The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War

by James Brady

  I can learn something from Gunny Tate, Verity thought, not for the first time, and tried to focus his mind on why he was here and what they were going to do next. If you had a problem to ponder and try to solve, you didn’t fall into an apathy that could drain and eventually kill you.

  “Captain, I swear, what a night, what a frigging night!”

  It was Izzo, small and spare and moving as he always did, furtive and gliding and not like old men. He was a hard case.

  “You all right, Izzo?”

  “Yessir.” Now he had a BAR instead of a rifle. Well, in a fire-fight you ran short of men before weapons. The BAR was nearly as tall as Izzo was. The Mouse. A good name for him, rodentlike and rapacious, a survivor.

  By ten a fresh company came up the hill from the road and passed through what was left of this bunch and settled in. They couldn’t dig in any more than Verity and his people had. Verity and Tate and Izzo walked back downhill to the road to the town. The jeep was still there, off to the side, unhit. So, too, the big radio. Izzo tried to get a fire going without fuel.

  “Turn it on, Tate; see if we can get anything.”

  “Yessir.” Tate played with dials and the aerial. Verity didn’t even know what he hoped to hear. There was static and lots of English traffic and some Chinese. Not that much. Maybe they were sleeping off the night before over there, too. Tate sent Izzo off to find out if there was any hot chow coming up and where the warming tents were, if there were any warming tents. Without a fire, their hut was colder than outside. It was better now with the sun up and moving around, but everyone was still cold. Verity thought some fingers were frostbitten, and he was sure about Tate’s nose.

  “Well, Captain,” the gunny said, “they say if it doesn’t turn black, it isn’t a total loss.”

  “Try to rig something, a bandanna or something, Gunny. That’s a pretty fine nose, and I’d hate to see you lose it.”

  Tate grinned. Verity was feeling better already. They had coffee now, cooked on the jeep engine block. Funny how sunlight and hot coffee got a man on his feet again. And Tate did have a good nose, sizable and straight, and without the frozen snot dripping from the nostrils as so many men did.

  “Personally, Captain, I find it disgusting,” Izzo had remarked a few days earlier. “I mean, however bad things get, I want to tell them, blow your frigging nose once in awhile! Jesus, we need this and the Chinks, too?”

  Izzo did have his sensibilities.

  Now a runner came along the road, red-faced and cheery.

  “Captain Verity?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Regimental commander wants you, sir.”

  Izzo brightened. He hadn’t found hot chow or a warming tent.

  “Maybe they’re gonna fly us out to Japan, Captain, you and me and the gunny; we got all this valuable intelligence.”

  “I doubt it. Anyway, get the jeep turned around. May as well ride in style.”

  Captain Verity was feeling a lot better. Except for some artillery fire, outgoing from the Marines onto the Chinese hills, and occasional jets coming in loud and low, it was quiet. The sun climbed higher, the sky clean and pale blue. The temperature was way above zero now, maybe fifteen, twenty degrees. Yeah, this was a lot better, Verity thought.

  Then he glanced at his watch. Almost noon. In five hours it would be dark again and the Chinese would come back. The day went too fast; the night came too soon.

  “OK, Izzo, let’s get moving,” Tate said, climbing in back with the radio and the two BARs they had now collected.

  “Yeah,” Verity said, “let’s move it.” So they moved it and at regiment they had Verity question prisoners. It wasn’t too bad. In daylight nothing was as bad.

  Once upon a time, Gen. Oliver Smith mused, war was a more courtly affair, and armies went over to winter quarters. They erected tents and dug proper latrines and drilled some but mainly stayed indoors out of the snow and the cold, enjoying the fire and smoking pipes and honing bayonets and oiling and cleaning rifles. That was how soldiers were supposed to spend the cold months and not out there fighting a full war on the hills and ridgelines with men on both sides freezing to death and professional general officers reduced to wearing side arms day and night in case hostilities broke out right there at divisional HQ.

  It was, Smith thought, not appropriate at all. And you could blame that damned MacArthur.

