4
Retreat to the Naktong
South of Seoul, Kim Il Sung’s army paused. The North Koreans needed time to regroup and allow their logistic “tail,” such as it was, to catch up. Yet the week that they lingered, however essential to enable them to consolidate their hold on the capital and prepare for the next thrust, was critical in the development of the war. When their advance began once more on July 5, the Communists encountered Task Force Smith, north of Osan. Smith’s battalion, committed under the most unfavorable circumstances, inflicted only the merest check upon the Communists. But behind the 1/21st Infantry the remainder of the U.S. 24th Division was deploying.
Major General William Dean, its commander, a big man of fifty-one with a reputation as something of a martinet, set up his headquarters in Taejon as the South Korean Army appointed its third chief of staff in less than three weeks of war. For all the South Korean assertions that their army was fighting desperately, the Americans could see evidence only of chaos and retreat. Subsequent evidence from Communist sources suggests that, in reality, in those weeks some South Korean units inflicted substantial damage and important delay upon the invaders. But the only useful intelligence about Communist movements came from the American aircraft now flying constant interdiction missions. These in turn were critically hampered by lack of general knowledge of the North Korean forces and specific information on targets. No effective system of forward air control existed. In those first weeks of war, the U.S.A.F. poured thousands of tons of bombs onto Korea. There is little evidence that these proved more than an irritant to Communist operations in the first stage of the war, however important they became in August and September.
The next unit of the 24th Division to face the enemy assault was the 34th Infantry, moving up behind Lieutenant Colonel Smith’s battalion. The 34th, 1981 men strong, devoid of tanks or effective antitank weapons, was transported from Japan under conditions of haste and confusion, and was no more prepared in mind, training, or equipment to arrest the North Korean advance than Task Force Smith. But Major General Dean could give its commander only the simplest and most straightforward of orders: to deploy his men in blocking positions across the key routes southward, at Ansong and Pyongtaek. It was to these positions, late on the night of July 5, that the stragglers and survivors of Task Force Smith began to drift in, bearing their bleak and confused tale of being overrun by a Communist armored host. The disarray within the 24th Division was compounded by almost total lack of communications: telephone wires were repeatedly cut, radios were defeated by distance and mountains between units. In the rain and mist of early morning on July 6, the 1/34th found itself facing North Korean infantry and armor swarming south across the shallow river line they were defending.
The brief action that followed was considerably more inglorious than that of Task Force Smith. The Americans engaged the Communists with mortars and machine guns, but quickly found the enemy closing in upon them. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Ayres, saw no alternative to retreat, if his men were not to be isolated and cut off. He had earlier been advised by General George Barth that, come what might, he was “not to end up like Brad Smith,” left irretrievably exposed behind the Communist advance. A few minutes ahead of the enemy’s T-34s, amid a frenzied stream of Korean refugees, their carts and baggage and animals, the Americans hastened southward, discarding equipment as they went. By the time General Dean had learned that his point battalion was in full retreat, and hurried forward in his jeep to check the movement, the 34th Infantry was south of Chonan. A furious scene ensued between the divisional commander and the senior field officers of the 34th. They had offered no significant resistance to the enemy and had withdrawn without orders. Dean expressed his disgust. He now had no alternative but to order them to dig in where they stood. He also relieved the commanding officer of the 34th Infantry and replaced him by an officer with experience of regimental command in World War II. It was the first of a long procession of sackings in the field which proved necessary in those early, traumatic weeks. Martin, the 34th’s new commander, survived just forty-eight hours before his death in action at Chonan.
• • •
“As daylight broke on July 8 [recorded Private First Class Robert Harper of the 34th Infantry’s Headquarters Company] we heard this loud clanking noise off on the left. We understood now what was happening—their tanks were coming. Eventually I could see them dimly, moving through the morning mist. I counted them. When I got to nine, an order was given to pull back off the railroad tracks and set up in the first row of houses behind the sewage ditch. From there I saw the North Korean infantry moving to my right across the field in front of the railroad depot. I could hear occasional small-arms and machine-gun fire. Mortar rounds began falling nearby. The tanks continued to roll down the road toward us. We had no way of stopping them. They came to the end of the road and I could hear them firing. I did not know which of our companies were down there but knew they were catching hell. We were ordered back to a narrow street, where we waited to see what would happen next. I heard the new CO, Colonel Martin, tried to take on one of the tanks with a bazooka. The tank scored a direct hit on the colonel, and he was killed on the spot. We began receiving real heavy mortar and tank fire. . . . We ran down some alleys and met some more GIs who said orders had been issued to evacuate the town. I could hear a lot of small-arms and mortar fire behind me. We went to the east edge of town, worked our way through rice paddies and got to the road. There were quite a few civilians still on the road. We joined them in heading south. We drew heavy artillery fire and began to lose a lot of people.”1
• • •
“Resistance had disintegrated, and now our troops were bugging out,” wrote Dean.2 Through the wretched weeks that followed, among the gloomiest in the history of the United States Army, the pattern of Chonan was repeated again and again. An uncertain and unhappy American infantry unit would be hustled into a defensive position, its officers unwilling or unable to conceal their own confusion and dismay. The flood of refugees would slow to a trickle, then halt altogether. There would be a tense silence, men peering up the empty road, until they heard the tortured squeal and clatter of advancing armor. The North Korean tanks would come forward until they met American fire. Then they halted to allow infantry to swarm past them, infiltrating the American positions and working around their flanks. The Americans then withdrew, often in undignified haste, abandoning vehicles and equipment as they escaped as best they might amid the swelling columns of civilian refugees. “We knew that we weren’t doing very well,” Major Floyd Martain, one of the survivors of Task Force Smith, declared wryly. “But we kept saying to ourselves, ‘Well, here we are, and we’ve been here a month, and where the hell is the rest of the United States Army?’ “3 They felt profoundly lonely.
The essential criticism of the performance of the 24th Division at this period centers not upon the fact that its units repeatedly withdrew, for had they not done so, they would assuredly have been bypassed and eventually destroyed. It was their failure to inflict significant damage or delay upon the enemy before disengaging that so embarrassed their commanders. Neither MacArthur nor his subordinates could reasonably have expected the scanty American forces deployed thus far to halt the Communist invasion. But well-handled regimental combat teams could have hit and run, punished the North Koreans for a few hours with mortar and machine-gun fire, then pulled back to the next obstacle suitable for defense. In reality, American officers seem to have had neither will nor skill to create antitank obstacles, to use mines even when these became available, or to employ the support weapons they had against the North Korean infantry. Terrain, logistics, poor communications, and refugees did more to delay the North Korean advance in the first weeks of July than the American infantry in their path.
