The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  52

  CHIPYONGNI HAD SIGNALED the beginning of a new stage in the war, one that lasted two more years without granting either side any turn-of-the-tide victory. The commanders of both armies were largely without illusions—though some illusions might still remain among the political figures above them. But from then on it became a grinding war. I want you, Ridgway told a group of Marine officers about that time, “to bleed Red China white.” It became a war of cruel, costly battles, of few breakthroughs, and of strategies designed to inflict maximum punishment on the other side without essentially changing the battle lines. In the end, there would be no great victory for anyone, only some kind of mutually unsatisfactory compromise.

  Each side had managed to neutralize the forces of the other, but both seemed somehow powerless to stop the war itself. The Chinese launched a major offensive in the spring of 1951, costly to them, and of only marginal success. They threw some three hundred thousand men into the line. Some of the most intense fighting of the war ensued, with insignificant benefits at the cost of horrific Chinese casualties. For the Western command, however, it was a reminder of just how good the Chinese troops really were and how many of them there were, which dampened any great desire to plan offenses to punch north of the thirty-eighth again and head for the Yalu. The commanders in the field did not always agree—the Eighth Army commander Jim Van Fleet was for a time very restless with the limits placed on him and thought, once he had stopped the Chinese offensive in May 1951, that it was his turn to drive north. But Washington had been through all that once before, and the results had been horrendous, and it had no intention of investing more American and other lives in trying it a second time.

  But no one knew how to end it. The war had settled into unbearable, unwinnable battles; it had reached the point where there were no more victories, only death. Both sides wanted to get out, but neither seemed to have the political skills to do so, and the figure of Joseph Stalin, not unhappy to see two potential rivals caught in so unhappy a war, slowed down any chance of getting out easily. Both the United States and China were also slowed by their policy of nonrecognition—the only place they recognized each other was on the battlefield, at gunpoint. Nonetheless peace talks, or at least armistice talks, began in mid-July 1951 at Kaesong, the ancient Korean capital just below the thirty-eighth parallel, and went forward at a speed somewhat slower than a snail’s pace. Eventually moved to Panmunjom in the no-man’s-land of the thirty-eighth parallel, the talks were slowed by great ideological hostility and distrust, and by the fact that neither of the ancillary powers, the two Koreas, wanted to admit the existence of the other. What also turned out to be a major deterrent to progress was the issue of repatriation. There were a large number of Chinese prisoners who did not want to go back to the mainland. One estimate suggested that there were some twenty thousand Chinese soldiers being held prisoner, and only about six thousand wanted to be repatriated. That made a difficult process even harder.

  BEFORE THERE COULD be peace in Korea, the American political process had to come to terms with the idea of a stalemate in a limited war. The Democrats, unhappily cast as the war’s architects, were badly limited in their ability to do that. But a Republican president, especially a centrist Republican one, might be able to bring home the kind of imperfect settlement that a Democrat could not. Thus the great political battle of 1952 was not waged in the general election, but rather at the Republican Party’s convention in Chicago, between the moderates and the conservatives. The anger there was visceral; it was as if all the long-simmering bitterness over foreign policy—and the parallel powerlessness among the right-wing members—surfaced at that convention. Everyone there believed that thanks to the war, they were now going to have the best chance to win in more than two decades—an even better chance than in 1948. And in the view of the right-wing isolationists there was Dwight Eisenhower, previously not even a declared Republican, arriving at their convention ready to steal their nomination. Who even knew if Eisenhower, who had worked so easily with Roosevelt and Truman, was really a Republican? “I Like Ike,” said the Eisenhower buttons. “But What Does Ike Like?” countered the Taft buttons. The tensions on the convention floor and on the Chicago streets were far more bitter than normal. John Wayne, the actor, who had been, at thirty-four, an acceptable age to fight in World War II (Jimmy Stewart, a year older, had an exceptional war record) but had decided to do the war in celluloid because his career was just beginning to take off, was a particularly vocal Taft delegate. The star of many war films, Wayne at one point jumped out of his cab and yelled at an old mess sergeant who was running an Eisenhower sound truck, “Why don’t you get a red flag?”

  Taft himself seemed to think he could use the Korean War and the firing of MacArthur as central issues. Just before the convention, he announced that if elected he would name MacArthur “deputy commander in chief of the armed forces,” whatever that actually meant. Senator Everett Dirksen was Taft’s man, the key floor leader for the Midwestern wing, ready to fight to the last to stop the Eisenhower intruders. The leader of the Eisenhower forces was the twice-defeated Tom Dewey. At one point Dirksen stood at the podium and pointed down at Dewey, the archenemy of his own people, now the leader of the Eisenhower surge, and said, “Reexamine your hearts before you take this action. We followed you before and you took us down the road to defeat.” Then, his finger still pointed at Dewey as if it were a weapon, Dirksen added, “And don’t take us down that road again.” It was the highest drama of the convention.

