War In Korea The Report Of A Woman Combat Correspondent

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War In Korea*

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Not since Ernie l j yle have the American
people taken any reporter to their hearts
as they have Marguerite Higgins the
photogenic young war correspondent for
the New York Herald Tribune. This bril-
liant woman reporter, greatly admired by
the fighting men, has dodged bullets with
troops on the line, has asked neither
favor nor privilege for herself, and has

i i i i v i r i

been commended publicly for bravery in
helping grievously wounded men under
fire. This is her up-front, personal report
of the human side of the war.

With the discerning eye of the expert
reporter and the sympathy of a woman
living through the agony of her country-
men, Mifj Higgins tells the whole story
of the "hit r Korean campaign: young,
green troops maturing in battle, Commu-
nist bullets kicking over the coffeepot at
breakfast, the initial inadequacy of Amer-
ican arms, and the terrible price in men
we are paying for unpreparedness.

Miss Higgins also sketches brilliant
thumbnail portraits of Generals Mac-
Arthur, Walker, and Dean, and of many
line and staff officers as well as GIs. In '
4V AK IN KOREA she has written a tre-
mendously compelling book that calls a
spade a spade as it reveals the hell and
heroism of an ordeal which compares to
Valley Forge in the annals of American
fighting men.

MARGUERITE HIGGINS:

War in Korea

THE REPORT OF A WOMAN COMBAT CORRESPONDENT

photographs by Carl Mydans and others

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.

Garden City, New York, 1951

Illustrations by Life photographer Carl Mydans

Copyright Time, Inc. 1951.

Copyright, 1951, by Marguerite Higgins

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States at

The Country Life Press, Garden City, N.Y,

The poem "xxxvi" from "More Poems," from The Collected Poems of
A. E. Housman, is copyright, 1940, by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.,
Copyright, 1930, by Barclays Bank, Ltd., reprinted by permission of
Henry Holt and Company, Inc., and The Society of Authors, Literary
Representative of the Trustees of the Estate of the late A. E. Housman
and Jonathan Cape, Ltd.

DEDICATION

This book is for the men of the United Nations
-who lie together in final fraternity
in the unmarked graves of Korea.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD 6

1 JOURNEY INTO WAR 13

2 THE FIRST RETREAT 23

3 PANIC 35

4 THE FIRST SKIRMISH S3

5 "HOW FAST CAN AN ARMY RETREAT?" 65

6 "THE EARLY DAYS" 75

7 NEWSMAN HIGGINS 93

8 "STAND OR DIE" 111

9 THE GREAT GAMBLE AT INCHON 133

10 OUR SOUTH KOREAN ALLIES 155

11 THE CHINESE INTERVENTION 167

12 THE EPIC MARINE "ADVANCE TO THE REAR" 179

13 THE ENEMY 199

14 THE PROSPECT IS WAR 213

ILLUSTRATIONS

184

Following

General Douglas MacArthur with President Syngman Rhee. 32

Major General William F. Dean as he led the United Nations

Forces during the early stages of the war. 40

Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, Eighth Army Commander. 40

Mm Higgins after landing at Taegu. 40

Marguerite Higgins at work on the manuscript for this book. 48

General Douglas MacArthur and his political adviser, Brigadier

General Courtney Whitney, observe a paratroop jump. 56

War-weary GI limps back to his base. 72

Casualty. 72

A Korean family sets out to find a new home. 80

Miss Higgins and Carl Mydans. 88

An American infantryman whose buddy has just been killed is com-
forted by a fellow soldier. 88

12 ILLUSTRATIONS

Following

page

A wounded American soldier being carried from a jeep. 96

Near Taejon an American infantryman winces with pain as corps-
men break the hold of a wounded buddy. 104

Deep in thought. 104

Marguerite Biggins with Colonel "Mike" Michaelis. 120

Four Russian-made tanks left in the wake of the 24th Infantry

Division. 120

Tank moving up near Masan. 120

Negro infantrymen take cover in a rice paddy. 128

Marines scale the breakwater that surrounds Inchon. 144

F4U-5 Corsairs support the marine advance. 152

Miss Higgins and fellow correspondents at a front-line observa-
tion post. 152

A marine sergeant interrogates two Chinese Communist prisoners. 176

The road back. 184

The American cemetery at Taegu. 184

One of the mass United Nations graves in Korea. 192

North Korean prisoners. 208

Victims. 216

Chonui y a typical Korean town. 216

Men of the 24th Infantry Division moving forward. 216

CHAPTER

JOURNEY INTO WAR

The Red invasion of South Korea on Sunday, June 25,
1950, exploded in Tokyo like a delayed-action bomb. The
first reports of the dawn attack were nonchalantly re-
ceived by the duty officer at the Dai Ichi building. He
didn't even bother to wake General MacArthur and tell
him. But within a few hours the swift advance warned us
of the power of the attackers. South Korea, the last non-
Communist outpost In North Asia, was crumbling. Amer-
ica had to decide at once whether to lend fighting support
to its South Korean protege or cede it outright to the Reds.
This decision was still hanging fire two days later when
my plane roared toward the heart of the Korean war zone
under a flashing jet-fighter cover. The plane was headed
for the besieged South Korean capital of Seoul to bring
out the last of the embattled American civilians. Four

16 WAR IN KOREA

newspaper correspondents were the only passengers:
Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News, Frank Gibney of
Time, Burton Crane of the New York Times, and myself.

We were to become the only eyewitnesses to America's
entry into the battle for Korea. America began this battle
unprepared. And today many hastily dug graves bear wit-
ness to the shocking price of underestimating the enemy.

But despite the many tragedies of Korea, we know now
that it is fortunate for our world that it resisted Red ag-
gression at that time and in that place. Korea has served
as a kind of international alarm clock to wake up the
world.

There is a dangerous gap between the mobilized might
of the free world and the armaments of the Red world
the Red world which, since 1945, has been talking peace
and rushing preparations for war, Korea ripped away our
complacency, our smug feeling that all we had to do for
our safety was to build bigger atomic bombs. Korea has
shown how weak America was. It has shown how des-
perately we needed to arm and to produce tough, hard-
fighting foot soldiers. It was better to find this out in Korea
and in June of 1950 than on our own shores and possibly
too late.

Nothing can make up for the licking we took in the
Korean prelude to the Third World War. But those men in
their icy graves will have died for something vital if their
warning galvanizes us to the point of becoming so strong
that we will win, at the least possible cost, the struggle we
cannot escape because the enemy will not cease attacking.

MYDANS

17 JOURNEY INTO WAR

It is just barely possible that if we confront the enemy
with obviously superior armed strength at every important
testing point in the world, he will back down without a
fight. Bu*44@dyhitT There may be strategic halts in the
Communist-armed expansion, halts of several years. They
will be merely periods of regroupment The Third World
War is on. It began in Korea, and I'm glad the first battles
I covered were so far away from San Francisco and New
York.

But as we four correspondents flew toward Seoul it was
only the beginning of the story. The dangers of that first
plane ride to Seoul did not greatly concern us, because
we were all so relieved to be on the job at last. In the first
forty-eight hours after the Korean story broke, it looked
as if fate, public relations, officers, and Red Yaks were all
conspiring to keep us from flying to Korea to cover the
biggest story in the world. At one time during those hectic
hours we were actually halfway to Kimpo airfield near
Seoul, aboard a big four-motored C-54. But news of a Yak
strafing of the field turned the plane back. In desperation
we flew to southern Japan, determined to get to Korea by
fishing boat if necessary. Fortunately we didn't have to
resort to that through a lucky fluke we had been able to
hitch this ride in the evacuation plane.

At the last moment Gibney had tried to dissuade me
from going along, insisting that Korea was no place for a
woman. But, for me, getting to Korea was more than just
a story. It was a personal crusade. I felt that my position
as a correspondent was at stake. Here I represented one of

18 WAR IN KOREA

the world's most noted newspapers as its correspondent
in that area. I could not let the fact that I was a woman
jeopardize my newspaper's coverage of the war. Failure to
reach the front would undermine all my arguments that I
was entitled to the same assignment breaks as any man. It
would prove that a woman as a correspondent was a handi-
cap to the New York Herald Tribune.

The pilot of our plane, a young veteran of World War
II, told us that his instructions, on arriving in Kimpo, were
to swoop low over the field and try to sight Americans.
"If we don t see any/' he said, "it means we get the hell out
but fast the field is in enemy hands. A green flare means
we land."

About an hour later we were circling over the rubble-
strewn field with its white, shell-pocked administration
building. At the end of the strip we spotted two planes in
flames. Apparently they had been strafed only a matter of
minutes before we appeared. Then, almost simultane-
ously, all of us saw a group of some thirty Americans.
They signaled us with all the intensity of the shipwrecked
who fear the rescue ship will pass them by.

After we landed we got the big news from Lieutenant
Colonel Peter Scott, who was busily burning documents
on the field. Seoul was still in friendly hands- the cor-
respondents who had fled the city that morning had been
premature. In fact, the sixty officers of the Korean Military
Advisory Group (KMAG) had moved back into the city
that afternoon on direct orders from General MacArthur.
MacArthur had been given responsibility for American

19 JOURNEY INTO WAR

personnel in Korea at the eleventh hour, after the outbreak
of actual hostilities.

We had a world scoop. Keyes, speaking for all four of
us, told the pilot that we were going to stay and go into
the city with the colonel. The pilot shook his head as if he
thought we were sadly crazy, but we had no more interest
in that particular plane.

There was plenty of transportation handy. The panicky
Americans had abandoned scores of nice new Buicks,
Dodges, and jeeps. Some had been carefully locked, out
of habit, but most of the owners had realized the futility
of the gesture and left their keys behind. Just about dusk
we set out through the rain, in convoy. Machine guns
sputtered in the distance.

"They are at least seven miles away," Colonel Scott said,
"but there's no point in hanging around. The road into
town can easily be cut by guerillas."

The road to Seoul was crowded with refugees. There
were hundreds of Korean women with babies bound pa-
poose-style to their backs and huge bundles on their
heads. There were scores of trucks, elaborately camou-
flaged with branches. South Korean soldiers in jeeps and
on horses were streaming in both directions.

It was a moving and rather terrifying experience, there
on that rainy road to Seoul, to have the crowds cheer and
wave as our little caravan of Americans went by. Their
obvious confidence in anything American had a pathetic
quality. I thought then, as I was to think often in later
days, "I hope we don't let them down."

20 WAR IN KOREA

In Seoul we drew up before tlie bleak, sprawling, gray-
stone building which housed the Korean Military Ad-
visory Group headquarters. There we found Colonel
Sterling Wright, the acting head of the advisory group.
He met us with the news that the situation was "fluid but
hopeful." Maps and files were even then being moved
back into the rickety building. Because of the confused
South Korean reports, Wright's staff of military advisers
had, that very afternoon, started out of the city. Since he
had no idea that help was coming from anywhere, it had
seemed to Colonel Wright that the jig was up and the bat-
tle for Korea all over except for the mopping up.

But halfway down the road to Suwon reports reached
him that the picture painted by the Koreans was far too
black. Then a message from General MacArthur arrived
and turned the group right around. I saw the message
there in the basket on Wright's desk. It announced the ar-
rival of an American survey team, charged with finding
out what was needed to save Korea. In typical MacArthur
style it exhorted: "Be of good cheer. Momentous events
are pending." It was the first hint that American arms
might be thrown into the Korean fight*

Actually, almost at this very moment, President Truman
was announcing the big decision to commit American air
and naval power in the attempt to prevent Communist
seizure of all Korea.

I remember vividly the midnight briefing during that
first siege of Seoul. "The South Koreans have a pathologi-
cal fear of tanks," Wright told us. "That is part of the rea-

21 JOURNEY INTO WAR

son for all this retreating. They could handle them if they
would only use the weapons we have given them prop-
erly/" I often thought later, when Colonel Wright saw
what those same tanks did to American troops, how much
he must have regretted his words. But he was certainly
not alone in his belief. It was just another example of how
much we underestimated both the enemy and his equip-
ment.

According to Wright, the Communists had had the ad-
vantage of complete surprise in their attack. The head of
KMAG, Brigadier General William Roberts, was en route
to the United States for a new assignment. Colonel Wright
himself was not even in Korea, but vacationing in Japan.
Of course it was well known that the North Korean Com-
munists had ordered civilians to evacuate a two-mile
stretch bordering the 38th parallel. They had also been
showering leaflets daily, threatening invasion, and had
even lobbed some mortars into the mountain border city
of Kaesong. But nobody took it seriously. Their excuse was
that the enemy had been making threats for six months
and nothing had happened.

Unfortunately, free countries Lave a chronic disposition
to ignore the threats made by dictatorships. Hitler told us
what he was going to do. The North Koreans told us what
they were going to do, and so did the Chinese. But be-
cause we didn't like what they told us, we didn't believe
them.

In the first few hours of the attack the South Korean
Army fought well, retreating to prepared positions. It soon

22 WAR IN KOREA

became clear that the main Communist thrust was in the
Uijongbu corridor just north of Seoul. The menacing
Soviet tanks headed the onslaught. At first the South Ko-
reans bravely tackled the tanks with highly inadequate
2.5 bazookas. They saw their volleys bounce off the mon-
sters, and many squads armed with grenades and Molo-
tov cocktails went to suicidal deaths in frenzied efforts to
stop the advance. The decisive crack-up came when one
of the South Korean divisions failed to follow through on
schedule with a counterattack in the Seoul corridor.

But this night the South Korean retreat had been tem-
porarily halted just north of Seoul, where the troops had
rallied. As we left headquarters General Ghee, then South
Korean Chief of Staff, bustled past us toward his offices.
He was resplendent in his brightly polished American hel-
met and American uniform, and told us, "We fightin* hard
now. Things gettin* better."

I had been assigned to Colonel Wright's headquarters
billets; the other three newsmen were housed with one of
his deputies. And, in spite of General Ghee's good cheer, I
followed some inner warning and lay down fully clothed.
It seemed as if I had hardly closed my eyes when Colonel
Wright's aide burst in. "Get up!" he shouted. 'They've
broken throughwe have to run for it/*

CHAPTER

THE FIRST RETREAT

Soon after the lieutenant announced the Communist
break-through, mortars started bursting around our billet.
Piling into separate jeeps, the colonel and his executive
officer in one, the aide and I in the other, we rushed to-
ward the big bridge across the Han River the only escape
route. As we raced through the rainy darkness a sheet of
orange flame tore the sky.

"Good God, there goes the bridge/' said the lieutenant.

We were trapped. The Han River lay between us and
safety to the south, and the only bridge had been dyna-
mited. We turned our jeep back to the Korean Military
Advisory Group headquarters. There in the darkness,
punctuated by shellbursts, the fifty-nine men of Colonel
Wright's staff were slowly gathering.

Colonel Wright told us, with disgust in his voice, "The

26 WAR IN KOREA

South Koreans blew up that bridge without even bother-
ing to give us warning, and they blew it much too soon.
Most of the town is still in their hands. They blew that
bridge with trucHoads of their own troops on the main
span. They've killed hundreds of their own men!'

Our situation was certainly both serious and highly con-
fusing. We had no idea why the South Korean com-
manders had suddenly bolted. We couldn't tell from the
sporadic gunfire around us where the enemy was or how
big a break-through had been made.

A number of officers began spreading the idea that if
we didn't get out fast we would be captured. The mur-
murings grew to a nervous crescendo. For a while I was
afraid that we might have the unpleasant development of
panic in our own American ranks. But Colonel Wright,
with quiet authority, easily got things in hand.

"Now listen, everybody/' he said. "Nobody is going to
go high-tailing off by himself. We're -all in this together.
We're going to take it easy until we're sure we've col-
lected everybody. Then we're going to try to find an
alternate route out of the citya rail bridge, perhaps so
that we can save our vehicles/*

We certainly tried. We assembled a convoy of sixty
jeeps, trucks, and weapons carriers and started off with
headlights ablaze. Although we knew that we might run
into the enemy at any moment, we drove for several hours
looking in vain for a rail span that could support our con-
voy. As we toured the town I kept asking KMAG officials
if they had seen the other three correspondents.

27 THE FIRST RETREAT

Finally Major Sedberry, the operations officer, told me,
"Oh, they got out in plenty of time. The three of them
came by the office and I told them to head fast across
the bridge for Suwon. They re probably there right now
scooping you."

My concern immediately turned into a very different
sort. Deep inside I had complete confidence that somehow
we would get over that river, even if we had to swim. But
I had no confidence whatever that I would get out in
time to compete with my rivals, whom I grumpily pic-
tured safe and smug in Suwon.

During one long wait, while a scouting party was look-
ing for a place to ferry across the river, Colonel Wright
noticed my gloomy air. "What's the matter, kid," he
asked, "afraid you won't get your story out?" And after
a pause he offered, "Look, stick by this radio truck and
well try to send out a message for you if you keep it
short"

It was now growing light, and in my elation I imme-
diately got out my typewriter, put it on the front of the
jeep, and typed furiously. Streams of retreating South
Korean soldiers were then passing our stationary convoy.
Many of them turned their heads and gaped at the sight
of an American woman, dressed in a navy-blue skirt,
flowered blouse, and bright blue sweater, typing away on
a jeep in the haze of daybreak. I got my copy in all right.
But as far as I know, communications never were estab-
lished long enough to send it.

As I was typing the last part of my story, artillery began

28 WAR IN KOREA

zeroing in. It was obvious now that if we didn't want to
be captured we would have to abandon our equipment
and wade or ferry across the river. When we reached the
riverbank we found masses of refugees and South Korean
soldiers in a panicky press. Some of the soldiers were fir-
ing at boatmen and raftsmen in an attempt to force them
to come to our side of the river. Other soldiers were de-
feating their own aims by rushing aboard any available
craft in such numbers that they swamped the tiny boats.
It was only by holding back the rush at rifle point that
we got our band across the river. We were harassed all
the while by steady but inaccurate rifle fire.

Once across the river, there was nothing to do but walk
across the mountain trail toward Suwon. Our single file of
soldiers was soon joined by a huge stream of refugees.
Even the Korean Minister of the Interior, who was once
a Buddhist priest, trudged along with a pack on his back.
South Korean soldiers in GI uniforms also fell in line.
Before long the Americans were leading a ragamuffin
army of tattered soldiers, old men, diplomats, children,
and a woman war correspondent

I was very conscious of being the only woman in the
group. I was determined not to give trouble in any way,
shape, or form. Luckily, I am a good walker, and by enor-
mous good fortune I was wearing flat-heeled shoes. For
much of the march I was close to the head of the column.

After we had sloughed southward over the muddy path
for about an hour I heard a steady drone in the sky and
looked up ? startled. Then the silvery fighters came nearer

29 THE FIRST RETREAT

and started looping and diving over Seoul. My heart
pounded with excitement this must be part of the "mo-
mentous event" mentioned in MacArthur's message. For
they were American planes. The realization that American
air power was in the war hit everybody at the same time.
The Koreans around me screamed and yelled with joy.
Women from an adjacent village rushed out to grab my
hand and point to the sky in ecstasy.

It was a sweet moment, but the savoring was brief. The
march was far too grim and sad to permit lengthy re-
joicing. It was plain that in this sector the Koreans were
in complete rout. We saw many throw down their weap-
ons and turn and run simply at the sight of our American
group going southward.

After we had hiked for about four hours, a jeep showed
up on the dirt trail. It already contained five Korean sol-
diers, but somehow a KMAG colonel, a Korean officer.
Colonel Lee, and I all squeezed in. Our mission was to go
ahead to Suwon and send back transportation to the now
very weary group.

The KMAG officer and Colonel Lee became increas-
ingly distressed by the disorderly retreat around us. Fi-
nally, at the main road, they got out to try to round up
stragglers so they could be reorganized. I was now alone
in the jeep with six Koreans who could not speak a word
of English.

When we reached Suwon, I had two messages to de-
liver, in addition to the request for transportation. One
was the information that Seoul had fallen. The other was

SO WAR IN KOREA

a request from KMAG for a "general bombing north of the
Han River line." I was to get these messages to Ambas-
sador John J. Muccio and Major General John Church.
General Church had, overnight, become head of the Amer-
ican Advance Command.

Suwon, the new temporary capital, was in an extremely
confused state. It took me several hours to find General
Church and Ambassador Muccio and give them the mes-
sages. A few minutes after I had finished my job Ambas-
sador Muccio called the handful of correspondents to-
gether (a total of five) and asked us to go away. He said
we were a nuisance.

At this gathering I learned that my three newspaper
colleagues had not only never gotten across the bridge
but that it had exploded right under them, wounding
Crane and Gibney. They were wandering around the Ag-
ricultural Building with bloodstained undershirts tied
around their foreheads. So twelve hours after the first fall
of Seoul, and several hours after American air power en-
tered the war, the only four reporters with eyewitness
accounts were still in Korea and the story was untold.

Burton, Keyes, and I decided to fly back to Itaztike in
Japan, where we could file our reports. When we got there
we heard some news that made us fully appreciate our
good luck in getting out of Seoul when we did. The
French news-agency correspondent, as well as most of
the staff of the French and British embassies, had been
captured at just about the time we were crossing the
river.

31 THE FIRST RETREAT

Back in Korea the next day, General Douglas Mac-
Arthur's famous plane, the Bataan, was sitting on the air-
strip. We learned that the Supreme Commander had gone
by jeep to the Han River to see for himself what was
needed. I was crouched by the side of the windy airstrip
typing a quick story on his visit when the general himself
appeared. He was clad in his famous Bataan gold-braid
hat and summer khakis with the shirt open at the collar.
He smoked a corncob pipe. He was accompanied by a
whole retinue of assorted generals, most of whom I'd
never seen before.

On seeing me on the airstrip, the general came over to
say hello and then asked if I would like a lift back to
Tokyo. Since the Bataan offered the only means of flying
back to communications and getting the story out, I
gladly accepted.

My presence on the plane, I later learned, considerably
miffed the four bureau chiefs: Russ Brines of the Asso-
ciated Press, Earnest Hoberecht of the United Press,
Howard Handleman of International News Service, and
Roy McCartney of Reuters. Until then they had thought
they had the story of MacArthur's trip completely to
themselves. We later dubbed these four correspondents
"the palace guard" because they were the only ones privi-
ledged to accompany MacArthur on his front-line visits.
On this plane trip, to the further annoyance of the palace
guard, Major General Whitney told me that the general
had given the other correspondents a briefing in the
morning, adding, "I'm sure he would like to talk to you

32 WAR IN KOREA

now. Why don't you go up to his cabin and see him?" Of

course I did.

In personal conversation General MacArthur is a man
of graciousness and great lucidity. So far as I am con-
cerned, he is without the poseur traits of which I have
heard him accused. It has always seemed to me most unfor-
tunate that the general held himself so aloof from most
of the newspapermen in Tokyo. I am convinced that if
he would spare the time, even once a month, to see cor-
respondents, he would dissolve most of the hostility felt
toward his command and toward him personally. The
lack of contact between MacArthur, who shapes many
Far Eastern events, and the newspapermen, who must
write of these events, has made it very difficult for cor-
respondents, no matter how talented or well-meaning.
There has been some bad reporting by those who had to
rely on guesswork. This, in turn, has increased the aloof-
ness on the part of MacArthur and his command.

It is said that MacArthur's lofty isolation from all ex-
cept a few very close, loyal advisers has won the respect
of the Japanese and so furthered the aims of the occupa-
tion. Certainly the unquestioning, almost mystic devotion
rendered him by those close to him forms part of his leg-
end. But I think that it might be better for the American
people if the store of wisdom he possesses were shared
with them through greater accessibility.

Washington had sent MacArthur to Korea with orders
to find out whether air and naval power alone could save
the South Korean republic. Reversing the earlier decision

General Douglas MacArthur with President Syngman
Rhee of the Republic of South Korea, MYDANS

S3 THE FIRST RETREAT

to write off Korea, President Truman was apparently now
determined to save this anti-Communist bastion if possible.

General MacArthur had come away from his front-line
view of the South Korean retreat with the conviction that
if America wanted to save Korea, ground troops would
have to be committed. "It is certain that the South Ko-
reans badly need an injection of ordered American
strength/* he told me. "The South Korean soldiers are in
good physical condition and could be rallied with example
and leadership. Give me two American divisions and I
can hold Korea."

General MacArthur's belief that two divisions could
"hold Korea" was based on recommendations from KMAG
and his forward commanders. It showed how disastrously
they still underestimated the enemy. As I look back, it
seems to me that we all underestimated, not so much the
North Koreans themselves, but the extent to which they
were equipped and backed by the Soviet Union.

In the light of the previous attitude of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, MacArthur was considerably surprised by Presi-
dent Truman's decision to go to South Korea's aid, but he
agreed with the change in policy. Although created under
United Nations auspices, Korea was actually a protege of
the United States. We had strongly encouraged South Ko-
rea to defy Soviet communism. The American Congress
had even legislated that aid to Korea would be imme-
diately cut off if a single Communist was discovered in
the National Assembly.

Now we had a job to do. On the plane that night Gen-

34 WAR IN KOREA

eral MacArthur said, "The moment I reach Tokyo, I shall
send President Truman my recommendation for the im-
mediate dispatch of American divisions to Korea. But I
have no idea whether he will accept my recommenda-
tion/*

CHAPTER

PANIC

On June thirtieth I started back to Suwon, and for the
last time, although I didn't know that then. It seemed in-
credible that only three days ago we had landed at Seoul,
now one retreat away.

Emergency had telescoped so many events that it was
impossible to grasp the full meaning of what was hap-
pening. I simply had an urgent impulse to get back to
the scene of action as fast as I could, before too many
things had rushed past me.

As our heavy, unarmed ammunition ship rumbled off
the runway the crew was in a fine state of nerves. For the
past two days Yak fighters had been spurting bullets at
the Suwon strip. The day before a transport had been
shot down going into the same field.

" 'Firecracker' is the code to call for help if a Yak jumps

88 WAR IN KOREA

you," we had been told by the operations briefing offi-
cers. "There'll be an umbrella of jets and Mustangs over
you as you start across the mountains/*

Our pilot was Lieutenant Donald Marsh. He was a
veteran of the fighting for Guam and knew what we might
run into. As we approached the deep, rocky inlets of bril-
liant blue water that are Pusan Bay, Marsh warned us,
"In a few minutes we reach hot weather. Put on your
chutes and grab a helmet/' And then, after glancing over
his shoulder in the direction of the big 155-millimeter
shells we were carrying, he added flatly, "Though I don't
know what in Christ good a chute will do if we do get
hit."

I felt the rush of fear that was to become so familiar
in the next weeks. It seemed to turn into a trapped ball
of breath that was pressing against my heart. I could see
by the faces of the crew that I was definitely not worry-
ing alone. The radio operator took his place beneath the
glass-dome turret of the C-54. In a few moments some-
body saw an unidentified plane, but it didn't see us. And
that was all.

But the ominous atmosphere continued even after
we had bumped and scraped to a stop on the Suwon air-
field. We had had to brake hard to avoid the wrecked,
bullet-splattered planes at the end of the runway.

As I climbed out of the plane, fervently promising my-
self never to ride on another ammunition ship, I was
greeted by a dour army colonel. He was the nervous, of-

39 PANIC

ficious type that the Army seems to have a talent for
producing.

"You'll have to go back, young lady/' the colonel said.
"You can't stay here. There may be trouble/'

Somewhat wearily, I brought out my stock answer to
this solicitude. "I wouldn't be here if there were no
trouble. Trouble is news, and the gathering of news is
my job."

