This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

could hold their beachhead indefinitely, Tokyo saw no point in this.

It was a new war, and already men in Tokyo and Korea were beginning to think in terms of a solid line of defense somewhere south of the 38th parallel.

To X Corps came orders to embark from Hungnam and Wosnan for redeployment in South Korea. Under an encircling ring of artillery, tanks, and naval rifles, X Corps went aboard ship, taking its equipment and supplies, even its gasoline, with it. It was not a Dunkirk—there was no pressure against the embarkment.

Thousands of North Koreans, anti-Communist and desperate to leave with the Americans, were taken aboard. Hungry, freezing, with little medical aid or facilities, hundreds of these unfortunates died during the embarkment and passage to Pusan.

Day after day, the corps perimeter shrank down to the icy sea. At last the field pieces were firing at the hills from the wharf area; then they turned and were trundled aboard ship.

Hungnam was blown up, and the city set afire. Even the docks were destroyed. On Christmas Eve, with the coastline a mass of flame and billowing dark smoke, the convoys stood to sea, leaving the shore to the enemy.

A gallant page had been added to the history of American arms from Yudam-ni to the reservoir, from Hagaru to the cold plateau of Kot'o-ri.

But though thousands upon thousands of his frozen corpses dotted the hills, and the survivors would be long without effective combat power, as in the west the enemy had won the field.

Ominously, the precarious balance on the remote shores of Asia had turned again.

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23

Chipyong-ni

Goddamit, get back up on that hill! You'll die down here anyway—you might as well go up on the hill and die there!

— Lieutenant Thomas Heath, G Company, 23rd Infantry, Chipyong-ni.

BY 1 DECEMBER 1950, Walton Walker, MacArthur, and Washington knew what the front-line riflemen had been painfully aware of for some days—they had an entirely new war on their hands. MacArthur was outraged at the Communist defiance. With entire sincerity he branded the Chinese intervention a criminal act, and with equal sincerity, from this time on, he desired to unleash the lightning upon the transgressors.

The Chinese criminals should be punished; they should be bombed, interdicted, and harassed, and their warmaking potential destroyed for decades to come. Despite the sharp tactical defeat on the ground of North Korea, the United States had sufficient power to do so, if such power were to be thrown into the war.

It was a time of confusion once again in the United States. Men in government met, while newspapers and periodicals spread a finely distilled gloom across the land. From their arrogance of October most media came full circle; now the action on the Ch'ongch'on and at the reservoir was described as the greatest defeat in American history; even as the Marines marched out, heads up, and the Eighth Army, once more in order, pulled back from P'yongyang, newsman and analyst cried disaster, and that the troops were lost.

Time, in its 11 December 1950 issue editorialized: The United States and its Allies stood on the abyss of disaster. The Chinese Communists, pouring across the Manchurian border in vast formations, had smashed the U.N. Army … caught in the desperate retreat were 140,000 American troops, the flower of the U.S. Army—almost the whole effective Army the U.S. had. With them, fighting to establish a defensive position were 20,000 British, Turkish, and other allies, and some 100,000 South Korean soldiers.

It was defeat—the worst defeat the United States had ever suffered. If this defeat were allowed to stand, it would mean the loss of Asia to Communism.

To place the defeat in North Korea in perspective, American casualties during the entire time of action did not come to half one week's total in the Ardennes campaign, when Germans killed or wounded 27,000 Americans in one seven-day period.

The 2nd Division, in the west, bearing the brunt, lost its equipment and some 4,000 men; the Marines lost slightly less. And after the first week's fighting, American retreat was a matter of policy. It was decided in FECOM, by the military. American forces had never been positioned to fight the CCF. When its intervention was a known reality, the American tactical and strategical position was untenable.

But the U.N. Army, pulling south faster than its tired, decimated pursuers could at first follow, was basically intact. It was in no danger of being over- whelmed, although there was some appearance of gloom and doom among commanders and staffs.

The problem that worried Washington was not what was happening in the frozen wastes of North Korea, but what was happening in the chancelleries of Communist nations. Now, as in summer, Washington could never be sure the thing it feared most—the start of World War III—was not occurring.

At a mass briefing of all officers stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, concurrent with such briefings all across the world, an Army spokesman stood before a map of the earth, pointing out the location of Soviet divisions, Soviet air armies. He pinpointed the hordes of the CCF; discussed the at least 175 divisions—one-third of them armored— Russia had assembled in East Germany alone. He talked of Soviet nuclear capability, and most of the assembled Americans, knowing their own strengths and weaknesses, were shaken. In the event of a major Soviet move, only the American nuclear deterrent could stave off disaster.

But after the divisions were placed on the map, and all the possible moves of the potential enemy analyzed, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant seated in the middle of the theater stood up.

'Sir,' he asked the briefing officer, 'but what do we figure the Communists will do?'

The briefing officer touched his pointer to the floor, looked down. Then he met the lieutenant's eyes and smiled wryly.

'Son, I don't have a living clue.'

In Washington, General of the Army Omar Bradley could have said the same. He was certain of only one thing: That a war with the Chinese, on the mainland of Asia, was the wrong war, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy. The more important men in government tended to agree with him.

Time shrilled, for all the world to read in its 18 December 1950 issue: The policy of containment was dead. There remained only the policy of retaliation and positive action by the U.S. and its allies to damage Communist power at the sources from which aggression flowed.

But what the editors of Time believed, and what was truth, were, as it so often is, two different things.

Harry Truman had not altered his basic belief that the United States might engage in general war with the Communist bloc, but it had no reasonable hope of forcing its will over the vast expanse of immense humanity of Eurasia. In defense of its vital interests America would still fight such a war—but Harry Truman saw no profit in it, and he would avoid it as long as he could do so with honor. Truman and his advisers could only hope that the Eighth Army could avoid complete debacle.

In the last days of November 1950, MacArthur wired Washington: We face an entirely new war … this command has done everything humanly possible within its capabilities but is now faced with conditions beyond its control and strength. MacArthur now wanted to accept Chiang Kai-shek's offer of Nationalist Chinese troops, but Washington told him such a move would have to be cleared with the U.N.—which was obviously hostile to the idea.

On 28 November, in a Security Council meeting, Omar Bradley informed President Truman that the JCS did not think the situation in Korea was 'such a catastrophe as our newspapers were leading us to believe.' At the same time George Marshall, Secretary of Defense, stated that in his opinion it was essential for the United States to go along with the United Nations and that all the service secretaries had agreed that neither the U.S. nor the U.N. should become involved in a general war with Red China if it could be avoided. Dean Acheson, Secretary of State, said that the nation should try to find some way to end the conflict.

He added that if the United States went into Manchuria and bombed bases and airfields there as part of a