But later that day, when Chiles flew in, Freeman managed not to be at the little airstrip to go out on the same plane. It would be used to take out wounded men, but not the outgoing regimental commander. Chinese mortar fire was falling on the strip as the plane landed, and the pilot needed to get out quickly. For the moment, the Twenty-third had two regimental commanders. “I told Chiles to find a shelter and stay out of my way until my departure,” Freeman said years later. Chiles was shrewd enough to stay in the background and let Freeman run the show through the night of the fourteenth and well into the late morning of the fifteenth. Even when Chiles officially took command at midday on the fifteenth, he let the regimental exec, Frank Meszar, who knew the relative value of all the subordinate commanders, continue in Freeman’s role.
45
MATT RIDGWAY HAD given Paul Freeman his word that if the Chinese attacked in full force, he would send help, and he intended to make good on his word. He was prepared to send the British Commonwealth Brigade, and the Fifth Cavalry Regiment under the command of Colonel Marcel Crombez. The Fifth Cav was a part of the First Cavalry Division. But help was not going to arrive any too quickly. The Commonwealth Brigade had a better, more direct route to Chipyongni, but it had run into an enormous Chinese blocking force and quickly found itself embattled and stalled, hardly in a position to rescue another trapped force. So Crombez was ordered by Major General Bryant Moore, the neighboring Ninth Corps commander, to get to Chipyongni in a hurry. In a case like this unit titles are often confusing: the First Cav itself was not a cavalry division, it was what the Army calls straight leg, that is, regular infantrymen; but the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, a part of the First Cav, was armored, and had been held in reserve at that time by Ninth Corps, at a base near Yoju. When he first started out on the rescue at Chipyongni, Colonel Crombez’s force had twenty-three tanks, three infantry battalions, two battalions of field artillery, and a company of combat engineers. It was a not inconsiderable force. Crombez would have plenty of firepower. In addition, if things went badly, there was always the possibility of dispatching air cover to protect him.
Crombez first heard about the mission on the morning of February 14, when General Moore called to say that it looked like he might be used in the relief of Freeman’s force. At 4 P.M., Moore called back, telling him he would have to move out that night to relieve Freeman’s regiment—“and I know you’ll do it.” An hour later, Charles Palmer, newly promoted to two stars and made the commander of the First Cav, arrived at Crombez’s CP and confirmed the order. Crombez was something of a controversial figure—a man who dressed with dash, wearing a cavalryman’s yellow scarf (as if he were fighting the Indians back in the Wild West), having an oversized eagle painted on his helmet, and pinning a grenade on his harness much as Ridgway did. He also carried with him a blue poker chip that he would flip up and down while talking with his men, telling them they had to know when to play their blue chip—the implication being that a great combat commander had a sixth sense about battle and always knew when to strike. Some in his unit thought, however, that he did not fight with equal dash. He had, until then, seemed the possessor of a self-invented mystique, one not actually forged on the battlefield. Some of the men under him thought he sought glory too intensely, wanted a star too badly, and did not seem adequately committed to them. “Brave, yes. Professional, no,” Clay Blair quoted a fellow West Pointer saying.
By the time he had his force ready to move, much later on the fourteenth, it was already dark, not the ideal time to push forward on roads where the Chinese might already be dug in. That first night Crombez made it to Yoju, about ten miles south of Chipyongni. There his units waited while the engineers built a bypass around a blown-out bridge over the Han River. Having finally managed to clear the Han on the evening of the fourteenth, his tanks were slowed by another blown bridge over a creek near Koksuri, about five miles from Chipyongni, and never really got moving until the morning of the fifteenth. Paul Freeman, monitoring Crombez’s progress by radio, knew that no relief party was going to make it through on the fourteenth. Meanwhile the heaviest fighting yet at Chipyongni was taking place on the night of the fourteenth and into the morning of the fifteenth. Freeman, aware that the relief mission was moving more slowly than expected, then requested all the air strikes he could get, but almost nothing came—because the Air Force was so committed to the fighting at Wonju. What he did get was a light spotter plane—the Firefly, the men called it—that dropped flares; a wonderful addition to the battlefield, Freeman later said, because it turned “night into day.” His men, he knew, were going to have to hold out a second night before help arrived.
