The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (59 page)

Then, in mid-to late October, Swift started receiving reports from his agents about Chinese troops crossing into Korea. These agents were all Chinese or, in the racist vernacular of the moment, “slopies” (for slope-eyes). The reports varied in quality, but there was enough good stuff to make any intelligence officer pay heed. Nor was Swift alone, for he was hearing similar tales from some of his friends in military intelligence, which he later believed reflected their awareness of the Chinese prisoners taken and being interrogated by General Paik and American headquarters in the Unsan region. But Swift
knew something else as well. “None of this was going to affect Willoughby. The Chinese were not going to come in.
He knew it. And he was never wrong
!”

IN FACT, WILLOUGHBY
was not only stopping the combat-level intelligence machinery from sending its best and most consequential material to the top in Korea, but he was blocking other sources of intelligence as well, and keeping a careful eye on a small, bare-bones CIA operation that in 1950 existed in Tokyo. By prearrangement with the Navy, a small CIA shop had been set up inside the Seventh Fleet, at its base in Yokosuka, and was being run by a man named William Duggan, an old OSS operative who had worked previously in Europe. From late September well into October, Duggan was receiving some exceptional intelligence from his colleagues in Taiwan on what the Chinese Communist Army was up to. Some of the old Nationalist units, now incorporated into the People’s Liberation Army, still had their radios. Sometimes they would manage to slip away at night and make contact with Taiwan to describe where they were and what they were up to. The messages all had a theme: we are all heading north to the Manchurian border; the field level officers believe the decision has already been made to cross the Yalu.

Then, suddenly, in late October, the radios went silent, perhaps because they were by then in North Korea and there was greater control over who had the radios. But there was no doubt that the earlier reports represented very real warnings. A young CIA operative on Taiwan named Bob Myers was picking up these reports from some of the Nationalists he was working with and passing them on to his superiors, and he knew that they had reached Duggan in Japan. What he did not learn until later was that Willoughby had found out about this and had threatened to close down Duggan’s tiny shop and run him out of Japan unless he stopped trying to notify anyone higher up about the intelligence he had.

Meanwhile, within the Eighth Army a fierce bureaucratic battle over the intelligence was taking place. The unfortunate man caught between Willoughby above him and the growing doubts among intelligence men working on the ground in northern Korea was the Eighth Army’s G-2, Clint Tarkenton. “He was a Willoughby man, not a Walton Walker man, and you must not underestimate the importance of that. You must remember the enormous power that Willoughby had in that overall command structure,” said Bill Train, who as a young officer in the First Cav’s G-3 shop, was convinced that the Chinese had entered the country in force, and that a major tragedy was in the making: “It was MacArthur’s command, not a U.S. Army command, and if you crossed Willoughby it was not just a ticket out of there, it was probably a ticket straight out of your career.” So Tarkenton followed the line from Tokyo that, as Willoughby had reported in an intelligence estimate on October 28, three days
after the capture of the first Chinese prisoner in the Unsan area, “the auspicious time for such intervention has long since passed; it is difficult to believe that such a move, if planned, would have been postponed to a time when remnant NK forces have been reduced to a low point of effectiveness.”

Train, however, was quite alarmed about what had happened at Unsan. He had been pulled into some of the intelligence work because the G-2 section was shorthanded. Now, as he paid more and more attention, he saw undeniable evidence of what appeared to be a large-scale Chinese entry into the war. It was not something that you scoffed at, as Willoughby’s shop was doing; it was something that sent a chill through you and made you want to come up with even more information. Technically, intelligence was not even Train’s area, but how could you do plans as a G-3 if you did not know who or where the enemy was? Even before the Chinese struck at Unsan, he felt himself putting together a jigsaw puzzle in which the newest pieces gave an ever clearer picture. American soldiers moving north were moving into an area filled with ghosts, but gradually those ghosts were beginning to have an outline. Train was no less struck by the way the intelligence people above him were systematically minimizing or openly discounting the same information. At the very least they should have been pushing harder for more information. Instead they were visibly shrinking the numbers on the enemy, and making it clear that they did not want better information. Whenever Train and his boss in G-3, John Dabney, spotted something that seemed to indicate a serious Chinese presence, Willoughby’s people minimized it.

