The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  In addition, there are a number of interviews I did for earlier books, which connect directly in this one, including the aforementioned long talks with Fred Ladd, and interviews and talks with Homer Bigart, the legendary Herald Tribune and New York Times reporter, a close friend and my predecessor in Vietnam, Walton Butterworth, Averell Harriman, Townsend Hoopes, Murray Kempton (another close friend), Bill Moyers, George Reedy, James Reston (my original sponsor at the New York Times), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Carter Vincent, and Theodore White, another good friend. In addition, when I wrote The Best and the Brightest, I became friendly with General Matthew Ridgway. He quite liked the book (in no small part because he was one of its rare heroes) and we stayed in touch. Late in his life, around, I think, 1988, we had a series of telephone calls, and during one of them he began talking about doing another book about the Korean War. He was clearly dissatisfied with parts of his earlier book, perhaps goaded by Dean Acheson, who had in a somewhat friendly way in a letter suggested that Ridgway had pulled his punches in describing his view of MacArthur’s behavior in those days. I think he was also stung by MacArthur’s own subsequent criticism of Ridgway’s conduct of the war. At this point his voice changed somewhat, and he became edgier and sharper of tone. He also started free-associating over the phone about the reasons he believed MacArthur had gone so far north, and in particular, why he had split the command—to diminish, Ridgway said, the influence and independence of General Walker and particularly the Joint Chiefs, to make Walker compete with Almond, who was completely under MacArthur’s control. It was really aimed at the Joint Chiefs, he said; and as his forces moved north it shifted ultimate power and control of the mission to Tokyo from Washington and Korea itself. He was also very critical—almost bitter in tone, I thought—about how completely removed the Tokyo command was from the reality of the battlefield, and the failure of Tokyo to understand what it was subjecting American soldiers to. As he continued to talk I took rough if imperfect notes and later consolidated them. There was the suggestion in that conversation that perhaps he would do another book and might want to do it with me. When a few weeks later I called back to see where his thinking was, he had pulled back from the idea of a book. He was, he said, in his early nineties (he was born in 1895), and it was more work than he wanted. But some of that conversation is reflected in this book.

  I AM INDEBTED to a great many people for their help with this book, starting with the men of the Second Infantry Division, especially the officers of their Korean War alumni association, and particularly Chuck Hayward, Charley Heath, and Ralph Hockley. From the First Cav, Joe Christopher was exceptionally helpful in connecting me with men who fought and survived Unsan. Edwin Simmons went out of his way to assist me with access to the First Marines and helping me find men like Jim Lawrence, who were unusually knowledgeable about O. P. Smith.

  I want to thank others who helped me: Tom Engelhart, who edited the book, which given its complexity was never an easy process; Ben Skinner, a talented young writer in his own right, who did additional research for me on the American decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel and head north; and my neighbor Linda Drogin, who volunteered on this book as in the past to do some vital checking for me. I would also like to thank my friend Joe Goulden, who not only wrote one of the best and most penetrating books on the Korean War but was a source of constant assistance and encouragement to me. I want to mention the scholars of the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, and in particular Kathryn Weathersby, for their help in this book—the Center is a remarkable source of new information on areas long closed off to Westerners.

  I was welcomed and treated with uncommon kindness at a number of libraries. From the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Dr. Richard Sommers, chief of patron services, as well as Michael Monahan, Richard Baker, Randy Hackenburg, and Pamela Cheney; from the Marines, known properly as the History Division of the Marine Corps University, Dr. Fred Allison, Danny Crawford, and Richard Camp; at the Douglas MacArthur Archives in Norfolk, Virginia, James Zobel was exceptionally helpful; at the Harry Truman Library, Michael Devine, the director, Liz Safly, Amy Williams, and Randy Sowell; at the Lyndon Johnson Library, Betty Sue Flowers; from the Franklin Roosevelt Library, Alycia Vivona, Robert Clark, the supervisory archivist, Karen Anson, Matt Hanson, Virginia Lewick, and Mark Renovitch; and from the New York Public Library, Wayne Furman, David Smith, and my friend Jean Strouse. At the Council on Foreign Relations, Lee Gusts was generous and helpful. As ever, the entire staff of the New York Society Library was helpful and helped create what is an oasis for me and other writers in the city.

  At Hyperion Bob Miller and Will Schwalbe had faith in this book and its value from the start and stayed with me, even though, like most books, it came in somewhat behind schedule. Others at Hyperion for whose support I am grateful are Ellen Archer, Jane Comins, Claire McKean, Fritz Metsch, Emily Gould, Brendan Duffy, Beth Gebhard, Katie Wainwright, Charlie Davidson, Vincent Stanley, Rick Willett, Chisomo Kalinga, Sarah Rucker, Maha Khalil, and Jill Sansone, and from HarperCollins, my old friend of more than thirty years, Jane Becker Friedman. I am grateful for the help of my friends and lawyer-agents, Marty Garbus and Bob Solomon. My friend Carolyn Parqueth once again transcribed most of the interviews. Charles Roos is my computer expert and he saved me from crisis after crisis—on those terrible days when my manuscript seemed to have departed my computer.

