The next day, the Northumberland Fusiliers, a unit of the British 29th Brigade, newly arrived in Korea and on its way north to the Pyongyang area, received an enemy attack between 3 A.M. and 7:30 A.M. by an estimated 1,200 enemy in the vicinity of Sibyong-ni, 40 miles west of Chorwon. These enemy troops had to be North Korean. In beating off this attack, the battalion committed two companies and fired 200 or more rounds of artillery. At the end of the month the US IX Corps G-2 Section estimated that North Korean units behind American lines included elements of the NK 10th and 15th divisions in the Koksan area; of the NK 2nd, 7th, and 43rd divisions in the Kangdong area; of the 8th, 33rd, and 34th regiments in the Ichon area; of the NK 4th Division in the Yonchon area; and of the 9th Division in the Kumhwa area. The intelligence report stated the first two groups were well organized and believed to be under the command of Gen. Kim Pack's newly organized NK II Corps, with his CP at Kumsong, just northeast of the Iron Triangle. The NK II Corps strength was estimated to be about 15,000 men. Gen. Kim Pack enjoyed the reputation of being an excellent guerrilla leader.15
In effect, North Korean remnants of many divisions of its original army had defeated the ROK 2nd and 5th divisions by the end of November and held control of the vital Iron Triangle in central Korea, north of Seoul. At exactly this same time, the CCF 2nd Phase Offensive had hurled the Eighth Army back from the Chongchon River front, far to the north, and the US 2nd Infantry Division was trying desperately to escape south through the CCF fireblock on the Kunu-ri-Sunchon road.
On 1 December Eighth Army estimated there were 2,000 North Korean guerrillas northeast of Pyongyang, 4,000 cast of Sariwon and southeast of Pyong yang, and 5,500 in the Iron Triangle. Eighth Army believed that these enemy behind the lines intended to attack south. The IX Corps intelligence officer reached the conclusion that the North Korean guerrilla forces behind the UN line had the capability of cutting the Pyongyang-Seoul MSR on the YangdokKumchon-Kaesong axis.16
ROK troops were never able to regain control of the Iron Triangle, although some ineffectual efforts were made again in the first part of December. On 10 December aerial intelligence showed much enemy activity in the Pyonggang area. At Yonchon there were new enemy installations visible, and nine roadblocks made of felled trees, rocks, and wood crates obstructed the north-south highway. A motorized patrol from the 1st Battalion, 5th RCT, US 24th Division, advanced toward Chorwon on 10 December to investigate the situation. At Taegwan-ni it encountered an estimated company of North Korean troops, armed with 82-mm mortars, automatic weapons, and small arms. In the ensuing firefight the patrol had two men seriously wounded."
On 13 December the 5th RCT was again sent toward Chorwon to help elements of the 19th Regiment fight out of a guerrilla roadblock south of Yonchon. The infantry element was supported by C Battery, 555th FA Battalion, to which was attached A Battery, 26th Antiaircraft Battalion. That night about 10 P.m., an enemy force of 60 North Koreans infiltrated to within a few yards of an M16 (quad-50), on outpost duty at the perimeter. Sfc. Neal M. Moms commanded the quad-50 and had seven men including his weapons crew with him. The enemy infiltrators wounded the quad-50 driver, and the others escaped to a point about 75 yards from the quad-50. From there, Moms and his men crawled back to within 10 yards of the quad-50. Morris continued on to the M16 and got his wounded driver out. He then went back to try to start the motor that operated the four .50-caliber machine guns. An enemy grenade blew Moms, mortally wounded, from the quad-50. The remaining small group of seven then drove off the North Korean infiltrators. A little later about 200 North Koreans overran a part of K Company and the 3rd Battalion's trains. Survivors withdrew to C Battery. After midnight an L Company platoon and a tank helped recapture the overrun mortars. About daylight that morning, 14 December, an estimated 300 North Korean guerrillas struck the C Battery perimeter but were repulsed, with heavy loss. During the day the ROK 6th Division cleared Yonchon of enemy, and the 5th RCT began withdrawing its 3rd Battalion under cover of supporting artillery fire from south of the Imjin River."
