On Wake Island in October 1950 MacArthur played down
Truman’s concerns. His own intelligence indicated that the Chinese wouldn’t
dare enter the conflict – and if they did, he was sure his forces would destroy
them. He did not think much of Mao’s troops. They were nothing more than a band
of serfs –subsisting on rice balls and yams, relying on little burp guns and
fizzly explosives that usually failed to detonate, an army held together with
hemp string and bamboo. Truman found MacArthur ‘stimulating and interesting.’
MacArthur though the president ‘radiated nothing but courtesy . . .I liked him
from the start.’
When the full conference- on the record- got underway- Truman turned to a list of questions he’d prepared in a notebook.. First he wanted to know MacArthur’s timetable for the rest of the war.
‘Organized resistance will be terminated by Thanksgiving,’ the supreme commander predicted. ‘The North Koreans are pursing a forlorn hope. They are thoroughly whipped. The winter will destroy those we don’t. For a moment, MacArthur seemed to rue the coming blood bath. “It goes against my grain to destroy them,’ he said.” But they are obstinate. The Oriental values ‘face’ over life.
The general was so confident in his prognostication that he thought many of his troops would be out of Korea by year’s end. Battalions of French, Dutch and other nationalities that had been requested from the U.N. were no longer needed. He was sure they would never see action.
Then Truman returned to the question he and MacArthur touched on earlier in the morning. ‘What will be the attitude of China?’ Truman asked. Driving to the Yalu might provoke Mao, it might even spark a world war. ‘Is there any danger of Chinese interference?’
MacArthur brushed away Truman’s question just as he had in private. ‘We are no longer fearful of their intervention,’ he replied. ‘The Chinese have 300,000 men in Manchuria. Only fifty to sixty thousand could be gotten across thee Yalu river. China has no air umbrella. There would be the greatest slaughter.” The Yalu, he suggested, would run red with Chinese blood.
Astonishingly, neither Truman nor anyone else at the table had a follow-up question to this. Everyone present appeared to agree with MacArthur’s analysis. They seemed not to have the slightest concern about the Chinese – or if they did, they didn’t raise it. Thy were dazzled and dazed. The rapture over the war’s imminent end, and the magnetic force of MacArthur’s delivery, had blunted their thinking. . .With Victory so close, all other scenarios were inconvenient distractions. A critical moment passed them by – and a fraught and nettlesome question on which many lives might depend was put to rest.
When the full conference- on the record- got underway- Truman turned to a list of questions he’d prepared in a notebook.. First he wanted to know MacArthur’s timetable for the rest of the war.
‘Organized resistance will be terminated by Thanksgiving,’ the supreme commander predicted. ‘The North Koreans are pursing a forlorn hope. They are thoroughly whipped. The winter will destroy those we don’t. For a moment, MacArthur seemed to rue the coming blood bath. “It goes against my grain to destroy them,’ he said.” But they are obstinate. The Oriental values ‘face’ over life.
The general was so confident in his prognostication that he thought many of his troops would be out of Korea by year’s end. Battalions of French, Dutch and other nationalities that had been requested from the U.N. were no longer needed. He was sure they would never see action.
Then Truman returned to the question he and MacArthur touched on earlier in the morning. ‘What will be the attitude of China?’ Truman asked. Driving to the Yalu might provoke Mao, it might even spark a world war. ‘Is there any danger of Chinese interference?’
MacArthur brushed away Truman’s question just as he had in private. ‘We are no longer fearful of their intervention,’ he replied. ‘The Chinese have 300,000 men in Manchuria. Only fifty to sixty thousand could be gotten across thee Yalu river. China has no air umbrella. There would be the greatest slaughter.” The Yalu, he suggested, would run red with Chinese blood.
Astonishingly, neither Truman nor anyone else at the table had a follow-up question to this. Everyone present appeared to agree with MacArthur’s analysis. They seemed not to have the slightest concern about the Chinese – or if they did, they didn’t raise it. Thy were dazzled and dazed. The rapture over the war’s imminent end, and the magnetic force of MacArthur’s delivery, had blunted their thinking. . .With Victory so close, all other scenarios were inconvenient distractions. A critical moment passed them by – and a fraught and nettlesome question on which many lives might depend was put to rest.
