“Inchon,” he said simply, and Major Park lapsed into an embarrassed silence, while Rhee found new respect for the colonel.
Inchon, Rhee had realized, had happened way back in 1950, but was it a salutary lesson in the present circumstances? None of the three men had been born, let alone been a soldier in the army when the present Dear Leader’s father, Kim Il Sung, had unleashed his million-strong Communist Army, his seven Soviet-equipped North Korean Army divisions hurling themselves against the South. As Kim, Park, and Rhee grew up, they, like all of North Korea’s children, had learned the story of the eighty-thousand-strong NKA invasion force which, spearheaded by an armored division of over 250 tanks, had surged across the 38th parallel early on the early morning of June 25, 1950. Seoul, the South Korean capital, had fallen in seventy-two hours, its fleeing, terrified population caught by Movietone cameramen, the sweeping black-and-white images of the South Korean collapse flashed across the world, the prospect of yet another world war threatening barely five years after the cataclysm of 1939–1945 had ended with the hope that a United Nations could prevent war.
Rhee remembered the exhilaration in his great-grandfather’s voice as he described how his platoon, indeed all the NKA platoons, ran, not walked, behind their Chinese-built Soviet T-34 main battle tanks as the NKA armor crushed Seoul, mercilessly routing and rolling over the terrified outgunned, outtrained, outplanned, and panic- stricken South Korean troops. U.S. troops were rushed from U.S.-occupied Japan to hold the line. They couldn’t. Though many were veterans of the fierce fighting of just a few years before in Europe and the South Pacific, having been blooded in the horrific close-quarters combat from Saipan to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, many were now out of shape, having enjoyed the long postwar furlough in Japan and carrying “spare-tire” stomachs to show it. And they were out of practice, their positions overrun as they joined the millions of fleeing South Koreans.
Through sheer luck, the Soviet member of the five-member-country Security Council had stormed out of the U.N. headquarters in New York in a fit of pique the day before the invasion and so wasn’t present for the crucial emergency Sunday Security Council vote as to whether or not the U.N. should send U.N. forces to assist the South Koreans in their hour of dire need. Without the Soviets, who would have had the power of a veto, the Security Council vote was unanimous to assist South Korea. And so U.S., British, Australian, Canadian, Turkish, and other troops, under overall U.S. command, embraced that euphemism for war, “police action,” on the Korean Peninsula. Like all civil wars, from before Athens and Sparta to the massive slaughter of the American Civil War and the equally savage Russian Revolution of 1917, the war between North and South in Korea was unforgiving, members of one American division machine-gunning unarmed NKA POWs in the dread-filled tit-for-tat nature of the “police action.” In less than twelve months, the NKA, as Rhee’s great-grandfather had told him, had managed, with the help of the Chinese, to force the U.S.-led, blue-flagged U.N. troops to retreat over 175 miles to the southern end of the “limp dick” as U.S., Australian, and British soldiers insultingly referred to the drooping-phallus-shaped country. The U.N. soldiers were fighting for their lives in the ever-shrinking Pusan pocket, a sixty-mile-diameter enclave of burning buildings and exhausted, dying men.
It was an extraordinary victory for Kim Il Sung’s armor-led Communist legions. And a massive humiliation for the U.N. forces, especially for the U.S. Army, the once-great capitalist army that as recently as five years before had boasted a strength of millions but which now stood, very unsteadily, at only a fraction of that. America, Rhee’s great-grandfather explained, was so typical of weak, democratic countries. It had demobilized so rapidly in 1945– 1946, after the Nazis and Japanese fascists had surrendered, that all the U.N. force had now, apart from the relatively few tough British Commonwealth brigades, U.S. Marines, and the Turks, were what Rhee’s great- grandfather’s generation called overfed, “degenerate Americans” shipped over in haste from Japan.
The NKA’s noose of steel, Rhee recalled his great-grandfather telling him, had tightened around Pusan, forward NKA officers consolidating their forces and making wagers with one another about who would be the first officer to have the honor of seeing the first U.S. flag of surrender.
Kim, seeing how the young lieutenant’s concern about a possible Freeman attack from the Free Trade Zone had been stymied by the mention of Inchon, reminded Major Park and Rhee in an uncharacteristic moment of levity that the joke at the time around the Pusan perimeter was that many South Koreans and some Americans had torn off their white T-shirts and underpants, so desperate were they to surrender. But it was not easy to see them, given the thick, roiling black smoke that had resulted from the U.N.’s forces’ ad hoc scorched-earth policy, and in the chaos that ensued from the South Korean forces’ massive abandonment of arms and materiel during their rout to Pusan.