  Although, in all fairness, the fault might go back in time a few years. To when Washington totally ignored tradition and niceties by crossing the Delaware in a blizzard on Christmas Eve to attack the Brits and the Hessians over their pipes and rum.

  That, too, was a hell of a thing. And Smith, while admiring Washington’s initiative, still considered the entire affair a bit unseemly.

  God never meant honest soldiers to fight winter wars. Not here, not anywhere. And that, Oliver Smith concluded, was the truth.

  General Almond’s chopper was expected, and Oliver Smith stood at the margin of the Haguru airstrip waiting for him to come in, turning his back against the wind of the rotor blades and the dust and the snow and pebbles whipped up.

  “Good to see you, General,” Smith said, saluting.

  “Thank you, Oliver.” It was Almond’s second trip in three days to see Smith.

  Haig was with Almond, Alexander Haig, his sleek young aide, a man they said would one day wear stars.

  When they were inside the small factory building Smith used as HQ, he told Almond right away what Murray and Litzenberg thought.

  “My two regimental commanders up at Yudam-ni want to abandon the offensive and go over to the defense. Right now. Murray fought one whole day just trying to get out of town. Made maybe fifteen hundred yards. And this was still on the flat ground, not even trying to get up the hills. Last two nights, we’ve been under attack. The place is swarming with Chinese. Litzenberg’s brought in the dead from three CCF divisions so far.”

  “And you, General, what do you want?” Almond asked, stiffening and formal.

  “I agree with Murray and Litzenberg. I want to go over to the defense, dig in, and see what we’ve got out there.”

  Almond, obviously unhappy, wound up the meeting swiftly.

  “I want to get up to see MacLean before dark,” he said. There was a brief handshake and he was out of there.

  But Oliver Smith had what he wanted. Almond hadn’t ordered him to resume the advance west toward Eighth Army.

  Maybe they could still save the First Marine Division.

  On leaving the Marines at Hagaru, Ned Almond and Alexander Haig flew by chopper to visit Colonel MacLean, whose regimental task force had been badly battered the preceding day on the opposite, eastern shore of the reservoir. MacLean confidently expected to be told to pull back to regroup at Haguru. Instead, with less than a regiment left and severely hurt, Almond unaccountably told MacLean to resume his march north, largely unsupported by any other UN force, the Marines being separated from MacLean by the width of the Chosin. When MacLean looked puzzled, Almond said, “We’re still attacking and we’re going all the way to the Yalu. Don’t let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop you. . . .“

  On this same day, November 28, and without Almond’s knowledge, from his office in the Dai Ichi building in Tokyo, MacArthur signaled Washington that the Chinese army had intervened in great force, that this had suddenly become an entirely new war, and that “I am going over to the defense.” But he didn’t yet tell General Almond.

  MacLean, a good soldier, gave orders to renew the advance north on the morning of the twenty-ninth. Almond had not given him any options. MacLean was army and Almond did not feel compelled to be diplomatic, as he had been with the Marine, Oliver Smith.

  What would happen to Task Force MacLean shocked and even frightened Ray Murray and Homer Litzenberg. They, too, were colonels commanding infantry regiments. Allan D. MacLean, it was said, was an excellent officer, and his regiment, the Thirty-first Infantry, though not Marines but army, was a good one except for its attach
ed reinforcing ROK troops. MacLean had been specially chosen by Ned Almond to drive North to the Yalu, around the right shore of the reservoir, in hopes of getting to the Chinese border before the Marines. Murray and Litzenberg knew you did not send a mediocre officer on such missions. Not even Almond would do that.

  Murray, especially, knew how close his Fifth Marines had come to a disaster of their own, having been ordered to drive west from the reservoir through the mountains to link up with Eighth Army, forty or fifty miles away and in disarray and worse. If the Chinese had been more subtle, Murray thought with a very palpable shudder, permitting the Fifth Marines to get six or eight miles into the hills before coming down on them, Colonel Murray, like MacLean, might have lost his regiment.

  And his life.