Oliver Prince Smith, commander of the First Marine
Division, was relieved by the early progress of the invasion at Inchon. The
resistance was proving tepid –either the North Korean defenders had been caught
off guard or they were overwhelmed by the intensity of the firestorm. But Smith
stopped short of celebrating. He was superstitious of good fortune. As an
assistant division commander at the W.W. II battle of Peleliu, he had witnessed
a senseless loss of life – the result of intelligence failures and strategic
mistakes not of his making. Scarred by the events at Peleliu, he tended to
proceed with a through-going sense of caution. In his own experience, it was
overconfidence, more than any other factor, that caused men to die.
Smith was puzzled about General Almond’s plan to advanced to the Chosen Reservoir and other hydroelectric installations to the north and their power grids that fed deep into Manchuria. Why, of all places on the map, were they driving straight for the cluster of assets that the Chinese had indicated were of vital strategic importance to their economy. This seemed to Smith like a deliberately provocative move on the part of the United States – or at least one that the Chinese could not help but perceive that way.
From the start, Smith was also suspicious of Almond’s plans because, among other things, it meant his division would be strung out along a narrow mountain road for nearly one hundred miles, in a long train of men and vehicles. They would move along this single artery, relying on a supply train that the enemy could sever at any point. In this desolate country (where extreme Arctic conditions would soon prevail) there were no air strips, no functioning rail lines, no other ways to receive reinforcements or evacuate casualties. They had only one road in, and, should anything happen, only one road out. As far as Smith was concerned, diffusion of this sort was a cardinal sin for any moving army. It violated most everything he’s learned in military school in France, it violated what he’d taught his own Marines at Quantico and Pendleton. But Almond, MacArthur’s chief of staff, gave it no thought.
Rumors had seeped into Smith’s command post that a new enemy had entered the war. At first they were only that: rumors, whispers in orchards and alleyways, furtive looks, premonitions. But then, on October 31, five days after Smith had landed at Wonsan, the first report trickled in. South Korea troops reported that thy had just engaged in a firefight with ‘many, many’ Chinese troops at the village of Sudong. They were rattled.
But the South Koreans had captured sixteen prisoners, and, upon interrogating them, had learned that they were from the 307th Regiment of the 12th Division of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)- Mao’s army. They claimed to have crossed the Yalu in mid-October. They freely indicated they were part of a much larger Chinese force, numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
When this alarming report and several others like it were sent up thee chain of command, General Almonds intelligence people reflexively disputed their accuracy. “This information has not been confirmed and is not accepted at this time,” and X-Corps intelligence memo curtly responded. Almond’s headquarters admonished officers in the field to stop conveying the ‘erroneous impression that CCF units may be engaged.” This was almost immediately echoed in an official G-2 document sent from MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo. “There is no positive evidence,’ the document insisted, ‘that Chinese Communist units, as such, have entered Korea’
It was MacArthur’s intelligence chief Charles Willoughby conclusion that the Chinese prisoners at Sudong were merely ‘volunteers,’ part of a token force of zealous Communist, probably from Manchuria, who had picked up their weapons and, in piecemeal fashion, streamed down of their own free will to help the North Koreans. This, in fact, was the story Peking Radio had been broadcasting and that representatives of the Chinese government, through various channels, had announced to the world.. It was a fiction that MacArthur seemed entirely willing to believe, one that provided sufficient cover for him to continue to advance rapidly towards the Yalu River. The Joint Chiefs of Staff gave him carte blanche to keep it going.
How Tokyo had arrived at its conclusions, General Smith could not understand. These were no ‘volunteers’. The Chinese had fought strangely at Sudong, but they had fought well. They were regular army troops, all right- Mao’s troops. Many of them had reported that they hailed from places deep in the hinterlands of China and that they had been lifelong professional soldiers. They had journeyed far, and at some one’s considerable expense, to get there. They had not come out of the kindness of their hearts to expel the imperialist invaders.
On November 9, Almond ordered Smith to start moving his Seventh Regiment from Sudong father up the mountain, to a little place called Koto-ri. Almond’s ambition to reach thye Yalu river remained undiminished, for now he wanted Smithy to make for Chosen Reservoir and assess the situation from there.
