The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War (7 page)

It would be funny if it was old Peng up there commanding the Chinese. Or even Lin. If it was one of them, he hoped it would be Peng. Maybe he and Verity could meet under a flag of truce and chat a bit, about old times, maybe pour a little Old Forester over ice. As he monitored the radio and listened to the sound of Chinese coming in over the static and tried to make something of it, that was how a man’s mind wandered; that was toward midnight, when Verity understood he was tired and should cut his losses and turn in.

The big radio clicked into silence, and, with a final long look upward at the autumn stars, he got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the pyramidal tent, trying not to disturb Izzo or Tate en route to his own sleeping bag, where he dreamed of other late nights.

Elizabeth liked a weekend in New York. They went up on the train and stayed at the Plaza or the Pierre and hit the clubs, 21 and El Morocco and the Stork. They weren’t regulars, but they had money and wore the right clothes and looked the part and she was undeniably beautiful and so they got good tables. Billingsley, who ran the Stork, was a shit to his employees and a phony in general, but he played up to the people he thought decorated the room and might be important.

One night Hemingway and his current girl (or wife) were there, looking the way you hoped Hemingway and his girl would look, handsome, competent, assured people.

Billingsley went to their table to chat. And then to Verity’s.

“Nice to have you here again,” he said, not quite sure who they were but remembering the faces.

“We always drop by en route to the house at Cap Ferrat,” Elizabeth replied, feigning languor. “It’s so restful before the parties begin.”

“Oh, yes, the parties,” Billingsley said, not sure which parties.

“The parties, the endless parties,” Elizabeth went on, overcome apparently by a fashionable ennui.

“Yes, yes, quite,” Billingsley said, out of his snobbish depth and retreating to Winchell’s table.

“Who are they?” Winchell inquired.

“Cap Ferrat. South of France. Lots of money. Oil money, I think. Name of Verity. The wife’s rich as Croesus.”

They danced until the band quit or the joints closed and then hailed cabs and drove around before returning to the hotel, where each time Elizabeth would astonish her husband with an imaginative lust good girls weren’t supposed to demonstrate and few wives could.

Later, as they lay there spent and slick, he muttered, “Cap Ferrat, indeed.”

“Why not admit it’s one of our playgrounds?”

“Because it isn’t, brat. And you’ve never been there.”

“Have too, have too.”

She lied incorrigibly. Except about important things.

He propped himself on one elbow. “Just when were you in Cap Ferrat, Elizabeth?”

“In
Tender Is the Night.
Fitzgerald stole me for a terrific scene in chapter five.”

“Come here,” Thomas Verity said. “I’m going to spank you.”

She licked ripe lips.

“Oh, good,” she said, tossing the bedsheet away.

On Monday, as they rode the train back home to Tom’s job teaching college boys, their names appeared in Winchell’s column as en route to their château in the South of France and they read it aloud and giggled about it almost all the way to Baltimore.

There were plenty of ROK troops rolling north, and sometimes they traveled with them. Not that ROK troops were any good; most of them weren’t, Tate said, but three Marines in a jeep couldn’t just go joyriding through North Korea alone. The towns and villages they passed through were pretty much untouched,
nothing like the wreckage Verity had seen in just a few days down near the Parallel. The people, the civilians, made themselves scarce. But any one of the villages could have concealed a company of North Korean regulars. For three Marines, a company of North Korean regulars could be somewhat embarrassing.

So they traveled with the ROKs and from time to time an American outfit.

“Hey, Marines, what the hell you doing here?”

“Out for a drive!” Izzo shouted. “A friggin’ Sunday drive!”

They got the finger for their trouble and some cheerful obscenity. The soldiers knew what the Marines had done at Inchon and in taking Seoul, so it wasn’t that tough. These men were part of the Eighth Army. The Marine division would be part of X Corps in a few days when it got to Wonsan. Both arms of the UN army would then push north, toward the Yalu River, toward China.

That, at least, was the idea.

Mouse Izzo was a good driver. On that he hadn’t lied. As for the rest of his story, and cautioned by Tate, Verity continued to reserve judgment.

“I got separated from my unit, Seventh Marines, in the fighting north of Seoul. I ran into some North Koreans and offered to take them prisoner—you know, Captain, put in a good word for them. Instead they put a gun on me, and since there was maybe a dozen of them and one of me, I was reasonable; I didn’t make life difficult and I went along. I was with them two days. Then they joined up with some other NK and I guess they heard how bad things was going and they gave me back half my cigarettes and turned me loose.

“ ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘my weapon. I’m not touring Korea without a weapon, not with all the shit and chaos going on.’ So they gave me back my M-l. Amazing thing. I think if I’d had time to stand around bargaining with those guys I would have ended up owning them. Near glorioso it was. But I didn’t have time and I took off, heading south. That’s when I found the jeep and attempted to return it to the rightful owner.”

He remained vague as to how he’d gotten separated from the Seventh Marines and precisely what outfit he’d been in.

The country was changing again now. In ways it was like northern New England—short, steep hills, narrow valleys with water, six-foot streams and thirty-yard rivers running through the bottoms, and the hillsides covered with firs and spruce and pine and other conifers Tom didn’t know. Nothing Asian or exotic. It could be the country between White River Junction and Stowe, Vermont. He didn’t like the Japanese very much and had fought against them, but no one could argue with reforestation in a country this poor. If the country was pleasant, give some credit to the Japanese, damn them! No, take that back. The War was five years ago. He no longer hated except for the thing that had killed his wife.

No one died in childbirth anymore. Not in the States. Not in a great city. Not when the mother-to-be was educated, had money and the best doctors, and was intelligent and knew about exercises and diet and all the rubbish that was supposed to make us safe, immune to tragedy. And, in this instance, had not.

The road now ran almost straight north to Wonsan.

“That’s where you’ll find the division, Tom. Or should.” That’s what he’d been told before he and Tate left Kimpo.

Now, with the division still at sea aboard troopships, the ROKs had captured Wonsan without much of a fight. The port city was one hundred and ten miles north of the Thirty-eighth Parallel. That’s how fast the war was moving when even ROKs went a hundred miles in a few days; that’s how completely the North Korean army had fallen apart.

“Wonsan coming up, Captain,” Izzo announced. He drove with a map folded on his lap and knew how to read it.

“Noted,” Verity said, charm exhausted elsewhere, thought elsewhere.

They rolled into Wonsan at midafternoon, drawing salutes and impressed stares from ROK troops and one or two Americans along for the ride as advisers.

“Make way for the First Marine Division!” Izzo shouted. “General officer coming! . . .”

Men stood in the dust they raised, straightening their caps and preparing to salute.

Down by the wharves Izzo asked directions and was given them.

“Good drive, Izzo,” Verity said.

“Why, thank you, Captain, very generous of the captain to say so.”

Maybe he wasn’t all that surly. Maybe the man had suffered. Izzo was always ready to give an officer a chance. It could always pay dividends.

He was respectful, too, of senior NCOs like Tate. But didn’t give them an entirely free ride.

Tate came from a place called Engine, Kansas, which drove Izzo near to distraction.

“What the hell kind of name is that for a town? Engine! Jeez, Gunny, you got to be kidding.”

For all his cool, Tate was sensitive. You could get to him. And while he would never agree aloud, he knew Engine was some name for your hometown.

“It was a railhead, Izzo,” he said patiently, “on one of the early transcontinental routes to the Pacific, the Union Pacific or Northern Pacific, one of them. Engine was where they repaired locomotives, did boiler work and the like. There was a big roundhouse. I remember seeing it as a kid, a big red-brick building that—”

“Jeez, Gunny, I used to think Philadelphia sounded like a stupid place to be from. But, Engine? . . .”

“Just watch your mouth, Izzo,” Tate said, turning crisp, “and while you’re at it, get under the jeep and see if you can find that rattle. No reason we got to have a rattle interfering with radio monitoring all the way to the Yalu.”

“No, Gunny.”

The ground was wet and muddy and Izzo knew he was being punished. And unfairly.

But what the hell did you expect from people that lived in a shit place like Engine, Kansas?

Chairman Mao had long ago shaped his military philosophy, one that still directed the strategic and tactical thought of his generals.

“Enemy advancing, we retreat; enemy entrenched, we harass; enemy exhausted, we attack; enemy retreating, we pursue.”