The ROK 10th Division was dispatched to occupy old concrete pillboxes built by the North Koreans before their invasion in June. These fortifications were in the Hwachon area, and the division's mission was to secure the Hwachon Dam. The ROKs did not hold these positions long. Nearby, the North Korean 9th Division was reported to be in Kumchon. Such was the unhappy situation just north of the 38th Parallel and in the Iron Triangle at mid-December as the Eighth Army was settling into its new defensive positions along the Imjin River line north of Seoul. '9
Later in the Korean War, intelligence collected from prisoner-of-war interrogations and captured documents produced a clearer picture of events in the Iron Triangle in November and December 1950. It indicated that, at the end of October 1950, the North Korean 4th Division, composed of the 5th, 18th, and 29th regiments, was just north of the 38th Parallel in the Yonchon-Chorwon area. On or about 8 November, other parts of the division moved south to the Chorwon area. On 9 November the 18th Regiment attacked Chorwon, capturing hand grenades, antitank ammunition, and other military supplies held there. The 4th Division thereafter remained in Chorwon, behind UN lines, and operated as a guerrilla force. For its successes in these operations, the division received an honorary title and was known as the Kim Chaek Division. It took part in the Chinese 3rd Phase Offensive, the New Year's offensive that began after dark on 31 December 1950, and was in contact with UN forces near Seoul on 4 January. After this it apparently withdrew to Pyongyang in the Iron Triangle for reorganization.'*
Aside from a short-lived and limited attempt by a part of the 5th RCT of the US 24th Division from 10 to 13 December to penetrate the North Korean stronghold in the Iron Triangle, the entire effort to hold that vital area for the UN command was made by poorly trained ROK troops. It failed.
The North Koreans certainly were wiser than the American command in late 1950 in recognizing the importance of controlling the Iron Triangle area, even though for a period it was like an island in a surrounding sea. The dividends would have been high for the UN forces if General MacArthur had used the X Corps to hold Wonsan on the east coast and the rail and road communications corridor south from it to the Iron Triangle and had established there a strong connection with the right flank of Eighth Army, rather than try to occupy all of northeast Korea to the border. But such a course would not have held forth the promise of ending the war with a unified Korea.
Could the UN Have Defended the Waist?
As one ponders the question whether General Walker could and should have tried to make a stand against the pursuing Chinese at Pyongyang in the first days of December 1950, the fact emerges that he and his staff had never developed a plan for such a contingency. Walker told General MacArthur in the conference at Tokyo during the night of 28-29 November that he hoped to hold Pyongyang, but there is no indication how he expected to do it. The 2nd Infantry Division had not yet been destroyed, and perhaps he felt that plain luck would ride with him and his army or that the Chinese push would run out of steam and come to a halt.
For an enemy halt to take place or to be enforced on it, a start toward that end would have had to take place along an cast-west line from Sukchon to Sunchon to Sinchang-ni, with a refused right flank holding in the vicinity of Kangdong. But instead of Eighth Army slowing and assuming a position there to halt the Chinese, it rushed right on south, with Walker making no effort to slow its pace and instead apparently doing everything he could to accelerate it. When there was no effort to regroup the army for a stand north of the Taedong River at Pyongyang, the die was cast. It would now be a frantic and headlong retreat-where it would slow and stop, no one could at that moment tell. The waist of Korea was to be abandoned.
The troops had not been prepared for a long retrograde movement, and as the speedup of retreat became apparent, there were indications all around of a near hysteria, involving the abandonment and uncalled-for loss of military equipment. The Eighth Army command and the army as a whole seemed franti
c. Not until the army had passed Sariwon did the panic start to abate. By that time morale had been shattered, and no one thought of stopping and of giving battle to the Chinese, although they were now far in the rear.21 Some soldiers had a sardonic laugh upon reading this notice tacked up in a latrine: "At this moment you are the only one in the army who knows what he is doing."