  MacLean had one rifle battalion and a battalion of field artillery at Sinhung-ni, about ten or twelve miles north of Hagaru. He was killed or wandered off or was captured, no one was quite sure at the moment, during the second day’s fighting. Lt. Col. Don Faith, with a battalion of the Thirty-second Infantry, fought his way north to Sinhung to assist and bulk up Task Force MacLean, only to discover MacLean was gone, and what was left of both units now became Task Force Faith. There was no longer any question of pushing north to the Yalu past these “Chinese laundrymen,” but of trying to get what was left of the regimental combat team disengaged and back to Hagaru, where they might regroup. Faith took command of all three battalions and set up a defense périmeter against the encircling Chinese. He had already had five hundred casualties out of an initial thirty-two hundred men and could only be supplied by air. On the twenty-ninth, General Hodes sent a company from the Thirty-first Infantry, supported by a couple of tanks, north to link up with Faith, an inadequate effort the Chinese easily turned back. On December 1, fearing his position would soon be overwhelmed, Faith destroyed his howitzers and, with his wounded, began a fighting retreat south toward Hagaru, supported by close-in air support. Less than five miles from Hagaru, Faith was killed. And his column of frozen, exhausted men, short of officers and senior noncoms, began to break up. By late that night some six hundred and seventy stragglers had come through the barbed wire and the minefields into Hagaru, where the Marines rushed them into warming tents to save their lives. The others, in small, leaderless bands, wandered into the hills or down onto the frozen surface of the big lake, chivied and hunted like animals by the victorious Chinese chasing at their heels.

  One of MacLean’s men, James S. Sellers, reported:

  We were attacking hills with less than three banana clips of ammo for our carbines and with bare bayonets. On the food side one ration of C Rations every three days. We once found some frozen potatoes and ate them raw. Everyone had dysentery. I went from 154 pounds to 118 in my time on the line. I froze my hands and feet. I fought my way into the Marines along with what was left of our outfit. I saw men fall through the ice of the reservoir and freeze to death before we could get them out and other men just lie down on the ice and freeze. I went back later with a Marine detachment to try to rescue wounded left on the east side of the reservoir. We found the trucks full of wounded had all been machine-gunned, gas poured on them, and set on fire. We found guys who had been captured, stripped of their clothes and left to freeze to death. After that on the way to Hungnam I took no prisoners. I shot them where they stood.

  Marine lieutenant colonel Beall led the rescue mission young Sellers joined and found a number of missing army troops “wandering about in aimless circles on the ice, in a state of shock.”

  Three hundred dead were found in the machine-gunned, burned-out truck convoy. One thousand and fifty of the original 3,200 survived, only 385 of them able-bodied soldiers, who at Hagaru were quickly formed up into a provisional battalion and armed and outfitted by the Marines.

  Sellers remembered: “We had been the most completely equipped winter outfit in Japan. We had to turn in all that winter equipment as we were told by the powers that be we would be home by Thanksgiving. We went into North Korea and the mountains in field jackets, summer fatigues, with ponchos and a blanket (two if you could steal one), no sleeping bags, leather glove shells with wool inserts, and combat boots. The field jackets were unlined.”

  Ned Almond made no apology, public or private, for sending MacLean and Faith north so poorly supplied and supported.

  The Marine colonels, Litzenberg and Murray, realized that they might have met the same terrible end on the western shores of the big reservoir if Oliver Smith hadn’t stood up to Almond and demanded to be allowed to go over to the defense rather than pushing farther north and deeper into the Chinese trap.

  Back in Yudam-ni, they were trying to handle the wounded. There was no airstrip to fly them out; they had to do the best with what they had. And that wasn’t much.

  Working in a tent, occasionally pierced by rifle fire, regimental surgeon Chester M. Lessenden, a navy lieutenant commander, operated by lantern light. The wounded, waiting their turn, lay outside in the cold on straw pallets covered by tarps.

  Navy corpsmen thawed frozen morphine syrettes in their mouths so that the wounded could be sedated during the surgery.

  “Everything was frozen,” Commander Lessenden said. “Plasma froze and the bottles broke. We couldn’t change the dressings because we had to work with gloves on to keep our hands from freezing.

