The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Those were terrible days. The mood in both Washington and Tokyo was increasingly grim. A fear grew that American troops in a limited war might not be able to hold and that pressure would gradually rise for the use of the atomic weapon. This was aptly caught in a New York Times editorial on July 16: “Our emotions, as we watch our outnumbered, out-weaponed soldiers in Korea, must be a mingling of pity, sorrow and admiration. This is the sacrifice we asked of them, justified only by the hope that what they are now doing will keep this war a small war, and that the death of a small number will prevent the slaughter of millions. The choice has been a terrible one. We cannot be cheerful about it, or even serene. But we need not be hysterical. We need not accept a greater war and the collapse of civilization.”

  Of the many American illusions that died in those first few weeks of the Korean War, perhaps the most important was the belief in the atomic bomb as the ultimate weapon, in effect the only weapon we needed. That was an idea that had taken serious root in the national security mentality immediately after World War II, in part because it was so formidable a weapon, and in part because it meant that the defense bill could be done on the cheap. Just a year earlier, Omar Bradley, normally a man of exceptional common sense, had testified before the Congress that the day of the amphibious landing was essentially over. “Frankly, the atomic bomb, properly delivered, almost precludes such a possibility [as an amphibious invasion],” he said. In those early painful defeats, the nation learned that its entire defense system was an illusion, that the bomb was the most limited kind of weapon in any kind of limited war, and that the great power stalemate with the Russians might produce on the peripheries of the two superpowers areas where it was harder to control indigenous tensions. There was also this new truth: the atomic weapon was so powerful and so awesome a weapon, that it was in many situations morally abhorrent. It was the great almost unusable weapon. It was the ultimate deterrent, awesome really, for no nation would lightly strike against a member of the atomic club without a good deal of thought. But the early American monopoly of it, the quick, instantaneous way it had seemed to end the Pacific War, had created an illusion when it came to America’s defense budget: that it could develop a military arsenal on the cheap, with only one kind of arrow in it. If the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had seemed to inaugurate a brand-new chapter in the history of warfare, supposedly making all other weapons obsolete and creating a world where military power rested only with the richest, most technologically advanced nations, then the Korean battlefield defeats of early July 1950 shattered that belief. The world of the military had seemed to change completely back in August 1945; but now it was clear it might not have changed that much. As the country realized the limits of the atomic weapon, the popularity of both the Korean War and of the Truman administration began a steady decline. Perhaps not that many people would want to exchange this new, not yet rooted internationalism for the old isolationism, but that did not mean they liked the way things were going nor the men in Washington who were in charge. If this was America’s new international fate they were being confronted with, it was hardly a fate they would have chosen.

  JULY 1950 WAS one of the worst months in American military history: one long ignominious retreat filled with terrible small battles and occasional moments of great gallantry by outnumbered and outgunned American units who were again and again overwhelmed by the sheer force, size, and skill of the North Korean assault. The American troops were invariably positioned too thinly at critical junctions, trying with limited numbers to slow down the North Koreans until other units by then gathering in the United States and ticketed for Korea could get there; it was an army trying to buy time in precious increments with the most precious coin of all, the lives of its young men. Back home, the country was just beginning to mobilize for this newest war. The manpower situation in Japan on the eve of the war had been so desperate that when the war broke out, soldiers in Japan who had been convicted of relatively serious crimes, and were on their way back to stockades in the States in handcuffs, were given an alternative—fight in Korea and their records would be cleaned. If you had been an officer in an American division in Tokyo in the days before the Korean War broke out, a vast percentage of your time, said Lieutenant William West, an aide to Major General Hap Gay, the commander of the First Cav, was spent arranging for all too many of your men to get ready for their courts-martial.

