The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  In the coming weeks, American or ROK forces repeatedly took Chinese prisoners who identified their units and confirmed that they had crossed the Yalu with large numbers of their compatriots. Again and again, Willoughby downplayed the field intelligence. But if Division, Corps, Army, and Far East Command were now arguing over whether Chinese prisoners were in fact really Chinese, whether they were part of a division, an army, or an army group, and what this meant for the extremely vulnerable troops of the United Nations force, little of this reached down to the troops themselves. Typical were the men of the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, who had been convinced, as they moved from Pyongyang to Unsan, that they were pursuing the last ragtag remnants of the North Korean Army and would soon reach the Yalu itself and, if at all possible, piss in it as a personal symbol of triumph.

  A very dangerous kind of euphoria had spread through the highest ranks of the Eighth Army, and no one reflected it more than MacArthur himself. As he, the most experienced officer in the American Army, was overwhelmingly confident of the road ahead, so were those in his command, including many of the senior people at Corps and Division. The higher you went in headquarters, especially in Tokyo, the stronger was the feeling that the war was over, and that the only job left was a certain amount of mopping up. There were many telltale signs of this overconfidence. On October 22, three days before the first Chinese prisoner was captured, Lieutenant General Walton Walker, commander of the Eighth Army, had requested authority from MacArthur to divert all further shipments of bulk-loaded ammunition from Korea to Japan. MacArthur approved the request and ordered six ships carrying 105-and 155mm artillery shells diverted to Hawaii. An army that had spent much of the previous four months starved for ammunition now felt it had too much.

  In the Eighth Army sector, Major General Laurence (Dutch) Keiser, commander of the famed Second Infantry Division, summoned all his officers for a special staff meeting on October 25. Lieutenant Ralph Hockley, a young forward observer with the Thirty-seventh Field Artillery Battalion, remembered the date and the words precisely. The Second, which had been through much of the heaviest fighting in the war, was going to leave Korea, Keiser said. He was in a wonderful mood. “We’re all going home and we’re going home soon—before Christmas,” he told his officers. “We have our orders.” One of the officers asked where they were going. Keiser answered that he couldn’t tell them, but it would be a place they would like. The speculation began: Tokyo, Hawaii, perhaps the States, or even some base in Europe.

  THE MEN OF the Eighth Regiment of the First Cavalry Division reached Unsan without difficulty. Sergeant Herbert (Pappy) Miller took the news that they had to leave Pyongyang and head north to Unsan to steady the ROKs philosophically. Miller was an assistant platoon sergeant with Love Company of the Third Battalion of the Eighth Cav. He might have liked a few more days in Pyongyang, but these were orders and that was the business they were in, plugging holes. He had never understood why the brass had thought the ROKs could lead the way north in the first place. Miller wasn’t worried about the Chinese coming in. What worried him was the cold, because they were still in summer-weight uniforms. Back at Pyongyang they had been told that winter clothes were on their way, already in the trucks, and supposed to arrive the next day, or the one after that. They had been hearing that for several days, but no winter uniforms had arrived. Because Miller’s regiment had been in so many battles for so long, the green troops of July and August had, through attrition, been replaced by the green troops of October. He and his close friend Richard Hettinger, from Joplin, Missouri, another World War II veteran, had vowed to keep an eye on each other. There was a lot of talk now about going home by Christmas, but Miller had a somewhat more jaundiced view, which was that you were home when you got home.

  Pappy Miller was from the small town of Pulaski, New York. He had served with the Forty-second Division in World War II, gone back to Pulaski, found little in the way of decent employment, and rejoined the Army in 1947. He was part of the Seventh Regiment of the Third Infantry Division, which had been detached and assigned to the First Cavalry, and he had only six months to go on a three-year enlistment when he was ordered to Korea in July 1950. In World War II, he had thought everything was always done right; and in Korea, damn near everything was done wrong. He and his company had arrived in country one morning in mid-July, had been rushed to the front lines near the village and key juncture of Taejon, and had been thrown into the line that first day. He had been through everything ever since, which was why his men called him Pappy, though he was only twenty-four years old.

  There had been a lot of bravado on the way up to the line near Taejon that first day, young soldiers who knew battle only through war movies bragging that they were going to kick some Korean ass. Miller had stayed silent while they boasted: better to feel that way after the battle was over than before it began. But there was no point in telling them that—it was something you had to learn yourself. And that first battle had been terrible; they were ill-prepared and the North Koreans were very effective, very experienced troops. By the next day, the company had been reduced from about 160 men to 39. “We were damn near annihilated that very first night,” Miller said. There was not much talk about kicking Korean ass after that.

