The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Graham remembered them trying to get off their hill, and finally taking cover in a ditch, the captain desperately going through his pockets attempting to find a few last rounds of ammo. That was when Graham was hit again—in the same general area but from a different direction. He was bleeding like a stuck pig, he thought. He lost any feeling in his leg almost immediately. So he took his undershorts off and had Ormand fold them and use them to stanch the bleeding, half-in and half-out of his belt—an instant battlefield bandage, for you made do as best you could in situations like this. The enemy fire was brutal by then. As far as Graham could tell, everybody had been hit. Only a few of them were still able to move. Maybe twenty Americans were now lying dead in the ditch next to him—he could barely tell the difference between the living and the dead anymore. A few of the men who were still functioning asked him what they should do—run, fight, or surrender? Surrendering in another war might have been an acceptable choice, but they had all heard stories—true ones, as it turned out—of American prisoners found with their hands wired behind them, shot through the head, and left in shallow graves. But how could they fight, he thought, when there wasn’t a clip of ammo among them?

  Graham answered that he was dying and could not tell them what to do. They were on their own. The last he saw of them, they were moving out to surrender. He listened carefully and, hearing no more firing, no telltale sound of bullets, he was relieved that at least they had not been executed immediately. Later, he learned that Wilson and Lobo had been killed; Wallace, Ormand, and Agnew were eventually recaptured by American forces. Graham lay there, bleeding badly, waiting for his death. The gooks got me, he thought. The first two groups of North Koreans who came by left him for dead. The third group discovered he was still alive, stripped him of everything—boots, socks, cigarette lighter, watch, even his much feared little black book with his company shit list, everyone who had pissed him off and the trivial offenses they had committed. No need for that anymore; most of the names belonged to dead men anyway, and he was about to join them. “You officer?” one of the Koreans asked. “No, me GI,” he answered. Then what little luck he had seemed to run out. The group had what he called a Smart John in it, an officer who seemed smarter and meaner than the rest of them. He tapped Graham between the eyes with the butt of his rifle, trying to make him get up. Graham tried to signal that he couldn’t rise because of his legs. The Korean aimed his bayonet and mocked stabbing Graham in the genitals. Graham shook his head—can’t get up, he gestured again. Graham’s uniform was soaked in blood below the waist. The officer left him momentarily to check out the other American bodies. Some of the Korean soldiers started teasing Graham—asking in primitive English how old he was and whether he was thirsty. He tried to get a drink from them, but they refused, though they seemed friendlier than the officer. Then the Smart John came back. This is it, Graham thought, my farewell moment. But the Korean, evidently deciding Graham was too far gone to bother with, just grabbed his dog tags and left.

  Miraculously, in about twelve hours Graham felt strong enough to begin to crawl off. For the next twelve nights he crawled and limped toward what he thought might be American positions, hiding during the day, moving painfully and slowly and cautiously at night. In the first twenty-four hours, he figured he crawled only about a hundred yards. Eventually, he found a stick and used it as a crutch. He got water where he could find it—even licking the dew off the grass. By the time he made it back to his battalion headquarters, he had a heavy beard and, he swore, his mustache was so long it was curling up at the end. He looked gaunt as hell, having lost some fifty pounds. For a small group of officers sitting there when he crawled in, including Lieutenant Colonel Claire Hutchin, it was as if a ghost had appeared. Major Butch Barberis had just opened a beer. He looked at the apparition, took the beer, and handed it to him. “Best thing I ever tasted,” Graham told Barberis. His Korean War was over. Charley Company had, of course, been devastated. Perhaps fifteen to twenty of them made it back to headquarters the next day. A company in a situation like that normally had six officers, but Charley Company had already been down to three, and two of them were killed in the first twenty-four hours.

