This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

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31

Heartbreak Ridge

The peace talks had been going on for months. The heart to fight though not gone, was not the bright light it had once been.

— Captain Raymond E. Webb, 72nd TANK BATTALION IN KOREA 1950—1952, Toppan Printing Co., Ltd., Tokyo.

THE ACTION ON Bloody Ridge, the principal activity along the Korean front at the time, drew attendant publicity to the discomfiture of some military leaders. Correspondents, watching the hellish fighting along the blasted spurs and ravaged slopes of 773, 983, and 940, wrote florid descriptions of the struggle. It was a correspondent from Stars and Stripes who first named Bloody Ridge, and during one action a group of men of 9th Infantry, on the ridge, read his account. For reasons of security, the exact location of Bloody Ridge was never mentioned in the papers.

'Jesus,' one soldier said, after reading the article, 'them poor bastards are getting clobbered, wherever they are.'

And the publicity had other, more unfortunate side effects. Bloody Ridge—though the Army need never feel shame for what it did there—had not been the kind of demonstration General James Van Fleet had in mind when he authorized it. Washington did not receive the casualty reports with anything like enthusiasm. Matthew Ridgway, in Tokyo, showed no indication of being pleased.

It was during this time that Tom De Shazo, a classmate of Boatner, and the Brigadier Commanding 2nd Division Artillery told the Assistant Division Commander:

'Haydon, don't you know people are expecting you to relieve John Lynch?'

'Sure,' Boatner said. He had had more than a few leading questions and insinuations on that score. 'Sure, that'll wash all our linen. That'll solve everything!'

Haydon Boatner knew that Colonel Lynch had assumed command of the 9th Infantry while it rested along Line Kansas, idle, while many of its best men rotated home. What failures, what disappointments had occurred in the 9th had not been due to command, but to a breakdown of team effort. And it was doubtful if any United States regiment, in August 1951, given the same assignment, could have done much better.

Haydon Boatner, a man not noted for tenderness, who believed with Jefferson Davis 'that tender consideration for those who are ineffective kills the good,' refused to recommend the relief of the 9th's C.O.

But he had found something lousy in 9th Regiment—the 3rd Battalion.

During the desperate days of Bloody Ridge, the 3/9 had done nothing. It had failed miserably in the only real attack it had attempted, and its C.O., Boatner knew, had been on the bottle.

The 3/9, in contravention of new Army policy at the insistence of a former corps commander, was wholly colored.

Boatner recommended that the battalion commander be reclassified or eliminated. The battalion could not be depended upon, which left the 9th with only two effective battalions in any fight, and Boatner said so.

He stabbed deeply into a subject that the Army, let alone Washington, preferred never to discuss.

There had been continual difficulty with the all-Negro units sent into Korea, in the 25th Division and elsewhere. The 503rd Field Artillery—'Get out of the way, here comes the Nickle Oh Tray!'—and others, through the present 3/9, had sometimes written less than glorious history on the battlefield.

But other colored soldiers had done splendidly, as well as any Americans had ever done.

A Columbia sociologist, quietly making a survey for the Army, had some reasons, which had long been understood by United States Army leaders: An essential ingredient in any fighting man is pride—pride in himself, pride in his unit, and the men around him. The seemingly nonsensical swagger of paratroopers, their special insignia, their carefully nurtured arrogance, seemingly in conflict with most decent, democratic practices, make sense only when what paratroopers must do is considered.

At the final moment, when a man must leap from a speeding aircraft into what is normally the most hazardous of military missions, an airdrop behind enemy lines; when his chances of serious injury or death are always high, even routine, a special esprit is required.

Unless spurred by a fearful pride and belief in themselves and their comrades, men do not willingly 'join hands and jump out of aeryplanes.'

It is this final, basic pride—what will my buddies think?—that keeps most soldiers carrying on, beyond the dictates of good sense, which screams at them

to run, to continue living, and to hell with war.

American society had permitted Negroes little chance to develop pride. American society tends to give its colored segments an inferiority complex, almost from birth. And in the military service, placed solely among other colored men, there is developed not mass pride but mass neurosis. Few colored men, understandably, feel the urge to prove themselves in front of other colored men.

The problem is not one of race or color, but of a minority group, anywhere,which has had much of its essential pride as human beings stripped from it. The strongest urge of any minority group, Armenians, French- Canadians, or Untouchables, is to survive. They have no other effective way of fighting.

The old jokes about the military courage of certain minority groups has some basis in fact. Turks joke about the fighting ability of Turkish Christians. The indigenous Christians that Turks know are submerged, wily folk, sharp with money, slyly sticking together against the Moslem world, absolutely uninterested in going out to fight and die for the Turkish State. They see absolutely nothing to be gained by it—nor is there.

A diplomat from Istanbul, several centuries ago, remarked it was odd that Franks in the Western kingdoms were much more like Turks than like Christians. If this Turkish gentleman had visited the medieval ghettos, he might have begun to understand.

Jews in Eastern Europe often went to the gas chambers without a protest, without lifting a hand. The young men of the same human stock raised in Israel are among the toughest, hardiest folk in the world.

To most people, this proves something.

Any group of human beings that has known long persecution is soon winnowed down to survival types. The brave and the bold in a persecuted society are soon lopped off.

And no army has ever been successfully forged wholly from survival types.Survival, in an army, is only incidental to the mission.

The Columbia professor, and others, discussed practical means of ending the Army's trouble. They saw only one solution: desegregation.

In front of white men, the sociologists claimed, colored soldiers would feel an urge to prove themselves, and have a chance to develop pride they could never achieve in a segregated unit. They recommended one per squad, or two, no more—because the tendencies of the persecuted are to group together against the world.

With much disagreement. in some quarters, the Army bought the idea. There was also the hope, as one unbeliever mentioned, that if the one man in a squad was guilty of malfeasance, the others would take care of him.

Under Boatner's urging, the commander of the 3/9 was relieved, and 534 men were transferred from 3/9 to the other combat regiments.

The 534 themselves were not wholly happy. They had a thousand and one bugaboos, from possible loss of rotation points to fear for their ratings.

Some of the old first sergeants of the receiving companies conjured up every procedure in the book to delay the transfers.

But they went through.

The troops were integrated, at 10 percent throughout the companies.

And the United States Army's combat problem with colored troops was largely ended. Filtered through the white units, they did well. Three weeks after its fiasco on Bloody Ridge, 3/9 performed with excellence.