IN THE ANNALS of the Korean War few incidents are as controversial as that of Marcel Crombez’s final dash to the rescue at Chipyongni. Yes, he got there, and he got there in time, and yes, what he did was what Matt Ridgway had ordered him to do. But there was an unnecessary recklessness to it, which resulted in unnecessary losses among the infantrymen who accompanied him that many involved felt reflected an almost cavalier disregard for their lives. That he had put the mission above the proper care and treatment of his own men angered those infantrymen who survived, and left a bitter aftertaste in the accounts of historians who believed the same results could have been achieved with far fewer casualties, and who in addition wondered, when it was over, about the personal courage of the rescue commander himself. It raised one of the great questions of command in wartime: Does elemental success in a crucial battle excuse all other failures and lapses? And if you succeed, are there are other issues you should answer to?
24. TASK FORCE CROMBEZ, FEBRUARY 14–15, 1951
On the morning of the fifteenth, Crombez ran into heavy Chinese resistance just south of Koksuri. He had placed his infantrymen on either side of the road, but his progress remained slow. At that moment it was not clear whether his tanks would be able to push through in time. Around noon Crombez received a message from the CP of the Twenty-third (by then under Chiles) saying, “Reach us as soon as possible, in any event, reach us.”
The importance of his mission had repeatedly been made clear to Crombez from the start by his superiors. He was visited by General Moore, the Tenth Corps commander, who told him to be there by evening, and then by General C. D. (known to his peers as Charley Dog, to match Army terminology) Palmer, his rather crusty division commander, and then by Nick Ruffner, the division commander of the besieged unit. All three of them pleaded with him to hurry. “I’ll do it personally,” Crombez promised. Finally, General Palmer landed in his chopper to talk to Crombez, check how things were going, and ask when he might reach Chipyongni—one more unneeded reminder that time was of the essence. “I’ll get there and before dark,” Crombez had assured him. Palmer then lent his chopper to Crombez, who scanned the area and saw that the road was still open but that the hills were full of Chinese. The decision to defend Chipyongni was Ridgway’s, and it was vital to his larger strategy for the war. Thus the pressure on Crombez to get through was immense, each visit or call a reminder of how badly Ridgway wanted this one; it was as if the heat falling on Crombez was a direct extension of the heat coming down level by level from Ridgway to the officers—nothing but brass—immediately below him.
From the moment the battle began, Ridgway seemed to believe that the tide of the war depended on its outcome, that the sooner the Americans and their UN allies showed they could handle the numerical superiority of the Chinese, the more quickly other victories would come. What was at stake was not just a specific small piece of terrain, but the very psyche of his army. If Freeman, and now Chiles, could hold, it would be a symbol to all the other fighting men that they had entered a new phase of the war, one in which the Chinese had been stripped of the immense psychological advantage they had gained at Kunuri. In the months to follow, Ridgway was determined to keep adjusting the battlefield odds, to make things better for the men under his command—better food, warmer clothes, better armaments, better commanders—and to wage a campaign by ar
tillery and air that would turn the lives of the Chinese soldiers into pure misery. But first and foremost he needed to change the mind-set of his own men.
At a certain point, Crombez called Chiles and said he did not think he could get there with his full train of infantrymen and supply trucks and ambulances. “Come on, trains or no trains,” Chiles replied. Then Crombez made a fateful decision, one that would forever after cling to his reputation as a kind of permanent asterisk. He decided to turn his charge to Chipyongni into an armored assault. He would get rid of most of the non-armored part of his column, narrowing it down from three battalions to a much smaller, more streamlined force. He would take his tanks and the engineers—he needed the engineers to remove land mines, for the Chinese used their sappers skillfully. In addition, he would place a company of infantry on top of the tanks, and, less burdened, go all out. What bothered the men who made the rest of the assault, and the historians who wrote about it afterward, was the decision to put the infantrymen on top of the tanks.
