The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Read online

  The bridge they were guarding was now open to the Chinese. Richardson took two or three of his remaining men and started north toward Battalion. He was in a ditch alongside the road when he ran into two soldiers coming the other way, part of the team he had sent off with Walsh earlier. “The rest of the squad is all dead! Walsh is dead!” one of the men said. By chance, the soldier added, he himself had gone to take a leak just when the Chinese broke in and shot the others while they were just waiting there. Otherwise he would be dead too. Just a few days earlier Richardson and Walsh, his oldest friend in the unit, had reached Pyongyang and congratulated each other on making it through that far. Now Walsh was dead, and their regiment was being destroyed.

  FOR MAJOR FILMORE MCABEE, the Third Battalion S-3, the worst thing was the chaos and confusion. They had no idea who had hit them or with what size force. “Was it ten thousand or was it a hundred or a thousand? Were they Chinese or were they Korean?” he said years later. Soon, there were two other paramount questions: Who was in charge of the American units and what were their orders? Ormond, the battalion commander, had tried to go north to the village of Unsan to check out their positions, had been severely wounded, and was already dying or dead. McAbee never saw him again. Veale Moriarty, the exec officer, went off reconnoitering and McAbee never saw him again either. He remained bitter about Moriarty’s disappearance for years afterward—the exec had made it out, but McAbee believed it was his job to stay and help hold the battalion together.

  McAbee headed south, to find out what was happening. Along the way, he was overtaken by three Chinese soldiers—he guessed who they were instantly by their padded, quilted jackets and the earflaps on their hats. They seemed as puzzled to stumble upon him as he was them. They raised their rifles and pointed them at him. Communication was impossible, so he just pointed up the road, and remarkably enough, they headed off in that direction without shooting him. Only then did his luck begin to run out. He was hit twice, apparently by Chinese soldiers positioned some distance from the road, whom he never saw. The first bullet struck the side of his head. Then another bullet shattered his shoulder blade and he sensed that it was over: he was bleeding heavily from the head wound and growing weaker by the minute. He knew the terrible cold worked against him, and he was sure he was going to die there when an American soldier found him and somehow guided him back to Battalion headquarters.

  LIEUTENANT KIES, WHO had been cut off since he left Richardson at the bridge, was moving his platoon toward Battalion headquarters when the Chinese opened up with machine guns and mortars. He tried to get his platoon to a ditch that ran along the side of the road, but they were caught between the Chinese and the American forces and losing a lot of men. “Lieutenant, I think we’ve got gooks all around us,” Sergeant Luther Wise, one of his squad leaders, said. Just then a mortar round came in and killed Wise and wounded Kies. The lieutenant found that he could not lift one of his arms. But he kept moving what remained of his platoon toward the battalion command post. In the chaos he almost stumbled into a Chinese officer, but saw him first, and quickly moved his men back, and eventually brought them to what was the new CP, which was in effect a battalion aid station. There was a Chinese machine gun that had fairly good coverage of their path back to the battalion, but Kies had checked the way the Chinese gunner fired—a pause and a burst, a pause and a burst, exact increments of firing each time—and it was like breaking a code. He timed each burst and moved his men across in small groups during the pauses. Kies thought they might have gotten some protection from the Chinese machine gun, because the Chinese bodies were beginning to pile up, limiting the gunner’s vision. By the time they reached the aid station, Kies estimated that he had only about twelve of the original twenty-eight men in his platoon left. They had been understrength from the start because of the shortage of replacements; now they were more like a squad. He was trying to help Dr. Clarence Anderson, the battalion surgeon, when a grenade landed near his feet, and he was wounded again, what turned out to be four breaks in one leg and some wounds in the other. Even as the grenade landed, a mortar round came in and killed five of the men left in Kies’s platoon who could still fight. Kies was absolutely sure that not many more men were going to get out—certainly not him, because he couldn’t move either leg.

  The battalion command post was a disaster. Men dazed, wounded, completely numbed by what had happened were straggling in from different positions. When Bill Richardson finally reached it, he was shocked by the sheer chaos he found. Americans were mixed in with Chinese, who seemed unable to comprehend their victory, as if they had succeeded beyond their expectations. Now, having taken the CP, it was as if they had no idea what to do next. You could pass a Chinese soldier right in front of the CP at that moment and he would do nothing. A medic told Richardson they had created a small position nearby where they were protecting about forty wounded men. Dr. Anderson was there, along with Father Kapaun. But there was a serious question of who was in charge. Ormond and McAbee were both seriously wounded, and no one knew where Moriarty was. New leadership would have to rise to the surface on its own, Richardson thought.

