The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Ridgway’s intelligence was gradually improving, but it was still far too fragmentary, given how much was at risk. He had a sense that a major Chinese campaign was coming and that it might be in or at the edge of the central corridor region. But he was not sure exactly where, or how large it would be, and he wanted more precise information. In fact, he wanted far more than that. Ridgway had already moved the Second Division into the general area. It was now part of Tenth Corps, under the command of Ned Almond. The Second Division had in effect replaced the First Marines, whose commander had made it clear that they did not want to serve under Almond again. Ridgway was planning a major attack to the west of Tenth Corps, and he wanted the Second Division to cover his own right flank. That put Paul Freeman’s Twenty-third Regiment on the far right flank of all those forces, where it would play a critical role in the fighting to come.

  ONE OF THE first things Ridgway had done after arriving in country was to make the Second Division whole again. Dutch Keiser had been relieved by Walton Walker and replaced by Major General Bob McClure. But Ned Almond had despised McClure, and he lasted only thirty-seven days as division commander. In his brief tenure, one of the things McClure fixed on was making all the men in the division grow beards. “He had seen beards on some of the Turkish soldiers and decided it made them look very tough—very warrior-like—and so the Americans should have them as well, and so we had to grow them and most of us hated them,” remembered John Carley, then a captain in the division’s G-3. Almond was a clean-look kind of general; he wanted uniforms and chins neat, and so the beards and McClure were both soon gone.

  Slowly, starting in mid-December, the division, now stationed at Yongdongpo, was being put back together. Fresh troops and better equipment arrived from the States. A battalion of French troops, mostly from the French Foreign Legion, was assigned to the Twenty-third on December 11, boosting its strength immediately. The First Ranger Company was also added, while the badly torn up Thirty-eighth Regiment received a battalion of Dutch soldiers. On December 15, some two weeks after it had been hammered at Kunuri, the Second Division was again declared combat effective. By late December, it was operating in the Hoengsong-Wonju area, and its top intelligence people were hearing reports that Wonju might be the next big Chinese prize.

  Wonju was the southernmost part of what would become a brutally contested piece of central corridor terrain roughly in the shape of a triangle, with the villages of Hoengsong and Chipyongni serving as its second and third points. Of the villages in the area, Wonju was the most important, both as a railhead and road center. Ansil Walker, who fought at Chipyongni, noted that if the Chinese controlled the triangular area, they would gain a formidable base from which to strike at Taegu, about a hundred miles south, and bitterly disputed in the earlier Naktong fighting. It would be like a knife poised at Pusan, he said. That was, in fact, very much the way Marshal Peng saw the coming battle. He had held his last staff meeting on December 27 and had worked hard to improve the mood of his men—some of whom were a bit edgy about fighting the Americans now that they might be better prepared. When they struck this time, Peng said, “the imperialists will run like sheep. Our problem is not Seoul. It is Pusan. Not taking it. Just walking there!” With that, as his aide Major Liquin noted, the mood in the room improved. Then Peng went to the map. “It is there at Wonju,” he said, “that the battle will be decided. A breakthrough at Wonju will carry us all the way down to Taegu.” He was clearly speaking with greater confidence and more bravado than he felt.

  By mid-January, Ridgway’s headquarters was receiving reports that enemy soldiers were pouring into the area. At first, Ned Almond, in whose Corps sector most of the fighting took place, and who was not as passionate about intelligence as Ridgway, thought they were North Koreans, but they turned out to be preponderantly Chinese, moving in (as they had in the past) at night and on foot, away from the roads, and so for quite a while failing to trigger any reliable estimates of just how large a force was gathering.

  On January 25, Ridgway, by now a month in country, launched his first major offensive, named Operation Thunderbolt. Troops from First Corps and Ninth Corps moved forward cautiously, almost shoulder to shoulder, so that the Chinese could not slip through them or behind them and attack their flanks. Ridgway wanted neither gaps in his line nor any significant section of it given over to the ROKs. Thunderbolt’s objective was limited; he wanted his forces to go about twenty miles north and reach the southern bank of the Han River. He wanted to do it cautiously and incrementally—only as the offensive seemed to be working were more units going to be added. Ridgway did not want to start north, find that he had underestimated the number of Chinese in the sector, and thus discover that instead of being on the offensive he was now on the defensive.

