The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (77 page)

When the Chinese launched their Third Campaign on New Year’s Eve 1950, food from China met only a quarter of the army’s minimum needs. Because of the American bombing campaign, casualties among truck drivers were higher than among the combat troops. The troops themselves were in a constant state of exhaustion. By February, they had been fighting continuously under difficult conditions and essentially living off the land for more than two months, but UN airpower left little chance to rest, even in safe areas removed from the front lines. The cold was very hard on the Americans and their feet, and American commanders issued warning after warning about care of socks and feet, but it was much worse for the Chinese: their men traveled in high-top sneakers, and that made frostbite a constant problem for them. In time, many Chinese soldiers could not get their swollen feet into their sneakers and so simply wrapped them in rags to go forth to battle.

Thus, even before the Third Campaign began, with his vast army still north of Seoul, and Mao badly wanting them to recapture the Southern capital for its propaganda value, Peng was lobbying to slow the offensive down so his men could rest and regroup. On December 8, 1950, he cabled Mao requesting a pause until the spring; in addition, he wanted to keep the battle area above Seoul. He believed that the American and UN forces had not been that badly damaged in the fighting in the North, and were now increasingly well dug in. It
might simply be too costly to assault them and their wall of firepower south of Seoul. To Peng it made little military sense to risk so much for the small political victory that would come with the liberation of Seoul. Mao felt quite differently; so did the Soviets and Kim Il Sung. If originally Mao had seen the decision to enter this war as a way of serving notice on the rest of the world—especially a Communist world so long under the hegemony of the Russians—that this was a new China, now he was slowly becoming a prisoner of his own pride and vanity.

In this way, the exceptional success of the early battles was turning into a burden for Peng. Because the Chinese had done so well, ever more was expected. The Soviets, through their ambassador to Korea, continued to push Peng to race ahead. Given the fact that the Soviets had not even made good on their promise of air cover, Peng was underwhelmed by Russian exhortations. To him they suggested admirable Russian battlefield audacity—paid for with Chinese lives. But Mao wanted much the same thing as the Russians; with the entire world watching, he badly desired the symbolic political victory that would come with the capture of Seoul. Besides, he had become contemptuous of the American forces—the early defeats had convinced him they were even weaker than the Chinese Nationalist armies he had defeated. By then some of America’s allies and some senior members of the Truman administration were talking about negotiating a cease-fire at the thirty-eighth parallel, but Mao was dubious. That his enemies wanted a settlement was proof to him that they knew they were losing and wanted to prevent a total defeat. Such a precipitous settlement was a trick on their part. On December 13, he sent Peng a cable pointing out the political dangers of failing to pursue their enemy. If Peng slowed down now, he warned his commander, the rest of the world would become suspicious of Chinese strength.

On December 19, Peng cabled back, warning against “a rise of unrealistic optimism for quicker victory from other parts,” a reference to the Soviets and Kim Il Sung and, implicitly perhaps, Mao himself. Instead he proposed a rest period to be followed by the next major campaign. Mao wanted that campaign to start in early January, some six weeks ahead of Peng’s preferred schedule. Some adjustment for Peng’s needs was made; but, as Bin Yu has written, the final compromise reflected Mao’s vision, and because of that, in his words, the “political goals defined by Mao tended to go beyond the CPVF’s [the Chinese People’s Volunteer Forces] capacities.”

What Mao wanted, Mao got. On New Year’s Eve, Peng struck, and eventually his troops did reach the thirty-seventh parallel, but the American retreat this time was careful and they took relatively few casualties. Ridgway had been in
country only a few days when the offensive began and he was furious with the ROK performance. “It was,” he wrote in his history of the Korean War, “a dismaying spectacle. ROK soldiers by truckloads were streaming south without orders, without arms, without leaders in full retreat. Some came on foot or in commandeered vehicles of every sort. They had just one aim—to get as far away from the Chinese as possible. They had thrown their rifles and pistols away and had abandoned all artillery, mortars, machine guns, every crew-served weapon.” If he was pleased about anything, it was that unlike what happened during the retreat from Kunuri, the Americans here lost very little equipment.