  Captain Bartholdi did not fare as well. He had been with a group of men who were eventually taken prisoner by the North Koreans. They were marched every night for about two weeks, the prisoners bound to one another by wire, making a couple of miles each night. The North Koreans tried to separate the Americans by class and rank, determined to be much harder on the officers, who were, they believed, true representatives of the capitalist class. During the day, while they were waiting, they often did interrogations: Are you from a rich or poor family? they would ask. If you said rich, they would hit you, so soon everyone said poor. Do you like MacArthur? they asked. No, the prisoners answered. Do you like Truman? No, they would answer. Bartholdi had always been known to the men as Captain Bart, and now to protect him they simply called him Bart, but finally after about two weeks of captivity, the North Koreans threatened to kill all the men if their officer did not step forward. Bartholdi did, and they beat him terribly in the next days, and eventually murdered him, placing him in a mass grave along with the bodies of a large number of local Koreans. Most of the other American prisoners were rescued the next day by an American tank unit. Bartholdi was posthumously awarded the Silver Star.

  Charley Company had taken the full force of the North Korean attack in those few days and suffered accordingly. Though it was rebuilt, it always seemed to be just a little less lucky than other companies, the casualties it suffered always a little higher. Soon, there were officers in the regiment who would threaten men by saying, “Fuck up here, and you’ll be in Charley Company.”

  SOMEHOW, IN ALL that brutal fighting, they had managed to slow down the North Koreans, who had broken through but failed completely to maximize their success. An entire North Korean division had been waiting in reserve near the Naktong Bulge and, inexplicably, had not been thrown into the battle. Instead, they had paused and regrouped, and that had been just enough time to give Walker’s forces a second chance. For there had been Charley Companies all along the Naktong River that night. No one knew better than Walker how little he had in the way of reinforcements and how long it took even the best troops now arriving in country to become accustomed to battle conditions. An elite unit, the Second Division, with an exceptionally proud history, would still not be an elite combat-tested unit, not in Korea, until it had served some time on the line. Of the officers now arriving in country as platoon leaders and company commanders, it would be impossible to tell who had the requisite talent and instinct for battle until they were under fire, for that could not be taught, not at West Point or VMI, or in ROTC. Mostly it was about instinct, and that was something only learned in the doing. That sooner or later these new divisions would fight well Walker had no doubt, but it was all about time, and time was the thing he had the least of. He was, Mike Lynch said, like a man with all his fingers in the dike all the time, and there were still never enough fingers.

  Later, the military judgment would be that the In Min Gun commanders had failed in that last great assault on the Pusan Perimeter largely because they had used their troops so poorly. If they had concentrated their forces and struck in greater numbers at fewer points, they might have been far more successful. (Of course, if they had done that, they might also have been better targets for American artillery and airpower.) But there would be little satisfaction for Walker in that ex post facto judgment; at the time, he had felt overwhelmed by the relentless nature of the North Korean attacks. September 1, Mike Lynch recalled, had been one of the worst days. They had been flying low over the sector occupied by the Ninth Regiment (of the Second Division) and had seen a company of Americans retreating along a creekbed, even though no enemy force was pressing on them. Worse, in Walker’s opinion, they were bypassing perfect defensive positions from which they could slow down the North Koreans. So he told Lynch to take him in as low as he cou
ld. Lynch dropped the plane down to three hundred feet, pulled back the flaps, cut the throttle, and glided in just fifty feet above the Americans (hoping, as always, that the engine would start up again). There was the three-star commander of the Eighth Army, leaning so far out the door, he was essentially no longer in the plane, screaming over his bullhorn, “Stop! Go back, you yellow sons of bitches! You are not under attack! Go back, you had great positions!” The troops paid no attention, leaving Walker in a rage. It was one more bugout at a crucial moment, and among troops from a supposedly elite division just in from the States. He told Lynch to fly on to the headquarters of Major General Laurence (Dutch) Keiser, the Second Division commander. Based on his treetop observations and other scattered bits of intelligence, he decided that the Communists had hit the Second Division and driven a hole right in the middle of its sector—about six miles wide and eight miles deep, he later concluded. At that moment, he believed, the Second Division was perilously close to being cut in half.