What made the struggle so unequal was that Clint Tarkenton was not an ally. He was not quite an opponent either, but he was caught in a squeeze between a dogmatic, authoritarian boss and an intrusive, unwanted reality. “Tarkenton was in an impossible situation,” Train said years later. “Willoughby was his boss and he was a bully and he knew his power and he liked using it, and he controlled that shop both in Tokyo and, because Tarkenton was his man, in the Eighth Army G-2 as well, and he could dominate any intelligence estimates he wanted. Tarkenton, no matter what his real thoughts, was very much under his shadow.” Later Dabney also said that Tarkenton was unduly influenced by Willoughby. Whatever they came up with in terms of the Chinese presence, Willoughby had an answer. If the ROKs reported killing thirty-six Chinese during a battle, and the bodies were still on the battlefield, then the answer came back that it was all just an Oriental way of saving face, that the ROKs had fought so poorly they had to claim a certain number of dead Chinese as a matter of pride. If Train came up with evidence that seemed to point to the presence of five or six Chinese divisions in a given area, the answer was invariably that these were different, smaller units from different Chinese divisions, now attached to a North Korean unit.

A most dangerous game was being played out, by one part of the Army, safely quartered in Tokyo, at the expense of another part that would have to fight that very dangerous enemy under terrible conditions. For example, on October 30, after the first attack at Unsan, Everett Drumwright in the Seoul embassy, reflecting the G-2 position quite precisely, cabled State that two regiments’ worth of Chinese, perhaps three thousand men, were probably engaged in the North. That was his honest attempt to answer what was the burning question of the moment for his superiors. The next day he cabled again, giving a smaller figure of only two thousand Chinese troops. By November 1, after lower-level interrogators showed that there were troops there from several different Chinese
armies,
Tarkenton, following the Willoughby line, said that it was because smaller units from those armies but not the full armies themselves had showed up.

On November 3, as the reality of Unsan gradually set in, Willoughby upped his figures slightly. Yes, the Chinese were there in country, minimally 16,500 of them, at a maximum 34,000. On November 6, Tarkenton placed the total figure of Chinese aligned against both the Eighth Army and Tenth Corps at 27,000. In reality, the number in country was already closer to 250,000, and growing. On November 17, MacArthur told Ambassador Muccio that there were no more than 30,000 Chinese in country, while the next day Tarkenton placed the number at 48,000. On November 24, the day the major UN offensive to go to the Yalu kicked off—instead of sensing how large the Chinese presence was and getting into strong defensive positions—Willoughby placed the minimum number at 40,000, the maximum at 71,000. At the time there were
300,000
Chinese troops waiting patiently for the UN forces to come a little deeper into their trap.

There was even a major split within the G-2 shop. Not only were a number of subordinate intelligence officers working in the field now absolutely sure Willoughby was desperately wrong, but Lieutenant Colonel Bob Fergusson, nominally senior to Tarkenton and originally supposed to be the G-2, shared their doubts. Fergusson, who had arrived in Korea after Tarkenton took over, tried without success to change Tarkenton’s mind. Unfortunately, it was not a man he was wrestling with but a system, and Fergusson was the outsider in it. It was, as Train put it, “the saddest thing I was ever associated with because you could almost see it coming, almost know what happened was going to happen, those young men moving into that awful goddamn trap.”

For Johnnie Walker, it simply did not feel right, but he was being pulled along by the power of the command above him. At first, he had stonewalled the war correspondents about the possibility of the Chinese being in country. When the first of several prisoners had been taken by the ROKs, Tom Lambert of the Associated Press, one of the best reporters there, along with Hugh Moffett of
Time,
had picked up on the rumor that one or more of the prisoners was Chi
nese. They had driven some twenty miles to the Korean regimental headquarters, where a Korean officer, who spoke both Chinese and English, was interrogating a prisoner who wore a quilted jacket and a very different uniform from any they had seen. The prisoner was indeed Chinese, and quite open about it—they were all supposed to be volunteers, he said, but he was not a volunteer. The next day, Lambert and Moffett jeeped over to Walker’s headquarters, where they found the Eighth Army commander in what seemed to them still an early stage of denial. “Well, he might be Chinese,” Walker said, “but remember they have a lot of Mexicans in Los Angeles but you don’t call LA a Mexican city.” In fact he had been extremely nervous from the moment the first Chinese soldiers were captured. On November 6, right after some of the damage to the Eighth Cav had been assessed, Willoughby had flown into Pyongyang for a meeting, and Walker had turned to him and said, “Charles, we know the Chinese are here; you tell us what they are here for.” The response, as Wilson Heefner, Walker’s biographer, noted, was not much of an answer at all.

