The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Read online

  The Coldest Winter

  America and the Korean War

  DAVID HALBERSTAM

  For Jean, again

  Contents

  Glossary of Military Terms

  List of Maps

  Note on Military Map Symbols

  Introduction

  PART ONE: A Warning at Unsan

  PART TWO: Bleak Days: The In Min Gun Drives South

  PART THREE: Washington Goes to War

  PART FOUR: The Politics of Two Continents

  PART FIVE: The Last Roll of the Dice: The North Koreans Push to Pusan

  PART SIX: MacArthur Turns the Tide: The Inchon Landing

  PART SEVEN: Crossing the Parallel and Heading North

  PART EIGHT: The Chinese Strike

  PART NINE: Learning to Fight the Chinese: Twin Tunnels, Wonju, and Chipyongni

  PART TEN: The General and the President

  PART ELEVEN: The Consequences

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Afterword by Russell Baker

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by David Halberstam

  Copyright

  Glossary of Military Terms

  NOTE ON MILITARY UNITS

  The size, composition, and leadership of military units varies with time, place, and circumstances. In the early fighting in Korea, almost every unit was always understrength. Therefore, these numbers are approximations.

  Army

  100,000 soldiers

  Comprised of 2 or more Corps

  Normally commanded by a full General

  Corps

  30,000 soldiers

  Comprised of 2 or more Divisions

  Normally commanded by Lieutenant General

  Division

  Up to 15,000 soldiers, often only 12,000 in Korea

  Comprised of 3 Regiments

  Commanded by Major General

  Regiment

  Up to 4,500 men, with affiliated units, such as artillery, armored, and medical units, included

  Comprised of 3 Battalions

  Commanded by Colonel

  Battalion

  700 to 850 soldiers

  Comprised of 4 or more Companies

  Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel

  Company

  175 to 240 soldiers

  Comprised of 4 Platoons

  Commanded by Captain

  Platoon

  45 or more soldiers

  Comprised of 4 Squads

  Commanded by Lieutenant

  Squad

  10 or more soldiers

  Commanded by Staff Sargeant

  WEAPONS AND ARTILLERY

  M-1 Rifle

  .30-caliber

  A 9.5-lb. rifle, with an 8-round clip, the basic American infantry weapon.

  Carbine

  .30-caliber

  A short-barreled rifle with a 15-or 30-round clip with less range and accuracy.

  Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR

  .30-caliber

  A two-man weapon—one to feed ammunition, one to fire—that was both semi-and fully automatic, capable of firing 500 rounds a minute.

  Machine Guns

  The .30-caliber machine guns were capable of sustained fire of 450 to 500 rounds a minute.

  The .50-caliber gun was mounted on trucks, tanks, and other vehicles. It fired 575 rounds per minute to a range of 2,000 yards.

  Rocket Launcher or Bazooka

  2.36-inch and 3.5-inch

  The ineffective 2.36-inch launcher was replaced by the 3.5-inch in 1950 even as the North Koreans drove south. The new bazooka was capable of penetrating thick armor plate; it had a range of up to 75 yards.

  Infantry Mortars

  .60mm

  .81mm

  4.2mm

  These front-loaded weapons fired shells at a high angle, able to reach into valleys and trenches, with a range of 1,800 to 4,000 yards.

  Howitzers

  105mm

  155mm

  8-inch

  Cannons with a range of 2 to 5 miles.

  List of Maps

  1. The Korean Peninsula before Hostilities, May 1950

  2. First Encounter with Chinese Communist Forces, November 1, 1950

  3. The Unsan Engagement, November 1–2, 1950

  4. The North Korean Invasion, June 25–28, 1950

  5. Task Force Smith, July 5, 1950

  6. Height of North Korean Advance, Late August 1950

  7.The Pusan Perimeter, August 4, 1950

  8. The Naktong Bulge, August 31–September 1, 1950

  9. The Inchon Landings, September 15, 1950

  10. The Drive to Seoul, September 16–28, 1950

  11. UN Breakout and Invasion of North Korea

  12. Chinese Attack at Chongchon River, on Second Division, November 25–26, 1950

  13. Chinese Assault on Love Company, November 25–26, 1950

  14. The Main Chinese Campaign in the West, November 25–28, 1950

  15. The Marine Sector, October–November 27, 1950

  16. The Gauntlet, November 30, 1950

  17. Breakout from Chosin Reservoir, November 27–December 9, 1950

  18. High Tide of the Chinese Advance, January 1951

  19. The Fight for the Central Corridor

  20. The Twin Tunnels—Chipyongni-Wonju Area, January–February 1951

  21. Battle of Twin Tunnels, January 31–February 1, 1951

  22. Battle of Chipyongni, February 13–14, 1951

  23. McGee Hill, February 13–15, 1951

  24. Task Force Crombez, February 14–15, 1951

  25. The Korean Peninsula after the Cease-fire, July 27, 1953

  Note on Military Map Symbols

  Every effort has been made to update the maps in The Coldest Winter to a modified version of the standard MIL-STD-2525B common warfighter symbology used by the U.S. Military. This is a comprehensive system that gives a trained interpreter instant information about a military unit’s alignment, size, type, and identity.