  In early July, MacArthur told the Joint Chiefs he needed eleven battalions simply to hold the line. There was a certain desperation to the way that need was translated back in America: Uncle Sam wants you, now (or yesterday) for the Korean War. Marines who had fought in World War II and had gone happily back to their civilian lives were finding to their extreme displeasure that, though they had not volunteered for the Marine Reserves and thought themselves civilians, they were available nonetheless to the Corps, based on their old contracts with Uncle Sam. They were being rousted from their civilian incarnations for a second tour in less than a decade. In the meantime, draft calls were on the rise for the Army, since not many young men had rushed down to recruiting centers to volunteer as they had back in December 1941 after Pearl Harbor. Men already in the service were herded into combat units and to Korea without much training. When the North Koreans struck, noted an officer named Captain Frank Munoz, who commanded a company in the early fighting, “We turned the vacuum cleaner on. It sucked up men from everywhere, behind desks, out of hospitals, from depots. We filled up fast.” At first there was talk of six weeks of combat training before the men were shipped out, but there turned out to be no time for that; then there was talk of ten days of training once they arrived in Korea, but that too was discarded; finally, there was talk of three days of special training once they got to Pusan, but there was no time for that either, as the North Koreans pushed closer and closer. So men arrived in the port directly from the States, drew their gear, and more often than not were immediately shipped up to combat positions, often without having zeroed in their rifles or calibrated and test-fired their mortars, and with the Cosmoline on their .50-caliber machine guns barely rubbed off.

  In the Pentagon, there was a growing nervousness about the effectiveness of the leadership, especially about Lieutenant General Walton Walker, the commander of the Eighth Army, which meant, at that time, the commander of all Americans (and soon all United Nations ground forces) in Korea. So it was that, in the terrible days of early August, the Army dispatched its ascending star, Lieutenant General Matthew Bunker Ridgway, as part of a special, high-level, three-man team to meet with MacArthur, listen to him, and go over his needs, while expressing Washington’s own anxieties, especially about MacArthur’s relationship with Chiang Kai-shek.

  While Averell Harriman, the leader of Ridgway’s group, was busy measuring MacArthur and trying to bridge the gap between him and the administration on the issue of Chiang and China, Ridgway’s most important job was to inspect Walton Walker and his Korean command. Ridgway, who had last witnessed a headquarters in the heady final days of World War II, commanding airborne troops, the elite of the elite, was appalled by what he saw in Korea. All too many of Walker’s key officers, he believed, were men who had not done well in that war and were being given one last opportunity to serve so that they could retire at a slightly higher rank and pay level. It was as if the people who had been in charge back in Washington and Tokyo were allowing tickets to be punched for old times’ sake, not sending or demanding the best of a new generation of officers. Walker could not have agreed more and was furious with the quality of men he had been getting, and the fact that so many of the better officers seemed to be siphoned off once they reached Asia, to serve in the headquarters in Tokyo rather than in the field commanding troops in battle. Walker was a good and decent officer, Ridgway thought; give him a tank unit and specific orders and no one would be better. But nonetheless he believed Walker was in way over his head in this assignment, and the Eighth Army staff around him was visibly weak and badly organized. The
passivity of Walker’s chief of staff shocked him. Some of the regimental commanders were older men lacking in combat experience. As for the fighting men themselves, they were not, he reported, by a very long shot up to the standards of their World War II predecessors.

