The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (22 page)

One of MacLean’s men, James S. Sellers, reported:

We were attacking hills with less than three banana clips of ammo for our carbines and with bare bayonets. On the food side one ration of C Rations every three days. We once found some frozen potatoes and ate them raw. Everyone had dysentery. I went from 154 pounds to 118 in my time on the line. I froze my hands and feet. I fought my way into the Marines along with what was left of our outfit. I saw men fall through the ice of the reservoir and freeze to death before we could get them out and other men just lie down on the ice and freeze. I went back later with a Marine detachment to try to rescue wounded left on the east side of the reservoir. We found the trucks full of wounded had all been machine-gunned, gas poured on them, and set on fire. We found guys who had been captured, stripped of their clothes and left to freeze to death. After that on the way to Hungnam I took no prisoners. I shot them where they stood.

Marine lieutenant colonel Beall led the rescue mission young Sellers joined and found a number of missing army troops “wandering about in aimless circles on the ice, in a state of shock.”

Three hundred dead were found in the machine-gunned, burned-out truck convoy. One thousand and fifty of the original 3,200 survived, only 385 of them able-bodied soldiers, who at Hagaru were quickly formed up into a provisional battalion and armed and outfitted by the Marines.

Sellers remembered: “We had been the most completely equipped winter outfit in Japan. We had to turn in all that winter equipment as we were told by the powers that be we would be home by Thanksgiving. We went into North Korea and the mountains in field jackets, summer fatigues, with ponchos and a blanket (two if you could steal one), no sleeping bags, leather glove shells with wool inserts, and combat boots. The field jackets were unlined.”

Ned Almond made no apology, public or private, for sending MacLean and Faith north so poorly supplied and supported.

The Marine colonels, Litzenberg and Murray, realized that they might have met the same terrible end on the western shores of the big reservoir if Oliver Smith hadn’t stood up to Almond and demanded to be allowed to go over to the defense rather than pushing farther north and deeper into the Chinese trap.

Back in Yudam-ni, they were trying to handle the wounded. There was no airstrip to fly them out; they had to do the best with what they had. And that wasn’t much.

Working in a tent, occasionally pierced by rifle fire, regimental surgeon Chester M. Lessenden, a navy lieutenant commander, operated by lantern light. The wounded, waiting their turn, lay outside in the cold on straw pallets covered by tarps.

Navy corpsmen thawed frozen morphine syrettes in their mouths so that the wounded could be sedated during the surgery.

“Everything was frozen,” Commander Lessenden said. “Plasma froze and the bottles broke. We couldn’t change the dressings because we had to work with gloves on to keep our hands from freezing.

“We couldn’t cut a man’s clothes off to get at a wound because he would freeze to death. Actually, a man was better off if we left him alone. Did you ever try to stuff a wounded man into a sleeping bag?”

You couldn’t blame the entire fiasco on MacArthur; Gen. Oliver Smith knew that. Much could be laid at the feet of the professional West Point careerists ambitious for a second star or fearful of losing a first, officers whose “can do” alacrity, when ordered to do things they knew they couldn’t, was little more than caste-system ass-kissing. Few officers dared speak back. John S. Guthrie, commanding officer of the Seventh Infantry Regiment, was one.

Guthrie’s regiment included two thousand ROKs, illiterate and untrained, swept up from the streets of Seoul and pressed into service without basic training. When difficulties in communications with its American troops and officers arose, Guthrie’s commanding officer, “Shorty” Soule of the Third Infantry Division, told Colonel Guthrie, “There is no language problem. I will not
accept
a language problem.”

“Yes sir, General,” Guthrie responded. “There is no language problem. But we better tell that to the American GIs out there so they know.”

Soule was one of several army generals who was a known drunk. Oddly enough, despite this and his mulishness, the Third Division performed creditably and “Shorty” Soule was decorated.

Gen. Oliver P. Smith’s forefinger traced lightly a medium-scale map. His division was still stretched out over nearly fifty miles of narrow mountain road that had already been cut at half a dozen points by marauding Chinese troops who could, it seemed, at any time slash through at another score of places.