The colonel's too familiar attitude was discouraging. I
had hoped that my performance under fire in the exit from
Seoul would have ended further arguments that "the front
is no place for a woman." But it was to be many weeks
before I was accepted on an equal basis with the men. In-
terestingly enough, most of my difficulties were with
headquarters officials, especially those who themselves
had never been directly on a firing line. I never had any
trouble when I got to the front lines,

As I was answering the colonel I saw a jeep approach-
ing, and to my delight the driver was Lieutenant May-
Colonel Sterling Wright's aide and a comrade of our long
march across the mountains out of Seoul. I knew he was
on my side.

"Hey, Lieutenant," I shouted, "how about a ride back
to headquarters?" Lieutenant May nodded, and as the
jeep swept by I jumped aboard and we were off before
the colonel could do anything but sputter.

Even in twenty-four hours one temporary American
headquarters at Suwon had changed, and, from a news-
man's point of view, for the worse. Reinforcements of

40 WAR IN KOREA

Tokyo colonels and majors were bustling about, holding
tight to information they imagined was secret. This Tokyo
contingent was rapidly taking over the job from the vet-
erans of the Korean Military Advisory Group, our friends
of the retreat from Seoul The latter, led by Colonel
Wright, had dealt with us as friends, caught in a situation
equally difficult for all. Now the American journalists
were being treated more like Communist agents than as
fellow citizens.

The moment the jeep rattled into the pine-dotted Su-
won headquarters I sensed another crisis. It was 6 P.M.
In the main wooden building little knots of officers were
talking in low voices. Major Greenwood of KMAG spotted
me as I got out of the jeep, walked over with elaborate
casualness, and said, "Don't go far away from headquar-
ters. It looks bad again."

Looking back later, I was shocked to remember that
Walt Greenwood was the only officer there who bothered
to warn, the correspondents and enlisted men of their pos-
sible danger. The events of that evening provided the
most appalling example of panic that I have ever seen.

By the time I anived at headquarters, Tom. Lambert
of the Associated Press and Keyes Beech by now an ex-
perienced man at retreatsalready had their wind up. The
rest of the correspondents were busy housekeeping. They
had taken over the only unoccupied shack, and photogra-
phers and newsmen were busy sweeping out the filth and
collecting straw on which to lay blankets. But Keyes, Tom,
and I all felt too worried to be domestic. We strolled up

ABOVE: Major General

William F. Dean

as he led the

United Nations

Forces during

the early stages

of the war.

He was

subsequently

taken prisoner

by the enemy

as he

participated in

front-line

fighting during

the summer

campaign. MYDAXS

BELOW: Lieutenant General

Walton II. Walker,

Eighth Army

Commander,

in his jeep as it

is ferried across

the Kumho River

a few weeks

before his death.

l f . S. AHMY

Miss Higgins after landing at Suwon. MYOANS

41 PANIC

to the main building where low-toned conferences were
still going on among the officers.

"We've got the jeep all set in case there's trouble,"
Keyes told me. "And there's a place in it for you/'

"Thanks a lot, Keyes," I answered with real gratitude.
I hoped that the invitation meant I was winning an ally
from the male correspondents' camp.

Strategically located near the conference room, we
tried to get information from the officers, Korean and
American, who were streaming in and out. We heard
something vague about a convoy of fifty North Korean
trucks and tanks that had somehow forded the Han River
and were in our vicinity. But no one would tell us any-
thing definite.

The general in charge of the Tokyo contingent, which
was then called the Korean Survey Group and later be-
came the American Advance Command in Korea, was
seven miles down the road at the repeater station. This
station afforded the only means of direct telephonic com-
munication with Tokyo.

It turned out that during the critical conference, all that
the group had to rely on were reports from Korean intelli-
gence. And these reports were as unreliable at that stage
as the South Korean Army itself.

Suddenly the doors of the conference room scraped
open. We heard the thump of running feet and a piercing
voice, addressed to the officers within the room: "Head for
the airfield."

We three correspondents looked at each other. Who

42 WAR IN KOREA

was heading for the airfield and why? The uncertainty
was frightening, maddening. Almost simultaneously we
jumped up and raced into the building. Our questions
were met with a flat., "You're not allowed in here/' Down
the hall we met an elderly colonel rushing wildly toward
the door.

He had to slow down because I was practically block-
ing his way. "Why/' I asked him quickly, "if there is some-
thing wrong, don't we all take the road south to Taejon?'*
(Taejon is about eighty road miles south of Suwon.)

Flinging his arms high in the air in an operatic gesture,
the colonel answered, "We're surrounded, we're sur-
rounded," and pushed past.

Keyes and I glanced at each other quickly. If this were
true, the beautiful independence of having our own jeep
ready didn't mean a thing. Our only chance of survival
was to stick by the guys with the guns and communica-
tions with Tokyo and the United States Air Force.

The panic of the next few minutes jumbled events and
emotions so wildly that I can remember only episodic
flashes. I remember a furious sergeant stalking out of the
Signal Corps room and saying to Keyes, "Those sons of
bitches are trying to save their own hides there are
planes coming, but the brass won't talk. They're afraid
there won't be room for everybody."

The rumor that the officers were trying to escape with-
out the rest swirled around the camp like a dust storm.
From then on every mess sergeant, jeep driver, code
clerk, and correspondent had just one idea to get hold

43 PANIC

of every and any vehicle around. Any South Korean who
owned four wheels and who was unlucky enough to be
near that headquarters that night was on foot from that
second forward. That was the fastest convoy ever formed,
and probably the most disheveled.

Someone shouted, "The Reds are down the road/'
Someone else bellowed, "No, they're at the airfield." Then
Major Greenwood came to us with the news, "We're go-
ing to defend the airstrip. Better be ready/'

I watched Tom and Keyes grimly arming themselves
with carbines, checking their clips. "My God/' Keyes said,
almost to himself, "do they really think this handful of
men can hold that airstrip? They're out of their minds."
There were about sixty men and myself. That was one
time when I wished that my rifle experience extended
beyond one afternoon on the range.

So much had happened it seemed impossible that
barely five or six minutes had elapsed since the wild
breakup of the conference. Keyes, Tom, and Gordon
Walker of the Christian Science Monitor, with carbines
in hand, were jammed into the jeep with me. We had a
young sergeant riding shotgun.

All I had with me was my typewriter and a toothbrush.
In the first retreat in Seoul, where I had had to abandon
all my personal things, I'd learned that they were all I
really needed.

The first jeeps started bouncing toward the airfield
without orders or direction. They were filled with infur-
iated GIs determined not to be left behind by the brass.

44 WAR IN KOREA

Correspondents and photographers, hitching rides as best

they could, joined the race.

At the field Major Greenwood did his best to organize
a perimeter defense of the bomb-pocked strip. Mines
were laid, machine guns entrenched, small-arms am-
munition distributed. It began to look to me like a fair
start toward a Korean Corregidor.

Much later I learned more about this projected last-
ditch stand at the field. Some planes really were due that
evening from Japan, not enough to take everybody, but
at least a start in the evacuation. Our small force was sup-
posed to hold the field until the planes arrived. Actually
they never arrived at all.

Suddenly plans changed. Rumors started spreading that
the brass had decided to take the escape road directly
south to Taejon.

"So we are not surrounded after all/* I said to Keyes*
"This is a fine way to find out/'

Distrusting all the rumor and counterramor, our jeep-
load of correspondents decided that we would stay put
until the very last minute, to try to judge for ourselves
what the situation was. We had heard that Colonel
Wright had gone back to the suddenly abandoned head-
quarters to tiy to get word to his advisory officers with
the South Korean troops. He was going to instruct them to
leave their charges and head for Taejon, but it appeared
certain that there would not be enough time to permit
his officers to catch up with our convoy.

This \yas the second time in a week that American of-

45 PANIC

ficers had been ordered to leave the front. Their depar-
ture, of course, didn't help the precarious morale of the
South Korean Army.

About 11 P.M. we decided to follow the crowd of Amer-
icans unhappily bumping southward on the rutted dirt
road. Then the torrential Korean rains started. Korean
nights are cool even in summer, and with this pitiless
downpour the temperature was like a foggy winter's day
in San Francisco. None of the men were wearing more
than shirts and slacks, and I was still in my blouse and
skirt. There had been no time to buy or scrounge a khaki
shirt and pants.

The rain pounded down without letup during the entire
seven miserable hours in our completely open jeep. The
blankets we put over us soon were soaked through, and
we just sat helplessly, as drenched as if we had gone
swimming with our clothes on.

The road turned to slithery mud and the rivers became
enormously swollen. At one point Keyes, who did much of
the driving, swore that we must be lost because the
bridge we were crossing appeared to be a long pier lead-
ing into the ocean. We all got out and groped around
ahead of the jeep, and finally convinced him that it was
merely a terribly wide river.

I was sitting scrunched in the front seat between Keyes
and Walker, straining to see the road, when suddenly the
jeep skidded viciously in the mud.

"Hold on, this is itP shouted Keyes. He fought the
wheel desperately as we teetered on the edge of a steep

46 WAR IN KOREA

drop on our right. Finally the jeep swerved and the front
wheels crashed into the ditch on our left. It wasn't as bad
as the one we had missed but it was deep enough. All
five of us, struggling in the mud and rain, couldn't get
the jeep back onto the road. Feeling guilty at my inad-
equate strength, I started out to look for a Korean farm-
house where we might get help. It was about 5 A.M. and
a dim gray dawn was breaking. Through the downpour I
sighted a Korean thatched hut across the brilliant green
rice paddy. It was, for Korea, a well-to-do farm. The Ko-
reans were stretched out on the wooden floor of their
porch. When I woke up the family of several men, a
woman, and two children, they accepted the situation
with true oriental calm. They showed no surprise what-
ever at seeing a rain-drenched white woman standing
there in the dawn, and two of the men promptly followed
me back to the jeep. Their muscle provided enough extra
power to wrench it back onto the road.

I had been worrying because we had absolutely nothing
to give the Koreans as recompense, but apparently they
expected nothing. The two white-clad men walked away
even as we started consulting among ourselves as to what
we could do for them.

That miserable drive ended about an hour later. We
rolled into Taejon about 6 A.M. and headed for the main
government building, a sturdy, rambling, two-story brick
structure. It looked deserted, but we went up the stairs into
the main conference room. There we were surprised to
find General Church sitting all by himself at a long, felt-

47 PANIC

covered conference table. A spare, small-boned man, the

general looked very alone.

As it turned out, there had been no reason to hurry. The
panic was all for nothing. There were no Communist
troops within miles of Suwon. In fact, it was more than
three days before it fell, and groups of American corre-
spondents and officers re-entered the city a number of
times before its final seizure.

It seemed that General Church had preceded us by
only a few hours. But he had had time to communicate
with Tokyo. He looked somewhat quizzically at these four
miserable, rain-soaked creatures. I was shaking like a wet
puppy, quite unable to control the chattering of my teeth,
my gabardine skirt dripping little pools of rain water on
the rug.

The general said quietly, "You may be interested to
know that two companies of American troops were air-
lifted into southern Korea this morning."

"Well, here we go America's at war/* I thought to my-
self, and hardly wondered at my own matter-of-factness.
(We were so completely cut off from the outside world
that we had no way of knowing then, or for several days,
that this was a United Nations action. ) By now my state
of utter physical discomfort, the cold, and the cruel need
for sleep left no room for any emotion.

Thinking of our retreat and reports of new rout all
along the front, I asked the general, "Don't you think it's
too late?"

"Certainly not," he said confidently. "It will be differ-

48 WAR IN KOREA

ent when the Americans get here. We'll have people we
can rely on. To tell you the truth, weVe been having a
pretty rough time with the South Koreans. We can't put
backbone into them. What are you going to do with
troops that won't stay where they're put? We have no
way of knowing whether the South Korean reports are
accurate or just wild rumor. It will be better when we
have our own organization. It may take one or two divi-
sions." (General Church later changed his opinion o the
caliber of South Korean soldiers and was one of the first
to include large numbers in his own 24th Infantry Divi-
sion.)

The general added that the first Americans would be
deployed directly north of Taejon to safeguard key
bridges between this city and Suwon. Troops would ar-
rive in Taejon, he said, in a matter of hours.

None of us, military or civilian, had the remotest idea
of what we were really up against: a total of thirteen to
fifteen enemy divisions. This meant approximately one
hundred and fifty thousand well-armed, hard-fighting
RedSj equipped with the only heavy tanks in that part
of the world. Actually, Major General Charles A. Wil-
loughby, MacArthur's Director of Intelligence in Tokyo,
had reported to Washington that the enemy was massing
this war potential. But certainly none of the soldiers in
the field seemed to know that his report realistically meas-
ured enemy strength.

I asked the general, "How long will it be before we
can mount an offensive?"

Marguerite Higgfns, her face and bands covered with
Korean mud, at work on the manuscript for this hook.

MYDANS

49 PANIC

"Oh, two weeks or somaybe a month/' he replied.

"But suppose the Russkis intervene?'* asked Keyes.

"If they intervene, we'll hurl them back too."

And that ended the interview. We walked back into
the rain with two tremendous stories: the flight from Su-
won and the arrival of the American soldiers. And here
we were again with the same old communications prob-
lem. How were we to get our stories out?

Tom Lambert, who was with the Associated Press, had
a twenty-four-hour-a-day deadline. He suddenly remem-
bered a rumor that Ambassador John J. Muccio had a line
to Tokyo at his quarters in Taejon. Remembering his hos-
tility to the press a few days earlier, we hated to ask for
anything. But we were desperate.

When the ambassador opened the door of his small
gray house in the American-built compound in Taejon's
suburb, his face clouded. Beyond him we could see an
open, blazing firethe most beautiful sight I've ever seen
in my life an open whisky bottle perched on the mantel,
and a melee of tired, distraught Americans in the process
of thawing out. Our faces spoke frank longing to be in-
vited in, and the ambassador must have been feeling com-
passionate, for he let us in. Never has the warmth of a fire
or the burning glow of a straight shot of whisky felt so
magnificent.

But there was no phone. The ambassador did tell us,
however, that some correspondents had been using a
phone down at the United States Information Service.
Tom and I, because we were the two on immediate dead-

50 WAR IN KOREA

line, promptly rushed out the door and hitched ourselves

a ride. (We had left our own jeep at headquarters. )

The phone was there all right, in the rickety first-floor
room just across from the Taejon rail station. Tom, by a
fluke, got through to his office in about twenty minutes
often it took two or three hours. Although we were tre-
mendously relieved to have communications at last, we
were both disappointed that we had no time to write out
our stories. We simply couldn't risk losing this oppor-
tunity and so had to dictate our pieces straight off. This
was particularly difficult for me, since I was used to daily
newspaper techniques rather than news-agency tech-
niques. I had never before been faced with the necessity
of organizing a story in my head for immediate dictation.

This was to prove the least of my troubles. I was a one-
man bureau, and so had no one in Tokyo to whom I could
give my story. Tom asked the Associated Press if they
would help me. The Associated Press is, of course, a co-
operative enterprise in which the New York Herald Trib-
une is an owner paper. They would ordinarily try to help
out a correspondent of a member newspaper.

But after I had dictated only about three paragraphs,
Mrs. Barbara Brines, wife of the Tokyo bureau manager,
cut in excitedly with, "That's all we can take, Marguerite,
that's all we can take/'

I was, of course, frantic. Was that long, horrible ride,
the cold, the fear, all of it, to be for nothing? There was
only one thing to do. I would try to get Tokyo back, call
the Press Club, and try to find one of my colleagues who

51 PANIC

could help me out. I thought immediately of Joe Fromm
of the C7. S. News b- World Report, one of the ablest and
hardest-working members of the Tokyo Press Club. Joe
agreed at once to take the story. But by this time the USIS
room had filled with correspondents pressing hard for the
use of the phone.

Under these psychological pressures I slashed the Su-
won episode to about two paragraphs and compressed
the rest of the really important events into five or six
paragraphs. I felt miserable and frustrated.

The battle of communications which began there at
Taejon continued throughout the war. The Army, it
seemed to me, consistently managed to make a very diffi-
cult situation frightful. At Taejon, for instance, the USIS
phone was taken away from us by the end of the next
day. Time after time correspondents, who were working
in a state of utter exhaustion, found themselves forced
into the attitude of "to hell with the quality the miracle
is to get the story out at all."

I know that never once during the Korean war have I
been satisfied with the writing and organization of a
single story. I know all of us in the beginning kept think-
ing, "Well, next time maybe there will be more of a
chance to think it through/' or, "Next time I won't be so
tired." But in those early days it was commonplace for
Keyes, Tom, and myself to find each other slumped over
our typewriters, collapsed in sleep in the middle of a
story.

The coverage of the Korean campaign has been domi-

52 WAR IN KOREA

nated by this situation. Getting the story has been about
one fifth of the problem; the principle energies of the re-
porters had to be devoted to finding some means of trans-
mission.

After dictating my story that morning, I rushed back
into the drizzle to try to hitch a ride for Tom and myself.
Keyes and Gordon were waiting for us at the ambassa-
dor's. I flagged a Korean officer who turned out to be an
exceptionally neat, well-dressed fellow who spoke English
quite well. Tom climbed in back with the officer, and I sat
in front with the driver. Feeling comparatively chipper
with the relief of sending his story, Tom clapped the
Korean officer heartily on the shoulder.

"Hey, Buster/' said Tom, "do you fight in this man's
army?"

"Well/' answered the officer politely, "I plan to. I have
just returned from Fort Benning/*

"That's fine, Buster," said Tom jovially, clapping him
on the shoulder again. "And what do you do? 3>

"I shall reorganize the South Koreans* defenses," the
officer replied. "You see, I have just been appointed the
new Chief of the Korean Army. My name is Major Gen-
eral Kim II Kuan."

CHAPTER 4

THE FIRST SKIRMISH

The Korean monsoon was still in full downpour two days
later when our jeepload of correspondents started to the
front to watch Americans dig inand die in their first
battle.

As we left the little gray house at Taejons outskirts
around three in the morning, our conversation was as
somber as the weather. We were going to Pyontek, where
only the day before our forces had been badly strafed by
our own planes. This was the first of many incidents which
showed how much we needed to improve our ground-air
co-ordination. I was assigned now to watch the skies and
give warning if I saw a plane.

As we neared Pyontek we had to drive around black-
ened, still-burning ammo trucks. And by the side of the
road were the mutilated bodies of scores of hapless ref-

56 WAR IN KOREA

ugees who had been caught in the strafing. The smell of
death rose from the ditches and the waterlogged rice
paddies on either side of the road.

The conversation, in keeping with the glumness of the
hour, turned to epitaphs. Roy McCartney of Reuters, a
portly, hard-working young Australian, told us of an in-
scription he had seen on an unknown British soldier's
tomb in Burma, He recited it in full for us there in the
wet dawn, as we paused for a C-ration breakfast of frank-
furters and beans,

"Here dead toe lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which u>e sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were youngf*

(I found out later that it is a quotation from A. E. Hous-
man.)

Aside from the general melancholy of the morning, I
had some purely personal reasons for being unhappy.
There has been some publicity about a feud between me
and one of my Herald Tribune colleagues. It is quite true
that the difficulty existed, and I see no point in being coy
about it here.

The simple fact was that my colleague didn't want me
to stay in Korea at all. I had cabled the office at home that
I very much wanted to stay, that I believed there was
more than enough news to share and that the war could
be covered on a partnership basis. My colleague disagreed
with this to the point where he told me flatly that I would

General Douglas MacArthur and his political adviser.,
Brigadier General Courtney Whitney, observe the
paratroop jump intended to cut off the fleeing Reds north,
of Pyongyang during the fall campaign. MYDANS

57 THE FIRST SKIRMISH

be fired if I didn't get back to Tokyo and stay there. He
also added the reassuring information that he didn't be-
lieve I had a single friend in Tokyo.

This was a distressing puzzle to me at the time, but I
later learned that he was probably right. The Tokyo
agency bureau chiefs were furious about a story I had
allegedly filed on American bombings north of the 38th
parallel. The four chiefs had learned of the proposed
bombings before the MacArthur visit to the front lines
and had agreed among themselves to keep the story a
secret until a fixed date. They had received callbacks on
some story of mine (callbacks apparently indicating that
they had been scooped) and wrongly believed that I had
learned about the bombings from MacArthur and filed
the story ahead of their schedule. Since I didn't know
anything about their schedule, what they were really
doing was accusing me of breaking an agreement to
which I was never a party. It is true that I knew about
the bombing plans, but from quite another source. I hon-
estly couldn't remember ever filing the bombing story
at all, and when I checked the Herald Tribune files on my
return I found no record of it. But that, of course, was
much later. And in the meantime I was caught squarely
in the middle of a lot of unpleasant confusion.

I was in such a state of physical exhaustion that I was
unusually vulnerable emotionally and really felt baffled
and upset. But, whatever the attitude in Tokyo, I found
some fine moral support in Korea. Carl ("Stumpy")
Mydans of Time and Life, a wonderfully kind human

58 WAR IN KOREA

being, had unwittingly become mixed up in my problem
because my colleague had warned him that if he took me
to the front I would be fired. I talked it all over with Carl,
and he helped me make up my mind with this question,
"What is more important to you, Maggie, the experience of
covering the Korean war or fears of losing your job?" Right
then I decided to go back to the front, no matter what
came of it.

But there was no denying that I was heavyhearted. I
felt that no matter what the cause of my colleague's hos-
tility, it would be harder on me because I was a woman.
Since I was the only woman here doing a daily news-
paper job, I was bound to be the target for lots of talk,
and this mix-up would supply fresh material I believed
that no matter who was right, I would undoubtedly be
blamed.

But I was happily wrong. The men correspondents on
the scene in Korea could not have been more fair. They
did the only sensible thing, which was to refuse to take
sides at all By the end of the summer the entire sit-
uation ended up where it belonged, in the joke depart-
ment.

But at Pyontek that morning there was only gloom in
the air and in my mind. We were all cold and tired by the
time we found the battalion command post hidden in a
tiny thatched hut surrounded by a sea of mud, Colonel
Harold ("Red") Ayres, commander of the first battalion
of the 34th Infantry Regiment, shared his command post
with a filthy assortment of chickens, pigs, and ducks.

59 THE FIRST SKIRMISH

We had barely had time to enjoy a cup of hot coffee
when Brigadier General George B. Earth strode into the
hut. "Enemy tanks are heading south/' he said. "Get me
some bazooka teams pronto/*

Then, apparently aware of our startled reaction, he
added, "Those Communist tanks are going to meet Ameri-
cans for the first time Colonel Smith's battalion is up for-
ward. We can depend on him to hold on, but if any
tanks do get by those batteries they'll head straight for
here."

So America's raw young troops, boys who had reached
the Korean front only a few hours before, were going into
battle. It was a big moment, and we four knew that we
had been cut in on a critical slice of history. We were about
to see the beginning of what we later named the long
retreat.

I was filled with a very uncomfortable mixture of ap-
prehension and excitement as we followed the bazooka
teams to the unknown front. Wrapped in rain-soaked
blankets, we traveled swiftly behind the small convoy of
trucks and command cars carrying the bazooka and rifle
teams. Then, on the crest of a hill, the convoy suddenly
halted. We could see soldiers jumping out of the trucks
and spreading out on a ridge parallel to the road. The
road was clogged with South Korean soldiers in what
seemed an endless procession southward. (South Ko-
reans, in these early days, simply appropriated the jeeps
or command cars assigned to them and took off individu-
ally. ) One South Korean soldier on horseback, his helmet

60 WAR IN KOREA

camouflaged with bits of branches sticking up at absurd
angles, came cantering toward us, shouting, "Tanks 1
Tanks! Tanks! Go back."

"Now wait a minute/' said McCartney in his quiet
British tone. "Even i tanks do show, no infantry has been
sighted. Tanks can't get off the road, and we can. Let's
walk on."

A little farther on we found Lieutenant Charles Payne
a dapper, fast-talking young veteran of World War II.
He had been examining the marks of huge tank treads
on the road and told us that the tank had sighted us,
turned around, and backed into a near-by village. "We're
going to dig in here," he added, "and send out patrols to
hunt him down."

But the tank didn't require any hunting. Even as we
were entrenching in a graveyard flanking the main road,
the enormous thing rumbled into view about fifteen hun-
dred yards to our left. It was astraddle a railroad, and
there was a second tank behind it. We had no idea how
many more tanks might be in the little village that lay
between us and Colonel Smith's battalion. And, to make
things even more tense, Colonel Smith's battalion was now
urgently messaging us for ammunition. Unless the tanks
were smashed, his forward battalion would be cut off.

At this point a small ammunition-laden convoy roared
up the road. Two lieutenants jumped out and rushed up
the hill to Lieutenant Payne. They were tall, fine-looking
officers with all the bravado and eagerness of very young,
very green soldiers. One announced theatrically to Payne,
"Charlie, our orders are to crash through with this ammu-

61 THE FIRST SKIRMISH

nition and to hell with the sniper fire. Well make it all

right, but we'd like you to give us a couple of your men."

Somewhat owlishly, but in a voice that bespoke author-
ity, Lieutenant Payne said, "Things are changing a bit.
We'll just wait and make another check with headquar-
ters. Then maybe we'll make like Custer."

Roy and I both smiled at that. We were becoming in-
creasingly impressed with the sure, professional way
Payne was handling the situation. I had asked him earlier
in the day how he felt about being back at war.

"Well/' he said, "when I learned in Japan that I was
coming over here I was plain scared to death I figured
that I'd run through my share of good luck in Italy. A
man's only got a certain number of close calls coming to
him. But as soon as I heard the guns I got over it."

Payne would really have been worried if he had known
just how very hard he was going to have to press his share
of good luck. When I saw him again in August, he and
Colonel Ayres were the only two survivors of the battal-
ion headquarters staff of eleven. Of the battalion itself,
about 900 men at full strength, only 263 were still on the
line. The rest were wounded or dead.

From our graveyard foxholes we saw the first of these
deaths the first American death in Korea.

When orders to attack first went out to the fifty-odd
youngsters in our bazooka team they gazed at the tanks
as if they were watching a newsreel. It took prodding from
their officers to make them realize that this was it that
it was up to them to attack. Slowly, small groups of them
left their foxholes, creeping low through the wheat field

62 WAR IN KOREA

toward the tank. The first swoosh from a bazooka flared

out when they were nearly five hundred yards away from

the tanks. But the aim was good and it looked like a direct

hit.

But apparently it didn't look good to Lieutenant Payne.
"Damn," he said, "those kids are scared they Ve got to get
close to the tanks to do any damage."

The first Communist tank whose turret rose above the
protecting foliage along the railway answered the bazooka
with a belch of flame. We could see enemy soldiers jump
from the tank, and machine guns began to chatter at the
approaching bazooka teams. Through my field glasses I
could see a blond American head poke up out of the grass
the young soldier was trying to adjust his aim. Flashes
from the tank flicked the ground horribly close, and I
thought I saw him fall. It was so murky I wasn*t sure. But
in a few minutes I heard a soldier shout, "They got Shad-
rickright in the chest He's dead, I guess." The tone of
voice was very matter-of-fact. I thought then how much
more matter-of-fact the actuality of war is than any of its
projections in literature. The wounded seldom cry there's
no one with time and emotion to listen.

Bazookas were still sounding off. We felt certain that
the tanks, which were like sitting ducks astride the tracks,
would be demolished within a matter of minutes. But time
passed, and suddenly, after an hour, we saw the bazooka
boys coming back toward us across the fields.

"My God/* said Mydans, "they look as if the ball game
was over and it's time to go home/'

63 THE FIRST SKIRMISH

"What's going on?" I asked a sergeant.

"We ran out of ammo/* he answered bitterly. "And the
enemy infantry moving up way outnumbers us. Besides,
these damn bazooks don't do any good against those heavy
tanks they bounce right off."