  Just about everything in his report was negative. The troops all too often lacked infantry fundamentals and were not aggressive. They had become prisoners of their machinery, most particularly their vehicles, and thus of Korea’s poor and limited system of roads. They did not counterattack; they did not dig in properly; attempts at camouflage were careless, fields of fire poorly drawn up, communications between units weak. Ridgway was shocked—here the United States was, sending young men out into combat in a way that greatly endangered them. That to him violated the most elemental tenet of an infantry commander’s creed. Ridgway felt strongly that Walker should be relieved, because in his estimation he lacked the larger command skills and the vision necessary to change things. Ridgway was, however, wary of making that recommendation too forcefully. He was naturally uneasy about relieving an already desperately embattled commander, one whose troops were threatened with being pushed into the sea. Might such a move damage the already fragile morale of our fighting men? he wondered. He was no less uneasy about looking like an opportunist, someone critical of Walker because he wanted the command for himself. Not knowing the deep chasm that already existed between MacArthur and Walker, he worried about MacArthur’s reaction if he suggested Walker’s relief. Would MacArthur, always so sensitive to Washington, see him as a spear carrier for Truman or just another opportunist? He decided to talk with Harriman, who had been running difficult, sensitive, high-level missions since the 1930s. Harriman, like General Lauris Norstad, an Air Force officer and the third member of their team, believed that Walker had to go, but was wary of broaching it at that moment unless, in their final talks, MacArthur opened the subject himself: any discussion, Norstad believed, should be initiated by the commander. They were not to look like they had come out from Washington to attack his command.

  Better, Harriman suggested, for Ridgway to discuss the Walker matter with senior officials in Washington, including the president himself, and then make the suggestion through proper channels. Ironically, as Clay Blair later pointed out, MacArthur himself had already lost confidence in Walker, was thinking of relieving him, and believed that Ridgway was the best man for the job. Had Ridgway actually replaced Walker at that moment, Blair wrote, “events in Korea would very likely have taken a different and more favorable course for the American Army.” For Ridgway would have been able to stand up to MacArthur as Walker never could, would have been far more independent of Tokyo than Walker, would have been far better connected back in Washington, and almost surely would have been more cautious in moving north after the thirty-eighth parallel was crossed.

  On their way back to Washington, Larry Norstad pushed Ridgway on the subject of the Eighth Army command. “I think you ought to be in command there.” But Ridgway, extremely sensitive to the idea that he might use his superior position and great Pentagon leverage to usurp another man’s command, resisted. “Please don’t mention that. It will look as though I was coming over here looking for a job and I’m not.” There was one other thing that Ridgway noted, but he was reluctant to talk about it. Much as he was thrilled by a briefing MacArthur had given about his plans for an amphibious landing behind the enemy’s lines at a place called Inchon—Ridgway was, after all, an airborne man and he liked the idea of surprise assaults away from the main strength of the enemy—he worried about the difficulties that came from dealing with so senior an officer as MacArthur, so physically distanced from a cruel, bitter, and alien battlefield.

  In fact, the command was almost turned over to Ridgway at that moment. Harriman pushed hard for it. His recommendation was made to Truman; Louis Johnson, the secretary of defense; Omar Bradley, the chairman of the JCS; and Joe Collins, the Army chief of staff. It was an ideal move, everyone agreed, because it would put in play the Army’s best younger commander and might have the side advantage—though no one ever actually said this—of lessening MacArthur’s ability to act on his own. Ridgway was so forceful an officer that even someone as lofty as Douglas MacArthur would find it harder to do end runs around him. But Joe Collins had already ticketed Ridgway for promotion to vice chief of staff in 1951 and feared that, in Korea, “you might be so involved I couldn’t get you out.” It was a curious way to look at command in the only shooting war America was involved in; it undoubtedly reflected a deep-seated belief in Washington that this still might be only the preliminary round, that the really big enemy strike might soon come in Europe. Among those who thought this was true was Ridgway himself.

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  SO WALTON WALKER would not be replaced at that moment, even though he had no important defenders either in Washington or Tokyo, where he was often out of the play on vital command decisions and where MacArthur’s people made fun of him in private. Walker was fighting, as his pilot, Mike Lynch, who was also his great confidant, put it, a two-front war—against the North Koreans and the Tokyo high command. Walton (Johnnie) Walker knew what was up, knew that he was perilously close to being relieved. Yet there was one exceptional quality Ridgway had sensed in him, whatever he believed were Walker’s limitations, and that was his bulldog tenacity. The two generals had conferred as Walker’s troops were being systematically pushed back to the Naktong River. The great question in those gloomy days was whether they could hold in the Pusan Perimeter at all, or might simply be pushed off the peninsula altogether. At their meeting Ridgway had asked Walker what he would do if he were driven back any farther. He would not be driven back any farther, Walker had answered. “That’s what you tell the troops,” Ridgway said, “but what will you really do if you are driven from the Naktong Line?” “General,” Walker had answered defiantly, “I will not be driven from the Naktong Line.”

