The Korean War (24 page)

The raw relations between the army and the Marines became increasingly apparent on the road to Seoul. Smith’s men displayed a lasting bitterness about the haste urged upon them by Almond, obsessed with fulfilling a promise to MacArthur that he would liberate the capital by 25 September. This would be three months to the day since the communist invasion. ‘He wanted that communiqué,’ said the disgusted Smith. ‘I said I couldn’t guarantee anything – that’s up to the enemy.’
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But some army officers, in their turn, declared their dismay at the headlong tactics of the Marines. ‘The Marines were always too keen on frontal attacks,’ argued Colonel John Michaelis of the 27th Infantry.
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From Inchon to Seoul

The Marines are a product of their history [said Colonel Ellis Williamson]. They are trained, indoctrinated, to go from ship to shore, then keep running forward until they have taken the pressure off the beach head. The thought of outflanking a position would horrify a man like ‘Chesty’ Puller. We used to call the Marines ‘the nursery rhyme soldiers’ because their motto was: ‘Hey diddle diddle, right up the middle’. On that march to Seoul, I saw Marines doing things no army outfit would think of. I watched them crossing that great sweep of wide open ground in front of Kimpo airfield, hundreds of young men rising up and starting across the flats in open order. They took far more casualties than we considered appropriate.
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It is interesting that Williamson’s perception of the US Marines, as a soldier, is that shared by most army officers around the world about their amphibious brethren. It is probably true that the Marine Corps places greater emphasis upon headlong courage than upon tactical subtlety. Even their own General Shepherd afterwards challenged the sluggishness of O. P. Smith’s move into Seoul: ‘If a man who is in command of a pursuit is someone who likes to have his ranks dressed all the time, you might just as well not pursue.’
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It was agreed by most senior marines that ‘Chesty’ Puller had been overpromoted to regimental command, and was saved from making disastrous mistakes only by the professional competence of Major Robert Lorigan, his Operations Officer. Yet in Korea, the courage and determination of the Marines remained unchallenged through three years of war, while many army units proved disturbingly lacking in morale and professional skill. If the senior officers of the 1st Marine Division could not be described as intellectual warriors, between Inchon and Panmunjom O. P. Smith and his men would earn great gratitude from their country.

Twenty-year-old Corporal Selwyn Handler of the Weapons Company, 2/1st Marines, found the advance from Inchon to Seoul an intoxicating experience. In checks and starts, the long files of men moved forward, jeeps carrying the heavy equipment, ahead the sound of spasmodic artillery and small-arms fire as the point companies cleared the road. The local Korean civilians seemed delighted to see them. They scurried hither and thither across the battlefield, looting rice stores and abandoned equipment, hastily removing their families and possessions from the immediate line of fire. Once, they found some North Korean stragglers hiding in a cave. Two men were detailed to escort them to the rear, but they soon returned. They said: ‘Prisoners are too much of a bother, right now.’ Like most men on most battlefields, Handler retained brief
snapshot glimpses of those days: leaping into a foxhole under shellfire, to be cursed by a man already sheltering in it, whom he had last seen in high school in California; watching a child scuttling past, bent under the burden of a rice sack larger than himself; Marines filling themselves with beer in a brewery they occupied in Yongdungpo; watching a Corsair hit overhead, diving into the ground and blowing up. Korean children swarmed around them, even as they fought. One said incessantly: ‘North Korean! North Korean!’ as he tugged at the American’s leg and pointed. Exploratively, Handler tossed a grenade into the rubble. Nothing moved, but still the child gestured furiously. The Americans threw two more grenades, and were rewarded with the bodies of two communist soldiers.

As Almond’s X Corps drove east, on 16 September in driving rain Walker’s Eighth Army launched its long-awaited break-out. It began sluggishly: the Americans were not across the Naktong in strength until the 19th. MacArthur suffered a period of serious concern that even now, the North Koreans could hold in the south-east. For four days, the weather severely hampered the air forces’ ability to support the UN advance. But as it cleared sufficiently to enable the bombers to operate, once the communist front had been broken open it collapsed with extraordinary speed.

