stopped, machine-gun fire poured upon it from all sides.
The infantrymen ran for the ditches and began to fire back, as Mace pushed the truck and tank to the side of the road with his own tank. But the M-39 vehicle would not budge. Lieutenant Heath ran for it, to see if the brakes were set. As he boarded it, a bullet struck his rifle, knocking it from his hand, and beside the stalled carrier he saw and heard a desperately wounded man.
This soldier, holding out an empty canteen, pleading, gasped, 'Me Turk—me Turk!' Heath had no water; no one in his party had any. All he could do was to shake his head and point to the north, from whence help was coming. The Turk had been shot in both the stomach and shoulder.
And then Heath saw something that struck like a dagger of ice in his own bowels—the blood surrounding the Turk's wounds was clotted and dark; he had been lying beside the road many, many hours.
Instantly, Charley Heath knew that instead of holding a shallow block along the main supply route, the enemy held these ridges at least three miles deep, and they had held them for a long time. Long enough to emplant machine guns, long enough to set up and register mortars. In a single sickening second, Heath knew the division was speeding into a trap.
But it was too late to stop, too late to do anything except to try to barrel through. Heath leaped onto the carrier and released the laterals; Mace's tank shoved the now loosened vehicle off the road. Only a few minutes had been lost, but these were enough to stop the entire convoy behind them.
And from this halt, it would never completely recover.
In motion once more, Mace's lead tank roared ahead, picking up speed again to fifteen miles per hour. Firing, fired on, the tank clanked south another three thousand yards, and entered the narrow defile of the pass. Coming at such speed, Mace surprised the Chinese assembled there; he even saw one group leap up from their noon meal as he went by. Grinding down from the pass, he saw more wrecked vehicles with Turkish markings, and he rammed across a makeshift roadblock the Chinese had set up. The heavy tank barreled across the obstacles; the jeeps immediately following had no such luck; they piled up against it.
Spurting onward, throwing up clouds of dust, Mace's tank cleared the pass and swooped around a bend. High in the turret, his hand on his .50-caliber machine gun, Mace stiffened as he saw a tank in the road.
But it was an American tank, one of those that had broken through earlier. Beyond it was the British brigade, brought to battle south of the pass and being knocked about. The British would not be able to close the gap this day.
Mace's tank, miraculously, had come through without loss among either crew or riders—the first and last vehicle to do so. Surprise, and their momentum, had served them well. And as they went through the British lines, these men knew the worst: that instead of holding only a small stretch of the road under light fire, a full Chinese division had locked itself over six miles of the route, covering it with small arms, mortars, and forty machine guns. Nor could Mace and party give warning; like those of the British, his radios wouldn't carry over the pass.
At any rate, such warning would have come too late. Behind the lead tank, with a roar of flame and singing steel, the huge trap closed.
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21
Terror by Night
— Walter Winchell, 1950.
IN THE DARK days of December 1950, certain American commentators became very bitter over the performance of American troops in North Korea. American armies were, after all, being pushed about by those of a third-rate power.
Whatever its skill or courage, it cannot be argued that the United States Army still suffered from deficiencies in discipline and training. A 'fair weather' attitude cannot be wiped out in a day. It was not until the Korean War was many months old that new Army trainees began to live half their time in the field, and to undergo a third of their training by night. Slowly, commanders then began to restore the old hard slap and dash that had characterized Grant's men in Virginia, Pershing's AEF, and Patton's armored columns.
This would be a bitter battle, fought against both men in the ranks and the public behind them. It would never be completely won.
But the principal reason that the Eighth Army was defeated along the Ch'ongch'on was that the men marching north had no more idea of what awaited them than had Lieutenant Colonel Custer riding toward the Valley of the Greasy Grass.
There had been the same arrogance in the march north that had characterized Braddock's movement against the French and Indians, Dade's demonstration against the Seminoles, and Custer's ride to the Little Big Horn. And it was the same conditions of terrain, low cunning, and barbarian hardihood that brought all these forces to defeat by an intrinsically inferior enemy.
It was almost as hard for minds trained on the fields of Europe to adjust to Korea as it had been for British generals to learn to fight colonials—who threw the book of civilized warfare away.
But the most ironic thing, in those bitter days of December 1950, was that the commentators who cried havoc the loudest were the very men who had done most to change and destroy the old 1945 Army. These were the men who had shouted for the boys to be brought home, who had urged the troops to exert civil rights. They were the ones who had hinted that leaders trying to delay the frenetic demobilization, or the reform of the Army, were no better than the Fascists.
And these were the men who screamed most shrilly when some young Americans on the field of battle behaved more like citizens than like soldiers.
Once irrevocably committed in motion, the single forlorn hope of the 2nd Division's motor column to clear the gauntlet sprung about it rested on its momentum. Once begun, there was gigantic power in the mechanized onrush difficult even for machine guns to stop.
But the single M-39 carrier, which forced Mace's tank to halt for half a dozen minutes, dealt this slender hope a fatal wound.
For as the long, serpentine column braked to a halt behind Mace, a hail of gunfire beat against its exposed sides like rain, killing men, exploding trucks, driving riders into the ditches. Still moving, stricken vehicles could have slued off the right of way. Destroyed while at the halt, they plugged the narrow road for those pressing on behind.
Brought under sweeping automatic fire, the tactically disorganized riflemen of Peploe's battalions could only tumble off their tanks and trucks and fight back from the roadside. But officers were separated from their platoons, and battalion commanders had lost touch with their companies upon entrucking. No organized action could be started and pushed home against the enemy firing from the flanking ridges. The movement had begun as a motor march, and a motor march it remained until the last.
When the tanks finally pushed wrecked vehicles out of the road, after each accordion-action halt, the armor and trucks, spurred by the flailing steel beating against them, often roared ahead without pausing to reload their passengers.
Wounded and dead clogged the ditches. Some lay apathetically, while others ran along in the column's dust, desperately trying to hitch a new ride. Officers had not anticipated trouble, and now, committed, they could only bore ahead, trying to bring through the few men riding in the same vehicle with them.
Some vehicles stopped, loaded hale and hurt alike. Men grabbed hold of others as they raced by, only to be kicked off by the already overcrowded riders. And each stop, when it occurred, only delayed the column more.
There could be no turning back. As the Light Brigade had ridden into the valley of death, so the 2nd Division rode into six miles of hell. The greater part of the leading serials came through safely, though blooded. Their momentum and the furious strafing of the encircling hills by the Air Force took them through. Then, as the road