  Operation Roundup, Almond’s part of the operation, run out of Tenth Corps, was scheduled to kick off on February 5. Even before it started, Ridgway was concerned about the growing Chinese presence in the central corridor region, to the east of where most of Thunderbolt would take place. He knew his forces were understrength there, and he wanted to keep both Wonju and Chipyongni from falling into Chinese hands. As a result, on January 28, he started sending units of the Twenty-third to probe the Chipyongni area, starting with a place they came to call Twin Tunnels.

  As January came to a close, the scene was set for two epic battles, the first involving the greatly outnumbered Twenty-third Regiment in what became a Communist siege of Chipyongni; the second, a few miles away at Wonju, bringing elements of the Second Division, the Thirty-eighth and Ninth regiments, along with members of the 187th Regimental Combat Team, to fight an estimated four Chinese divisions. Both were bitter battles, and in both it was uncertain who would emerge victorious until, quite literally, the final hours. That was especially true of Wonju, where elements of the Thirty-eighth Regiment were initially hit so hard that the area became known as Massacre Valley. The two battles were connected and yet quite separate; it was the battle of Chipyongni that long resonated with allied commanders in Korea, and quickly became the model for how to fight this new and formidable enemy. Wonju, on the other hand, was a victory in the end, but it reflected the fact that some senior commanders, like Almond, still had the capacity to underestimate the enemy grievously.

  IN EARLY JANUARY, Ridgway had assigned the Twenty-third Regiment to the defense of Wonju, thus placing Colonel Paul Freeman and his regiment under the command of Almond for the first time. It was not to be a happy relationship. Freeman’s forces were already engaged in early skirmishes around Wonju when, on January 9, he had his first meeting with Almond. A large enemy force was well dug in on a major hill just south of the village. Two battalions had been ordered into the battle by Division, one of them from the Thirty-eighth Regiment and commanded by Jim Skeldon. His battalion was on the left side of the main road, working its way toward the hill, while a battalion of the Twenty-third Regiment worked the right side of the road. When Almond and Freeman had their first encounter, the battle was not going particularly well. The American force was probably too small for the job. Almond was a commander who, much more than most comparable officers, had his favorites, Almond’s Boys. When they served him well, he pushed hard for choice slots for them, guaranteeing him not merely talent but loyalty. He was very hard on commanders of comparable ability who were not his boys. Freeman was not one of Almond’s boys, and it struck him that his corps commander seemed to take an immediate dislike to him. If Bob McClure was still the nominal division commander, it quickly became clear to Freeman that Almond was the real man in charge, the corps commander as division commander. Freeman had been moving up closer to the battle to check out exactly what was happening, when he came upon Almond, McClure, Nick Ruffner (the corps G-3 but soon to replace McClure), and Al Haig, a young Almond aide (and one day to be a major White House player), gathered on a hill overlooking the part of the battle where Skeldon’s troops were engaged. Almond immediately asked Freeman, “Who’s in command here?”


  “Colonel Skeldon,” Freeman replied. Where is he? Almond wanted to know. On the next hill, Freeman answered.

  “Aren’t you in command here?” Almond pressed. No, said Freeman; he commanded another unit, a little farther back. “What are you doing up here?” Almond asked. “I came up to see if I could help out,” Freeman answered. “Well, why isn’t a stronger force being used to get back to Wonju?” Almond asked. Freeman replied that they had been told to use only two battalions. That, he was aware, put the onus completely on McClure. Just then the interrogation was interrupted by an enemy mortar attack and everyone hit the ground. Freeman was grateful for the interruption.

  Finally Almond and his team decided to leave. On the way down the hill they ran into one of Freeman’s sergeants. Almond, as Freeman remembered it, decided to make small talk, about how cold it was. “It’s so cold that the water froze in my trailer this morning,” Almond said—an attempt to buddy up, Freeman thought, and a poor one at that. “You’re goddamned lucky to have a trailer and a basin of water,” the sergeant answered. It was icy and treacherous moving down the hill, and Almond slipped, going down right on his butt. Freeman extended a hand to help him up. “If I need your help, I’ll ask for it,” Almond said. A great first meeting, Freeman thought to himself.