• • •
On July 10, General Douglas MacArthur was formally appointed Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command. The United States rejected the UN Secretary-General’s proposal that the war should be directed by the “Committee on Co-Ordination for the Assistance of Korea,” as the British, French, and Norwegians seemed to favor. Since the U.S. was bearing the overwhelming burden of war—and directly contributing most of its cost—Washington insisted upon direct military control and got its way with its allies. “In the military field,” the principal diplomatic historian of the UN has written, “the control of the United States government was complete; in the political field, consultations with the United Nations and some contributing nations were more frequent. On occasion the UN made various recommendations. In the final analysis, however, a large range of political decisions was taken by the United States government as the United Command.”4 On July 13, General Walton Walker, a corps commander under Patton in Northwest Europe, established his Eighth Army headquarters in Korea, with operational responsibility for UN ground forces in the field. The stubby, rugged, impatient little Texan could scarcely enthuse about the material he was being asked to work with. His forces were exclusively now, as they would remain principally for many weeks, men of the American Occupation Army in Japan. The only available reinforcement for the crumbling forces of Syngman Rhee must come from Japan, where the 25th and 1st Cavalry Divisions were being hastily mobilized for war. Until they came it was essential for Dean’s 24th to delay the Communist advance, to give ground only yard by yard between Osan and the next natural defensive line, forty miles southward on the Kum River.
The North Koreans brushed past the two regiments of Dean’s shaken force deployed along the Kum with almost contemptuous ease. At its low, almost barren summer level, the river presented no significant threat to T-34s. The 19th Infantry found itself compelled to fight its way out of encirclement, with the loss of almost one man in five, more than half of its 1st Battalion. With his flanks turned, Dean was driven back into Taejon. The Communists began their assault on the city on July 19. Dean directed its defense with furious energy. Antitank teams armed with the newly arrived 3.5-inch bazooka scored a string of successes against the Communist T-34s. Dean himself led one team, stalking a tank through the streets for more than an hour before successfully destroying it. But within a few hours North Korean armor and infantry had broken through, and the survivors of the 24th were retreating southward once more. Dean himself remained a fugitive in the hills for a month before he was captured, the senior American officer to be taken by the Communists in the Korean War.
It was a period when there was a desperate need for heroes, and Dean was represented as one across the United States. At the end of the war he was decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor. His courage was never in doubt. Yet some expert soldiers in Korea were dismayed, even disgusted, by the collapse of leadership in the 24th Division even before the Taejon battle. “Why any general would tolerate the chaos at his headquarters in the fashion that Dean did, I never understood,” said Colonel John Michaelis, a distinguished World War II combat veteran who witnessed it. “There was a sense of hysteria. Nobody seemed to want to go and kick somebody in the butt. I never knew what Dean thought he was doing, as a divisional commander, to grab a bazooka and go off hunting tanks.”5 Michaelis was among those who considered Dean’s behavior the negation of his responsibility as a commander. He was not alone in his opinion. “Dean was very personable,” said Lieutenant Colonel George Masters, “but he still did not know what war was. Fundamentally, he was a silly man.” If these seem harsh judgments, they are those by men who watched the agony of the 24th Division. It was difficult to pass any less cruel verdict upon the performance of most of the American units in the battle. “We had the conceited opinion that we were trained soldiers,” said Colonel Masters. “Yet what we did in Korea, as we do quite frequently in our history, was to try to use civilians as soldiers and expect them to be combat-effective. We are usually disappointed.”6
Between July 10 and 15 the U.S. 25th Division landed in Korea. On July 18 the 1st Cavalry—paradoxically, an infantry division—came ashore at Pohang-dong. By July 22 they were deployed. The remains of the battered, indeed almost ruined, 24th Division were able to withdraw through their positions and at last catch their breath. In seventeen days the 24th had lost some 30 percent of their strength, more than 2,400 men reported missing in action. Yet the reinforcing formations gave little ground for confidence on their first appearances in action. On July 20 the 24th Infantry of 25th Division broke and fled after their first few hours in battle at Yechon. The 24th was an all-black unit, a relic of the U.S. Army’s ill-fated segregation policy. The pattern of the 24th’s first action was repeated in the days that followed, with men streaming toward the rear as soon as darkness provided cover for their retreat. An inexplicable panic overcame the 1/24th on July 29 after facing a Communist mortar barrage. It became necessary to set up roadblocks behind the 24th’s positions, to halt deserters and stragglers leaving the line. The U.S. Army’s official history castigates the regiment: “The tendency to panic continued in nearly all the 24th Infantry operations west of Sangju. . . .” By the end of July, Walker recognized that it was possible to use the 24th only as an outpost force, a trip wire in the face of Communist assaults. It proved necessary to maintain another regiment in reserve behind the front, to conduct serious resistance when the 24th broke.I In Washington, Collins, the Army Chief of Staff, recognized the failure of the concept of all-black units. At the earliest possible moment, black soldiers must be integrated into white units. But there was no time for that in Korea in July.
Even for the better American regiments, the first encounter with the Communist manner of making war in Korea was disturbing, confusing, demoralizing, brutalizing. It was a common experience to see a herd of refugees shuffle toward an American position, then sweep aside at the last moment to reveal the North Korean infantrymen sheltering among them. Even for GIs who had seen combat against the Japanese in the Pacific in World War II, it was a frightening experience to meet a North Korean enemy willing to hurl away his life in suicidal “human wave” charges at point-blank range. Later, when the Chinese came in, these tactics would be translated to a vastly greater scale, even more unnerving in their fanaticism. The Communists acknowledged no claim of treachery or breach of the rules of war in their use of soldiers in civilian clothes or pretended surrenders to mask attacks. Most shocking of all to American sensibilities in Korea and at home in the United States, the Communists proved ruthlessly indifferent to the taking of prisoners. A shudder of revulsion ran through the American nation at the discovery, in Korea, of the first groups of American prisoners shot dead by the roadside, their hands tied behind their backs with barbed wire. It rapidly became apparent that the North Koreans served prisoners in such fashion whenever they had no explicit need for them alive, for propaganda or intelligence purposes.
Bleakly, American commanders perceived a certain advantage when news of Communist atrocities spread through their formations. Some soldiers who had hitherto made little show of wanting to fight were now brought face-to-face with the likely consequence of capture. There was no salvation to be sought in a comfortable POW compound. Yet, conversely, fear of being outflanked and cut off became an obsession in many units. “Bugout fever,” the urge to withdraw precipitately in the face of the slightest threat from the flank, was already a serious problem. “I saw young Americans turn and bolt in battle,” wrote Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune, “or throw down their arms, cursing their government for what they thought was embroilment in a hopeless cause.” Americans trained and conditioned to fight as part of a large army of mutually supporting elements were deeply ill at ease holding isolated positions with their flanks in the air, with the knowledge of perhaps twenty or thirty miles of mountains between themselves and the next allied formation in the line.
