broadcast across the world.
It was here, perhaps, that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, soldier, aristocrat, man of God, had his greatest moment. He spoke, and he stated his case, but he did not sound the tocsin of revolt. What might have been public disgrace to a lesser man he turned into personal triumph.
There are such things as great men. Some are born, or make themselves, as Douglas MacArthur, and some, like Harry Truman, are made by the Constitution.
The storm broke, and then, like MacArthur, it faded away.
Power, after all, still stood on Pennsylvania Avenue. There was never any real possibility of congressional revolt centering around the general. The President, after all, was leader of the Democrats. They might gleefully slaughter his domestic program—after 1948 Truman got not one Fair Deal measure through Congress—but these same men had no desire to tear their party in shreds, however they felt about China.
And the leaders of the increasingly powerful Republican opposition—Bob Taft, Wherry, and Joe Martin—could hardly rally behind the general, even had he raised the standard of revolt. More than anything else, these men really wanted to get out of Korea entirely, not to expand the war into Central Asia.
It was ironic that those who screamed the loudest on MacArthur's relief were the former isolationists, and those who had consistently voted down or pared every military budget.
There was frustration in the spring of 1951, but no change of policy. The world had changed, and America was being forced to change with it. Containment, as developed by the Truman Administration, was not a satisfying answer. Millions disliked or distrusted it, but could put forth no better course. There were frustration and trauma.
The majority could no longer accept isolation as a way of life. And only the paranoid saw a true solution in atomic war.
There was nothing left but to return to the checkerboard, and to play the dangerous game.
MacArthur faded away in retirement; Ridgway soon proved, bluff paratrooper that he was, that he would not be a bull in the China shop of the
In the soggy, just-turning-green hills of Korea, the war went on.
First Lieutenant Leonard F. Morgan, of the Army 1st Base Post Office, arrived at Hungnam, North Korea, 12 December 1950. Morgan was an Adjutant General's Corps officer who had enlisted in 1938 and worked his way through the ranks. And over the years he had come to regard the flowing of the mails as seriously as any postman.
But at Hungnam, with the Marines and soldiers of X Corps streaming down out of the frozen hills for evacuation, Morgan was told politely but firmly that this was no time to set up in business. And just as firmly, he was ordered onto an LST for shipment to Pusan.
At Pusan, the 1st Base Post Office was billeted at the old Agricultural College Building, called universally by the troops 'Pusan U.' And here the P.O. had to wait until the lines got straightened out once more, and the mails could flow.
Then, on 5 February, Morgan, a small, dark, serious officer, at thirty-eight a bit grizzled for his rank, was told to take twelve enlisted men up to Suwon by air. He was to take tents and stoves and a minimum amount of postal equipment, mostly fixed credit—postal stamps.
He got into Suwon seventy-two hours after the Chinese had cleared it. It was cold as hell, with snow all over the ground, and now Morgan found out what it was like to be in what the Army called a bastard unit.
He arrived with a few tents but no mess facilities, no vehicles, or anything else. And there were no combat men in the Army Postal Unit; it strained their ability to get the tents up.
Fortunately for Morgan, he ran into Captain Bond of the 25th Division Quartermaster Company, in whose area the new APU was to be located. And Bond was a good man to know.
'I've got a big squad tent for your men, and I can feed you,' Bond said. 'We'll get you some litters from the Medical Company to sleep on.'
Shivering in their borrowed tent, the boys of the APU decided war was hell. But as Leonard Morgan told them, 'The mail must go through.'
Morgan himself carried $5,000 worth of postage stamps, which he kept chained to his cot post.
But at Suwon, he dragged out some fifty-five-gallon oil drums, made a platform, and put up a sign that he was open for business. There were some 88,000 American troops in the area, from the 2nd, 3rd, 1st Cavalry, and 25th divisions, plus the Air Force. The mail came in, in truckloads.
Day and night now, handling mail and the
For several hours after capture at Kunu-ri, the troops guarding Sergeant Charles B. Schlichter and the other men from his medical company marched the exhausted prisoners north. Finally, they herded them into a North Korean farmhouse, where they were allowed to rest till dark.
The men who were wounded had received no medical treatment, except for the little they could give themselves. One of the surgeons with the party, an American major, declared he had been an administrator for so long he was not up on the latest treatment. He was able to do very little to help.
With dark, the chilled, miserable men were forced outside. And now, from sundown to sunup, they were marched north. At dawn they staggered into another Korean farmhouse, where they were allowed to lie soddenly until the sun sank once more.
They received one meal a day, a handful of corn boiled in water. But all of them had been eating good United States rations, and as yet the cold and hunger hadn't really bothered them.
The single daily meal was fed to them in their canteen cups. Some men had lost or thrown their mess gear away. These ate out of their caps, or from their cupped hands, like animals.
And each day at dusk they were forced out into the stinging, freezing wind, to march north until light broke in the east. The Communists moved them by night, because they feared the United Nations air power, which still ranged over the whole of North Korea despite the retreat of the land armies; and they kept the prisoners on the road because they had taken far more POW's than had been anticipated, and they did not know what else to do with them.
For more than twenty nights, until Christmas 1950, they kept the POW's from Kunu-ri and other points marching over the hills, in circles, gradually bearing toward the Manchurian border.
Under the terrible pressure of those night marches, the meager diet, and the brutal cold, some of the American soldiers began to give up. Soon all were exhausted; many were sick.
On Christmas night, while people back home were recuperating from Christmas dinner and drinking eggnog, the men with Schlichter—now grown to several hundred—were marched over what seemed like the longest, highest mountain in Korea.
Worn out, miserable, hopeless now, several of the American POW's started to cry. One young boy gave up completely. He told Schlichter, 'Sergeant, I can't go on.'
Schlichter tried to argue him into continuing. But the boy refused to move. The guards came—and they were very considerate. They did not shoot or bayonet the boy, but brought a sled.
All night long, up the mountain and down its far side, other men took turns dragging the man who refused to march.
In the dawn, when the stooped, limping party halted under the harsh command of their guards, the face of the man who had been pulled on the sled was white with frost. He had frozen to death during the night.
The next day, the group of POW's arrived at a bleak, deserted bauxite mine. Here, in the little squalid huts that made up the old mining camp, the Americans were sequestered, some forty men to a hut. The valley was in no sense a true POW camp, with barbed wire, sentry posts, and the like. But it was surrounded by cruel mountains, and the guards stood about with ready guns.
As the long, bedraggled, stubble-faced column weaved its way into the mining valley, men failing out at each hut a lean collie dog ran up and down the column, barking happily. As the dog came up to sniff the strange Americans, Charles Schlichter held out: a hand to the friendly animal, soothing it.
That night, Schlichter and the men in his hut ate roast dog. The other men let Schlichter, who did the honors, have the largest piece.