Smith passed down the orders reluctantly, and in so many words told Litzenberg to ignore Almond’s call for haste. Contrary to his name, Blitzin Litzen was to proceed slowly with maximum caution. Smith’s operations chief, Bowser, said Smith wanted the Seventh Marine’s to pull ‘every trick in the book to slowdown our advance, hoping the enemy would show his hand before we got even more widely dispersed tan we already were.’
On the morning the Marines struck their camps and wound their way up through the pass and onto the plateau, most of them felt a tinge of apprehension, a dreadful tinge in the belly. The known presence of an officially non-existent foe led some to utter a kind of tautological jest: If you are shot and killed by an enemy that is not there, are you still alive? Some tried to relieve the jitters with gallows humor and assorted vulgarities. ‘We joked and laughed as we marched,” said Lieutenant Joe Owen, “and made obscene comments about the things that were central to our lives: the chow, the terrain, the enemy, the lack of women.’ When I get home to my wife, they’d say, the second thing I’m gonna do is take my pack off.
As they rose into the mountains, the landscape turned as gray and somber as a Rembrandt painting. ‘Even at noon there was a shadow’, said one Marine account. ‘ Shadow and shade, a gloom, a darkness, over the snow and the land.’ You could scarcely reach a summit, it seemed- the forbidding terrain rolled ever upward. Said Colonel Litzenberg: ‘Beyond each hill lay another hill, and that one always seemed higher’. This kind of real estate, said General Smith, ‘was never intended for military operations. Even Genghis Khan wouldn’t tackle it.’
On November 10th the Marine’s celebrated the Corps’ 175th Anniversary. That night, after the cake was eaten and Smith and his staff had gone to bed, winter arrived with a vengeance. Perhaps the Indian summer of the past week had made the men apathetic, had caused them to forget all the warnings they’d all heard. Of course, they’d been told that Old Man Winter was no joke in this part of the peninsula. The weather was supposed to be like that of North Dakota, or Saskatchewan. But the men weren’t prepared for such an enveloping chill, neither its intensity nor the abruptness of its descent. Overnight, temperatures went into free fall. Within a few hours, the mercury plummeted forty degrees, to nearly ten below zero Fahrenheit. Then came the winds –flattening, buffeting, straight from the steppes of Manchuria. The gusts built in waves until they reached 30 knots.. . . the cold a ‘wet, raw, devouring . . howling beast., powerful enough to numb the spirit as well as the flesh.’ It stole into men’s nostrils, took away their breath, froze the phlegm in their sinuses. Spitting resulted only in a disappointing crackle upon the ground, ‘It got into the marrow of your bones.’
The chill altered people’s personalities too- it made the chipper guys brood and the tough guys cringe. It made people daft. They stopped talking, ‘accept to blaspheme the goddamned fools who sent us out into this miserable, cold country…’ ‘If I’d known what the temperature was,’ said a truck driver from North Carolina, ‘ I probably would have died.’
At the mess tent, a cup of scalding coffee would accumulate a skim of ice within minutes. Canteens and C-rations froze solid. Fingers stuck to metal. Helicopters refused to rise. Truck engines balked. Rifles seized. Batteries fizzled. The cold seem to come with only one upside: It had a cauterizing effect on wounds. Blood from bullet holes and shrapnel tears simply froze to the skin and stopped flowing.
The quartermasters had already issued the men warm winter clothing – windproof trousers, alpaca-lined parkas, heavy woolens, mountain sleeping bags – but the gear was inadequate to combat this kind of cold. Dozens of marines collapsed as though from exhaustion. They seemed to be in shock. They were dazed, semiconscious. Their vital signs became erratic, and their respiratory rates dropped to dangerously low levels. Others suddenly transitioned from this catatonic state into a hysterical sadness, sobbing uncontrollably.
This was the beginning of a peculiarly severe weather pattern that would lead to one of the coldest North Korean winters on record. More than Smith realized, the weather would not only be a factor in the coming conflict; it would be, in effect, the third combatant, an omnipresent force that would color his every decision and follow his every move. The farther his men traveled from the coast and the higher they climbed into the mountains, the stronger this third combatant would become. ‘It seemed with each step,’ said one account, ‘the air was changing, cooling, closing its grasp on the earth’. Few American armies –few armies from any nation –had ever conducted extended operations in such harsh, sub-zero conditions – in an alpine landscape, no less. Wrote Martin Russ: ‘General Winter, having won many a campaign down through the centuries, was about to reap a larger harvest of casualties at the reservoir than the armies with their bombs and bullets.’
