had been offered and North Korean troops had not come looking for him at first light. So far, he had been lucky. Logic forced him to acknowledge that sooner or later everybody’s luck changed, most often for the worse.