  It was not that the kids had fought badly. They just weren’t ready, not right off the boat, and there were so many North Koreans. No matter how well you fought, there were always more. Always. They would slip behind you, cut off your avenue of retreat, and then they would hit you on the flanks. They were superb at that, Miller thought. The first wave or two would come at you with rifles, and right behind them were soldiers without rifles ready to pick up the weapons of those who had fallen and keep coming. Against an army with that many men, everyone, he thought, needed an automatic weapon. And the American equipment was terrible. Their basic infantry gear was often junk. Back at Fort Devens, they had been given old training rifles in terrible shape, poorly cared for, not worth a damn, which seemed to indicate how the nation felt about its peacetime army.

  Once they got to Korea, there was never enough ammo. Miller remembered a bitter fight early in the war when someone had brought over an ammo box and it was all loose. They had to make their own clips. He had wondered what kind of army sent loose ammo to outnumbered infantrymen whose lives were hanging in the balance. It was amateur hour, he thought. The North Koreans were driving good tanks, Russian A-34s, and the sorry old World War II bazookas the Americans had couldn’t penetrate their skins. In World War II, you always knew what your objective was and who was fighting on your left and right. In Korea, you were always fighting blind and were never sure of your flanks, because, likely as not, the ROKs were there.

  On the day they reached Unsan, Miller took a patrol about five miles north of their base, and they came upon an old farmer, who told them that there were thousands of Chinese in the area, many of whom had arrived on horseback. There was a simplicity and a conviction to the old man that made Miller almost sure he was telling the truth. So he brought him back to his headquarters. But no one at Battalion headquarters seemed very interested. Chinese? Thousands and thousands of Chinese? No one had seen any Chinese. On horseback? That was absurd. So nothing came of it. Well, Miller thought, they were the intelligence experts. They ought to know.

  Of the men in the Eighth Regiment, a young corporal named Lester Urban in Item Company, Third Battalion, was one of the first to sense the danger. He was a runner attached to Headquarters Company, which meant that he was around Battalion headquarters a lot and tended to pick up what the officers were saying. The seventeen-year-old Urban was only five-four, a mere one hundred pounds, too small for the football team at his high school back in the tiny town of Delbarton, West Virginia. His nickname in the Cav was Peanut, but he was tough and fast, and so he had been picked as runner. Given the sorry state of American wire and radio communications in Korea—the equipment rarely functioned properly—it was his job to deliver messages, oral and written, from Battalion to Compa
ny. It was exceptionally dangerous duty. Urban was proud of the fact that he knew how to do it and survive. If he made four or five trips to the same place in a day, he always varied his route and never got careless. Get predictable and get dead, he thought.

  Urban had a sense of unease, because there were no American units on either flank, which maximized your vulnerability. But they had been on such a roll and there had been so little opposition in the last few weeks that he wasn’t particularly worried, at least not until they reached Unsan. At Unsan, though, his regiment jutted out, in his words, like nothing so much as a sore thumb, and if you thought about it, then you realized that its three battalions were ill-placed and ill-spaced. The gaps between them, small on a map somewhere back at headquarters, were surprisingly wide if you had to run from one unit to another, as he did.

  Urban was near Battalion headquarters on October 31 when Lieutenant Colonel Harold (Johnny) Johnson, until the previous week the battalion commander of Third Battalion of the Eighth Regiment—the 3/8—but recently promoted to the command of his own regiment, the Fifth Cav (also part of the First Cavalry Division), had driven up to check on his old outfit. One of the last things Johnson had done before they all left Pyongyang was hold a memorial service for the men of the Third Battalion who had been lost since the war began—some four hundred of them. He was joined at the service by the soldiers who had been there from the start, “a pitifully small remainder,” as Johnson put it.

  Johnny Johnson was more than admired, he was loved by most of the men in his old outfit. He had been with them from the day they arrived in country, and they felt he always made the right decisions in battle. He had an unusual sense of loyalty to the men under him, the kind of thing that ordinary soldiers notice and value when they grade an officer—and they were always grading officers, because their lives depended on it. They knew that Johnson had turned down a chance to be a regimental commander early in the fighting in order to stay with the battalion when it was new to combat, because he felt obligated to the men he had brought over.

  He was a man who had already been through his own prolonged hell. Captured by the Japanese at Bataan at the start of World War II, he had managed to survive the Bataan Death March and more than three years as a prisoner. Generally, being a prisoner of war did not help an officer’s career—this would be especially true in Korea, where the treatment of American prisoners by the Communists was unusually cruel and where, because of the brainwashing, some men had been damaged—but Johnson eventually ended up as chief of staff of the Army. “He was the best,” Lester Urban said years later, “someone born to lead men. I think he was always thinking about what was good for us. Nothing ever got by him.”

  His experience on Bataan had made Johnson less trusting of conventional wisdom, and he knew more about the consequences of undue optimism than most officers. At that moment, he had the Fifth Cav positioned as a reserve force just a few miles south of his old unit, but he was becoming nervous, hearing talk of a large enemy force moving through the area, one that might cut the road, severing the Eighth Regiment from the rest of the division. On his own Johnson had driven north to check the situation out. On the ride, the same stillness that had bothered General Paik, the fact that there was nothing moving, upset Johnson too. Something like that, he later said, made the back of your neck prickle. When he finally reached his old battalion, he did not like what he saw at all. His replacement, Robert Ormond, was brand-new to his job and, to Johnson’s eye, had dispersed the battalion poorly. Most of the men were positioned in the flat paddy land and not even very well dug in.

