The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Korea was, he wrote on August 9, soon after he arrived, “one of the toughest spots our forces have ever been committed to and we have [come with] far too little and too late. None of us can understand the optimistic and complacent accounts put out by headquarters. The enemy hasn’t shown any signs of weakening.” The terrain and weather were terrible. “As for me in my job as regimental commander, I’m the model of optimism and enthusiasm. I intend to do my best as a professional soldier.” Two and a half weeks later, just before the final North Korean push on the Pusan Perimeter began, he wrote, “We have dug ourselves into the hillside like a bunch of moles. The flies and mosquitoes are terrific and the dead we can’t get to bury are beginning to stink. We never even get our shoes off here. Water is scarce and our food has to come up from ten miles back.”

  Everyone, he wrote home, was always exhausted. There was no time off, no place to rest or sleep, no place to eat. The Americans chose to do their fighting in the daytime; the North Koreans, who had no airpower, at night. That meant the Americans never really got the night off. Even in the rare peaceful moments they had to be on alert, wondering when the next attack might come. Those who slept a little too soundly, it was believed, might never wake up. In the Naktong battle, even though the Americans had stopped the main North Korean thrust in the first forty-eight hours and gradually strengthened their defensive positions, the fighting never abated, not even by September 16, which was the jumping-off day in the Naktong area for the big American counter-assault, coordinated with MacArthur’s Inchon landing the day before.

  Probably on September 8 the In Min Gun came closest to smashing through the Twenty-third’s lines, attacking regimental headquarters from the rear and almost breaking through just at the point where Fox Company, which was in charge of the regiment’s defense, was thinnest. It was a terrible night, rain pouring down, one that favored the North Koreans. First Lieutenant Ralph Robinson, nominally the battalion adjutant but just promoted to company commander because Fox had in the previous week lost all its officers, reacted brilliantly. Although the North Koreans had already deeply penetrated his company’s position, Robinson managed to slip right through their position under heavy fire in the drenching rain, reach Able Company, detach its reserve platoon, and lead it back. He used Able Company to patch up the collapsing defense and drove the North Koreans off. It was an astonishing accomplishment, his superiors later decided.

  After the battles for the Naktong were over, regimental aides estimated that between September 2 and September 15, at least seventeen major Communist attacks took place, all aimed at the heart of the Twenty-third’s position. In one letter Freeman wrote his wife after ten days of the Naktong fighting, he noted, “It’s poured for the last three days. We’ve had no air support. (In fact damn little when the weather is good.) Our artillery planes can’t go up and we are blind. We’re just sitting here, taking it. We have already repulsed thirteen attacks in force—ten of them at night. The nights are the worst. The gooks just pour in all over, and we continue to slaughter them. The rest of the time we’re continually under fire. He can bring his stuff across the River at will. We are all disgusted with our Air Force. Our losses are terrific. I have left less than 40 per cent of what I had on the 31st of August when this particular battle started. Almost all of my company officers have been lost…. We are bitter about the whole thing. We fight desperately for all we’re worth; not only because we realize our course is right, but also because we’re fighting for our survival. But it all seems so useless and stupid. To ‘liberate’ South Korea we’re destroying it and its people in the course of war more than we are the North Koreans. All Koreans hate us. Everyone here is an enemy. We can’t trust anyone.”

  He concluded: “Then too I’m more and more convinced that we’ve been sucked into a beautiful trap where we’re having to take on all the fanatical hordes of Asia. It seems our whole regular Army has been committed and chewed up. I see no way of getting out of this thing or any end to it. We can’t impose a military defeat on these Oriental fanatics. They just keep coming. Life is cheap. They aren’t dependent on supplies or communications as we are. I feel more and more that we have made a supreme error in committing our forces in this bottomless pit.” These were the words of an Army commander who had not had a decent night’s sleep in weeks. Even the paper he was writing on, he noted, was soggy from the rain.

