The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (43 page)

About five days after that battle a mosquito bite gave Lee Beahler Japanese
B encephalitis. He was shipped to a hospital in Japan, where his weight dropped to ninety pounds. He was still recuperating there about three months later when the Second Engineers were hit at a place in the far north of Korea called Kunuri. The news of what had happened at Kunuri was exceptionally bitter for the lieutenant; so many friends had been killed or were missing. That mosquito bite, he realized, had quite possibly saved his life.

ON THE SECOND
day of the North Korean offensive along the Naktong, Paul Freeman had summoned his senior officers to a meeting at the Second Battalion’s command post. Major George Russell, the operations officer for the First Battalion, remembered that they met in what was essentially a culvert that went under the road, water up to their knees because the rain that day had been the heaviest anyone could remember. Colonel Freeman had been both impassioned and exhausted. They were all exhausted. No one had slept in days. Freeman talked about how difficult it was, with no air support and with Asian hordes descending on them. Asian hordes, Russell had thought, and he started laughing. Everyone was always talking about Asian hordes. “What’s so funny?” an irritated Freeman asked. “It can’t be that bad,” Russell said. But it was that bad, he thought later, it really was just that bad.

Exhaustion was inevitable. By September 3, Freeman and his understrength regiment had been fighting a multidivision attack for three days and nights—and they had been tired well before the attack started. They had been on the line constantly since they had arrived in country in early August. For Freeman, who had missed a chance to command in combat during World War II and had always hoped for a second chance, days like this turned out to be more of an opportunity than he had ever needed. In 1949, Paul Freeman had been worried about his career and the increasing likelihood that his superiors were in the process of defining him as a staff officer rather than a combat officer. Then the war broke out. Up to that moment he had been a planning expert, greatly admired by his superiors in Washington, but in the years immediately after the world war his career had seemed stymied. There were few openings in a rapidly downsizing army for regimental commanders, the command he wanted, and the few that existed seemed ticketed for officers who had already commanded a regiment.

Paul Freeman was forty-three years old when the Korean War began and in genuine jeopardy of being pushed aside by other officers who had made greater names in combat during World War II. He was thoughtful, intelligent, and careful, but in no way charismatic. He was not tall or physically powerful or fierce in manner, as some men favored for leadership appeared to be. Rather he was an unusually handsome man, becoming even more so as he aged and his con
siderable mane of hair turned completely white. If he was to gain the respect and affection of his troops, it would have to be hard-won. Style and self-created dramatics were not going to do it for him. “He was an absolutely outstanding officer, and his greatest strength,” his younger colleague Captain Hal Moore (who would later distinguish himself as a commander at the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in the Vietnam era and end up a three-star) said, “was his intelligence, his respect for other people, especially the people under his command, and how careful he was. The men who served under him understood that he was always going to be careful and judicious in the risks he took with their lives. That is no small thing. He was a very good listener, paid attention to everything around him, and wasted no one’s time or energy. If you were a younger officer coming to command in Vietnam you might go back to the battles where he had commanded in Korea and you would find that he had done everything right.”

Freeman was an Army brat, his father having been an early graduate of the Army Medical School, back in 1904, and then a regimental surgeon. In 1907, when Paul Freeman was born, the senior Freeman was stationed in the Philippines, a doctor who, when he went out with cavalry units, simply stuffed the tools of his trade into his saddlebags. The young Paul Freeman grew up on Army posts in Asia and the United States, came to love the Army life, and never really considered another career. He wanted to go to West Point, but had not done particularly well in high school. Nor were the Freemans, after all those years overseas, well connected politically, and so a congressional appointment seemed unlikely. Still, he went to a cram school, worked hard, but just missed a presidential appointment—twelve men passed out of two hundred; he was the thirteenth. His father was then stationed at Governor’s Island in New York harbor. He and his father started calling New York congressmen who might have vacancies, and finally came up with one representing a district filled with new immigrants, mainly Yiddish-speaking Jews from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, most of whom had a historic fear of the military, since in the old country its representatives tended to show up in their small villages only, it seemed, to round them up for pogroms. There was no great rush on the part of their children to head for West Point and join what might well be the New World’s Cossacks. A congressional appointment came with surprising ease.

