The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (21 page)

T
HE UNITED STATES
would go to war totally unprepared. The first American units thrown into battle were poorly armed, in terrible shape physically, and, more often than not, poorly led. The mighty army that had stood victorious in two great theaters of war, Europe and Asia, just five years earlier was a mere shell of itself. Militarily, America was a country trying to get by on the cheap, and in Korea it showed immediately. The blame for the poor condition of the Army belonged to everyone—the president, who wanted to keep taxes down, pay off the debt from the last war, and keep the defense budget down to a bare-bones level; the Congress, which if anything wanted to cut the budget even more; and the theater commander, MacArthur, under whose aegis the troops had been so poorly trained, and who had only five years earlier said that he did not really need all the troops Washington had assigned him. But mostly it was Truman—the president has to take full responsibility in a matter like this: the Army of this immensely prosperous country, rich now in a world that was still poor and war-ravaged, was threadbare. It had been on such short rations, so desperately underfinanced, that artillery units had not been able to practice adequately because there was no ammo; armored groups had done a kind of faux training because they lacked gas for real maneuvers; and troops at famed bases like Fort Lewis were being told to use only two sheets of toilet paper each time they visited the latrine. There were so few spare parts for vehicles that some enlisted men went out and bought war surplus equipment at very low prices, using their own money, in order to break it down for spare parts. If there was any upgrade in weaponry, it was almost exclusively in the planes and weapons being designed for the Air Force, not in the weapons employed by infantrymen.

World War II had dragged a sleepy, isolationist nation to superpower status. Out of the reach of enemy bombs, the United States had become the great arsenal of democracy. Its awesome factories, their modernity then the envy of the developed world, produced formidable weapons of war at a stunning rate. Many critics at the start of World War II had feared that Americans would not
be good soldiers, that they had grown soft because of the nation’s material successes. Worse, there was the question of whether because America was so democratic, its men would be able to stand up to soldiers from mighty totalitarian countries like Germany and Japan. But American troops had proved first-rate soldiers, and the country had produced an enviable army from a democratic society, built as much as anything else around the toughness, shrewdness, and skills of its noncommissioned officers, an army that reflected well on the democratic process, where the ability to think for yourself and accept responsibility were valuable assets. In the European theater, the mighty Wehrmacht had been matched by ordinary kids from ordinary American homes, coupled with the growing U.S. technological advantage; that and the sheer ferocity of the Red Army assaulting the Germans on the eastern front had doomed the Third Reich. In the Pacific, the Japanese had fought tenaciously, but again the combination of force, superior American technology, MacArthur’s shrewd campaign designed to isolate rather than confront the enemy’s strongest positions, and finally Japan’s own limited resources had doomed their forces.

But now, almost daily, there were stories of American units being driven back, of constant North Korean advances. Had Americans in this new postwar era too casually overestimated the ability of U.S. troops? Had they thought that the kind of fighting force the United States had produced by early 1944 was somehow a permanent condition, that America was ipso facto such a powerful—indeed superior—nation that it would always produce better weapons and tougher troops? Did America believe that other nations would know this and deal with it accordingly, always keeping their distance? Certainly there was a sense of that at the beginning of the Korean War, even among those senior military men who knew that the Army was too small and not in very good shape. U.S. expectations of how well the Army would fight greatly exceeded its abilities. The Americans had expected when the North Koreans crossed the border that, whatever the Army’s multitude of flaws, it would not take much to end the incursion. As soon as they knew that they were fighting
Americans,
the war would turn around, and good news would replace bad news from the front. For it was not just Douglas MacArthur who thought that he could fight the North Koreans with a limited number of troops, it was much of the top military and political establishment, and regrettably altogether too many of the troops themselves.

