The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War

by James Brady

  It was, recalled Tate’s friend, more like animals howling.

  “I don’t want to be a POW again, Captain,” Tate said, “not ever.”

  There were low hills just north of Sudong, and after Verity checked in with ROK officers and was assured the area was quiet, he and Tate and Izzo set up the radio and a pyramidal tent and the rest of their gear on a hilltop and did some listening that evening and into the night until about midnight. They didn’t get much. Toward dawn, maybe 5:00 A.M., there was a big storm swept through, thunder and lightning and heavy rain for an hour or so, more like a summer storm than October.

  In the morning the whole country seemed cleaner and fresher, the air sweet.

  “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” Verity said. The tent hadn’t leaked very much at all.

  “Glorioso,” Izzo agreed.

  Tate looked at the sky. “I dunno,” he said. “Back home in autumn, just before the real cold, there’s generally one last good thunderstorm, clearing things out.”

  Verity looked around then, too. Not a cloud.

  “But this ain’t Kansas and I may be wrong,” Tate said.

  “Sure, Gunny,” Izzo said. “Even a gunny can be wrong.”

  “Izzo, just strike the tent and load the jeep.”

  Verity’s orders were to spend just the one night in Sudong and report back to Division. Smith didn’t like to have Marine officers out too far ahead and relying on ROKs.

  Fine with me, Verity thought.

  Besides, maybe Tate was right and the weather would be coming off cold.

  Ned Almond had his prejudices. He didn’t like black troops or trust them. He’d commanded a black unit in Italy during the War, when the American army was still segregated, and had lacked confidence in blacks ever since. At one point while ordering troop dispositions in X Corps, Almond said that a black 155mm howitzer battalion and several other black units should be “bivouacked behind the lines and left there.”

  Nor did he like Marines very much.

  But the Marines were what he had to work with and, he conceded with reluctance, they were probably the best he had. He ordered them to move out of Hungnam and Hamhung toward the reservoir no later than November 1. And to move fast.

  It was Oliver Smith to whom Almond issued these orders.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “If you as much as smell Chinese cooking,” General Smith instructed Captain Verity, “get back here and tell me.”

  Homer Litzenberg, the colonel commanding the Seventh Marine Regiment, was so aggressive a decidedly corny nickname had adhered: Blitzin’ Litzenberg. No one used it in his presence, although his troops enjoyed it. It gave them something to amuse themselves when the Old Man wasn’t listening.

  Now Litzenberg’s commanding officer, Gen. Oliver Smith, called Litzenberg aside to tell him his Seventh Marines would lead the march north toward the reservoir and Hagaru-ri and on to Yudam-ni to relieve the ROK forces there and to spearhead whatever farther move north or west the entire Marine division would be ordered to make.

  Said Smith, when the two men were alone: “Colonel, I don’t want you to ‘blitz’ your way north. Not this time.”

  Litzenberg nodded but looked, and was, confused. Smith wasn’t confused at all. But he was aware he was doing a very subversive thing, something that for a Marine general officer was almost without precedent. He was coldly and knowingly setting out to disobey Ned Almond’s order.

  Smith went on now with Litzenberg.

  “Homer, I don’t like the way this division is being used and where it’s being sent. General Almond’s ordered an advance to the Chosin and beyond without a secure left flank. There is nothing out there to our left but a range of mountains with no roads across them. And on the other side of those mountains it’s another twenty, maybe forty or fifty miles to the right flank of Eighth Army. I think it’s a mistake by General Almond and by General MacArthur to send two distinct and widely separated wings of this army north in winter conditions against what may be a major element of the Chinese Communist army. I’ve told Almond that. He told me those were the orders and to proceed.”

  Smith looked grim now and Litzenberg leaned forward, not wanting to miss any of the subtleties of his own orders, on which his own professional competence would be judged. Such things were important to career military men. He wanted desperately not to misunderstand any of what Smith was telling him.

  “Yes, sir?” Litzenberg said, aware that more was coming.

