4 » WALKER’S WAR
1. Retreat to the Naktong
South of Seoul, Kim Il Sung’s army paused. The North Koreans needed time to regroup, and allow their logistic ‘tail’, such as it was, to catch up. Yet the week that they lingered, however essential to enable them to consolidate their hold on the capital and prepare for the next thrust, was critical in the development of the war. When their advance began once more on 5 July, the communists encountered Task Force Smith north of Osan. Smith’s battalion, committed under the most unfavourable circumstances, inflicted only the merest check upon the communists. But behind the 1/21st Infantry, the remainder of the US 24th Division was deploying.
Major-General William Dean, its commander, a big man of fifty-one with a reputation as something of a martinet, set up his headquarters in Taejon as the South Korean army appointed its third chief of staff in less than three weeks of war. For all the South Korean assertions that their army was fighting desperately, the Americans could see evidence only of chaos and retreat. Subsequent evidence from communist sources suggests that, in reality, in those weeks some South Korean units inflicted substantial damage and important delay upon the invaders. But the only useful intelligence about communist movements came from the American aircraft now flying constant interdiction missions. These in turn were critically hampered by lack of general knowledge of the North Korean forces, and specific information on targets. No
effective system of Forward Air Control existed. In those first weeks of war, the USAF poured thousands of tons of bombs on to Korea. There is little evidence that these proved more than an irritant to communist operations in the first stage of the war, however important they became in August and September.
The next unit of the 24th Division to face the enemy assault was the 34th Infantry, moving up behind Lieutenant-Colonel Smith’s battalion. 1,981 men strong, devoid of tanks or effective anti-tank weapons, it was transported from Japan in conditions of haste and confusion, and was no more prepared in mind, training, or equipment to arrest the North Korean advance than Task Force Smith. But Dean could only give its commander the simplest and most straightforward of orders: to deploy his men in blocking positions across the key routes southwards, at Ansong and Pyongtaek. It was to these positions, late on the night of 5 July, that the stragglers and survivors of Task Force Smith began to drift in, bearing their bleak and confused tale of being overrun by a communist armoured host. The disarray within the 24th Division was compounded by almost total lack of communications: telephone wires were repeatedly cut, radios were defeated by distance and mountains between units. In the rain and mist of early morning on 6 July, the 1/34th found itself facing North Korean infantry and armour swarming south across the shallow river line they were defending.
The brief action that followed was considerably more inglorious than that of Task Force Smith. The Americans engaged the communists with mortars and machine guns, but quickly found the enemy closing in upon them. The battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Ayres, saw no alternative to retreat if his men were not to be isolated and cut off. He had earlier been advised by General George Barth that, come what might, he was ‘not to end up like Brad Smith’, left irretrievably exposed behind the communist advance. A few minutes ahead of the enemy’s T-34s, amid a frenzied stream of Korean refugees, their carts and baggage and animals, the Americans hastened southwards, discarding
equipment as they went. By the time General Dean had learned that his point battalion was in full retreat, and hurried forward in his jeep to check the movement, the 34th Regiment was south of Chonan. A furious scene ensued between the divisional commander and the senior field officers of the 34th. They had offered no significant resistance to the enemy, and had withdrawn without orders. Dean expressed his disgust. He now had no alternative but to order them to dig in where they stood. He also relieved the commanding officer of the 34th Infantry, and replaced him by an officer with experience of regimental command in World War II. It was the first of a long procession of sackings in the field which proved necessary in those early, traumatic weeks. Martin, the 34th’s new commander, survived just forty-eight hours before his death in action at Chonan.
As daylight broke on July 8 [recorded PFC Robert Harper of the 34th Infantry’s Headquarters Company], we heard this loud clanking noise off on the left. We understood now what was happening – their tanks were coming. Eventually I could see them dimly, moving through the morning mist. I counted them. When I got to nine, an order was given to pull back off the railroad tracks and set up in the first row of houses behind the sewage ditch. From there I saw the North Korean infantry moving to my right across the field in front of the railroad depot. I could hear occasional small-arms and machine-gun fire. Mortar rounds began falling nearby. The tanks continued to roll down the road toward us. We had no way of stopping them. They came to the end of the road and I could hear them firing. I did not know which of our companies were down there but knew they were catching hell. We were ordered back to a narrow street, where we waited to see what would happen next. I heard the new CO, Colonel Martin, tried to take on one of the tanks with a bazooka. The tank scored a direct hit on the colonel, and he was killed on the spot. We began receiving real heavy mortar and tank fire . . . We ran down some alleys and met some more GIs who said orders had been issued to evacuate the town. I could hear a lot of small-arms and mortar fire behind me. We went to the east edge of town, worked our way through rice paddies and got to the road. There were quite a few civilians still on the road. We joined them in heading south. We drew heavy artillery fire and began to lose a lot of people.