Beyond this, the terrible shocks of the first weeks of war, the sense of facing a merciless Asian enemy caused many Americans to extend their fears and suspicions to the entire people of Korea: “the gooks” meant not merely the Communists, but all Koreans. Communist atrocities provoked callousness in many Americans, fighting a desperate struggle for survival, toward the Asians around them, creatures from another planet whose language they could not understand, whose customs bewildered them, whose country seemed most vividly represented by the universal stench of human excrement manuring the fields.
Yet whatever the shortcomings of the American military performance in those weeks, it narrowly sufficed. And for all the bitter criticisms of the South Korean Army, the ROK, whose battered and demoralized remnants were falling back alongside the Americans, its struggle had not been in vain. Amid the pain of withdrawal and defeat in July, America and her allies were disposed to dwell upon the sufferings of their own armed forces. Yet in those first weeks of fighting, surprised and facing overwhelming odds, the South Koreans and their American allies inflicted heavier losses upon the Communists than was understood at the time. It later emerged that the North Koreans had suffered some 58,000 casualties between June 25 and early August. At the moment when the confidence of Walker and his army was at its lowest ebb, when they saw defeat staring them in the face in southeast Korea, the UN forces in the peninsula by now outnumbered their Communist enemies.
The 25th Division held its positions in the center of the country until July 30 before being compelled to begin falling back. The 1st Cavalry, outflanked around Yongdong, began retreating on July 29 toward Kumchong. And even as the Americans fought the threat from the north, in the west an even more dangerous Communist movement was under way. A North Korean division had hooked around Taejon and hastened through the defenseless countryside southward. By August 1 its leading elements were near Masan, just thirty miles short of the southeastern port of Pusan. If the North Koreans could reach Pusan, the Americans would be encircled with little chance of escape. Their predicament was desperate. Walker was able to rush units of the 25th Division down to Masan, with hours to spare, to block the advance. By now the Eighth Army’s commander knew that both his men and the North Koreans had run out of room for grand maneuvers. The defenders must stand and fight. On the high ground behind the great loop of the Naktong River they would command positions of great natural strength. In the first days of August the long files of dusty, exhausted Americans and their overloaded vehicles trudged doggedly south and east, to the new line. Here, on the last mountain mass before the sea, the fate of Walker’s army, of the United Nations in Korea, would be decided.
Dressing Ranks
Even as the men from that soft, ill-prepared American Occupation Army struggled to improvise their perimeter against the Communist assault, the Western powers were gathering forces to reinforce them. From the outset it was apparent that MacArthur would need every man who could be spared from the democracies’ worldwide commitments if he was to hold the North Koreans. At the Pentagon, the War Office in London, the war departments of Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand, politicians and staff officers pored earnestly over their orders of battle and staff tables, seeking to determine what could be spared for Korea. From far and wide, reservists were being recalled from their civilian occupations and tranquil domestic lives; draftees hustled through basic training; cadre formations built up to strength with whatever men could be found to fill their ranks, and equipment to stock their inventories. Only five years after the end of World War II, the victors found themselves embarrassingly, absurdly pressed to find the resources with which to fight a limited war in Asia.
MacArthur’s initial optimism about the scale of resources required to halt the Communists in Korea was replaced by mid-July with demands for men on a scale that thoroughly alarmed the Joint Chiefs in Washington. On July 5 he sought—and received agreement for—the deployment of the 2nd Infantry Division, a regiment of the crack 82nd Airborne, and the 2nd Engineer Special Brigade. On July 20 four National Guard divisions were activated. Within days of the outbreak of war, Congress rushed through a one-year extension of the newly lapsed Selective Service Act. The Defense Department declared a requirement for 50,000 conscripts in September, the same again in October, 70,000 in November. Caught in the contemporary mood of war fever, Congress voted the President an $11 billion emergency defense appropriation. Yet even the vast economic strength of the United States did not make it possible, by a mere national act of will, instantly to transform a demobilized, almost decayed military machine into an instrument of war capable of fighting effectively in Korea while maintaining combat readiness for a greater struggle elsewhere in the world. For months to come, as America mobilized, her military effort in the Far East would be a patchwork of expedience and improvisation.
• • •
Some young Americans, matching the mood of the time in their country, saw the war in genuinely idealistic terms, as an opportunity to take a heroic part in the crusade against communism—that and perhaps a hint of boredom with postwar life in a small town. Bill Patterson was the tall, lanky, twenty-year-old son of an industrial worker in Stillwater, New York. He and a group of friends became passionately excited by the cause—forty-five of them marched in a group to enlist: “They had a problem over there. We wanted to do something about it. And I guess I didn’t have a lot to do at home. We started preaching around the town, saying—‘Come down to Albany! Join the service!’ I remember driving one kid of seventeen home to his parents to sign the papers.”7
Private Warren Avery was a bus driver’s son from Virginia, a high school dropout who had “bummed around” for a year before joining the Army in June 1949. He volunteered for Korea because the war sounded exciting. He was issued with a brand-new M-1 rifle, pushed onto a Pan Am airliner to make the first flight of his life to the Far East, and posted to the 29th Infantry on line on the Pusan Perimeter just ten days after he put in his name for Korea.8
Corporal Selwyn Handler was called to active duty with the 1st Marines after two years as a reservist, a few days after returning from summer camp. He found the intense, purposeful bustle at Camp Pendleton entirely romantic: “To me, it was a great adventure.”9 A few reservists with young families were unhappy, but most exulted in the intensive training that continued every day on the ships on which they sailed for Japan. Marine Bill Sorensen had always bitterly regretted missing World War II, not least because his idolized elder brother had won the Congressional Medal of Honor as a sergeant. He was thrilled to be recalled from the reserves and shipped to join the 7th Marines. As they practiced firing their rifles over the fantail of the transport in mid-Pacific, the young man from Michigan enthused like a schoolboy about the prospect of combat. But an old sweat said to him, “Sorensen, as soon as that first shell goes over your head, you’ll wish you’d never seen a war.”10 And, of course, it was true.
But many men still believed that whatever was happening in Korea—and whatever Korea was—it would “never be any big deal.” Private Clyde Alton, from Indiana, a World War II veteran of thirty, found himself drafted to a battalion of the 2nd Division alongside the same top sergeant with whom he had gone through the North African campaign. He and Alton agreed that Korea was unlikely to amount to much: “This is going to be no war, cos these people are natives.”11
The Pusan Perimeter
The six-week series of actions that came to be known as the battle of the Pusan Perimeter began on the night of July 31 when the last of Walker’s retreating army crossed the Naktong eastward. “There will be no more retreating, withdrawal, readjustment of lines or whatever you call it,” the Eighth Army’s commander declared in a ringing order of the day following the fall of Chinju. “There are no lines behind which we can retreat. This is not going to be a Dunkirk or Bataan. A retreat to Pusan would result in one of the greatest butcheries in history. We must fight to the end. We must fight as a team. If some of us die, we will die fighting together.” If it was corn, this was an hour when corn, as well as courage, was called for.