  In the end, he believed the battle along the Naktong had been worth it, for all the hardships and losses they suffered. They had also been incredibly lucky. The North Koreans had had little sense of just how fragile the American positions were. They had had no airplane spotters to tell them how few forces initially stood between them and Pusan. American losses, though, had been terrible. The First and Second Battalions of the Twenty-third alone, according to regimental logs, had suffered over 50 percent killed and wounded. The commanders of every rifle company in the first two battalions had been lost during this two-week period. In some companies, the official report noted, they had been replaced three to five times. Paul Freeman never really forgot those awful days on the Naktong or the grim choices he had been forced to make, sacrificing some young men so others might live. Some seventeen years later, as a four-star making his last tour of Fort Benning before retiring, he discovered that Sergeant Berry Rhoden, formerly from Charley Company, by then a grizzled master sergeant, was still stationed there. Freeman had always remained close to the men who had served with him in the Twenty-third in Korea, and he had sought out Rhoden a number of times, just to talk. Now, on this final ceremonial day, he asked Rhoden to accompany him on his tour. There was another general with them that day, a two-star, and Rhoden enjoyed the byplay between them, four-star to two-star, rarified stuff for an NCO to witness. At one point, Freeman turned to his colleague. “I’d like to introduce you to a member of your command, Sergeant Berry Rhoden. He’s an old comrade of mine. Berry is a survivor of a terrible moment when I made the hardest decision I ever had to make as an Army officer. I had to sacrifice his entire company for the good of my regiment and all the other units in the Pusan Perimeter. I had to buy time for the other units to form into a blocking force. And they bought the time we needed. It was a terrible, terrible moment and a brutal decision. It was the hardest decision I ever made. Almost no one from his unit survived. You take good care of him, hear.” It was one more reminder to Rhoden that none of them had been able to forget that moment.

  THE STAND BY the Second Engineers and the arrival of the Marines to help block the routes to Miryang did not end the Naktong-Pusan fighting. It only abated with Inchon—and even then, despite the threat of being completely cut off, some North Korean units fought on, with the rare tenacity that reminded veterans of the island struggles with the Japanese near the end of World War II. Isolated pockets of resistance, where the North Koreans were entrenched in well-concealed hill or mountain positions, held out for days. “We hit Hill 610 so hard,” Lee Beahler said of some of the fighting “that after the battle it should have become Hill 609.”

  Walton Walker was one of the first to sense the change in the Naktong fighting. During the worst of it in early September he had worried constantly about whether the moment had come to abandon the Naktong defense completely and move back to what was known at headquarters as the Davidson Line, a position drawn up about three weeks earlier at the request of General MacArthur just in case the Eighth Army could not hold. It was smaller, tighter, and easier to defend than the Naktong Line, and much closer to Pusan itself. On the night of September 4, Walker had Gene Landrum, his chief of staff, prepare orders for all units to fall back to the Davidson Line. The next day, he asked Mike Lynch to fly him over the front lines, and wherever they went, the troops, recognizing the three stars recently repainted on the plane, waved. Walker was impressed; the morale of his men was on the upswing, and based on that sense he decided they would try to hold at the Naktong.

  The North Koreans had not collapsed. But the great offensive had failed, and they were now
the overextended force, caught in strategically vulnerable positions, their supply lines too long, their elite troops badly beaten down by two very hard months of fighting an adversary who had gradually gained the advantage in hardware, armor, artillery, and airpower and was gathering strength by the day, rushing men and materiel to the front. The dream of a three-week race to Pusan had died as completely as that of two hundred thousand Communists in the south rising up to join the battle. The Communists had rolled the dice in that winner-take-all moment on August 31 and had come up short. Ever so slowly, they were being turned, without anyone quite realizing it at first, into an army on the defensive. Suddenly, they were the ones fighting just to hold on.