“There are now sixteen CCF divisions in your vicinity,” X Corps had informed him. Maybe it was that which drummed sense into Ned Almond’s thick head after two wasted days of moronic
adherence to an implausible objective: the advance due west across mountains to link up with Eighth Army. Damned fool! Almond should have been man enough to stand up to MacArthur and tell him the thing wasn’t doable. Instead, all this lickspittal bullshit. Almond could still lose his army. So could Johnny Walker over there on the other side of the hill. And how would Douglas Jesus Christ MacArthur like that?

Smith was in a tent at Hagaru with his staff and about to issue orders for a march to the sea, starting with a pullback of the leading regiments from Yudam-ni. Not a retreat, he told himself, but a march. He knew what happened even to good troops when things got bad. A retreat could become a rout, a rout become flight, flight become panic, and in the end you had a stampede. That’s what had happened just the other side of the reservoir to Task Force MacLean. They had the figures now, as good as they were ever likely to have them. Maybe there were a few still out there, wandering around on the frozen lake, ducking the Chinese, hiding from patrols. They wouldn’t last long, not in this cold. He thought of the dead MacLean.

Now, thanks to MacArthur and Ned Almond, Smith could lose an entire division.

“Gentlemen,” he said, rapping a knuckle sharply on the map table to quiet their chat.

His orders to the staff were crisp, very specific.

“No unit moves south until it’s been leapfrogged by another and until that other unit has reached its objective and secured it. I don’t want two units moving simultaneously. Everything’s to be orderly, step-by-step. No bunching up or milling about. If a unit is held up by Chinese resistance or terrain or a blown bridge, the unit behind it doesn’t move south until the problem has been eliminated and the first unit’s reached its objective. If you are not clear on this, ask me now. I want no confusion, no lack of clarity.”

Marines weren’t soldiers like MacLean’s Task Force, but they were still men. Anyone could panic.

“One unit anchors before the unit north of it begins to move south. Got it?”

There was murmured assent. Oliver Smith was nothing if not clear. When he was sure they understood him, Smith turned the meeting over to his ops officer, the G-3, to go into details as to the order of march.

There were desperate fights just to get out of Yudam-ni and through the first hills hemming in the road. The Chinese had two entire Marine rifle regiments penned up here and much of their artillery, more than two-thirds of the whole division, and if they could keep them here, or kill them here, X Corps would collapse. During the firefight a Marine platoon surrounded by Chinese was reduced to using entrenching tools alternately as weapons, chopping at the Chinese with the steel blades, and as baseball bats, slapping back hurled grenades coming into their position much as a good singles hitter sprays base hits. It was small, ugly brawls like this, lots of them, that got them out.

Maggie Higgins somehow hitched a ride into Hagaru-ri on December 5 to meet and talk with Marines from Yudam: “They had the dazed air of men who have accepted death and then found themselves alive after all. They talked in unfinished phrases. They would start something and then stop, as if meaning was beyond any words at their command.”

In New York and other places Americans read her dispatches over breakfast and wondered if she exaggerated. The newspapers often do, don’t they?

You rolled a few yards forward with the wheels slipping in place or sliding sideways and then you stalled. Then you moved a few yards again and stalled. It wasn’t your vehicle that wasn’t working but the vehicle ahead that had skidded or broken down. Or there was fighting ahead. A firefight, even a brief one with a lone sniper or a half-dozen Chinese trying to cut the road, could bring the whole damned line of thousands of men and hundreds and hundreds of vehicles to a halt. There was no way to get around, no shoulder.
For most of the way, the road was carved into the side of the mountain, with the upper heft of the mountain looming steeply above the narrow road and the lower slope equally steep, clifflike, falling away five hundred or a thousand feet toward some ravine or streambed below.

You stayed with the road or you got the hell out of the vehicle and played mountain climber.

When they stalled for perhaps the tenth or maybe the twentieth time Verity, growing impatient, said to Izzo, “Maybe you ought to cut the engine when we get hung up like this. Save gas.”

“We got plenty of gas, Captain. I got jerricans in the back that—”

“And not have the radiator boil over.”