The Naktong River itself created an obstacle between a quarter and half a mile wide in its lower reaches defended by the Eighth Army but was shallow enough to be forded in many places. More important for Walker, it was commanded by steep hill ranges on both banks. Half the length of the American perimeter lay along the river line. On the south side the Americans were now dug into positions of great natural strength. Armor, heavy artillery, and support equipment was being unloaded in quantity at Pusan. As the fighting stabilized, forward air control and clearer identification of positions made fighter bomber strikes increasingly effective against Communist concentrations. Walker’s most serious problems, his chronic difficulties throughout the Perimeter battle, were the poor morale and training of many of his men together with the shortage of manpower which made it impossible for him to hold his entire 130-mile front in strength. At the end of July, Walker disposed of a paper strength of some 95,000 men. Most of his 47,000 American combat troops were deployed in three infantry divisions of the Japan Occupation army, some of whose units were already badly mauled. Week by week this number was increasing as reinforcements reached Korea—the Marine Brigade, the British 27 Brigade. Walker could also call upon 45,000 South Koreans, though the combat value of these men was very limited indeed. Most were entirely untrained levies, dragged at gunpoint from their villages days before being sent to the front.
In August 1950 the men on the Pusan Perimeter saw themselves as a beleaguered army, clinging to the United Nations’ last toehold in Korea amid the onslaught of massed ranks of Communist fanatics. Beleaguered Walker’s army indeed was. But it is a measure of the psychological dominance the Communists had achieved at this time that most Americans would have been frankly disbelieving had they been told that the UN forces by now outnumbered the North Koreans significantly, and outgunned them overwhelmingly. The ferocity and suicidal recklessness of the massed attacks of Kim Il Sung’s units, night after night through those weeks, gave the defenders the impression of an Asian horde with limitless reserves of manpower. In reality, the North Koreans were squandering their dwindling reserves of armor, ammunition, and trained men. But again and again the Communist gamble came close to success. Enemy attackers broke through Walker’s line, began pushing forward to open a chasm in the front, and were halted only by the last-ditch movement of one of his handful of reliable “fire-brigade” units to stop the gap.
The battle for the Pusan Perimeter was marked by an almost daily succession of crises for the Eighth Army, in which disaster was averted by the narrowest of margins. Kim Il Sung and his commanders fully grasped the urgency of smashing through to Pusan before the UN buildup made their task impossible. The North Korean 4th Division mounted one of the first big attacks against the U.S. 24th—the battle of the Naktong Bulge. On the night of August 5 they successfully pushed forward across the river with tanks and guns, overrunning American outpost positions. In the days that followed they built up strength on the east bank, gaining ground steadily.
On August 17 the Marine Provisional Brigade was committed to counterattack. Two days later, after bitter fighting, the Communists were driven back across the Naktong. And even as the 24th Division was being hard pressed, farther north the 1st Cavalry and ROK 1st and 6th Divisions faced a succession of thrusts aimed to break through to Taegu, where Eighth Army headquarters was sited. By August 15 they had come within fifteen miles of the town. Three Communist divisions were poised for the assault. But when two further enemy formations, the 3rd and 10th Divisions, sought to force the Naktong eastward to link up with the assault, in a week of intense action between August 8 and 15, they were thrown back with massive losses. American air and artillery concentrations hammered their crossing points by day and night. The Naktong’s defensive value was diminishing as the river fell to its lowest summer level. Some of the 1st Cavalry’s forward positions east of the river were overrun. But the North Koreans proved unable to reinforce their leading elements. The attack was repulsed. Walker could turn his attention to the northwestern threat to Taegu.
The 15th Division bore the brunt of the fighting in “the Bowling Alley,” as it became known, the sheer-sided valley in which a week-long tank battle—one of the rare armored encounters of the war—raged as the Communists strove to break through. The defenders watched in awe as the glowing armor-piercing shells of the T-34s streaked down the valley through the night, searching out the American Pershings. Again and again the Communists pushed forward, yet each time their assaults broke upon the barrier of American firepower. By August 24 the northwestern thrust had burned itself out. The sector was left in ROK hands, while the 25th Division was withdrawn.
At the northeastern end of the perimeter, the ROK 3rd Division was pushed back through Yongdock to Changsa-dong. On August 10 the North Koreans worked through the mountains to cut the road south behind the South Korean positions. The 3rd Division was successfully evacuated by sea, but the town of Pohang-dong was lost, and Walker’s resources were stretched to the limit to fill the hole in his line. Scratch American task forces were dispatched to support ROK units in the northeastern sector. To their relief, they began to perceive that the Communist effort and manpower in the area were almost spent. Pushing cautiously north again, by August 20 they had retaken Pohang-dong. Walker was confident that he faced no further serious threat in this quarter.
• • •
Most men’s first impression of Korea was of the stench, drifting out from the land to the sea—of human excrement and unidentifiable oriental exotica, mostly disagreeable. Replacements and new formations filed down the gangplanks at the pierside amid the disturbing spectacle of casualties being loaded alongside. There was no shortage of black jokes about the most likely fashion of leaving the country. Pusan was a grossly overcrowded shambles of corrugated iron, street markets, refugees, military convoys, beggars, prostitutes, and organized crime. Most American units had been organized and reorganized, stripped of specialists and reinforced with drafts so often since early July that officers, NCOs, and men scarcely knew each other. “We realized something was radically wrong the moment we arrived,” said Lieutenant Clyde Fore of the 29th RCT. “We could see our advance party sitting on the quay, silent and unmoving. Our unit really was unfit to go at all. We had been told we would have three or four months in country to train before we were committed to combat. Instead, on the quayside we were just told to uncrate the weapons and get ready to go in the line.”12
When Lieutenant Colonel Robert Taplett, commanding the 3/5th Marines of the 1st Marine Provisional Brigade, landed on August 1, “everything seemed in turmoil—there were too many people with a wild stare in their eyes. The whole story of the army at this period is a very unsavory one.”13 The Marines were dismayed by meeting army units that had abandoned their dead, and even wounded, on the field, by units that, indeed, did not linger to fight at all. There were tales of officers who had found it convenient to make their own way back to Japan, and of the black battalion of the 9th Infantry, which had failed to distinguish itself, to put the matter politely, by its determination in combat.
When Private James Waters reported with two other replacements to the 1/35th Infantry of the 25th Division on August 28, his company commander welcomed them bluntly: “This isn’t a police action—it’s a war. You’d better get it into your heads that you can get killed at any second.”14 Waters’s companions were indeed killed within weeks. The seventeen-year-old Missourian found the nervous strain of the night battles, the constant uncertainty about where and when the enemy would come almost intolerable. He and his comrades came to hate even the cowbells tinkling in front of the positions, for the North Koreans sometimes used them to mask their movements. The low moment of the day came toward evening, when section by section they filed back down the hill to the chow jeep, knowing that night was approaching. The high moment followed in early morning, when once again they went to get their chow, knowing that they had survived the hours of darkness.
