action, and more thousands of unwounded risked their lives daily, month in and month out.
In the spring of 1951, with no end to what had been considered a short campaign in sight, the United States Government began to consider ways of equalizing the burden, for it was manifestly unfair, in a free society, to ask a few to bear the entire burden.
Troops on line began to hear rumors of a rotation policy. Already there had been set up R&R—Rest and Recuperation—a five-day rest period back in Japan. R&R at first worked wonders. Men came off line, away from incessant danger and hardship, for a flight to Tokyo, Yokohama, or Kyoto. They boarded planes at Seoul and elsewhere, gaunt, unshaven, some with the thousand-yard stare. Five days later they returned, new men, rested, bathed, refreshed. R&R gave the troops something to look forward to; it was a morale factor without equal.
It was only later, when the pressure in Korea was not so great, that men going to Japan turned R&R into the great debauch that came to be known as I&I—intercourse and intoxication. Men coming out of weeks and months of hard combat are too tired and beaten down to seek trouble.
Men leaving months of filthy living and screaming monotony tend to seek something else again.
But R&R, then and later, was only a stopgap. Soon there rose talk of Big R—rotation to the United States.
On 1 May, Captain Munoz's boss, the 2nd Division G-4, called him in and said, 'Frank, you're going home!'
Munoz was the second officer to rotate from the 2nd Division. The first quota had been for only one, and the man who got that quota had received the Distinguished Service Cross. Munoz, who had more infantry-line time than any other officer, had only the Silver Star. He made the second draft.
He went from the area of the Soyang to Pusan, and boarded the
All over Korea, those who were left of the early men to arrive began to go home in little dribbles, as new men came in to replace them.
A point system was set up. It took thirty-six points to rotate. On line, a man received four points a month; anywhere in the combat zone, from the firing batteries back through regimental headquarters, three.
Any man in Korea got at least two, which meant rear echelon and service troops rotated at eighteen months. Tankers went out in ten months, the average infantryman within a year.
Now, if asked why they fought, many men would say, 'To get my time in.' The point system had great merits—and great disadvantages. No man liked to risk his neck—and thirty points.
The handling of high-point men was a continuing problem of commanders from this time on.
Some men, with enough points, did not rotate. James Mount, who had come to Korea a corporal, was made second lieutenant in the medical service. The promotion delayed him till November.
One colonel, who had had long and arduous service since the beginning, was ready to leave. On the eve of his departure he received his brigadier's single star. He felt it a crowning accomplishment to his service in Korea— until he was informed that as a general officer he was on a new rotation list; he was now the general officer with the least overseas service in the Far East. Dedicated man that he was, the new brigadier's remarks were pungent and heartfelt.
After the beginning of truce talks, the primary interest of every man in Korea was going home. It could hardly be otherwise.
And with rotation, the complexion of the Army changed. Now the men and officers coming in were largely reservists, National Guardsmen, draftees. The percentage of regulars in most line units sank to forty or less, as more and more men were recalled from business and farm to man the line. Few of the new officers and men arrived with any enthusiasm, then or later.
For whatever enthusiasm the American people might have had for the Korean conflict had died in childbirth, up along the Ch'ongch'on.
Worse than lack of enthusiasm, the new troops were green. The kind of lessons troops needed to fight this kind of war could be learned only in Korea. In a period of a few months the complexion of the American Army changed, more even than the generals realized.
New troubles were inevitable. But, under the circumstances, it was not remarkable that they occurred—what was remarkable was that the new men, unready, unmoved, and coming from a society that was beginning to hate this war, did so well.
On 1 July, approximately 750,000 Chinese and North Koreans held the Communist battle line, against half a million U.N. troops. The CCF and the Inmun Gun had changed, too.
The cream of the Communist armies had been destroyed, from the Naktong to the Imjin, and from the Imjin to the Soyang.
Replacements coming down the mountains were recent inductees, impressed from rice field and village, untrained, in some cases unarmed and badly clothed.
But though they might not be expert at war, these men were used to hard work and hardship all their young lives. Their leaders set them to work, digging. From the Sea of Japan, on the east, to the Yellow Sea on the west, they burrowed into the earth. They entered mountains from the rear slope, tunneling through to make gun positions opening on the front. They dug bunkers in which a company could safely and warmly bivouac. They dug so deeply into the earth that no conventional gun or cannon could reach them.
They dug bunkers and trenches and firing steps.
And when they had dug these, they went backward and dug a new defensive line, and one beyond that, stretching into the north. They dug a line such as the world had never seen—ten times the depth of any in World War I.
They dug positions that could—and might have to, their leaders reasoned—stand against nuclear explosion.
With their mountains, hollowed out, the training of the new CCF and Inmun Gun could begin. They were taught all the tricks the older men had learned: to move and attack by night, when the terrible American air was impotent; not to rush down valleys, as the CCF had learned to its sorrow on the Imjin and across the Soyang, but again to become phantoms, lurking in the hills, never letting the enemy see them until they chose.
They learned to use their bright new weapons, carried laboriously down from the Yalu, and to load, aim, and fire the huge numbers of cannon with Cyrillic inscriptions on their tubes, now coming into Korea for the first time.
They were sent on patrol, to learn to move quietly and effectively, and to learn the taste of blood.
Over the months, beginning in the summer of 1951, the tough, squat peasant boys from China and Korea learned well.
In the Communist armies there was no rotation.
In February, when MacArthur had again and again pressed for reinforcements for FECOM, Washington had authorized him to arm and train some 200,000 to 300,000 more ROK's.
More than 100,000 South Koreans were in arms, and other thousands served with United States forces, as KATUSA—a program that was quietly being abandoned; the cultural gulf between Korean and American was too great for them to use the buddy system—or laborers.
Each American battalion and company had its indigenous personnel, from barbers to houseboys, paid in native currency and eating Korean rations furnished by the Army. They might add little to the effective fighting ability of the units, but they helped a great deal with the laundry problem.
But American planners were still looking forward to the day of their eventual displacement from Korea, and the twice-shattered ROK Army had to be once again rebuilt. Men—tough, patient, hill-padding Korean peasants— there were in plenty. Surplus weapons from the big war, food, and money to pay them, America could easily furnish.
What neither Korea nor America could furnish was leadership.
A nation that for forty years had been made into hewers of wood and haulers of water could not put forth competent, educated officer material overnight. What little the Tachan Minkuk had enjoyed had mostly died north of
