The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (70 page)

I
F THE SECOND DIVISION
was the tail end of the Eighth Army now heading south, then the Second Engineers were at the very end of the tail, the last of the units to go out. Gino Piazza, who had fought so well with Dog Company of the Second Engineers during the worst of the Naktong fighting, thought that November 30 was the worst day of his life. For the first time, he was sure he was going to die. As far as he could tell, many of the officers at more senior levels had bailed on the men. A number of the officers in the Second Engineers had gone out in a group. There had been one young second lieutenant, John Sullivan, whom Piazza particularly liked and who had wanted to stay with the men because he thought that was what officers were supposed to do, but he had gotten his orders, and so had said good-bye to Piazza—in tears. All too many of the officers whose job it was to get the Second Engineers into the larger convoy had in Piazza’s opinion just been goddamned old-fashioned cowards who did not give a damn about the men. “It was the moment of truth, the moment when you needed your officers most, and they were trying to separate all the officers from the men and ferry them out by themselves—turning the retreat into some kind of officer’s club for safety!” Piazza said.

Engineers do not move lightly, something infantry commanders often seemed to forget. For more than a week before the Chinese made their initial strike, the Engineers’ commander, Colonel Alarich Zacherle, had been pushing Division to make a decision on all their heavy construction gear, the bulldozers and heavy trucks loaded with bridging equipment, which was at the heart of what engineers did. In any military convoy, Zacherle had tried to remind them, this would make the Engineers the slowest of the slow and the easiest of targets, slowing down everyone else. Zacherle wanted permission to send the heavy stuff back four or five days before the Chinese attacked. They were sure as hell not going to build anything new this far north. There would never be an instant airstrip to sit alongside the Yalu River. Each day when Piazza had asked Zacherle if they had a decision on the heavy equipment, the colonel would simply shake his head—and there was an implication, Piazza thought, in the
way he answered that Zacherle did not think the men in charge knew what the hell they were doing. And so they were stuck with all that heavy gear now.

The night before the final retreat, Zacherle had visited Gerry Epley, the Division chief of staff, to find out what was going on. Epley had then invited him to go out with some of the Division staff. Zacherle was surprised by the offer. No, he had answered, he would go out with his own men. He thought that was the right way to do it. He was already—at least, so some of his men thought—badly shaken by the damage inflicted on his unit. The Second Engineers had lost up to two hundred of their nine hundred men in the first seventy-two hours of the Chinese attack. Zacherle had always taken his command quite personally and was proud of the fact that he knew—or at least thought he knew—every man in the battalion by name. In most circumstances such an attitude greatly aided morale. But now his affection for and commitment to his men made things harder for him.

So the Engineers were going to have to go out late, and they were going to have to go out burdened with all their heavy equipment, waiting for their place, which would be near the end of that cumbersome main convoy. They were all formed up, Dog Company in the lead, Headquarters Company next, followed by Able, Baker, and Charley companies. As the afternoon moved along, though, there was a growing sense that the situation was hopeless—word kept filtering back to the waiting units that the convoy was being torn up just a mile or two down the road. There they were, Piazza thought, ever so patiently waiting their turn to be part of a growing disaster. Piazza was in the lead jeep. They were told they would get their slot in the convoy around 4
P.M.
, but the convoy was moving ever more slowly and the time was being pushed back. Soon it was dusk and they hadn’t moved; then dusk had gone and it was getting darker. The 503rd Field Artillery passed them with its heavy guns. The Engineers were next. Just then five trucks from one of the artillery units cut in front of them, five big deuce-and-a-halfs. Normally, Piazza hated anyone doing that, but in this case he felt more philosophical—you want it, big guys, he thought, you’re welcome to it.