Walker at that moment felt very much on the outside. At the time of the celebration of the liberation of Seoul, he had told his aide Joe Tyner and his pilot, Mike Lynch, that it would be a big day because he was finally going to learn what the plans were for the future. He had returned later that day utterly confused. No one had even bothered to speak to him about the next step. Once they crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, he would have preferred to dig in about a hundred miles north, along the narrow neck of that part of the peninsula, on a line that went roughly from Pyongyang to Wonsan, and leave roughly two-thirds of the country, much of it largely uninhabited wilderness, untouched. That penetration would have been easier to secure, to defend, and to supply, and it would have made any Chinese or North Korean attempt to attack vulnerable to UN airpower. It fell short by about three hundred miles of going all the way to the Yalu. But it was not to be. In truth, Walker was no longer the Eighth Army commander. He was now the commander of about half of it, bypassed on all major decisions, and very much aware that he was in a competition to reach the Yalu before Almond and Tenth Corps.

None of this was by happenstance, Matt Ridgway thought. Washington might be on the defensive, but MacArthur also knew that there were three magic words that might alert it if they came from his headquarters: “massive Chinese intervention.” If there was any evidence that a new enemy had entered the war big-time, the military men, including Marshall and the Chiefs, as well as the political people, would rise from their current passivity and set much more strict limits on what had been a generally free hand for him. Therefore the second real battle in the drive north right after Unsan was a political one, over the intelligence figures.

I
N THE BACKGROUND
there was a parallel force still at work, that of domestic American politics. The attempt by Truman to share some of the Inchon glory by going to Wake Island failed. On November 7, some three days after the Chinese had overrun Unsan, and even as the senior people at the First Cav were beginning to comprehend the full wreckage of the battle, Americans went to the polls to vote in the off-year election. The Democrats, burdened by a war that was already deeply unpopular, did poorly. They lost five Senate seats and twenty-eight House seats.

The election—the first time the country had been able to vote since the war began—heralded the rise of Senator Joe McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin. He had given his first speech on subversion in February of 1950. To many Americans the war itself now seemed to validate his charges, while to others it had merely reconfirmed their exhaustion with the Democrats. The most immediate beneficiary was McCarthy himself. For a period of about three years in the election’s wake, he went on a sensational political rampage. He basked in the easy reverberation of his charges, in the eager way the country seemed to respond, and the play—ever so careless—the media gave him for charge after charge, paying, as it did, very little heed to verification. “Reds Run State Department, McCarthy Claims, Senator Charges Reds Coddled”: if a senator had said it, then it was news. Verification never interested him; nor, for that matter, did any serious study of just what the Communists were doing in this country. That was too bad because in the long run he did a serious disservice to the study of the postwar Soviet apparatus in America, and whether whatever success it had came from the relatively small number of people who joined up during the Depression years because they had lost their faith in democracy, or from the tiny hard core of men and women who actually spied for the Soviets. Serious interest in either Communism or espionage was not McCarthy’s specialty. “Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square—he didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx,” as George Reedy, who covered him in those days, once said.

He was the great political roughneck of the era, a populist playing on fears generated by a new and uncertain atomic age. He gloried in how in his own mind he had become the very embodiment of Americanism. “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys,” he told two reporters at one instant press conference, “you’ve got to be a Communist or a cocksucker.” McCarthy became the perfect hit man for the right. He was extremely valuable to more sedate Republicans, “a pig in a minefield for them,” in the words of the writer Murray Kempton. “Only by ‘mucking’ can we win, and only a mucker can muck,” he once said. The estimable Senator Robert Taft once told him not to worry if some of his accusations did not pan out. He should just “keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, [he] should proceed with another.”

In the 1950 elections McCarthy scored two important victories. His primary target that year was Senator Millard Tydings, an old-fashioned, quite aristocratic Maryland Democrat whom Roosevelt had earlier tried to purge because he was so conservative. Tydings had been appalled by McCarthy’s charges, so reckless and partisan, and in the summer of 1950 he had taken a subcommittee and studied them, investigating the investigator so to speak. The Tydings Committee eventually criticized McCarthy for his behavior and exonerated most of those attacked by him. McCarthy’s accusations, it reported, “represented perhaps the most nefarious campaign of half-truths and untruths in the history of the Republic.”