So, on the very first day of the war, we began to learn
that the bazookas were no match for the Soviet tanks un-
less they scored a lucky hit from very close range. But
even so it seemed incredible that we were going to pull
back with enemy tanks still within our lines. I was gripped
with a sense of unreality that followed me through most
of the war. Reality, I guess, is just what we are accustomed
to and in Korea there was never time to become accus-
tomed to anything.

Incredible or not, it was clear enough as we returned to
the command post that we Americans had not only been
soundly defeated in our first skirmish but that a major re-
treat of our battalion would be forced. We simply had
nothing with which to halt the tanks, and we were far too
few to prevent the North Korean infantry from coming
around our flanks. We hated to think what was happening
to Colonel Smith's forward battalion.

But you soon learn, at a war front, to place events firmly
in separate emotional compartments. There was abso-
lutely nothing to be gained by thinking about Colonel
Smith's situation. When we got back to battalion head-
quarters I think most of us tried to lock the door of the
worry compartment and concentrate on immediate, ma-
terial problems.

64 WAR IN KOREA

This was fairly easy for me that day, for a very simple
reason. My first act, on getting out of the jeep at head-
quarters, was to slip and sprawl flat on my belly in a
muddy rice paddy. Soaked and mud-caked, my consum-
ing, immediate interest was the getting-dry department.

Lieutenant Payne came to my rescue. He found me
some dry green fatigues and gallantly escorted me to an
empty thatched hut where I changed. Next on the list of
compelling interests was flea powder. I had been in agony
all day, completely defenseless against as vicious an as-
sault as fleadom ever made. A thick network of bites
pocked my waist, thighs, and ankles. I hurried down to
the medic's hut to beg for the little gray box of insecticide
powder which was to be my most precious personal pos-
session of the Korean war.

I was talking to a Medical Corps sergeant when they
brought in the body of Private Shadrick. His face was un-
covered. As they carefully laid his body down on the bare
boards of the shack I noticed that his face still bore an ex-
pression of slight surprise. It was an expression I was to
see often among the soldier dead. The prospect of death
had probably seemed as unreal to Private Shadrick as the
entire war still seemed to me. He was very young indeed
his fair hair and frail build made him look far less than
his nineteen years.

Someone went to look for a dry blanket for him, and
just then the medic came back with the flea powder. He
glanced at the body as he was handing me the gray box.

"What a place to die/' he said.

ACME

CHAPTER

FAST CAN AN ARMY RETREAT?'

The full impact of our first disaster in Korea Mt General
Earth's command post within eighteen hours of tlie open-
ing skirmish.

The story unfolded shortly after midnight. I had been
trying to sleep on a blanket-covered bit o floor where
other correspondents and most of the battalion officers
were also stretched out. Despite bone-aching weariness,
the memory of our bazooka skirmish and the thought of
tanks within our lines filled my brief sleep with uneasi-
ness. Stealthy ^ unexplained stirrings in the room set my
heart banging.

Suddenly through the darkness a voice whispered to
me, "Better get into the war room fast. We may have to
pull out suddenly."

In the hall I flashed a light on my watch. It was one

6B WAR IN KOREA

o'clock 'It's retreating time again/' I said to Carl Mydans,
who appeared in die darkness. As lie looked at me ques-
tioningly, I added, "It s exactly the same time that we had
to leave Seoul and Suwon."

We stepped quietly into the tense, hushed war room.
In the center sat General Earth and "Red" Ayres. Deep
concern had replaced the confidence that had marked
both these men only twelve hours earlier.

A kerosene light flaring on the table in front of them
highlighted their serious faces. The table was covered
with a map and surrounded by field telephones. Separat-
ing the officers from the relentless downpour outside were
grotesque rain-soaked blankets that flapped over the win-
dows. The handful of correspondents stood in the dark-
ness at the opposite end of the room.

Near us various officers were frantically grinding their
field telephones, which cast strange shadows in the melo-
dramatic light.

"This is danger forward. (Code name for our command
post ) Trying to reach danger rear/' one officer was say-
ing urgently into the phone. Just as we entered, I saw
three tattered, shaken GIs heading for the door. One was
limping. They looked as if they had been on a prolonged
Dunkerque.

"What's happening?" I asked Carl, who had been taking
notes earlier as General Earth talked to the soldiers.

"It's the forward battalion," Carl answered. "These kids
just escaped. They say most of the battalion is lost."

"Wait a minute," interjected General Earth. "These kids

69 "HOW FAST CAN AN ARMY RETREAT?"

are green and excited. We've just contacted an officer
Colonel Perry. Let's hear what he has to say/'

In a few minutes Lieutenant Colonel Miller O. Perry
appeared. He had difficulty walking. Shrapnel had got
him in the leg. He walked slowly up to General Earth. His
voice reflected a mixture of exhaustion and deep unhappi-
ness.

"I'm sorry, sir/' the colonel said simply. "We couldn't
stop them. They came at us from all sides. We fired until
we ran out of ammo."

Through the glare I could see General Earth pause a
second. Then, with visible effort to take emotion out of his
voice, he said, "I know that you and Colonel Smith did
everything that could be done. How bad is it?"

"Bad, sir," Colonel Perry said. "We lost a lot of men."

"The wounded?"

"The litter cases were abandoned, sir."

The general winced and then asked in a very low voice,
"Let's hear it briefly from the beginning."

"Right, sir," said Perry. "As you know, we were dug in
north of the town of Osan on ridges on either side of the
main road. We had some recoilless 75s, some mortars and
other artillery. About eight-thirty in the morning those
heavy tanks started rolling in on us. We took them under
fire at about fifteen hundred yards and hit four or five. But
we couldn't stop them they rolled right by our positions.

"We sent the bazooka boys down, but their fire couldn't
hurt that armor. Pretty soon the tanks got around to our
rear and were shooting at our positions from behind. Then

70 WAR IN KOREA

the infantry came in with automatic weapons and rifles.
Some were dressed like farmers, in whites, and the rest
had on mustard-colored uniforms. They came like flies, all
around us.

"We had no way of protecting ourselves from encircle-
ment. We didn't have enough men to deploy. Then we got
caught in the cross fire of the tanks and infantry. We were
out of rations and out of ammo by three in the afternoon.
We had to leave all our heavy guns, though we took out
the breeches. The last I saw of Colonel Smith, he was
leading a group of men over the hill."

Superimpose Colonel Perry's story on a series of Ameri-
can holding positions southward and you have a picture of
the Communist tactics for the major phases of the war.
And the Chinese, when they came in, followed exactly the
same battle procedures.

When not successfully spearheaded by tanks, enemy
infantry would take advantage of our numerical weakness
to infiltrate and encircle. I remember describing it in a
story as a "circular front." Particularly in those early days,
we were attacked from the rear and the sides as often as
head on. We started the war with three under-strength
battalions. They were perfect targets for the enemy battle
plan.

As the war developed, the Communists perfected some
new tricks, of course. As they captured more and more of
our equipment, they began to disguise themselves in
American uniforms and try to fool the troops by calling
to them in English and pretending to be South Korean
allies.

71 "HOW FAST CAN AN ARMY RETREAT?"

But the basic pattern never changed. The enemy simply
avoided frontal assault and depended on infiltration and a
series of enveloping movements.

Both the North Koreans and the Chinese keyed their
tactics around their one big advantagevast quantities of
man power. And they were extravagant with it, as we
learned that night from Colonel Perry. His phrase, "They
came at us like flies," became a commonplace one in the
next few months.

As the colonel finished his unhappy account, General
Earth's first words were, "My God, to think I personally
pulled away the dynamite from those bridges." It seemed
that General Earth's confidence in Colonel Smith's ability
to hold the line had been so great that the general had re-
moved the materials with which the South Koreans
planned to blow the bridges in the face of the oncoming
tanks. Now there was absolutely nothing to stop them.

Our weak half -strength battalion was inevitably due for
the next blow. We could not understand why the enemy
had not struck already.

We didn't know it then, but there were six well-armed
North Korean divisions bearing down on us. Why they did
not push their tanks straight through to Pusan then and
there is one of the war's mysteries. A hard push would
have crumbled our defenses, as everyone from General
MacArthur on down now concedes. Facing the enemy
were only a thousand Americans at the most and the dis-
organized remnants of the South Koreans.

General MacArthur believes that the Communist hesi-

72 WAR IN KOREA

tations in the opening weeks of the Korean war constitute
their biggest mistake. They overestimated us as much as
we underestimated them.

Knowing that our battalion was due for a showdown, I
elected to stay on and watch the fight. General Earth
offered both Carl tod myself a ride back to the regiment,
adding, "I'll bring you on back up here early in the morn-
ing/' We accepted and rode off in General Earth's command
car to Songhwan, some twenty miles south of Pyontek.
The command post, as usual, was located in a school-
house. Regimental officers were bending over maps, grind-
ing telephones, and frantically trying to piece together
what was happening up front. As so often happened in this
lightning-fast war, correspondents had to function as liai-
son officers. Carl and I were cross-examined at length
about the bazooka skirmish, and we reported the situation
in as much detail as we could remember.

It was now 3 A.M. With the waning of excitement,
weariness closed in again. Until this period in the Korean
war I had not realized that the bodily mechanism could
be pushed so hard and so long without sleep. Later, watch-
ing soldiers and marines march miles and then fight all
night and day without sleep, I realized what a compara-
tively small dosage of exhaustion we correspondents had
to endure. But on that particular night the long, rough
jeep ride in the cold, the innumerable hikes up and down
hills, and the many previous nights with only an hour or
two of sleep combined to put both Carl and myself in a
state of stupor. Despite the hubbub around us, we each

War-weary GI limps back to his base near Wonju after a
fifteen-mile patrol. ACME

Casualty. ACME

73 "HOW FAST CAN AN ARMY RETREAT?"
picked a rickety table top in the corner of the kerosene-
lighted room, stretched out, and fell asleep.

When I woke at about 5:30 A.M. I think the silence
and a new crop of fleabites must have done it there was
not a single American soldier left in the room. Maps, guns,
and the big square cases of C rations that had been strewn
around the floor were gone.

Carl, his head propped on his elbow and his eyes still
blurred with sleep, was blinking about the room with dis-
belief.

"Why, the whole damn regiment has moved right out
from under us/' he said. "How fast can an army retreat?"

There was nothing to do but go out to hitch a ride, won-
dering what new disaster had caused the sudden move.

CHAPTER

6

"THE EARLY DAYS'

When we reached headquarters of the rapidly forming
24th Division at Taejon, we were told that the sudden re-
treat south of Pyontek had been a "mistake/' General
Earth asserted that we had way outrun the enemy and
had given up ground needlessly.

I am continually astonished when, with the benefit of
hindsight, I remember the atmosphere of confidence at
division headquarters on that day. It was July fifth. The
war was ten days and four retreats old. Major General
William Dean, one of the kindliest and finest of soldiers,
was just taking over the division command. In spite of
what had happened, the myth persisted that just a few
more soldiers and a few more guns could turn the tide. On
that date, according to my notes, the newly appointed
briefing officer estimated that it might take ten more days

78 WAR IN KOREA

before we could mount a counteroffensive. I remember
cabling my office, "Best headquarters estimate is a six- to
eight-week war/'

But sometime in the nightmare of the next few days
headquarters realized our desperate peril Then it became
a fierce race to scrape together reinforcements and rush
them to Korea,

To meet the danger, Japan was stripped of its American
occupation troops. But still this was not enough. For we
were terribly unprepared in the Far East. General Doug-
las MacArthur had repeatedly and urgently warned
Washington that he had insufficient forces in the event of
an emergency. Here was sad proof of his wisdom. Even at
home America itself had fantastically few trained men on .
hand. In Korea regular army officers who knew the paucity
of our numbers wondered if enough men could possibly
be mustered. Then the United States, fighting under the
banner of the United Nations, made the fateful decision
to send virtually every mobilized American soldier to
Korea, stripping our homeland of all but the most meager
defenses. General Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, later told America the "bruising truth" of
how deeply the Korean war bit into our supply of trained
soldiers.

America paid heavily for its unpreparedness. It bought
time with the lives of a few who were sacrificed against
hopeless odds to hold till reinforcements should arrive.
The swiftness with which reinforcements were rushed to
the scene once the crisis was recognized is a tribute to the

79 'THE EARLY DAYS"

resourcefulness of the United States Army, Navy, and Air
Force. It cannot make up for the men who are dead and
who might at least have had a fighting chance to live had
we been prepared.

Delaying action is the military term for the licking we
took in those strange, faraway places: Chonan, Chonui,
Chochiwon, the Kum River, Taejon, Yongdong Po a sad-
dening litany for anyone who witnessed those frightful
days in Korea.

At Chonan the first of these holding actions the enemy
caught us in a deadly trap. We walked into it in the effort
to regain the ground that headquarters believed had been
needlessly relinquished in the last swift retreat.

Our jeepload of correspondents accompanied the rein-
forced American patrol on its excursion into no man's land.
Keyes, back from Tokyo, was at the wheel, and the old
team Tom Lambert, Roy McCartney, Carl Mydans, and
myself was together again.

The patrol was led by Major Boone Seegars, a tall,
smooth-looking officer of an almost Arrow-shirt-advertise-
ment quality of handsomeness. I had met him briefly in
Germany, my previous post. There Major Seegars, a
World War II pilot, had functioned as the aide of General
Joseph T. McNarney, onetime commander-in-chief in
Germany.

"I transferred out of the Air Force at my mother's re-
quest," Major Seegars explained as we started out. "You
see, Tm an only child, and she was terribly worried about
me in the last war." The major paused a second then and
added wryly, "So now I'm leading a patrol/'

80 WAR IN KOREA

We tucked in behind the radio jeep. Two infantry pla-
toons inarched in ditches by the sides of the road and
heavy guns were all set to roll forward if we needed them.

After several miles we spotted the enemy dug in ahead
of us. To our surprise, the enemy soldiers hurriedly with-
drew over the brow of the hill at our approach. An eager
first lieutenant said, "Let's hurry them up with some fire."

But Major Seegars thought differently. "We have plenty
of time/' he said. "Let's see how far we can make them
run without firing a shot/'

The North Korean Reds scurried away from hilltop after
hilltop for about six hours as we cautiously probed for-
ward. We rode through Chonan without drawing a shot,
its rickety wooden houses deserted and silent.

Suddenly our caravan stopped. Rifle fire struck at us
from the hill ahead and a few mortars lobbed in. But re-
sistance was slight and soon ebbed. However, Major See-
gars decided to pause and call up the artillery.

At this pointfour o'clock in the afternoon Keyes
urged that it was time to go back and file our stories. Copy
was log-jammed back at Taejon and there was as much as
twenty hours' delay. I was in a spot. I hated to leave the
situation at this critical juncture. But if I pressed the time
too close, I might miss my deadline altogether. There was
the transportation problem, too, and Keyes was the boss
of that jeep. So I decided to head back to Taejon, about a
two-and-a-half-hour ride.

Pausing at the 34th Infantry Regimental Command,
I found new cause for worry. It seemed that in the brief

A Korean family sets out to find a new home, MYDANS

81 "THE EARLY DAYS"

period since we had left the forward patrol a skirmish had

been reported. Then communications had broken down.

When we heard this, Keyes and I decided that we
would not even attempt to get any sleep that night at
headquarters, but would head straight back to the front
the moment our stories had been telephoned.

Twelve hours later dawn was breaking as we finally got
back to the fighting lines. By that time Major Seegars was
dead. His patrol and the battalion that had gone to the
rescue had been ambushed in a sanguinary battle that had
raged all night in and around Chonan. The command of
the 34th Regiment had changed twice. The first com-
mander had been relieved, and the second, Colonel Mar-
tin, had died attacking a tank with a bazooka from fifteen
yards.

"Blew him right in half ," said Captain Eugene Healey,
whom we met there on the road. "A real tough guy, but he
only lasted a few hours."

Smoke and colored flares spiraled out of Chonan as
American artillery poured it on. They were trying to
smash the oncoming advance of the Communist tanks and
give cover to retreating GIs. The exhausted doughboys
came straggling around the bend, hungry, bedraggled, and
disgusted.

Red shells started zeroing in as we stood there, and
about ten of the infantrymen jumped on the jeep as Keyes
zoomed down the road.

"For Christ sakes, get down, I cant see," he yelled to
the GIs on the radiator. A shell burst close, and a GI on

82 WAR IN KOREA

the hood, his face cut by the fragments, yelled frantically,

"Get going, will you."

Once a safe distance from the shells, Keyes and I tried
to take stock. Soon our stories of the patrol would be tele-
phoned to Tokyo for transmission to the United States.
Under ordinary circumstances I would still have had time
to rush back to communications and catch the storynow
so completely changed before my deadline.

Keyes, reading my thoughts, shook his head. "You've
had it. That filing system has you licked." I realized he
was right. For at Taejon each piece of copy was given a
place in line to be telephoned and you could make no sub-
stitutions. According to the system, I could not remove
my story of the successful patrol and submit instead the
story of the Chonan debacle. The new development would
have to take its place in line, and because of the pile-up of
copy it would be another twenty-four hours before it
would get out. The news agencies were in the same spot
as I was. And that is why the dispatches featuring Major
Boone Seegars as the enthusiastic leader of America's first
successful patrol continued to appear all over the United
States for hours after we all knew that he had died a he-
roic death.

We asked Captain Healey, who had joined us, to tell us
about Chonan.

"The gooks really trapped us," he said, "The)* let us
through the town, then came at us from the hills and from
the rear. Those tanks must have been there all the time,
hidden behind these deserted-looking houses. We got lots
of them, but you can't get a tank with a carbine/'

83 "THE EARLY DAYS"

(American tanks arrived just too late to take part in the
fight for Chonan.)

This was the prelude to a seemingly endless series of re-
treats. In the coming days I saw war turn many of our
young soldiers into savagely bitter men. I saw young
Americans turn and bolt in battle, or throw down their
arms cursing their government for what they thought was
embroilment in a hopeless cause. But I was also to see
other young boys perform incredibly brave deeds to save
a position, help a buddy, or, more simply, to live up to
their belief that, as citizens of a great nation, they had a
duty to fight well. /

Most correspondents in Korea would report, I think,
that it pays off to expect much of an American. Outfits like
the Marines and the 27th (Wolfhound) Infantry Regi-
ment wanted to justify the publicity about them. They
knew they were supposed to be good. And each individual
was damned if he was going to do anything to disprove
the theory. They were prodded on by their own collective
good opinion of themselves. Sometimes this is called esprit
de corps. But people like Lieutenant Ray Murray of the
5th Marines simply say "Gallant, hell. These guys fight
well because they don't want to let the rest of the guys
down. And the rest of the guys have pretty high stand-
ards."

The standards of discipline were quite understandably
low in the weeks of defeat. Any human being wants a
fighting chance. You don't get that at fifty-to-one odds.
In the first skirmishes in Korea we paid a high price in

84 WAR IN KOREA

the lives of trained officers because a disturbing number
of our troops were reluctant to follow orders to stand fast.
It was routine to hear comments like, "Just g* ve me a J ee p
and I know which direction 111 go in. This mamma's boy
ain't cut out to be no hero/* or, "Someone really gave old
Harry the wrong dope on this war. He can find someone
else to pin his medals on."

It was hard to impress the average GI with the fact that
these successive holding actions in Korea were the best
that America could do under the circumstances and that
these sacrifices were gaining us desperately needed time.

These arguments are a mockery if you have just seen
your men massacred in what seems a hopeless fight Lieu-
tenant Edward James, twenty-five years old, who had
crawled down a river bed to safety after having held "at
any cost," approached me in a fury. As his lips trembled
with exhaustion and anger, he said, "Are you correspond-
ents telling the people back home the truth? Are you tell-
ing them that out of one platoon of twenty men, we have
three left? Are you telling them that we have nothing to
fight with, and that it is an utterly useless war?"

Many high-ranking Americans who should never have
taken a chance in the front lines had to go forward to
steady the soldiers by their example. One of these was
Colonel Richard Stephens, of the 21st Infantry Regiment,
who won a silver star for directing one of the first battles
from a forward outpost. The regimental commander was
the last to leave his position.

He described the situation this way: "The boys had to

85 "THE EARLY DAYS''

stick around this time, what with all the high-priced help"
meaning himself "around."

Colonel Stephens added that he decided his presence at
company level was necessary because "before when I
said 'Withdraw/ these boys would just take off like a big
bird. And panic taking off every which, way, dropping
your weapons and such! gets too many people killed/'

In the first three weeks of the war I was filled with pity
at the sense of betrayal and astonishment displayed by
our young soldiers who had been plucked so suddenly out
of the soft occupation life in Japan and plunged into bat-
tle. Most had had only routine basic training and were far
from combat ready- Only a small percentage had ever
heard artillery fire before.

Americans do like to go soft between wars, and hereto-
fore we have always been able to afford that luxury. In
Korea, America found out it could never let down until a
showdown military or diplomatic with the Soviet-dic-
tated world brings some kind of reliable international
truce. Somehow American leadership is going to have to
impress on every potential GI that there are strong odds
that he's going to have to fight some dirty battles to keep
the vanilla-ice-cream kind of world he has been brought
up in. Korea showed that we had fallen miserably short in
indoctrinating the GIs. The United States, which may one
day have a much more important war on its hands, should
face this fact squarely. Otherwise it will continue to find
in its ranks soldiers reluctant to fight. And we can no
longer risk the loss of life that comes when you toss troops

86 WAR IN KOREA

that are unprepared psychologically and physically into

the kind of combat imposed by the Communists and their

satellites.

It was fascinating in Korea to watch the changing atti-
tudes in our front-line soldiers. If, by the end of August,
you asked any front-line GI what he was fighting for, he
feltbecause most GIs aren't very articulate just as em-
barrassed at the question as he had been three months be-
fore. But the things he was saying around the front to his
buddies and the stubbornness he displayed in combat
showed that he was gradually understanding that this sys-
tem he was fighting was an ugly, threatening thing and
that it was best to beat it as far from his own shores as
possible.

A lot of things could have brought about this change:
a look at the bodies of American prisoners, their hands
tied behind their backs with white engineer tape, mur-
dered in cold blood; a conversation with an English-
speaking Korean refugee who could tell firsthand about
life in the Red-occupied north; the absurd name-calling
propaganda of Seoul City Sue. Whatever the cause, it was
encouraging to see the change.

More impressive than the bitterness was the utter resig-
nation with which some of the officers, like Colonel Ayres,
faced the succession of debacles. I remember visiting his
battalion several days after Chonan. Ayres's outfit had
been going through some hell of its own west of Chonan.
But they had pulled back finally out of contact with the
enemy. In the lull, depression and tiredness spread.

87 "THE EARLY DAYS"

Ayres asked Mydans, "Have you heard anything more
about American troops arriving?"

"No," answered Mydans unhappily. "I wish I did have
some good news for you. Have you any special reason for
asking?"

"Oh no," responded Ayres. "I was just kind of wonder-
ing if any more Americans were coming, and if they were,
whether we'd be still around to see them."

During those terrible days, the North Korean Reds had
three key advantages. First, they had overwhelming su-
periority of man power, which often saw our soldiers fight-
ing against ten-, twenty-, and even fifty-to-one odds. Time
after time companies would tell of night infiltrations
through their lines by Communists who would suddenly
appear at dawn on top of their foxholes at the ratio of five
or ten to every GL

Secondly, the Commies had heavy tanks which we were
unable to halt effectively until the third week of the war,
when rocket launchers were brought in.

Our own light tanks were no match for Soviet armor
under ordinary circumstances, and our officers refused to
commit them in tank battles except in case of dire emer-
gency. (American, tanks then mounted 75-millimeter guns,
whereas the Soviets were 88-millimeter, even 90-mfDl-
meter. )

Soviet tank superiority was brought home to me vividly
one day on a curving mountain road, where a bitter young
infantry sergeant, leading a platoon in a counterattack,
complained, "Them American tanks run out on us the

88 WAR IN KOREA

minute they heard the Russian babies coming round the

corner."

The sergeant added disgustedly, "I asked the tank com-
mander where the hell he thought he was going. He had
the nerve to tell me he was heading back because his tank
was at an unfair disadvantage against Russian armor. I
asked that slob what sort of armor he thought I had on
my back."

North Koreans had far more tanks available than had
been estimated more than four hundred in initial stages
of combat alone, as compared to sixty-five predicted by in-
telligence, And the successful tank-spearheaded advance
of North Korean infantry taught us that, in mountainous
terrain, air superiority cannot possibly be relied on to
neutralize enemy armor.

Tliis is not to belittle either air-force or marine tactical
aviation. Tve seen the murderous effects of a rocket-
launching plane-strike on Soviet tanks charred bits of
steel and flesh blown hundreds of yards.

But ask any veteran officers of the Korean campaign
and he'll tell you that the best answer to massed enemy
tanks is bigger and better masses of American tanks. By
early fall American 47%-ton Patton tanks were in action in
substantial numbers and had scored victories against the
38-ton Soviet T-34.

Any GI reminiscing over the first days of the Korean
war will remember with grimness how many felt that the
swift jet planes were more of a hindrance than a help.
During the first four days of battle I was forward with bat-

Miss Higgins and Carl My dans (seated behind her) with
three of their colleagues on the banks of the Han River.
MYDANS

An American infantryman whose buddy has just been
killed is comforted by a fellow soldier as a corpsman in the
background fills out casualty tags, u. s. ARMY

89 "THE EARLY DAYS"

talions which were strafed every day by our own jets. Dug
in a ditch with jets swooshing rockets that seemed person-
ally aimed at us, a GI, on the second day of the war,
summed up the general feeling with the remark, "Why
don't those jet guys either stay at thirty thousand feet or
go back to the officers* club?"

But those were the opening days. The improvement in
air-ground co-ordination techniques was miraculous.
There was nothing wrong with air-force tactical pro-
cedures that an incredibly brief amount of practice didn't
improve. Having been one of the first to write about the
poor air-ground co-ordination^ I feel compelled to say
that in light of the full record the accent of publicity has,
in my opinion, been unfair. I shall never forget those
strafings, but I shall never forget either how, on the seventh
day of the war, a sergeant watching Mustangs diving at
targets only a few hundred yards away commented admir-
ingly, "Those guys ought to have bayonets on their pro-
pellers."

The Communists had the third great advantage of con-
fusion, especially the confusion caused by the difficulty
our troops had in distinguishing the North Korean foe
from the South Korean friend. The Reds made the most
of it. Time after time an American soldier would pass an
innocent-looking bearded Korean farmer hoeing a rice
paddy only to be confronted with the same figure throw-
ing grenades at him in a dawn attack. In engagements
with our Negro troops, Communists went so far as to black
their faces with charcoal and don the uniforms stripped

90 WAR IN KOREA

from dead or wounded Americans. So disguised, they

managed to walk right up on our positions.

Then there were the streams of refugee women with
huge bundles on their heads, babies on their backs, old
men equally bent and weighted, and droves of children.
We soon learned to suspect them. Many escaped Ameri-
can prisoners warned of seeing bent old Korean men and
women "refugees" appear at Red outposts, and produce
mortar plates and guns from otherwise innocuous-seem-
ing bundles.

Add to all this the inevitable disorder of troops over-
run, nipped off unit by unit, and constantly on retreat,
and you can picture the wild atmosphere surrounding our
outnumbered young soldiers, A sergeant of Red Ayres's
battalion plaintively expressed the situation one day with
the remark, "Nobody knows where we are except the North
Koreans."

So, all considered, it is nothing short of miraculous that
the officers, commissioned and non-commissioned, of the
24th Infantry Division were able to pull together their
green, bewildered troops and successfully hold off the
enemy as long as they did. They did wonders with the
peacetime occupation army that had never expected com-
bat, and certainly not under those conditions. Rarely in
American history have so few been asked to do so much
with so little.