  Like others in the command, he already had serious doubts about Dutch Keiser, fifty-five at the time, a little old for such a demanding command and believed to be an old fifty-five at that. There was a growing feeling that this war had come too late for him. He seemed reluctant to leave his division headquarters, depending far too much on his subordinates to get around. He was in those difficult hours, as Clay Blair rather delicately put it, “operating from his well guarded command post.” Sometimes men who are exceptionally brave in one war, when they are young, do not age well as soldiers. So it was with Keiser. He was West Point, class of 1917, had commanded a battalion and won a Silver Star in World War I, where everything had gone right for him and he had been young and brave. But the ensuing thirty-three years had seen a changed officer. He had been away from combat for more than three decades—had not commanded troops in World War II. In the fall of 1948, he had joined the Second Division as the assistant division commander, and in February 1950 had gotten his second star and command of the division, helped along, no one doubted, by his close friendship with his former classmate, Joe Collins, the Army chief of staff. Mike Lynch, who often expressed bluntly what Walker thought privately, believed that Keiser had turned into a coward as he aged, that the demands of this war were simply too much for him. That morning he seemed to be completely overwhelmed by circumstances. Walker’s arrival at his headquarters precipitated a brutal scene, one that plays out only in the worst moments of combat, when two men are perched at the abyss, and when there is no more room for failure. Walker was already in a rage when he walked in, and then he saw Keiser’s map—a dreamer’s map that had nothing to do with the collapsing front he had just flown over. Here was a general, part of whose division was being overrun, and he did not even seem to know it.

  “Dutch, where’s your division?” was the first thing Walker asked. “Where are your reserves? What are you doing about positioning your reserves? You must hold at Yongsan! If you don’t, we could lose Miryang, and if we lose Miryang, we could lose Pusan. You’re in the heart of this thing and you don’t know what’s going on.” Keiser, indicating that he was still waiting for his liaison men to return and tell him where different units were, complained that the roads were jammed with troops, which were slowing his men down. Of course, they’re jammed with troops, Lynch thought. They’re your own damn troops bugging out.

  Keiser tried to fill Walker in on where his division was, but nothing he said gibed with what Walker had just seen. “That’s not it at all,” Walker interrupted him. “I’ve just flown over your front line.” Just then, one of Keiser’s liaison officers arrived, apologizing for being late but he had been slowed down by some colonel who was standing at a road junction, ordering everyone to stop retreating. “No son of a bitch who can fight passes this line,” the colonel had been saying. “Yes,” said Walker, “I know that colonel—that’s my assistant G-3.”

  Then Walker laid down the law: “You get this division under control or I’ll take control of it, and I’ll run you out of the Armys! I am not going to lose this battle.” He explained to Keiser exactly where he wanted his troops to make a stand. Then, as he got up to go, Keiser started to accompany him back to his plane, but Walker shook him off. “You get busy now. I don’t need anyone to walk me to my plane.” At the plane, instead of getting in, Walker sat down for a moment, obviously trying to pull himself together. Lynch assumed he wanted a moment of quiet until he looked over and saw that Walker was crying. “I can’t let this Army be destroyed, but I’m losing the whole Army and I don’t know what to do to stop it.” He was, Lynch thought, absolutely exhausted. Not beaten, not defeated, not broken, just exhausted, completely wrung out. Lynch wondered how much more the Army could get out of one man in a situation like this before he broke.