Smith was puzzled about General Almond’s plan to advanced to the Chosen Reservoir and other hydroelectric installations to the north and their power grids that fed deep into Manchuria. Why, of all places on the map, were they driving straight for the cluster of assets that the Chinese had indicated were of vital strategic importance to their economy. This seemed to Smith like a deliberately provocative move on the part of the United States – or at least one that the Chinese could not help but perceive that way.
From the start, Smith was also suspicious of Almond’s plans because, among other things, it meant his division would be strung out along a narrow mountain road for nearly one hundred miles, in a long train of men and vehicles. They would move along this single artery, relying on a supply train that the enemy could sever at any point. In this desolate country (where extreme Arctic conditions would soon prevail) there were no air strips, no functioning rail lines, no other ways to receive reinforcements or evacuate casualties. They had only one road in, and, should anything happen, only one road out. As far as Smith was concerned, diffusion of this sort was a cardinal sin for any moving army. It violated most everything he’s learned in military school in France, it violated what he’d taught his own Marines at Quantico and Pendleton. But Almond, MacArthur’s chief of staff, gave it no thought.
Rumors had seeped into Smith’s command post that a new enemy had entered the war. At first they were only that: rumors, whispers in orchards and alleyways, furtive looks, premonitions. But then, on October 31, five days after Smith had landed at Wonsan, the first report trickled in. South Korea troops reported that thy had just engaged in a firefight with ‘many, many’ Chinese troops at the village of Sudong. They were rattled.
But the South Koreans had captured sixteen prisoners, and, upon interrogating them, had learned that they were from the 307th Regiment of the 12th Division of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)- Mao’s army. They claimed to have crossed the Yalu in mid-October. They freely indicated they were part of a much larger Chinese force, numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
When this alarming report and several others like it were sent up thee chain of command, General Almonds intelligence people reflexively disputed their accuracy. “This information has not been confirmed and is not accepted at this time,” and X-Corps intelligence memo curtly responded. Almond’s headquarters admonished officers in the field to stop conveying the ‘erroneous impression that CCF units may be engaged.” This was almost immediately echoed in an official G-2 document sent from MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo. “There is no positive evidence,’ the document insisted, ‘that Chinese Communist units, as such, have entered Korea’
It was MacArthur’s intelligence chief Charles Willoughby conclusion that the Chinese prisoners at Sudong were merely ‘volunteers,’ part of a token force of zealous Communist, probably from Manchuria, who had picked up their weapons and, in piecemeal fashion, streamed down of their own free will to help the North Koreans. This, in fact, was the story Peking Radio had been broadcasting and that representatives of the Chinese government, through various channels, had announced to the world.. It was a fiction that MacArthur seemed entirely willing to believe, one that provided sufficient cover for him to continue to advance rapidly towards the Yalu River. The Joint Chiefs of Staff gave him carte blanche to keep it going.
How Tokyo had arrived at its conclusions, General Smith could not understand. These were no ‘volunteers’. The Chinese had fought strangely at Sudong, but they had fought well. They were regular army troops, all right- Mao’s troops. Many of them had reported that they hailed from places deep in the hinterlands of China and that they had been lifelong professional soldiers. They had journeyed far, and at some one’s considerable expense, to get there. They had not come out of the kindness of their hearts to expel the imperialist invaders.
On November 9, Almond ordered Smith to start moving his Seventh Regiment from Sudong father up the mountain, to a little place called Koto-ri. Almond’s ambition to reach thye Yalu river remained undiminished, for now he wanted Smithy to make for Chosen Reservoir and assess the situation from there.
Smith passed down the orders reluctantly, and in so many words told Litzenberg to ignore Almond’s call for haste. Contrary to his name, Blitzin Litzen was to proceed slowly with maximum caution. Smith’s operations chief, Bowser, said Smith wanted the Seventh Marine’s to pull ‘every trick in the book to slowdown our advance, hoping the enemy would show his hand before we got even more widely dispersed tan we already were.’