  But to many ordinary delegates at the convention, hungering for a presidential victory, the promise of Eisenhower with his immense charm was more seductive than that of Taft’s greater ideological purity. And Eisenhower it would be, both at the convention and in the general election. There was even a chemical formula for his campaign, worn on pins by his supporters, K1C2, or, translated into politics: the Korean War, corruption in government, and Communists in government. During the campaign he had uttered one single sentence that had virtually guaranteed his election. “I will go to Korea,” he had said. Translated from the codes of politics to the public at large, that meant, “I will end the war.” He won the election handily, by 6.6 million votes. He went to Korea, met with both General Mark Clark, who had the old MacArthur job, and Jim Van Fleet, who had the Walton Walker job, both of them more hawkish than Eisenhower and both irritated by the limits imposed on them—they were not allowed major offensives and were to focus on minimizing casualties. They were both filled with plans on how to intensify the pressure on the Chinese. Eisenhower barely listened. He wanted out.

  Eisenhower was probably the perfect centrist candidate for that moment as America went through the torturous, grudging process of becoming an international power. He was thoughtful, careful, and experienced, the least jingoistic of military men. He was what the country wanted and probably needed just then, a tempered and tempering figure in an edgy and surely dangerous time. His sense of internationalism was impeccable and hard-won. He had led the largest invasion force in the history of mankind. He was, in personal terms, the anti-MacArthur, generous with subordinates, quick to give them credit, brilliant at suppressing his own ego, and capable of fending off the considerable ego of others.

  His election also spelled the end for a certain kind of overt McCarthyism and, finally, for the senator himself. McCarthy had never quite understood the boundaries and limitations under which he operated, that he was useful when he attacked a Democratic president, not a Republican one. He did not understand that his role changed once Eisenhower had been elected, and so he continued on, reckless as ever, until in 1954 the Republican center began to move against him, resulting in his eventual censure. If McCarthy himself was censured in 1954, that did not mean that McCarthyism itself was dead—the willingness of prominent politicians in one party to attack their political opponents, not because of a valid disagreement over policy but on grounds of loyalty, accusing those they opposed of treason, and of aiding and abetting
the Communists, continued; and some of the issues that had burdened Truman and Acheson still smoldered just under the surface. Much to his surprise, Eisenhower, new at the political game, quickly found that on some key issues he had more support and greater sympathy from the Democrats in Congress than from his own party. “Republican Senators,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary a few weeks after becoming president, “are having a hard time getting through their heads that they now belong to a team that includes rather than opposes the White House.”

  WHAT THE ELECTION of Eisenhower also did was ease the way for a future settlement in Korea. Then in March 1953, both the United States and China caught a break. Joseph Stalin, the man covertly pushing the Chinese to be more obstinate, died, opening the way to finding a solution. Both sides were now freer to get a settlement than they might have been only a few months earlier, the Americans because Eisenhower could bring home the same kind of disappointing settlement that Truman might have been pilloried for, and the Chinese because Mao no longer had Stalin looking over his shoulder.

  A routine letter to the Chinese from Mark Clark, the United Nations commander, suggesting an exchange of sick and wounded prisoners, drew an immediate and positive response. In late April 1953, the exchange, known to the Americans as Operation Little Switch, took place. The way was now open for further progress. But it was still a difficult task. Syngman Rhee, furious about the inconclusive nature of the potential solution, the fact that he would, like Kim Il Sung, after all that bloodshed and sacrifice, once again rule only half a country, tried to undermine the talks. First he announced in May that he would not be a party to any settlement and that the South would fight on alone—a threat that was palpably embarrassing to the Americans but also palpably empty. What he got in return was an offer of a bilateral security from the United States. Then, in mid-June, as both sides seemed to be moving ever more quickly toward a settlement, Rhee moved again to undermine the talks. He pulled his guards from the prison camps in the South, allowing some twenty-seven thousand North Koreans, who might have been forced into repatriation, to escape and slip back into South Korean society, thereby enraging Pyongyang. But even that did not stop the process. The two larger powers wanted out.

  The war went on grimly and meanly as the peace talks continued; the battles became an especially cruel way for each side to show to the other that if it was not exactly winning, then nevertheless it could stay there forever. By mid-1952, the war had begun to resemble more than anything else the worst of the First World War: trench warfare, days and nights of living under constant artillery barrages, men caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with almost all meaning subtracted from the fighting and dying. By then both sides had created seemingly unassailable extensive defensive lines. It was as if the Chinese, who had been so cavalier with their manpower in the earlier months of the war, had morphed their troops into a different kind of Army in the previous two years, skilled at this different kind of warfare. Given UN air and artillery supremacy, they had gradually adjusted their style of fighting. They had created quite exceptional tunnels, triumphs of raw, primitive engineering (and eventually to be copied and perhaps exceeded by the North Vietnamese, first in their assault on the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and then in time in their war with the Americans). In Korea these tunnels went from Chinese positions relatively removed from the point of assault to the very mouth of an attack point. They allowed the Chinese relative immunity from UN firepower until the very last moment of an attack. In addition, the Chinese had their artillery pieces, usually ones captured during their civil war, hidden away, virtually invisible to detection even from the air. They were positioned on the back side of the mountains, often in caves laboriously carved out of the mountains themselves. A given artillery piece would be slipped out periodically, would fire about twenty rounds of frighteningly accurate fire at the American positions, and then be wheeled back into the cave. “By the time our counterfire guys could fix its location, their gun was safe and its crew was safely back in the cave too, sucking down their rice,” said Hal Moore, who had commanded a rifle company in those days. Their defensive positions were exceptional, “very tough to crack—they were hard-core, heavy duty, professional diggers,” Moore said. “Their lines were built around deep caves, catacombs with large underground rooms sometimes twelve or fifteen miles behind the front lines. Because of that our artillery, bombers, and close air support had little or no effect on them.”