Lieutenant Rhee knew the rest: it had been drilled into him and his comrades at school how his great grandfather’s generation of North Koreans had continued to close on Pusan along the 150- to 200-mile-long semicircular perimeter, the NKA’s disposition of forces looking from high points along the banks of the Naktong River on the evening of September 14 like a predator’s open mouth about to snap shut on the beleaguered American and other U.N. forces, their backs to the East Sea. U.S. fighter bombers were swarming overhead, but all along the perimeter, as had often been the case during the U.S. and South Korean retreat from the 38th parallel, the confusion created by the flood of refugees intermixed with fleeing soldiers, the NKA in hot pursuit, made it impossible for the pilots to distinguish friend from foe, scores of the U.N. soldiers being killed or wounded by “friendly fire.”
“Then it happened,” Rhee’s great-grandfather told him. “Inchon.” Rhee remembered that whenever his great-grandfather came to this part of the story about the Americans being exhausted, about to be pushed into the sea, the old NKA soldier’s face became a bitter mask. “The American gangster MacArthur landed at Inchon.”
Lieutenant Rhee recalled the story of how the seventy-year-old legendary American general, risking all, had done something that, to even some in the U.S. Pentagon itself, seemed at best ill-conceived, at worst insane. Withdrawing the vitally needed 1st Marine Division from the Pusan pocket, MacArthur used the Marines to spearhead an amphibious assault by the American X Corps against Seoul’s port of Inchon, well over two hundred miles to the northwest of the Pusan pocket. The sheer audacity of it, a long, overextended Marine, air and naval left hook deep
Now Colonel Kim and Park were, like Rhee, remembering the landing. Every graduate of the harshly disciplined NKA staff college was required to study MacArthur’s strategy. The American general, Colonel Kim reminded Major Park and Lieutenant Rhee, had snatched victory from defeat by forcing the NKA on the defensive at Inchon. With the NKA having suddenly to throw all it had into trying to contain MacArthur’s brilliant landing, the beleaguered Eighth Army in the Pusan pocket was not only able to hold its ground but to effect a breakout. Suddenly the pursuing NKA was the pursued. Which was why now, all these years later in Kosong, Kim’s mention of “Inchon” had so quickly nullified Major Park’s initial disdain for young Rhee’s reminder that the American gangsters “have helicopters.” Park realized that if there was to be an American reprisal for the terrorist attack against the three airliners, it might not be a direct line of attack but very indirect, like MacArthur’s deep thrust behind the NKA’s front line.
In any event, the three men took comfort from the hope that the Americans, despite their opulent logistical capability, would be unable to make any attack, direct or indirect, for at least two to three weeks, given the formidable line of rapidly approaching thunderstorms. The rain in them would blind even the most sophisticated helicopters, except perhaps for the renowned Pave Low. Besides, the coast north and south of Wonsan fairly bristled with NKA radar posts.
“I have to go,” Kim announced abruptly. “All we can do is stay sharp.”
It was 1600 hours, the earlier Prussian blue of the East Sea now a brooding expanse as the line of thunderstorms moved ominously southward down North Korea’s sullen east coast as the three officers dispersed from their meeting, Colonel Kim on an unannounced inspection in the tense, tight air of the DMZ’s Panmunjom, Lieutenant Rhee to his Beach 5 unit, and Major Park to Wonsan Harbor, sixty miles north of Kosong, where he was liaison officer between the army and east coast elements of the North Korean East Sea Fleet, whose 236 combat vessels were responsible for the defense of North Korea’s rugged east coast all the way north from the DMZ to the Yalu, Amur, and Ussuri rivers on the border with China and Russia.
At 1620, Rhee radioed the five section leaders of his Unit 5 patrols. Although, as Colonel Kim had said, it would take the American gangsters a while to prepare any assault they might be contemplating, the lieutenant wasn’t going to be so foolish as to slacken off from sending patrols fanning out into the hills around the Kosong warehouse. It would keep his men on their toes, though he did admit to himself that there was a problem, something that every military and civilian leader knew about, namely that if you place people on