  Smith, too, was now tensed and leaning toward his subordinate. He knew how important it was that Litzenberg understand yet how impossible it was to reduce his instructions to paper. A written document instructing the colonel to disobey X Corps orders direct from Ned Almond would be prima facie evidence of insubordination that could easily have Smith, perhaps both of them, up on charges, facing a General Court-Martial.

  “I smell something bad out there, Colonel, and I wouldn’t take it amiss if you went north at somewhat less than flank speed.” Oliver Smith was worried about Litzenberg’s Seventh Marines and about sending Marines along a narrow mountain road with real winter coming on and, perhaps, a Chinese army waiting.

  Litzenberg was no happier.

  His regiment jumped off on November 1. The day before, the ROK II Corps had come under heavy attack from regular Chinese Communist Forces, the first such major encounter with the Chinese. The Chinese attack was a long way off to the west near Kanu-ri but confirmed there were heavy forces in the war and not just a few Chinese “volunteers,” as Willoughby kept insisting. Litzenberg moved out of Hamhung heading north but not in a rush, throwing out patrols on each flank and far ahead of the leading battalion and not moving a yard until the patrols signaled the way was clear. There was snow on the ground, and on the single road that would now become the Main Supply Route (MSR) for the entire division, the snow was being packed and polished into ice by treads and wheels and men’s boots.

  Still, it wasn’t snow and ice or even Litzenberg’s official “caution” that slowed the advance. It was the enemy.

  At Sudong, regimental-sized Chinese Communist Forces attacked and for a time cut off two rifle battalions of Litzenberg’s three. It was more than a firefight, the toughest fighting the Marines had been in since taking Seoul. Air strikes were called in, the Eleventh Marines artillery was brought up, and still it took two days to secure Sudong. Then a company of North Korean tanks—and where the hell did they come from?—came out firing and cutting up the lead rifle company before the heavier, bigger-gunned Marine tanks could be brought up. Another day and night went to the taking of Funchilin Pass, nearly five thousand feet high and deep in snow.

  On November 7, after a week giving battle, the Chinese abruptly broke off and seemed just to melt into the hills.

  Litzenberg didn’t understand it, and back at headquarters neither did Smith. Verity was still there, still monitoring, and had been due to drive north to accompany Litzenberg when the fighting at Sudong broke out and the road was cut.

  “We got lucky, Gunny,” Izzo remarked. “We could of been up there with my old buddies in the Seventh getting shot.”

  Tate gave Izzo a sour look but knew he was right. It looked as if there was going to be plenty of fighting to go around before this was all over, and a prudent man didn’t rush things.

  The battle at Sudong surprised everyone. Hadn’t Verity and Tate driven up there just days earlier to have a look-see and found the place solidly in South Korean hands? Where had the South Koreans fled? Why had the Chinese attacked so ferociously and then broken off?

  This Peng is a chess player, Oliver Smith told himself. Worrying. And hadn’t Verity assured him the man would fight in the center of the ring? Well, maybe he would yet; maybe all this so far was just the preliminaries, the four-round bouts before the main event.

  In Tokyo General Willoughby had finally admitted there were Chinese troops in North Korea, still insisting they were “volunteers.”

  “Yeah,” responded cynics at headq
uarters when sure they were out of hearing, “about a million volunteers.”

  There were little signs of panic.

  Starting October 25 when the ROK Sixth Division was hit near Unsan, Chinese pressure had built. On November 1 the army’s First Cavalry Division was attacked. On the second, the Marines at Sudong. A few days later Australians had to fight off attacks so fierce they ran short of ammunition and were reduced to wielding bayonets. MacArthur demanded Washington order bombing of the Yalu bridges to cut off Chinese supplies and reinforcements.

  Suddenly it looked as if “the boys” might not be home for Christmas, after all.

  Yet in other sectors of North Korea, Allied patrols had reached the Yalu, meeting almost no resistance, while along the east coast ROKs sprinted north more than one hundred miles ahead of the Marines still getting under way at Hungnam.