The one important question was: could they hold a line above Seoul? Ridgway reluctantly decided that they could not ignore the kind of pressure the enemy could apply to the impermanent bridges built by the American engineers across the Han River. He could not risk isolating part of his army on the north side of the Han when the bridges behind them could be so easily destroyed. His choice was a difficult one—especially for a man who always wanted to attack and now more than ever wanted to infuse some positive energy into his men: but they had to give up Seoul and go south. On January 3, he told Ambassador John Muccio to inform President Syngman Rhee that he was going to have to take his government and head south yet one more time, and do it very quickly at that, because the bridges would be closed to all but military personnel by mid-afternoon of that day. On January 4, Seoul was burning again and the bridges over the Han had been blown.

The Third Campaign now seemed like another great success, and inevitably created pressure on Peng for yet more victories, and a belief among some in the Beijing leadership that he was being far too cautious. The idea that the Russians might think the Chinese timid appalled Mao. The balance between the two countries might change significantly in the next decade—as Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev started a de-Stalinization campaign and the Chinese claimed the mantle of Communist purists—but at that point, China was still the untested junior partner, and the Russians still had the right to judge the Chinese. Thus, it was easy for the Russians to goad Mao. Russian representatives in Beijing kept pressuring Mao to pursue the enemy. So too did Kim Il Sung. He met with Peng at his headquarters and asked him to pursue the Americans more audaciously.

Peng controlled his temper. The Americans were not actually defeated, he said. They had held their army together better than Kim realized. They might simply be trying to lure the Chinese too far south, so that they could strike back with another amphibious landing (a not so subtle reminder of mistakes made in the past). Still, the retaking of Seoul seemed like a significant propa
ganda victory, and there were huge rallies in China celebrating its recapture. In late January, Mao cabled Peng with his directives for the next campaign. In the process, Mao suggested, Peng’s forces would wipe out twenty to thirty thousand enemy soldiers. It was as if the chairman had not heard a word Peng had said in the last few weeks, caught up as he was in his own dreams of glory.

B
Y EARLY FEBRUARY,
the Chinese and American armies were stumbling toward a defining confrontation in what was known as the central corridor of Korea. It was a confrontation Ridgway now eagerly sought and about which Peng remained somewhat uneasy, though if the two forces had to meet, he greatly preferred that the central corridor with its mountainous terrain be the principal battleground. If he won, there would be little the UN forces could do to stop him. He intended that his troops could once again move up the mountainsides on foot at night, leaving the Americans once again warm in their vehicles on the roads deep in the valleys. So the Fourth Phase offensive would be launched, with control over the Wonju-Chipyongni area as its goal.

Ridgway’s intelligence was gradually improving, but it was still far too fragmentary, given how much was at risk. He had a sense that a major Chinese campaign was coming and that it might be in or at the edge of the central corridor region. But he was not sure exactly where, or how large it would be, and he wanted more precise information. In fact, he wanted far more than that. Ridgway had already moved the Second Division into the general area. It was now part of Tenth Corps, under the command of Ned Almond. The Second Division had in effect replaced the First Marines, whose commander had made it clear that they did not want to serve under Almond again. Ridgway was planning a major attack to the west of Tenth Corps, and he wanted the Second Division to cover his own right flank. That put Paul Freeman’s Twenty-third Regiment on the far right flank of all those forces, where it would play a critical role in the fighting to come.

ONE OF THE
first things Ridgway had done after arriving in country was to make the Second Division whole again. Dutch Keiser had been relieved by Walton Walker and replaced by Major General Bob McClure. But Ned Almond had despised McClure, and he lasted only thirty-seven days as division commander. In his brief tenure, one of the things McClure fixed on was making all the men in the division grow beards. “He had seen beards on some of the Turkish soldiers
and decided it made them look very tough—very warrior-like—and so the Americans should have them as well, and so we had to grow them and most of us hated them,” remembered John Carley, then a captain in the division’s G-3. Almond was a clean-look kind of general; he wanted uniforms and chins neat, and so the beards and McClure were both soon gone.