  No one who sets off to do a book like this is ever the first; someone has always been there before, and we in this business are always aware of those who went before us and our debt to them, especially when the events took place more than fifty years ago. So it should be noted that among the books listed in the Bibliography, certain books were truly essential, most notably Clay Blair’s encyclopedic The Forgotten War, the most important primer for anyone dealing with Korea; William Manchester’s American Caesar; the books of Roy Appleman; S. L. A. Marshall’s The River and the Gauntlet; Joe Goulden’s Korea; Max Hastings’ The Korean War; and Martin Russ’s Breakout. Uncertain Partners, the book by John Lewis, Sergei Goncharov, and Xue Litai about the relationship between Stalin, Mao, and Kim, is a groundbreaking work, its value greatly enhanced by my own long conversation with Professor Lewis. My friend Les Gelb, until recently the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, was as ever a wise consultant and a thoughtful ally.

  My two friends Lieutenant General Hal Moore (who commanded a company in Korea) and Joe Galloway, who together wrote what I consider the best book on combat in Vietnam, We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, were not only constantly supportive but gave me valuable guidance. In addition my friend Scott Moyers, who has been uncommonly helpful in my work for more than a decade, kept an eye on me and helped me out when I was struggling with the manuscript. I want to acknowledge my immense admiration for the esteemed photographer David Douglas Duncan, who came out of Chosin with the First Marines and is revered by them for that alone. With his remarkable photographs he has been able to remind us of what all those men went through in those days; I am proud that he was willing to let me use one of his photographs for the jacket of the book—it’s a badge of honor.

  Afterword

  by RUSSELL BAKER

  David Halberstam had put the finishing touches on The Coldest Winter in the spring of 2007, just five days before his death in a car accident in California. He had essentially finished the book months earlier, but with a book there is finishing, and then a little more finishing, and then a final finishing, and after months of revising, checking and rechecking, slashing, inserting, and wrestling with endless pages of manuscript and printed proofs, he stopped by his publisher’s office on an April Wednesday and dropped off his final corrections. This was the book as he wanted it to be, and he was happy with it. It is the book now at hand.

  He had worked at it off and on for ten years—his first formal proposal for what came to be called “the Korea book” was drawn up in 1997—but the ide
a sprang from a 1962 conversation in Vietnam with an American soldier who had fought in Korea. In a sense The Coldest Winter is a companion book to The Best and the Brightest, which dealt with America’s failure in Vietnam. The Korean War had ended in stalemate while he was still in high school. He was in his twenties when he started covering Vietnam for the New York Times, and by that time the Korean War did not mean much to him, or to many other Americans except the soldiers who had fought it. Americans neither celebrate nor long remember their stalemates. Halberstam sensed that this forgetting masked some turning point in the history of America’s political development after World War II. How had we gotten from Korean stalemate to Vietnamese disaster? He set out to understand, then re-create, a time of extraordinary political bitterness that Americans had put out of mind.

  Finally, on a Wednesday in April, he finished this monumental task and by the following Monday, not being a man to relax after completing a big job, he was in California to do some work on his next book. This one was to be about professional football. It would be the twenty-second book he had written over nearly fifty years. His first, published in 1961, was The Noblest Roman, a novel about small-town corruption in the Deep South. His only other novel, One Very Hot Day, had a Vietnam setting, but he was a man prone to a kind of moral outrage not readily accommodated in fiction. As a reporter in Vietnam he had discovered that the plain, astonishing, outrageous, absolute implausibility of the real world made it far more fascinating than whatever world any but the greatest fiction writer could possibly imagine. He spent the rest of his life trying to be the best of all possible journalists.

  Halberstam thought journalism a high, sometimes even a noble calling, and was sometimes cruelly dismissive of those who belittled it and especially of those who betrayed it. One of his earliest books, The Making of a Quagmire, dealing with the Vietnam War, put an antique word back into common use while introducing the country to the then astounding possibility of American fallibility.

  With The Best and the Brightest, his sixth book, he returned to the subject of Vietnam and established himself as a singular force in what was being called “the new journalism.” This involved the use of fictional techniques to interest readers in complex matters that many might otherwise find forbiddingly tedious. The aim was to create the sense of a storyteller weaving a tale. The writer was expected to remain faithful to the facts but not to encumber the story with constant explanations of how the facts were obtained. The Best and the Brightest was a masterful illustration of the technique and, though traditionalists once fumed about its unorthodox journalistic method, it is now regarded as an essential classic of Vietnam War literature.