Then his jeep led the Second Engineers into the convoy. Everyone was scared to death. They were in the convoy only thirty minutes, the artillery trucks just ahead of them, when the artillerymen came upon a small cut in the road, hills on both sides, and suddenly, in Piazza’s words, all hell broke loose. It was as if the Chinese had been waiting expressly for the artillery and its carriers, all those big guns in those big trucks, moving so slowly, and they struck with their perfectly sighted mortars. The firestorm was overpowering—the artillerymen had driven into the perfect trap within a trap. The trucks simply exploded, one after another. Five had entered the trap; five were now on fire. All
those men, surely some Piazza had gone drinking with over the years, blown up just like that, one moment as alive as he was and then gone. If you sat down to dream up the worst possible scenario for your buddies, this would be it. In real life, he thought, you were supposed to wake up and find out that it was only a nightmare, but there was no waking up from this. You could not move forward; you could not move back; and right in front of you, hundreds of men whom less than an hour ago you had lightly cursed for cutting into the line, were dying.

TO GINO PIAZZA,
the convoy seemed completely stalled. Then he heard a new set of orders. “Abandon your vehicles and assemble on the side of the road! Abandon your vehicles and assemble on the side of the road!” No one even knew where the orders came from or who had given them. So the men of the Second Engineers began to leave their vehicles and scramble up the hill on their right. Piazza wanted to blow up their trucks, which had a lot of communications gear he did not want the Chinese to capture, but he was told the Air Force would fly over the next day and blow them up for them. For the first time since he had been in Korea, Piazza found himself truly despairing. He sensed that his will to survive, which had helped sustain him during the Naktong fighting, was leaving him. He had never been especially religious, but now he started to pray. His prayers were very specific. He offered prayers for the souls in purgatory. That went back to his childhood in Brooklyn. It was the prayer his mother always offered up when something bad happened. Her explanation was quite simple: If you had lived a good life, then you went to heaven. But if you hadn’t, and the chances were that Gino Piazza, given his myriad flaws and imperfections, had not, then the more prayers you offered for the souls in purgatory, the less they suffered—and maybe it would help you as well when you got there.

Strangely enough, it seemed to work, or at least it worked for him at that moment. At the very least it calmed him. He realized that in such chaos no one else was going to save him, so he had to save himself. If the Chinese wanted his ass, he decided, they were going to have to come and get it. There were a lot of men gathering on that hill, hundreds, he thought, maybe even a thousand. No one seemed to be in charge—so he might as well lead. He formed up one group and started for the crest, and his band seemed to grow larger by the minute because no one else seemed to be leading. The Chinese spotted them and raked their area with machine gun fire, which sent some of the men racing downhill again. A few NCOs who were helping Piazza tried to stop them, because when they were on the road they became perfect targets, but it was too late. They had broken when the machine gun opened up. Piazza doubted whether many of them ever made it out.

WHAT ALARICH ZACHERLE
remembered most about the day when the Chinese captured much of his unit was how bad the communications were. No one seemed able to reach anyone else. It wasn’t the fault of the radio operators—they stayed at their stations at the expense of their own safety—just poor equipment, and very poor leadership. He was supposed to come out near the end of the convoy, with the Twenty-third Regiment right behind him, and on a number of occasions each unit failed in its attempt to reach the other. Years later, long after Zacherle had returned from his two and a half years in a prison camp, he finally met Paul Freeman, who assured him he had tried to reach him several times to tell him the original plan was being abandoned, that his regiment was going out on the west road, and the Engineers should come with them. It had been a tense moment, because Freeman’s unit had made it out relatively unscathed, while so many of Zacherle’s men had been killed or captured. “Hell, yes, we would have loved to come out with you,” Zacherle told Freeman, and assured him that he bore him no animus. What had happened that day, Zacherle believed, was the fortunes of war.

Back at his spot where the Engineers were waiting, Zacherle knew it was all coming to an end. The road wasn’t going to open up; not for heavy equipment, that was for sure. Even before the end, Zacherle gave the order to blow up some of the heavier stuff, the trucks and bulldozers. They used phosphorous grenades to burn the gears. Then, sometime in the very late afternoon, with the Chinese closing in, they burned the unit colors. He and the other officers did not want the Chinese to capture them and flaunt them. They were in a wooden box, and Zacherle ordered an extra dose of gasoline poured on them. Burning the colors, that told it all. Then it was time to start walking out. The Engineers were more vulnerable than other units—they were known as
combat
engineers, and they might be used as infantry, but they had no automatic weapons and no mortars. In any confrontation with the Chinese they would be seriously underarmed.

