The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  In a way the madness—for that is the right word—behind MacArthur’s final offensive showed more clearly on the eastern front than on the west. On the western side the generals might not have been as good as Smith, but Walker himself was wary of it all, reluctant to push his men too hard, and even as he told his generals to go forward, he was warning them of the dangers ahead as well. But Almond was MacArthur’s boy, the true loyalist, headstrong and arrogant, determined to make the reality of the Korean battlefield fit the dreams of the commander in the Dai Ichi. That was why the ongoing confrontation between Almond and Smith was so important—it was really a struggle between MacArthur and Smith, with Almond as a self-important, highly impatient middle man, demanding that the men under him follow orders that were essentially conceived in madness, while Smith played the unfortunate role of the subordinate officer, charged with representing the battlefield as it actually was, and protecting the lives of his men if at all possible. Ordered to go north toward the Yalu as fast as he could (the words “barrel through” were sometimes used), Smith systematically tried to undermine his orders. The area in which his division was to operate and dominate the Chinese contained one thousand square miles, filled with rugged mountains, in freezing temperatures. He was absolutely convinced that the Chinese were there in large numbers, and he did not intend to fragment his division in the way that Almond demanded. When the Chinese struck, which he was quite sure they were going to do, he did not want his regiments so poorly dispersed that they were unable to support one another. He tried to impress Almond with the fact that the superior power of the First Marine Division came from using it as a whole, but he felt that, whatever Almond’s other skills, listening to subordinates was not one of them. As such, Smith fought his orders as best he could for as long as he could. He slow-walked them when he could and came perilously close to out-and-out insubordination to a superior known for the explosive quality of his temper. Had he been an Army officer and not a Marine, there is no doubt that Almond would have relieved him. In the end, because he was so careful and obstinate, he not only saved the First Marines from total destruction, but saved Almond’s command as well.

  Major General Oliver Prince Smith was in fact one of the great, quiet heroes of the Korean War. Other Marines thought he should have won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his leadership. Yet, unlike Chesty Puller, his heroics lacked a certain drama, and few outside the Marine Corps knew his name. Smith was highly professional, wary of hubris, almost deliberately non-charismatic, and most important of all, respectful of his adversaries. He looked, as Martin Russ wrote, like someone who might have been “cast in an amateur play as a small town druggist, a man whom older ladies would call nice looking if only he would put on a little weight.” His career had been an exceptional one, but it had been slow as well—he had spent seventeen years in grade as a captain. He had been the assistant division commander of the First Marine Division at the battle of Peleliu during the Pacific campaign in September 1944. Peleliu was a small island, not necessarily of great strategic value, that had proved very costly. It was roughly four miles long on a north/south axis and two miles wide on an east/west one, consisting mostly of coral, a place where it was virtually impossible to dig a decent foxhole. It had ended up one of the major disasters—if not the major disaster—of the Pacific War, in the view of many Marine officers. “The worst campaign in the history of warfare—far worse than Iwo Jima or the others,” said Colonel Harold Deakin, a staff member under Major General William Rupertus, who commanded the First Marine Division there. The Japanese, by then on the defensive, had hunkered down during the prolonged air and artillery assault preceding the landing, and only afterward surfaced to fight with great courage and ferocity. Rupertus shared a good many of Ned Almond’s qualities—he was vainglorious, impetuous, contemptuous of the forces arrayed against him. There might be some casualties, he had said before the battle, but “this is going to be a short one, a quickie. Rough but fast. We’ll be through in three days. It might take only two.” Instead it took a full month of yard-by-yard, cave-by-cave fighting. It had taken, the Marines estimated later, almost sixteen hundred rounds of ammo, both heavy and light, to kill each of the ten thousand Japanese soldiers on the island. So when Smith dealt with Almond, it was as if he had been there once before.

