He saw the 1st Cavalry Division falling back on the Taejon-Taegu axis with alacrity. He made known his disappointment to General Hobart Gay, the division commander.
Gay, who had been Patton's chief of staff in Europe, admitted he did not know how to conduct a retreat—thus far in this military experience he had never been involved in one.
In addition to the problems of understrength units and missing batteries and battalions, lack of communications, and poor equipment, shaky morale and weak discipline, Eighth Army faced another problem, one that grew as summer lengthened.
July and August of 1950 were abnormally dry for Korea; the monsoon ended early, in blazing heat and droughts. The temperature soared to unusual heights, reaching 120 degrees at times.
The hillsides of South Korea are steep; often slopes of 60 degrees are found on low ridges. Under the sullen sun, the ridges shimmered like furnaces, and there was almost no shade in the scrubby brush that covered them.
And there is very little drinking water, outside the brownish stuff in the fecal paddies.
The land viewed from afar is beautiful, rolling terraces and rice paddies, each a subtly different shade of green. But each paddy is a humid, stinking oven, and the bare hills are like broiler plates.
When they left their trucks and moved up onto the hills and ridges, American soldiers, as one officer put it, 'dropped like flies.' Their legs, unused to hard pulls, gave out. The heat and exertion gave them throbbing headaches. During these weeks exhaustion and heat knocked out more men than NKPA bullets.
Short of water, lacking water discipline, they drank from ditches and paddies, developed searing dysentery.
They sweated until their shirts and belts rotted, and their bellies turned shark-white. Salt tablets became such an item of priority that they had to be air-dropped on units, along with vital ammunition.
Korea is a land cut by multiple hills and valleys, lacking roads. It is no terrain for a mechanized army. The principal—and sometimes only—means of getting from one place to another through the hills is shank's mare.
But American troops, physically unhardened for foot marches, were road-bound. They defended on roads, attacked on roads, retreated on roads. If their vehicles couldn't go, they did not go either.
FEAF soon made the roads unpopular with the Inmun Gun. On the roads, tactical air strafed them, rocketed them, burned them. The Inmun Gun left the roads and went over the ridges, and it seemed to bother them not at all. They went stolidly up the slopes with the patient, sideways, Korean peasant tread, and they carried their machine guns, mortars, and mountains of ammunition with them.
They set their guns up on the high ground behind the Americans, interdicting their supply roads. Americans had trouble attacking up the hills to knock them off. And when their roads were blocked, Americans could hardly drag themselves over the hills to safety, let alone their heavy equipment. Second to the Soviets, the American Army became the principal supplier to the Inmun Gun of guns and ammunition.
The great problem was that in 1950, an infantryman in Korea was called on to do almost the same things Caesar's legions had done, and to suffer the same hardships. In twenty centuries, infantry warfare has changed but little in the burdens it puts on the men in the mud. But in 1950, while ground warfare had changed little, the American society and the American soldier had.
In American society the best weapon against a convertible may be another convertible, but in Korea it is apt to be a. good pair of legs.
Johnny Walker, a tenacious little bulldog of a Texan, seeing the poor performance of his men, began to feel a certain warmth in his own britches area. He requested MacArthur to come to Korea, and they conferred, with only General Almond present. MacArthur said there was going to be no Korean evacuation, no repetition of Dunkirk. Walker agreed.
Walker moved among his divisions afterward and began to lay down the law. On 26 July he had issued a warning order for a planned withdrawal to defensive position behind the Naktong River, but now he put out an order that was promptly tagged by the press as 'stand or die.'
Walker knew Eighth Army would have to fall back more—he did not intend the order to be one to stand or die. But he was doing everything he could to slow the southward rush. A determination to stand—somewhere—had to be instilled in all ranks.
Walker's presence up and down the line was felt to good effect, though his order of 29 July had little effect other than in the press.
The front moved south. On I August, Walker commanded an orderly withdrawal across the Naktong, the last natural defense barrier to the port of Pusan. Once across, the bridges were to be blown, and all hands were to dig in for a final stand.
Behind the Naktong, Eighth Army would be only fifty miles from the sea.
The American and ROK divisions streamed back across the Naktong for several days, sometimes breaking contact with the NKPA, against Walker's instructions. By the evening of 3 August, all were across except a battalion of the 8th Cavalry, acting as rear: guard. This battalion was on the west side of the river at Waegwan, preparing to come across so that the bridge could be dynamited.
But this rear guard had a problem.
Thousands upon thousands of Korean civilian refugees were pressing upon these men, clamoring to be let across the bridge. Hundreds of thousands of South Koreans, frightened of the Inmun Gun, were fleeing south ahead of, with, and behind the fighting forces, complicating their job enormously.
As the rear guard came across the bridge to the east side, throngs of Koreans followed them, filling the bridge with jostling bodies. General Hobart Gay, who had ordered the bridge to be sent up only at his express command, instructed them to go back to the far side, and clear the bridge.
This they did, as dusk approached. Then, with the refugees pushed back onto the west shore, the rear guard turned and pelted across to the friendly bank—but the second they turned, the Koreans dashed madly for the bridge and soon filled it, even before the cavalrymen were across.
Three times, at Gay's order, they repeated the maneuver, without success. Short of shooting them there was no way to keep the Koreans from using the bridge. Even telling them it would be blown did no good.
Now it was growing dark, and the Inmun Gun was closing. As the rear guard recrossed to the east side for the third time, with the mass of Koreans close behind them, Hobart Gay, his face pale, said, 'Blow it.' He had no other choice.
Several hundred Koreans went into the river with the bridge.
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11
Perimeter
— Lieutenant General Walton H. (Johnny) Walker, to the staff of the 25th Division.
BY 4 AUGUST the entire United Nations force—the U.N. had now given the command of its effort over to the United States, and the Republic of Korea, though not a member, had placed its Armed Forces under U.N. command—had reeled into the Pusan Perimeter. So far only the ROK's and three occupation divisions from Japan had been engaged, and they had been blooded, knocked about, and pushed back. They had lost mountains of equipment and thousands of men. Staggering back into the small remaining toehold at the corner of the peninsula, the fighting men were exhausted, dispirited, and bitter.
Walton Walker reported to MacArthur that the 24th Division needed complete rehabilitation and that he had grave doubts as to the offensive capabilities of the 25th.
Behind the Naktong River the U.N. held only a rectangular box of terrain ranging one hundred miles from north to south and fifty miles across. On the west was the barrier Naktong. Across the north rose high and rugged mountains, difficult for an attacker to penetrate. On all other sides was the sea.
But at the bottom of the rectangle lay the major port of Pusan, now pumping renewed American strength into