  Walker needed fresh troops to plug the gaps, but he was losing them to the coming Inchon assault. All too many of the troops coming from the States seemed to be ticketed for the Seventh Division, which would be part of MacArthur’s Inchon landing force. In addition, he was about to lose the Marines, who were going to be the main assault force at Inchon. He had been arguing with Tokyo for several days, trying to keep the Fifth Marine Regiment (part of the First Marine Division) under his command. He had reached a tentative agreement that he could have them—but only through September 4, and only if he would do his best not to use them in defense of Pusan. After all, the Inchon landing, scheduled for September 15, was the main event and it was now only two weeks away. MacArthur wanted these troops fresh for so dangerous an assault. As such, they were Walker’s more in theory than in reality. But if ever there was a moment when he felt himself perched on the very edge of failure, this was it. After watching the battering part of the Second Division was taking, he called Brigadier General Eddie Craig, the Marine commander, and told him he was going to need the Marines to protect the road to Miryang, and they should start moving up now. He also called MacArthur’s headquarters and spoke to Major General Doyle Hickey, the assistant chief of staff, who was acting as G-3 (operations officer), with Almond so involved in the Inchon planning. He issued an emotional request for permission to use the Marines—essentially, an ultimatum of the sort MacArthur himself was famous for. “If I lose the Marines,” he told Hickey, who was considered by outsiders to be unusually fair-minded, “I will not be responsible for the safety of the front.” Those were words that could chill any higher echelon officer. Back came word from Hickey that MacArthur had approved their use in Pusan and that Walker’s control of them, if needed, was now extended beyond September 4.

  Armies, no matter how great or small, poised between defeat and victory, depend more than anything else on the leadership of junior officers. One of the many junior officers who helped save Walker and the Eighth Army in those first terrible days was a lieutenant from the Second Engineer Battalion of the Second Division named Lee Beahler. With his engineers, he skillfully created a tiny but effective blocking force and, miraculously, stopped the North Koreans at Yongsan just when it seemed like they were going to pour through. By the end of September 1, there had seemed no chance to hold Yongsan. But Beahler and his engineers, in time with other Army units and the Marines joining in, managed to do it. The battle for Yongsan lasted two weeks, and it was continuous and ferocious; to some of the men who fought there, and never forgot it, Yongsan was both a war within a war, and a war without end. To the GIs and Marines, who heard again and again how important Yongsan was, the village, once taken, was a singular disappointment: two streets, one east-west, one north-south, crisscrossing each other. No more than that. If it had been a town back in the States, as one of the engineers said, the first thing you’d have wanted to do was get the hell out of it. When they finally walked through Yongsan, there was a sense almost of wonderment—that so much blood, Korean and American, had been shed for something that seemed so without value. Men had fought and died for Paris and Rome—more than three hundred thousand Russians had died in the final battle for Berlin—but to fight so long for someth
ing that barely existed amazed the Americans, and seemed to emphasize the special madness of this war. But Yongsan was important, for the road from there could lead to Miryang, some twelve miles away, and the road from Miryang led to Pusan, and beyond Pusan was a lost war.

  Pushed by Walker, Keiser had taken the Second Combat Engineers, who had already seen a good deal of action, almost all of it as infantrymen, and attached them to the already battered Ninth Regiment. Lee Beahler commanded Dog Company of the Engineers. The odyssey that had taken him back to Korea in July 1950 had not been an entirely happy one. He had served in the Army in World War II, then gone back to the Texas College of Mines. There, somewhat to his surprise, he found that he missed the camaraderie and sense of purpose he had found in the Army, and so in 1946 he decided to go back in. There, in the mysterious ways that the Army operated, he had been offered a chance to go overseas and had, he thought, been given a choice of possible destinations. He had expressed a great preference for Europe, but had of course been sent to Korea, a country he quickly came to dislike, in no small part because of its pervasive smell—that of human waste turned into instant fertilizer, a fragrance that bothered many other Americans as well. Nor had he found the Korean people, angry over their years under a colonial reign and unsure of what the Americans represented in terms of their future, particularly sympathetic. Other Americans told him how much more pleasant Japan was and how friendly the Japanese, now defeated and eager to imitate their conquerors, had become. There was surely an injustice in this: the people who had inflicted the cruelest colonial horrors on another nation turned out to be, once the war was over, a great deal more likeable than their victims in the eyes of most Americans.