Much of that reflected a certain kind of racism, a belief in the superiority of Caucasians over Asians on the battlefield. This was a judgment from which the Japanese with their victories at the very beginning of World War II had been quickly exempted, their triumphs explained in American minds not because
they were Asians, but because they were fanatics. These, however, were merely Koreans. How could
Koreans
defeat Americans? The answer for some of the commanders in those early days was very disturbing. In late July, Major General Bill Dean was reported missing and was eventually captured by the North Koreans after personally leading the defense of Taejon. But a few days before his capture, Keyes Beech of the
Chicago Daily News
had run into him at a small airstrip. “Let’s face it,” Dean told Beech, “the enemy has something that our men don’t have and that’s the willingness to die.” Beech agreed with him. Himself a Marine veteran of World War II, Beech later wrote that the first American troops sent to Korea were “spiritually, mentally, morally, and physically unprepared for war.” Ordinary troops, pulled from their very comfortable peacetime existences in Tokyo, many of them poor boys back home who now lived with servants and had undergone only the most minimal training, were rushed into combat and had spoken arrogantly of what a piece of cake it would be and how soon they would be back in Japan. And then almost overnight it had turned into a disaster of the first magnitude. The American forces had not been able to hold terrain. The North Korean spearhead units had been very good and were better armed than the Americans. Again and again, the Americans had retreated. The war, by the end of July, was turning into a disaster even as the United States raced to get up to speed, to form new units bound for Korea, and to speed up the deliveries of aircraft, tanks, and bazookas that could stop a T-34 tank.

In Korea itself, the first big surprise had been how well the North Korean troops fought in those first few days; the second had been how poorly the ROKs had done. They had suffered what seemed like an almost complete collapse on most fronts. The next big surprise—for Americans anyway—was just how poorly the first American troops sent to the Korean mainland did during their initiation into battle. It was more than a surprise; it was nothing less than a shock. The first plan for the use of American troops, Operation Bluehearts, drawn up by Major General Ned Almond, MacArthur’s chief of staff and closest military associate, reflected a wildly optimistic view of how well American troops would fare. It featured MacArthur’s preference for an immediate amphibious strike behind North Korean lines at a place called Inchon, and it was planned as if the North Korean assault was nothing more than the arrival of a few mosquitoes who could easily be swatted away. The landing was to take place on July 16, barely two weeks after the moment when the first American troops made their awkward, clumsy landing on Korean soil. Given the pathetic condition of the American troops in Japan, it was completely undoable at a moment when mere survival was very much in doubt. But it reflected the almost supreme self-confidence of the Tokyo command about what any American troops could accomplish against Korean troops.

Bluehearts was very quickly discarded, the troops too desperately needed for a much more immediate task—keeping the North Koreans from running American forces right off the peninsula. That it had even been considered reflected how little attention the command had paid to the respective forces gathering in the two Koreas; nor were any of the subsequent plans being put together in Tokyo much better. Much of the decision-making in those early days reflected the essential racism of the moment. Any experienced officer knew that for psychological reasons it was important for the first American troops to be at their best in their initial encounter with the North Korean troops, to fight well from strong positions, and to maximize their potential superiority in hardware. Yet at a moment when shrewd planning was critical, it proved not just careless but clueless. The headquarters sent the Twenty-fourth Division, acknowledged by consensus to be the weakest and least well prepared of the four divisions in Japan, into Korea first because it was based at Kyushu, which was closest to the peninsula. Because it had been stationed farthest from Tokyo, on the southernmost island of Japan, the Twenty-fourth had gotten the last pick of everything coming in country—officers, men, and equipment. Its regimental and battalion officers—this would be a major problem with all units in the early months of the war—were largely second-and even third-rate. It was, said one of its platoon leaders, “literally at the end of the supply line.” Its equipment, an operations officer for the Thirty-fourth Regiment said, “was a national disgrace.” A good deal of the ammo for its mortars was faulty. Its .30-caliber machine guns were worn down and not very accurate. It had the old 2.36 bazookas. Later one of its officers would write that it was “rather sad, almost criminal that such understrength, ill equipped and poorly trained units were committed.”