  In some cases, complete information was not available for specific military units, and rather than introduce inaccuracies, an easily legible shorthand has been applied. With clarity in mind, other modifications that aren’t standard MIL-STD-2525B have been made to improve readability.

  While MIL-STD-2525B accounts for hundreds of military designations, only a few are necessary to understand the units employed in the Korean War.

  UNIT ALIGNMENT:

  Artillery

  Division XX

  Friendly Unit

  Engineer

  Brigade X

  Hostile Unit

  Armor

  Regiment III

  UNIT TYPE:

  UNIT SIZES:

  Battalion II

  Infantry

  Army XXXX

  Company I

  Cavalry

  Corps XXX

  Platoon •••

  The name of the unit can be displayed to the left of the unit symbol, the name of the larger group it is part of appears to the right of the unit symbol, and the size of the unit is indicated by the marking at the top. For example, the symbol for the Third Battalion of the Eighth Cavalry is:

  Unless otherwise noted, a solid black line represents U.N. positions or a defensive perimeter.

  The Coldest Winter

  1. THE KOREAN PENINSULA BEFORE HOSTILITIES, MAY 1950

  Introduction

  ON JUNE 25, 1950, nearly seven divisions of elite North Korean troops, many of whom had fought for the Communi
st side in the Chinese civil war, crossed the border into South Korea, with the intention of conquering the entire South in three weeks. Some six months earlier, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in a colossal gaffe, had neglected to include South Korea in America’s Asian defense perimeter, and the only American forces then in the country, part of a tiny advisory mission, were almost completely unprepared for the attack. In the early weeks of the invasion, the Communist offensive was a stunning success. Every bit of news from the battlefield was negative. In Washington, President Harry Truman and his top advisers debated the enemy’s intentions. Was this, as they greatly feared, an assault ordered up by the Russians? Were the North Koreans nothing but Moscow’s pawns? Or was it a feint, the first in a series of what might be provocative Communist moves around the world? They quickly decided to use United States, and in time United Nations, forces to draw a line against Communist aggression in Korea.

  The Korean War would last three years, not three weeks, and it would be the most bitter kind of war, in which relatively small American and United Nations forces worked to neutralize the superior numbers of their adversaries by the use of vastly superior hardware and technology. It was a war fought on strikingly harsh terrain and often in ghastly weather, most particularly a numbing winter cold that often seemed to American troops an even greater enemy than the North Koreans or Chinese. “The century’s nastiest little war,” the military historian S. L. A. Marshall called it. The Americans and their United Nations allies faced terrible, mountainous terrain, which worked against their advantage in hardware, most notably their armored vehicles, and offered caves and other forms of shelter to the enemy. “If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location to fight this damnable war politically and militarily, the unanimous choice would have been Korea,” Secretary of State Acheson said years after it was over. “A sour war,” Acheson’s friend Averell Harriman said of it.

  To call it an unwanted war on the part of the United States would be a vast understatement. Even the president who had ordered American troops into battle had not deigned to call it a war. From the start, Harry Truman had been careful to downplay the nature of the conflict because he was intent on limiting any sense of growing confrontation with the Soviet Union. One of the ways he tried to do that was by playing with the terminology. In the late afternoon of June 29, four days after the North Koreans had crossed the border, and even as he was sending Americans into battle, Truman met with the White House press corps. One of the reporters asked if America was actually at war. Truman answered that it was not, even though in fact it was. Then another reporter asked, “Would it be possible to call this a police action under the United Nations?” “Yes,” answered Truman. “That is exactly what it amounts to.” The implication that U.S. soldiers in Korea were more a police force than an army was a source of considerable bitterness to many of the men who went there. (A similar verbal delicacy would be employed four months later by Chinese leader Mao Zedong when he ordered hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers into battle, deciding, for reasons somewhat parallel to Truman’s, to call them volunteers.)