  “We couldn’t cut a man’s clothes off to get at a wound because he would freeze to death. Actually, a man was better off if we left him alone. Did you ever try to stuff a wounded man into a sleeping bag?”

  You couldn’t blame the entire fiasco on MacArthur; Gen. Oliver Smith knew that. Much could be laid at the feet of the professional West Point careerists ambitious for a second star or fearful of losing a first, officers whose “can do” alacrity, when ordered to do things they knew they couldn’t, was little more than caste-system ass-kissing. Few officers dared speak back. John S. Guthrie, commanding officer of the Seventh Infantry Regiment, was one.

  Guthrie’s regiment included two thousand ROKs, illiterate and untrained, swept up from the streets of Seoul and pressed into service without basic training. When difficulties in communications with its American troops and officers arose, Guthrie’s commanding officer, “Shorty” Soule of the Third Infantry Division, told Colonel Guthrie, “There is no language problem. I will not accept a language problem.”

  “Yes sir, General,” Guthrie responded. “There is no language problem. But we better tell that to the American GIs out there so they know.”

  Soule was one of several army generals who was a known drunk. Oddly enough, despite this and his mulishness, the Third Division performed creditably and “Shorty” Soule was decorated.

  Gen. Oliver P. Smith’s forefinger traced lightly a medium-scale map. His division was still stretched out over nearly fifty miles of narrow mountain road that had already been cut at half a dozen points by marauding Chinese troops who could, it seemed, at any time slash through at another score of places.

  “There are now sixteen CCF divisions in your vicinity,” X Corps had informed him. Maybe it was that which drummed sense into Ned Almond’s thick head after two wasted days of moronic adherence to an implausible objective: the advance due west across mountains to link up with Eighth Army. Damned fool! Almond should have been man enough to stand up to MacArthur and tell him the thing wasn’t doable. Instead, all this lickspittal bullshit. Almond could still lose his army. So could Johnny Walker over there on the other side of the hill. And how would Douglas Jesus Christ MacArthur like that?

  Smith was in a tent at Hagaru with his staff and about to issue orders for a march to the sea, starting with a pullback of the leading regiments from Yudam-ni. Not a retreat, he told himself, but a march. He knew what happened even to good troops when things got bad. A retreat could become a rout, a rout become flight, flight become panic, and in the end you had a stampede. That’s what had happened just the other side of the reservoir to Task Force MacLean. They had the figures now, as good as they we
re ever likely to have them. Maybe there were a few still out there, wandering around on the frozen lake, ducking the Chinese, hiding from patrols. They wouldn’t last long, not in this cold. He thought of the dead MacLean.

  Now, thanks to MacArthur and Ned Almond, Smith could lose an entire division.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, rapping a knuckle sharply on the map table to quiet their chat.

  His orders to the staff were crisp, very specific.

  “No unit moves south until it’s been leapfrogged by another and until that other unit has reached its objective and secured it. I don’t want two units moving simultaneously. Everything’s to be orderly, step-by-step. No bunching up or milling about. If a unit is held up by Chinese resistance or terrain or a blown bridge, the unit behind it doesn’t move south until the problem has been eliminated and the first unit’s reached its objective. If you are not clear on this, ask me now. I want no confusion, no lack of clarity.”

  Marines weren’t soldiers like MacLean’s Task Force, but they were still men. Anyone could panic.

  “One unit anchors before the unit north of it begins to move south. Got it?”

  There was murmured assent. Oliver Smith was nothing if not clear. When he was sure they understood him, Smith turned the meeting over to his ops officer, the G-3, to go into details as to the order of march.

  There were desperate fights just to get out of Yudam-ni and through the first hills hemming in the road. The Chinese had two entire Marine rifle regiments penned up here and much of their artillery, more than two-thirds of the whole division, and if they could keep them here, or kill them here, X Corps would collapse. During the firefight a Marine platoon surrounded by Chinese was reduced to using entrenching tools alternately as weapons, chopping at the Chinese with the steel blades, and as baseball bats, slapping back hurled grenades coming into their position much as a good singles hitter sprays base hits. It was small, ugly brawls like this, lots of them, that got them out.