The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (21 page)

“Hut, hut!” Tate called as they marched back into Yudam-ni, not really trying to keep anyone in step, just to remind them who they were.

Marines.

For two days there were no new orders from Tokyo, no responses to General Smith’s call for guidance.

“It’s as if they’re in a panic. They’re frozen. They don’t know what to do because suddenly they realize they could lose their army.”

So concluded senior Marine officers and others on the ground.

An aide thought MacArthur was starting to crack. They swapped stories about him, floated theories.

“The Old Man’s expecting the Republicans to nominate him for president as the last American hero. And now he’s been suckered by the Chinese and screwed by Truman and his army is surrounded and maybe falling apart.”

Another recalled MacArthur’s early penchant for drama and self-pity as army Chief of Staff way back in the thirties. His aide then, Lt. Thomas Jefferson Davis, did a memoir in which he remembered long conversations with MacArthur as he sat there, revolver in hand. And one train ride through the South.

“We are nearing the area where my father won his medal of honor, Davis. I’ve done everything I can in army and life. As we pass over the Tennessee River bridge, I intend to jump from the train. This is where my life ends, Davis.”

The lieutenant, who had been through this sort of thing before, told his commanding officer, “General, would you hurry up and get it over with so I can get back to sleep?”

In the corridors of Far East HQ in the Dai Ichi building in
Tokyo officers now recalled such yarns and repeated them with furtive whispers.

They fought like that, up on the line as riflemen, for a second night. In the morning, there was rare sun, a real dawn, cold but clear. The Chinese had died pretty quickly. It was all very efficient. The gun-fire killed you or the cold did. A badly hit man didn’t last long. Not when he lay on the snow on the side of the hill and the glass was at ten or fifteen below zero Fahrenheit. Blood froze on the snow like cherry topping on a vanilla sundae. Because he was still an officer, Tom Verity asked Tate how Izzo had done.

“From what I saw, Captain, he was doing OK.”

“Sure, he’ll be OK,” Verity said. He was less sure about himself. Last night had been bad. He didn’t know how many nights like that he could take. The fighting, the cold, and no sleep—they ganged up on a man, sapping his will. Lying in the snow all night without shelter while crazy Chinese came at you firing burp guns and yelling, that was something. He tried to recall if he’d ever been this frightened, either on the ’Canal or Okinawa. He didn’t think so. But on the ’Canal he was twenty-one; on Okinawa, twenty-four. And there hadn’t been the cold. There’d been the Japanese and that was bad enough. But you weren’t trembling with cold the whole time you were trying to fire back and hold steady and not get killed. Verity realized in all the excitement, he hadn’t even thought of Kate.

He wanted to say something about this to Gunny Tate but didn’t. An officer doesn’t whine or seek guidance from men serving under him.

Instead, he looked around. Up and down the ragged line Marines were getting stiffly to their feet, eighteen and twenty-year-olds moving creakily, like old men. The cold did that, too. It was seven o’clock and full light of morning. No wind, thank God. The cold alone could kill you; the wind only sped the process. Over-head were the morning vapor trails of the carrier jets, crisscrossing the front and the MSR. It was the jets and the artillery spotters that sent the Chinese to ground at first light, not the Marine infantry.
Verity got up feeling like a man in his fifties, say, even older. He was just thirty. Tate was moving along the line, checking things out and taking names. That was what gunnery sergeants did.

I can learn something from Gunny Tate
, Verity thought, not for the first time, and tried to focus his mind on why he was here and what they were going to do next. If you had a problem to ponder and try to solve, you didn’t fall into an apathy that could drain and eventually kill you.

“Captain, I swear, what a night, what a frigging night!”

It was Izzo, small and spare and moving as he always did, furtive and gliding and not like old men. He was a hard case.

“You all right, Izzo?”

“Yessir.” Now he had a BAR instead of a rifle. Well, in a fire-fight you ran short of men before weapons. The BAR was nearly as tall as Izzo was. The Mouse. A good name for him, rodentlike and rapacious, a survivor.

By ten a fresh company came up the hill from the road and passed through what was left of this bunch and settled in. They couldn’t dig in any more than Verity and his people had. Verity and Tate and Izzo walked back downhill to the road to the town. The jeep was still there, off to the side, unhit. So, too, the big radio. Izzo tried to get a fire going without fuel.