  At the bottom of the hill it only got worse. There was a soldier chopping wood and doing it poorly. Almond promptly told him he was doing it wrong, and if he was not careful, he might chop his foot off. “I hope to hell I do; maybe they’ll send me out of this goddamned place,” the soldier replied. Freeman was aware that he had lost even more points. Another soldier was in a foxhole behind a tree. Almond ordered him out, got in, took his rifle, and decided the foxhole commanded a poor field of fire, which it did. He complained bitterly about this to Freeman. From then on, the view of Freeman back at Almond’s headquarters was that he was soft and timid, a man who did not push his troops hard enough. He appeared to be an officer marked for relief just as soon as Almond could get around to it.

  That was in sharp contrast to the way the men of the Twenty-third saw their commander. But none of this mattered; from then on Freeman was a marked man at Corps headquarters. By contrast Freeman, like all too many subordinate commanders under Almond, found the corps commander to be dangerously overconfident about the superiority of his own tactical views at all times, thinking himself at once a better company commander, battalion commander, and regimental commander than any of the men serving under him. Freeman’s view of Almond coincided almost exactly with that of O. P. Smith of the Marines. Unlike other high-ranking officers Freeman had dealt with, Almond was a poor listener; he seemed to feel that there was only one way to go about any assignment: push farther ahead ever more quickly, whatever the shortcomings or the consequences. All of this made Freeman the man on the spot, his regiment virtually on point in its sector as the Chinese prepared to strike. Matt Ridgway wanted a major confrontation with the Chinese, and Paul Freeman found the enemy for him, however involuntarily, when the two great armies finally stumbled into each other in mid-February.

  40

  IN A WAY, there were two battles of Chipyongni. First came the battle of Twin Tunnels, between the two gathering armies, in which the Chinese nearly overwhelmed the UN forces. That, in turn, triggered the battle of Chipyongni. All of this was part of a larger contest for control of the transportation arteries leading south through the central corridor. Chipyongni itself was about fifty miles east of Seoul, about forty south of the thirty-eighth parallel, and about fifteen miles northwest of Wonju. The Twin Tunnels were “about three miles southeast of Chipyongni,” in the words of historian Ken Hamburger, who wrote with exceptional clarity of both battles. There, he noted, the railroad “abruptly turns south to east and tunnels under two ridgelines before turning again to the south and east. The terrain in the tunnels area consists of the two ridgelines generally running north to south and rising to about one hundred meters above the valley floor. The ridgelines curve toward one another in the north where they close into a horseshoe with a single constricted road leading to Chipyongni. As this road leads out of the valley, it crosses the east-west railroad between the two tunnels that give the area its name.” The valley floor, Hamburger noted, ran about five hundred meters from east to west, and one thousand meters from north to south. Several high hills of about five hundred meters each surrounded it.

  The American command was beginning to look at nearby Chipyongni as critical, because it would help them control the access to Wonju, the larger communications center, where the Americans, like Peng, now believed one of the fateful battles of the central corridor would be fought. In late January, as Ridgway’s forces over on the west began their first major operation, the Second Division found itself ordered to protect its flank on the east, and at the same time to move into the Chipyongni area and try to locate the Chinese Forty-second Army. Ridgway’s intelligence people believed it was hiding out somewhere in the central corridor but had not yet revealed itself. For it was one of those great contrasts of the first year of the war, the stark difference between the two armies and the way they maneuvered: on the eve of battle, even facing a force that had nine divisions in it, the Americans did not yet know where the Chinese were; by contrast, hiding an American division on Korean soil would have been comparable to hiding a hippopotamus in a pet store.