  Smith did not intend to be the man who would lose the First Marine Division to the Chinese in some frozen wasteland because he had blindly followed orders he believed bore no relationship to the battlefield. The Marine breakout from the Chosin Reservoir was certainly one of the great moments in the Corps’ history—and no small amount of credit for its success was Smith’s, more for what he did not do than for what he did. When he finally sent his troops forward, he left a number of supply dumps along the way. Those supply dumps, Division operations officer Alpha Bowser later noted, “were ultimately to save the lives of thousands of fighting men, and may have saved the Marine Division as a whole.”

  The day that the Marines were to kick off their part of the big drive north was November 27, but for almost three weeks Smith had been struggling to thwart a battle plan he completely distrusted. He thought Tokyo a city of fools—first they had split Tenth Corps off from the Eighth Army, and now they were trying to split all of his regiments off from one another, making each part far more vulnerable, and thus playing into Chinese hands. Almond, the Marines decided, loved to break larger forces down into little ones. He favored, albeit on a limited scale, Bowser noted, grand sweeps and broad arrows on his maps—big operations similar to what the Allies had mounted in Europe. The Chinese, Smith had been assured by Tokyo, could not move through these allegedly impenetrable mountainous regions to his west. He didn’t think his troops should be operating there in the first place. “The country around Chosin was never intended for military operations,” Smith said after the battle was over. “Even Genghis Khan wouldn’t tackle it.” But Smith had his orders to push forward. He let his subordinate officers know the danger he felt they were in—not that they needed any additional warnings—and that he wanted every unit buttoned up at night in perfect defensive positions, as if that night was the one during which the Chinese would strike. If Smith had his doubts about what they were doing, he also had a certain nervous respect for the MacArthur mystique. When the general decided to push all the way to the Yalu, Smith told one colleague, “Well, he got away with it at Inchon, so he’ll probably get away with it here.” But, Smith later added, this time he did not.

  No one was going to be able to help bail Smith out. By the beginning of November, he had come to believe that the Chinese were probably setting a vast trap for the American forces. On October 29, around the time of Unsan, a ROK unit in Smith’s sector had captured sixteen Chinese soldiers. They were from an ammunition platoon, were taller than most Chinese and considerably darker, wore quilted uniforms, and spoke openly of their unit. They were from the 370th Regiment, in the 124th Division, of the Forty-second Army, in the Ninth Army Group. They had crossed into Korea on October 16, they said, and added that there were at least three Chinese divisions—the 124th, 125th, and 126th—from the Forty-second Army in the area. Almond came and met with them, got them to do some close-order drills, and did not seem impressed. They were scruffy-looking and exhausted—they had not eaten in several days. He used, the Marine historian John Hoffman wrote, the phrase “Chinese laundrymen” to describe them, not the first or the last time he would use it. They were not, he told some of the men around him, very intelligent. The Marines were not, as Hoffman wrote, “so sanguine.” When Charles Willoughby eventually arrived and checked out the prisoners, he decided that they were part of a relatively small group of Chinese volunteers, perhaps ten thousand men, in effect a token Chinese force, not part of any massive Chinese Army.

  Colonel Homer Litzenberg’s Seventh Marine Regiment, one of Smith’s three regiments, replaced the ROK unit that had captured the Chinese and was almost immediately engaged by a large Chinese force, at least a division and
possibly more, at Sudong—the first significant battle between the Marines and the Chinese on the eastern front. It went on from November 2 to 4. “We thought for a while that we were like Custer at the Little Big Horn, and that we were not going to get out—it was very very tough,” said Major James Lawrence, who for a time was a battalion executive officer there, and received the Navy Cross for his leadership. It was very hard fighting. The Marines finally fended the Chinese off, but in the process they took heavy casualties—44 dead, 162 wounded, and one man missing in action.