  In at least one way Walker was fortunate—he did not have much time to worry about what Washington or Tokyo thought of him. He was too busy each day desperately moving troops around, trying to head off the latest North Korean advance. As such, he had little time for self-pity. Crisis followed crisis. Every division commander, every regimental commander, every company commander was short of troops. Each night in July, the In Min Gun seemed ready to break through American lines at four or five different places. Walker’s job was always to plug the next leak—to try to decide which of the many places was most important. Rarely had an American commander been dealt such a bad hand. That his troops were poorly prepared was partly his own fault, for he had been one of the commanders in Tokyo in those pre–June 25 days, but in the early days they were also badly outnumbered by an enemy fighting on its own terrain. Walker’s supply line was hopelessly long, extending all the way back to California. There were shortages of everything: troops, commanders, and sometimes most important of all, ammunition. He was in hostile territory, a tank commander in predominantly mountainous country, and when it came to tanks, the other side had more and better ones than he did. Worse yet, even in his own command he was to no small degree an outsider: MacArthur and his ever more powerful chief of staff, Ned Almond, viewed him with condescension, if not with open contempt. Sometimes it seemed to Walker that he was the last American in the Far East to hear of vital decisions. The entire Tokyo staff under MacArthur and Almond grasped the disrespect shown him by its two superiors and, as so often happens, parroted their attitudes.

  6. HEIGHT OF NORTH KOREAN ADVANCE, LATE AUGUST 1950

  Walker could not even get the field officers he wanted. Others back in Washington, and Ridgway on his trip out, had complained about the poor quality of Walker’s staff, but whenever a troopship docked in Yokohama, Japan, before any officers could disembark, their records were screened by the Far East command. The best officers would then be skimmed off by MacArthur’s headquarters, and the others would be released to the Eighth Army. It was a pipeline to be sure, but a corrupt one, for it was deliver
ing talent to all the wrong places. Walker was not normally a man to complain. He had always accepted the whimsical nature of Army decision-making for what it was, but he would later complain to intimates about how headquarters made fun of the quality of his staff and commanders but then refused to send him the rising stars he asked for. He wanted Slim Jim Gavin, a famed airborne commander in World War II and one of the most talented, charismatic younger officers in the Army, and was angry to discover he could not get him. During World War II, George Marshall had been appalled by the relatively advanced age of many of his regimental commanders and had demanded younger, more vigorous men; he had wanted no regimental commander over the age of forty-five. But in Korea, in what would be an unusually taxing command physically because of the cruel climate and the nature of the war, it was the same old story. On the eve of the war, only one of nine regimental commanders, thirty-seven-year-old Mike Michaelis, met the Marshall test: of the others, one was fifty-five, one was fifty, four were forty-nine, and two were forty-seven. Michaelis was far and away the best regimental commander in Korea in the beginning, and his Twenty-seventh Regiment Wolfhounds were being used in almost every critical situation, much like a fire brigade. In those early days, when the American units were, on occasion, surrounded by the North Koreans, Michaelis was so successful (some of his contemporaries thought) because he was an airborne officer, and airborne people were taught not to worry if they found themselves surrounded. That was in a sense their natural habitat, and they always expected to be resupplied from the air. Officers in other units, surrounded and cut off, had a tendency to panic and fall back too quickly, their unit discipline unraveling as they pulled back, all too often into well-prepared North Korean ambushes. Michaelis and his men worried first and foremost about unit integrity. The ability of his men to protect one another and use their weaponry to create protective fields of fire was considered more important than whether or not they were momentarily encircled.