“Everything I had read about Bataan, I felt in the first few hours after landing at Pusan,” said Sergeant John Pearson of the 9th Infantry. “People were just completely demoralized. We were told right off that the front had collapsed. As we were taken forward on the train, we could see GIs on flatcars, without weapons, going the other way—stragglers getting out.”15 Pearson was dismayed to learn that his raw recruits would not even be given time to zero their weapons. They were dumped out in the countryside by trucks that turned and drove back toward the city at once to fetch more men. They were filling their canteens in a stream when a furious officer drove up in a jeep, jumped out, and began demanding what they were doing. It was Walton Walker himself. They said they were taking on water. “What are you thinking of?” shouted the Eighth Army commander. “I want your asses forward.”
Without reconnaissance, they were launched into a counterattack to recover a lost position, advancing in a skirmishing line across open paddy fields toward high ground held by the enemy. Their battalion commander was wounded within a few minutes, while men dropped right and left from the Communist fire. But they reached their objective. In the days that followed Pearson began to marvel at the incompetence of the North Koreans, as much as the shortcomings of his own side: “They just threw their tanks away, coming at us head on again and again.”
Pearson was twenty-seven, a veteran of the Pacific campaign who had found life in the postwar army an anticlimax—“I couldn’t stand all the peace and quiet.” He had married a German girl while stationed in Frankfurt, and the very night after that first action in Korea he received a letter reporting her safe arrival in New York. Pearson was the son of British immigrants and a keen student of military history. He cherished a sepia photograph on the wall at home, of his Uncle Charlie, a Lancashire Fusilier in the First World War. In Korea he was dismayed to see how far the U.S. Army had declined since 1945: “Somehow, the whole thing had come unglued.” There were too few West Point officers, too few trained men. They became accustomed to the sudden appearance of North Korea infiltration parties behind the front, to sudden movements from position to position to meet Communist night attacks, to the chronic shortage of tank and artillery support on their own side. One morning Pearson was an awed spectator as the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade launched its legendary assault in the battle of No Name Hill. “They went up in column of companies. They came back on stretchers in column of platoons,” he said. “It was a magnificent thing, but out of another era—a typical Marine frontal attack.”
That night the 9th Infantry were committed to the battle. After fighting all through the hours of darkness, the men stood up on their positions and cheered as the Australian P-51 Mustangs came in rocketing and machine-gunning the North Korean trenches at first light. Again and again as the infantry met Communist attacks and approached their last reserves of ammunition, they were saved at the last moment by resupply from the patient files of Korean porters trudging up the reverse slopes, their backs bent over their A-frames laden with ammunition. “We couldn’t have fought the war without those Korean litter bearers,” said Pearson. “There were a lot of complaints about them, but I guess there were a lot of complaints about Gunga Din, too.”
Sergeant Pearson was walking the line of his platoon’s positions when a new Communist assault began, and he was slow jumping for a foxhole. A bullet entered his thigh, turned on his message book, and stopped at the base of his spine. He suffered instant trauma, and lay thinking himself dead, wondering dimly what would happen to his wife. Then a man gave him a drink from his canteen, which made him feel even worse. Semiconscious, he endured the agony of being bumped and jolted down the hill on a stretcher, along an endless track by jeep. At the aid station, the orderly who stripped off his boots asked if he could keep them: “You won’t be needing them.” He made the first helicopter trip of his life to an operating table from which he looked up at an exhausted, blood-spattered surgeon who said, “This is not going to hurt. We’ll give you a spinal.” Then he pulled Pearson’s bowels up, and the sergeant was torn by excruciating pain. They left the bullet and the scraps of his message pad inside him. Next he remembered a train, and hearing a grenade explosion, and the hammer of quad .50-caliber machine guns. Was this the reality of a guerrilla attack or a comatose fantasy? He never knew. In Pusan a priest gave him the last rites. He murmured that he was an Anglican. “That’s all right,” said his comforter reassuringly. “It all counts upstairs.” A British hospital ship bore him to Japan. Thence, after almost six months of medical care, he was returned to the United States in March 1951.
• • •
It was only with the deepest reluctance that the British government and chiefs of staff at last agreed to send a token ground force to Korea. In response to Washington’s urgent pleas, 27 Brigade, part of the Hong Kong garrison, was dispatched posthaste to join the defenders of the Pusan Perimeter.
The Brigade’s arrival at Pusan was not auspicious. Their brigadier, a sound, steady, competent professional named Basil Coad, was met by an American officer with the cheerful greeting, “Glad you British have arrived—you’re the real experts at retreating.” When Coad and his staff were taken on an introductory tour of the line by an American general, the British were disconcerted to find that their movements were stage-managed for the benefit of the accompanying photographers. They were staggered by the lack of military security, above all by the freedom with which men could telephone on civilian circuits from the perimeter to girlfriends in Japan. And the British had ample problems of their own. Many of their men were young conscripts, bewildered to find their service abruptly extended to go to war.
• • •
For many South Koreans the process of discovering the meaning of Communist liberation was extended through the four months that Kim Il Sung’s army occupied their country. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of this period in the subsequent history of Korea. In the years between 1945 and 1950, many of those living under the regime of Syngman Rhee were dismayed and disgusted by the corruption and injustice that the old President came to represent. For all the rumors filtering down from the North, about land reform and political education, there seemed no reason to imagine that life under Kim Il Sung was any worse than under Syngman Rhee. The two vicious totalitarians appeared to have much in common. Even when the invasion came in June 1950, in the words of the young bank clerk’s son Minh Pyong Kyu, “We still did not realize that this was a catastrophe for us.”16 Syngman Rhee’s creatures conducted some odious killings of alleged Communist sympathizers as they fled south. Yet the behavior of the North Koreans in their four months of dominance of the South, their ghastly brutalities and wholesale murders of their enemies, decisively persuaded most inhabitants of the country that whatever the shortcomings of Syngman Rhee, nothing could be as appalling as Communist tyranny. In 1950, and in the years that followed, many distinguished Western journalists such as the British James Cameron were so disgusted by the excesses of Rhee’s lackeys that they became opponents of the UN presence in Korea. Not a few UN soldiers were appalled by the acts they witnessed, committed by South Korean soldiers and police. Yet the attitude of such observers as Cameron reflected a Western liberal conscience that shrunk from facing the relative moral issues that Korea posited. Something will be said below about the crimes of Syngman Rhee’s minions. But to this day not a shred of evidence has been discovered of crimes by the Seoul regime on the scale which the North Koreans committed during their rule in the South: the awful mass murders, of which the 5,000 bodies discovered in Taejon alone were only a sample. The UN Command later estimated that some 26,000 South Korean civilians were slaughtered in cold blood by the North Koreans between June and September 1950. The arrival of the Communists unleashed a reign of terror which gave the United Nations cause in Korea a moral legitimacy that has survived to this day.