Some months later, Eighth Army could tolerate with some humor the circulation of a joke that had started: "How many platoons in a horde?" The answer came, "Three swarms equal a horde, two hordes equal a human wave, two waves equal a human tide, and then followed the bottomless ocean of Chinese manpower." At the beginning of December, no one seemed to think that the Chinese soldier was human, that his legs would ever weaken under him, that he must now be exhausted, or that a week earlier he had started out with no more than ten days' supply of food. One captured Chinese officer said that his supply was six kilograms of hard wheat bread and six kilograms of millet, carried in a stockinglike roll on his back when he left Manchuria, and that he had not been resupplied since."
More experience with Chinese preplanned major attacks against the UN forces showed that the Chinese soldiers began to weaken after about the third day of an offensive; by that time, their rood and ammunition had been exhausted. The UN forces could then counterattack and win back what they may have lost, and the Chinese enemy were generally defeated. That probably would have happened in early December 1950 if the Eighth Army had made a stand near Pyongyang and the soldiers and their leaders had retained fighting morale. But cool common sense had Ned, and the army never stopped to test its will and strength against an all-but-exhausted enemy.
Whatever Eighth Army might have tried to halt the Chinese short of Pyongyang and the waist of Korea in December 1950, it would have had to do alone. It was too late to expect any help from the X Corps. When Eighth Army Faced its crisis in the first days of December, the bulk of the 1st Marine Division was still trying to fight its way from Yudam-ni to Hagaru-ri at the Chosin Reservoir. It did not accomplish that until 4 December. The 31st RCT of the 7th Division on the east side of the reservoir had been destroyed as a tactical unit by 2 December, as told in East ofChosin (1987). The 1st Marine Division and some hundreds of mixed army troops did not begin their retreat from Hagaru-ri to Hungnam until 6 December, and the leading formation in this retreat did not arrive there until 11 December. Not until 24 December were the last of X Corps troops taken on board ships at Hungnam and the port destroyed by explosives and naval gunfire.
This was another price paid for separating the two forces. In a crisis for either, the other could be of no help. The X Corps could have taken care of itself indefinitely in a tight perimeter defense at Hungnam with offshore naval support. But for the Eighth Army, only its own will and ability would decide the issue. It did not have the will; whether it had the ability will never be known.
In any attempt to estimate the Eighth Army's chance of containing the Chinese offensive short of Pyongyang and the waist of Korea in early December 1950, several variant factors applying to both sides must be noted. The enemy, the Chinese XIII Army Group of the Fourth Field Army of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), had been in the attack for five days and nights without resupply. They had moved through the region almost entirely on their legs. Their food supply of grain was exhausted, and thousands of them had become casualties. They had had no resupply of either ford or ammunition, other than what they could salvage from the battlefield. They had poor footgear for winter (a type of tennis shoe), and frozen feet and frostbite had exacted a heavy toll. Their arms were those of light infantry-rifle, submachine gun, grenades, small mortars, a few 57-mm recoilless rifles-no artillery, no heavy mortars, no combat aircraft over the battlefield, no armor, few radios, few vehicles. The soldiery were a mixture of Communist regulars with a large contingent of former Nationalist soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek's army. One authority estimates the composition of the PLA in 1951 as follows: 15 percent were World War II Communist soldiers, 25 percent were veterans of the Chinese civil war, 30 percent were former Nationalist soldiers, and 30 percent were young Chinese inducted since 1948. Most of the soldiers were of peasant origin, with a high rate of illiteracy at the beginning. The XI II Army Group, however, was more cosmopolitan than most of the Chinese formations, including many urban workers from Mukden and other cities in Manchuria.
A weakness of the Chinese army in 1950 was the miscellaneous origin of its weapons. Its heavier weapons such as the 57-mm recoilless rifle, the small mountain gun, and the mortars were of mixed Chinese, Japanese, German, and Czech patterns and manufacture. Each had an uncertain ammunition resupply. Perhaps its most potent small arms were of American manufacture, such as the Thompson submachine gun, the Springfield rifle, and the 60-mm mortar, which had been captured in large numbers from the Nationalist Army during the civil war. The Chinese army at this time had no Soviet arms or equipment.=' Its major assets were stamina, foot power, willingness to climb hills and to exist on poverty rations, and capability to achieve surprise.