  If the ferocity of the battle did not slow down Tokyo or Almond, then it made Smith warier than ever. His job, he believed, was to slow down the journey into that trap if at all possible and, in his phrase, “not go too far out on a limb.” Thus did tensions with Almond continue to increase. “Our Marine division was the spearhead of Tenth Corps,” as Colonel Bowser, Smith’s operations man, noted. “General Almond had already begun to notice that the spearhead was hardly moving at all. We were in fact just poking along—deliberately so. We pulled every trick in the book to slow down our advance, hoping the enemy would show his hand before we got more widely dispersed than we already were. At the same time we were building up our levels of supply at selected dumps along the way.”

  On November 5, the Marines picked up a lone Chinese soldier sleeping in a hut. Everything he said seemed authentic and in no way hyped up. He was a member of the 126th Division and seemed to be full of information—one of the differences in the Chinese Army was that, as part of the new egalitarian spirit, ordinary privates, through lectures from the political commissars, often knew a great deal about battle orders. The prisoner told the Marines that twenty-four Chinese divisions had crossed the Yalu. On November 7 this was passed on to Almond—and for a brief time Smith thought that this information, along with the news of what had happened at Unsan, had had the effect of sobering Almond up. For the first time he seemed amenable to the idea of Smith concentrating the First Marines. But then the orders came down from Tokyo to speed it up, and Almond pushed Smith to drive ahead faster.

  Meanwhile, in the Chinese command post, Peng Dehuai was talking about placing 250,000 Chinese on the western front against 130,000 of Walker’s men, or a 1.92 edge in manpower, with 150,000 Chinese against 100,000 UN troops on the eastern front, or a manpower ratio of 1.67. They were by now on the south side of the Yalu, well hidden away in caves. It was almost as if their earlier clashes were a means of taunting the Americans and UN forces, striking at them and disappearing. “To catch a big fish, you must first let the fish taste your bait,” General Sung Shih-lun of the Chinese Ninth Army Group, the overall commander of the Chinese forces on the eastern front, told his staff. In mid-November the UN forces were, in the phrase of one senior Chinese officer, “still far from our preselected killing zones.”

  On November 15 Smith met with Almond, and Almond again pushed harder for speed. The Marines had reached Hagaru, at the south end of the Chosin Reservoir, and now he wanted them to go toward Yudam-ni, fourteen miles away, while another Marine regiment moved east. The third regiment was fifty miles south. The division was still badly fragmented. “We’ve got to go barreling up that road,” Almond said. Smith immediately exclaimed, “No!” but Almond, according to Brigadier General Ed Craig, the assistant division commander, pretended not to hear it. Then Almond flew out. After he did, Smith said, “We’re not going anywhere until I get this division together and the airfield [which he wanted midway between the coast and the reservoir in order to airlift the wounded out in case the Chinese struck] built.” That day, still bothered by Almond’s failure to comprehend the dangers he was sure they faced, and by his insistence on fragmenting the division, Smith did something very unusual—he wrote to the Marine commandant, Clifton Cates, complaining about his orders, citing chapter and verse of the dangers inherent in them, in effect warning that there was a danger of losing the entire division.

  The Chinese who had hit Litzenberg had withdrawn north, he wrote Cates, but he had issued no orders to pursue them. His own left flank, he said, was “wide open.” The nearest element of the Eighth Army was eighty miles away. His own troops were not able to support one another. “I do not like the prospect of stringing out a Marine Division along a single mountain road for 120 miles from Hamhung to the Manchurian border.” He was made extremely nervous by the orders from above. “I have little confidence in the tactical judgment of X Corps or in the realism of their planning. There is a continual splitting up of units and assignments of missions which puts them out on a limb. Time and time again I have tried to tell the Corps Commander that in a Marine Division he has a powerful instrument, and that it cannot but help lose its effectiveness when dispersed.” Finally, he was obviously worried about the cold and the mountains. “I believe a winter campaign in the mountains of Korea is too much to ask of an American soldier or Marine, and I doubt the feasibility of supplying troops in this area during the winter or providing for the evacuation of sick and wounded.” Finally in mid-November he got one of the things he most wanted, a small airstrip near Hagaru. Even that had been hard. He had done it jointly with Major General Field Harris, who was in charge of the Marine air operations. One day Almond had asked Harris what he was looking for, and Harris had answered that it was a small strip so they could land enough transports to bring in supplies and carry out the casualties. “What casualties?” Almond had asked Harris—who soon lost his own son up near the Chosin. “That’s the kind of thing you were up against. He wouldn’t admit there even would be casualties,” Harris later told Bemis Frank, a Marine historian. “We took 4500 casualties out of that field.”