  Watching the two officers meet, Urban sensed Johnson’s distress. Johnson was not, as Urban saw it, a man to chew another officer out, but what he said to Ormond seemed surprisingly tough: “You’ve got to get these men out of the valley and up on the high ground! They’re much too vulnerable where they are! You’ve got no defense if you’re hit!” (“I thought he was going to whip Ormond’s butt right then and there,” Urban said years later.) Johnson assumed that Ormond would pick up on what he said and was appalled to discover later that his advice had been ignored. Nor was it just the Third Battalion that was poorly positioned. After the entire tragedy was over, many of the more senior officers would admit that the disposition of the entire Eighth Regiment had been very poorly done. The men were arranged as if they had no enemies to fear.

  Lieutenant Hewlett (Reb) Rainer joined the regiment immediately after the Unsan battle, and one thing he decided to do was put together in his own mind what had happened. He was shocked at the way the regiment had been positioned: “The first thing was that the battalions could not really support each other. They were not properly linked up. The second thing was that you could drive a division or maybe two divisions of Chinese soldiers through them and the people spending the night there might not even know it. And that was the way the enemy fought—he came up and moved along the flanks, then encircled you, and then squeezed you,” Rainer said. “I know Regiment hadn’t gotten the word from higher headquarters about the Chinese, but still, they were very far north; it was Indian country; something was clearly up; and there was no point at all in being positioned as if you’re back in the States on some kind of war game. To say it was careless—that was an understatement.”

  Sergeant Bill Richardson, who had a recoilless rifle section of a heavy weapons platoon in Love Company, remembered October 31, 1950, exceptionally well. His section had drawn duty at the south end of the Third Battalion’s position, near a place called the Camel’s Head Bend, part of a unit guarding a bridge where a small road crossed the Nammyon River. The day before, they had finally received a shipment of what the supply people claimed were winter clothes: some field jackets, fresh socks, and nothing much else. Richardson had told one of his men to distribute the jackets as best he could and skip the sergeants because there just weren’t enough to go around. Years later, it infuriated him when he read that the men in his company had been caught asleep in their sleeping bags. It had been bad enough the way they were hit, but they sure as hell weren’t in their sleeping bags, because they didn’t have any. They had to create do-it-yourself sleeping bags as best they could, wrapping their blankets and shelter halves together.

  That day, Richardson had been on duty at the bridge when Lieutenant Colonel Johnson stopped on his way back from the battalion command post. Johnson had wanted to talk, but he was also being somewhat guarded. “Look,” he said, “we’ve had reports of a few minor roadblocks in the area. We think they’re remnants of the North Korean Army, and they may be coming up the river bend heading towards you, going north.” Richardson was not bothered by the news. He told Johnson (“my famous last words”), “Colonel, if they come up the river bend, they’ve had it.” Then Johnson warned him to be careful and they shook hands. Johnson wished him good luck and Richardson thought to himself—because Johnson was driving through the countryside virtually alone—Colonel, sir, you’re the one who needs the luck.

  They had been together since training at Fort Devens back in Massachusetts. Richardson had served in Europe at the tail end of World War II, arriving in that war too late to see combat, only the devastation it had wrought. But in Korea, he would eventually be battle-tested far beyond the norm, in combat as difficult and dangerous as any American force had ever been exposed to. He had grown up in Philadelphia and his parents had been entertainers. He was a less than diligent student, and was sent in time to the local industrial school, which was the system’s way of telling him to forget about college, in the unlikely event that the idea had ever entered his mind. His formal schooling ended in the ninth grade, and he joined the Army and found he liked it. He had been trained by skilled professionals, men who had been through the worst of World War II and passed on the little things that were most likely to save your life. In the early spring of 1950, Richardson was on the third extension of his enlistment in a period of post–World War II downsizing, and the Army had been trying to force him out. Then the North Koreans
moved south, and overnight the people who ran the Army decided they wanted him to stay on.

  So instead of mustering out at Fort Devens in late June, he became a charter member of the 3/8. Richardson remembered that immediately after the North Korean invasion, on June 26 or 27, Johnny Johnson had assembled the whole battalion at a post movie house, and the unit was so small that only the first two or three rows were filled. They were shown an infantry propaganda movie that ended with some soldiers being awarded Silver Stars and Bronze Stars. Johnson had told them, “Men, those of you who aren’t wearing one of those will be in a few weeks.” Richardson had thought he was crazy at the time. Within days men started arriving from every kind of outfit; MPs and cooks and supply men, all infantrymen now, enough to fill any movie theater. Then they shipped out.