  After that the books came in profusion: big books like The Powers That Be, The Reckoning, The Fifties, War in a Time of Peace; books about the world of sports like The Amateurs, Summer of ’49, Playing for Keeps, and The Teammates; books both short and long, written simply because he thought they ought to be written: The Children, for example, celebrating a group of young Southern blacks who had been in the vanguard of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s; and Firehouse, a tribute to his neighborhood fire fighters. (On September 11, thirteen of them left the firehouse for the World Trade Center; twelve did not return.)

  This next book, the football book that had brought him to California, demanded a great deal of interviewing. There was nothing unusual about that. Interviewing was the bedrock of his work. His books were filled with the sound of people talking, and getting the sound right required endless interviewing and patient listening. The Coldest Winter, for example, opens with the voices of American soldiers happily discussing their apparent triumph over the North Korean Army while several hundred thousand Chinese soldiers are silently closing the trap that will annihilate them.

  The Teammates begins with Dominic DiMaggio’s wife, Emily, objecting to her husband’s plan to visit his dying teammate, Ted Williams: “I just don’t want you driving to Florida alone,” she says in the book’s third sentence. In Ho, his character study of Ho Chi Minh, a French army officer on page one starts talking in a Vietnamese bar about the defeat at Dienbienphu: “It was all for nothing…I let my men die for nothing.”

  Halberstam once said that after finishing Harvard he deliberately sought work on small-town Southern newspapers so he could learn how to talk to ordinary people, a skill not much cherished in the Ivy League, but indispensable to success in journalism. Getting people to talk was vital to his distinctive way of writing history, because he believed in the individual human as history’s agent. It is doubtful that he was ever much interested in a Tolstoyan view of man at the mercy of history’s tides, and for good reason. Take that road and journalism becomes absurd; Halberstam was a journalist, heart and soul.

  He needed to understand the connection between the human and the event. He was constantly trying to understand why a nation with such high aspirations, led by the most excellent people, so often ended up in one quagmire or another. His work assumed a vital human agency behind historical developments. Belief in the importance of these human forces led naturally to the study of people, and they appear in astonishing variety in his books: powerful men like the Kennedys, Douglas MacArthur, Ho Chi Minh, Lyndon Johnson; great athletes like Michael Jordan and Ted Williams; important policy shapers like Robert McNamara, Brent Scowcroft, and Madeleine Albright; but also a young man rowing a single scull in hopes of making an Olympic team that almost no one else cares about, and a bunch of black kids risking their lives for the right to vote and eat an ice-cream sundae sitting down, and those thirteen firemen headed for the World Trade Center.

  To bring them to life on the page he had to hear people talking. So he interviewed and interviewed. For his twenty-second book, the one about football, he was on his way to interview a Hall of Fame football player named Y. A. Tittle. The crash occurred on his way to the interview.

  Notes

  For further details about the sources listed in these notes, please refer to the Bibliography.

  INTRODUCTION

  “nastiest little war”: Hastings, Max, The Korean War, p. 329.

  “If the best minds”: Goulden, Joseph, Korea, p. 3.

  “sour war”: Ibid., p. xv.

  “a police action”; Paige, Glenn, The Korean Decision, p. 243.

  “[was] another mountain”: author interview with George Russell.

  put their losses at roughly 1.5 million: Hastings, Max, The Korean War, p. 329.

  CHAPTER 1

  so raw it made you gag: author interview with Phil Peterson.

  “we did it, buddy”: author interview with Bill Richardson.

  “the thirteenth platoon leader”: author interview with Ben Boyd.

  “Kim Buck Tooth?”: Breuer, William, Shadow Warriors, p. 106.

  “they were going to be overrun”: author interviews with Barbara Thompson Foltz, John S. D. Eisenhower.

  “On to the Yalu”: Paik, Sun Yup, From Pusan to Panmunjom, p. 85.

  “No, I’m Chinese”: Ibid., pp. 87–88.

  “diplomatic blackmail”: Spurr, Russell, Enter the Dragon, p. 161.

  “We’re all going home and we’re going home soon”: author interview with Ralph Hockley.

  “damn near annihilated that very first night”: author interview with Pappy Miller.

  “He was the best”: author interview with Lester Urban.

  his advice had been ignored: Blair, Clay, The Forgotten War, p. 381; Harold Johnson oral history, U.S. Army War College Library.

  “To say it was careless”: author interview with Hewlett (Reb) Rainer.

  thought he was crazy at the time: author interview with Bill Richardson.

  particularly enticing target: author interview with Fillmore McAbee.

  little curiosity about either: author interview with William West.

  “than battle-tested officers”: Ibid.

  “strangest sight I have ever seen”: Appleman, Roy, South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu, p. 690.

  encircled on thre
e sides: Ibid., p. 691.

  “twenty thousand laundrymen”: author interview with Ben Boyd.

  “Walsh is dead!”: author interview with Bill Richardson.

  “gooks all around us”: author interview with Robert Kies.

  “Well, He is, He is”: author interview with Bill Richardson.