Slowly, starting in mid-December, the division, now stationed at Yongdongpo, was being put back together. Fresh troops and better equipment arrived from the States. A battalion of French troops, mostly from the French Foreign Legion, was assigned to the Twenty-third on December 11, boosting its strength immediately. The First Ranger Company was also added, while the badly torn up Thirty-eighth Regiment received a battalion of Dutch soldiers. On December 15, some two weeks after it had been hammered at Kunuri, the Second Division was again declared combat effective. By late December, it was operating in the Hoengsong-Wonju area, and its top intelligence people were hearing reports that Wonju might be the next big Chinese prize.

Wonju was the southernmost part of what would become a brutally contested piece of central corridor terrain roughly in the shape of a triangle, with the villages of Hoengsong and Chipyongni serving as its second and third points. Of the villages in the area, Wonju was the most important, both as a railhead and road center. Ansil Walker, who fought at Chipyongni, noted that if the Chinese controlled the triangular area, they would gain a formidable base from which to strike at Taegu, about a hundred miles south, and bitterly disputed in the earlier Naktong fighting. It would be like a knife poised at Pusan, he said. That was, in fact, very much the way Marshal Peng saw the coming battle. He had held his last staff meeting on December 27 and had worked hard to improve the mood of his men—some of whom were a bit edgy about fighting the Americans now that they might be better prepared. When they struck this time, Peng said, “the imperialists will run like sheep. Our problem is not Seoul. It is Pusan. Not taking it. Just walking there!” With that, as his aide Major Liquin noted, the mood in the room improved. Then Peng went to the map. “It is there at Wonju,” he said, “that the battle will be decided. A breakthrough at Wonju will carry us all the way down to Taegu.” He was clearly speaking with greater confidence and more bravado than he felt.

By mid-January, Ridgway’s headquarters was receiving reports that enemy soldiers were pouring into the area. At first, Ned Almond, in whose Corps sector most of the fighting took place, and who was not as passionate about intelligence as Ridgway, thought they were North Koreans, but they turned out to be preponderantly Chinese, moving in (as they had in the past) at night and on foot, away from the roads, and so for quite a while failing to trigger any reliable estimates of just how large a force was gathering.

On January 25, Ridgway, by now a month in country, launched his first major offensive, named Operation Thunderbolt. Troops from First Corps and Ninth Corps moved forward cautiously, almost shoulder to shoulder, so that the Chinese could not slip through them or behind them and attack their flanks. Ridgway wanted neither gaps in his line nor any significant section of it given over to the ROKs. Thunderbolt’s objective was limited; he wanted his forces to go about twenty miles north and reach the southern bank of the Han River. He wanted to do it cautiously and incrementally—only as the offensive seemed to be working were more units going to be added. Ridgway did not want to start north, find that he had underestimated the number of Chinese in the sector, and thus discover that instead of being on the offensive he was now on the defensive.

Operation Roundup, Almond’s part of the operation, run out of Tenth Corps, was scheduled to kick off on February 5. Even before it started, Ridgway was concerned about the growing Chinese presence in the central corridor region, to the east of where most of Thunderbolt would take place. He knew his forces were understrength there, and he wanted to keep both Wonju and Chipyongni from falling into Chinese hands. As a result, on January 28, he started sending units of the Twenty-third to probe the Chipyongni area, starting with a place they came to call Twin Tunnels.

As January came to a close, the scene was set for two epic battles, the first involving the greatly outnumbered Twenty-third Regiment in what became a Communist siege of Chipyongni; the second, a few miles away at Wonju, bringing elements of the Second Division, the Thirty-eighth and Ninth regiments, along with members of the 187th Regimental Combat Team, to fight an estimated four Chinese divisions. Both were bitter battles, and in both it was uncertain who would emerge victorious until, quite literally, the final hours. That was especially true of Wonju, where elements of the Thirty-eighth Regiment were initially hit so hard that the area became known as Massacre Valley. The two battles were connected and yet quite separate; it was the battle of Chipyongni that long resonated with allied commanders in Korea, and quickly became the model for how to fight this new and formidable enemy. Wonju, on the other hand, was a victory in the end, but it reflected the fact that some senior commanders, like Almond, still had the capacity to underestimate the enemy grievously.

