The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  For the next two nights Mace fought constantly with different Chinese units. Finally, on the twenty-ninth, he was ordered back to Kunuri to join up with Division. He was relieved. It would be like heaven, he thought, getting back with your own men with all the protection a massed division could provide. But Kunuri was no heaven; it was all chaos. Just about every semblance of leadership seemed to have vanished. Mace had no time to rest. His tanks had to be resupplied, their guns cleared, and they had to be prepared for what they already sensed was going to be the worst part of all, the retreat from Kunuri. It seemed to him that he had not slept in weeks. He had been at Division headquarters and had seen Colonel George Peploe, the regimental commander of the Thirty-eighth, sleeping on a cot next to him. A regimental commander sleeping in a Division headquarters—that brought home better than anything just how broken the American military machine really was. Like everyone else he was hungry, and like everyone else he was very cold. It was twenty below, and in those days they did not even try to calculate windchill. The previous five days had been a kind of hell, and Mace sensed that veteran enlisted men like him out in the units had a far better feeling for what was happening than the men commanding them. Division, it seemed to the men stumbling back, had been hopelessly slow to react from the moment when the Chinese struck.

  IN THOSE SMALL units that had been hit so hard, the men believed that the longer they fought, the more time they were buying for their battalions and regiments, and most of all for the division. But were the people at Division and Corps listening? Lieutenant Charley Heath, who was in the regiment’s Headquarters Company, always remembered the fury in the voice of Colonel Peploe as he talked with someone at higher headquarters at least two days after the big attack began: “Yes, goddamnit, they had been hit by Chinese, and yes, he damn well knew the difference between a Chinaman and a Korean and did any of them want to leave Division and come down to his headquarters with an interpreter and check on the accuracy of what he was saying because he had some prisoners, because he would damn well like to give them a tour proving they were Chinese, and even if they didn’t have an interpreter, he had a hell of a lot of very dead Chinese to prove he was right.” Heath had never seen an angrier officer. “Jesus Christ,” Peploe said when he put the phone down. “You’d think those goddamn people at Division would give me credit for knowing a Chinaman when I see one.”

  SAM MACE’S BELIEF that Division equaled safety turned out to be a great illusion. The worst thing about Division headquarters was the fear in the air. Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield, Mace believed, and it could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse, it was contagious and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear-suppression business; great ones could take the undertow of fear, the knowledge that it was always there, and make it an asset; weaker commanders tended to let it fester. The very same men who will fight bravely under one commander will cut and run under another who projects his own fear. Great commanders are not just men gifted in making wise tactical moves, they are men who give out a sense of confidence, that it can be done, that it is their duty and their privilege to fight on that given day. Thus does the strength of any unit ideally feed down, from top to bottom. The commander generates strength in the officers immediately underneath him, and it works all the way down the chain of command.

  In Kunuri, it was as if no one was in command. The men who were supposed to be in charge seemed lost and dazed. Dutch Keiser, the division commander, as far as Mace’s commander, Jim Hinton, could tell, had been paralyzed by the Chinese attack. Even before that moment, he had been a kind of ghost commander, preferring to let the assistant division commander, Brigadier General Sladen Bradley, be the more visible officer, the one who visited the troops. The degree to which Keiser deferred to Bradley, some officers thought, was a reflection that Keiser himself knew that it was all past him, and that he was too old to be commanding in this war, in this cold, against this enemy. As the division shattered, Keiser had no earthly idea of how to put it back together.

  His was the ultimate nightmare for a commander of a large unit: the Chinese were pressing in on him and he was now in danger of losing his entire division. The general belief in the division was that he and the other senior officers had already squandered three days in grasping the extent of the Chinese attack. He and the men above him had been very slow to understand that this was the big one, that as many as twenty Chinese divisions might be operating in the western sector. By November 29, though, everyone in Kunuri knew that the Chinese were drawing closer by the hour, that it was like a noose being tightened around their collective necks, and that the clock favored the Chinese, because there were obviously so many of them, and because they would be able to block the avenues of retreat.

  This then was going to be the most important decision of Keiser’s career. They had been fighting the Chinese for four and in some cases five days, and the state of their military intelligence was pathetic. They did not seem to know where the Chinese were coming from or how many of them there were. Worse, no one seemed to be sure what the main route out should be.

  Jim Hinton agreed with Mace—the confusion at headquarters seemed like a kind of virus. The division had a number of light spotter planes, but as far as Hinton could tell, they had not been up. Mace was shocked when he quickly realized that the entire division was now in jeopardy and that they were on their own. He was sure there was little chance of any relief mission reaching them. There was talk about a British relief column on its way to help them, but he had his doubts. Even in the worst days of the Battle of the Bulge, when he had shivered in the terrible cold at Bastogne and the Germans had pounded away with their heavy artillery, he had believed that someone was on the way. They were so good back then, so damn efficient and powerful, that when things went wrong, they soon went right. But he had no such feeling now. Dutch Keiser was bad enough, but Mace was convinced that the real problem was with the higher headquarters, and that the paralysis worked downward. From then on, for the rest of his life, Mace refused to speak of Douglas MacArthur by name. Instead he simply called him, in letters and articles for veterans’ groups, and in conversation, the Big Ego.