  Lieutenant Jack Murphy was soon a beneficiary of that change. Murphy was a talented recent graduate of West Point, class of 1950, who had found himself on his way to Korea only a few weeks after graduation, his honeymoon cut in half, and he had taken over a platoon in the Ninth Regiment of the Second Infantry Division. He had been involved in very heavy fighting from the moment he arrived, just in time for the big North Korean push along the Naktong. Within twenty-four hours of his arrival at the front, he had been engaged in bitter fighting for which he had received the Silver Star, and his platoon sergeant, Loren Kaufman, the best soldier he ever met, won the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  The Naktong fighting, thought Murphy, had been the most bitter kind of combat, a violent death to the loser kind of tug-of-war. For the fighting men, each day was a triumph—or a disaster—because it seemed like it could always go either way: exhausted men in both armies stumbled into one another in small firefights that often ended with bayonets as the arbiters of victory. The victories were anything but clear or grand. Surviving for another day was everything. The problem with taking one small hill was that, sooner or later, some officer somewhere up the ranks was going to find another small hill for you to take. The new hill would be one no one had ever cared about except that it overlooked some narrow dirt road that no one had ever cared about either, which would lead the Communists, if it were not guarded and controlled, to a small port city called Pusan, which no one outside Korea had even heard of until June 25, 1950, and which most Americans still did not care about—unless, of course, the Communists entered the city.

  The Naktong fighting was comprised of a thousand little battles, many of them fought with unsurpassed savagery, so many miniature Battles of the Bulge, in George Russell’s words, containing all the principal elements of that famous battle, everything but the size and scope and place in history. But if these battles lacked sufficient scope to be worthy of a great historian, they offered sufficient history to last the rest of a man’s life and haunt him accordingly, frozen permanently and cruelly in memory.

  Murphy had been on the line for some two weeks when he was switched from a platoon in George Company to the command of Fox Company, which had lost all its officers. It was not a move he had been eager to make. He had come to like his men, his guys, in that difficult two-week stretch. The relationships, starting from nothing and building each day with each new battle, had become incredibly intense; it was as if they had all been born in the same week in the same hospital in the same small town, had known one another all their lives, and had never made any other friends. But Murphy had no choice—his superiors wanted him to take Fox, and Fox he would take. In some way he sensed that something big was coming up on the UN side. No one at his grade level, fighting out there in the field, knew anything about Inchon, soon to be launched, but there was certainly talk about something big about to happen. Around September 13 or 14, he was never sure which, Murphy was moved back up to the Naktong and ordered to take a huge hill about two miles from the river, where the North Koreans appeared to be very well emplaced. Whenever the Americans got near the hill’s base, a rain of mortar fire came down. Fox Company had lost its company commander early in the fighting there, and that was why Murphy, at the age of twenty-four, became a company commander. It was not an assault he was looking forward to—the hill seemed to be filled with natural craggy points where the North Koreans could take cover and fire away.

  Murphy tensed just as the assault began, sure that the enemy mortars would tear his company apart. But they moved forward across a partly open field and nothing happened. What should have been a violent battlefield remained silent. He wondered if the North Koreans were waiting for his men to get even closer before they opened up. But there was no resistance even as his men started their ascent. When they finally reached the top unscathed, Murphy could look down in one direction, the one from which he had come, and see how terribly vulnerable he and his men had been, and then look in the other direction and see the reason for the silence: the North Koreans beginning to pull out, turning their heavy guns in the other direction and hauling them away. To Murphy, expecting the worst battle of his young career, a climb up a steep hill under fire from heavy weapons, it seemed like a small miracle, nothing less than the gift of life. Just then he got a call from his superiors telling him to return to the command post because something had happened. That something, he soon found out, was Inchon.

  When the In Min Gun broke, they did so poorly, like a conventional army. They were not nearly as experienced in this sort of situation as the Vietminh fighting the French in Indochina, who were long accustomed to dealing with the superior airpower and general firepower of their Western enemy. The Vietminh, as Murphy understood it, were expert at disappearing from battlefields they no longer liked, and would have split immediately into very small units at the Naktong and slipped into the hills, moving mostly at night. But the In Min Gun stuck to the roads at first and for a day or two the Air Force had a free-fire zone. When Fox Company began moving up, Murphy had never seen anything like it—blackened bodies and blackened vehicles all along the route.