“Turn it on, Tate; see if we can get anything.”

“Yessir.” Tate played with dials and the aerial. Verity didn’t even know what he hoped to hear. There was static and lots of English traffic and some Chinese. Not that much. Maybe they were sleeping off the night before over there, too. Tate sent Izzo off to find out if there was any hot chow coming up and where the warming tents were, if there were any warming tents. Without a fire, their hut was colder than outside. It was better now with the sun up and moving around, but everyone was still cold. Verity thought some fingers were frostbitten, and he was sure about Tate’s nose.

“Well, Captain,” the gunny said, “they say if it doesn’t turn black, it isn’t a total loss.”

“Try to rig something, a bandanna or something, Gunny. That’s a pretty fine nose, and I’d hate to see you lose it.”

Tate grinned. Verity was feeling better already. They had coffee
now, cooked on the jeep engine block. Funny how sunlight and hot coffee got a man on his feet again. And Tate did have a good nose, sizable and straight, and without the frozen snot dripping from the nostrils as so many men did.

“Personally, Captain, I find it disgusting,” Izzo had remarked a few days earlier. “I mean, however bad things get, I want to tell them, blow your frigging nose once in awhile! Jesus, we need this and the Chinks, too?”

Izzo did have his sensibilities.

Now a runner came along the road, red-faced and cheery.

“Captain Verity?”

“That’s me.”

“Regimental commander wants you, sir.”

Izzo brightened. He hadn’t found hot chow or a warming tent.

“Maybe they’re gonna fly us out to Japan, Captain, you and me and the gunny; we got all this valuable intelligence.”

“I doubt it. Anyway, get the jeep turned around. May as well ride in style.”

Captain Verity was feeling a lot better. Except for some artillery fire, outgoing from the Marines onto the Chinese hills, and occasional jets coming in loud and low, it was quiet. The sun climbed higher, the sky clean and pale blue. The temperature was way above zero now, maybe fifteen, twenty degrees.
Yeah, this was a lot better
, Verity thought.

Then he glanced at his watch. Almost noon. In five hours it would be dark again and the Chinese would come back. The day went too fast; the night came too soon.

“OK, Izzo, let’s get moving,” Tate said, climbing in back with the radio and the two BARs they had now collected.

“Yeah,” Verity said, “let’s move it.” So they moved it and at regiment they had Verity question prisoners. It wasn’t too bad. In daylight nothing was as bad.

Once upon a time, Gen. Oliver Smith mused, war was a more courtly affair, and armies went over to winter quarters. They erected tents and dug proper latrines and drilled some but mainly stayed
indoors out of the snow and the cold, enjoying the fire and smoking pipes and honing bayonets and oiling and cleaning rifles. That was how soldiers were supposed to spend the cold months and not out there fighting a full war on the hills and ridgelines with men on both sides freezing to death and professional general officers reduced to wearing side arms day and night in case hostilities broke out right there at divisional HQ.

It was, Smith thought, not appropriate at all. And you could blame that damned MacArthur.

Although, in all fairness, the fault might go back in time a few years. To when Washington totally ignored tradition and niceties by crossing the Delaware in a blizzard on Christmas Eve to attack the Brits and the Hessians over their pipes and rum.

That, too, was a hell of a thing. And Smith, while admiring Washington’s initiative, still considered the entire affair a bit unseemly.

God never meant honest soldiers to fight winter wars. Not here, not anywhere. And that, Oliver Smith concluded, was the truth.

General Almond’s chopper was expected, and Oliver Smith stood at the margin of the Haguru airstrip waiting for him to come in, turning his back against the wind of the rotor blades and the dust and the snow and pebbles whipped up.

“Good to see you, General,” Smith said, saluting.

“Thank you, Oliver.” It was Almond’s second trip in three days to see Smith.

Haig was with Almond, Alexander Haig, his sleek young aide, a man they said would one day wear stars.

When they were inside the small factory building Smith used as HQ, he told Almond right away what Murray and Litzenberg thought.

“My two regimental commanders up at Yudam-ni want to abandon the offensive and go over to the defense. Right now. Murray fought one whole day just trying to get out of town. Made maybe fifteen hundred yards. And this was still on the flat ground,
not even trying to get up the hills. Last two nights, we’ve been under attack. The place is swarming with Chinese. Litzenberg’s brought in the dead from three CCF divisions so far.”