The British contingent suffered a wretched little tragedy, indicative of the indifferent air–ground liaison of the period. On 23 September, the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders had just fought their way up Hill 282, on the left flank of the push across the Naktong. They called for air support, and laid out their recognition panels. A flight of Mustangs swung in to attack with cannon and napalm, which they laid with terrible accuracy on the Scots positions. The survivors retreated in confusion from the summit. But Major Kenneth Muir, second-in-command, determined that they must retake it. He led thirty men towards the crest, and reached his objective with fourteen. ‘The gooks will never drive
the Argylls off this hill,’ he said, as he fell mortally wounded by automatic fire. Muir won a posthumous Victoria Cross. The Argylls lost seventeen killed and seventy-six wounded.

But this was the bitter small change of war. All along the front, the enemy was collapsing. North Korean units began to melt away, thousands of fugitives throwing away weapons, equipment, clothing. On the 26th, at Osan, men of the 1st Cavalry driving north from the Perimeter met men of the 7th Infantry, pushing south from Inchon. ROK units advanced up the east coast, meeting negligible resistance. Everywhere, the North Koreans were breaking in flight, surrendering in hundreds, or taking to the mountains to maintain guerrilla war.

Further north, 1st Marines were obliged to fight hard for three days for Yongdungpo. Meanwhile, after a setback to their first attempt on the night of the 19th, on 20 September Puller’s 5th made a successful assault crossing of the Han river. By 25 September, both Marine regiments were committed to the bitter, desperate street battle for possession of Seoul, which devastated great areas of the capital, and continued for three days. Even as air reconnaissance revealed the main body of Kim Il Sung’s army fleeing northwards, communist rearguards fought on to delay the advance of Smith’s regiments, extracting their price yard by yard, at each rice-bag barricade.

The battle for Seoul became a source of lasting controversy, and deep revulsion to some of those who witnessed it. It provided an example of a form of carnage that would become wretchedly familiar in Indochina a generation later – allegedly essential destruction in the cause of liberation. It was passionately argued by some correspondents and not a few soldiers that the civilian casualties and wholesale destruction could have been avoided by an effective enveloping movement, rather than a direct assault supported by overwhelming air and artillery support. But MacArthur and Almond wanted Seoul fast. In their path stood some 20,000 still resolute communist troops. ‘The slightest resistance brought down a deluge of destruction blotting out the area,’ wrote
an eyewitness, R. W. Thompson of the
Daily Telegraph
.
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In the words of the historian David Rees, ‘at the heart of the West’s military thought lies the belief that machines must be used to save its men’s lives; Korea would progressively become a horrific illustration of the effects of a limited war where one side possessed the firepower and the other the manpower.’
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The Marines advanced into the capital from north, south and west, while a regiment of 7th Division and the 187th Airborne RCT covered their flanks. Some men were appalled by the evidence of atrocities they encountered. Selwyn Handler was among those who entered a jail compound in which they found several headless bodies, and the sword that had obviously been used for the executions. Ed Simmons of the 3/1st saw a group of Marines clustered around a trench. A lieutenant waved him over. The trench was filled with dead Koreans – men, women, children, hundreds of them: ‘It was a ghastly sight. The stench was unbearable. For days, civilians were coming out from the centre of Seoul in the hope of identifying them.’
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Colonel Taplett of the 3/5th was less troubled by the evidence of the communist occupation. ‘That’s the way these people treat each other,’ he shrugged, a view that would be repeated through foreign UN contingents again and again in the years to come.

