The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (86 page)

Up on the hill McGee knew it was pretty much over; he was going to die there. It was down to Kluttz and him fighting side by side with a couple of other men nearby. He was oddly fatalistic about it. He felt no self-pity at all. He had volunteered, had wanted this battle and this war, and he had gotten all of it. If he felt bad, it was for his mother and father, who would take it hard. He and Kluttz were in the same foxhole by then, McGee firing a BAR, which he had taken from a man two foxholes over, and Kluttz with a machine gun taken from a wounded gunner. Kluttz was a damn good man who was not going to break, not even here at the end. “Kluttz,” McGee yelled out, “I believe they’ve got us.”

“Well, let’s get us as many of the sons of bitches as we can first,” Kluttz replied, and they opened up with both weapons.

Then Kluttz’s machine gun jammed and that seemed to be that. “Kluttz, let’s try and get out,” McGee shouted, and then threw the last of his grenades. Sometime early on the morning of February 15, probably about 3
A.M.
, their ammo almost completely gone, McGee, Kluttz, and two other men managed to slip out. Of the forty-six men in McGee’s platoon, only four were able to walk out on their own power. Everyone else was killed, wounded, or missing in action. Paul McGee received a Silver Star for his bravery and leadership, as did Bill Kluttz.

IN THE VERY
early morning of the fifteenth, among his last commands, Paul Freeman had tried to send some reserve units, including the Ranger Company, to stiffen the George Company position. If they had been unable to drive the Chinese off the hill, they had somehow managed to neutralize them, and as
dawn approached, the chances of the Chinese exploiting their position began to shrink. By mid-morning, George Stewart and some of Freeman’s pals at his own regimental headquarters were telling him that he simply had to leave as Almond had ordered or events might take a very ugly turn for him. So far, they reminded him, he had done everything right, but there was a time when you had to accept the fact that you were in a command structure. Besides, his colleagues argued, the battle was essentially done. Crombez had apparently broken out of the last of the traps set for him by the Chinese and would almost surely be there before nightfall. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Edwards, commander of the Second Battalion, whose forces were still bitterly engaged near McGee Hill, told Freeman that the Chinese had been driven off. It was something of a white lie, Edwards noted later, but otherwise, Freeman might have refused to leave and surely would have been court-martialed by Almond. With that, Freeman flew out for treatment at a MASH unit at Chungju. There, he was met by Ridgway, who congratulated him, told him he had done just fine, and awarded him the DSC. After talking with Ridgway, Freeman believed he would go to the States briefly for R & R, and then return to Korea. He had, after all, spent eight straight months of constant fighting in the line and needed a bit of a break. He was now confident that, like Mike Michaelis, against whom he always measured himself, he would get his star. But Paul Freeman did not return to Korea. Instead, much to his chagrin, he was assigned to make public appearances to explain the war to civic clubs—he was uncommonly good-looking and spoke well. Whether his return was blocked by Almond he never knew. He went on to a full career and eventually received four stars.

THE CHINESE HAD
finally taken the ridge of McGee Hill, but it had cost them dearly: McGee was told later that when the battle was over they found the bodies of more than eight hundred enemy soldiers immediately in front of his position. The surprising thing was that when the Chinese had finally gained it, albeit with the hours of darkness disappearing, and having expended such a terrible amount of human resource, they hesitated and so failed to maximize their success. It was a failure not caused by lack of bravery—they had been absolutely fearless against an enemy with the terrifying capacity to create areas that were nothing less than killing zones. Not only did the Americans have the capacity to hammer a given target with endless artillery rounds, but they had now added to it a new weapon that the Chinese quickly came to fear, a jellied death that American planes could spread from the air and that had the capacity to burn out entire units in fiery communal deaths. It was called napalm.

With their troops finally atop the high ground, the Chinese failed to exploit
their breakthrough. Their troops fought tenaciously once there, beating back repeated American attempts to drive them off. But in front of them that morning lay a far greater victory, had they been ready. They could have rained fire down on the Americans below. It was a fateful moment, and they simply stayed on McGee Hill. They certainly had enough troops available in that sector, and they might have been able to move more men over from other sectors in the west and east. But they never did. Perhaps the breakthrough had come too late in the day and they were simply not ready for it. It reflected at the very least a failure in communications, but possibly a failure of imagination as well.

One of the great weaknesses of the Chinese at that point in the war, the Americans were beginning to discover from prisoner interrogation, was the rigidity of their command structure. It worked top-down with little flexibility and little room for individual initiative at lower levels. It produced brave, rugged, incredibly dutiful foot soldiers who often served under middle-level commanders who, in the midst of battle, had neither the authority nor the communications ability to make critical decisions as the battlefield changed. Wonju had been a classic example of that, of their inability to adjust in mid-battle. That was in stark contrast to the American Army, where the initiative of good NCOs was valued and the ability to adjust to a battle as it unfolded was becoming a major asset.