• • •
Young Minh Pyong Kyu and his family lived near the West Gate prison in Seoul. They watched the arriving Communist army unloose its doors, spilling out into the streets thousands of captives, common criminals, and political prisoners who ran forth yelling “Long Live the Fatherland!” Minh said, “In the beginning, it was an atmosphere of unrestrained happiness, of true liberation. Everybody was running through the streets, leaping for joy.” Minh’s family found themselves penniless. But they had relations in the country. His father decided to travel to visit them with his younger brothers, in the hope of getting food. Minh went back to his medical school. He found most of the teachers still in residence, having declared decisively for the cause of socialism. Minh and other students who had been expelled for political activity were readmitted. But there were no classes. Only the hospital was functioning, under North Korean military supervision. Minh was impressed by the Communists’ tough discipline. They kept themselves to themselves, they committed no excesses. “Then, in the days that followed, we heard that the Communists were rounding up ‘reactionaries.’ Slowly, the atmosphere of terror set in.”
Kap Chong Chi, a twenty-two-year-old student, knew from the beginning that, as the son of a landowner, his position and that of his family was perilous. He spent the night after the Communist seizure of Seoul deep in thought about what he should do. He had still reached no decision the next morning, when he walked out into the street to see the bodies of two policemen, their identity cards laid neatly upon their chests. Yet, foolishly, he went to the house of a friend in the police force to ask his advice. The man had gone, but two strangers carrying rifles stopped him by the door and demanded to know who he was. His answers did not satisfy them. He was taken away to police headquarters near the Capitol Building and held alone with his fear all that day and night. Early the next morning he was marched through the courtyard, past the bodies of men already executed, and taken up to the third floor. He joined a long procession of men and women awaiting interrogation, their wrists tied together with strips of cloth. After an endless, wretched wait, he found himself before the People’s Court. The judges, in white civilian clothes, were themselves newly released from Syngman Rhee’s prisons. To his dismay, he identified one as an acquaintance of his older brother. This man said, “I know your family. Landowners. Your life is finished.” Kap was taken away to join some thirty others, mostly South Korean soldiers or policemen, in a basement cell.
The captives said little to each other through the hours and days that followed, each one fearful of willing his own death by identification with another. A succession of different Communist officials took their names and asked further questions. Kap, in desperation, tried a new tactic. He told his interrogators that, like his cousin, he had always been a secret sympathizer. His answers to new, probing questions about his Communist convictions sounded pathetically unconvincing. But one of his interrogators proved surprisingly sympathetic. He prompted Kap with some ideological answers. At last, at 4 A.M. five days after his arrest, this official gave him a chit to present to the desk officer responsible for the prisoners.
The little student suffered a further agonizing delay in the central hall of the headquarters building, sitting amid a throng of officials, guards, and prisoners coming and going while his papers were processed. He shrank against the wall, hiding his face, terrified of being identified by a new denunciator. But at last he was casually told that he might go. He walked home through the early morning Seoul streets, decked with huge posters of Stalin and Kim Il Sung. For a few hours he hid, listening to the Voice of America, desperate to discover what was happening in the south of the country. Then, ravenously hungry, he went to the house of a fellow student. He found his friend in the same case as himself. They discussed what to do. No young man could leave the city, yet somehow they must. They considered stealing a boat, rowing out to the American Fleet. They lingered for days, not daring to venture onto the streets. Only when they became convinced that if they remained, they must face rearrest did they summon up the courage to join the great throng of refugees crowding the approaches to the improvised ferry crossings south across the Han River. They had forged themselves crude passes to get past the Communist checkpoints. In the confusion at the river, they bluffed their way through.
Like hundreds of thousands of Koreans in those days, they walked for weeks, hither and thither amid the Communist troop columns and incessant American strafing, which killed many hundreds of civilians along with the North Koreans. They sought in vain to get through to the UN perimeter in the southeast. Despairing of this, they set out for the family home at Kwangju. Kap was arrested again, held overnight, and escaped during a bombing raid. From a friend outside Kwangju he heard that all his family had been arrested and were believed to be dead. Kap could think of nowhere else to go: “I began to travel aimlessly, merely waiting for something to happen.”17
Thousands, even millions, of South Koreans lived on the brink of animality in those months, roaming the countryside, fighting off fellow strugglers for survival with increasingly ruthless desperation, existing partly on peasant charity, but more generally by plundering the fields of whatever crops and scraps and domestic animals they could reach in darkness. Suk Bun Yoon was a thirteen-year-old middle school pupil, the son of a Seoul merchant. Many of his fellow students, urged by their teachers to volunteer for Kim Il Sung’s army, did so. But Suk’s father knew that sooner or later the Communists would find his name on the rolls of several Rhee-sponsored political organizations. The family hid in their home for weeks while Suk and his younger brothers walked out into the countryside to buy food, each trip a longer search becoming necessary, sometimes twenty, thirty, forty miles. Then they struggled back to the city. One day Suk was stopped on the road and pressed into joining an army forced-labor group, humping ammunition. It took the boy twelve hours to carry his huge load six miles to the station where it was wanted. Then he was detailed to dig slit trenches, a task interrupted by repeated flights to a nearby sewer during air attacks. Once he found himself within a few yards of a bridge that blew up before his eyes, beneath the bombs of a B-26. At last he was able to slip away and walk home to the city. He found that his father had gone, seeking refuge in the countryside. The rest of the family lingered in the house, exhausted by hunger and fear. They could think of nowhere to go, but they knew that if they remained, sooner or later the Communists must come for them. They prayed for a miracle.
There are those who might argue that the families of such young men as Suk Bun Yoon or Kap Chong Chi had willed their own misery by their support for the regime of Syngman Rhee; that their own terrors at the hands of the Communists were matched by those of left-wing sympathizers in the hands of Rhee’s police in the years that went before. Yet if Rhee’s regime had been a relative tyranny, that of Kim Il Sung proved absolute. There are no more striking testimonials to the political development of Korea at war than those of such young men as Minh Pyong Kyu, who were avowed left-wing sympathizers before the North Korean invasion, yet who abruptly ceased to be so when they saw the manner in which the regime of Kim Il Sung exercised its power.
• • •
The men of the Eighth Army strung out along the mountains above the Naktong were entirely unconscious of the terrors and nightmares of many South Koreans at the hands of their occupiers. They could measure something of the reluctance of thousands of people to join the ranks of Kim Il Sung by the vast drift of refugees into the Perimeter. But the Americans had come to this war too speedily to have any chance of indoctrination about its higher purposes, and their cause still lacked any remotely grand grievance in the manner of Pearl Harbor. They were told that they were fighting Asian communism at the gates of the Pacific. Most were aware only of the desperate need to survive against the cluster of “gooks” working up the defile below them, the T-34 grinding down the road toward their position. The struggle for the Pusan Perimeter attained its historical coherence only to those who wrote about it afterward. In those autumn weeks of 1950 it was an interminable series of short, fierce, encounter battles in which the defenders’ units had known each other, had fought together, for too brief a period to be called an army in any meaningful sense.