Darkness in the streets, still possessed of so many unknown perils, brought hours of acute tension to the Marines in the forward positions. On the night of 25 September, the 5th Marines were appalled to receive a sudden order to launch an attack at 2 a.m. It was made clear that this was the direct consequence of General Almond’s obsessive determination to control all Seoul within the deadline he had promised MacArthur. Major Simmons had assumed temporary command of a rifle company in place of its commander, who was hiding in a cellar. ‘I can’t do it! I can’t do it!’ the officer cried, amid the stress of battle. ‘Take my bars! Take my bars!’ Simmons was horrified to discover that a supporting artillery bombardment would be put down in the area to which he had just dispatched an eight-man patrol. But the American
attack was pre-empted. Long before H-Hour, the Marines heard the grinding clatter of armour advancing towards their own positions. The North Koreans had launched their own movement. All night, the artillery poured fire in front of Puller’s men, breaking up the communist infantry concentrations. An immobilised communist tank stood stalled in front of Simmons’ company position. The major feared what it might still do to them with its gun when daylight came. He ordered up a 75mm recoilless rifle, and told its gunner to fire as soon as he had enough light to aim. At last, in the first glimmerings of dawn, he said: ‘I can see it!’ and fired. The Marines were so absorbed in the enemy that they forgot the backblast of their own weapon, which bounced off a house behind, blowing them off their feet and showering them in mud and debris. But the communist impetus was spent. American tanks moved up, and they began to advance again. The Marines found their own patrol intact, having taken refuge in a culvert all night, their fatigues concealed beneath civilian clothing stolen from a washing line.

The 5th Marines reached the Capitol building only on 27 September, two days after Tokyo had announced the liberation, in relentless accordance with the Supreme Commander’s schedule. To the chagrin of the visitors, soon after they had hoisted the Stars and Stripes, they were diplomatically ordered to lower their nation’s colours, and raise the blue flag of the United Nations. Two days later, MacArthur himself presided over the solemn ceremony in the shattered Capitol building, marking the liberation of Seoul and the return of the government of Syngman Rhee. The Joint Chiefs in Washington sought in vain to prevent the ceremony, because of their reluctance to identify the United States so closely with the controversial South Korean President. They were unsuccessful. MacArthur was determined to savour his moment of ceremony, indifferent to the cynicism of his own troops who had made it possible. ‘If the Inchon landing had been as carefully planned as
that ceremony, it would have been marvellous,’ said Ed Simmons acidly. Immense labour and resources had been diverted from the battle to build a pontoon bridge across the Han that would enable MacArthur and his cavalcade to drive direct from Kimpo airport into Seoul.

In the midst of the ruined Capitol, the Supreme Commander unleashed a characteristic flood of rhetoric for the throng of soldiers, naval officers and correspondents gathered around himself and Rhee: ‘By the grace of merciful Providence, our forces fighting under the standard of that greatest hope and inspiration of mankind, the United Nations, have liberated this ancient capital city of Korea . . .’ The Lord’s Prayer was interrupted by the crash of glass and masonry from the damaged dome a hundred feet above. MacArthur appeared not to notice. He turned to address Rhee: ‘Mr President, my officers and I will now resume our military duties and leave you and your government to the discharge of the civil responsibility.’ The two men shook hands. Rhee seemed overtaken by the emotion of the moment: ‘We admire you,’ he murmured to the general. ‘We love you as the saviour of our race.’ The Supreme Commander flew home to Tokyo mantled in his own serene sense of destiny fulfilled, imbued with an aura of invincibility that awed even his nation’s leaders. He was confident that the war for Korea had been won, and that his armies were victorious. Now it was just a matter of cleaning up.

6 » TO THE BRINK:
MACARTHUR CROSSES THE PARALLEL

When MacArthur came out on to the deck of the
Mount McKinley
the morning after the Inchon landing, his first question to the Marines’ General Shepherd was: ‘Have we seen or heard anything of the Russians or the Chinese?’
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It was an inquiry he repeated, insistently, each day thereafter as his army drove deep inland. The Supreme Commander was perfectly aware of the political embarrassments and military implications of killing, capturing, or even encountering Chinese or Russian advisers or troops. Yet as each day passed with no word of their presence, MacArthur’s assurance grew. Peking and Moscow had backed off. This was a struggle between the United Nations and the crumbling divisions of Kim Il Sung. The communists had reached out for their easy victory in South Korea, and come within a hairbreadth of achieving it. Yet when the will of the United States – the will, indeed, of the nation’s supreme representative in Asia, Douglas MacArthur – was tested and shown to be strong, that of the enemy crumpled. In MacArthur’s perception, strengthened by each day of triumph after 15 September, the crisis had passed.