Bob Nehrling, battalion adjutant for the Second Engineers, knew that it was all over too. They had started the day as part of a blocking force for Division headquarters, and they were a unit, Nehrling decided later, that could be sacrificed. Somebody, somewhere up the chain of command had decided that. Nehrling was with a group of about thirty-five staff officers from Battalion, and Zacherle had told them that they were going to have to get out as best they could. They never had a chance, Nehrling thought. They had barely moved from their waiting point near the road when suddenly there were Chinese everywhere, as surprised to come across them as they were to be surrounded. The Chinese who captured them were headed south, and so for a time they too
kept going south, the group of prisoners increasing steadily as stragglers from the Ninth and Thirty-eighth regiments were captured. Pretty soon they had about twenty infantry officers with them as well as engineers. It was the beginning of a terrible time, from which very few of them made it back.

GINO PIAZZA TRUSTED
his instincts in no small part because he had nothing else to go on. It was dark by then and no one had a compass. Piazza had a general sense that they needed to head southeast, and he knew the terrain better than most because he had done some recon earlier on, looking for mines in the area. He managed to line up the general direction he wanted by sighting on two stars—it was the most primitive kind of compass sighting—and soon he found an old railroad spur heading that way for them to walk along. His group—maybe five hundred at tops, and two hundred at its smallest—took fire constantly. Piazza, with a carbine and several hundred rounds of ammo, was careful to fire only when he had a target. When it was over, he had very few rounds left, so he knew he had been firing through much of the night.

Some of the officers in his group kept wanting to turn right—as if some tidal pull were affecting them—a direction that would surely bring them back where they had started out, but gradually, in the mysterious way that these things work, Piazza took command of this bedraggled unit. He seemed the only one with the requisite confidence. Eventually, in a clearing, they came across another group whose leader, an officer, wanted to dig in for the night. But Piazza argued with him. They could
not
dig in, he insisted; they lacked the weaponry to hold the Chinese off, and the Chinese were right on top of them. In the end, they kept going as Piazza wanted. Once, from a high point, they looked down and spotted a tunnel on the tracks below. Some of the men wanted to go down there, as if a tunnel were the perfect hiding place. Piazza told them not to, but a number went anyway. It was exactly where the Chinese would look first, he believed. What looked safe was not safe; what looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.

Finally, they spotted the main Kunuri-Sunchon road. Some of the men wanted to go down immediately, because it looked like the easiest way out. The road, Piazza understood, represented the familiar to American troops and they found comfort in the familiar. He had to fight that impulse not just in himself but in the men he was leading. When some soldiers peeled off from the group and made for the road anyway, the Chinese opened up on them immediately. Gradually, Piazza sorted out command functions with other NCOs, so they could have some structure if he was hit. He even found an officer, Lieutenant Wilbur Webster, from the Eighty-second AAA, or Anti-Aircraft Artillery, an antiaircraft unit used thus far as an infantry weapon, and suggested he take over,
but Webster said, “No, Sergeant Piazza, you’re doing just fine.” And so they slowly worked their way along the high ground, resisting the temptation of the easy, and they eventually made it back. Perhaps three hundred men came out with Piazza. He thought the prayers to those in purgatory had made the difference.

PERHAPS NO UNIT
in the Second Division was hit as hard as the Second Engineers. When the retreat was over and they assembled near Seoul, it seemed as if each man stood where once an entire platoon or squad might have been. Gino Piazza, who became a kind of ex officio historian of the group, believed that there had been about 900 men in the battalion as it was moving north. There were a total of 266 men in that final formation, he remembered. Perhaps as many as 500 men had been lost in that one day—it was a ghost battalion now. You couldn’t be exact on the figures, Piazza believed, because some of the men had been back in rear echelon positions and had not been hit by the Chinese. But it had been a terrible day. The Second Engineers, Piazza later reflected, with untempered bitterness, paid an unusually high price for the stupidity and arrogance of other men.