Both Lin Piao and Peng Teh-huai, Mao’s leading generals in North Korea, held fiercely to his way, though both men were nimble thinkers who knew how to improvise. Variations on a theme. Peng also knew the Marines. Some of their young officers had impressed him in North China in the winter of ’45–’46, after the Japanese surrender, when the country was in chaos with bandits and not yet disarmed Japanese troops and Kuomintang forces and Communist units wandering the land and engaging in pitched battles until the Marines came in to establish some variety of crude order.

Peng wished he were assigned the sector west of the Taebaek Mountains, where the American army and the ROKs were advancing, and not here in the east near the Chosin, where, when the word came to attack, his command would meet the First Marine Division.

He wondered if any of the Marines he’d met five years ago at Tsingtao and Tientsin were still serving. And would they recall him?

By October 20, though no one on the Allied side could yet know this, four Chinese armies numbering about thirty thousand men each and under the command of Communist veteran soldier Peng Teh-huai, had crossed the border into Korea. Three of the four armies lurked in the hills north of the Eighth Army; the Fourth was positioned opposite X Corps in eastern North Korea in the mountain territory roughly encircling the Chosin Reservoir. By the end of October two additional Chinese field armies would join them. On October 15 President Truman and General MacArthur held their summit conference on Wake Island. MacArthur assured the president there was little danger of Chinese intervention.

According to Truman, “He [MacArthur] said the Chinese Commies would not attack, that we had won the war, and that we could send a division from Korea to Europe in January.”

As for rumblings back home that MacArthur had his eye on a
run for the White House two years from then, the General said politicians had made “a chump” of him in 1948 and he assured the president “it would not happen again.”

Said MacArthur, he “had no political ambitions.”

As for Korea, there were “a few loose ends,” but the General told Truman, “Formal resistance will end throughout North and South Korea by Thanksgiving.”

Their conference lasted just ninety-six minutes.

At the time of the Wake Island meeting (October 15), Lin Piao’s Fourth Army was well into North Korea. By the end of October he would have six armies comprising eighteen divisions in North Korea. Also much of the Third Field Army based in Shantung was aboard trains heading for or already in Manchuria, ready to cross the border, another three armies of twelve more divisions.

The total Chinese deployment ordered in mid-October, when MacArthur was assuring Truman no substantial intervention was coming, was nine CCF armies totaling about two hundred and seventy thousand men.

As “Lightning Joe” Collins said of General MacArthur that autumn, “He was like a Greek hero of old marching to an unkind and inexorable fate.”

I’ve been doing this since 1941. March Field, California. I did a radio show for Pepsodent and one night we went down there to do the show for a bunch of kids just drafted. The war wasn’t on yet and they laughed and cheered and stamped their feet and whistled. . . . The producer said, “Hey,. . . we got something here. You’re going back . . . every week.” So it wasn’t anything patriotic at the start, just a comedy hour in search of laughs.

—Bob Hope

V
erity and Tate and their driver weren’t the only Marines in Wonsan. The division itself might still be at sea, puking up its guts and raging at MacArthur and the Russian mines, but the advance parties and air wing were already here. So, too, the USO troupe. Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell were en route, it was widely (and accurately) reported. Verity was admitted to the presence of one of Oliver Smith’s staff.

“Verity, you’re supposed to be our Chinese expert.”

“I’m not, Colonel, you know. I speak the language, know the country. But not much about their army.”

“Well, you know more than I do. Or General Smith does. So you’re it.”

“Yessir.” You never got anywhere arguing with rank.

“Now, General MacArthur pulled off a brilliant stroke at Inchon. Give him credit, an imaginative and subtle plan. Marvelously carried out by the Marine Corps. Give us a little credit, too. But now he’s done an odd thing. He’s separated his army. We and two army divisions and a ragbag of other units, all of them gallant and so on, I’m quite sure, comprise the X Corps. We’re
here [he poked a finger at maps] in the east of North Korea up against the Sea of Japan. To our immediate west is a range of mountains running north and south the length of the peninsula. Four thousand, six thousand, eight thousand feet, most of the passes already closed by snow. The middle of October and there’s snow up there a couple of feet deep. The other side of that mountain range is the Eighth Army, the other half of MacArthur’s command. We can’t get to them; they can’t get to us. Oh, maybe a small unit could make it up and over the mountains, traveling light. You couldn’t move armor or artillery or heavy units. So in effect, MacArthur’s army is split in two until spring. And we have all these rumors about the Chinese. You were briefed on that.”