  There were three stages to the Twin Tunnels battle: a recon, and then two battles, each of escalating violence. The Eighth Army’s Operation Thunderbolt, Ridgway’s main drive and his attempt to reclaim the initiative in the war, kicked off on January 26, and the first recon into the Twin Tunnels area, led by Lieutenant Maurice Fenderson, took place the next day. Fenderson was new to the Twenty-third, having arrived right after the Kunuri fighting, for which he remained eternally grateful. He was assigned to Captain Sherman Pratt’s Baker Company, given its first platoon, and as an added welcome assigned to take his men and recon an area to the east where there were some railroads and, he was told, two tunnels. There were scattered reports of some Chinese troops operating in the area. All he had to do was go over there and check it out—nothing much to it, he was told.

  It was an eerie assignment. Even the spot his motorized patrol started out from was already deep in enemy territory, far north of the American lines. At every moment he feared a possible ambush. As a kid of seventeen, straight out of high school, Fenderson had served in World War II, as part of the Seventieth Division, mostly trying to keep up with George Patton as his tanks raced across France. That race, its sheer muscularity, stood in stark contrast to the patrol he was now leading. This was about being apart from other American units, and, more than anything else, about the loneliness of war. If bad things happened, you were out there by yourself. His patrol proceeded to the assigned location, perhaps a mile south of the tunnels, very cautiously. There, they spotted soldiers, almost surely Chinese, and a brief firefight ensued. Fenderson was then ordered to return to base, which he did, feeling he had done his job and been lucky as well.

  The next day, on Almond’s orders, Freeman sent out a larger force to recon the area, setting in motion the next stage of the Twin Tunnels struggle. The men in this task force were to patrol the area, but if at all possible not engage any larger enemy force. Elements of two companies were sent in, the reconstituted Charley Company of the Twenty-third Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant James Mitchell, and a company from the Twenty-first Regiment of the neighboring Twenty-fourth Division, commanded by Lieutenant Harold Mueller. About half the men from Charley Company were brand-new, hardly surprising given all the hits the company had taken in the last few months. Many of them were just out of the repot-depot, where replacement troops arrived, and few were trained combat infantrymen. The two units were to join up at the village of Iho-ri and then head for Twin Tunnels, some fifteen miles away.

  20. THE TWIN TUNNELS—CHIPYONGNI-WONJU AREA, JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1951

  It was a relatively small combined force—four officers and fifty-six
enlisted men. The weaponry was quite heavy for so small a unit: eight BARs, two heavy machine guns and four light ones, a rocket launcher, a 60mm mortar, and both a 57 and a 75 recoilless rifle. In a fight, nearly half the unit would either be firing a heavy weapon or assisting on one. They also had two three-quarter-ton trucks and nine jeeps. A liaison plane flew overhead, a spotter in case Chinese units, unseen from the ground, were moving in on them. The plane enjoyed better communications with their base than did the men on the ground, and the plane’s link to the men on the ground was weak. Captain Mel Stai, the assistant battalion operations officer, had also joined the unit. He was supposed to return to Battalion headquarters when the patrol left Iho-ri, but he decided on his own to stay with them to Twin Tunnels. In his jeep was the only radio capable of contacting the spotter plane. It was slow going all day—there was a lot of snow on the icy road, and also heavy fog, all too typical of the Korean winter. The spotter plane was of little value for much of the morning.

  They reached the Twin Tunnels area around noon, well behind schedule. Mitchell waited at the south end of the valley that led to the tunnels, until Mueller caught up with him. So far everything had gone reasonably well. Mitchell had kept his jeeps about fifty yards apart in the convoy and the trucks with the heavy weapons farther back so if the jeeps were hit, they could quickly come to their aid. It was at this point, as Ken Hamburger later wrote, that a kind of Murphy’s Law took over—and everything that could go wrong began to go wrong. They had stopped just where the main road led north to the tunnels, but a side road shot off east to the nearby village of Sinchon. Because the patrol was late, Captain Stai volunteered as a courtesy to go into Sinchon by himself and look it over, allowing the main body to continue without interruption. He drove partway to the village, left his vehicle at the side of the road, and walked in, taking with him, of course, the only radio compatible with the one in the spotter plane. That was a critical mistake. His jeep was soon destroyed, his driver killed, and Stai was never seen again.