38
The Last Spring
…
— S. L. A. Marshall, PORK CHOP HILL.
COMPARED TO Gettysburg, Bastogne, or Verdun, the outpost battles that erupted across Korea from time to time were skirmishes, pinpricks next to the wounds of the world's great battles. But on the bodies of troops actually engaged the casualties were exceedingly high. When companies are reduced to forty men, and platoons to six or seven, to the men in them it is hardly limited war.
The hill battles along an unmoving line were costing the United States casualties at the rate of thirty thousand a year.
This number was still less than the annual traffic toll. But while Americans are well conditioned to death on the highways, they are not ready to accept death on the battlefield for apparently futile reasons.
The last spring of the Korean War, when it was apparent that peace was near, was one of the most horrible of all.
By 1953 almost every troop leader in the Far East held the opinion that continuance of the war under the present conditions was not only wasteful but verging on the criminal. It was all very well to say that sometimes the line must be held while nations muddle through—but there comes time when soldiers no longer see logic, when they are no longer willing to suffer while someone else improvises.
Now generals said freely that it had been a mistake to remove the terrible pressure from the Communist armies in 1951. They did not say the U.N. should have marched to the Yalu—though many believed it—but they agreed that a firm foot should have been kept on the Communist neck until a signature was on the dotted line at Kaesong.
In retrospect, it seems beyond question that because the West brought naivete concerning Communist motives and methods to the conference table thousands more men than necessary were maimed and killed. If the U.N. had approached the table with a hard eye instead of a sigh of relief, in fighting stance instead of immediate relaxation, the chances are high that peace could have been attained in 1951.
Perhaps, as General Matt Ridgway wrote, it is futile to speculate. Perhaps it was necessary that the United States prove its own desire for peace. But to the men who for two more bitter years held the outpost line, and to the friends and families of those thousands killed and injured between July 1951 and July 1953, the question will forever remain.
One final bitterness, of all these people, was that much of the bitter struggle of the last spring went unreported. There were months when as many as 104 enemy attacks—from company to division strength— smashed against the U.N. outpost line, and days when as many as 131,800 rounds of Communist artillery fell on it within a twenty-four-hour period. Few of these events, buried deep in newspapers, caused a stir.
These were limited attacks, for the purpose of destroying outposts and killing men, similar to the bloody raids and counterraids on the Western Front during 1915-1918. None of them, by itself, could affect the war. In each of them men died.
Because the lines never move, trench warfare is not spectacular. The public and the home fronts soon lose interest in it; it seems to them that nothing happens. The lines do not move. But each day and night, men die, by the bayonet, grenade, or submachine gun, in violent night assaults down trenches and across bunkers and revetments, or by the deadly pounding of artillery, which falls again and again, without warning.
Between the times of dying, men wait. The waiting, seemingly endless, is perhaps the worst of all.
And one final bitterness was that this type of warfare was self-imposed. In 1915, developments in weaponry had stalemated the battle lines; no one knew any other course. In 1953, the men along the outpost line knew that the powers that had sent them forth apparently had chosen to play the enemy's game. Fighting this anachronistic war, over the long months each of the armies changed.
The Republic of Korea Army grew better. While its high leadership was still shot through with weaknesses, its divisions had lost their horror of Chinese. Hit by waves of CCF, they no longer dissolved; they took high losses, but they held. The ROK Army was still far from 'second best in the world,' though it was now among the largest of the non-Communist world. Neither so good as the American or the Chinese, it still had little of which to be ashamed.
The American Army changed the least, from 1951 onward. The men came and went; the faces changed, for the United States divisions had one great disadvantage compared to the other combatants—they continually bled away their best men through rotation. Because of rotation, quality tended to remain static. The divisions retained the basic excellences developed in 1951: good weapon handling, superior communications, and superb artillery and superb artillery direction. But the troops were shot through with green men and remained somewhat clumsy and heavy-footed to the last, and their patrolling left something to be desired.
The new men arrived with legs unequal to the steep Korean slopes, and by the time they had learned to patrol the windy hills and deep valleys of no man's land, they had become casualties, or had enough points to go home.
It was the CCF, by all accounts, that changed the most. By 1953 the clumsy peasant armies, which had pushed masses of men through the valleys to the sound of horns and bugles, were no more.
There had been no rotation in the CCF, and the painful lessons of modern ground warfare had been pushed home.
In 1950, in the frightful mountains of North Korea, the CCF had won initial victories against a modern army beset by intelligence failures and deployed in an impossible scheme of maneuver, an army that had walked almost blithely into a trap. In 1951, from the Imjin to the Soyang, the CCF learned at great cost that they could not push home pell-mell attacks against a modern force that had both room to maneuver and the will to fight.
Unlike the old Imperial Japanese Army, the CCF understood the lessons of firepower, and did not repeat their failures.
After 1951, the Chinese soldier again became the phantom he had been in the North Korean hills. His fortifications and fieldworks, built with unstinted labor, almost always surpassed the American. Harassed by ever- present air power, he went completely underground, and he learned to move stealthily, and by night. He became furtive, fast, and skilled at deception.
He could pad noiselessly through the dark and assemble a battalion within U.N. lines before it was seen or heard, and fade away again before daybreak. He became adept at the ambush of American patrols, which could often be heard coming hundreds of yards away, and in the dark, deep valleys, more and more the honors went to him.
He rarely lost prisoners now, a matter of concern to American Intelligence. He proved he could slip small parties into U.N. lines and drag U.S. soldiers screaming from their bunks. While Americans continued to hate the dark, he loved the night as a friend, and made use of it.
He came onto the heavily defended U.N. hills and outposts like a phantom, and often took them within minutes. He could rarely hold them, however, under the quickly massed and superior fires of American artillery, and the grinding attacks launched against him by day, under artillery, air, and armor cover.
New American soldiers arriving in Korea were surprised to hear their officers tell them not to sell the Chinaman short, and that, man for man, the Chinese was as good a man as they. They were told of the vast improvement of the CCF; the Chinese had artillery and communications, now, supplied by Russia, and even more important, they had improved morale.
Corruption and desertion had disappeared. Rape and plunder, the old hallmarks of all Asiatic armies, were no longer reserved to field commanders or common soldiers, but to the state. Under continuous indoctrination, CCF soldiers fought more from pride and belief in their cause, and less from fear of their leaders. All ranks, down to squad privates, were briefed before operations to an extent no Western army attempted, because of security hazards.