  He decided he would go back to Love Company and see if there were any other men he could help bring back. He started retracing his steps, shouting out his name so his own men wouldn’t shoot him. He found Lieutenant Paul Bromser, the commander of Love Company, badly shot up, but the exec, Lieutenant Frederick Giroux, though wounded, was still functioning. It had been awful, Giroux said. The Chinese had swept right through them. Perhaps only 25 of the company’s 180 men were left. “Can you get them out?” Giroux asked, and Richardson replied, “Yes, but not over the bridge.” He would have to make his own return route, zigzagging back and forth. On the way he ran into two Chinese soldiers with bags of grenades, and shot one. A grenade went off, and then a Chinese machine gun opened up, panicking some of Richardson’s men. As they neared the makeshift battalion perimeter, they spotted two American tanks, and, instinctively, some of the men climbed on—Americans always moved to their vehicles, Richardson thought, as if the vehicles could save them. He was sure the Chinese would go after the tanks first. So he and Giroux talked most of the men off.

  The perimeter they were creating, about two hundred yards in diameter, abutted the old battalion CP. They dug quickly into the soft loam the river had left behind, with the three tanks inside giving them a little more firepower and some fragile radio links to other units. (Only the tank radios were working by then.) They took fire all the rest of that first night, but miraculously the Chinese, who seemed to have it in their power to overrun them at any point, never made another all-out attack. Probably, Richardson thought, the Chinese were as confused as the Americans on that first night, but their confusion, he remembered, did not last into the second day. When the dawn broke, the Americans relaxed slightly. They had outlasted the first attack. The enemy in this war rarely struck during the day, and even if this was their first battle with the Chinese, they doubted that they would be very different from the Koreans. There was still some vestige of hope. One of the last radio messages they had received was that help was on its way. At one point, Chaplain Kapaun, a man remembered for his remarkable bravery and selflessness (and who would be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism), asked Richardson how he was doing. “Do you know what day it is?” the chaplain wondered.

  Richardson said he had no idea.

  “It’s All Souls’ Day.”

  “Father,” Richardson answered, “someone better be looking out for our souls because we really need it now.”

  “Well, He is, He is,” the chaplain replied.

  FIRST LIEUTENANT PHIL PETERSON, who had shared that bottle of Communist bubbly with Walt Mayo in Pyongyang, was an artillery forward observer with C Battery of the Ninety-ninth Field Artillery Battalion, which supported the Third Battalion of the Eighth Regiment and had been attached to King Company of the Third, which was set up near the battalion CP. Fifty years later, he believed he co
uld still quote almost to the word how the people at Battalion had explained the reports of Chinese being in the area in those hours before the enemy struck: “It is assumed that these Chinese are here to protect the North Korean electrical generators [up along the Yalu], and you are not to fire on them unless they fire on you. No forward observer is to call in any fire on any electrical installation.”

  It was only after the Chinese hit that Peterson realized how disingenuous the higher headquarters had been in letting them know how dangerous their situation was. “What they gave us,” he said angrily many years after, “was a cover story.” That night, about 9 P.M., just before the heavy firing began, some men from one of King Company’s outposts brought in a prisoner, complete with quilted jacket. The Korean soldiers attached to King Company could not talk to him. Peterson was sure he had encountered his first Chinese soldier. They were ordered off their hilltop position and told to head toward Battalion; it was a confusing maneuver at night, and the company was split up into groups of a dozen or so men each. Then the firing began. Peterson’s group was caught in a ditch alongside a rice paddy, with Chinese machine guns hammering away from both ends of the ditch. He hunkered down with a young sergeant who got hit right in the ass and seemed almost amused by it. He told Peterson (the humor was dark, because no one expected to make it out of there alive), “Look, Lieutenant, I got my million-dollar wound!”—the one that would send him home. Home at that moment had never seemed farther away.

  While Peterson was trapped in that ditch, others in the company were trying to move the battery’s six 105mm howitzers out. The window on saving their pieces from the enemy was closing fast. By the time they decided on an escape route and got together their little convoy (about sixteen vehicles—trucks carrying the howitzers and jeeps carrying some of the men and some food supplies) it was very late. Unbeknownst to them, the Chinese had already cut the road to the south and were waiting on both sides. Many of them were armed with Thompson submachine guns, a weapon no longer favored by the U.S. Army, but captured or bought by the thousands from their Chinese Nationalist enemies in the recently concluded civil war, and a valuable weapon at this moment.

  The fire on the blocked road was withering. Lieutenant Hank Pedicone, one of the best officers in the unit, a man who had won the Silver Star in World War II, was in the convoy that night, one of the few who lived through it. He later told Peterson they hadn’t had a chance, that it was a terrible thing to watch an entire company being wiped out. Much earlier that evening, Pedicone had pleaded with his superiors to start moving out, but they had told him they needed to wait on orders. “We can’t get any orders,” Pedicone had said, “because we don’t have any communications. We have to act on our own.” A few men, like the battery commander, Captain Jack Bolt, riding in the lead in a jeep, managed to make it out, because the Chinese held their fire—probably waiting to disable a rig carrying a howitzer, not only because it was a bigger prize, but because it might block the road. But of about 180 men in the company, only a handful survived. It was the last convoy that tried to flee the Unsan area. In the meantime, Peterson and his group had retreated slowly toward Battalion headquarters, waiting for morning to come. At dawn, they made it to a flat spot about two hundred yards from the battalion CP and then in small groups raced inside the perimeter.