The battle for Taejon, a key communications city, was
the most critical and the most costly of the early holding
actions.

91 "THE EARLY DAYS"

"We desperately needed/' said General MacArthur, "
six days between July twelfth and eighteenth. And Gen-
eral Dean and his men won them for us."

It was in that period that the 1st Cavalry and the 25th
Infantry Division were landed in Korea.

The price of Taejon was high. General Dean, a big,
young-looking man of fifty with a wide, soft smile, had the
terrible responsibility of ordering unit after unit to hold at
any cost. I remember the sorrow with which he told a
number of us, "The officers are wonderful. Why, I know
of one lieutenant colonel who alone killed fifteen enemy
with hand grenades. But I'm losing them all. Where am I
going to get replacements?"

General Dean was one of his own replacements. It is
legend now how he led five tanks through no man's land
to a fiery roadblock to rescue his old friend, Colonel Mel-
loy of the 19th Infantry Regiment; how he personally fired
bazookas destroying enemy tanks; and how, after being
wounded, he kept right on rounding up stragglers to guide
their escape after enemy encirclement of Taejon made
further defense futile.

At Taejon we tasted the full poison of North Korean
cruelty. For Captain Lincoln J. Buttery, Medical Corps-
man, it is a story spelled out in terms of a hillside massa-
cre of a band of helpless wounded near the roadblock on
Taejon road. Captain Buttery crawled away from the
scene on his belly, dragging a wounded leg. He told me his
tale in the stench and darkness of a filthy, bug-ridden
hospital train bearing the wounded who had es@aped the
battle lines.

9S WAR IN KOREA

"About a dozen walking wounded and an equal num-
ber of litter patients were trapped north of the roadblock
last night," Captain Buttery began. "The Catholic chap-
lain, Father Hermann Feldhoelter, and the Protestant
chaplain, Captain Kenneth Hyslop, and I were the officers
with them. Father Feldhoelter told the walking wounded
to take to the hills and make out as best they could. Those
in better condition stayed behind to help us carry the
litter patients.

"But the terrain was rough. About midnight we ran
into trouble. Those burp guns rattled at us. We put the
litters down and tried to take cover. Captain Hyslop and
Father Feldhoelter paid no attention to the fire. Father
Feldhoelter went from litter to litter administering last
rites. Men were dying. Pretty soon Captain Hyslop got
nicked.

"We could hear the Koreans yelling and carrying on,
the way they do. We knew they would be on top of us soon.

"Father Feldhoelter said to me and the Protestant chap-
lainthe rest of the litter bearers had left 'You two must
leave. You have families and responsibilities. Mine is the
duty to stay/

"I started crawling away as it got light I glanced back
as I slipped over the bluff. The Reds young kids sixteen
to eighteen, they looked were closing in. The litter pa-
tients screamed and screamed, "No, no!' but the Reds
shot them anyway. Father Feldhoelter was kneeling by
one of the stretchers. He made no sound as he fell/'

CHAPTER

NEWSMAN HIGGINS

In the midst of the battle of Taejon, I received a personal
blow that rocked me as rudely as if it had been a bullet. I
received orders to get out of the Korean theater of war
immediately. No one, including the officer who passed the
message on to me, knew why.

Everyone jumped to the conclusion that I, like Tom
Lambert of Associated Press and Pete Kalischer of the
United Press, had been accused of writing stories "giving
aid and comfort to the enemy/*

In those weeks of defeat it was an agonizing period,
emotionally and mentally, for front-line correspondents.
We felt it our responsibility to report the disasters as we
saw them. And we knew how passionately the guys who
were doing the fighting wanted the "folks back home" to
know what they were up against. But we frequently found

96 WAR IN KOREA

ourselves called traitors by the brass at division, and es-
pecially the brass in Tokyo, for telling die brutal story
about the licking our troops were taking.

Td like to stress that there was never any quarrel be-
tween the press and officialdom on questions of purely
military security. We were eager to keep out names of
towns, camouflage tactical maneuvers, and, in short, co-
operate in depriving the enemy of any information that
might be of military help to him. We repeatedly asked,
without success, for military censorship so that we would
have uniform guidance. If we slipped and I know I did
in the first few daysit was because of ignorance or con-
fusion. (Censorship was finally imposed seven months
later. And then it went way beyond my concept of military
censorship; in my opinion, it added up to psychological
and political censorship. )

But in those early days officialdom's quarrel with us was
over our reports on the bitterness and greenness of our
troops and the humiliating mauling they were taking.
Aside from accusing us of disloyalty, MacArthur's official-
dom had the very real weapon of being able to throw us
out summarily if we displeased them.

Like most newsmen, I deeply believe this: so long as
our government requires the backing of an aroused and
informed public opinion, so long as we are a democracy,
it is necessary to tell the hard "bruising truth/* It is best
to admit panic among our soldiers and so bring home the
great need for better training; it is best to admit that ba-
zookas don't even tickle the big Soviet tanks and make

A wounded American soldier being carried from a jeep to
an airplane which will rush him to a hospital in Japan.
MYDANS

97 NEWSMAN HIGGINS

known the urgent need for better and more weapons; it
is best to tell graphically the moments of desperation and
horror endured by an unprepared army, so that the Amer-
ican public will demand that it not happen again.

With these convictions, I and the rest of my colleagues
quoted the Captain Healeys of the war ("You can't get
a tank with a carbine"); told of the "whipped and fright-
ened" GIs; took our rebukes; and hoped that officialdom's
bark was worse than its bite.

But, as it turned out, my stories had nothing to do with
my banishment. I was being thrown out on orders of
Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker because I was a
female and because "there are no facilities for ladies at
the front"

The banishment-from-Korea edict came as very much
of a last straw in what had been a frantic period, not just
for me but for all correspondents. We never had any com-
plaints about obtaining chow or a place to sleep; we
could always scrounge for ourselves. The big hurdle was
coping with headquarters and somehow, despite official-
dom, getting the story out We had, as a press corps, al-
most no co-operation in obtaining two essentials to our
trade as war correspondents: transportation and com-
munications, Keyes and I were the envy of the group be-
cause of our jeep, the one he had rescued from Seoul. For
many months we had the only available vehicle. The rest
of the press usually hitchhiked. Even during the brief
days of victory it was easier to get a jeep out of the South
Koreans, with their pitifully few vehicles, than from the

98 WAR IN KOREA

Eighth Army, which had motor pools gorged with jeeps.

Despite the much-publicized 270 accreditations to the
Korean war, there were never to my knowledge more than
sixty-odd correspondents actually at the front at any one
time, and the average was closer to twenty.

Hal Boyle, Associated Press columnist, whose long ex-
perience in World War II puts him in a better position
-to speak than I, said, "Never since, and including, the
Civil War have correspondents had so few of the facilities
vital to their trade."

Colonel Pat Echols, MacArthur's press chief, apparently
regarded the press as natural enemies. He couldn't get rid
of us completely, but he could make our reporting life
very difficult. This headquarters attitude inevitably was
reflected by the Army in Korea. The Air Force and the
Marines, on the other hand, took the view, "Once our
official business is clear, we'll give you what help we can/*
And that's all anyone asked.

One early rule that made us particularly angry was that
the telephone could be used only from 12 to 4 A.M. or from
2 to 4 A.M. It didn't matter whether the line was com-
pletely free of military traffic at other hours; the arbitrary
twelve-to-four rule would stick until another rule came
along. We resented the drain on our energies made by
what we viewed as unnecessary difficulties. We felt that
the first call on our time should be coverage of the troops
at the front.

At Taejon there had been crisis after crisis. The Army
had cut off telephones again, and a new backlog meant

99 NEWSMAN HIGGINS

that the only way to get a story out was to fly it personally
to Japan.

Also, despite friendly reassurances from Keyes and
Carl and Roy, I was sincerely worried about my job. I
had heard nothing from the office since my colleague's
warning that I would be fired if I stayed on in Korea. My
state of mind was shaky and there was a continual, op-
pressive lump in the worry department located in my mid-
riff.

So, as usual with bad things, the banishment edict
could not have come at a worse time. I felt, of course,
that it was highly unjust, and warranted a direct appeal
to General MacArthur.

I had already been with the troops three weeks. Now,
with an entire division in the line and more due to arrive,
the worst had already been endured. Realizing that as a
female I was an obvious target for comment, I had taken
great pains not to ask for anything that could possibly be
construed as a special favor. Like the rest of the corre-
spondents, when not sleeping on the ground at the front
with an individual unit, I usually occupied a table top
in the big, sprawling room at Taejon from which we tele-
phoned. The custom was to come back from the front,
bang out your story, and stretch out on the table top. You
would try to sleep, despite the noise of other stories being
shouted into the phone, till your turn came to read your
story to Tokyo. Then, no matter what the hour, you would
probably start out again because the front lines were

100 WAR IN KOREA

changing so fast you could not risk staying away any

longer than necessary.

As for "facilities for ladies" a euphemism employed by
generals when they want to be delicate about latrines-
nobody in Korea, including the Koreans, worried much
about powder rooms. There is no shortage of bushes in
Korea.

Bad language? Well, I'd already been at the front in
World War II. And I really didn't need a trip to our front
lines to know how to fill in the dots and dashes in Hem-
ingway's novels. The American Swearing Vocabulary is
pretty limited, so far as I've observed. Nor do I think I
inhibited the soldiers much, at least not much more than
to make them lower their voices now and again. The nice-
ties of language on a battle front just don't seem very
important.

I telephoned General Walker in Taegu, and pleaded
at the very least not to be yanked out of the story till a re-
placement could arrive. (My Herald Tribune colleague
was then at sea to cover the 1st Cavalry's amphibious
landing.) It was unfair, I argued, to deprive the Herald
Tribune of coverage at this critical juncture in the Taejon
battle. The answer was, "You'll have to leave." I told
Walker I'd go <c as soon as feasible."

On the afternoon of the edict a major tried to put me on
the train leaving Taejon. But I had been entrusted by
Keyes (also on the amphibious landing) with the jeep
and was determined not to be separated from it. General
Dean supported me in this, arguing that there was no

101 NEWSMAN HIGGINS

need, after so many weeks of war, to give me a "bum's
rush."

From then on,, with my appeal to MacArthur still up in
the air, I simply avoided headquarters and stayed at the
front. In the succeeding days, rumor of my plight soon
got around. A touching number of soldiers, from regi-
mental commanders to privates first class, took the trouble
to come to me and say, "We hope you can talk the gen-
eral out of this." I believe they were sincere.

Their concern made me feel awful. There is very little
that is not wasteful and dismal about war. The only clear,
deep, good is the special kind of bond welded between
people who, having mutually shared a crisis, whether
it be a shelling or a machine-gun attack, emerge know-
ing that those involved behaved well. There is much pre-
tense in our everyday life, and, with a skillful manner,
much can be concealed. But with a shell whistling at you
there is not much time to pretend and a person's qualities
are starkly revealed. You believe that you can trust what
you have seen. It is a feeling that makes old soldiers, old
sailors, old airmen, and even old war correspondents,
humanly close in a way shut off to people who have not
shared the same thing. I think that correspondents, be-
cause they are rarely in a spot where their personal
strength or cowardice can affect the life of another, prob-
ably feel only an approximation of this bond. So far as I
am concerned, even this approximation is one of the few
emotions about which I would say, "It's as close to being
absolutely good as anything I know."

102 WAR IN KOREA

As more and more old front-line friends commiserated
with me, I was increasingly aware of the feeling of kinship
and of my emotional involvement in the war. It made the
prospect of departure all the harder. The Reds had thrown
me out of Seoul and it had been a long walk out. I wanted
terribly to stick with this man's Army till we all walked
back in. I was very much pleased one day when Colonel
Stephens, trying to cheer me up, solemnly said, "I tell
you what, Maggie, if they really try to throw you out as
a correspondent, 111 hire you back for my rifle platoon/'

Forty hours went by and still nothing from MacArthur.
But there was one bright spot. My home office cabled that
it was making strenuous efforts on my behalf. I was
pleased and relieved. Their message was the first word
since their original instructions to head for Korea, and it
meant they supported me in my desire to stay at the
front. It was one load off my mind.

By this time, July sixteenth, Taejon was tottering and
almost all the rest of the correspondents had gone south
with division rear echelon. I realized that a reversal of
the edict apparently wasn't coming as quickly as I had
hoped. The business of constantly dodging headquarters
officialdom was very uncomfortable indeed. I decided
to write my final front-line story and gradually go south-
ward to Taegu. There I could plead my case personally
with General Walker, who had said on the telephone that
he would be glad to see me on my way through to Tokyo.

It looked that afternoon, for a few brief moments, as if
I would never leave Taejon. Late in the day "I was jeeping

103 NEWSMAN HIGGINS

unconcernedly past the compound that enclosed division
headquarters. Suddenly a roar of voices boomed to me
to come back.

Looking back, I saw dozens of soldiers, their guns
pointed in my direction, peeping around the compound
fence. Tanks in front of headquarters also had their guns
trained my way. So I hastily wheeled my jeep about and
pell-melled into the compound, heading for the building
we had adopted for the press. It was deserted except for
Bill Smith of the London Daily Express.

"You got here just in time for some excitement," Smitty
said. "Everybody is shooting, but nobody knows why or
at what."

Smitty and I went over to the headquarters building
to try to find out the cause of the trouble. But about all
we found was a number of headquarters men, who had
never been shot at before, under a table. Outside we
found General Dean. He was leaning over thefence> the
boards of which had just been nicked by bullets.

"Somebody is a bad shot," Dean said with a smile.
"They should have got me that time."

One of the general's assistants suggested that maybe
some of our own trigger-happy lads had started this thing
and now we were all shooting at each other. As we looked
around at troops firing aimlessly, we were inclined to
agree. In any event, it was getting dark and we could
not put off leaving the compound much longer. Our exit
from town was practically jet-propelled. Smitty, con-
vinced that the guerillas were imaginary, told me as we

104 WAR IN KOREA

left the compound, "Now wave nicely at those tank boys,
so that at least they won't shoot at us."

Smitty then stepped on the gas and we whizzed down
the deserted main road through the town. To top off
everything, our jeep, just at that critical moment, had an
extreme seizure of backfiring, so that we sort of exploded
down main street. If anyone fired at us, we never knew
it. Our jeep outgunned them.

Joining the sad, dusty American exodus over the wind-
ing mountain road, we finally turned off at 21st Infantry
Regimental Headquarters, located in a Korean school-
house. It was close to midnight and already the main
room was filled with snoring officers sprawled on the
floor. Everyone slept in his clothes for the simple reason
that you had to be ready to move at a second's notice. I
quietly put my blanket down on the floor, doused myself
thoroughly with flea powder, and went to sleep.

The astonished officer who woke up the next morning
and found me next to him on the floor caused considerable
amusement around headquarters by dashing into Colonel
Stephens's room with the exclamation, "My God, sir, did
you know we'd been sleeping all night with a lady?"

The 21st Infantry, which had been badly cut up in pre-
vious fighting, was busy that day digging in for the in-
evitable battle that would come when the two battalions
now defending Taejon were pressed back. I noticed that
the soldiers seemed much calmer than in the days north
of the Kum River. They were even wisecracking a lot.

One GI called out to me, "Hey, Maggie, look at this

Near Taejon an American infantryman winces with pain
as corpsmen break the hold of a wounded buddy whom he
carried two thousand yards from the front to a medical
jeep. ACME

Deep in thought ACME

305 NEWSMAN HIGGINS

foxhole I'm digging. Tm going to stop just short of where

they'd get me for desertion."

"Yours is nothing" chimed in his pal. "I'm diggin* me
a real Hollywood foxhole. All the comforts."

I mentioned the change to Colonel Stephens.

"I told you/' Stephens replied, "no American division
is any damn good until after its first fight. These kidsll be
okay after a while/'

That night I started for Taegu on a "hospital train"
which consisted of unlit, filthy Korean passenger cars.
I had wanted to take the jeep, but it developed that the
Eighth Army was in an extra big hurry to get me out of
the country. The train was due to leave at midnight.

It seemed we waited there for hours in that hot, stinking
car as ambulance after ambulance disgorged its load of
wounded. Silent and sullen, the litter patients and the walk-
ing wounded were crowded into the gloomy train. They
were in the charge of a medic corporal. Stretchers were
placed across the backs of the wooden benches. A gangre-
nous odor of untended wounds mingled with the car's own
smell that of a very old latrine. Many of the wounded
tried to lie down on the floor and on the wooden seats.
But we were so crowded there was no way for anyone
to stretch out. The heat and fetid air made me agonizingly
sleepy.

In the car, the bitterness in the face of the young boy
across from me was such that I almost hesitated to speak
to him. His misery gave me a deep sense of guilt that I
was not wounded. I wanted to say, "Look, I'm not here

106 WAR IN KOREA

because I want to be, but because a three-star general
insisted on putting me on this train." Finally I said,
"Could I get you some water?*'

The kid he must have been about eighteen said, "No,
ma'am." Then he asked the question I had heard all
around the front: "How come you're up here if you don't
have to be?"

I explained that I was a war correspondent, that this
was a tremendous story in the United States, and that
people wanted to know from firsthand observers how the
GIs were doing.

"I hope you are telling them that this is nothing more
than a perpetual Battle of the Bulge," he said.

A sergeant across the way, whose leg had been ampu-
tated, broke in, "Oh, for God's sake, quit griping. We
finally won the Bulge battle, didn't we? 3 '

Two wounded died that night. But they made no sound.
I learned of it only on reaching Taegu, where the train
paused en route to Pusan and their bodies were carried
off.

At Eighth Army, I went straight to General Walker's
aide, to ask for a date to see the general. He said Walker
was at the front but that I could probably catch him
around three that afternoon.

As I was very sleepy, I inquired of a military police-
man about the newly established Eighth Army correspond-
ents' billet and was referred to a captain of public rela-
tions, a rather tall, square-shouldered young man.

He greeted me with, "You're not going to any corre-

107 NEWSMAN HIGGINS

spondents' billet. I'm taking you to the airstrip, and right
now, if I have to call some military police. And you can
write that down in your little notebook [which I did]. I
know all about you. You're just trying to make some un-
pleasant publicity for the general."

"Am I under arrest?" I asked.

"Don't pull that stuff," he replied. "I know your pub-
licity tricks. The general's orders are to take you to the
airstrip, under escort, if necessary."

"Look," I said, "I came here to see General Walker. All
I want is his okay to go back to the front. IVe got a tenta-
tive date to see him after three."

"You're not going to see anyone," was the answer.
"You're going to the airstrip."

It wasn't hard to figure out that there was no use argu-
ing. I wrote a note to the head PIO protesting the expul-
sion, and that was that. Then the captain called a jeep and
armed himself with a carbine. Two similarly armed sol-
diers joined us, and off we went. On the way to the field
he further clarified his views on women correspondents.

When I arrived in Tokyo that night I learned that Gen-
eral MacArthur had rescinded the expulsion order some
twelve hours earlier. It must have been just about the
time the captain was packing me off to the field.

Responding to a cable from Mrs. Ogden Reid, presi-
dent of the New York Herald Tribune, MacArthur mes-
saged: "Ban on women in Korea being lifted. Marguerite
Higgins held in highest professional esteem by everyone."
It was a very welcome change.

108 WAR IN KOREA

I've been asked a lot about the advantages and disad-
vantages of being a woman in my profession, especially in
a war. I think the biggest disadvantage is that you are a
target for all sorts of stories, most just exasperating, but
some very vicious. The fact that they are untrue has
nothing to do with quashing them. You just have to
toughen the area between your shoulder blades and pre-
pare for a lot of darts thrown in that direction.

Each time I'd go back to Tokyo, Carl would fill me
in on the latest crop of Maggie Higgins stories. Once,
very discouraged, I complained bitterly about them to
Jimmy Cannon, columnist for the New York Post.

He said, "If the Racing Form sent a race horse to cover
the war, he wouldn't be any more of an oddity than you
are. That horse's activities would be the subject of all
sorts of stories, and nobody would care how true they
were so long as they were good stories. You're in the same
fix and you'd better just quit worrying about what you
hear/'

I think Jimmy's advice was exactly right.

If you offer any competition in the highly competitive
daily newspaper world, some male colleagueespecially
if he had just got a "where were you?" from his home office
on one of your stories is going to say that you got that
story only because you have a very nice smile. Even if you
got the information from the boss's female secretary and
not from the boss, there is nothing you can do about it*

Some of the men correspondents in Korea had a dis-
tinct objection to female invasion of the field of war cor-
responding. Walter Simmons of the Chicago Tribune

109 NEWSMAN HIGGINS

wrote in a news article, "Women correspondents in Ko-
rea are about as popular as fleas." This hostility was cer-
tainly shared at first by others, especially at the opening
of the war. But it was never manifested in anything other
than a few nasty comments now and again, and these
came mainly from the Tokyo contingent rather than from
the front-line correspondents.

At the actual war front a woman has equal competitive
opportunities. Essentially it comes down to being in the
combat area at the crucial time and having the stamina
to do the jeeping and hiking necessary to get to where
you can file your story.

Of course GIs whistle and wolf-call as you jeep past a
convoy on a road. But when the shelling and the shooting
starts, nobody pays any attention. They are too busy fight-
ing and dodging bullets. No one has offered me his foxhole
yet. And they didn't have to. I early developed a quick
eye for protective terrain and can probably hit a ditch
as fast as any man.

I recently .received from Robert Worth Bingham, presi-
dent of the Louisville Courier- Journal, a clipping about
me from his editorial page. It said, in part: "Miss Higgins
shows no desire to win a name as a woman who dares to
write at the spot where men ,are fighting. Her ambition
is to be recognized as a good reporter, sex undesignated
... An envelope in our newspaper library^ clipping file
is labeled: Higgins, Marguerite Newsman. We believe
Miss Higgins would like that"

The Louisville Courier- Journal was very right.

CHAPTER 8

"STAND OR DIE'

I met the Eighth Army commander, Lieutenant General
Walton H. Walker, for the first time when I returned to
the front in mid- July after MacArthur had lifted the ban on
women correspondents in Korea. General Walker was a
short, stubby man of bulldog expression and defiant
stance. I wondered if he were trying to imitate the late
General George Patton, under whom he served in World
War II as a corps commander.

He was very much of a spit-and-poHsh general, his
lacquered helmet gleaming and the convoy of jeeps that
escorted him always trim and shiny. I shall never forget
the expression on the faces of two United States marine
lieutenants who, on driving up to the Eighth Army com-
pound at Seoul, were told by the military policeman
at the gate: "You can't drive that vehicle in here. It's too

114 WAR IN KOREA

dusty. No dusty jeeps in here. General Walker's orders!"

"Well, 111 be damned/* breathed the marine lieutenant
with deliberately exaggerated astonishment. "Everything
we've been saying about the United States Army is true."

General Walker was very correct and absolutely frank
with me.

He said he still felt that the front was no place for a
woman, but that orders were orders and that from now
on I could be assured of absolutely equal treatment.

"If something had happened to you, an American
woman," the general explained, "I would have gotten a ter-
rible press. The American public might never have for-
given me. So please be careful and don't get yourself
killed or captured."

General Walker kept his promise of equal treatment,
and from then on, so far as the United States Army was
concerned, I went about my job with no more hindrance
than the men.

Despite large-scale reinforcements, our troops were
still falling back fast. Our lines made a large semicircle
around the city of Taegu. The main pressure at that time
was from the northwest down the Taejon-Taegu road.
But a new menace was developing with frightening ra-
pidity way to the southwest For the Reds, making a huge
arc around our outnumbered troops, were sending spear-
heads to the south coast of Korea hundreds of miles to
our rear. They hoped to strike along the coast at Pusan,
the vital port through which most of our supplies fun-
neled.

J15 "STAND OR DIE"

It was at this time that General Walker issued his fa-
mous "stand or die" order. The 1st Cavalry and 25th Divi-
sion were freshly arrived. Like the 24th Division before
them, the new outfits had to learn for themselves how to
cope with this Indian-style warfare for which they were
so unprepared. Their soldiers were not yet battle-tough-
ened. Taking into account the overwhelming odds, some
front-line generals worried about the performance of their
men and told us so privately.

General Walker put his worries on the record and at
the same time issued his "no retreat' 3 " order. In a visit to
the 25th Division front at Sangju in the north, he told
assembled headquarters and field officers, "I am tired of
hearing about lines being straightened. There will be no
more retreating. Reinforcements are coming, but our sol-
diers have to be impressed that they must stand or die.
If they fall back they will be responsible for the lives of
hundreds of Americans. A Dunkerque in Korea would
be a terrible blow from which it would be hard to re-
cover."

Immediately General Walker, in a massive straighten-
ing operation of his own, took the entire 25th Division
out of the line there north of Taegu. He sent them barrel-
ing to the southwest front to bear the brunt of the enemy's
attempt to break through to Pusan. The operation was
skillfully done and the reshuffled troops arrived just in
time.

To fill the gap vacated by the 25th Division, the 1st
Cavalry and the South Koreans were pulled back in a

116 WAR IN KOREA

tightening operation in which we relinquished about fifty

miles, but we attained a smaller, better-integrated defense

arc.

It is certainly a tribute to General Walker that in the
period when he had so few troops on hand and no re-
serves at all he was able to juggle his forces geographi-
cally so as to hold that great semicircle from the coast
down the Naktong River valley to Masan on the southern
coast

I reached the southwest front in time for the 25th*s
first big battle after the "stand or die" order. By luck, I
happened to be the only daily newspaperman on the
scene. The rest of the correspondents were at Pusan cov-
ering the debarkation of the United States Marines. My
colleague on the Herald Tribune had selected the marine
landing for his own. So I left Pusan and hitchhiked my
way west.

At Masan, I borrowed a jeep from the 724th Ordnance
and drove in the dusk over the beautiful mountains that
wind west and overlook the deep blue waters of Masan
Bay. The jewel-bright rice paddies in the long, steep-
sided valley held a soft sheen and the war seemed far
away. But only a few nights later the sharp blue and
orange tracer bullets were flicking across the valley's
mouth until dawn.

The valley leads to Chindongni, where the 27th (Wolf-
hound) Infantry Regiment had established its headquar-
ters in a battered schoolhouse under the brow of a high
hill. Windows of the schoolhouse were jagged fragments,

117 "STAND OR DIE"

and glass powdered the floor. For our big 155-millimeter
artillery guns were emplaced in the schoolhouse yard,
and each blast shivered the frail wooden building and its
windows. The terrific effect of these guns is rivaled only
by the infernal explosions of aerial rockets and napalm
bombs, which seem to make the sky quake and shudder.

I had been looking forward with great interest to see-
ing the 27th in action. Other correspondents had praised
both the regiment's commander, Colonel John ("Mike")
Michaelis, Eisenhower's onetime aide, and the profes-
sional hard-fighting spirit of his officers and men.

The spirit of the 27th impressed me most in the anxious
"bowling-alley" days when the regiment fended off pla-
toon after platoon of Soviet Red tanks bowled at them in
the valley north of Taegu. I will never forget the message
that bleated through on a walkie-talkie radio to the regi-
ment from Major Murch's hard-pressed forward battal-
ion. Sent close to midnight, the message said: "Five tanks
within our position. Situation vague. No sweat. We are
holding/'

On that first night at Chindongni, I found Colonel
Michaelis in a state of tension. Mike Michaelis is a high-
strung, good-looking officer with much of the cockiness
of an ex-paratrooper. His ambition and drive have not
yet been broken by the army system.