  Their troops were much admired by the American commanders in the field for their discipline and tenacity. The Americans were rotating their frontline people more and more quickly because it was such an unpopular war, but the Chinese were more often than not keeping the same units and the same troops engaged on the line for extended periods, and the American commanders in the field marveled at how well they seemed to be able to move at night without exposing themselves. As the war had continued, it had obviously become a kind of two-track struggle: the peace talks at Panmunjom, slow and agonizingly difficult, and the fighting itself, just enough input to let the other side know that neither side, Western nor Eastern, was going to lose military face.

  So it was with the battle of Pork Chop Hill in the spring of 1953. Pork Chop Hill, or Hill 255, was almost a symbol of the sheer emptiness of the last stages of the war, so much to be invested for so little gain. It was a bitter and bloody battle that took place in several stages, and it involved a small number of American infantry units, positioned at the extreme outer point of the UN lines, struggling for one of the most distant outposts on the UN exterior line. It had no great strategic benefit, and it was only of value because it had been deemed of value and because whichever side held it, the other side wanted it. The battle was more accurately a series of battles, for Pork Chop Hill had been going on for more than a year, culminating in the final battles of the Korean War in July 1953. The closer the people talking at Panmunjom came to some kind of a settlement, the more the value of Pork Chop seemed to go up, and the bloodier the fighting for it became. In late March of 1953, the Chinese attacked the hill and were driven off, but in the process took a neighboring outpost on a higher hill, Old Baldy, making Pork Chop that much more exposed. Major General Art Trudeau, the commander of the Seventh Division, wanted to take Old Baldy back, but Lieutenant General Maxwell Taylor, the new commander of the Eighth Army, refused permission for fear of additional prohibitive casualties. Taylor himself was under orders to clear any assault larger than two battalions with his superiors in Washington. That order in itself reflected Washington’s desire for less not more war at this point.

  In mid-April 1953, just as they were moving ahead on Little Switch and Panmunjom, the Chinese struck again, some twenty-three hundred of them, attacking the tiny garrison at Pork Chop. What ensued was a furious artillery battle. Slam Marshall, who wrote of that battle as he did of the fighting up near Kunuri, said that during the first day of the artillery barrage, the nine artillery battalions of the Second and Seventh divisions fired 37,655 rounds, and on the second day alone an additional 77,349 rounds. “Never at Verdun were guns worked at any rate such as this. The battle of Kwajalein, our most intense shoot during World War II, was still a lesser thing when measured in terms of artillery expenditure per hour, weight of metal against yards of earth and the grand output of the guns,” he wrote. “For this at least the operation deserves a place in history. It set the all time mark for artillery effort.”

  The American troops managed to hold. In July 1953, the Chinese tried once again. The battle went on ferociously for two days, with both sides in a virtual stalemate on the crest of the hill. King Company, commanded by Lieutenant Joe Clemons, took the hardest hit. Clemons had gone up there with 135 men in his command and came back with 14. The fighting went back and forth over five days, from July 6 to July 11. On the morning of July 11, Maxwell Taylor drove up to Trudeau’s headquarters and told him that Pork Chop was not worth the investment of any more American lives, that the battle was over. The remaining American forc
es slipped off the hill, unbeknownst to the Chinese. When someone asked Major General Mike West, the commander of the British Commonwealth Division, what he would have done to get Pork Chop back, he answered, “Nothing. It was only an outpost.” Sixteen days later, on July 27, a truce began in Korea.

  A difficult, draining, cruel war had ended under terms that no one was very happy with.

  53

  PERHAPS ALL WARS are in some way or another the product of miscalculations. But Korea was a place where almost every key decision on both sides turned on a miscalculation. First, the Americans took Korea off their defensive perimeter, which in turn encouraged the varying Communist participants to act. Then, the Soviets gave a green light to Kim Il Sung to invade the South, convinced the Americans would not come in. When the Americans entered the war, they greatly underestimated the skills of the North Korean troops they were going to face, and vastly overestimated how well prepared the first American troops to go into battle were. Later, the Americans decided to drive north of the thirty-eighth parallel, paying no attention to Chinese warnings.