the Tongduch'onni road, up which it would attack at dawn.
The arriving 2nd Division, under Brigadier General Lee Hyung Koon, would take over the entire P'och'on sector, and attack up the right-hand road in a coordinated effort with that of 7th Division.
Counterattacked, the advancing Inmun Gun would be halted short of Uijongbu, and, with luck, destroyed.
Brigadier General Yu accepted his orders, and began to move his units westward at midnight.
Lee Hyung Koon did not buy the plan at all. He explained that his division was still on the road and that only his Division HQ and two infantry battalions had closed in on Uijongbu. He said he could not possibly deploy the entire division north of Uijongbu by morning—it would not even have arrived.
Chae told him, 'You will attack with whatever troops you have available.'
'But I shall have to attack piecemeal, throwing in small units one at a time. And my men cannot march all night and fight at dawn. We must defer the counterattack until all my division, or at least most of it, is in position!'
Chae said, 'No. You are overruled. The attack will proceed as I have planned.'
Lee looked at Captain Hausman, the American KMAG officer. Hausman agreed with Lee, and said so. Lee's 2nd Division would be in no position to make a major effort; in fact, such a commitment risked its destruction.
But Hausman had no command here. He was an adviser lent by a friendly government, and at the moment even his status was not clear. Even had he been a major general, he could not overrule, and would not have felt justified in an attempt to overrule, the ROK chief of staff.
Chae, his huge bulk sweating, would listen to no more argument. Furious, Geeral Lee departed for his command post at Uijongbu.
The hours of remaining darkness passed swiftly. General Yu, with his weary, half-demoralized troops strung out along the Tongduch'on-ni road after many of them had made a night march, gave orders for a counterattack to be launched at daylight, and when the orders had gone out, paced up and down inside his CP, watching the intermittent flashes of gunfire to the north. At dawn, he would see to it that his 7th Division attacked.
But on his right flank, at Uijongbu, General Lee Hyung Koon, surrounded by his Division HQ, with two tired battalions dozing along the road, did nothing.
He had made up his mind, and he had no intention of doing anything.
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5
Disaster
— Unofficial doctrine of the United States Army Infantry School.
BECAUSE OF THE International Date Line, there is a day's difference in time between Korea and the United States; it was still Saturday, 24 June, in Washington when word of the North Korean attack arrived.
Early Sunday morning, Korea time, both the military attache and Ambassador Muccio had cabled the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence and the State Department, respectively. Muccio said, in part:
'It would appear from the nature of the attack and the manner in which it was launched that it constitutes an all-out offensive against the Republic of Korea.'
Meanwhile, newsmen from the various wife services sent their own messages from Seoul.
The word, from varying sources, first reached Washington at about eight Saturday night; Muccio's cable came in at nine-thirty. On Saturday night in Washington, particularly in summer, things were slow. It was not until the next day, Sunday morning, that even a good panic could get organized.
At nearly the same time, members of the United Nations Commission that was still in Korea reported to U.N. Headquarters in New York. Secretary General Trygve Lie was at his Long Island estate; receiving the news by telephone, the rotund Norwegian blurted, 'This is war against the United Nations!'
Lie, furious, called an emergency meeting of the Security Council to convene at 2:00 P.M. Sunday.
Official Washington, meanwhile, had been taken completely by surprise. As General Lyman Lemnitzer reported to :an angry Secretary of Defense a few days later, while United States Intelligence knew that North Korea had had the capability to attack the South, similar capabilities had existed all along the Soviet periphery, and not one intelligence agency had singled out Korea as an imminent danger point.
When the Soviet pressure had relaxed in Europe in 1949, with the ending of the Berlin blockade and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Washington had tended to relax also. Owing to American commitments and atomic superiority, no war seemed imminent in Europe—and Asian policy had not been completely firmed.
The shift of Soviet strategy away from Europe, which after all remained the major prize, to the periphery of Asia had not been understood in the West. And the West tended to think only in terms of an all-out Soviet attack, of which there was no evidence. Almost no one had considered the possibility of limited military operations, for which the Western powers were completely unprepared.
Now, on 25 June and later, Washington could never be sure that Korea was not merely a smokescreen, to divert American attention and troops while an assault against Europe was being prepared. For this reason, even after it had committed itself to the defense of Korea, the United States Government was reluctant to throw any major portion of its strength into the peninsula.
Only gradually did American planners realize that the Soviets might attempt to achieve their ends by bits and pieces rather than in the traditional American way, with one fell swoop. Soviet strategy, like Soviet thinking, has always been devious where American has been direct.
On Sunday, 25 June, the government was stunned by the Communist action, In the climate of opinion prevailing in Washington, such an overt military operation was unthinkable.
The surprise pointed up a continuing of American Intelligence. The various intelligence agencies poured a vast amount of information into Washington; they knew the numbers of divisions, guns, tanks, and naval craft of potential enemies. But this intelligence could not be evaluated because Washington had not even one pipeline into official circles of enemy capitals; they could not even estimate what the potential aggressor was thinking or might do.
This was no change from the past. In December 1941, American Intelligence knew that strong carrier task forces of the Imperial Japanese Navy had left port. But not understanding official Japanese thinking, the fact had meant nothing to Washington.
The situation in 1950 was no change from the past, and there would be little change in the future.
Now, Sunday morning 25 June, there were observers in Washington who recalled a similar shock on another Sunday eight and one half years before.
President Truman was in Independence for the weekend. He immediately prepared to fly back to the capital and called a conference of high Defense and State officials at Blair House that evening.
But the shock in Washington was more of anger and annoyance than of alarm. No one yet could know the real extent of the military disaster that had already overtaken the Taehan Minkuk.
As the shock wave set off by the overt Communist aggression against the Republic of Korea reverberated through the West, Seoul began its second day of war, and by now the city was relatively calm.
Confidently, their initial hysteria drained away, Seoul's million and a half inhabitants waited for word of their army's victories in the North. Troops still streamed through Seoul toward Uijongbu and other points north, and soothing statements came over the national radio.
The day passed quietly; then in the afternoon of 26 June, Seoul broadcast the news that the 7th Division had counterattacked north of Uijongbu.
Fifteen hundred enemy soldiers had been killed, fifty-eight tanks destroyed, and a mountain of other materiel had been captured. Listening, the people shouted with enthusiasm.
But as evening fell, an ominous tide of frightened, fleeing refugees began to pour into the suburbs from the north, and, by listening closely, men could hear the distant mutter of cannon on the wind. The sound seemed to be