There were other limitations the Americans began to discover about this fierce new enemy. The Chinese could fight with great intensity for two or, at most, three days, but limits in ammo, food, medical support, and sheer physical endurance—as well as the intensity of the American airpower—affected their ability to exploit any advantages or breakthroughs, and magnified any breakdowns or defeats. By the third day of a given battle they began to run out of everything and needed to break off contact. Chipyongni and Wonju were the great primers for all of this. At different moments, both battles had seemed as if they might come out a different way.

Matt Ridgway had not only gotten the battle he wanted at Chipyongni. Equally important, he was learning priceless lessons about an enemy he badly needed to understand. He had already received a number of early lessons in the strengths of the Chinese; now, for the first time, he was learning their weaknesses.

THE SOUND OF
a column of tanks on the approach is not a gentle one, and most of the men besieged at Chipyongni heard their rescuers long before the relief column arrived. There had been one last desperate attempt on the part of the Chinese to stop the tank column. About a mile south of Chipyongni, there
was a cut in the hills, where the road narrowed, with high ground on both sides, a perfect place for an ambush. The cut went on for about 150 yards and the Chinese were dug in about fifty feet above the road waiting with their mortars and bazookas to hit the tanks. The lead tank, struck by a bazooka round, made it through, as did the second and third. A bazooka round penetrated the fourth tank’s skin and ignited ammunition inside. Some of the crew, including Captain John Hiers, were immediately killed. The driver was badly burned, but in a great show of valor, he gunned the engine and somehow managed to drive the tank through the cut so that the road remained unblocked for the rest of the column.

Crombez’s tanks arrived at Chipyongni a little after 5
P.M.
Just as his column was approaching, three American tanks inside the perimeter ventured out to fire at the Chinese behind their lines, and there was a tense moment as the two tank forces eyed each other warily, the rescuers and the rescued, neither quite sure who was who, before the defenders understood that the Cav had arrived and the siege was broken. At almost the same moment, the Air Force started hitting the surrounding hills with napalm. Suddenly the Chinese began to break and abandon their positions. For a brief time it was a free-fire zone, as thousands of the enemy were caught moving through open territory, and the American commanders poured artillery, tank fire, and napalm down on them. To the Americans watching from the hills surrounding the village it was, as one American soldier said, like “kicking an anthill” and suddenly seeing, rather than ants, thousands and thousands of Chinese emerge from a place where you thought none existed, and only then becoming truly terrified, as if realizing finally just how many Chinese had actually surrounded them.

Nothing reflected the complexity—and the moral ambiguity—of war more clearly than Crombez and his mission. To the men trapped inside Chipyongni, exhausted, low on ammunition, fearing they could not hold out another night, Crombez’s tankers were nothing less than saviors, who like the storied cavalrymen of a thousand western movies, had arrived just in the nick of time. To the men of Treacy’s battalion, it was another matter entirely. Captain Barrett was in a rage. Love Company had been torn apart, and so many men, he believed, had died so needlessly.

To the men of the Twenty-third, Captain Barrett at that moment did not seem like a hero or a rescuer so much as a madman, an officer completely out of control, running around with his pistol out, screaming about Crombez and his goddamn blue chip and how he had gotten all of Barrett’s men killed. Barrett kept shouting that he was going to kill Crombez. He was in so violent a rage, his desire to kill Crombez so genuine, that the medical team of the Twenty-third
eventually had to give him a shot to sedate him. A French soldier, Corporal Serge Bererd, remembered the men of Love Company being so exhausted, and in such a state of shock from the assault, that they could not respond when he tried to talk to them. “They were just too tired to kill [Crombez],” Bererd said. Men like Bererd, who had endured the siege and felt grateful to be rescued, were puzzled by the violent attitude of Crombez’s infantry—they were not men celebrating the success of an extremely dangerous mission, but mourning what in their minds was a defeat.

THE DAY AFTER
the battle was over, Sergeant Ed Hendricks, who had arrived with the Fifth Cav, saw a terrifying sight—twenty to thirty trucks, all giant deuce-and-a-halfs, lined up to take the American dead out. But the men doing the loading couldn’t lay the bodies down the way they normally might have, flattened out. The dead had been frozen as they had died, arms and legs sticking out in every direction, some frozen in firing positions. Their bodies had to be stacked awkwardly atop one another, the loaders using the space as best they could. Fitting them in, Hendricks remembered, was like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle. It was the worst thing he had ever seen.