The World War II veterans were gone. They had been replaced by troops who, as T. R. Fehrenbach, a commander of a company in Korea, noted, were fighting a war they did not understand. They knew neither their ally nor their enemy, and hated the country they were in. The men volunteering for the military in the period right after World War II had enlisted, in Fehrenbach’s words, “for every reason known to man except to fight.” The Army the United States sent to Korea in those early days was, Ned Almond thought, about 40 percent combat effective. That estimate, Clay Blair noted, was on the rosy side. Like most American units in Tokyo, instead of having three battalions to a regiment, the Twenty-fourth Division had only two. Worse, the division commander, disrespectful of his enemy, initially sent in only two regiments, both of them badly understrength—a third was on maneuvers elsewhere in Japan, and instead of feeding all his troops into one area where they could concentrate their efforts and their fire, he broke them down into three smaller units and placed them so that they would almost instantly
find themselves badly outnumbered, easily encircled, and incapable of holding off the massive In Min Gun assault. Given the force they were up against, despite some moments of exceptional bravery, they were bound not only to fail but to fail quickly, their battles all too often turning into routs—something that greatly encouraged the North Koreans and discouraged other American units just then starting to arrive.

None of this was by happenstance. It was the direct product of the great victory that had taken place five years earlier and the desire to disarm overnight. When Bob Eichelberger turned the Eighth Army over to Walton Walker, he was all too aware of its weakness—“it is already nothing but a supply organization with no combat soldiers, just a cadre.” Whatever hard-won respect for an Asian army that had been gained while fighting against the Japanese during World War II had disappeared. Duty in Tokyo had been considered a very good deal, with all the pleasures of being a victor and living exceptionally well in a very poor Asian country, and little in the way of military responsibility. Newcomers arriving from the States were welcomed, told that Japan was a great place, that if you knew how to play the game, you could get laid easily and cheaply, and you could make a nice bit of change on the side dealing in the black market. Each GI was living much better than he ever had at home. Most had, in the vernacular of the time, a “shack girl.” In a devastated, impoverished, burned-out Japan, everyone, even the lowest private it sometimes seemed, could find a houseboy who took care of his uniforms and shined up his boots. The imbalance of personal power in Japan, of an American private or corporal who was momentarily rich (or at least richer than he had ever hoped to be back in Ohio or Tennessee) living among Japanese who were now all supplicants, seemed only to underline an innate American racism and prove that the white world was superior in all ways. The men of the white world won wars; the men of the non-white world shined their shoes, and the women of the non-white world became their girlfriends. In this army of easy occupation, soldiers did not necessarily show up for roll call on a Monday, and it was often the responsibility of the company clerks to work wonders to make sure that units still appeared combat effective.

That these troops were not battle ready was hardly a great secret. Major General Tony McAuliffe, who in 1945 had been the commander at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, had been given the command of the troops in southern Japan in 1948 and he had hated every minute of it. Keyes Beech had visited him and asked him if he liked the duty. McAuliffe answered that he liked it fine, “but they [the troops] don’t like me. In fact, I’m just about the biggest sonofabitch in these parts. The only excuse for an army in peace or war is that it be ready to fight. This army here is no damn good…. I’m turning the
place upside down and seeing that all the men get out in the field on maneuvers. I want them to sleep on the ground and get their feet wet.” His tour did not last long, and his spirit, as Beech added, was not contagious.

These were the troops who first set foot in Korea so sure they would readily defeat the In Min Gun. Colonel John (Mike) Michaelis, the first regimental commander to lead his troops well there, was appalled by the performance of most of them in those early months. He told Robert (Pepper) Martin from the
Saturday Evening Post
in early October: “When they started out, they couldn’t shoot. They didn’t know their weapons. They had not had enough training in plain old-fashioned musketry. They’d spent a lot of time listening to lectures on the differences between communism and Americanism and not enough time crawling on their bellies on maneuvers with live ammunition singing over them. They’d been nursed and coddled, told to drive safely, to buy War Bonds, to give to the Red Cross, to avoid VD, to write home to mother—when someone ought to have been telling them how to clean a machine gun when it jams.” They were, he added, so roadbound that they had almost lost the use of their legs—“Send out a patrol on a scouting mission and they load up in a three quarter ton truck and start riding down the highway.”