  Part Six

  MacArthur Turns the Tide: The Inchon Landing

  19

  INCHON WAS TO be Douglas MacArthur’s last great success, and his alone. It was a brilliant, daring gamble. It surely saved thousands of American lives just as he had predicted. He had fought for it almost alone against the doubts of the principal Navy planners and very much against the wishes of the Joint Chiefs. Inchon was Douglas MacArthur at his best: audacious, original, unpredictable, thinking outside the conventional mode, and of course, it would turn out, very lucky as well. It was why two presidents, who had grave personal and professional reservations about him, had held on to him nonetheless. “There was one day in MacArthur’s life when he was a military genius: September 15, 1950,” wrote his biographer Geoffrey Perret. “In the life of every great Commander there is one battle that stands out above all the rest, the supreme test of generalship that places him among the other military immortals. For MacArthur that battle was Inchon.”

  He had understood Inchon’s value from the start, that it was the best way to employ his superior technology when his troops were still badly understrength and threatened with being driven off the peninsula. From the beginning, he was determined to avoid a strategy in which American forces were ground up in traditional infantry tactics in harsh terrain by a numerically superior enemy. He eventually carried the day, and in the end it was everything he had promised it would be, although he was so enamored of capturing Seoul—so great a public relations triumph—that he and the officers under him did not throw out a good net to block the retreating North Korean troops, and he partially diminished the value of his own strike. If there was one serious flaw in his plan, it was the totality of his success, which gave him, if anything, more leverage over Washington and the Chiefs. Because he had stood for it against everyone else, on all other issues afterward it was hard to stand up to him. He had been right on Inchon and those who doubted him had been wrong, his supporters now argued when doubters subsequently grew nervous as he pushed his troops ever closer to the Yalu. He had rolled the dice once against great odds, and it made it harder to stop him as he pushed forward toward an even greater roll.

  Douglas Mac
Arthur had made the mistake of underestimating the abilities of the North Korean forces in the first days of the war. (He had spoken of what would happen if he could put only one division, the First Cav, into Korea—“Why heavens you’d see those fellows scuddle up to the Manchurian border so quick, you would see no more of them.”) But he soon came to realize that he was fighting a ferocious, resilient, well-led, and courageous force, “as capable and tough,” he told Averell Harriman in an early meeting in Tokyo, as any soldiers he had ever encountered. That assessment immediately affected his sense of strategy. Therefore, well before the American troops were pressured into the Pusan Perimeter (in danger of being “like beef cattle in the slaughterhouse,” MacArthur later said), he was already focused on an amphibious landing that could bring superior American technology to bear in a way that might actually turn the war around with a single, decisive stroke.

  The lessons of World War I were always with him. The British, French, and German generals, he believed, had betrayed their men again and again by sending them forward in hopeless charges against the very heart of enemy machine gun and artillery emplacements. It was a war of lion-hearted soldiers, it was always believed, commanded by donkey-brained generals. When it was all over and the awful casualties were assessed, it was almost impossible to tell who had been the victor and who the loser in the set piece battles on the Western Front. Part of MacArthur’s belief that Europe was a decadent place, less important than Asia in the American future, was rooted in what he had observed in World War I. The generals on the winning side had been so careless with their men as to make him believe they were representatives of a bygone era. World War I had taught him the dangers of frontal challenges. In his deft campaign in the Pacific, vast island-hopping distances accomplished with minimal casualties, he struck more often than not at islands that were not Japanese strongpoints, a strategy premised on what he had learned in the first war. It was part of his immense complexity as a man that he could sound, in his often overripe Kiplingesque sentences, like a bloodthirsty warrior who loved the thrill of battle almost as an end in itself, but when an actual battle was being planned, could be surprisingly cautious when it came to the lives of his men.