Freeman was an undistinguished student at West Point; he was in the bottom half of his class and in no way a gifted athlete. He graduated in 1929, a difficult time to break into the Army. The country was between wars; Wall Street was about to crash. Promotions, always slow, became slower than ever; it took five years and four months for Freeman to go from second to first lieutenant. Army families, unless there was inherited wealth—and daughters of prosperous
families were always of interest to handsome young cadets—lived on the financial edge and became brilliant at penny-pinching. When Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933, one of his first and easiest targets for reducing expenses was military pay, and he instituted a 10 percent cut across the board, which meant that the newly married Paul and Mary Anne Fishburn Freeman had their monthly paycheck cut from $125.00 to $112.50, while the two-and-a-half-month paid leave normally granted to officers immediately became one month without pay. But these were shared hardships; everyone else their age in the military was living through the same thing, and it only served, as so many things do in the military, to tighten the communal bonds.

Paul Freeman, West Point scores notwithstanding, was bright and impressed his superiors from the start, including his future division commander in Korea, the young Laurence Keiser, who was his tactical officer at the academy and became his first company commander when Freeman joined the Ninth Regiment of the Second Infantry Division at Fort Sam Houston in Texas right after graduation. Freeman had tried at first for the newly formed Army Air Force (which only became a separate branch of the service after World War II). To modern young officers it beckoned as the hot new branch of the future. But Freeman failed the eye exam—his right eye fell just short of 20/20. That had raised the most serious career question for a bright young man looking to distinguish himself in a time of peace: what should he try next? He thereupon volunteered for duty in China in the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment, a fabled unit in those semicolonial years when the great Western powers could still, in effect, divide up China territorially and post their troops there. It was a unit in which many prominent American officers, including George Marshall and Joseph Stilwell, had also served. Freeman was drawn by a young man’s sense of adventure and by childhood memories of his parents in the Philippines discussing their magical days visiting an exotic China. He arrived in China in September 1933, when the first incidents in what would become a tragic world war were just taking place. An aggressive Japan was in the process of taking over China’s five northern provinces—Manchuria—and turning them into Manchukuo, a Japanese protectorate. It was the start of a fascinating new part of Freeman’s education, watching a once-great country, more colonized and feudal than most Americans realized, pressured from both outside and inside, eventually collapse from within. Though he became a Chinese language student (and was still fluent enough to interrogate Chinese prisoners during the Korean War), Freeman was very aware that he never really knew China. He was there, he later reflected, in the last days of empire, and the only Chinese he had known were a handful of very wealthy ones who belonged to the same clubs and enjoyed the same sports—polo and horse racing—as Westerners.
Some of the clubs did not even allow Chinese members. He understood that he had no feel for the difficult lives of the great mass of people.

Freeman spent most of World War II becoming an Asia Hand. His very pregnant wife had been sent home in the fall of 1940 as tensions mounted and the Japanese Army seemed poised to strike deeper into Asia. (He did not meet his daughter, Sewell, until she was three and a half years old.) After Pearl Harbor, he worked coordinating activities among various parts of the hydra-headed monster that was the China-Burma-India Theater: a headquarters filled with fault lines, Americans and Brits who did not care for each other, and two key American officers, Joe Stilwell and Claire Chennault, who cared for each other even less, along with representatives of different geographic venues trying to push the importance of their specific locales. He was appalled by the success of the Nationalist Chinese propaganda machinery, which implied, as he later said, that “every Chinese was baring his breast and fighting desperately against the Japanese. This wasn’t true at all…. Once we got into the war they decided they didn’t have to fight at all anymore.” He also was able to watch Chiang’s victory over Stilwell from a ringside seat—“He [Stilwell] knew too much about China for his own good,” Freeman later noted.

