There was no democracy in the CCF, or freedom of choice; the soldiers were still peasant conscripts, under harsh discipline. But the essential puritanism of the Communist leadership had seeped downward. As one Chinese POW proudly told Haydon Boatner on Koje-do, it was now possible to blow the whistle on a corrupt commander, and to make the charge stick.
The day of 'silver bullets'—when a Chinese general could be bought—was done. Now, using machine guns, grenades, and other hand weapons with a skill they had not possessed on entering Korea, the CCF fired real bullets, with disturbing accuracy.
The erasure of the corruption that had marked Chinese life from top to bottom—and which still held sway in Korea—undoubtedly caused many individual Chinese, though they remained non-Communist, to support the new regime.
As both General Mark W. Clark and S. L. A. Marshall remarked, the two and a half years in Korea were priceless to the Chinese Army, 'for on that training ground [the Chinese] armies became as skilled as any in the world in the techniques of hitting, evading, and surviving.'
After the violent activity prior to the U.S. elections—about which Communists hold the same shibboleths as Westerners do about May Day—the action eased off during December 1952.
Then, by January 1953, the CCF was making life miserable again, now on Old Baldy, held by the 7th Division, now at Nori, against the Ist ROK, or at the Hook and Gibraltar, where the British stood firm.
During one small action as savage as that at Cold Harbor, the British lost a pipe major, which to the bewilderment of Americans and ROK's the British regarded as a blow against the Empire British soldiers stated, angrily, that it was easier to make a good colonel than a good pipe major, and the commander in question should have acted accordingly.
In January, shortly after Eisenhower's inauguration, the U.S. 7th Division launched one of the infrequent U.N. raids against the enemy, with the primary purpose of taking prisoners. Moving a company over frozen ground toward the bristling CCF fortifications, in open daylight, the 7th Division took a severe black eye from what it had code-named Operation Smack.
Because the move had been planned in advance, and a great amount of brass had come forward from Eighth Army and other places to observe, the press then charged that the whole operation had been staged as a show for the generals, and American boys had died for reasons somewhat similar to the early Christians in the Roman arena. While this was nonsense, it did point up three things: that the CCF had built their line to the point where any operation against it would be exceedingly costly; that any kind of losses were rapidly becoming unacceptable to the American public; and that the brass, admittedly, did not have enough to do.
On 11 February 1952, Lieutenant General Maxwell D. Taylor, who had dropped as CG of the 101st Airborne Division in Normandy, replaced Van Fleet as Eighth Army Commander. Van Fleet, disappointed at not moving up to FECOM command, retired.
Max Taylor, handsome, a paratrooper, and superb soldier, arrived understanding the situation perfectly. Among his first directives to the line was an order that every man wear his flak jacket—the new nylon or steel- plated body armor devised and issued as protection against shell fragments—at all times. Any officer, high or low, who suffered men killed was apt to find himself in painfully hot soup.
February passed, with continuing outpost activity. Over MIG Alley, between the Yalu and the Ch'ongch'on, the jet air war increased in intensity, with hundreds of Communist aircraft now sighted, though the U.N. retained complete dominance of the air. The U.N. air interdiction against North Korea went on, destroying what little was left of its economy, making life utterly miserable for its people, but affecting the dug-in Chinese and North Korean armies, supplied from privileged sanctuary across the Yalu, hardly at all.
March came, and the men of the front-line divisions heard increasing rumors of a political settlement of the war. They heard that after a long recess since October, men at last were going to talk again at Panmunjom.
But during March, the enemy became more vicious along the line.
He flailed at the Marine outposts of Carson, Vegas, Reno. Reno, a particularly exposed section outpost that had been fought over many times, had to be abandoned, though elsewhere the 1st Marine Division held firm. The Chinese also assailed Old Baldy again, now held by a Colombian battalion of the 7th Division, and in a flaming debacle, took it.
After a violent effort, after some retail spending of men in wholesale totals, Generals Trudeau—called Shaped Charge by the riflemen—and Taylor decided the price of Old Baldy was too high. The Chinese were left in possession.
Afterward, there would be fist fights and bitter words between men of the 2nd Division, which had shed the blood of thousands of its troops holding Baldy, and those who wore the hourglass patch of the 7th, who had lost it.
With Baldy gone, the Pork Chop was flanked and by military logic should have been abandoned, too. But gradually now, the U.N. Command was beginning to realize the political nature of these hill battles. The CCF was fighting, not for territory that had little value, and would be abandoned anyway according to the agreement already signed at Panmunjom in November 1951, but in a test of wills. While it seemed foolish to expose men to danger and death on worthless real estate, the U.N. Command was being forced to play King on the Mountain with the Chinese.
For it was becoming apparent that each relinquished hill only whetted the Chinese appetite, and made the Communists more intransigent than ever. In their own way, they were trying to force the U.N. to give up on the POW question, and to end the war on Chinese terms.
Stubbornly, the U.N. Command refused to give up Pork Chop, and here, in April, American troops engaged in their heaviest fighting of 1953.
Spring 1953 was a cruel time in Korea. Once again, behind the blasted stumps and explosive-churned earth of the outposts, the grass struggled upward through the shell shards and bones; the geese flew north, honking, for the Manchurian border, and the magnificent Mongolian green-necked pheasants pecked with renewed vigor among the long-abandoned rice fields behind the lines.
Springs, loosened by the thaw, trickled down the hillsides, and the smell of sap was in the air.
Behind the corps boundaries, beyond the sound of guns, behind the Farm Line, the odor of fecal earth that had vanished from the untilled and unfertilized fields to the north began again with raw freshness. And from here southward to the Japanese Strait, life was again much the same as it had always been: hard, painful, and never free of debt.
Though most of the American money, the new lifeblood of the Taehan Minkuk, stopped in Seoul where there were again motorcars and imported luxuries, the blasted and burned cities were being rebuilt. To them flocked the thousands of homeless and jobless, living in squalor, as at Tongduch'on-ni above Seoul, on the boundary of United States I Corps. Here squatted thousands of Korean prostitutes—women whose husbands and fathers had disappeared into the Communist maw—old men, orphans. Here, they lived in wattle huts and hoped to survive.
Frequently, they strayed from Tongduch'on-ni over into the forbidden corps zone. The American MP's always caught them and turned them back to Korean police, who let them straggle back to the place the Americans called 'Little Chicago.' The Korean National Police were devoid of sentiment, but even they understood that all human beings had the right to earn their bread, as best they could.
The women plied their trade; the old men made Ridgway hats for the big loud foreigners; the orphans begged and stole, with equal fervor.
Thousands of men who had come to Korea saying, 'This war is for a bunch of lousy gooks,' passed through Little Chi, and thousands of them contributed millions of American dollars to the missions and orphanages.
Some, like Colonel Ted Walker, who came to hate Communism to the point of incoherency, adopted Korean waifs, and sent them to school in the United States. In 1953 not all the shining deeds of the American Army were done on line.
Bitter, feeling forsaken, haunted by the fears of all men going into battle danger, the Americans who passed through Korea and Japan whored and drank with abandon, and the whoring and the drinking had its chroniclers.
Few men wrote of the orphanages supported by battalions, or the schools donated by divisions. Few people, perhaps not even the Koreans, will remember them. For there was never enough.