IN EARLY JANUARY,
Ridgway had assigned the Twenty-third Regiment to the defense of Wonju, thus placing Colonel Paul Freeman and his regiment under the command of Almond for the first time. It was not to be a happy relationship. Freeman’s forces were already engaged in early skirmishes around Wonju when, on January 9, he had his first meeting with Almond. A large enemy force was
well dug in on a major hill just south of the village. Two battalions had been ordered into the battle by Division, one of them from the Thirty-eighth Regiment and commanded by Jim Skeldon. His battalion was on the left side of the main road, working its way toward the hill, while a battalion of the Twenty-third Regiment worked the right side of the road. When Almond and Freeman had their first encounter, the battle was not going particularly well. The American force was probably too small for the job. Almond was a commander who, much more than most comparable officers, had his favorites, Almond’s Boys. When they served him well, he pushed hard for choice slots for them, guaranteeing him not merely talent but loyalty. He was very hard on commanders of comparable ability who were not his boys. Freeman was not one of Almond’s boys, and it struck him that his corps commander seemed to take an immediate dislike to him. If Bob McClure was still the nominal division commander, it quickly became clear to Freeman that Almond was the real man in charge, the corps commander as division commander. Freeman had been moving up closer to the battle to check out exactly what was happening, when he came upon Almond, McClure, Nick Ruffner (the corps G-3 but soon to replace McClure), and Al Haig, a young Almond aide (and one day to be a major White House player), gathered on a hill overlooking the part of the battle where Skeldon’s troops were engaged. Almond immediately asked Freeman, “Who’s in command here?”

“Colonel Skeldon,” Freeman replied. Where is he? Almond wanted to know. On the next hill, Freeman answered.

“Aren’t you in command here?” Almond pressed. No, said Freeman; he commanded another unit, a little farther back. “What are you doing up here?” Almond asked. “I came up to see if I could help out,” Freeman answered. “Well, why isn’t a stronger force being used to get back to Wonju?” Almond asked. Freeman replied that they had been told to use only two battalions. That, he was aware, put the onus completely on McClure. Just then the interrogation was interrupted by an enemy mortar attack and everyone hit the ground. Freeman was grateful for the interruption.

Finally Almond and his team decided to leave. On the way down the hill they ran into one of Freeman’s sergeants. Almond, as Freeman remembered it, decided to make small talk, about how cold it was. “It’s so cold that the water froze in my trailer this morning,” Almond said—an attempt to buddy up, Freeman thought, and a poor one at that. “You’re goddamned lucky to have a trailer and a basin of water,” the sergeant answered. It was icy and treacherous moving down the hill, and Almond slipped, going down right on his butt. Freeman extended a hand to help him up. “If I need your help, I’ll ask for it,” Almond said. A great first meeting, Freeman thought to himself.

At the bottom of the hill it only got worse. There was a soldier chopping
wood and doing it poorly. Almond promptly told him he was doing it wrong, and if he was not careful, he might chop his foot off. “I hope to hell I do; maybe they’ll send me out of this goddamned place,” the soldier replied. Freeman was aware that he had lost even more points. Another soldier was in a foxhole behind a tree. Almond ordered him out, got in, took his rifle, and decided the foxhole commanded a poor field of fire, which it did. He complained bitterly about this to Freeman. From then on, the view of Freeman back at Almond’s headquarters was that he was soft and timid, a man who did not push his troops hard enough. He appeared to be an officer marked for relief just as soon as Almond could get around to it.

That was in sharp contrast to the way the men of the Twenty-third saw their commander. But none of this mattered; from then on Freeman was a marked man at Corps headquarters. By contrast Freeman, like all too many subordinate commanders under Almond, found the corps commander to be dangerously overconfident about the superiority of his own tactical views at all times, thinking himself at once a better company commander, battalion commander, and regimental commander than any of the men serving under him. Freeman’s view of Almond coincided almost exactly with that of O. P. Smith of the Marines. Unlike other high-ranking officers Freeman had dealt with, Almond was a poor listener; he seemed to feel that there was only one way to go about any assignment: push farther ahead ever more quickly, whatever the shortcomings or the consequences. All of this made Freeman the man on the spot, his regiment virtually on point in its sector as the Chinese prepared to strike. Matt Ridgway wanted a major confrontation with the Chinese, and Paul Freeman found the enemy for him, however involuntarily, when the two great armies finally stumbled into each other in mid-February.