In time, he was sent back to Washington, where he became one of Marshall’s top aides planning for the Pacific, a great vantage point, he later noted, from which to watch Douglas MacArthur argue with the top Navy people on the dangers of splitting a command in battle. MacArthur spoke brilliantly against it—an irony that did not escape Freeman, whose men would eventually be victimized when MacArthur did the unthinkable and split his command in Korea. Desperate to get out of Washington and finally get a combat command, in November 1944, quite late in the war, Freeman was finally sent to the Philippines as chief of staff of the Seventy-seventh Division, only to be ordered back to Washington in late 1944 to work on plans for the invasion of Japan.

If Paul Freeman had been a skillful and valued planner during the war, he had nonetheless logged almost no combat time, and in the years right after the war, his career seemed to be floundering. In those days the Army used a reviewing system called the Case Board to evaluate each officer’s worth during World War II and his chances for assignment and promotion in the future. On the scale used, combat leadership brought a maximum number of points, while running a PX on a domestic Army post perhaps the least. By Case Board standards, Freeman had done poorly. “A pretty undistinguished officer,” he had thought, coldly sizing up his own standing as if he were a member of the board. In 1949, ever more concerned about the direction of his career, he visited a colleague who was a military career manager, who explained Freeman’s
dilemma in perfect Catch-22 terms. Freeman was a bird colonel with several years of experience who needed to command a regiment and attend the National War College. Here, however, was the Catch-22: because of the demobilization, there were few regimental slots available, and division commanders wanted to fill them with officers who had wartime experience commanding, naturally enough, regiments. As for the War College, that too was blocked, because only officers who had served with distinction as regimental commanders could attend. So it appeared likely that Freeman would end his military career as an Army attaché in Chile.

But Freeman was not without powerful friends; he had, after all, spent much of the war working at a relatively high level for George Marshall. A year later, when he visited his career counselor, things had quite magically turned around. “Well, lucky you,” the counselor, Pic Dillard, noted somewhat sardonically at their second meeting. For Freeman had been assigned both the command of a regiment and a ticket to attend the War College. Since he owned a house in Washington and the War College was located there, he preferred to go to school first, but the Army had its own special sense of order, and so Freeman was told to pack up and take over his regiment. The financial resources of a regular Army officer were always thin, so he sold the house—the deal being completed on June 25, 1950—before heading for Fort Lewis to assume command of Second Division’s Twenty-third Regiment. Freeman had barely joined his unit before it boarded troopships for Korea. Under his command, the Twenty-third (like the division itself ) was to participate in and eventually to excel in some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

From the start, in no small part because of his knowledge of China and what had been happening since 1945, Freeman privately viewed the war itself with considerable melancholia—the exact word he used in his letters to his wife. He expressly cautioned her to tell no one else what he was thinking. (“For God’s sake don’t go putting this out—it’s just for you and close friends.”) He feared that otherwise his doubts and anxieties, private though they were, might represent an unacceptable attitude for a commander. He told her just how difficult the fighting was and how depressed he was. In his wariness of what American forces were engaged in, he was not that different from many of the officers then taking command in Korea. The realities of the war seemed to dilute much of America’s natural military strengths. In his letters there is an early glimmering of what would later be labeled the Never Again Club, those military men who served in Korea and left with a deep-seated belief that American ground forces should never again fight on the mainland of Asia, in part because of the terrible logistical difficulties, but even more because of the inevitable deficit in manpower. These were, it should be noted,
his views
before
the Chinese even entered the war, and he worried constantly in his letters that sooner or later they were going to come in. He was haunted by a sense that the proportions in this war were in some way all wrong, what the other side might be able to invest compared to what the United States could safely afford to invest—in a war that was self-evidently peripheral to American national security interests.