  14. THE MAIN CHINESE CAMPAIGN IN THE WEST, NOVEMBER 25–28, 1950

  Smith was now sure that the Chinese were baiting an immense trap for him, and there was one bit of empirical evidence that definitely showed that. That was the Chinese failure to blow the bridge at the Funchilin Pass. The road from Hungnam, the port from which the Marines would eventually disembark, to Yudam-ni, which was their farthest penetration and where they were when the Chinese made their major assault, was seventy-eight miles. On the way north from Hungnam, the road at first was relatively flat. From Sudong, where the Chinese had first struck the Marines on November 2, to Hungnam was about thirty-seven miles. Just north of Sudong and south of Kotori, the road became more and more difficult, elevating at an accelerating rate, twenty-five hundred feet in eight miles, to a terrifying stretch known as the Funchilin Pass, becoming, as Matt Ridgway wrote, “a narrowing, frightening shelf with an impassable cliff on one side and a chasm on the other.” At a critical point in the pass the only way to keep going north was over a concrete bridge that covered four gigantic pipes, which pumped water from the Chosin Reservoir to a power plant. The mountain was so steep, and the passageway so narrow, that if the Funchilin Pass bridge were blown, given the hideous nature of the terrain and the overwhelming logistical limitations, it would be the end of the offensive for the American troops, so dependent on motorized equipment. But the Chinese heading north had not blown the bridge. To Smith, it was like the dog that hadn’t barked. The failure to blow the bridge on the part of so formidable and shrewd an adversary was a sure sign that the Chinese wanted the Americans to cross it—it was virtually an invitation—but it meant nothing to Almond, so disrespectful was he of his adversary. “Smith was sure that they wanted us to come across, and that they were going to blow the bridge after we crossed, thus completely isolating us,” said Major (later Major General) James Lawrence, who had been the executive officer at Sudong when the Chinese struck. “It was shrewd of Smith to understand that but it’s hard to think of any other capable officer who was paying attention not coming up with much the same scenario. Almond seemed to have so little respect for the Chinese as fighting men that it was as if he didn’t care.”

  By November 26, Smith had essentially won his most important victory. He had consolidated his division to what he considered an acceptable degree. Almond had pushed him to put men j
ust west of the Chosin, at Yudam-ni, and he had two regiments in the general Yudam-ni area, closer to each other than they had been before, but still separated by the reservoir itself. Smith was hardly happy with the entire situation, but it was much better than it had been. When Craig brought the degree of fragmentation that still existed up with him, all he said was “It’s what the Army wants.”

  15. THE MARINE SECTOR, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 27, 1950

  To the east of Yudam-ni, where the Seventh Marines were, the reservoir pointed like a very long icicle toward Hagaru, just south of it. Yudam-ni was about fourteen miles west of Hagaru, and the Fifth Marines were on the other side of the icicle. At Hagaru, Smith had posted a battalion from Puller’s First Marine Regiment. Another battalion of Puller’s troops was posted at Kotori, about eleven miles directly south of Hagaru, on the Main Supply Route, and another battalion at Chinhungni, about another ten miles south. Puller’s men were to keep the road open. It might not be ideal, given that their intelligence had now pinpointed at least six Chinese divisions in the area, but with a break or two, it might allow the division to fight like a division. As Colonel Bowser said, “Even so we were now at the end of a long, cold, snow-covered limb. The limb was sixty-five to seventy-five miles long, depending on where you wanted to measure.” Smith had, unlike Keiser and some other Army generals, thought long and hard about what would happen if the Chinese appeared.