  If there was a fault line in Korea in those critical hours, it fell between those in the field being punished so harshly and those in Tokyo reluctant to admit that they had blundered into a catastrophic trap. In the field that fault line ran between the senior officers in Division, trying however inadequately to represent the dangers to its men, and Corps, still responding to the hopes and vanities of commanders in Tokyo. Whatever Dutch Keiser’s faults—and he was a completely inadequate leader—Corps was worse.

  30

  AT 4:30 P.M. on the twenty-ninth, with darkness falling, Dutch Keiser radioed to Corps that his situation at Kunuri was perilous. The Chinese were becoming more audacious all the time, now beginning to fight even in the daylight. But the people in the command structure just above him, at Ninth Corps, were even weaker than he was, and may have been even more culpable for what happened in those critical two days, when they had the last, best chance to get the division out largely undamaged. The corps commander, John Coulter, was frozen in place and very slow to respond to the catastrophe now happening except when it came to moving his own headquarters farther south, to Pyongyang. Corps was now in danger of losing an entire division, and Coulter, a weak commander, almost a figurehead and a pawn of Tokyo, was overwhelmed. His sources of information were poor, he had little sense of the battlefield as it existed, and he was far too fearful of what were by then hopelessly outmoded orders from headquarters in Tokyo. More than anything else he seemed to fear what Tokyo thought. Corps should have been a source of wisdom and guidance and, if need be, additional troops. If anything, most of what guidance Corps gave in those vitally important hours proved flat-out wrong—it was a negative rather than a positive force.

  Major General John Coulter, known as Nervous John to much
of his staff, was the most timid of the three corps commanders. That he was not up to the job was not exactly a secret. When Matt Ridgway took over the command of the Eighth Army a month later, Coulter was the first corps commander relieved, though the relief was masked as a promotion, for generals were always to be protected, and a star, his third, was added along with the Distinguished Service Medal. He was then given a staff job, as Ridgway’s liaison officer with the South Koreans and Syngman Rhee.

  He had always been MacArthur’s man. He had graduated from the West Texas Military Academy in San Antonio in 1911, MacArthur’s old pre–West Point school, had served in Mexico with General Jack Pershing before World War I, then with MacArthur’s Forty-second, or Rainbow, Division during the war, and had been a battalion commander at St. Mihiel. In World War II, he had commanded the Eighty-fifth Division, which had fought alongside Ned Almond’s Ninety-second Division in Italy. In 1948, MacArthur brought Coulter to the Far East as commander of the U.S. Seventh Division; he then served as deputy commander of U.S. forces in Korea and commander of First Corps in Japan. He returned briefly to the United States, but with the North Korean invasion, MacArthur brought him back to Korea and gave him First Corps again, officially under Walker, but in effect he was a MacArthur-Almond man in Walker’s upper command structure.

  Walker had been unimpressed with the way Coulter had used First Corps during the Naktong fighting, but it was always difficult to deal with a subordinate you did not like who happened to be a favorite of your superior officer. Walker dealt with his problem by giving First Corps to Shrimp Milburn at the time of Inchon. That meant Coulter was essentially in reserve during the march north—his new command, Ninth Corps, did not even become operational until September 16 and was then put in charge of mopping-up operations.

  In the Army it is the responsibility of a commander to give primary attention to any unit that is endangered. Of all the American units in the Eighth Army still engaged in the fighting on the western side of the peninsula by November 30, only the Second Division was in serious trouble. Coulter was the man who had access to additional forces and had the right to ask his superior commander, Walton Walker, for reinforcements if necessary.

  When the Chinese attack had begun, the original attitude back at Corps had been that this was serious but not apocalyptic. American forces were in trouble, it was believed, only because the ROKs had folded, thereby momentarily placing some American units in jeopardy. It was, Coulter had said, “a local problem.” By November 27, more than two days into it, the people at Division were becoming frustrated with orders from Corps calling for bite-sized pullbacks, in effect minor retreats that did not allow regiments or battalions to break off from the Chinese, regroup, and consolidate at more advantageous places. They were in effect moving from positions that were vulnerable to other positions that were no less vulnerable. On the morning of the thirtieth, Keiser had been engaged in a prolonged debate with Corps for at least three days. He felt his orders were inadequate, retrograde movements that were four or five miles at best. He wanted to pull the division farther back and then regroup. He had argued, for example, with an earlier order to pull back to Won-ni, which was only a mile and a half north of Kunuri. It was a half-baked move, Keiser had said, dangerous to execute without granting his division any real additional security. His division would be just as endangered, just as far out on a limb, once it got to Won-ni.