  ON THE NIGHT of November 1, Pappy Miller, his buddy Richard Hettinger, and their platoon were about a mile from Battalion headquarters when they got the call telling them to come back. The battalion, indeed the entire regiment, had been told to pull back, though for them the news came a bit late. They had just passed an outpost near a bridge when they heard the first automatic weapons fire, and then the enemy was all around them, so Miller hustled the platoon under the bridge and across the river—it was nothing but a dry creek by then. Already tracers were lighting up the area. Most of the men were on the other bank when some grenade fragments hit Miller in the hand. What he remembered was how completely disorganized everything was—Chinese everywhere, seemingly coming from all directions, no clear lines for the Americans to fall back to. He had a sense that the enemy troops were close by and then suddenly they were there, right on top of him and his men. By then, his men had reached a ditch alongside the road, and they took cover in it. Almost all of them, Miller remembered, were new men, replacements just arrived, and none of them had ever seen fighting like this. They mistook the ditch for cover, which it was not, and thought they were safe there when they were not. Nothing was going to be truly safe, not even the higher ground, not even at the battalion CP, but Miller knew that the least safe place of all was that ditch, which now held about thirty-five men, some from his platoon, some from others. So he yelled to his friend, “Het, let’s get going before we get killed,” and they started forcing everyone out. This was about 3 A.M. on November 2, he thought. He was just about to clear the ditch when a Chinese grenade tore his leg apart, shredding muscle and breaking the bones in his foot. He could no longer move.

  So he lay there, waiting for daylight, waiting to die. He knew there would be no one to carry him. His only chance was to crawl to a battalion aid station that he thought might be nearby, but even a battalion aid station might be overrun by then. It was so cold his breath was condensing, and he feared that the Chinese, searching the bodies as they were sure to, would be able to tell he was alive from his breath. He tried to cover himself with dead enemy bodies. About 2 P.M. on the afternoon of November 2, five or six Chinese soldiers, moving through the battlefield, methodically checking American and Chinese bodies, found him. One pointed a rifle at his head. Oh, he thought, I’ve finally bought the big one. Just then, Father Kapaun rushed up, pushed the Chinese soldier aside, and saved his life. Miller waited for the Chinese soldier to shoot both Kapaun and himself, but the chaplain had been so audacious that the soldier seemed in awe of him. Ignoring the enemy soldier, Kapaun pulled Miller up and hoisted him on his back: perhaps they would both be prisoners, but he was going to carry Miller as long as he could.

  THE ASSAULT OF the Chinese had come as a complete surprise to the men in the Eighth Regiment’s First Battalion. In fact, they had already fought the Chinese in a brief skirmish without knowing they were Chinese. For Ray Davis, a nineteen-year-old corporal with Dog Company in the First Battalion, a heavy weapons company, it was a random firefight, the kind that took place all the time. They had arrived in Unsan on October 31, and he had been part of a company-sized force moving through a rice paddy when they started taking fire from some nearby hills. Davis remembered that he and his men had been rather casual when the firing began. Most of them hadn’t even been wearing their helmets. Then both sides had backed off. The real hit came a day and a half later.

  Davis was part of a heavy machine gun team, posted on reasonably high ground, on a hill on the south side of a road that wound in an east-west direction. The road was narrow—just wide enough for one oxcart at a time—and it was by then bumper to bumper with the vehicles of the Eighth Cav, a reflection of an Army that did all its movement on wheels and so would prove unusually vulnerable to this new enemy. The Chinese, who moved by foot, invariably had easier access to the high ground, while the Americans were fatefully linked by their vehicles to the roads, which were almost always in the valleys.

  A little after midnight, the Chinese struck with full force. For almost four months Davis had been in battles where the enemy always had vastly superior numbers, and where the great problem for those in his squad—like so many other machine gunners—had been the way their machine guns tended to wear out from the heavy use. Davis knew this all too well. As he had moved from being just an ammo bearer when he first arrived in country, to second and then first gunner on the two-man weapon, he had already gone through three or four machine guns. They always needed more firepower because of the sheer numbers of the attacking enemy. The basic infantry weapons they had started out with—the M-1 rifle, the carbine, even the machine guns—had not been designed for the force levels they were encountering.
Lieutenant Colonel Bob Kane, his battalion commander, once told Davis that the key to this war was that you had to get one hundred of the enemy before you could go home. Once you got your one hundred, that was that. How you proved that you had your one hundred Kane never quite explained.

  Davis had never seen anything quite like this. When the Americans sent up flares, Davis, who had grown up on a farm in upstate New York, saw so many enemy soldiers that he was reminded of nothing so much as wheat waving in a field back home. It was a terrifying sight, all those men, thousands and thousands, it seemed to him at that moment, coming right at him. If you got one, another would come; if you got one hundred, another one hundred would be right behind them. It put a bitter edge on Kane’s joke. Then Davis spotted the men on horseback, who seemed to be directing the others. They had bugles, and when the bugles blew, the enemy soldiers would sometimes change the direction of their attack.