He has inherited from his onetime boss, "Ike" or per-
haps he just had it naturally the key to the art of good
public relations: complete honesty, even about his mis-
takes.

118 WAR IN KOREA

That night Mike Michaelis felt he had made a bad one.
His very presence in Chindongni was technically against
orders. He had turned his troops around and rushed them
away from assigned positions when he heard the Reds
had seized the road junction pointing along the southern
coast straight at Masan and Ptisan. There was nothing in
their path to stop them. But, reaching Chindongni, his
patrols could find no enemy. There were only swarms of
refugees pumping down the road. And at the very point
Michaelis had left, heavy enemy attacks were reported.

Miserably, Michaelis had told his officers: "I gambled
and lost. I brought you to the wrong place/*

But depression could not subdue him for long. He de-
cided he would find the enemy by attacking in battalion
strength. If the road really was empty, his men might re-
capture the critical road junction some twenty miles to
the east.

Michaelis asked the 35th Regiment to the north to
send a spearhead to link up with his troops approaching
the junction on the coastal route, and ordered Colonel
Gilbert Check to push forward the twenty miles. The ad-
vance turned into the first major counterattack of the
Korean campaign.

Michaelis told me about it in the lamplit headquarters
room where conversation was punctuated by roars from
the 155 guns. Again he was unhappily belaboring himself
for having made a bad gamble.

It appeared that the Reds had been on the coastal road
after all. Disguised in the broad white hats and white

119 ''STAND OR DIE"

linen garb of the Korean farmer, they had filtered unhin-
dered in the refugee surge toward Chindongni. Then,
singly or in small groups, they had streamed to collecting
points in the hills, some to change into uniform and others
simply to get weapons.

From their mountainous hiding places they had
watched Colonel Check's battalion plunge down the road.
Then they had struck from the rear. Mortars and machine
guns were brought down to ridges dominating the road.
This screen of fire sometimes called a roadblock cut the
road at half a dozen points between Michaelis's head-
quarters and Colonel Check's attacking battalion. Rescue
engineer combat teams had battered all day at the hills
and roads to sweep them clean of enemy, but had failed.
The worst had seemingly happened. The regiment was
split in two; the line of supply cut. The 35th Regiment to
the north had been unable to fight its way to the road
junction.

The fate of Colonel Check's battalion showed that the
enemy was here in force and proved that Michaelis had
been right to wheel his forces south to block this vital
pathway to Pusan. But he felt he had bungled in ordering
the battalion to advance so far.

"I overcommitted myself," Michaelis said miserably.
"Now Check's men are stranded eighteen miles deep in
enemy territory. From early reports, they've got a lot of
wounded. But we've lost all contact. I sent a liaison plane
to drop them a message to beat their way back here. Tm
afraid we've lost the tanks.'*

120 WAR IN KOREA

Colonel Check's tanks took a pummeling, all right, from
enemy antitank guns. But the tanks got "back. Colonel
Check himself told us the remarkable story as his weary
battalion funneled into Chindongni at one o'clock in the
morning.

"Antitank guns caught us on a curve several miles short
of our objective," Check said. "Troops riding on the tanks
yelled when they saw the flash, but they were too late.
The tanks caught partially afire and the crews were
wounded. But three of the tanks were still operable. I was
damned if I was going to let several hundred thousand
dollars' worth of American equipment sit back there on
the road. I yelled, 'Who around here thinks he can drive
a tank?' A couple of ex-bulldozer operators and an ex-
mason volunteered. They got about three minutes' check-
ing out and off they went."

One of the ex-bulldozer operators was Private Ray
Roberts. His partly disabled tank led Check's column
through ambush after ambush back to safety. Men were
piled all over the tanks, and the gunners also volunteers
had plenty of practice shooting back at Reds harassing
them from ridges. Once the tank-led column was halted
by a washout in the road. Another time Colonel Check
ordered a halt of the whole column so that a medic could
administer plasma.

"It might have been a damn-fool thing to do/' Colonel
Check said, "and the kids at the back of the column kept
yelling they were under fire and to hurry up. But well,

Marguerite Higgins with Colonel "Mike" Michaelis.
MYDANS

ABOVE: Four

Russian-made

tanks left in the

wake of the 24th

Infantry Division

as it attacked

near Taegu;

BELOW: Tank

moving up near

Masan. MYDANS

121 "STAND OR DIE"

we had some good men killed today. I didn't want to lose

any more/*

That night I found ex-bulldozer operator Roberts in
the darkness still sitting on the tank. He was very pleased
to show me every dent and hole in it. But he dismissed
his feat with, "I fiddled around with the tank a few min-
utes. It's really easier to drive than a bulldozer. You just
feel sort of funny lookin* in that darn periscope all the
time.'*

I was amused after the roadside interview when Rob-
erts and several of the other volunteers came up and said,
"Ma'am, if you happen to think of it, you might tell the
colonel that we're hoping he won't take that tank away
from us. We're plannin' to git ordnance to help us fix it
up in the mornin'." Private Roberts and company gradu-
ated from dogfeet to tankmen that night, but no special
pleas were necessary. There were no other replacements
for the wounded crews.

The battalion at final count had lost thirty men. In
their biggest scrap, just two miles short of the road junc-
tion, the battalion artillery had killed two hundred and
fifty enemy soldiers.

"We counted them when we fought our way up to the
high ground where they had been dug in," Colonel Check
said. "And earlier we caught a whole platoon napping by
the roadside. We killed them all."

As Check concluded, Michaelis, with a mock grimace
on his face, sent for his duffel bag, reached deep into it,
and produced a bottle of scotch whisky, probably the

122 WAR IN KOREA

only bona fide hard liquor in southwest Korea at the time.

"Here, you old bum/' he said. "Well done."

When Check had gone, Michaelis turned to Harold
Martin of the Saturday Evening Post and myself. We had
been scribbling steadily as the colonel told of the breakout
from the trap.

"Well, is it a story?" Michaelis asked. "YouVe seen how
it is. YouVe seen how an officer has to make a decision on
the spur of the moment and without knowing whether it's
right or wrong. YouVe seen how something that looks
wrong at first proves to be right. Frinstance, coming
down here against orders. And youVe seen how a deci-
sion that seems right proves to be wrong like sending
Checks column up that road without knowing for sure
what it would face. And then youVe seen how a bunch
of men with skill and brains and guts, like Check and the
kids who drove the tanks, can turn a wrong decision into
a right one. But is it a story?"

I said it was a honey and that I'd head back to Pusan
first thing the next morning to file it.

With an entire battalion swarming in and around the
schoolhouse, regimental headquarters was in an uproar.
Colonel Michaelis had been planning to move his com-
mand post farther forward. But due to the lateness of the
hour and the exhaustion of the headquarters staff and
the troops, he postponed the transfer.

It was another of those chance decisions on which vic-
tories are sometimes balanced. We found out the next
morning how close we had shaved our luckagain.

123 "STAND OK DIE"

Half a dozen regimental staff officers, myself, and Mar-
tin were finishing a comparatively de luxe breakfast in
the schoolhouse (powdered eggs and hot coffee) when
suddenly bullets exploded from all directions. They
crackled through the windows, splintered through the
flimsy walls. A machine-gun burst slammed the coffeepot
off the table. A grenade exploded on the wooden grill on
which I had been sleeping, and another grenade sent
fragments flying off the roof.

"Where is the little beauty who threw that?" muttered
Captain William Hawkes, an intelligence officer, as he
grabbed at his bleeding right hand, torn by a grenade
splinter.

We tried to race down the hall, but we had to hit the
floor fast and stay there. We were all bewildered and
caught utterly by surprise. It was impossible to judge
what to do. Bullets were spattering at us from the hill
rising directly behind us and from the courtyard on the
other side.

Thoughts tumbled jerkily through my mind . . . "This
can't be enemy fire . . . we're miles behind the front lines
. . . that grenade must have been thrown from fifteen
or twenty yards . . . how could they possibly get that
close . . . My God, if they are that close, they are right
behind the schoolhouse . . they can be through those
windows and on top of us in a matter of seconds . . .
dammit, nobody in here even has a carbine . . . well, it
would be too late anyway . . . why did I ever get myself
into this ... I don't understand the fire coming from the

124 WAR IN -KOREA

courtyard . . . what has happened to our perimeter de-
fense . . . could it possibly be that some trigger-happy
GI started all this . . ."

There was soon no doubt, however, that it was enemy
fire. We were surrounded. During the night the Reds had
sneaked past our front lines, avoiding the main roads and
traveling through the mountain trails in the undefended
gap between us and the 35th Regiment to the north. In
camouflaged uniforms, they crept onto the hillside behind
the schoolhouse, while others, circling around, set up
machine guns in a rice paddy on the other side of the
schoolyard. This accounted for the vicious cross fire.

They had managed to infiltrate our defenses for sev-
eral reasons. The GIs forming the perimeter defense were
utterly exhausted from their eighteen-mile foray into
enemy territory and some of the guards fell asleep. And
at least one column of the enemy was mistaken, by those
officers awake and on duty, as South Korean Police.

We had been warned the night before that South Ko-
reans were helping us guard our exposed right flank. This
was only one of the hundreds of cases in which confusion
in identifying the enemy lost us lives. It is, of course, part
of the difficulty of being involved in a civil war.

The Communist attack against the sleeping GIs
wounded many before they could even reach for their
weapons.

I learned all of this, of course, much later. On the
schoolhouse floor, with our noses scraping the dust, the
only thought was how to get out of the bullet-riddled

125 "STAND OR DIE"

building without getting killed in the process. A whim-
pering noise distracted my attention. In the opposite cor-
ner of the room I saw the three scrawny, dirty North Ko-
reans who had been taken prisoner the night before. They
began to crawl about aimlessly on their stomachs. They
made strange moaning sounds like injured puppies. One
pulled the blindfold from his eyes. On his hands and
knees he inched toward the door. But the fire was too
thick. The bullets of his Communist comrades cut off
escape. When next I saw the three of them they were
dead, lying in an oozing pool of their own blood that
trickled out the room and down the hall.

The bullets cutting through the cardboard-thin walls
ripped the floor boards around us, and we all kept won-
dering why one of us didn't get hit.

I mumbled to Harold that it looked as if we would have
a very intimate blow-by-blow account of battle to con-
vey to the American public. But he didn't hear me be-
cause one of the officers suddenly said, "I'm getting out of
here/' and dove out the window into the courtyard in the
direction away from the hill. We all leaped after him and
found a stone wall which at least protected us from the
rain of fire from the high ground.

In the courtyard we found a melee of officers and non-
coms attempting to dodge the incoming fire and at the
same time trying to find their men and produce some
order out of the chaos. Some of the soldiers in the court-
yard, in their confusion, were firing, without aiming, dan-
gerously close to the GIs racing in retreat down the hill.

126 WAR IN KOREA

Many of them were shoeless, but others came rushing by

with rifles in one hand and boots held determinedly in

the other.

Michaelis, his executive officer, Colonel Farthing, and

company commanders were booting reluctant GIs out

from under jeeps and trucks and telling them to get the

hell to their units up the hill.

A ruckus of yelling was raised in the opposite corner
of the courtyard. I poked my head around in time to see
an officer taking careful aim at one of our own machine
gunners. He winged him. It was a good shot, and an un-
fortunate necessity. The machine gunner had gone ber-
serk in the terror of the surprise attack and had started
raking our own vehicles and troops with machine-gun fire.
By now the regimental phones had been pulled out of
the town schoolhouse and were located between the
stone wall and the radio truck. Division called, and the
general himself was on the phone. I heard Colonel Farthing
excusing himself for not being able to hear too well. "It's
a little noisy/* he told the general.

Almost immediately Lieutenant Carter Clarke of the
reconnaissance platoon rushed up to report he had spot-
ted a new group of enemy massing for attack in a gulch
to the north. Another officer came up with the gloomy in-
formation that several hundred Koreans had landed on
the coast a thousand yards beyond.

I started to say something to Martin as he crouched by
the telephone methodically recording the battle in his
notebook. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably, I dis-

127 "STAND OK DIE"

covered, and in shame I broke off after the first disgraceful
squeak of words.

Then suddenly, for the first time in the war, I expe-
rienced the cold, awful certainty that there was no escape.
My reactions were trite. As with most people who sud-
denly accept death as inevitable and imminent, I was
simply filled with surprise that this was finally going to
happen to me. Then, as the conviction grew, I became
hard inside and comparatively calm. I ceased worrying.
Physically the result was that my teeth stopped chattering
and my hands ceased shaking. This was a relief, as I
would have been acutely embarrassed had any one caught
me in that state.

Fortunately, by the time Michaelis came around the
comer and said, "How you doin , kid?" I was able to an-
swer in a respectably self-contained tone of voice, "Just
fine, sir."

A few minutes later Michaelis, ignoring the bullets,
wheeled suddenly into the middle of the courtyard. He
yelled for a cease-fire.

"Let's get organized and find out what we're shooting
at," he shouted.

Gradually the fluid scramble in the courtyard jelled
into a pattern of resistance. Two heavy-machine-gun
squads crept up to the hill under cover of protecting rifle
fire and fixed aim on the enemy trying to swarm down.
Platoons and then companies followed. Light mortars
were dragged up. The huge artillery guns lowered and
fired point-blank at targets only a few hundred yards
away.

128 WAR IN KOREA

Finally a reconnaissance officer came to the improvised
command post and reported that the soldiers landing on
the coast were not a new enemy force to overwhelm us, but
South Korean allies. On the hill, soldiers were silencing
some of the enemy fire. It was now seven forty-five. It did
not seem possible that so much could have happened since
the enemy had struck three quarters of an hour before.

As the intensity of fire slackened slightly, soldiers
started bringing in the wounded from the hills, carrying
them on their backs. I walked over to the aid station. The
mortars had been set up right next to the medic's end of
the schoolhouse. The guns provided a nerve-racking ac-
companiment for the doctors and first-aid men as they
ministered to the wounded. Bullets were still striking this
end of the building, and both doctors and wounded had
to keep low to avoid being hit. Because of the sudden rush
of casualties, all hands were frantically busy.

One medic was running short of plasma but did not
dare leave his patients long enough to try to round up
some more. I offered to administer the remaining plasma
and passed about an hour there, helping out as best I could.

My most vivid memory of the hour is Captain Logan
Weston limping into the station with a wound in his leg.
He was patched up and promptly turned around and
headed for the hills again. Half an hour later he was back
with bullets in his shoulder and chest. Sitting on the floor
smoking a cigarette, the captain calmly remarked, "I guess
Td better get a shot of morphine now. These last two are
beginning to hurt"

In a field near Masan, Negro infantrymen take cover in a
rice paddy. They are part of a force rushed from the
central front during the early stages of fighting to protect
the port city of Pusan. MYDANS

129 "STAND OR DIE' 9

In describing the sudden rush of casualties to my news-
paper, I mentioned that "one correspondent learned to
administer blood plasma/' When Michaelis saw the story
he took exception, saying that it was an understatement
Subsequently the colonel wrote a letter to my editors
praising my activities in a fashion that, I'm afraid, over-
stated the case as much as I perhaps originally under-
stated it. But that Mike Michaelis should take time out
from a war to write that letter was deeply moving ta me.
I treasure that letter beyond anything that has happened
to me in Korea or anywhere. And, wittingly or unwit-
tingly, Michaelis did me a big favor. After the publication
of that letter it was hard for headquarters generals to
label me a nuisance and use the "nuisance" argument as
an excuse for restricting my activities.

It was at the aid station that I realized we were going
to win after all. Injured after injured came in with re-
ports that the gooks were "being murdered" and that they
were falling back. There was a brief lull in the fighting.
Then the enemy, strengthened with fresh reinforcements,
struck again. But Michaelis was ready for them this time.
At one-thirty in the afternoon, when the last onslaught
had been repulsed, more than six hundred dead North
Koreans were counted littering the hills behind the school-
house.

We really had been lucky. The enemy had attacked the
first time thinking to find only an artillery unit. We had
been saved by Michaelis's last-minute decision of the
night before to postpone the transfer of the command post

ISO WAR IN KOREA

and bed down Colonel Check's battle-weary battalion at

the schoolhouse. Without the presence of these extra

thousand men, the Reds would easily have slaughtered

the artillerymen, repeating a highly successful guerilla

tactic.

The North Koreans didn't go in much for counter-bat-
tery fire. They preferred to sneak through the lines and
bayonet the artillerymen in the back.

Michaelis's self-doubts were not echoed by his bosses.
The series of decisions some of them seemingly wrong
at the time that led to the battle of the schoolhouse re-
sulted in a spectacular victory for the 27th Regiment. For
Michaelis it meant a battlefield promotion to full colonel,
and for Colonel Check a silver star "for conspicuous gal-
lantry."

After the schoolhouse battle I usually took a carbine
along in our jeep. Keyes, an ex-marine, instructed me in
its use. I'm a lousy shot, but I know I duck when bullets
start flying my way, even if they are considerably off
course. I reasoned that the enemy had the same reaction
and that my bullets, however wild, might at least scare
him into keeping his head down or might throw his aim
off. Since Keyes usually drove our jeep, I, by default, had
to "ride shotgun."

Most correspondents carried arms of some kind. The

enemy had no qualms about shooting unarmed civilians.

And the fighting line was so fluid that no place near the

front lines was safe from sudden enemy attack.

In those days the main difference between a newsman

131 "STAND OR DIE"

and a soldier in Korea was that the soldier in combat had
to get out of his hole and go after the enemy, whereas the
correspondent had the privilege of keeping his head down.
It was commonplace for correspondents to be at company
and platoon level, and many of us frequently went out on
patrol. We felt it was the only honest way of covering the
war. The large number of correspondents killed or cap-
tured in Korea is testimony of the dangers to which scores
willingly subjected themselves.

Fred Sparks of the Chicago Daily News, pondering
about the vulnerability of correspondents, once observed:
"I was lying there in my foxhole one day after a battle in
which the regimental command post itself had been over-
run. I started thinking to myself, 'Suppose a Gook sud-
denly jumps into this foxhole. What do I do then? Say to
him, "Chicago Daily News"!*" After that Sparks an-
nounced he, too, was going to tote "an instrument of de-
fense."

At Chindongni, when the battle was finally over, I
went up to Michaelis and asked if he had any message for
the division commander.

"Tell him/ ? said Mike, "that we will damn well hold/*

And they did; in this and in many subsequent battles.
So did the Marines, who replaced the 27th in that area,
and the 5th Regimental Combat Team, who came after
the Marines. Thousands of Americans "stood and died''
to hold Chindongni and the emerald valley behind it.

In battles of varying intensity, the "stand or die" order
was carried out all along the Taegu perimeter. The de-

182 WAR IN KOREA

f ense arc was ominously dented on many occasions, with
the most critical period being the Red offensive early in
September. But it never broke. And because the line held
despite the great numbers of the enemy, the fabulous am-
phibious landing at Inchon was made possible.

CHAPTER

THE GREAT GAMBLE AT INCHON

General MacAxthur says that he decided on an amphib-
ious assault in Korea almost immediately after he learned
of President Truman's decision to commit American
ground troops.

"In war," the general said, "as in a card game, one tries
to lead from strength. United Nations strength lay in its
sea and air power." He figured that an end run, in which
a substantial force would strike at the enemy rear and cut
off reinforcements, was the only way to lick the numer-
ically superior foe.

Plans for a landing began five days after the United
Nations entered the war. MacArthur chose Inchon Har-
bor for two reasons. His advisers told him that a landing
at Inchon was virtually impossible because of the un-
usual tides. These tides, rushing into the narrow channels,

136 WAR IN KOREA

cause the depth of the water to vary as much as thirty
feet. Then for hours each day most of the harbor becomes
a sea of mud flats. The general decided that if his advisers
felt the Inchon landing to be so difficult, the enemy prob-
ably felt the same way and could be surprised. Secondly,
our intelligence reported that the harbor was very lightly
defended.

As far as correspondents are concerned, the Inchon
landing will be remembered for a long time as one of the
biggest snafus in public-relations history. Around the
Tokyo Press Club the landing was dubbed "Operation
Common Knowledge'* for many weeks in advance. But
despite this common knowledge the officers in charge
agreed that the press was in no way to be consulted about
coverage requirements. The result was that magazine
writers and columnists rode in on the first assault waves
and many first-rate daily newsmen with urgent deadlines
arrived about three days late.

My request to go aboard an assault transport was
greeted with about the same degree of horror as might
have met a leper's request to share a bunk with the ad-
miral. Navy tradition, I was told, was strictly anti-female,
and of course there were no "facilities." (I later noted
with some glee that the flagship McKinley was fully
equipped with a special ladies* room. )

I gave Captain Duffy all my usual arguments: that
women war correspondents were here to stay and the
Navy might as well get used to them; that there were far
more "facilities" on a ship than in the foxholes Yd been

137 THE GREAT GAMBLE AT INCHON
occupying; that it was not fair to deprive the New York
Herald Tribune of coverage because I was a female. I
might as well have been talking to myself. I was relegated
to a hospital ship and told that I might not even be al-
lowed to get off once the hospital ship reached the assault
area. The prospect of wasting seven days on a ship and
then not being certain of getting a story was discourag-
ing to say the least.

But when I went to pick up my orders, Captain Duffy,
apparently in a fit of absent-mindedness, handed me four
neatly miiiieographed sheets which announced that Miss
Higgins could board "any navy ship." By the time I had
grasped this wonderful switch, Captain Duffy was un-
available.

I now learned that some of the assault transports were
leaving from Pusan Harbor in South Korea, and I de-
cided to go there by air. It was an agonizing race, for I
believed the transports were set to go momentarily, and
even if I got there in time I wasn't at all certain of getting
on one. Once in Pusan, I hitched my way to the docks.
They were really roaring, with loaded trucks, tanks, am-
tracs, and ducks barreling past lines of troops. Almost
immediately I spotted some of the male correspondents
on the deck of a transport. I envied their male security
from the bottom of my heart.

My first request for space was promptly refused, on the
grounds that the ship was already overcrowded. I offered
to sleep on deck, but it was no use. I decided to try Cap-
tain Fradd of the Henrico, the command ship of this par-

138 WAR IN KOREA

ticular group o transports. I was both downhearted and

tense by the time I knocked on Captain Fradd's cabin

door. But I presented my orders and stressed the fact

that Td be happy to put my sleeping bag in the hall if

necessary.

Captain Fradd studied the orders methodically and
then said, "These look okay. I'll be happy to have you
aboard, and we happen to have a spare room a sort of
emergency cabin/*

I trembled with elation as I stammered my thanks,
and rushed away to get my gear. The transports were
due to leave in a matter of hours there was a typhoon
threatening which would smash the ships badly if it
caught them in the harbor. I was delighted to leave so
quickly, since it meant that I would soon be completely
out of officialdom's reach. I went straight to my cabin
and locked myself in. Then I lay on the bunk with my
heart racing at every approaching sound that might mean
someone was coming to throw me out. At one o'clock
the dreaded rap came and I opened the door about three
inches.

"Ma'am," said a neat Filipino boy, "the captain wants to
know if you'd like some lunch."

From then on everything went along splendidly. The
5th Marines and the Navy weathered the horrors of hav-
ing a woman around with a nonchalance that would have
annoyed Captain Duffy no end.

It took us four days to reach Inchon. I have read much
about the rigors of life on a troop transport and was pre-

139 THE GREAT GAMBLE AT INCHON
pared to be uncomfortable. But I was agreeably sur-
prised. Perhaps it was just the comparison of four months
of sleeping on the ground or in various flea-bitten huts,
but life on the Henrico seemed to me very pleasant for
everybody. I ate many times with the enlisted men and
enjoyed the food. It was very much of a mass-production
job, efficiently managed. You took your tray, cafeteria
style, filed past the servers, and ate standing up. The food
was warm and filling, and some of it was fresh. To my
taste it ranked one hundred per cent better than the rich,
fatty tins of C rations that were our normal fare at the
front.

During the trip Captain Fradd and Colonel Murray
briefed us fully on the technical difficulties of the battle
ahead. Our assault was to be made on "Red Beach/* which
really wasn't a beach at all, but a rough sea wall of big
boulders. (The marines were definitely not looking for-
ward with pleasure to the prospect of smashing their light
landing craft onto the stones. ) At the moment of the first
landing, the wall would tower twelve feet above the water
line. Engineers had improvised wooden ladders with big
steel hooks on top to enable the first wave of troops to
scramble over the wall. Aerial photographs showed deep
trenches dug on the inland side of the wall. If any enemy
guard was still on the wall when we struck, it would be
murder. The channel approaching Inchon Harbor was so
narrow that the transports would have to anchor at least
nine miles away from the assault beaches. Space in the
harbor was reserved for warships.

140 WAR IN KOREA

A total of two hundred and sixty ships was involved in
the Inchon landing. Our transports had been preceded by
sixty warships, including six cruisers and six aircraft car-
riers. The destroyers played a remarkable role. Six of them
deliberately approached within range of the shore bat-
teries in order to draw fire. The idea was to trick the main
Red defense guns into giving away their positions so that
the planes and big warships could go to work on them.
The trick was successful, and the destroyers were only
slightly damaged. For forty-eight hours big naval guns
had been pounding the shore, softening it up for the as-
sault.

There were to be three landings in all. At dawn the first
troops would storm Wolmi, a tree-covered island jutting
into Inchon Bay and connected to the mainland by a long
concrete causeway.

Then at five-thirty in the afternoon new marine assaults
would be hurled against Red Beach, the very heart of the
city of Inchon, and at Blue Beach, a long stretch of sea
wall south of the city.

In between Red and Blue beaches lay the all-important
tidal basin. It was the only part of the harbor that did not
periodically turn into mud flats at low tide. Successful as-
saults on Red and Blue beaches would give us the tidal
basin, where small and medium-sized craft could bring in
cargo from the transports standing down the channel.

The 5th Marines were to seize the high ground just back
of Red Beach and push on to the city's eastern outskirts if
possible. Specially trained South Korean marines would

141 THE GREAT GAMBLE AT INCHON

be charged with mopping up any enemy by-passed by our

troops.

At breakfast time on D day the first reports came over
our radio.

"Wolmi has been secured/' the radio squawked. "Casu-
alties light."

Word spread quickly around the ship, and the normally
cocky marines became even cockier. Colonel Newton,
commander of the 1st Battalion, expressed the general
feeling when he said immediately, "It looks as though
we're in."

At three o'clock orders went out to lower the rectangu-
lar, flat-bottomed craft into the sea, and the squeaks of
turning winches filled the air. From the deck I watched
the same operation on the other transports, strung out
down the channel as far as the eye could travel.

I was to go in the fifth wave to hit Red Beach. In our
craft would be a mortar outfit, some riflemen, a photogra-
pher, John Davies of the Newark Daily News, and Lionel
Crane of the London Daily Express.

There was a final briefing emphasizing the split-second
timing that was so vital. The tide would be at the right
height for only four hours. We would strike at five-thirty,
half an hour before dead high. Assault waves, consisting
of six landing craft lined up abreast, would hit the beach
at two-minute intervals. This part of the operation had to
be completed within an hour in order to permit the ap-
proach of larger landing ship tanks (LSTs), which would
supply us with all our heavy equipment. The LSTs would

142 WAR IN KOREA

hit the beach at high tide and then, as the waters ebbed
away, be stranded helplessly on the mud flats. After eight
o'clock, sea approaches to the assaulting marines would be
cut off until the next high tide. It was a risk that had to be
taken.

"Wave Number Five/* someone shouted, and we
threaded our way through the confusion on deck to our
prearranged position. Our wave commander, Lieutenant
R. J. Shening, yelled at us to be careful climbing down the
cargo nets into our craft. The cargo nets were made of
huge,, rough ropes. The trick was to hang onto the big
knots with all your strength while you groped with your
feet for the swaying rungs below.