  Anyone looking at a map could see that MacArthur’s two armies were spread out over a terrible range of hostile country, so much so that by November 7 MacArthur himself was ordering all units to slow down and consolidate gains.

  Then, unaccountably, the Chinese fell back and vanished. By November 14 MacArthur was again preening. The Chinese, he said, had made their little demonstration and gone home. Either that, or they’d run out of steam.

  The General had again been proven right.

  “Come up with me, Verity,” one of Smith’s staff said. “We’ve got some bodies.” They were from the fighting at Sudong, from the Chinese attack on the Seventh Marines.

  Verity told Tate to keep the radio watch and followed the staff major. Izzo, he assumed, was out stealing things.

  General Smith had a big tent with a stove going, and it was warm enough you could shed your gloves and open your parka. It was also warm enough to thaw the dead, and so now the staff and a handful of other officers were led out around back behind the general’s tent to where nine or ten Chinese bodies had been lined up for their inspection.

  “I always like to see stiffs,” Verity heard one officer whisper to another. “Talk all you want about body counts. I like to see the bodies. That way you know, you really know.”

  “You’re right,” the other murmured, deferential in the presence of Oliver Smith.

  “Well now,” General Smith said, “they won’t be the last, but these certainly are the first.”

  “Yessir,” the murmurs went, rather pleased.

  Smith turned to an intelligence officer who had, apparently, already examined the dead.

  “Marsh, what can you tell?”

  “Well, sir, from the little service record books we’ve been able to examine, one of these men, still a private soldier, has been in the army and fighting much of the time since 1937. He . . .”

  Since ’37? Marine officers looked at one another.

  “. . . was drafted in ’37 by Chiang Kai-shek, fought the Japanese for eight years until VJ Day in ’45, then started fighting the Communists again in ’47, was still fighting when Chiang bugged out to Formosa—”

  “Colonel, we say of our gallant ally Generalissimo Chiang that he and his forces evacuated to Formosa, rather than ‘bugged out.’ ”

  “Right you are, General. So when they ‘evacuated,’ this fellow was left behind and after a few weeks was conscripted into the CCF. Same uniform, they just added a red star on his hat. So he’s been in the army thirteen years and he’s still a private and until yesterday he was still fighting. . . .”

  Verity stared down at the row of dead. He wondered which of them was the long-suffering private. Hard to tell, even for Verity, who knew the Chinese and had some notion of how the men aged. Women, well, they aged even faster. Functions of the social structure.

  The intelligence officer lectured briefly. The dead men, “the stiffs,” as the Marines had it, wore layers of uniform, all cotton, none of them proof against the cold they’d all already sampled, on both sides of the line, and knew would get worse.

  As the dead were picked over for the delectation of Smith’s staff, Verity thought, irrationally he knew, of Elizabeth, dead and cold in the ground. A more dignified death, of course, but no less cold, no less dead. Oh, how he loved her, how he missed her.

  “As you can see, gentlemen,” the intelligence man went on, “the outer clothing is dun or khaki on one side, white on the other, the camouflage potential being obvious. We might ourselves one day consider . . .”

  General Smith, tall and taciturn, moved his feet impatiently. He didn’t want this turning into a headquarters lecture or a seminar for the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico.

  The lecturing officer was not stupid. He caught the gesture.

  “. . . and under this padded winter uniform, the usual cotton summer suit, plus any sweaters or extra shirts available. On the feet, sneakers. One or two pairs of cotton socks. We are finding the occasional Chinese soldier dead of wounds. But already suffering, and rather badly, of frostbite.”

  Several of the staff officers knelt to look more closely at the bodies, to finger cloth, like bespoke tailors or the operators of a quality funeral parlor.

  The mountains slumped down toward the road, in places hanging over it. Even at noon there was shadow. Shadow and shade, a gloom, a darkness, over the snow and the land. That was the doing of the slope, the steep vertical incline, so severe it was difficult to understand how even dwarf trees grew on such gradients and clung. There was the single road, snaking more than a hundred miles through these mountains from the Sea of Japan to the frontier of China—a narrow road of dirt and gravel, not constructed so much as carved into the slopes and clinging there.