That same morning, when Crombez asked the men of Love Company which of them wanted to return to their base along with his tanks, none volunteered. Many of the Love Company infantrymen who had been left behind when Crombez had driven ahead eventually found their way back. Total casualties for the unit were thirteen killed, nineteen missing and likely captured, thus thirty-two likely dead, and more than fifty wounded. Crombez wrote in his after-action report that his force suffered only ten men killed in action. He also noted that Colonel Treacy had disobeyed orders by joining the attack column. That, as Ken Hamburger noted, was shocking of itself, extremely close to an official reprimand for a man missing in action and most likely dead. Captains Barrett and Norman Allen went among the officers and men taking signatures and statements recommending Treacy for the Medal of Honor. Their recommendations never left the Fifth Cav. When the papers were brought to Crombez, he threw them on the floor and ground his boot on them. “Medal of Honor, no, goddamn it, no. If he ever returns to military control, I will court-martial him.” Crombez, however, quickly put himself up for an important medal, dictating his own recommendation for the Distinguished Service Cross. The recommendation wound its way up through the Army command until it reached the chief of staff of the Eighth Army, Brigadier General Henry Hodes, who turned it down, saying, “No son of a bitch earns a DSC inspiring his troops buttoned up in a tank. I know. I am an old tanker.” But Crombez apparently made a personal appeal to Ridgway, who told Hodes that yes, the medal was questionable, but to give him the DSC
anyway—after all, he had promised Freeman that if his men fought and held at Chipyongni against those terrible odds, he would send the entire Eighth Army in to relieve them if need be, and Crombez had done just that. So Crombez got the DSC, and eventually one star, and retired as a brigadier five years later. In his book on the Korean War, Ridgway never mentioned his name. To experienced Ridgway-ologists, that was a sure sign of the commander’s own ambivalence and distaste about what had happened.

S
TILL, EVEN IF
the defense had been imperfect it had been a major victory at a site that the Chinese, not the UN, had chosen, and Ridgway had gotten what he had wanted. Taking and holding terrain, so important in other wars, was less important here. Inflicting unbearable losses on the Chinese was now perceived to be the key to winning, or at least proving to the Chinese that
they
could not win. If Douglas MacArthur had once been lulled by preconceptions, it was now Mao’s turn to be the prisoner of his own mind-set. As MacArthur had failed to factor in the effect of a political revolution in a country he had known almost nothing about, so Mao now failed to factor in the effects of the vast American technological superiority, and the ability of American troops when commanded by a great general. As Mao had once said of MacArthur, arrogant, egotistical men were easy to defeat.

Peng Dehuai, warier than Mao of an all-out confrontation with the Americans, had been more realistic about future confrontations back in January. The question following Chipyongni and Wonju was whether he would finally be listened to. There had already been considerable tension between the two men in the months preceding Chipyongni. But the defeats and the casualties had come as a shock. “Chipyongni,” said Chen Jian, the Chinese historian, “changed everything. Up until then the Chinese thought they were doing very well and they thought they knew how to fight the Americans—that they had the secret. They were sure they were going to win the war and do it very quickly. They had all the momentum starting with the victories up along the Chongchon river.” The defeats at Chipyongni and Wonju were devastating to Peng. He had used frontline Chinese troops, the best he had from his best divisions. And in the end they had suffered grievous casualties and his men had been forced to flee the battlefield. While the Chinese were always secretive about casualties, the Americans estimated that they might have killed as many as five thousand soldiers at Chipyongni alone. To Peng it was obvious that this was a new and very dangerous foe with—because of its airpower—a very long and a very quick reach.

Peng, who hated to fly—if he could not walk to a destination, he greatly preferred trains—flew to Beijing on February 20 to see Mao. There is a difference of opinion among historians as to whether he went on his own or was summoned there. It is at least possible that the initiative was Peng’s, that he felt he had to explain in person the nature of the changed battlefield they now faced. When he reached Mao’s house in mid-morning, the chairman, very much a night person, was asleep.

Mao’s bodyguard tried to block Peng. “You can’t go in there—he’s still sleeping.”

“You cannot stop me,” Peng answered. “My men are dying on the battlefield. I can’t wait for him to wake up.” So Peng barged in and woke Mao and told him that they had an entirely new war on their hands. There would be no rush to Pusan, no great American retreat south. They now had to prepare for a long war, and they were going to rotate some of their troops because the kind of combat they were engaged in was exhausting to the men. That morning they agreed upon some rotation of troops, even though part of Mao, clearly dreaming different dreams from Peng and other commanders on the battlefield, still believed that the entire Korean peninsula might yet be his.

CHIPYONGNI AND WONJU
were huge victories for the United Nations, a major turning point in the war. What was particularly encouraging to Ridgway was the fact that he had not chosen these particular battlefields; the Chinese had selected them, on terrain far more favorable to them than existed near either coast. Though there had been mistakes and some United Nations units had suffered disproportionately, Ridgway had gotten a kind of textbook example of what UN forces might do if even partially prepared for an attack in decent defensive positions. It was a warning to the Chinese leadership of what the future might hold. Even when some of Ridgway’s units had been momentarily isolated, he had, in at least one critical showdown, been able to send a relief column in time. Ridgway was sure that his intelligence would get better and that his airpower would now be able to limit the ability of Chinese forces to gather and strike, as well as their ability to resupply and feed their troops. In that he was correct. He thought it would only be a matter of time before the Chinese realized that they, like their UN adversaries, had run into a certain kind of wall.