“There was no point where the line began [wrote the British correspondent James Cameron] because naturally there was no line—except at rear on the briefing-room map: a doubtful chalk-mark between established positions; it had no meaning on the ground. What line there was, was this road, winding up from security in Taegu northwards into the hills until it stopped, only for fear of its own length. A mile or two outside town no part of it was safe; you would meet nothing on the road, but the hillsides were full of invisible people, and when you turned back along the track there would be a barrier between you and your rear. It might be only a machine-gun roadblock, but for a while it would dislocate the whole crawling vertebrae of the column, which could move only in one plane, forwards or back, and never to the side. One drove trying to look behind; the dangerous place was always one corner away, at the back of your head.
“Bit by bit the front materialized, the tanks squatted on the flats of the river-beds, the road grew dense with traffic, and soon, where it ran in a kind of cutting between wooded slopes, were the groups of men, like picnickers, crouching on the verge with automatic guns, huddling in the dust of the passing wheels among a litter of ration-cans (‘The Ripe Flavor of Nutty Home-Grown Corn Enriched with Body-Building Viadose’) or heads buried under the hood of a jeep. The air was alive with a tinny whispering from field-telephones and the radios of tanks, a thin erratic chattering like insects, the ceaseless indiscriminate gossip of an army. Up and down the road, weaving through the traffic, bare-legged Koreans humped loads of food or mortar ammunition on their porters’ frameworks of wood, like men with easels on their backs.”18
• • •
“In many ways, it seemed a tougher war than Europe,” said Lieutenant Walt Mayo, an artillery forward observer with the 8th Cavalry. Mayo had fought as an enlisted draftee with the 106th Division at the Battle of the Bulge.
“Things were so disorganized and depressing—I remember going back to the battery to get some clean clothes, to find them evacuating our ammunition dump. We were rationed to twenty-five rounds a tube a day, and one was constantly fighting to get extra rounds—it became a game as to which FOO could lie best to the Fire Direction Officer. There were days when one lay there for hours on end under incoming mortar fire, but could get no rounds at all to send back. You fought for a hilltop; you lost it; you got it back. There was none of that excitement of being on the move. Men were kept going just by a crude feeling of ‘To hell with it, those bastards aren’t going to beat us.’ “19
• • •
Many men’s service on the Naktong was painfully brief. Lieutenant David Bolté of the 2/8th Cavalry, son of the U.S. Army’s Chief of Plans, arrived in Korea straight from West Point. Many of his men, he found, were slow to understand that here the penalty for failing to behave like a soldier was death. The shortages even of basic equipment were a constant source of frustration. Bolté found himself wrestling with a machine gun under heavy Communist fire, lacking the tool for removing a ruptured barrel. He had been compelled to take over the gun when he saw it standing abandoned. One of its crew had been wounded, and the others had seized the familiar excuse to take him to the rear. There were chronic problems with men drifting away out of the line in darkness: “They just didn’t want to be up there at night.” Bolté saw a man blow himself to pieces, clumsily dropping a primed grenade into his own foxhole. He himself lasted just ten days in Korea, before a bullet smashed into his shoulder as he peered at the Communist lines through his binoculars. In the days that followed, as he lay in a Japanese hospital where plaster was so short that they could not put a cast on his arm, he remembered his last night before embarkation watching three smart young paratroopers celebrating in the Top of the Mark at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. An excited woman said, “Oooh, it’s just like World War II all over again.” Bolté looked back from the perspective of a man who would never be fit to see a battlefield again: “One had this great romantic ideal, of an adventure in which people don’t bleed.” In that Japanese hospital where the halls were crowded with stretcher cases, where nurses were working twelve-hour shifts to cope with a thousand-patient overload, Bolté’s youthful ideal died.
• • •
The difficulties of defending the Pusan Perimeter were caused, above all, by inadequacies of training and leadership in the American formations thrust into the line after five years’ chronic national neglect of the armed forces. Some of Walker’s formations were in desperate condition. After its terrible mauling in July, the 24th Division was scarcely battleworthy—“a completely defeated ragtag that had lost all will,” in the words of Colonel Paul Freeman of the 23rd Infantry. Like most American officers, Freeman could also find little to say in favor of the ROK Army’s contribution to the campaign: “It was pitiful. But it wasn’t their fault. They lacked the training, the motivation, the equipment to do the job. Whenever their units were on our flanks, we found that they were liable to vanish without notice.”20 Nor were some of the American reinforcement units much better. The men of the 1st Cavalry Division were scornfully nicknamed “MacArthur’s pets” for their supposedly decorative rather than active function in Japan. The 1st Cavalry suffered terribly in the autumn and winter of 1950 for their shortcomings of training and competence.
The line could not have been held at all without the ruthless professionalism of a handful of outstanding officers, among whom must rank Colonel John Michaelis of the 27th Infantry. “Iron Mike” was a thirty-seven-year-old “army brat” who graduated from West Point in 1936. By 1945 the tall, slim Californian had become one of America’s outstanding combat soldiers, commanding the 502nd Airborne Regiment, a twice-wounded veteran of D day and Arnhem. Michaelis was posted to the Operations section of the Eighth Army in 1949, where he was dismayed to find so many of the best officers being diverted from regimental duty to administrative and staff jobs. He assumed command of the 27th “Wolfhounds” when its CO was abruptly relieved in the field. His second-in-command and two of his battalion commanders were likewise drafted in haste. With his ranks filled with so many green, frightened young soldiers, Michaelis resorted to drastic measures to raise their confidence. One of his master sergeants took post behind a wall while their own guns dropped 105-mm shells in front of it to demonstrate the effectiveness of cover. The 27th had lost many of its best NCOs because these were sent to stiffen the 24th Division when it was first committed to Korea. Michaelis was acutely conscious of the shortcomings of leadership at platoon level. He was ruthlessly frank about the difficulties of taking into battle men with pitifully little tactical or weapons training. At the height of the battle in August 1950, when many heroic myths were being circulated about the fighting qualities of the Eighth Army, Michaelis told an interviewer from The Saturday Evening Post:
“In peacetime training, we’ve gone for too damn much falderal. We’ve put too much stress on Information and Education and not enough stress on rifle marksmanship and scouting and patrolling and the organization of a defensive position. These kids of mine have all the guts in the world and I can count on them to fight. But when they started out, they couldn’t shoot. They didn’t know their weapons. They have not had enough training in plain, old-fashioned musketry. They’d spent a lot of time listening to lectures on the difference between communism and Americanism and not enough time crawling on their bellies on maneuvers with live ammunition singing over them. They’d been nursed and coddled, told to drive safely, to buy War Bonds, to give to the Red Cross, to avoid VD, to write home to mother—when somebody ought to have been telling them how to clear a machine gun when it jams. . . . The U.S. Army is so damn roadbound that the soldiers have almost lost the use of their legs. Send out a patrol on a scouting mission and they load up in a three-quarter-ton truck and start riding down the highway.”21
• • •
If it sometimes appears, in the course of this narrative, that a British author is adopting too critical an attitude toward the professional conduct of the U.S. Army in Korea, it is worth recalling the brutal professional strictures of Michaelis, echoed by other objectively minded observers. In September 1950, even as the colonel talked to his interviewer at his command post in the chemistry laboratory of a Korean middle school, there was a shot outside, followed by a report that a man had killed himself cleaning his pistol. “See what I mean?” said the colonel. “They still don’t know how to handle their weapons without blowing their own brains out. They’ve had to learn in combat, in a matter of days, the basic things they should have known before they ever faced an enemy. And some of them don’t learn fast enough.”22 The colonel’s comments on the shortcomings of the Eighth Army remained equally vigorous thirty-five years later.
