This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

Later in the night, an officer finally returned with a truck and rescued Meloy and several other wounded men who had gathered with him.

An hour after Meloy was sent out, the officer commanding north of the roadblock, Captain Fenstermacher, told the 500 men remaining to prepare for movement out cross-country. He passed orders to set the 100 waiting vehicles afire with gasoline, and as he did so, fell shot through the throat. At dusk, the men scattered into the hills.

Some of them made it. Some did not. Some of the wounded they brought out, others they left behind. One chaplain, Herman Felhoelter, refused to leave the wounded when the unhurt men would no longer carry them. A sergeant, watching from another hill through his field glasses, saw Felhoelter killed by the NKPA along with his charges as he knelt over them, praying.

All night, and all the next day, the remnants of the 19th Regiment streamed into Taejon and the surrounding villages. Only two companies, E and G of the 2nd Battalion, were intact. Less than half of the 1st Battalion came back. The regimental HQ had taken unusual losses in both officers and enlisted men. The supporting artillery had lost heavily, too.

On 17 July, General Dean relieved the 19th with B Company of the 34th. The Rock of Chickamauga then moved twenty-five miles southeast of Taejon to reorganize and reequip.

The battle for Taejon was lost. General Dean knew that he now had only the remnants of three defeated regiments, each one little better than a battalion in size. The 21st had come apart at Osan and Choch'iwon; the 34th had been shattered successively at P'yongt'aek, and Ch'onan; the 19th had bought it at the Kum River. Not only were the regiments weak in men and equipment; they were exhausted and their morale was poor.

Dean himself was worn down. For fourteen days he had lived from crisis to crisis without a breathing spell. He did not plan to make a last ditch stand in Taejon, though he did plan to delay there.

But on 18 July General Walton Walker, commanding Eighth Army, flew into Taejon. Walker had been assembling a great deal of data on the Korean situation, and was becoming nervous to know when and where the enemy was going to be stopped. Back home, the Pentagon was still putting out sweetness and light over the intervention and 'police action,' but Johnny Walker's own pants were beginning to burn, however confident the Pentagon remained.

On 11 July, an official communique reported '65 enemy tanks damaged or destroyed.' On the same date Tokyo claimed that the 'morale of North Korean troops was reported cracking under the steady hammering from the air.'

On 13 July 1950 the New York Times, reporting the request of the Army for 20,000 draftees, said, Draftee duty set—none will go to Korea soon, 'and not many at all,' Army says.

On 14 July the Times also carried the following dispatch, datelined 13 July, Tokyo:

Front dispatches have greatly exaggerated American losses in one of the most skillful and heroic holding and rearguard actions in history although outnumbered at times more than 20 to 1, and the casualties inflicted on the enemy have been immeasurably greater than they have sustained.

On admitting the loss of the Kum River Line, the Times quoted the Pentagon as saying: Enemy said to use 150,000 men in the onslaught, led by Russian tanks, some weighing 60 tons— though the attack had been mounted by less than 20,000 NKPA, and the largest tank sighted in Korea had been the 34-ton T-34. Bad news was always offset by the mention of insuperable odds.

The Times, widely quoted by other newspapers across the land, reported 16 July 1950 that 'General Collins (J. Lawton Collins, Chief of Staff) spoke well of American troops and their equipment. 'In spite of their greenness,' the Army Chief said, 'the troops had done an exceptionally fine job.' '

The same day Tokyo commented that 'morale and combat efficiency remained excellent despite the necessity of withdrawals and holding actions.'

There was constant talk of air power and air attacks and the damage air was doing to the enemy. Gradually, the reports became almost plaintive, as air power remained unable to stem the North Korean advance.

Side by side with the official Pentagon and Tokyo communiques, however, there were stories by men such as Richard J. S. Johnston and Hanson Baldwin, of the New York Times. Johnston reported troops as saying, 'I never saw such a useless damn war in my life,' and wrote: In the last few bloody days of fighting the bravado and self-assurance have given way—

One of the problems, in 1950, was to recognize the problem.

Walker had decided that he could hold along the Naktong River in southeastern Korea with the divisions and troops now on the way. Already, his boss, MacArthur, had developed plans for taking the enemy in the rear by amphibious assault—but such a plan was worthless unless the enemy advance could be stopped short of the Naktong.

Talking with Bill Dean at the 34th Infantry CP, Walker told Dean he needed two more days' delay in Taejon, so that the 1st Cavalry and 25th divisions could deploy to the city's east. Then he flew back to his own HQ at Taegu, above Pusan.

His chief of staff asked Walker how much rope he had given Dean, and Walker replied, 'I told him that I had every confidence in him, and that if it became necessary for him to abandon Taejon earlier, to make his own decision, and I'd sustain him. Dean is a fighter. He won't give an inch if he can help it.'

Johnny Walker was right.

General Dean was to be much criticized for remaining inside the city as it fell. The majority of the men complaining did not comprehend the situation on the ground in Korea. They could not understand that a senior commander, issuing orders for a last-ditch defense from a safe position in the rear, was apt to be trampled in the rush.

The United States Army, understandably, has been reluctant to discuss the problem, even among its own. Once it had returned to the bosom of a permissive society, and tried to adopt that society's ways, its own hands were tied. Once it had gone on the defensive to its critics, it would never regain the initiative. When the answer to a problem is not immediately at hand, the better part of valor is to ignore it.

Dean had almost no communications. If he wanted to know what was happening to the front-line troops, he had to be on the front lines. He had found, sadly, that it was much easier to get a message to the rear than it was to get one carried forward.

In the chaotic situation along his front, with units continually breaking contact and moving south, Dean could never be sure of the real situation. This was one reason he would stay so long in Taejon.

He had three basic reasons for remaining inside the beleaguered city; one, to keep up the crumbling morale of the 34th Infantry and the other defenders by the sight of their commander moving shoulder to shoulder with them; two, to set an example for the ROK officers and staffs fighting alongside the Americans, who by now had all virtually climbed on the Pusan Express; and three, Bill Dean wanted to see close up just what kind of fighting cat the North Korean was.

As he would write later, he was too close to the forest to see the trees.

The North Korean assault on Taejon was like all other North Korean attacks—they crashed into the defenders head on pinning them down, forcing them back, while at the same time they flanked or infiltrated to the rear and blocked the defenders' retreat. At any given moment, it was impossible for Dean or any other commander to know what the situation was to his rear; this was a kind of tactic that the Europe-trained American officers, who liked to keep tidy lines, could not grasp until too late.

As it developed, Dean kept what he wanted of the 34th in the city, and sent other elements of the division, including his own HQ, to the east. As he would say much later, what he did afterward could have been done by any competent sergeant—but in saying this, Dean was thinking of the old Army, not the forces of 1950.

There is no point to detailing the day-by-day and street-by-street actions during the next three days. They were repetitions of what befell the Americans earlier. The NKPA attacked. The defenders fought, then fell back. The enemy got into their rear, and cut them off. The Americans disintegrated and saved what they could.

On the morning of 20 July Dean awoke to heavy gunfire as the ragged line drawn around Taejon continued to shrink. The city was now afire in many places, the stench of smoking thatch competing with that of gunpowder and the underlying filth of the Orient. And by the morning of the 20th, Dean realized that his hope that help might arrive