To mount on the tanks he chose Love Company, with its 160 men, led by Captain John Barrett. Lieutenant Colonel Edgar Treacy, who had begun the rescue mission as the infantry battalion commander, was appalled by the idea. It violated every aspect of Army doctrine—if the Chinese continued to hit the convoy, the infantrymen riding on the tanks would be sitting ducks for the Chinese machine guns and mortars. Both Treacy and Barrett protested the order—the casualties would be horrendous, they said. Not only were the men on the tanks likely to be exceptionally vulnerable to Chinese fire, but when Patton tanks heated up, they could set a man’s clothes on fire. In addition, the sweep of one of the tanks’ big guns could knock men off at any time. What most men—certainly military historians who wrote about it—believed was that the tanks should have been buttoned up, with perhaps some infantrymen and engineers riding inside protected vehicles that followed behind the tanks. Then they could have gone hell for leather to Chipyongni. At the very least, if the infantrymen got off, there had to be some very dependable means of communication between their commander and the commander of the tanks.
What made the battlefield confrontation between Crombez and Treacy particularly difficult and caused subsequent events to be touched by exceptional bitterness and anger was the fact that there already appeared to be unusually bad feeling between the two of them. Both were West Point men, but theirs had been very different West Points and very different careers after graduation. Crombez had been born in Belgium, had enlisted in the Army in 1919, and had made it to West Point, graduating in 1925. He had always retained a rather heavy accent, and had been seen by his classmates as a heavy-handed striver, too crudely ambitious in terms of the academy’s culture. What had attached itself to Crombez early on was the back-channel word that he wanted it all too much and yet did not have the right stuff. At the start of World War II, he was sixteen years out of the academy and was, in terms of command possibilities, a little too old for the lower ranking commands and not good enough for the more senior ones. He had done stateside training for most of the war. By war’s end, he had made colonel. Like almost everyone else in the postwar military, his personal position shrank and he became a light colonel.
After the war, he finally got a command, being placed in charge of two separate regiments of the Seventh Infantry Division in Korea. He was, in the vernacular of the Army, something of a hard-ass, a petty one at that, it was believed, someone who seized on small things and made them too important. Before the Korean War started, he seemed disproportionately interested, for example, in keeping the troops stationed near Kaesong away from the hookers in town. Troops being troops, they were going to find a way to connect, even if it meant slipping the women into the barracks, as they sometimes did, disguised as ROK soldiers. Crombez once showed up at a company headquarters and threw a fit because in the little stand where the soldiers could buy some basic needs, the different candy bars for sale were not lined up properly. Still he had managed to hang on and, in 1949, was promoted once again to colonel, this time permanently. When the war started, he was given command of the Fifth Cav. His position, however, was in jeopardy, for Ridgway was eager to replace most of the regimental commanders with younger men. As the oldest of them, Crombez was a prime candidate to be sent somewhere else and thus fall short of getting his star. It was an unenviable situation, one likely to make an already aggressive officer even more so.
By contrast, Lieutenant Colonel Edgar Treacy was as close as you could get to being Crombez’s mirror opposite, a gifted younger commander of virtually the same rank who had graduated from West Point ten years later. He was a kind of golden boy, with admirable connections within the Army’s hierarchy, and yet beloved by the men in his battalion. Whether the bad feelings began because the younger man’s career seemed so effortless, blessed as he was with personal grace and the support of powerful superiors, or because Treacy, as some men believed, had sat on the board that recommended that Crombez be reduced to lieutenant colonel at the end of World War II, no one was sure. But the tension had been apparent since the early days of the Naktong fighting, when Treacy was a battalion commander under Crombez.