In contrast to the characteristics of the Chinese enemy, the UN force, mostly American, had complete control of the air over the battlefield, with napalm, rocket, bomb, and strafing weaponry; it had light and medium artillery in quantity; it had armor, although Korea was a poor place to use it; it had large numbers of light, medium, and heavy mortars; it possessed a vast quantity of trucks and other transport vehicles; it had a normally good resupply system of both ammunition and food, and an array of radio and telephone equipment for communication; it had better clothing and footgear than the Chinese; and it had naval gunfire on both sides of the peninsula and uncontested control of the coastal waters. Its small arms were a good rifle (the .30-caliber M-1 Garand), the .30-caliber M-1 carbine, a .45-caliber pistol, and the .30-caliber BAR. In automatic weapons it possessed a liberal quantity of both light and heavy machine guns (.30 and .50 caliber). In its artillery were the 105-mm, 155-mm, and 8-inch howitzers, and some antiaircraft artillery-the M16 quad-50 half-track .50-caliber machine gun and the M19 dual-40 40-mm full-track. Both of these weapons carriers were capable of horrendous human destruction with their rapid rate of automatic fire.
One side was a modern force with the latest in weapons and a good com munications, transport, and resupply system with naval and air supremacy; the other was a primitive force of light infantry with only light hand weapons for the most part, almost no resupply capability, and primitive communications and transport systems.
Given these contrasting characteristics, it would seem in any commonsense evaluation of their capabilities that the Eighth Army should have been able to set up a series of hedgehog-type strong points in front of and around Pyongyang and hold out against any attack the Chinese could have mounted in the first days of December 1950. The Germans found in their campaigns against the Russians on the eastern front in World War II that such defenses could hold off numerical forces in a ratio of 1 to 6 and at the same time could inflict devastating casualties by machine-gun fire. With adequate leadership and a decent morale in the soldiery, this could have been done in North Korea at Pyongyang. The Chinese "hordes" were an appearance and a perception in the minds of the American leadership and their soldiers for the most part and derived largely from the typical Chinese method of attacking in line formation-squad behind squad, platoon behind platoon, company behind company. The formation behind always stepped into the place of the one ahead of it if the former faltered or was destroyed, until, like the dropping of water in the same spot, its effect was to wear down the defenders at that narrow point where there seemed to be no end of enemy soldiery and the line gave way or was penetrated. Thus was born the "human wave" concept.
But at Pyongyang there was no intent, attempt, or effort of any kind to make a stand and fight the Chinese in a defensive battle, which the UN should have been able to win. The essentials to win such a battle-the will to fight, morale to contest the outcome, confidence of the professional leadership-were lacking in the top leadersh
ip and the officer corps, and in the rank-and-file as well. The rank-and-file might have responded had the leadership been up to it. But it was not. Eighth Army as a whole panicked and fled; it was a shameful performance. At Pyongyang there was nothing of Chipyong-ni, where in February 1951 French and American UN forces achieved a decisive victory.
The story of the two weeks following the evacuation of Pyongyang is one of Eighth Army moving as rapidly as possible toward the 38th Parallel, 90 miles south, where it might take up a defensive position in the old defenses north of Seoul, anchored on the lower Han and Imjin rivers. There was no thought of stopping anywhere short of that line. In all that two weeks the Eighth Army had no contact with the Chinese army, nor did it try to establish contact. The Eighth Army was essentially blind as to the location of the Chinese forces, their centers of concentration, and their intentions for the immediate future. In this headlong race for the 38th Parallel, General Walker's UN forces violated one of the fundamental rules of war. It lost contact with the enemy. It did not leave behind any screening forces to report on enemy advances, their routes and speed of advance, and their directions of future concentrations-or whether there was any pursuit at all.
About 20 December Chinese advance reconnaissance and probing elements appeared in front of the UN forces where they were waiting in defensive positions south of the Imjin River. It was the Chinese and North Koreans who reestablished contact, not Eighth Army. It would appear that, when the Chinese reached Pyongyang, they were exhausted and desperately in need of food and resupply of ammunition, and in the days that followed they would have been vulnerable to counterattack. They halted at Pyongyang and vicinity until they had rested and achieved some degree of resupply before venturing farther south.
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