  So, out of a question casually asked and rather casually answered, were policies and even wars defined. The terminology Truman offered that day in some ways endured. Korea would not prove a great national war of unifying singular purpose, as World War II had been, nor would it, like Vietnam a generation later, divide and thus haunt the nation. It was simply a puzzling, gray, very distant conflict, a war that went on and on and on, seemingly without hope or resolution, about which most Americans, save the men who fought there and their immediate families, preferred to know as little as possible. Nearly thirty years after it was over, John Prine caught this spirit exactly in the song “Hello in There,” where he sings eloquently of the tragic loss of a young man named Davy, and how he sacrificed himself for no good reason. Over half a century later, the war still remained largely outside American political and cultural consciousness. The Forgotten War was the apt title of one of the best books on it. Korea was a war that sometimes seemed to have been orphaned by history.

  Many of the men who went to Korea harbored their own personal resentments over being sent there; some had already served once, during World War II, had been in the reserves, had been called away from their civilian jobs most reluctantly and told to serve in a war overseas for the second time within ten years, when all too many of their contemporaries had been called for neither. Others who had served in World War II and had decided to stay in the Army were embittered because of the pathetic state of U.S. forces when the North Koreans struck. Undermanned, poorly trained American units, with faulty, often outmoded equipment and surprisingly poor high-level command leadership, were an embarrassment. The drop-off between the strength of the Army they had known at the height of World War II, its sheer professionalism and muscularity, and the shabbiness of American forces as they existed at the beginning of the Korean War was nothing less than shocking to these men. The more experienced they were, the more disheartened and appalled they also were by the conditions under which they had to fight.

  The worst aspect of the Korean War, wrote Lieutenant Colonel George Russell, a battalion commander with the Twenty-third Regiment of the Second Infantry Division, “was Korea itself.” For an army that was so dependent on its industrial production and the resulting military hardware, especially tanks, it was the worst kind of terrain. Countries like Spain and Switzerland had difficult mountain ranges, but these soon opened onto flat areas where industrially powerful nations might send their tanks. To American eyes, however, as Russell put it, in Korea “on the other side of every mountain [was] another mountain.” If there was a color to Korea, Russell claimed, “it came in all shades of brown”—and if there was a campaign ribbon given out for service there, he added, all the GIs who fought there would have bet on the color being brown.

  Unlike Vietnam, the Korean War took place before television news came into its own and the United States became a communications society. In the days of Korea, television news shows were short, bland, and of marginal influence—fifteen minutes a night. Given the state of the technology, the footage from Korea, usually making it into the network newsrooms back in New York days late, rarely moved the nation. It was still largely a print war, reported in newspapers in black and white, and it remained black and white in the nation’s consciousness. In the year 2004, while working on this book, I chanced into the Key West, Florida, library: on its shelves were some eighty-eight books on Vietnam and only four on Korea, which more or less sums up the war’s fate in American memory. Arden Rowley, a young engineer with the Second Infantry Division who had spent two and a half years as a POW in a Chinese prison camp, noted somewhat bitterly that, from 2001 to 2002, each year marking a fiftieth anniversary of some major Korean battle, there were three major war movies made in America—Pearl Harbor, Windtalkers, and We Were Soldiers—the first two about World War II, the third about Vietnam; and if you added Saving Private Ryan, produced in 1998, the total was four. No film was made about Korea. The best known movie linked to Korea was 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, the story of an American POW who had been brainwashed in a Chinese prison camp and turned into a robotic assassin aimed by the Communists at an American presidential candidate.

  To the degree that the Korean War ever had a niche in popular culture, it was through the Robert Altman antiwar movie (and then sitcom) M*A*S*H, about a mobile surgical hospital operating during that war. Ostensibly about Korea, the film was really about Vietnam, and came out in 1970, at the high-water mark of popular protest against that war. It was a time when Hollywood executives were still nervous about making an anti-Vietnam movie. As such Korea was a cover from the start for a movie about Vietnam; director Altman and the screenwriter, Ring Lardner, Jr., were focused on Vietnam but thought it was too sensitive a subject to be treated irreverently. Notably, the men and officers in the film wear the shaggy haircuts of the Vietnam years, not the crew cuts of the Korean
era.

  And so the true brutality of the war never really penetrated the American cultural consciousness. An estimated 33,000 Americans died in it. Another 105,000 were wounded. The South Koreans lost 415,000 killed and had 429,000 wounded. Both the Chinese and North Koreans were exceptionally secretive about their casualties, but American officials put their losses at roughly 1.5 million men killed. The Korean War momentarily turned the Cold War hot, heightening the already considerable (and mounting) tensions between the United States and the Communist world and deepening the chasm between the United States and Communist forces asserting themselves in Asia. Those tensions and divisions between the two sides in the bipolar struggle grew even more serious after American miscalculations brought China into the war. When it was all over and an armed truce ensued, both sides claimed victory, though the final division of the country was no different from the one that had existed when the war began. But the United States was not the same: its strategic vision of Asia had changed, and its domestic political equation had been greatly altered.