I dropped last into the boat, which was now packed
with thirty-eight heavily laden marines, ponchos on their
backs and rifles on their shoulders. As we shoved away
from the, transport sheets of spray were flung back upon
us by the wind.

We must have circled almost an hour, picking up the
rest of the craft in Wave Number Five. I was thoroughly
keyed up, but the marines around me were elaborately
calm. Two of them played .gin rummy on the wooden
cover over the engine. They only stopped when the lurch-
ing of the boat scattered their cards all over the wet
planks.

Finally we pulled out of the circle and started toward
the assault control ship, nine miles down the channel. It
was an ear-shattering experience. We had to thread our
way past the carriers and cruisers that were booming away

143 THE GREAT GAMBLE AT INCHON

at the beach, giving it a final deadly pounding. The quake

and roar of the rocket ships was almost unendurable.

After twenty minutes we rounded Wolmi Island it
looked as if a giant forest fire had just swept over it. Be-
yond was Red Beach. As we strained to see it more clearly,
a rocket hit a round oil tower and big, ugly smoke rings
billowed up. The dockside buildings were brilliant with
flames. Through the haze it looked as though the whole
city was burning.

Red Beach stretched out flatly directly behind the sea
wall. Then after several hundred yards it rose sharply to
form a cliff on the left side of the beach. Behind the cliff
was a cemetery, one of our principal objectives.

At the control ship we circled again, waiting for H hour.
Suddenly the great naval barrage lifted and there was
gigantic silence. Then the sky began to roar and the planes
zoomed in, bombing and strafing the sea wall. It didn't
seem possible that anything could survive the terrific hail
of explosives.

Silence again. Then H hour. The first wave pulled out
of the circle and headed for the beach. There were only a
few more minutes to wait. We all stared fixedly at the
shore about two thousand yards away and tried to guess,
from the expressions on the faces of the seamen returning
from the beach in their empty boats, what it had been like.

The control ship signaled that it was our turn.

"Here we go keep your heads down/* shouted Lieuten-
ant Shening.

As we rushed toward the sea wall an amber-colored star

144 WAR IN KOREA

shell burst above the beach. It meant that our first objec-
tive, the cemetery, had been taken. But before we could
even begin to relax, brightly colored tracer bullets cut
across our bow and across the open top of our boat. I
heard the authoritative rattle of machine guns. Somehow
the enemy had survived the terrible pounding they'd been
getting. No matter what had happened to the first four
waves, the Reds had sighted us and their aim was excel-
lent. We all hunched deep into the boat.

"Look at their faces now," John Davies whispered to
me. The faces of the men in our boat, including the gin-
rummy players, were contorted with fear.

Then our boat smashed hard into a dip in the sea wall.
With the deadly crisscross of bullets whining above them,
the marines involuntarily continued to crouch low in the
boat.

"Come on, you big, brave marines let's get the hell out
of here," yelled Lieutenant Shening, emphasizing his
words with good, hard shoves.

The first marines were now clambering out of the bow
of the boat. The photographer announced that he had had
enough and was going straight back to the transport with
the boat For a second I was tempted to go with him.
Then a new burst of fire made me decide to get out of the
boat fast. I maneuvered my typewriter into a position
where I could reach it once I had dropped over the side.
I got a footing on the steel ledge on the side of the boat
and pushed myself over. I landed in about three feet of
water in the dip of the sea wall.

Marines scale the breakwater that surrounds Inchon
during their surprise invasion, u, s. MARINE CORPS

145 THE GREAT GAMBLE AT INCHON

A warning burst, probably a grenade, forced us all
down, and we snaked along on our stomachs over the
boulders to a sort of curve below the top of the dip. It
gave us a cover of sorts from the tracer bullets, and we
three newsmen and most of the marines flattened out and
waited there. As we waited, wave after wave of marines
hit the beach, and soon there must have been sixty or more
of us lying on our bellies in the small dip.

One marine ventured over the ridge, but he jumped
back so hurriedly that he stamped one foot hard onto my
bottom. This fortunately has considerable padding, but it
did hurt, and Tm afraid I said somewhat snappishly, "Hey,
it isn't as frantic as all that/* He removed his foot hastily
and apologized in a tone that indicated his amazement
that he had been walking on a woman. I think he was the
only marine who recognized me as a woman my helmet
and overcoat were good camouflage.

The sun began to set as we lay there. The yellow glow
that it cast over the green-clad marines produced a tech-
nicolor splendor that Hollywood could not have matched.
In fact, the strange sunset, combined with the crimson
haze of the flaming docks, was so spectacular that a movie
audience would have considered it overdone.

Suddenly there was a great surge of water. A huge LST
was bearing down on us, its plank door halfway down. A
few more feet and we would be smashed. Everyone
started shouting and, tracer bullets or no^ we got out of
there. Two marines in the back were caught and their feet
badly crushed before they could be yanked to safety.

146 WAR IN KOREA

Davies, Crane, and I vaulted the trenches on the other
side of the sea wall and ran some twenty yards across the
beach. There we found a mound, only about fifteen feet
high, but it gave us some protection from the bullets. In
the half -dark, marines started zigzagging toward the cliff
on our left, and we had an anguished view of a half dozen
of them hurled to the ground by tracer bullets.

There was another terrible moment when one of the
LSTs mistook some men on the top of the cliff for the
enemy and began banging rockets at them. They were
marines who had seized the objective only minutes be-
fore. Frantic shouts and waves from the beach finally put
a stop to it, but not before a number of our men had been
hit.

Six LSTs were now at the beach with their planks down.
Despite the intermittent fire, they had to be unloaded. A
marine colonel spotted our little group by the mound and
yelled, "Hey, you big, brave marines by that mound-get
the hell over here and start unloading/* When we hesi-
tated he rushed over, grabbed me by my coat lapels, and
started pushing me toward the LST. I said that Fd be very
glad to help if he wanted me to. When he heard my voice
he dropped me hastily and very pleasantly allowed that it
would undoubtedly be better if Davies, Crane, and I
tended to our regular duties. I greatly admired the will
and courage with which this particular marine colonel ral-
lied his men to unload the ships in spite of severe fire.

One incident seemed to me to symbolize the technologi-
cal marvel that was the Inchon landing. It started when

147 THE GREAT GAMBLE AT INCHON
Crane decided to investigate the possibilities of filing our
stories from an LST. He left his typewriter with us and
told us sternly to stay right by the mound so that he could
find us again. But only a few minutes after he left, the
same marine colonel showed up and told us to get away
from there. Of course we asked why.

"Because we're going to remove the mound/' the colonel
answered. "It's in our way."

A big bulldozer loomed up in the darkness as we edged
away. A few minutes later the mound was gone and tanks,
trucks, and Jeeps were rolling over the spot where we had
been standing. We had a terrible time locating Crane.
When we finally did find him, he was so angry at what he
considered our desertion that we had an even worse time
convincing him that our mound just wasn't there any
more.

Around seven o'clock the beach was secure and small-
arms fire was insignificant. But enemy mortars were now
beginning to get the range. We decided to go aboard an
LST to write our stories. On our way to the wardroom we
passed through a narrow alleyway which had been con-
verted into a hospital. The doctor was operating on a
wounded marine. About sixty wounded were handled by
this emergency hospital that night. The number of in-
jured was higher than at Wolmi. But, considering the
natural defenses of Red Beach, we had gotten off very
lightly.

As we came out of the brightly lit hospital ward the
steel frame of the LST shivered. A mortar had glanced off

148 WAR IN KOREA

the right side of the deck, narrowly missing some gaso-
line tanks stored there.

I went up to the blacked-out radio cabin to see if we
could send our stories from there to the McKinley, the
flagship of the fleet. But the radio communications had
just broken down for the second time when I arrived. So
we decided to try to flag a small assault boat and get back
to the McKinley before the tide was out. We threaded our
way across the beach through the heavy traffic of tanks,
artillery guns, and trucks until we reached the sea wall.
Even though we had been warned about the tide, it was
an astonishing sight to look over the sea wall and see the
boats twenty-five feet below us. We found a boat going to
the McKinley and had to climb down a shaky ladder to
get aboard.

The tide was ripping furiously when we reached the
McKinley. It was all that our small boat could do, even
with motors roaring, to hold steady against the current
and give us a chance to grab the steps on the ship's side.
It had started to rain, and we were drenched with rain
water and spray. As I balanced precariously on the gun-
wale and tried to grab the steps, an officer of the deck
appeared above.

"We don't want any more correspondents aboard," he
shouted.

Davies and Crane and I just looked at each other. Then,
without a word, we climbed on board.

The wardroom of the McKinley seemed the last word in
warmth and luxury. They were even serving hot coffee.

149 THE GREAT GAMBLE AT INCHON
The "headquarters correspondents" were putting the fin-
ishing touches on stories which they had obtained by go-
ing with MacArthur on a tour of Wolmi.

Davies and Crane were grudgingly accepted now they
were on board. At least they were left alone and allowed
to file their stories. I was treated like a criminal.

Captain Duffy appeared, angrily asking how I had got-
ten there at all I showed him the orders that he had
given me himself, and they certainly read that Miss Hig-
gins could board "any navy ship in the pursuit of press
duties/'

I begged him earnestly to leave me alone long enough
to write my story a story, I couldn't help but point out,
that I had gone to some effort to get. I offered to go back
and sleep on the beach if he would only handle my copy
without discriminating against the Herald Tribune. At this
point one of the ship's medics made himself very unpopu-
lar with Duffy by saying that there was a completely
empty room in the dispensary, complete with "facilities."

But Duffy would have none of it. He insisted on waking
Admiral Doyle out of a sound sleep to deal with this Hig-
gins menace. Once in the admiral's cabin, I tried to ap-
pease him quickly by expressing my sincere thanks for the
fine treatment I had received on board the Henrico. And
after much backing and filling it was finally agreed that I
could sleep on a stretcher in the dispensary but only for
one night. Finally, around one in the morning, I was able
to write the story.

After that night Admiral Doyle decreed that ladies

150 WAR IN KOREA

would be allowed on board the McKinley only between
9 A,M. and 9 P.M. This meant that if I got the world's most
sensational scoop after nine at night, I would not be al-
lowed aboard to write it. I felt that this put me at an
unfair disadvantage with the New York Times, my prin-
cipal competitor, and protested it fervently. As usual, my
protests did no good.

From then on I slept on the docks or at the front with
the troops. This was no better or no worse than what I'd
grown used to in the summer war, and I didn't complain.
Still, when Keyes and the rest would leave me on the
docks to go out to their warm showers and real scrambled
eggs, I won't pretend that I blessed the Navy. (I was
much amused about a month later, when it no longer
mattered, to have the Navy rule that I would be allowed
aboard any ship but that I must be chaperoned at all times
by a female nurse. )

The morning after the assault landing Keyes and I went
ashore very early. We were worried about transportation
our own jeep was back in Pusan. Since the Army would
give us no transportation officially, one of our most im-
portant jobs was scrounging. Keyes is a master at this art.
Since he is an ex-marine, he is particularly good at getting
what he needs from them. Actually the leathernecks are
very obliging fellows anyway.

I have read President Truman's accusation that the
Marines have "a propaganda machine equal to Stalin's."
Actually they have almost no organized propaganda at all.
I have run across only one public-relations officer attached

151 THE GREAT GAMBLE AT INCHON

to the Marines, and he never interfered with us in any

way. This was most unusual, for I have observed that the

main effect of military public-relations officers is to hamper

correspondents.

The marine, as an individual, is usually extremely proud
of his organization. He welcomes correspondents because
they are there to tell the rest of the world about the job
he is doing. Also, since they are a smaller organization
than the Army, the Marines are less stuffy and less in-
volved in red tape. It is easier for them to help you out.

This morning the shore party produced a jeep for us
or, rather, for Keyes. As we rode through the still-burning
city we were astonished to find it virtually all in our hands.
The civilians, afraid of being mistaken for Reds, were out
in the streets by the thousands. They took elaborate care
to bow and wave each time an American vehicle went by.

We located the 5th Marine command post way beyond
the town. And when we finally caught up with Colonel
Murray he told us, with confidence, "The beachhead? Oh,
that's long been secured. Our new objectives are Kimpo
airfield and Seoul."

General MacArthur's great gamble at Inchon had paid
off. And in the forthcoming days I was able to fulfill the
promise I had made myself I walked back into Seoul.

It was not an easy or a pleasant walk. The United States
Marines blazed a bloody path to the city. The going was
particularly rough the day that Charlie Company of the
1st Marines seized a Catholic church in the center of
Seoul. We did not know that the road was heavily mined

152 WAR IN KOREA

until a medic jeep raced ahead of us. The jeep blew up
directly in our path. Of the three people in it, only the
medic survived. And his torn body and shredded, bloody
face were a ghastly sight.

We quickly climbed out of our vehicles. The company
commander shouted to us not to step on any freshly up-
turned dirt it might be a mine. On the rough dirt road it
was difficult to follow his instructions, so we went forward
gingerly on our toes.

The first platoon of Charlie Company,, led by Lieuten-
ant William Craven, stormed to the top of the bluff about
three o'clock. The stinking tenements and back alleys were
burning. The water front spurted mushrooms of black
smoke. We had had to use white phosphorus shells and
napalm fire bombs to knock out the machine guns and
artillery.

"We literally had to shoot the Commies out of the
church/' Lieutenant Craven told us. "They were using it
as a place to snipe from/*

The church was a shambles. The cross had been ripped
from above the altar and all religious symbols stripped
from the building. Huge posters of Stalin and Kim II Sung,
the North Korean Premier, grinned down at us from the
walls. There were also posters caricaturing Americans as
inhuman monsters bent on murdering innocent Korean
women and children. The church had obviously been
used as a Communist party headquarters.

From the church we could see, in the street below, huge
sandbagged barricades. The civilians told us that the bar-

Billows of smoke and flame bear out the accuracy of the
flying leathernecks' marksmanship as F4U-5 Corsairs
support the marine advance, u. s. MARINE CORPS

Miss Higgins and fellow correspondents at a front-line
observation post. KEYSTONE

153 THE GREAT GAMBLE AT INCHON

ricades were mined. The Communists were using the road-
block as cover from which to shoot at us in our higher po-
sition.

The church bell hung on a wooden beam outside the
building, and we could hear the bullets clink against it.
Then suddenly we saw four Koreans standing boldly
against the sky, swinging the bell. It rang out clearly over
the racket of the battle. It was a strange, lovely sound
there in the burning city. Later on the four bell ringers
rushed up to Lieutenant Craven and said, through an in-
terpreter, "That was for thank you.'*

We were giddy with victory. None of us could know
how temporary that victory was to be.

CHAPTER

10

OUR SOUTH KOREAN ALLIES

The caliber of our South Korean allies, both as soldiers
and as politicians, has been almost as controversial a sub-
ject as the Korean war itself.

In the early days of the war American soldiers felt very
sour about the South Korean soldiers. This was certainly
understandable. In those days South Korean soldiers
and officers would appropriate American army jeeps and
trucks as personal property and stream southward in
complete disarray. They clogged the very roads along
which our soldiers were struggling north toward the
front.

After the initial Red capture of Seoul on June twenty-
seventh the South Korean Army of one hundred thousand
men dissolved to less than twenty thousand. Many South
Korean soldiers suddenly became civilians by the simple

158 WAH IN KOREA

process of changing their clothes. Others joined the refu-
gees going south.

Many of these soldiers were reclaimed for the Army.
This was made possible through the untiring and largely
unpublicized efforts of the American officers and the men
of the Korean Military Advisory Group. Special ten-day
training systems were set up, and by the summer's end
the South Korean Army had expanded to more than one
hundred and fifty thousand. In early fall many South
Korean units were incorporated bodily into American di-
visions. The American officers reported enthusiastically on
their courage under fire.

From the beginning the fighting quality of the South
Koreans varied to a bewildering degree. There was great
admiration, for example, for the South Korean division
that held out on the Onjin Peninsula without help from
anybody. Other divisions turned tail and ran.

This unpredictability was hard to explain. I believe that
one explanation is that there had not been sufficient time
to build a strong officers corps. The South Korean Army,
like any other, is only as good as its officers. The Korean
Military Advisory Group (KMAG) began systematic
training of a Korean army in July of 1949. The Reds struck
eleven months later, A month before the war started Briga-
dier General William Roberts, head of KMAG, boasted
that the Korean GIs he had trained were good enough to
compete with the average American soldier. But he
warned that the quality of the officers was poor.

Another difficulty was that the South Koreans were

159 OUR SOUTH KOREAN ALLIES

equipped largely with unwanted leftovers from the Ameri-
can military occupation. They had none of the essentials
of modern war: tanks, adequate antitank weapons, and
air power. It is true that the South Korean Army dealt
successfully with most of the guerilla activity in the spring.
Perhaps if they had been confronted with North Koreans
who were operating alone, without foreign assistance, they
might have been able to repel border attacks. But they
were not even halfway prepared to fight a Russian-
equipped, Russian-directed army which had been im-
mensely strengthened by many recruits from the crack
Chinese Eighth Route Army. This extraction of soldiers of
Korean ethnic origin from the Chinese Eighth Route Army
boosted the invading army's force to some fifteen divi-
sions. In addition, they had more than a thousand tanks.

After the South Koreans were supplied with American
equipment things improved quite a bit. The American
tankmen who were attached to the Korean general's divi-
sion were full of praise for the little ROK (Republic of
Korea) soldiers. They told me that the South Korean en-
gineers cleared eight miles of mined roads under heavy
enemy fire and cheerfully took crazy risks to do it.

By early fall of 1950 the ten-day soldier schools were
going strong. The Koreans were allowed to fire nine
rounds of ammunition and were given instruction on car-
bines, mortars, and machine guns. But ten days is an
awfully short time. Major Dan Doyle, one of the in-
structors, said to me, "We teach them how to dig foxholes

160 WAR IN KOREA

and how to take care of their guns. But I'm afraid they

have to get most of their practice in battle/'

With this rushed training, it was unavoidable that the
quality of some South Korean units would be low, no mat-
ter how brave they might be. It was also to be expected
that the Chinese and Reds would strike hardest at the
weak South Korean units. The result is that the South
Koreans have been very badly hurt in this war and have
frequently been unjustly blamed for failure to stand up
under pressure.

One main reason for the South Koreans entering the war
with an insufficient number of first-rate officers and with
poor weapons was the vacillating American foreign policy.
The Americans pulled the last of their occupation troops
out of South Korea in midsummer of 1949. This was done
in spite of vehement protests from Syngman Rhee, the
President of the Republic. The Americans left because
many high policy makers in Washington felt it best to
write Korea off. My authority for this statement is John J.
Muccio, the present Ambassador to Korea. Muccio worked
hard to change the policy because he believed that the
maintenance of Korea as a non-Communist bastion was as
important to the morale of Asia as was Berlin's fate to the
morale of western Europe.

Militarily, America settled for half measures. We were
not quite ready to go all out and announce our sponsor-
ship of South Korea, but neither were we ready to aban-
don Korea completely. So we started to train a Korean
army too late, and gave too little in the way of equipment.

MYDANS

161 OUR SOUTH KOREAN ALLIES

There Is no doubt that we underestimated the power and
fighting ability of the Soviet-directed Oriental. But even
given a lesser enemy, it was absurd to think that Korea,
with its limited man power, could defend itself without
tanks and planes.

I think it should be emphasized that at the time of the
Red invasion South Korea was specifically excluded from
General MacArthur's command. Ambassador Muccio re-
ported directly to Washington. The responsibility for the
protection of Korea lay in the inexperienced hands of the
fledgling Defense Ministry, assisted by the Korean Mili-
tary Advisory Group.

The confused condition of South Korea's inflationary
economy was undoubtedly one reason why some Ameri-
cans dismissed Korea as unsalvageable. Nevertheless, in
our contradictory way, we continued to pour EGA money
into the country. (Approximately $120,000,000 for the fis-
cal year of 1949-50. )

But when American officials began to insist that re-
forms be instituted in order to put some sort of lid on the
wild inflation, the EGA money turned out to be a good
thing. The Korean government was bluntly told that un-
less irresponsible government spending, money printing,
and inflation in general were checked, the United States
would consider withdrawing EGA assistance. Once con-
vinced that the United States was in earnest, the legisla-
ture passed new tax laws and revenues. Since the Korean
government operated all large industries, the principal
source of new government income was to come from in-

162 WAR IN KOREA

creased prices on government goods and services. There
was, for example, a one-hundred-per-cent increase in rail
fares and electric power.

To the amazement of many people, the economic situa-
tion improved markedly. By mid-April of 1950 prices were
holding comparatively steady. Money in circulation
dropped in volume and the national budget was balanced.
There is reason to believe that South Korea's increasing
economic stability was one of the factors that decided the
Communists to strike when they did. By Asiatic standards,
South Korea had a chance of becoming an anti-Com-
munist show place. The Reds wanted to move before
South Korea became too strong. Also, our highly contra-
dictory attitude made the Communists believe that once
our occupation troops were gone we would assume no
further military responsibility for South Korea. There is
no doubt that United Nations intervention in Korea came
as a shock to Russia and China. This has been borne out
by the testimony of responsible North Korean prisoners.
As far as Korean politics went, I have often heard Asian
experts in the newspaper world refer to South Korea as a
police state. I had made only one visit to South Korea be-
fore the Red invasion and make no claim to being an ex-
pert on the country. But I can make something of a claim
to being an expert on the police state. I spent four postwar
years behind the iron curtain in Berlin and Warsaw, and
also in Prague and Vienna.

There is no doubt that the three-year-old Republic of
a^ when measured by Western standards, had much

163 OUR SOUTH KOREAN ALLIES

to learn about making democracy work. The police had
been trained by Japanese masters and were brutal in the
extreme. In the general elections in 1950 there were nu-
merous charges of police pressure, and I am sure some of
them were true.

But there was no comparison between the orderly,
secret balloting that I witnessed in South Korea in 1950
and the procedures used in Poland in the January 1947
voting. (This Korean election, by the way, was the first
general election in Korea's four-thousand-year history.)
In Poland, a bona fide police state, thousands were
marched to the polls and forced to display their ballots,
marked in favor of the Communist ticket. The alternative
was a stint in prison or dismissal from their jobs.

In deciding whether to place a country in a police-
state category, I think it is always wise to avoid black-
and-white decisions. Let me put it this way. From what I
have seen and read about Korea, the margin of individual
freedom seemed to be increasing before the Red invasion.
It was increasing much too slowly to suit most Americans,
but still it was doing so. From what I have seen and read
about Poland, the margin of individual freedom is rapidly
diminishing. Korea had a long way to go to catch up or
down with Poland.

The Korean Republic was established in August of
1948. This followed years of oppression by the Japanese,
who had annexed the peninsula in 1910. For three years
after World War II, Korea was governed by American
occupation forces. Its Constitutional Assembly was chosen

164 WAR IN KOREA

under the auspices of the temporary United Nations Com-
mission. The Constitution was supposed to apply to all
of Korea. But the Russians ordered the North Koreans to
boycott the government sponsored by the United Nations.
In September of 1948 the Reds established a regime of
their own with a capital at Pyongyang.

The northern half of Korea is the larger geographically
and the country's main industries are located there. But
the North holds only nine million inhabitants as com-
pared to some twenty million in South Korea. The 38th
parallel of latitude, which ultimately became the demar-
cation line between Red Korea and Free Korea, has no
basis in international law. This parallel was selected arbi-
trarily by the United States and Russia to help solve the
problem of splitting up the Japanese war prisoners. Ac-
cording to the agreement, all Japanese who surrendered
above the parallel would be cared for by the Soviet Union.
All those who surrendered below the parallel would go
into United States POW camps. When it proved impossi-
ble to establish a coalition government acceptable to both
Russia and the United States, the parallel turned into a
permanent barrier bristling with guns and barbed wire.

The Korean Republic had a unicameral legislature
elected directly by the people. The most powerful official
was the venerable President, Syngman Rhee. When I last
saw him in September of 1950 he appeared the very es-
sence of old age. He was small, slight, very wrinkled, and
his voice was shaky and faded. He admitted to seventy-
eight years. But, whatever his age, it had in no way blunted
his will.

165 OUR SOUTH KOREAN ALLIES

Rhee has frequently been called reactionary. George
M. McCune > in his book Korea Today, said that in the
early days of 1945-46, "Many Americans objected to
Rhee's reactionary methods and favored Koreans who
would be more conciliatory toward the Russians/ 7 In the
light of subsequent events, it is hard to hold Rhee's anti-
Soviet stand against him.

I have had frequent talks with President Rhee about
police activities in Korea. He has always insisted that the
rule of law prevailed and that the police were not allowed
to make arrests without warrants. But I happen to know
that during the confusion of the Red invasion the rule of
law was frequently ignored. I have seen captured Com-
munist suspects summarily and brutally executed. Rhee
insists that these incidents are the inevitable result of the
passions aroused by the war and that his government did
its best to control them.

Rhee seemed to me a man of autocratic temperament
but sincere democratic convictions. He believed in the
democratic way for the Korean people, but every so often
he has taken undemocratic short cuts to achieve immediate
aims. It infuriated him to be called reactionary. In the
defense of his government, he pointed to the widespread
land reform inaugurated in June of 1950. He also referred
to government plans for the sale of former Japanese indus-
tries to small businessmen and to the government owner-
ship of all big industry. I think he regards himself as a sort
of oriental Winston Churchill. He knows both England
and America well, since he has passed most of his life in

166 WAR IN KOREA

exile. For many years Rhee was the head of the group of
Korean patriots-in-exile who were agitating for Korean in-
dependence.

I remember Rhee's final words on that Indian-summer
day in September when victory seemed so deceptively
close.

"Your government must learn, as we have," he said,
"that there is no compromise with the Reds. It will always
be a trick for them to gain time and lull your suspicions.
The next time they strike it may be, for your world, too
late"

CHAPTER

11

THE CHINESE INTERVENTION

The September successes at Inchon and Seoul broke the
back of the North Korean Array. With the 10th Corps
astraddle their main supply routes in the north, and the
Eighth Army hammering at them from the south, the
enemy disintegrated. The North Koreans needed outside
help to prevent a United Nations victory. At this point the
Soviet world decided that the issues of prestige and mili-
tary strategy involved were worth the risk of a world con-
flict. On October 14, 1950, Chinese troops smashed across
the Yalu River.

The possibility of Chinese intervention had been obvi-
ous from the moment President Truman sent American
air power into combat. Unless we chose to abandon Korea
entirely, it was a chance we had to take. But the actual
timing of the Chinese intervention came as a complete

170 WAR IN KOREA

surprise to high-ranking military men, including General
MacArthur. They had figured that if the Chinese were
going to strike, midsummer would have been the logical
time. Between June and September the Chinese could
easily have pushed our tiny force out of Korea at very
little cost to themselves. It was hard to explain why Mao
Tse-tung had waited until we had built up our fire power
to a point where, even in retreat, we could take a punish-
ing toll of lives.

The most convincing explanation seems to me to be that
the Chinese stayed out of the war just as long as there was
any hope that the North Koreans could lick us on their
own. That hope came very close to reality until the Inchon
landing suddenly changed the picture. POW intelligence
indicates that sometime in late September the Chinese
troops along the Manchurian border were told to get ready
for combat.