By chance Tydings was up for reelection in 1950, and McCarthy went after him. He made repeated trips from Washington into neighboring Maryland and even used a faked photo purporting to show Tydings with Earl Browder, the head of the American Communist Party, working together. Tydings was defeated, by a surprisingly large margin of forty thousand votes—and the real victor was not John Marshall Butler, who ran against him, but McCarthy. His other main target was Scott Lucas of Illinois, the Democratic majority leader. McCarthy’s timing could not have been better—the Democratic machine in Chicago, so critical to any statewide victory, was in bad odor for a variety of reasons, Lucas more vulnerable than he realized. McCarthy made eight trips to Illinois during the Senate race and attacked Lucas among other things for his connections with Dean Acheson, a magically negative name in much of the Midwest. Rural Illinois and rural Wisconsin seemed to share many of the same fears, and McCarthy drew large, enthusiastic crowds everywhere he went. Everett McKinley Dirksen, Lucas’s opponent, represented, McCarthy told these crowds, “a prayer for America.” Lucas lost as well. Suddenly McCarthy had become a major national figure. Because of the nature of the issues, the elections represented a major setback for the Truman administration and its congressional allies. Overnight McCarthy had become the great national intimidator.
“You couldn’t imagine the change in his [McCarthy’s] status when he returned to Washington,” said Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas. “The Republicans looked on him as the new messiah. The Democrats were just scared to death. He was the same old McCarthy, as odious as ever. But oh my, how things had changed.”

What happened was important news politically in the United States and had a profound effect on Korea and Tokyo as well. It meant that at this most critical moment in Korean War decision-making, the president was being undercut by a changing tide in domestic politics, something the general at the Dai Ichi was acutely aware of. The politics of this war were always difficult for the president; now they had become more difficult than ever.

On November 8, the day after the off-year elections, the Joint Chiefs, reflecting a growing fear that the Chinese had entered the war (and a complete lack of trust in Willoughby’s reporting), cabled MacArthur again suggesting that, in view of what had happened at Unsan, his mission might have to be reexamined. But on November 9, he came back hard at Washington. He did not intend, as they wanted, to draw a line at the narrow neck of the peninsula. He knew the British (and the French) favored that position, as did many of the senior American commanders actually on the ground, including Walker. That was appeasement, he said, and it found its “historic precedence in the action taken at Munich.” He was confident that his airpower could stop any larger Chinese passage to the battlefield. (He was unaware that most of the enemy force was already in country and that it was too late for his airpower to block the route for them.) Then he added, “To give up any part of North Korea to the aggression of the Chinese Communists would be the greatest defeat of the free world in recent times. Indeed to yield to so immoral a proposition would bankrupt our leadership and influence in Asia and render intolerable our position both politically and militarily. We would follow closely in the footsteps of the British who by the appeasement of recognition [of Communist China] lost the respect of all the rest of Asia without gaining that of the Chinese segment.”

This then was the fateful moment. Unsan and the assault on the Eighth Cavalry should have marked the point at which they all reconsidered their plan, with the Tokyo command, if anything, more nervous than Washington because its men were at risk. It represented the last real chance to reexamine the war before the full Chinese force attacked. In military terms, MacArthur’s troops now crossed the fail-safe point; Unsan and the assault upon the Eighth Cavalry Regiment marked not only a critical moment on the battlefield but also a major defeat for Washington in its war with the general. Dean Acheson and General Omar Bradley both eventually wrote of how poorly the presi
dent’s advisers had served Truman at that moment. They had been intimidated by their commander in the field, despite their own feelings that they were losing control. In effect they allowed him to keep going north, as long as he was successful, but not to get in a war with the Chinese. His last great offensive would proceed as planned.

AT THE HIGHEST
levels in the Dai Ichi, as they had prepared for the final push in late October, just before the attack at Unsan, there was a genuine feeling of euphoria. The enemy had virtually deserted the battlefield. On October 23,
Time
magazine ran an extremely flattering cover story on Ned Almond; “Sic ’em Ned,” the cover line said, reflecting the fact that the North Koreans were fleeing and the UN forces were seemingly in hot pursuit. Not only was Almond treated as an exceptional military hero, one with an almost magical touch with the ordinary soldiers (“What’s your name? Where’s your home town? How long have you been in the service?”), but the cover story also offered a chance for Almond to praise MacArthur extravagantly. In the past, Bill McCaffrey, his closest deputy, remembered, the only two military figures Almond had ever had kind words about were George Catlett Marshall and Robert E. Lee, the only men, until he met MacArthur, he had allowed into his personal Hall of Fame. Everyone else was significantly flawed. Now he spoke of MacArthur as the greatest military genius of the twentieth century. Unfortunately he could not rank him, he told
Time,
against the greatest military men of all time, “because it’s hard to compare the present day with the time of Napoleon, Caesar, and Hannibal.” The name of Napoleon, as they prepared for a campaign that might entail the worst kind of winter weather against what was potentially the most populous nation in the world, was spoken with no irony.