It had flared into the open during the difficult fighting that had taken place in mid-September. They were in the Taegu area, engaged in a vicious seesaw struggle to take Hill 174, when Crombez ordered Treacy’s Love Company up it three times. The third time, Treacy finally objected to what he felt was a suicidal assault. The North Koreans, extremely well dug in, drove them back again, inflicting heavy casualties. Then Crombez ordered Treacy’s Item Company up the same hill, and Treacy objected. “The enemy knows that we’ll be coming…. The gooks will be ready for [us]. Item Company is the only company of good strength in the regiment and probably Eighth Army and if they get chewed up that will be the last strong company gone to hell.” But Crombez insisted. So once again up they went, eventually taking the hill at a high price, only to be driven off by a ferocious Korean counterattack. Once more Crombez ordered Item to take the hill. This time Captain Norman Allen, the company commander, refused the order. “Colonel,” he told Treacy, his immediate superior, “I never thought I would ever have to do this, least of all to you, but you can report to Regiment that Captain Allen of Item Company refuses the order!” Treacy had turned to him, quite weary, Allen remembered, and said, “That’s all right, Norm. I understand. I refuse the order too!”
Then Allen had asked Treacy what he had been doing on Hill 174 himself the day before—a battalion commander going forward on an extremely dangerous assault that he was in no way supposed to be part of. Treacy pointed out that four days earlier the battalion had had almost 900 men. Now they were down to 292. “If I had been ordered to take Hill 174 again, I was going to refuse the order, and I wanted to insure that there would be no basis for a charge of personal cowardice!” he told Allen. He did refuse the next order, and Allen learned later that Crombez had called him yellow in front of the other battalion commanders. What tore at Treacy was the unnecessary loss of men in useless assaults in this particular stretch of fighting. At night, some of the other officers had noticed that he seemed to be mumbling to himself just before he went to sleep. At first they thought he was saying his prayers. One officer asked if Treacy were reciting Hail Marys. No, the answer came back, he was reciting the name of each man in his battalion who had died and asking God’s forgiveness for his own responsibility in his death.
NOW, ON THE road to Chipyongni, Treacy found himself in a very difficult position—asking a superior, who was under almost unbearable pressure and who clearly bore him some animus, not to put his infantrymen on top of the tanks. Crombez was unmoved by his protest. He made only one concession. If the Chinese hit them hard, he would stop his tanks while the infantrymen got off, and he would use his considerable suppressive firepower on the enemy. Then there would be a signal for the men to reboard before they moved on. Treacy responded by demanding the right to accompany his men. He could not ask them to do what he himself was not willing
to do. But Crombez denied that request, ordering Treacy to take command of the rest of the convoy and to move forward to Chipyongni only after the road was cleared. So it was that the 160 men of Love Company boarded the tanks.
Barrett, the company commander, and the tank company commander, Captain Johnny Hiers, worked out signals. If the tanks were going to move on, Hiers was to radio Barrett, giving the infantrymen time to remount. But the poor quality of their radios, plus the overwhelming noise of the tanks and the chaos of battle, offered little guarantee of success. Treacy was sure something terrible was about to happen. He told Barrett to leave behind one man from each squad in case Love Company needed to be reorganized after the mission. That would give them a kind of ghost structure to rebuild around. In addition, he asked every man in the unit to write home and put any personal effects in the letters.
Thus did the rescue convoy set off, each tank spaced about fifty yards from the next. The newer Patton tanks were in the lead; the older Shermans, with less mobile big guns, followed. Crombez was, as the historian J. D. Coleman notes with considerable irony, in the fifth tank, with the hatch closed. The combat engineers would ride on top of the first four tanks, the troops from Love Company on the others, ten men to a tank, with the last four empty. Captain Barrett rode on the sixth tank. Colonel Treacy argued for and won the right for a two-and-a-half-ton truck to follow the column to pick up any wounded men. Just as the convoy was moving out, Treacy jumped aboard the sixth tank and rode with Barrett.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Page 77