Fear of Chinese intervention was one reason why Gen-
eral MacArthur felt so strongly that military operations in
Korea should be completed in the shortest'possible time.
He hoped that if we could move fast enough to confront
the Chinese with the fait accompli of a United Nations
victory, they would hesitate to reopen the war. That is
why he refused to postpone the Inchon landing when the
American Joint Chiefs of Staff urged him to wait until
October. (This temporary uncertainty about the timing
of the Inchon landing is probably one reason why it was
such a surprise to the Communists. One good thing about
not knowing our own minds is that this prevents the Red
intelligence network from knowing them either. )

171 THE CHINESE INTERVENTION

Chinese influence in the Korean war was considerable
from the beginning, I remember as early as July being
present at a forward South Korean outpost when a
Chinese-speaking prisoner of war was brought in. In his
pockets were Chinese Army manuals, complete with pic-
tures of Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese dictator, and Chu Teh,
the head of the Chinese armies. We learned, upon ques-
tioning him, that he had parents in Korea, but he had
spent so much time in China that he could scarcely re-
member his native tongue.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can recall other warn-
ings of the extent of the Chinese involvement. At the time
of the battle for Seoul we wondered why the North Ko-
reans fought so desperately when it was seemingly use-
less. The battle involved house-to-house, cellar-to-cellar,
roof-to-roof fighting of the most vicious sort, We had to
burn down many acres of the city with artillery and flame-
throwing tanks.

The day of Seoul's fall, September twenty-eighth, Keyes
Beech and I paid a visit to the Chosun Hotel. We were
greeted there by the assistant manager, Wang Han Sok.
He was rather excited over what he considered a puzzling
incident. The Communist manager, who had been sent
down from Pyongyang, had absconded with all the hotel
keys and records. When asked for an explanation of this
apparently meaningless action, he had said, "We are com-
ing back soon help is coming/* We thought it was just a
bluff.

In early October, before the crossing of the 38th paral-

172 WAR IN KOREA

lei, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai released a statement over
the Peking Radio in which he pledged, "China will always
stand on the side of the Korean people . . . and will
support their liberation of Korea."

Despite the threat of intervention implicit in this state-
ment, General MacArthur sent his forces into North Korea
on October eleventh. This was done with the full official
approval of the United Nations and was in pursuance of
his military mission to restore "peace and security in all
Korea."

At this point various nations secretly urged that Mac-
Arthur be told to halt, first at the 38th parallel and then
north of Pyongyang. But the United Nations itself never
withdrew its original assignment.

In official American opinion the question of stopping
at this or that parallel had no bearing on the Chinese in-
tervention. In support of this view, various Chinese state-
ments are cited. Wu Hsiu-chuan, the Chinese Communist
delegate to the United Nations, took pains to stress that
the Chinese objected to American presence anywhere in
Korea. From the beginning the Chinese have labeled
American intervention even south of the 38th parallel as
aggression. The Peking Radio had pledged the liberation
of all of Asia from the non-Communists. America felt that
if the North Koreans could not push us out, the Chinese
would try to finish the job.

Both the British and Madame Pandit, Indian Ambassa-
dress to the United States, disagree with this view. They
insist that the crossing of the parallel aroused fears in Pe-

173 THE CHINESE INTERVENTION

king that we would invade China proper. It was these
fears, they believe, that prompted the Chinese to inter-
vene.

Before crossing the parallel General MacArthur broad-
cast two pleas to the North Koreans to surrender and ac-
cept United Nations rule for the entire country. These
offers were defiantly rejected. It seems reasonable that if
the Chinese intervention were based on security consider-
ations, they would have urged their Korean protege to
accept the offer of United Nations rule. It would have
been a rule in which their Soviet protector would cer-
tainly have had a big say. But the United Nations rule was
turned down without hesitation.

A few Chinese were in Korea even before we crossed
the parallel. But the main body of Chinese began slipping
across the Yalu River by night on October fourteenth.
(The Yalu divides North Korea and Manchuria.) Two
weeks later they struck at forward columns of the Eighth
Army, which was approaching the Yalu in pursuit of
North Korean remnants. This forced an abrupt withdrawal
while the Eighth Army regrouped on the Chongchon
River.

General MacArthur then issued a communique in which
he announced that he was confronted with a totally new
war. He added that since the Reds were possibly backed
by a large concentration in the sanctuary of Manchuria,
a trap was being "surreptitiously laid calculated to encom-
pass the destruction of the United Nations Forces.'*

Nevertheless, nineteen days later he ordered the highly

174 WAR IN KOREA

controversial "end the war" offensive. He was accused of

walking into the very trap he had just described.

The offensive, like Inchon, was a gamble. But this time
we lost. There is no doubt that General MacArthur was
laboring under unprecedented military handicaps. Before
the offensive we had no clear idea of what forces opposed
us. Field intelligence was hampered by the severest limi-
tations. Aerial reconnaissance was impossible. The ave-
nues of advance from the border were only a night's march
and provided maximum natural concealment.

And yet the enemy capabilities the concentration of
reinforcements which MacArthur himself had described
had not changed. In order to understand why Mac-
Arthur discounted his own warning, it is necessary to re-
view the events of the nineteen days before the offensive.
During this time the Chinese yielded a lot of ground to
our probing. The Peking Radio doggedly broadcast the
fiction that the troops in Korea were only volunteers. At
the same time the 10th Corps continued to push forward
successfully on the east coast. The 17th Regiment raised
the flag on the Yalu River.

As MacArthur himself has stated, he gambled that the
Chinese in Korea were only token units, sent to fulfill the
letter but not the spirit of their promises to help Korea.
MacArthurs aides say that he also hoped that Peking
would be discouraged by the devastating bombing of
North Korea.

Air-force close-support capabilities were once again
overestimated. MacArthur's communiqu6 announcing the

1/5 THE CHINESE INTERVENTION

"end the war" offensive confidently said that the "air
forces have successfully interdicted the enemy's lines of
supply from the north so that further reinforcement there-
fore has been sharply curtailed and essential supplies
markedly limited/ 7

Tokyo was apparently overly impressed by reports from
prisoners of war that many Chinese were terrified of our
fire power and ready to give up. Some of MacArthur's
aides pictured the Chinese as seriously demoralized.

MacArthur maintains that it was far better to discover
the enemy's intentions when we did rather than to wait
for him to complete his build-up and strike at a time of his
own choosing. His critics do not disagree in principle, but
they feel that he found out the hard way. Instead of an
"end the war" offensive they believe there should have
been a reconnaissance in force.

MacArthur's critics also claim that, in view of the pos-
sible strength of the enemy, our forces were far too thinly
scattered. In the northeast the 10th Corps troops were
strung out from Wonsan on the coast to die wild moun-
tains around the Changjin reservoir. Some Korean forces
were rushing toward Siberia up a coastal road. By spread-
ing itself so thinly in the west, the Eighth Army made it
possible for the Chinese to break through anywhere.

General Walker, in a defense of the abortive offensive,
stated that it had saved his army from possible destruc-
tion. But the critics say that the Eighth Army went on the
move at a time when its supply lines were insecure, when
it had no prepared defensive positions to fall back on, and
when guerillas were attacking its rear bases.

176 WAR IN KOEEA

Finally, the critics assert that MacArthur's forces were
deployed in a manner suitable for fighting the remnants
of the North Korean Army when the war with the Chinese
had already begun.

From the psychological point of view it would cer-
tainly have been better if MacArthur had labeled his of-
fensive a final test of Chinese intentions rather than a
"general assault* which, if successful, should for all prac-
tical purposes end the war/' General MacArthur has pri-
vately admitted that he made a mistake in issuing such an
optimistic communique. He explained that his references
to bringing our troops to Tokyo were intended as reassur-
ances to the Chinese that we would get out of Korea the
moment the Manchurian border was reached.

At any rate, the assault uncovered the might of two
Chinese armies, more than thirty divisions. The Chinese
counterattack hurled us out of North Korea in only a
month.

During that period the Western World presented a
frightening picture of disunity. Instead of blaming the
Chinese, we hunted frantically in our own ranks for
scapegoats. It almost seemed as if we were looking for
someone to condemn on our own side, so that we could
avoid facing the fact that China was warring against us.
General MacArthur, of course, was on the griddle. The
man who had been hailed as a military genius because
of the Inchon landing was now accused by some Ameri-
can newspapers as militarily incompetent

In the uproar that was raised against him MacArthur

With the aid of a South Korean interpreter, a marine
sergeant interrogates two Chinese Communist prisoners
near the Chosin reservoir, u. s. MARINE CORPS

177 THE CHINESE INTERVENTION

was in a way a victim of his own public personality. He
was caught in the trap of his own legend: that of a lofty,
infallible genius. This legend has been built up assid-
uously by his aides, who for years have refused to admit
that their leader could ever make a mistake. When Mac-
Arthur underestimated the enemy and showed his military
fallibility, the world was shocked and angry. He had
broken his legend, and the world could not forgive him
for being human after all.

Personally, I have the highest respect and a deep sense
of loyalty toward General MacArthur. I have talked with
him many times, and my impression is of a man who is
beyond personal ambition, whose selflessness in his coun-
try's cause is complete. I do not know nearly enough
about military theory or practice to evaluate the scope of
MacArthur's miscalculations, but I can report that even
his severest critics do not believe that this setback in
North Korea can change his over-all place in history as
a great soldier.

One thing is sure. No amount of military genius could
have prevented the Chinese from hurling us back a con-
siderable distance in Korea once they chose to strike. The
odds were overwhelming; in view of their man power and
resources, our only possible choice was to retreat. Our
military knew from the beginning that if the Chinese
intervened in force, committing their best troops, we
would have to start rimning. MacArthur's maneuver had
no bearing on the ultimate outcome, which was one of the
greatest strategic withdrawals in our history. A different

178 WAR IN KOREA

tactic might possibly have slowed the retreat a few days,

but that is all.

The retreat of the United Nations from North Korea was
one of the major reversals in our history. But it was a
fighting retreat and produced one of the epics of United
States military history. The marine breakout from their
entrapment at Yudamni is symbolic of how a military sit-
uation at its worst can inspire fighting men to perform at
their best.

CHAPTER

12

EPIC MARINE "ADVANCE TO THE REAR 9

On December 4, 1950, the Peking Radio announced con-
fidently to the world, "The annihilation of the United
States 1st Marine Division is only a matter of time." The
Chinese certainly had good reason for their cockiness.
At the time of the great Chinese counteroffensive the
leathernecks were trapped in the icy wastes of the Chang-
jin reservoir, high in the purple mountains of northeast
Korea. They were surrounded on all sides by Chinese
armies and were outnumbered at least six to one.

But there was never any thought of surrender. I was
present, one day after that Peking broadcast, at a briefing
held in the snowy fields of Hagaru. The snow lashed hard
at the raw faces of a dozen marine officers as they stood
in the zero temperature listening to the words of their
commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ray Murray.

182 WAR IN KOREA

"At daylight," Murray said, "we advance to the rear.
Those are division orders." Then he added, almost argu-
mentatively, "We're going to come out of this as marines,
not as stragglers. We're going to bring out our wounded
and our equipment. We're coming out, I tell you, as ma-
rines or not at all."

The men to whom he spoke had just fought five days
and five nights to lead their men out of the icy Commu-
nist trap at Yudamni. It had been a Korean Valley Forge,
and worse titan anything in marine history. The men were
exhausted, and the tension among them was all-pervasive.
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 to say something
and then stop, as if the meaning was beyond any words
at their command.

Despite what they had gone through, they took this
withdrawal order hard. While Murray spoke I watched
their faces, and their expressions were of deeply hurt
pride. From Chateau-Thierry to Guadalcanal, from Eni-
wetok to Iwo Jima, marines had never fought any way
but forward. Many thousands had died in those strange-
sounding places, as they had here at Yudamni. But never
had the marines stopped fighting until, to use the matter-
of-fact language of the corps, the objective was secured.

Sensing the atmosphere, Colonel Murray went on some-
what harshly, "This is no retreat. This is an assault in
another direction. There are more Chinese blocking our
path to the sea than there are ahead of us. But we're going

183 THE EPIC MARINE "ADVANCE TO THE REAR"

to get out of here. Any officer who doesn t think so will

kindly go lame and be evacuated. I don't expect any

takers."

This briefing started the last phase o the fighting re-
treat The terrible trek out of the mountains cost more
than Tarawa or Iwo Jima. There were nearly five thou-
sand army and marine casualties, including dead, missing,
wounded, and frostbite cases. Never brush off the word
"frostbite." For many marines it meant amputated fingers,
toes, feet, or legs.

As I pieced it together there on the plateau, and later
at Marine division headquarters, the full story of the first
marine withdrawal in history begins properly in mid-
November. It was then that the 1st Marine Division be-
gan pushing north from Hamhung on the winding road
leading to the Changjin reservoir.

There were warnings even then. The enemy harassed
the supply lines, and the frequent ambushes showed that
he was present in considerable numbers between the
supply base at Hamhung and the forward troops at the
reservoir. Still it was believed that there was only a divi-
sion in the area, and they seemed to be yielding to our
pressure.

In reality, as Private Richard Bolde so well described
it, "It was a mousetrap. The Chinese would let us in but
they wouldn't let us out."

On November twenty-fourth the 5th Marines were or-
dered to cross the snowy mountain passes and seize the
oriental shanty town of Yudamni. The town is a series

184 WAR IN KOREA

of rickety clapboard huts, shared, with complete impar-
tiality, by humans and oxen with great wintry beards.
Yudamni was deep on the northwestern side of the res-
ervoir. The 7th Marine Regiment, then located at Hagaru
on the southern tip of the reservoir, was to follow after
the 5th. The 1st Marine Regiment was moving into Koto,
about eight miles below the reservoir, at the point where
the road drops off the plateau and descends sharply to
the coastal plain three thousand feet below.

It is now an open secret in Korea that the marines be-
lieve that faulty generalship was partly responsible for
the extent of their entrapment. The marines were a part
of the 10th Corps and so were subject, for the first time
in their history, to army orders. The marines now claim
that they had qualms from the beginning about the
army orders which sent them into Yudamni valley. Ac-
cording to the marines, by November twenty-fourth there
were strong reports of a Chinese build-up south and west
of Yudamni. That meant that the enemy was on their west
flank and to their rear. These reports were borne out by the
dangerously persistent attacks on the only line of supply.

Then on November twenty-fifth the great Chinese of-
fensive slashed at the Eighth Army. The Eighth Army had
been situated southwest of the marine forward spear-
heads. When it was hurled back, the marines were
stripped of protection for their western flank. The strength
of the assault on the Eighth Army left no doubt that great
masses of Chinese must be swarming over the spiny moun-
tain ridges that separated the two American forces.

THE ROAD BACK: These three pictures were taken on
the road back from the Changjin reservoir, over which the
marines had to plunge fifteen miles through ice and snow
and enemy lines. They fought their way through to the
coast, bringing their wounded and their equipment out
with them, u. s. MARINE CORPS

The American cemetery at Taegu, MYDANS

185 THE EPIC MAEINE "ADVANCE TO THE REAR"

Nonetheless, even after November twenty-fifth, the
10th Corps ordered the marines to keep on advancing.
Although they were already under attack, they did so,
but they questioned the wisdom of the move. On No-
vember twenty-sixth the 5th Marines seized Yudamni, and
the next day they began attacking westward.

But in the meantime the Chinese infiltrated in back of
the spearheads. They cut the road between Yudamni and
Hagaru, and between Hagaru and Koto. The marines were
trapped on all sides by a sea of Chinese.

In justification of the 10th Corps order to the marines
to keep on attacking, I have been told that by sending
the marines westward the Army hoped to strike at the
Chinese rear and deflect pressure from the Eighth Army.
But the marines contend that, since the strength of the
enemy had been revealed, it was a mistake to extend their
outnumbered forces any farther. They believe they should
have been ordered back to Hamhung immediately. Two
regiments, they argue, could not possibly deflect the dozen
or more divisions pushing south. The attack out of Yu-
damni was all the more ill advised, in the marines' opin-
ion, because of the tortuous and vulnerable supply route.

In the early morning hours of November twenty-eighth
the worst happened. Between six and eight Chinese divi-
sions (estimates range from eighty thousand to one hun-
dred and twenty thousand men) converged on the ma-
rines. The most vicious assaults hit the 5th and the 7th
Marines, trapped at Yudamni with their supply lines al-
ready cut. From this time until they broke out of Yu~

IBB WAR IN KOREA

damni, the marines had to be supplied by air. Big Air
Force C-119s used gaudy red-and-yellow chutes to drop
ammo and food. The chutes contrasted weirdly with the
spectacular black-and-white country.

At four o'clock on the morning of November twenty-
eighth the 7th and 5th Marines reported that they were
"heavily engaged" and sent a plea for maximum air sup-
port. Finally, without waiting for word from Corps, Ma-
rine Division instructed the regiments to stop attacking
and hold where they were. The next day the orders came
to fight their way back from Yudamni to Hagaru.

"Those five days and nights fighting our way out of
nightmare alley were the worst thing that ever happened
to the marines/* Colonel Murray told me. "The rest was
nothing compared to that. (The trip from Hagaru to the
coast.) Night after night near Yudamni I thought Yd
never see daylight again."

Yudamni was an ideal trap; steep-sided valleys led to
it along a narrow, icy road. The Chinese hugged the
ridges, and the marines were easy targets. Then the tem-
perature dropped way below zero. Guns and vehicles
froze. The marines had to chip the ice off the mortars to
fire them. Carbines jammed in the cold.

There was no refuge for the wounded. They had to
take their chances in the convoy, under attack at every
point. Murray brought out two wounded men strapped
across the radiator of his jeep, their hands and legs frozen.
Many wounded were on stretchers for more than seventy-
two hours. Exposure and frostbite complicated their

287 THE EPIC MARINE "ADVANCE TO THE REAR"
chances of survival enormously. Nothing could be done
about it.

Riflemen were given the job of clearing the ridges as
the convoy inched forward. They were frequently
slaughtered. Whole platoons disappeared.

I had a long talk with Lieutenant John Theros, forward
air observer with the 7th Marines, and I think he can de-
scribe the general setup better than I can.

"It's a hard kind of fighting to explain/' he said, "ex-
cept to say that everyone in the valley either came out
with a Purple Heart or came within inches of getting one.
Look at me. My pant leg has two bullet rips. And my can-
teen that I carried on my hip is an old sieve.

"I used to kid some of my friends about leading a soft,
fat-cat life back at regiment. Well, at Yudamni there was
no such thing as a safe place. The Chinese headed for
the command posts they liked killing colonels just as
much as killing privates.

"But the guys you ought to write about are guys like
Captain Hull of our battalion. He was a company com-
mander, and what a terrific guy. He was wounded going
into the valley, but he wouldn't be evacuated. Then the
Chinese really let us have it, and Captain Hull's company
got pushed off the hill they were holding. He only had
forty-nine men left in his company, but he was mad and
so were the men. They went back up that hill, and the
guys said they were stomping over frozen dead gooks all
the way up. But they got shoved down again, and this

188 WAR IN KOREA

time Hull was reported hit We didn't hear anything more
about him at battalion.

**! thought sure he was done for then, and I remember
sitting around during a lull that night saying what a ter-
rific guy Captain Hull had been. And suddenly the old
bastard walks in with two more wounds one high up in
the chest and one in the shoulder,

"That night we had been forming what we called the
'damnation battalion.* Our regiment had been so cut up
that we were putting all the remnants in it platoon
leaders without platoons, mortar men without a mortar
company, track drivers without trucks we formed them
all up in the 'damnation battalion/ Well, Hull didn't have
any company left to speak of, and damned if he didn't
go to the major running the 'damnation battalion' and
volunteer. He said to the major, Tm not much good at
shooting in this condition, but I can still walk, and if
you've got any men who want to follow me, 111 lead 'em/
He marched out of the valley with the rest of us. You
know, you hear stories about comrades of battle getting
to be closer than brothers. I guess it's true. I'd do anything
for that Captain Hull, and I don't even know his first
name/'

The 7th and 5th Regiments were now operating for
the first time under joint orders and without benefit of
division guidance. As they battered their way along they
came across Fox Company of the 7th. The company had
been isolated for five days on a hilltop.

There were only seventy-five men left in Fox Com-

189 THE EPIC MARINE "ADVANCE TO THE REAR' 9
pany, and every one of them was wounded. But, except
for the most critical cases, they were still shooting. They
used piled-up bodies of dead Chinese to protect their
foxholes.

On December third and fourth the ten-mile-long ma-
rine caravan finally broke out of the Yudamni valley. They
reached the temporary haven of the saucer-shaped Ha-
garu plateau. They had cracked half a dozen roadblocks
and fixed numerous bridges under fire. Time after time
they had fought off the Chinese, who would swoop down
on them and throw phosphorus hand grenades into the
truckloads of screaming wounded.

The marines had even brought some army wounded
with them remnants of a 7th Division unit that had been
smashed on the eastern side of the reservoir. The Chinese
had attacked the ambulances, and most of the wounded
had been spilled out onto the ice. In order to rescue them,
the marines had to dodge vicious enemy fire.

I had arrived at Hagaru as the last of the marines fil-
tered through the pass. As our "gooney bird" DC-6 circled
over the icy humps that passed for an airstrip, our pilot
pointed to the snow-topped foxholes in the ridges. These
foxholes, which were in easy rifle range of the field, con-
stituted the limits of our defense perimeter. North, south,
east, and west there was nothing but gooks.

Between December third and sixth forty-five hundred
wounded and frostbite cases were flown out of the Ha-
garu strip. Doc Herring, naval surgeon attached to the 1st
Marine Division, was on hand at the strip. He had the

190 WAR IN KOREA

difficult job of deciding which men were sufficiently hurt
to justify flying them out. No one could go unless it was
absolutely necessary: every man able to shoot was needed
for the forthcoming fight. Hagara was only twenty min-
utes from the coast by air. But it was sixty tortuous, pre-
cipitous walking miles. And for the first twenty miles, to
the bottom of the plateau at Chinhungni, the marines
would have to punch through a solid Chinese wall.

As I looked at the battered men there at Hagaru, I
wondered if they could possibly have the strength to
make this final punch. The men were ragged, their faces
swollen and bleeding from the sting of the icy wind.
Mittens were torn and raveled. Some were without hats,
their ears blue in the frost. A few walked to the doctor's
tent barefoot because they couldn't get their frostbitten
feet into their frozen shoepacs. They were drunk with
fatigue, and yet they were unable to shrug off the ten-
sion that had kept them going five days and nights with-
out sleep and often without food. (It took at least an hour
to thaw out a can of frankfurters and beans, and there had
seldom been an hour to spare for such matters. )

Colonel Murray was a haggard ghost of the officer
whom I had watched lead the 5th Marines assault on Red
Beach in the happy days of the successful Inchon landing.
But his driving will was still there. When I entered the
regimental tent he was hard at work on plans for the
fight to Koto, eight miles away.

Militarily speaking, the colonel explained, the breakout
from Yudamni had been possible because the Chinese

191 THE EPIC MARINE "ADVANCE TO THE REAR"
had not observed one of the basic principles of war: they
had failed to concentrate their forces where they would
do the most good.

"If the Chinese had concentrated their troops at the
point of exit/' Murray said, "we could never have gotten
out of the trap. By trying to keep us consistently en-
circled, they dispersed their strength."

"Do you think they'll make the same mistake again?" I
asked.

Murray's answer was simple. "They've got to," he said.

And they did. The marine trek from Hagara to Koto
lasted two bloody days. But even as the spearheads of the
7th Regiment reached Koto's bleak haven, the men of the
5th were still at Hagaru fighting off a furious night attack
aimed at wiping out the rear guard. With dawn and the
arrival of air cover, the 5th Marines thrust back the Chi-
nese.

An aerial curtain of marine Corsairs and navy fighters
protected the head and tail of the column as it wound
over the road to Koto. Only the drivers stayed in the ve-
hicles. Everyone else walked, with weapons at the ready.
When the Chinese attacked there was no time to waste
scrambling out of jeeps and trucks. So the caravan crawled
along, fighting off attacks from the sides and rear.

By journalistic good fortune, I was on hand in Koto
to meet the marines. I had hitched a ride in a fighter-
bomber piloted by Captain Alfred McCaleb, going to
Koto to fly out wounded. There were only three of these
planes in service that first day. One blew a tire and the

192 WAR IN KOREA

other tripped over on the runway, so that left the main
burden on McCaleb. I later learned that McCaleb per-
sonally flew out nearly a hundred men. It was the first
time in history that fighter-bombers were used in this way,

There was an unmistakable difference in the attitude of
the marines arriving in Koto and that of the haggard men
I'd seen at Hagaru. The new feeling seemed to be, "If
we've got this far, we're bound to make the rest."

I was deeply impressed by the large number of Korean
refugees who followed after the marines and squatted
stubbornly in the snowy fields. Our presence in Korea
had brought destruction to their towns and death to their
people. Yet here were nearly a thousand people who had
left their homes and followed our troops rather than re-
main and face the Chinese Communists.

It was now December seventh, still very cold, but at
least the racing winds were letting up. The canyon road
that lay ahead was the steepest and narrowest part of the
journey. But it was only ten more miles to Chinhungni,
and Chinhungni was the doorway to safety.

At General Smith's tent, very popular with the marines
because of its big iron stove, a new crisis had turned up.
It seemed that a bridge had been blown on the mountain
road ahead of us. Unless it was repaired, the marines
would have to abandon all their equipment and fight their
way across the mountains as scattered units. This they cer-
tainly didn't want to do. And yet it was vital to save time,
since every day lost meant more Chinese between them
and the sea.

One of the mass United Nations graves in Korea. MYDANS

193 THE EPIC MARINE "ADVANCE TO THE REAR"

It looked as if they would have to pluck a new bridge
from the sky. And, in a very short time, that is exactly
what they did. Eight spans of a treadway bridge hurtled
out of the big bellies of Air Force flying boxcars to the
waiting marine engineers below. Despite the parachutes,
the heavy steel spans dug deep into the ground. But they
were undamaged. Plans could be made to go ahead.

The 7th Marine Regiment was to seize key ridges over-
looking the canyon road between Koto and the bottom of
the mountain. From the south, the first battalion of the
1st Marines would fight north toward the 7th. Task Force
Dog would guard the road from Chinhungni to the coast>
in an effort to make a speedy exit possible. A thick air
cover was called for the next day to help the marines
fight for the important ridges.

But the air cover never came. On December eighth a
thick mixture of fog and snow masked Koto and the jagged
peaks around it. One "gooney bird'* probed miraculously
through the blur, and that was all. The familiar drone of
planes was strangely absent, and a glacial, primeval si-
lence settled over the hundreds of tents dotting the Koto
plain.

It was with cruel suspense that division officers waited
for word from their troops who were attacking the criti-
cal ridges without benefit of air cover. The Chinese fought
hard, and it was not until late in the day that the initial
objectives were reported secured. Actually those ridges
were never totally secure: skirmishes raged on them the
entire time that the caravan rolled by on the road below.

194 WAR IN KOREA

But the skirmishes kept the Chinese busy and apparently
prevented them from making a major attack on the cara-
van.

The next day was luckier. The fog cleared overnight,
and on December ninth fleets of marine and navy fighters
swooped low to protect the marine engineers as they
pressed forward to build their bridge. Back at Koto,
preparations were made for the final exit once the bridge
was completed. Tents were dismantled, stoves piled on
trucks, and time bombs set in the huge dump of ammuni-
tion that had to be left behind.

The two-motored C-47's were scooting in and out reg-
ularly, and by afternoon all the wounded were out But
there was not enough time for aerial evacuation of the
dead. Three mass graves were dynamited out of the
frozen earth. Then the dead were buried by the hun-
dreds. The marines were wrapped in their ponchos. Some
British commandos still wore their berets. They were
laid beside men of the Army's 7th Infantry Division in
a kind of final fraternity.