  What that order reflected was the vast distance that by then existed between reality on the battlefield and the illusions that existed in Tokyo. In those first few days, MacArthur’s command was still trying to minimize the importance of what had happened—for a full-scale retreat would shatter the last of his great dreams. As Dick Raybould would say many years later of the chaos that hung over his division, “We failed because we were set up to fail.” Yet, if anything, at that moment what was happening was obvious, and not only were most of the senior officers in Korea far ahead of Tokyo in their awareness of the scale of the catastrophe, but journalists were as well. On November 28, Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, who was soon to win his second Pulitzer for his Korean War reporting, wrote, “U.N. forces are now paying the initial price for the unsound decision to launch an offensive north of the peninsula’s narrow neck. The move was unsound because it was undertaken with forces far too small to secure the long Korean frontier with China and Russia. Even without the open intervention of Red China, the U.N. Army was too weak to justify scattered garrisons along the Yalu River.” Bigart added that it might be possible to hold the line at the narrow neck of the peninsula, if the divisions could be moved south quickly enough, “but the overall picture is grim.”

  Later, Dutch Keiser was blamed for the division’s terrible performance on its most tragic day, November 30, but much of the blame belonged to higher headquarters. Still, Keiser was the commander, and commanders have to think for themselves and their troops, and he had taken the advance north, dangerous though it self-evidently was, at face value. From the start he had underestimated the dangers his troops faced, and had scoffed at those who tried to warn him. Right after Unsan, he had given an interview in which he said that the Chinese had not yet committed “their best and most loyal troops to Korea,” that those who had appeared were “forced volunteers who do not want to fight” and were not “any more ferocious than the Korean Reds.” As for his men, they were “bayonet sharp,” ready for any assignment. Those were words he would soon regret.

  TO UNDERSTAND WHAT Keiser did not do, and what a great division commander might have done, it is only necessary to know what Major General O. P. Smith, his counterpart with the First Marines in Ned Almond’s Tenth Corps, did. Operating in the eastern part of the front, the First Marines were supposed to advance to the Manchurian border near the Chosin Reservoir and then move west and link up with the rest of the troops of the Eighth Army. Smith too had his orders—to push ever faster toward the reservoir and the Yalu—and they came from the relentlessly aggressive, and very abrasive, Almond. “His [Almond’s] greatest weakness as a commander in Korea was his conviction that MacArthur could do no wrong,” Roy Appleman wrote, rather generously, in his account of the Marine breakout from the Chosin Reservoir. No one had ever faulted Almond for a lack of aggressiveness. “When it paid to be aggressive, Ned was aggressive,” said Maury Holden, the G-3 of the Second Division. “When it paid to be cautious, Ned was aggressive.” Nothing was going to get in his way.

  Here then a great collision was taking place, with Almond, in effect, playing the part of Tokyo’s proxy on the ground in the eastern sector, and Smith representing the reality of the battlefield. Even before they collided over the use of the Marines in the Chosin-Yalu area, Smith loathed Almond and was completely distrustful of him. The two men already had a history, of course. Even before Inchon, Almond had postured to Smith, an expert in amphibious landings, about how easy they were, though he had never been part of one. On the day of that landing, Almond had been standing on the deck of the Mount McKinley, MacArthur’s command ship, with Victor Krulak, a senior Marine officer, watching as the LVTs came out of the mother ship. The LVTs were immense amphibious tractors, essential to getting the troop and equipment ashore. When Krulak in passing told Almond what wonderful machines they were, Almond asked, “Yeah, can those things float?” “I immediately went and told ten people,” Krulak noted, “because I didn’t want it forgotten. Here was the man commanding the landing force at Inchon asking, ‘Can those things float?’”

  Even before the final push north began, Almond was, in the words of Martin Russ, who fought in Korea and wrote two exceptional books about it, “at the very top of [the Marines’] always lengthy shitlist.” It was a point of pride among the Marines that their officers share as much as they could the hardships of the men in the field, that there not be greater warmth and better food for the brass. To them Almond represented a completely different and very outmoded military culture. His personal trailer was filled with numerous comforts and amenities, mo
st important, heat in a country where everyone else was dreadfully cold. Creature comforts were important to him and he lived in a surprisingly grand style. His trailer even had a bathtub, and there almost always seemed to be hot water. (Smith, offered a trailer with some amenities, turned it down.) In addition Almond had a separate tent with a heater for his toilet. He always ate very well—the best steaks flown in regularly from Tokyo, along with fresh vegetables and the finest wines. The men under his command knew this, of course, and resented it. Nothing travels faster among combat infantrymen in a hellish environment than news of a superior officer’s excessive lifestyle. It was, thought one contemporary, like dealing with the last of the World War I generals. There had been a memorable dinner he had given on October 9 to which he had invited Smith and his three regimental commanders. The four Marines had been appalled by the entire performance—they had been served by enlisted men in white uniforms; there were linens on the table with fine china and silver place settings. It was, thought Lewis (Chesty) Puller, one of the regimental commanders and a legendary figure in the Corps, “an unconscionable waste in a war zone.” The Marine officers, Puller said, preferred to eat cold rations and use their trucks to haul ammo. There were three thousand men serving the Corps headquarters, Puller estimated—enough to form an additional regiment. To the Marines, good officers simply did not do things like that and retain the respect of their men.