On the morning the Marines struck their camps and wound their way up through the pass and onto the plateau, most of them felt a tinge of apprehension, a dreadful tinge in the belly. The known presence of an officially non-existent foe led some to utter a kind of tautological jest: If you are shot and killed by an enemy that is not there, are you still alive? Some tried to relieve the jitters with gallows humor and assorted vulgarities. ‘We joked and laughed as we marched,” said Lieutenant Joe Owen, “and made obscene comments about the things that were central to our lives: the chow, the terrain, the enemy, the lack of women.’ When I get home to my wife, they’d say, the second thing I’m gonna do is take my pack off.
As they rose into the mountains, the landscape turned as gray and somber as a Rembrandt painting. ‘Even at noon there was a shadow’, said one Marine account. ‘ Shadow and shade, a gloom, a darkness, over the snow and the land.’ You could scarcely reach a summit, it seemed- the forbidding terrain rolled ever upward. Said Colonel Litzenberg: ‘Beyond each hill lay another hill, and that one always seemed higher’. This kind of real estate, said General Smith, ‘was never intended for military operations. Even Genghis Khan wouldn’t tackle it.’
On November 10th the Marine’s celebrated the Corps’ 175th Anniversary. That night, after the cake was eaten and Smith and his staff had gone to bed, winter arrived with a vengeance. Perhaps the Indian summer of the past week had made the men apathetic, had caused them to forget all the warnings they’d all heard. Of course, they’d been told that Old Man Winter was no joke in this part of the peninsula. The weather was supposed to be like that of North Dakota, or Saskatchewan. But the men weren’t prepared for such an enveloping chill, neither its intensity nor the abruptness of its descent. Overnight, temperatures went into free fall. Within a few hours, the mercury plummeted forty degrees, to nearly ten below zero Fahrenheit. Then came the winds –flattening, buffeting, straight from the steppes of Manchuria. The gusts built in waves until they reached 30 knots.. . . the cold a ‘wet, raw, devouring . . howling beast., powerful enough to numb the spirit as well as the flesh.’ It stole into men’s nostrils, took away their breath, froze the phlegm in their sinuses. Spitting resulted only in a disappointing crackle upon the ground, ‘It got into the marrow of your bones.’
The chill altered people’s personalities too- it made the chipper guys brood and the tough guys cringe. It made people daft. They stopped talking, ‘accept to blaspheme the goddamned fools who sent us out into this miserable, cold country…’ ‘If I’d known what the temperature was,’ said a truck driver from North Carolina, ‘ I probably would have died.’
At the mess tent, a cup of scalding coffee would accumulate a skim of ice within minutes. Canteens and C-rations froze solid. Fingers stuck to metal. Helicopters refused to rise. Truck engines balked. Rifles seized. Batteries fizzled. The cold seem to come with only one upside: It had a cauterizing effect on wounds. Blood from bullet holes and shrapnel tears simply froze to the skin and stopped flowing.
The quartermasters had already issued the men warm winter clothing – windproof trousers, alpaca-lined parkas, heavy woolens, mountain sleeping bags – but the gear was inadequate to combat this kind of cold. Dozens of marines collapsed as though from exhaustion. They seemed to be in shock. They were dazed, semiconscious. Their vital signs became erratic, and their respiratory rates dropped to dangerously low levels. Others suddenly transitioned from this catatonic state into a hysterical sadness, sobbing uncontrollably.
This was the beginning of a peculiarly severe weather pattern that would lead to one of the coldest North Korean winters on record. More than Smith realized, the weather would not only be a factor in the coming conflict; it would be, in effect, the third combatant, an omnipresent force that would color his every decision and follow his every move. The farther his men traveled from the coast and the higher they climbed into the mountains, the stronger this third combatant would become. ‘It seemed with each step,’ said one account, ‘the air was changing, cooling, closing its grasp on the earth’. Few American armies –few armies from any nation –had ever conducted extended operations in such harsh, sub-zero conditions – in an alpine landscape, no less. Wrote Martin Russ: ‘General Winter, having won many a campaign down through the centuries, was about to reap a larger harvest of casualties at the reservoir than the armies with their bombs and bullets.’
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