“And you, General, what do you want?” Almond asked, stiffening and formal.

“I agree with Murray and Litzenberg. I want to go over to the defense, dig in, and see what we’ve got out there.”

Almond, obviously unhappy, wound up the meeting swiftly.

“I want to get up to see MacLean before dark,” he said. There was a brief handshake and he was out of there.

But Oliver Smith had what he wanted. Almond hadn’t ordered him to resume the advance west toward Eighth Army.

Maybe they could still save the First Marine Division.

On leaving the Marines at Hagaru, Ned Almond and Alexander Haig flew by chopper to visit Colonel MacLean, whose regimental task force had been badly battered the preceding day on the opposite, eastern shore of the reservoir. MacLean confidently expected to be told to pull back to regroup at Haguru. Instead, with less than a regiment left and severely hurt, Almond unaccountably told MacLean to resume his march north, largely unsupported by any other UN force, the Marines being separated from MacLean by the width of the Chosin. When MacLean looked puzzled, Almond said, “We’re still attacking and we’re going all the way to the Yalu. Don’t let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop you. . . .“

On this same day, November 28, and without Almond’s knowledge, from his office in the Dai Ichi building in Tokyo, MacArthur signaled Washington that the Chinese army had intervened in great force, that this had suddenly become an entirely new war, and that “I am going over to the defense.” But he didn’t yet tell General Almond.

MacLean, a good soldier, gave orders to renew the advance north on the morning of the twenty-ninth. Almond had not given him any options. MacLean was army and Almond did not feel
compelled to be diplomatic, as he had been with the Marine, Oliver Smith.

What would happen to Task Force MacLean shocked and even frightened Ray Murray and Homer Litzenberg. They, too, were colonels commanding infantry regiments. Allan D. MacLean, it was said, was an excellent officer, and his regiment, the Thirty-first Infantry, though not Marines but army, was a good one except for its attached reinforcing ROK troops. MacLean had been specially chosen by Ned Almond to drive North to the Yalu, around the right shore of the reservoir, in hopes of getting to the Chinese border before the Marines. Murray and Litzenberg knew you did not send a mediocre officer on such missions. Not even Almond would do that.

Murray, especially, knew how close his Fifth Marines had come to a disaster of their own, having been ordered to drive west from the reservoir through the mountains to link up with Eighth Army, forty or fifty miles away and in disarray and worse. If the Chinese had been more subtle, Murray thought with a very palpable shudder, permitting the Fifth Marines to get six or eight miles into the hills before coming down on them, Colonel Murray, like MacLean, might have lost his regiment.

And his life.

MacLean had one rifle battalion and a battalion of field artillery at Sinhung-ni, about ten or twelve miles north of Hagaru. He was killed or wandered off or was captured, no one was quite sure at the moment, during the second day’s fighting. Lt. Col. Don Faith, with a battalion of the Thirty-second Infantry, fought his way north to Sinhung to assist and bulk up Task Force MacLean, only to discover MacLean was gone, and what was left of both units now became Task Force Faith. There was no longer any question of pushing north to the Yalu past these “Chinese laundrymen,” but of trying to get what was left of the regimental combat team disengaged and back to Hagaru, where they might regroup. Faith took command of all three battalions and set up a defense périmeter
against the encircling Chinese. He had already had five hundred casualties out of an initial thirty-two hundred men and could only be supplied by air. On the twenty-ninth, General Hodes sent a company from the Thirty-first Infantry, supported by a couple of tanks, north to link up with Faith, an inadequate effort the Chinese easily turned back. On December 1, fearing his position would soon be overwhelmed, Faith destroyed his howitzers and, with his wounded, began a fighting retreat south toward Hagaru, supported by close-in air support. Less than five miles from Hagaru, Faith was killed. And his column of frozen, exhausted men, short of officers and senior noncoms, began to break up. By late that night some six hundred and seventy stragglers had come through the barbed wire and the minefields into Hagaru, where the Marines rushed them into warming tents to save their lives. The others, in small, leaderless bands, wandered into the hills or down onto the frozen surface of the big lake, chivied and hunted like animals by the victorious Chinese chasing at their heels.