Dealing with Almond in those days was like dealing with a man who had fallen in love, McCaffrey thought. McCaffrey was probably as close to Almond as anyone, had been Almond’s top deputy in World War II, and was permitted to argue with him more than any other subordinate officer, almost, McCaffrey remembered, as if he were a favored son. McCaffrey remained extremely pessimistic about venturing farther north. But Almond simply would not listen to any dissent, though the dangers that lay ahead were obvious. There were all those giant maps at the various senior headquarters, and on them were a great many little red flags, each flag representing a Chinese division, seeming to show hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops poised along the Yalu River. McCaffrey had arrived in Tokyo to be Almond’s deputy about a week before Inchon. And every time he looked up at the giant map in headquarters, he could see the curving boundary of the Yalu, and along the Yalu were those little
red flags, representing countless Chinese divisions, maybe thirty or more. The first time McCaffrey had seen that map, he immediately understood the dangers it reflected: all those Chinese divisions just waiting up there in the mountains, and the UN supply lines stretched so thin. “What if they come in?” he asked Bob Glass, the corps G-2. “Ned Almond says that we don’t have to worry,” Glass answered. “MacArthur has thought it all through and it’s not to their advantage to come in, so they won’t come in.”

But the dangers, McCaffrey thought, were both obvious and terrifying. The country mushroomed out dramatically as you went farther north, becoming ever more vast and opening into a kind of mountainous wasteland with few decent roads. Some of the mountains were seven to eight thousand feet high. “Every mile further north was like a mile wider on the front, every mile north was a bit colder, and every mile north the roads got worse: every mile north worked against our basic strength, which was as a technology-based army. Every day it got more dangerous,” said McCaffrey, who eventually ended up a three-star. There were more and more ominous signs, and just beneath the Bataan Gang, the next level of officers at the Dai Ichi was becoming noticeably nervous. But they could not argue with Almond. When McCaffrey tried to bring it up, he was always immediately lectured for his lack of faith. “You were against Inchon too,” Almond would say, and then he would add, “Bill, you keep on underestimating General MacArthur.”

In early December, after the Chinese attack, McCaffrey found himself with Swede Larsen, a Joe Collins aide and a longtime pal. “For Christ sakes, Swede, what were you guys in Washington doing? Didn’t anyone notice that we were spread out all over North Korea? Didn’t anyone happen to notice it?” Larsen answered, “Bill, did you ever stop to think what it would have been like to tell Douglas MacArthur that his strategic ideas are screwy after Inchon? It wasn’t going to happen.”

SURELY EVEN MACARTHUR
had rarely ridden so high. Colonel John Austin, a member of the First Corps staff, had an image of MacArthur visiting their headquarters at that moment, “erect and supremely confident, absolutely at his peak.” It was, Austin later said, like watching “walking history.” Rarely had any commander seemed so confident. “Gentlemen,” he had told the assembled officers, “the war is over. The Chinese are not coming into this war. In less than two weeks, the Eighth Army will close on the Yalu across the entire front. The Third Division will be back in Fort Benning for Christmas dinner.” No one questioned him at this moment, Austin told the writer Robert Smith—“it would have been like questioning an announcement from God.”

The initial kickoff date for the final offensive north was supposed to be
November 15, but Walton Walker had felt he was being pushed ahead of himself and he managed to delay it by pointing out how limited his supplies were; Shrimp Milburn, the First Corps commander, had only one day of ammo, a day and a half of fuel, and three or four days of rations. By then Walker was absolutely convinced that he had a minimum of three Chinese divisions in his area, and was nervous about every mile north they had taken after reaching Pyongyang. He had, he later confided to a newspaper reporter, moved as slowly and deliberately as he could, as he crossed the Chongchon, advances so slow that he had received sharp messages from his superior. He had also tried to create positions that would be useful in case the Chinese struck and he was driven back. Later he was sure that he saved a considerable amount of his army because of his caution. He was also quite sure, he told a trusted journalist friend, that he was going to be relieved of his command by Tokyo for his slow-walking and his virtual disobedience.