  It was along this road the two armies would march: the Chinese and the Marines.

  In a way, between Peng and Oliver Smith it was what in the Old West they called a walkdown, the rival gunmen walking down the dusty western street toward each other, guns holstered but ready. One night as they sat over a courtesy fire, Verity asked Tate if there was validity in the analogy.

  “Well,” said Tate, the student of Captain Quantrill, “there’s no Calamity Jane. But there are two men very handy with guns, competent men, at opposite ends of the MSR. Which ain’t too dusty. But otherwise is available for killing people.”

  Izzo threw up his hands.

  “With all due respect, Captain, if a couple of guys in South Philly start shooting each other, not only does the police department arrive, but there are calls for the federals and the state police, maybe for committees of vigilantes. Yet when you got a couple of drunken cowboys shooting guys in Texas or Arizona or someplace, they’re frigging Gary Cooper and Duke Wayne.”

  Tate told Izzo he didn’t understand history, but Verity thought there was an argument to be made.

  In the words of Mouse Izzo, “This place looks like frigging Switzerland.”

  Izzo had never seen Switzerland. But he was about right.

  From Hungnam on the coast of the Sea of Japan to the southern tip of the Chosin Reservoir was nearly seventy miles. Soon after you left Hungnam, the port, and its twin inland city, Hamhung, you could see the real mountains ahead and yet still, at the hairpin turns, you could look back at the sea in the distance.

  “Glorioso, Captain,” Izzo said, very impressed, “even better than the Poconos.”

  “Praise indeed, for I have seen the Poconos,” Verity replied, enjoying the moment.

  Smith released him from headquarters with instructions to drive north and catch up to Litzenberg, monitoring the radio all the way. Where were the Chinese? Where had they gone after the fight at Sudong?

  “If you as much as smell Chinese cooking, Verity, get back here and tell me. I want to know what your chum Peng is up to.”

  “Yessir.”

  As Izzo drove north, the sun dimmed, a sort of yellow veil coming between it and the earth. And it got colder with the wind up. By two in the afternoon they could no longer see either the sea behind or the distant mountains ahead. Then the snow began to fall, heavy snow, heavy and wet, coating everything.

  “Oh, shit,”
Izzo said, no longer admiring the landscape.

  It was the first half of November.

  Gen. Oliver Smith was not happy. His First Marine Division had reached Hagaru-ri, at the southern end of the reservoir. To the northwest, two of his three rifle regiments, the Fifth and Seventh, would soon be based on Yudam-ni, north of Hagaru. The other infantry regiment, General Puller’s First Marines, was still far to the south, having been sent off on the equivalent of a wild-goose chase, waiting to be relieved by the Third Army Division so it could rejoin Smith and the other Marine regiments to re-form the division as a whole. Smith did not like the way X Corps had broken up his division or what Generals MacArthur and Almond were telling him to do.

  More fundamentally, Smith didn’t like MacArthur and didn’t much like Ned Almond, who more and more took on his master’s (MacArthur’s) posturing and protective coloration. There were army generals who felt the same as Smith did, but their careers depended on MacArthur’s favor. The Marines had never liked MacArthur (calling him Dugout Doug), and as a Marine general Smith could get away with a lot more backtalk. Sass, his grandmother used to call it.

  Oliver Smith, wreathed in pipe smoke, sat at a table in the old Jesuit schoolhouse at Hungnam that served as divisional HQ with his ops officer, his intelligence chief, and four or five other members of the division staff.

  “Captain Verity, sir,” a duty officer announced.

  “Send him in.”

  When Verity came in, blinking in the gloom after the bright sunlight of the long jeep trip south, Smith welcomed him, told him to pull up a chair, get out of his coat, and light up if he wished. Verity always worried when encountering such high-level urbanity, and he was instinctively on guard.