“Sir, the radiator on this vehicle ain’t going to . . .“

Verity shrugged. He drove an MG around Georgetown; this bird was supposedly wheelman for a Philadelphia holdup gang.

“OK, Izzo, just an idea.”

“Yessir, and I want the captain to know I appreciate it.”

In other words, “Screw you, Captain Verity.”

There was firing up ahead and they could see Marines in trucks in front of them standing up and craning their necks to see.

“Marines,” Tate said partly in wonder and partly in disgust. “They’d pay good money to see someone else in a firefight. They hate to miss the double feature.”

Occasionally a ricochet from the fighting up ahead sang its way down the line of vehicles and men ducked, instinctively, only to straighten up again right away trying to see what was going on and who was winning, the good guys or the bandits. They had, after all, a rooting interest.

“But I did think of one thing, Captain,” Izzo resumed, “which I thought may be was an excellent idea.”

“Yes?”

“Well, now that we’re pretty sure it’s Chinks up there on the hill, like you been trying to prove all this time, and now we got the bodies as evidence, thanks to you, Captain, I thought maybe to save weight and space we could sort of lose that there radio back there.”

Tate growled in response before Verity could say anything. “I
checked out that radio, Izzo. My name’s on the requisition. Anyone shitcans that radio it’s going to be me.” He looked toward Verity for approval.

Verity shrugged. What the hell, Izzo had a point. With Chinese all around them, sixteen divisions’ worth, there wasn’t a lot more intelligence Verity and his radio were going to give the division or Gen. O. P. Smith or anyone else. But Tate was a regular who’d signed out the radio.

“We’ll keep the radio, Izzo. Just drive.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

That afternoon a corpsman flagged them down. “I got some wounded here, sir, and I’m trying to get one or two of them aboard vehicles.”

Marines got their wounded out if they could. That was the tradition. Always had been.

Verity looked past the corpsman to where six or seven men lay on the snow just off the road. Some of them looked pretty bad, eyes staring and sunken.

“Tate?”

“Yessir, we can squeeze one back here with me and the radio, if he ain’t too big.”

Verity turned back to the corpsman. “OK, Doc, pick out a small one if you can.”

“Yessir.” Then bundled in a smallish, almost beardless young man with a leg wound. “Thank you, sir.”

The wounded man was reasonably chipper. Probably glad to be out of the fighting this easy. By sundown they had two more wounded riding with them, one perched on a fender, holding on with a good arm, the other stretched crossways over the hood on his back and not looking very sprightly. That one died quickly.

“I wish there was nurses, Gunny,” Izzo said. “We could make room for nurses, squeeze ’em in somehow.”

“I’ll squeeze you, Izzo.”

That night the column secured about 11:00
P.M.
and didn’t roll again until seven the next morning. By then the boy with the leg wound who had seemed so chipper was dead.

“Shock. Or loss of blood. I dunno, Captain.”

“OK, Gunny, tie him on somehow with the other one ’til we find someplace to turn ’em in.”

Jeez
, Izzo thought,
it’s like driving a hearse
.

They did only four miles that next day.

In Tokyo, rainy but not cold, and even amid the imperial trappings of his Caesarite, MacArthur panicked.

On October 25 he saw the war virtually at an end. His armies, both of them, could soon be at the Yalu. The North Koreans were finished. The Chinese cowered behind the border, an enormous bluff. The General was jotting notes for his victory speech. American boys, at least some of them, would be home for Christmas. The 1952 Republican convention wouldn’t be a contest; it could be a coronation.

“Jean, we’re going home!” he had informed his wife.

Not five weeks later, by the last day of November, both his armies were bloodied, entire units had been smashed, at least four and perhaps six Chinese army corps had been identified in North Korea, and it looked very much as if an entirely new, and larger, war had begun.

If the General swore, he would have done so.

He got little consolation from Willoughby, his intelligence general. For years Willoughby’s consolations had been welcomed. But MacArthur had the numbers of ROK and even American battalions swallowed up in the maw of the shocking surprise Chinese attack.

This was beyond mischief. MacArthur called Washington on a secure line to inquire as to the availability of nuclear weapons.