In the first grave there were only thirty bodies, so
small wooden crosses could be put up inscribed with
name, rank, and outfit. But the other two graves were
marked by single red-and-white wooden poles. The
graves registration officer paced off the spot and drew a
map in case we should ever come back. The chaplain
recited "The Lord Is My Shepherd" to a small audience
of two privates, a few reporters, and several officers. But
the tobogganing wind swept away his words.

195 THE EPIC MARINE "ADVANCE TO THE REAR"

Later on in the morning I was in the command post
when an excited marine major burst open the flimsy
wooden door to tell General Smith that the bridge was
ready. We could start rolling.

I had been asked by a company of the 5th Marines,
with whom I had made the landing at Inchon, to walk
out with them. Of course I wanted very much to do so.
But General Smith had a strong seizure of chivalry that
afternoon and insisted that the walkout was too danger-
ous.

I walked down the mountain anyway at least a good
half the way. It was a reverse hike. Since I had to, I flew
out of Koto to Hamhung. Once there, I took a weapons
carrier to the bottom of the mountain. Then I hiked up
the mountain for about five miles, past the streams of
vehicles heading for the sea. After I had climbed far
enough to get a sweeping view of the steep road and the
valley below it, I headed back down. It was tough on the
feet but worth every blister to be with the marine foot
troops as they came at last to safety.

It was a battle all the way. The frost and wind, howl-
ing through the narrow pass, were almost as deadly as
the enemy. Bumper to bumper, trucks, half-tracks, and
bulldozers slipped and scraped down the mountain. Half
a dozen vehicles skidded and careened off the road. Mor-
tars lobbed in, and sometimes the convoy had to stop for
hours while engineers filled in the holes. It was a struggle
to keep from freezing during these waits*

Once die convoy had to stop to accept the surrender

196 WAR IN KOREA

of some Chinese soldiers, "They popped out of their holes

at dawn and handed us their guns/' said Major Sawyer,

who led the advance guard. "It was very strange. But

they were in miserable shape maybe they had just had

enough/'

Most of. the marines were so numb and exhausted that
they didn't even bother to take cover at sporadic machine-
gun and rifle fire. When someone was killed they would
wearily, matter-of-factly, pick up the body and throw it
in the nearest truck.

On the road the first morning, David Duncan, brilliant
photographer for Life, was busy taking pictures. He took
one of a marine patiently hacking out his breakfast from
a frozen tin of beans. The beans were encased in ice crys-
tals, and little ice crystals had also formed on the marine's
beard. His eyes were running, and his cold fingers could
scarcely manipulate the spoon. Thinking of his Christmas
issue, Duncan asked the marine, "If I were God and
could give you anything you wanted, what would you
ask for?"

"Gimme tomorrow," said the marine, and went on
hacking at the beans.

About twenty-five thousand marines got "tomorrow"
as their Christmas present. The first elements of the con-
voy poured out of the shivering nightmare of the trap
around two in the morning on Sunday, December tenth.
It had taken them fourteen hours to go ten miles. After
that, in spite of several bad ambushes, the convoys flowed
in intermittently. And late that night the bulk of the
marines were safely in Hamhung, warm and sleeping.

197 THE EPIC MARINE "ADVANCE TO THE REAR"

Many of the marines were at first too dazed to realize
that their ordeal was actually over. But gradually a feel-
ing of elation spread. I talked again to Lieutenant Theros*
who had told me the story of Captain Hull.

"We've really got it made now," he said. "I don't know
if I can tell you how the guys feel. It's not having to look
for a place to hide . . . it's being able to sleep without
feeling guilty . . . it's being able to eat something warm
. . . it's not having to spend most of your time just trying
not to freeze to death . . . maybe it doesn't sound like
much."

The marines had come to Hamhung in good order,
bringing their equipment, their wounded, and their newly
dead, just as Colonel Murray had said they would on that
cold morning in Hagaru. As they boarded the transports in
Hungan Harbor, the places for which they had fought so
hard Yudamni, Hagaru, Koto, Chinhungni were already
swarming with Chinese. But as far as the reputation of
the United States Marines was concerned, it did not
matter. Their reputation as fighting men remained fully
"secured,"

CHAPTER 13

THE ENEMY

The Soviet-directed Oriental taught us a great deal about
himself in the period between June and December of
1950. He did this through a series of stinging defeats. It
is true that in many battles he outnumbered us over-
whelmingly. But the enemy's strength is not in numbers
alone.

In Korea the oriental peasant, both Chinese and Ko-
rean, showed that he could drive a tank, lob a mortar, and
fire a machine gun with deadly efficiency. I remember
talking to a marine in the Naktong River bulge who said
ruefully, "Those gooks can land a mortar right in your hip
pocket"

In addition, the enemy can fight on about one fifth
of what the United States Army presently considers nec-
essary. The enemy's army has a minimum number of

202 WAR IN KOREA

housekeeping and supply services. Beer and mail are not
received in front-line foxholes. Trucks carrying goodies
from the Post Exchange do not clog the enemy's roads.
The proportion of administrative officers to combat offi-
cers is low. More soldiers are required to shoot and fewer
to do paper work than in the American Army. By our
standards, the enemy's medical corps is primitive. But
he is accustomed to privation and dirt and has great pow-
ers of endurance. The slogan of the Chinese soldier is
typical: "First we suffer, then we enjoy."

Probably the greatest achievement of the Chinese and
North Korean dictatorship is the quality of their officers.
Here their system of intensive political indoctrination has
certainly paid off. The fanaticism of the officers often kept
the North Koreans and Chinese fighting under circum-
stances in which the enlisted men were eager to surrender.

There was little fundamental difference between the
North Korean soldier and the Chinese soldier. This is not
surprising, since the nucleus of the North Korean Army
was trained in the Chinese Eighth Route Army. If any-
thing, the Chinese were a little smarter, a little better
disciplined than the Koreans.

The enemy made maximum use of his great man-
power advantage for the infiltration and encirclement of
our forces. They combined guerilla tactics with a shrewd
use of modern weapons. They used psychological warfare
to advantage. They made the most of night attacks, in
which assaults were launched to the blowing of bugles,
and squads controlled by the shriek of whistles. An

208 THE ENEMY

amazing number of Chinese and Koreans spoke a little
English. These men would strip overcoats and parkas
from our dead soldiers and try to make us believe they
were friends. Others learned to yell "'medic, medic" and
trick us into revealing our positions.

Private Carrol Brewer told me of one tactic used by
the Chinese in the marine battle out of Yudamni. "They
would let us into their foxholes and disappear over a hill.
Then at night they would come back by the thousands.
And they'd wait until they were practically on top of
you before they'd shoot"

They frequently seemed to care very little for life and
were willing to die unquestioningly. They would keep
right on surging toward a target even though wave after
wave of them were blown up in the process.

In their encircling and nipping-off tactics, the Com-
munists often won rich prizes in American equipment.
When the enemy broke through our lines on the Kum
River, for instance, they scooped up ammunition, artillery
guns, machine guns, recoilless weapons, and mortars. The
Chinese winter break-through also gave them substantial
booty.

This capture of our weapons enabled the enemy to
hold out at the beginning in spite of our heavy bombing of
North Korean bases. The Communists didn't have to de-
pend on supplies from home bases. They were getting
them from us.

The Chinese, and particularly the North Koreans, for-
age much of what they need in the way of food and serv-

204 WAR IN KOREA

ices as they go along. They make the local population
carry ammunition and cook their food. (It was only very
late in the summer that Americans learned to use local
citizenry for ammo bearers. ) They make use of every con-
ceivable beast of burden, even camels.

The complaint against the Russians made by the Ger-
man General von Manteuffel could well be repeated
against the Reds in Korea. Von Manteuffel said of the
Russian Army: "You can't stop them, like an ordinary
army, by cutting their communications, because you so
rarely find any supply columns to cut."

By comparison with the enemy, the American Army is
road-bound. General Dean of the 24th Division put the
problem very neatly when he said, "How am I going to
teach these boys that they can't all jeep to battle?"

The Chinese were very short of heavy equipment in
the first phases of their intervention. They had to rely
mainly on machine guns and grenades, although they did
turn American light bazookas against us very effectively*
If the numerical odds had been anywhere near even,
their lack of heavy equipment could have been a handicap
to them. But as it was, their shortage of heavy artillery
made it possible for them to hike at night over mountain
trails, with the guns and packs on their backs. Then, with
the enormous advantage of surprise, they could jump our
troops at will.

Five years of political indoctrination had put highly ef-
fective intellectual blinders on North Korean officers. I
was impressed by a talk I had with one North Korean

205 THE ENEMY

lieutenant. He was among a group of wounded prisoners
of war whom I interviewed in our base hospital at Pusan.

"The only reason I am here is because I was uncon-
scious when I was captured/' he said. "I would never have
surrendered of my own will. I believed with all my heart
that I was doing the right thing by fighting for the unifi-
cation of my country. I believed the people in South Ko-
rea were oppressed/'

The lieutenant himself was ragged and covered with
sores, and he now indicated to the interpreter, an Ameri-
can missionary, that he wanted to say more. It may have
been for my benefit, but he added, "Now that I've talked
to South Koreans, I believe that all the things we were
taught are not true. I feel pity for those who are still fight-
ing, because they do not know the truth."

Apparently this indoctrination is not completely shared,
as yet, by the rank and file. Many North Korean enlisted
men surrendered. The marines, completely surrounded
by the enemy at Hagaru, had a pleasant surprise when
two hundred Chinese came voluntarily into camp.

These POWs were reassuring evidence that the enemy
was only human. When I was at Koto there were nearly
three hundred Chinese POWs in the improvised stockade.
I wanted to find out why they seemed to survive the
frightful cold better than we did. The answer was that
they didn't. Their feet were black with frostbite, and the
gangrenous odor of rotting flesh filled the stockade air.

While I was in the stockade a wounded Chinese was
brought in on a stretcher. His arms were bent at the el-

206 WAR IN KOREA

bow, and his hands and feet were frozen marble solid. He

was groaning rhythmically.

A wizened Chinese corporal plucked at my sleeve and
pointed to Bis moaning countryman, "That is why we
surrender," he said.

These Chinese captured on the northeast front gen-
erally wore only tennis shoes and several pairs of socks.
Naturally their feet suffered, but the rest of their uniforms
quilted jackets and pants seemed to keep them suffi-
ciently warm.

The Chinese who surrendered to us in the northeast
were the weakest link in the Communist enemy command.
Significantly, none ranked higher than corporal. They all
said that they had been forced to fight. But this claim
may be more representative of innate Chinese diplomacy
than the truth. I asked, through my interpreter, Lieuten-
ant Paul Y. Kim, if any of them wanted to go back to
China.

All the prisoners gestured "No." The corporal, the oldest
of the group and its spokesman, recited reasons that have
become decidedly familiar. "We were poor under
Chiang/' he said, "but now we are both poor and cannot
do as we want. We cannot move freely from village to
village. Many are arrested. We do not wish to fight for the
Communists."

These Chinese POWs were ignorant men but they had
a very clear idea of their country's relationship to Russia.

"The Russians," said the old corporal, with a distressed

207 THE ENEMY

sweep of his hands, "are everywhere in China, but es-
pecially at the airfields. And it is they who decide/'

The original North Korean Army that struck southward
on June twenty-fifth probably totaled close to one hun-
dred and fifty thousand men. Even without air power and
without sea power, they mauled us badly until the Inchon
landing.

Then the Chinese armies stepped in. The Chinese
Peoples Liberation Army consists of five million men. But
Far Eastern experts say that only two million of these are
first-rate front-line troops. These are organized in a system
of five field armies.

The Fourth Field Army, the first to intervene in Korea,
is led by General Lin Piao. He is forty-two years old and
graduated from the Whampoa Military Academy at Can-
ton. He began fighting for the Communists in 1927 and is
considered one of Peking's best commanders. The Third
Field Army, also in Korea, is led by General Chen Yi, who
previously held command of East China.

These forces are not only the best trained but also the
best equipped in China. Much of their equipment is
American. They seized many American bazookas, jeeps,
trucks, and fieldpieces in Manchuria and they captured
many American weapons from the Chinese Nationalists.
They also took over Japanese supplies left behind in Man-
churia. The Russians have provided them with tanks. And
the Chinese air force, which probably totaled only five
hundred planes in January of 1951, may soon be rapidly
expanded.

208 WAR IN KOREA

We relearned from the Chinese what we had discovered
in fighting the North Koreans. Air power and artillery are
not enough when you are vastly outnumbered in moun-
tainous terrain. Even the marines, fully supported by air
and equipped with the best American weapons, could
not cope with the masses of howling, bugle-blowing Chi-
nese, In the mountains of East Korea ill-equipped Chinese
pushed the marines back by sheer weight of numbers.
Marine close-support planes, striking sometimes within
thirty-five feet of the front lines, saved thousands of lives
and won many skirmishes. But the planes could not win
the day.

One of the "Eight Rules of Conduct" laid down by Pe-
king provides for the good treatment of captives. It is the
Communist theory that this contributes to victory. From
time to time the Chinese have made token releases of pris-
oners, in the hope that the prisoners would report their
good treatment and encourage our soldiers to give up.
The Chinese were certainly far more correct in their be-
havior toward captives than were the North Koreans.
This is not surprising, as both North and South Koreans
are notorious for their cruelty.

I do not believe that the Chinese treatment of prisoners
reflects any innate softheartedness. It is a tactic. When
barbarism served the purpose better, the Chinese did not
hesitate. They certainly caused inhuman suffering by their
practice of hurling hand grenades into ambulances, and
on one occasion they set fire to a gasoline-soaked track-
load of American wounded.

North Korean prisoners. MYDANS

209 THE ENEMY

The North Koreans gave the local population the full
Communist treatment. Their police-state techniques were
far more ruthless than those I had seen in Poland. The
Reds seemed in a greater hurry in Korea perhaps they
reasoned that the people had had such a short experience
with individual freedom that a return to despotism would
not meet with much resistance.

In Seoul the North Koreans jailed key clergymen, in-
cluding Bishop Patrick J. Byrne. One Catholic priest was
murdered and most of the rest were deported to the
North. One explanation for this bold persecution is un-
doubtedly that the Christians are only about a million
strong, a decided minority. The Reds must have felt in
a position to make an all-out attack against the Church
without arousing too much popular indignation.

The Reds were also astute at using food as a political
weapon. They took over all stocks of rice. Then families
whose children joined the Communist League got special
ration cards. The same was true of workers who enrolled
in Communist unions.

The invaders carried on a systematic terror campaign
against all people who had ever been associated with
Americans. Many thousand alleged "pro-Americans" were
thrown into prison and all their property was confiscated.
The Seoul newspapers were labeled pro-American and
their plants annexed by the Reds.

Their formula for taking over the government of the
important cities was the same everywhere. A municipal
administration, complete with mayor and cabinet, was

210 WAR IN KOREA

formed in Pyongyang and sent to the city immediately
after capture. All key posts were filled by trusted emis-
saries from the North. Sometimes local elections were
held, carefully designed to make the conquered areas an
integral part of the northern government.

In some places the Reds issued decrees dispossessing
landowners who held more than a certain prescribed
acreage. In the short period of the first occupation they
were unable to do a thorough job of this. Their decrees
aroused little enthusiasm because they were coupled with
very high crop-delivery requirements.

One way the Communists really made themselves un-
popular was by introducing forced conscription of young
men into the North Korean Army. They would go into
houses and farm dwellings at night and, often at pistol
point, force young Koreans to march off to training cen-
ters.

At Hagaru we had an example of local hostility to-
ward the invading Chinese armies. Colonel Bankson Hoi-
comb, 1st Marine Division intelligence officer, told me
that some of the townspeople had actually come to him
and asked him to burn their homes so that the Chinese
could not get them. Of course he didn't do it, but it was
an interesting insight into the depth of their feeling.

The pitiful swarms of refugees who fled South in the
wake of our retreating army were irrefutable evidence of
how much the people feared the Reds, They waded across
icy streams and crawled painfully across broken ridges
rather than stay at home and face the Communists. At

211 THE ENEMY

the Hungan beachhead Rear Admiral Doyle radioed to
Tokyo, "My personal observation is that if the lift were
available we could denude North Korea of its civilian
population. Almost all of them want to go to South Korea."
In my first visit to Seoul in May of 1950 there were a
number of Korean newspapermen who believed some of
the Communist propaganda. They felt that unity was
better than two antagonistic Koreas, even if it meant Com-
munist domination. I tried to revisit some of these men
when the second Red siege of Seoul was threatening. But
their taste of Red rule between June and September had
been enough. They had been among the first to go south,
and I could not find them.

It is true, of course, that in the early days of the Chinese
Communist struggle the agrarian reforms won much pop-
ular support in China. Probably the Chinese must have
been comparatively gentle in their demands for com-
pulsory crop deliveries. They were seeking to win over
the Chinese people by persuasion. But the Reds in Korea
were backed from the start by the Soviet. They had ab-
solute power and did not need to persuade. In any event,
the Korean farmers with whom I talked near Wonsan and
in the Hungnam Hamhung Plain expressed great bitter-
ness against the government. They claimed that taxes and
quotas were so high that there was nothing left for their
own families. After our December retreat from the North
thousands of farmers abandoned their own land to become
propertyless refugees in South Korea.

It is high time to evaluate what these months in Korea

212 WAR IN KOREA

have taught us. Korea has proved decisively to the world

that the oriental peasant is an efficient fighting man and

that the new militarism of China has produced a first-class

army.

Until now the democratic world has relied on techno-
logical supremacy and the possession of superior firearms
to win its battles with the oriental world. Now the oriental
world has most of these weapons, in addition to man
power. The Chinese are a powerful instrument of the
Soviet, which has boldly attacked the United States and
the United Nations.

By challenging us with force, the enemy has confronted
the free world with a series of choices, all of them un-
pleasant.

CHAPTER

14

THE PROSPECT IS WAR

If we cede the Asian mainland to the Communists, with-
out a fight, we will greatly strengthen our enemy. We will
give the Chinese military dictatorship time to build an
even stronger and better army. We will give them the op-
portunity to "liberate" the rich prizes o Indo-China and
Thailand. But we will not be giving them only man
power and raw materials. We will be giving them some-
thing of great strategic importance. If we pull out of
Asia, we say to the Soviet world, "Your eastern flank is
now comparatively secure. Go ahead and concentrate on
Europe."

If we do the Soviet world this favor, Europe will even-
tually go under. And when that happens, if America con-
tinues to sit back, naively waiting for the Soviet dictator-
ships to crack from within, it is only a matter of time

216 WAR IN KOREA

before the entire world will become a string of Soviet

socialist dictatorships.

All of this might take from twenty to fifty years. But
it would happen eventually because of an old-fashioned
precept known as the balance of power. The Soviets
would have so many more people and resources than we
would that they could attack us and win. It's one wotld,

alHrfj^itH^^ It's*

either our world or their world. The Soviet powers have
shown us that this particular planet has become too small
to exist half slave, half free.

I have watched seven modern police states at work, and
I cannot place any hope on an internal crack-up in the
dictatorships. A modern dictatorship has a monopoly of
mass communications and almost complete control over
men's minds. Hitler's Reich was crushed only by defeat
on the battlefield. Resistance movements do not spring
up until there is hope of liberation. Europe lay submis-
sively in Hitler's grasp until the American invasion of
North Africa.

In ancient times, when dictators were separated from
their subordinates by days of travel, they had to allow
their underlings some individual initiative. In that small
freedom lay the possibilities for revolt. But today Moscow
controls east Berlin by long-distance telephone. The
slightest deviation from the rules will be reported imme-
diately, and punishment can be dealt out with equal swift-
ness.

The alternative to appeasement in Asia is to fight a se-

ABOVE: Victims; BELOW: Chonui, a typical Korean town.
In the distance a 155-mm. shell has exploded. MYDANS

Men of the 24th Infantry Division moving forward.
MYDANS

217 THE PROSPECT IS WAR

ries of holding actions. At the same time we must work at
top speed to rectify our critical lack of trained man power
and our lack of weapons. By continuing to harass the
enemy in the Far East we will keep alive the hope of anti-
Communist countries.

If we build up our strength quickly enough, perhaps the
inevitable showdown can be diplomatic. But we must
prepare for the worst.

Our preparations must be political as well as military.
We must help other nations to help themselves, so that the
non-Communist way of life is something worth fighting for.
We must turn our back on colonialism everywhere and, in
this common struggle against the dictatorships, we must
give every partner honorable status. This is particularly
important in the Far East, where we are faced with a surg-
ing nationalistic spirit on which the Reds have capitalized.
There is no need for the Communists to capture these
countries in revolt against old imperialisms. America
should put herself squarely on the side of those nations
asking national independence and self-government, and
do all she can to help them economically.

Politically speaking, time is beginning to be on our side.
The Communists in Asia have begun to discredit them-
selves. It is not lost on the average Chinese, for example,
that his great new "liberation" has been capped by the
greatest inflow of Russians in important posts that China
has ever seen. Oppressed people who apathetically as-
sumed that Communists couldn't be worse than what they

218 WAR IN KOREA

had before are rapidly beginning to regard the Reds as the
greater of two evils.

You can't have a working democracy where people are
starving. Hunger breeds desperation; desperation breeds
violence; violence breeds a police state.

And let no American feel that anything he does for the
rest of the world is charity. We urgently need as many
people as possible on our side. Since we are not a dictator-
ship and have to persuade rather than browbeat, America
must prove by concrete acts that the people of the world
have more to gain by siding with her than with the new
militaristic dictatorships of the Soviet Union and its
satellites.

The Korean war taught us another very important lesson :
we can no longer substitute machines for men. It is a
grave worry to many officers at the fighting front that
the people back home haven't grasped this fact. Men like
Colonel Michaelis, Colonel Stephens, and General Church
believe that if we make use of what we have learned in
Korea we can fight many successful holding actions. But
the endurance and will of the individual are all-important.

A German general, talking about the French failure in
1870, described exactly what we must avoid. "The people
had always concentrated on materiel questions/' he said.
"They thought that the offensive power of the enemy
would be broken by the defensive action of new and ter-
rible weapons. In that way they ruined the spirit of their
army."

The main thing America should mass-produce is cour-

219 THE PROSPECT IS WAR

age. We need the kind of spirit that made Marine Sergeant
Robert Ward ask his mother to let him leave his safe desk
job and go back to his platoon.

"I'm no hero/' Sergeant Ward wrote, "but if these peo-
ple aren't stopped here on their own ground, we will have
to share the thing which so many have died to prevent
their loved ones from sharing the sight of death in our
own back yards, of women and children being victims of
these people. I went on the warpath for the right to do my
bit to keep our people free and proud, and now I'm
shackled to a useless job. I ask you, my mother, to free me
so I can once again be free to help my boys. They placed
their faith in me . . . and whenever I led them I brought
them all back. Now someone else leads them and I know
they need me. Maybe in a sense I need them my dirty,
stinking, and loyal platoon/*

Many more Americans will have to be tough enough
and spirited enough to want to fight these dirty, stinking
battles. We are engaged in a kind of international endur-
ance contest, and the Communists are the first to recog-
nize it. They believe that the comforts of our capitalist
way of life have so softened us that our lack of self-disci-
pline will help to defeat us. A North Korean colonel, who
had spent some time in the United States, expressed this
widespread belief in our decadence very well when he
told me, "Your countrymen will be defeated by a longing
for a hot shower."

In his book, Strategic Problems of Chinas Revolution-
ary War, Mao Tse-tung stated his contempt for the staying

220 WAR IN KOREA

power of non-Communist armies. He wrote, "The theory
that the massing of a great army is limited by terrain.,
roads, supplies and by billeting facilities should be taken
with great discretion. These limitations have a different
application in the Red army than in the non-Communist
army. For the Red army can undergo greater hardship
than the latter,'*

Then he added a remark which we would do well to re-
member: "A Soviet war lasting ten years may be surpris-
ing to other countries, but to us this is only the preface."

Certainly Americans are comfort-loving. And perhaps
too many soldiers have been coddled into believing that
USO shows are essential to their fighting ability. But the
marines at Hagaru, and countless other individual Ameri-
can regiments, have shown the ferocity with which our
soldiers can fight when they are well trained, have confi-
dence in their leaders, and have learned to face the brutal
fact that many must accept death.

In a conversation recorded by Harold Martin of the
Saturday Evening Post, Colonel Michaelis summarized
what was wrong with the American soldier in Korea.

"When I took command of my regiment at Pusan, I
found myself in a pretty depressing assignment/' Michaelis
said. "I was new. My executive officer was new. Some of
the officers only a fewwere seeing green grasshoppers
on their shoulders at the very thought of going to war.
These had to be weeded out and sent back to desk jobs.

"The troops were green. Most of them had only eight
months* service behind them. They came in with their

221 THE PROSPECT IS WAR

duffel bags loaded down. The officers carried foot lockers.
As a paratrooper I had learned that you have to travel and
fight lightly loaded if you are going to fight at all. We had
to have a general shakedown. We had all kinds of special
gear violins, banjos, God knows what all There must
have been eight carloads of junk shaken out of the
regiment before we started north. But when we started
out we traveled like a fighting soldier ought to travel. Each
man had his weapon, his ammunition, his blanket, shelter
half, mess gear, razor, soap, and towels, and an extra pair
of socks. That was all and that was enough.

"In peacetime training we've gone in for too much damn
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 de-
fense 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 bel-
lies on maneuvers with live ammunition singing over them.
They'd been nursed and coddled, told to drive safely, to
buy War Bonds, to avoid VD, to write a letter home to
mother, when somebody ought to have been telling them
how to clear a machine gun when it jams. They've had to
leam 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."

222 WAR IN KOREA

The demoralization that sometimes gripped these green
troops seems to be the direct result o too much coddling
and not enough tough training. Toughness on the battle-
field is important because it saves lives. There will have to
be equal toughness at home.

We shall have to face the prospect of a decade of wars.
It helps to remember that, for Mao Tse-tung, a ten-year
war is only the preface. And we will have to face the
prospect of a decade of austerity. In this era it is no longer
a question of how much our economy can stand but how
much is needed to survive.

We will certainly produce anything that is needed. I
refuse to accept the idea that Americans are so decadent
that they prefer a way of life that will give them a new
automobile each year rather than a way of life that will
protect them from the midnight knock of the secret po-
liceman, from the concentration camp, from slave-labor
camps.

The word "alarmist" has come into disrepute in
America. Perhaps this is because we like what we've got,
and don't want to believe that we should be alarmed. I
think the word should come back into good standing; we
need more alarmists. My great worry is that the alarm will
not be sounded in time. It seems to me that our leaders
should have started preparing us for possible war the mo-
ment that Russia slammed down the blockade in Berlin in
1948. Russia showed then that she was prepared to use
force. It is a mockery for Truman to tell the nation that
three and a half million soldiers can protect us when every

223 THE PROSPECT IS WAR

responsible officer knows that it will be closer to fourteen

million if we want to win.

Like any American, I realize that the strain of preparing
for total war is a threat to freedom. But it is a threat which
I think we can handle. Our habits of free speech and a
free press are deep enough to permit us to marshal our
forces against the Soviet world without ourselves becom-
ing a dictatorship.

Until now, the two great oceans have protected Ameri-
cans from the danger that war could land in their own
back yards. Now there is no safe place in the world. In a
matter of minutes New York could become a more ghastly
deathtrap than a front-line regimental command post.

The war in Korea has made it clear that the Communists
will resort to force of arms whenever and wherever they
think the non-Communist world is an easy mark. Now we
must mobilize so that we can stop them with our superior
strength. In Korea we have paid a high price for unpre-
paredness. Victory will cost a lot too. But it will be cheaper
than defeat.

s DO

2 =3

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