The 27th Infantry became a vital ingredient in Walker’s defensive operations, the Perimeter’s “fire brigade,” held in reserve to be rushed from point to point as enemy attacks developed. Again and again under Michaelis’s ruthless leadership, the Wolfhounds proved the force that stemmed the tide. Their morale soared from this knowledge. It was a Korean officer, Paek Sun Yup, who remembered watching Michaelis lose his temper after a neighboring ROK unit broke off an action and withdrew without informing the Americans. “If we lose this battle, we may not have a Korea,” the furious colonel of the 27th told the hapless ROK battalion commander. “We have nowhere else to go. We must stand and fight.”
Throughout the struggle for the Perimeter, Syngman Rhee’s army was being reinforced by the most ruthless means. Each day police combed the city and the countryside for any male capable of bearing arms: boys, teenagers, grandfathers were relentlessly rounded up, given a few hours’ rudimentary weapon training, and herded into the line to join a unit.” It was never at any time possible to obtain a firm or official figure for the number of South Korean troops in the field,” wrote a British correspondent.23 “They were at most times heavily outnumbered, and their casualties were enormous. The intake was vast, the training almost unbelievably cursory. The man was drafted at the age of eighteen. On the Sunday he might be at work in the paddies or the shop; by the following Sunday he was in the line; in next to no time he was either a veteran or a corpse.”
Lee Chien Ho, the young Seoul chemical engineering student who had sought to defend his campus with a broomstick in the dying days of June, reached Pusan on August 4 after an endless, painful journey by train, oxcart, and shoe power. He went to the temporary Ministry of Education building and asked where he might go to continue his schooling. An official looked at him in astonishment: “Your country is at war.” Then he learned that Lee spoke a little English: “The Americans need interpreters.” He was sent to the 1st Marine Brigade, and soon felt relieved to be fed, clothed—to belong somewhere. He remained with them through all the battles of the six months that followed.
As the struggle continued, American and South Korean units began to learn—or, rather, relearn from history—painful tactical lessons. It was fatal to seek to defend a sector by spreading men in penny packets along its length: defend everything, and you defend nothing. Units must concentrate on key positions. If the enemy outflanked a position, the defenders must hold their ground while reserves were brought forward to counterattack. Every battalion, every company, every platoon must site its foxholes for all-round defense. These were principles essential to survival. Some units had still failed to learn them by November 1950, with tragic consequences. But there were enough—just enough—men of the Eighth Army who did so in August and September to hold the Pusan Perimeter.
• • •
In the last ten days of August, there came a lull in the fighting along the entire Pusan front. The Communists were reorganizing and regrouping their shattered formations. They acknowledged the mistake they had made by attacking successively at different points, enabling the Americans to rush reserves to meet each thrust in turn. This time it would be different. They would mount a coordinated assault. The North Korean 6th and 7th Divisions would attack in the south, by Masan, on the U.S. 25th Division front. The 2nd, 4th, 9th and 10th would strike at the Naktong Bulge, against the U.S. 2nd Division. The 8th and 15th Divisions, in the north, would seek to cut off Pohang-dong and the ROK units covering the line of communications from Taegu. The 5th and 12th Divisions would strike directly at Pohang-dong. Underwater bridges were constructed across the Naktong, log and sandbag constructions intensely difficult to detect in the muddy water even from the air. Each night there was intense activity on the Communist front: guns and ammunition being moved forward, such tanks as remained being concentrated, small armies of men laboring with shovel and mattock. Walker knew for certain that the Communists were coming. He was in doubt only as to when.
The onslaught, the last great North Korean effort of the battle, was unleashed on the night of August 31. In the south the attackers broke through the defenses of the 25th Division to threaten Masan. Further north the 2nd Division was almost cut in two by KPA troops overrunning some of its forward positions, sweeping on to leave others completely isolated. Around Taegu, the U.S. 1st Cavalry lost Waegwan, and Walker was compelled to transfer his own main headquarters to Pusan, so imminent seemed the threat to EUSAK HQ at Taegu. Pohang-dong fell once more. By September 5, Walker was obliged to consider a general withdrawal. Almost everywhere along the line the will and ability of his army to sustain their positions seemed in serious doubt.
Yet over the next hours and days reports reaching Eighth Army first hinted, then confirmed, that the Communist advance had run out of steam. On every sector of the front the fighting was withering away. Desultory North Korean movements were checked with little difficulty by the defenders and their air and artillery support. The Communists had reached the limits of men, guns, supplies, ammunition. The Pusan Perimeter held, and more than a few of its defenders had now heard the astonishing rumors of a great operation for their relief already being mounted from Japan. The spirits of the Eighth Army rose perceptibly, and with it their respect and gratitude to Walker, the fiercely energetic little Texan who had made their survival possible. Walker would not go down in history as a military intellectual, a man of ideas. But he would be remembered for bringing to the battle for the Pusan Perimeter the qualities that made its survival possible: ruthless dynamism, speed of response, dogged determination. He was leading one of the least professional, least motivated armies America had ever put into the field. Even many of its higher commanders seemed afflicted by bugout fever, a chronic yearning to escape from Korea and leave the thankless peninsula to its inhabitants. Walker kept his men at their business by sheer relentless hounding, goading, driving, with the support of a handful of exceptional officers and units whose competence decided the day. The Eighth Army’s performance at Pusan narrowly maintained the United Nations’ presence in Korea. It remained to be seen whether the achievement of survival on the battlefield could now be translated into outright victory over the Communists.
I. This account is disputed by members of the 24th Infantry. The U.S. Army’s official history is currently under review.