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‘Resistance had disintegrated, and now our troops were bugging out,’ wrote Dean.
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Through the wretched weeks that followed, among the gloomiest in the history of the United States Army, the pattern of Chonan was repeated again and again. An uncertain and unhappy American infantry unit would be hustled into a defensive position, its officers unwilling or unable to conceal their own confusion and dismay. The flood of refugees slowed to a trickle, then halted altogether. There was a tense silence, men peering up the empty road, until they heard the tortured squeal and clatter of advancing armour. The North Korean tanks crawled forward until they met American fire; then they halted, to allow infantry to swarm past them, infiltrating the American positions and working around their flanks. The Americans then withdrew, often in undignified haste, abandoning vehicles and equipment as they escaped as best they might, amid the swelling columns of civilian refugees. ‘We knew that we weren’t doing very well,’ Major Floyd Martain, one of the survivors of Task Force Smith, declared wryly. ‘But we kept saying to ourselves: “Well, here we are, and we’ve been here a month, and where the hell is the rest of the United States Army?” ’
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They felt profoundly lonely.
The essential criticism of the performance of the 24th Division at this period centres not upon the fact that its units repeatedly withdrew; for had they not done so, they would assuredly have been bypassed and eventually destroyed. It was their failure to inflict significant damage or delay upon the enemy before disengaging that so embarrassed their commanders. Neither MacArthur nor his subordinates could reasonably have expected the scant American forces deployed thus far to halt the communist invasion.
But well-handled regimental combat teams could have hit and run: punished the North Koreans for a few hours with mortar and machine-gun fire, then pulled back to the next obstacle suitable for defence. In reality, American officers seem to have had neither will nor skill to create anti-tank obstacles, to use mines even when these became available, or to employ the support weapons they had against the North Korean infantry. Terrain, logistics, poor communications and refugees did more to delay the North Korean advance in the first weeks of July than the American infantry in their path.
On 10 July, General Douglas MacArthur was formally appointed Commander-in-Chief of the United Nations Command. The United States rejected the UN Secretary-General’s proposal that the war should be directed by the ‘Committee on Co-ordination for the Assistance of Korea’ as the British, French and Norwegians seemed to favour. Since the US was bearing the overwhelming burden of war – and directly contributing most of its cost – Washington insisted upon direct military control, and got its way with its allies. ‘In the military field,’ the principal diplomatic historian of the UN has written, ‘the control of the United States government was complete; in the political field, consultations with the United Nations and some contributing members were more frequent. On occasion the UN made various recommendations. In the final analysis, however, a large range of political decisions was taken by the United States government, as the Unified Command.’
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This was to be a war overwhelmingly directed by American soldiers and American politicians. On 13 July General Walton Walker, a corps commander under Patton in north-west Europe, established his Eighth Army headquarters in Korea, with operational responsibility for UN ground forces in the field. The stubby, rugged, impatient little Texan could scarcely enthuse about the material he was being asked to work with. His forces were exclusively now, as they would remain principally for many weeks, men of the
American occupation army in Japan. The only available reinforcement for the crumbling forces of Syngman Rhee must come from Japan, where the 25th and 1st Cavalry Divisions were being hastily mobilised for war. Until they came, it was essential for Dean’s 24th to delay the communist advance, to give ground only yard by yard, between Osan and the next natural defensive line, forty miles southwards on the Kum river.
The North Koreans brushed past the two regiments of Dean’s shaken force deployed along the Kum with almost contemptuous ease. At its low, almost barren summer level, the river presented no significant threat to T-34s. The 19th Infantry found itself compelled to fight its way out of encirclement, with the loss of almost one man in five, more than half of its 1st Battalion. With his flanks turned, Dean was driven back into Taejon. The communists began their assault on the city on 19 July. Dean directed its defence with furious energy. Anti-tank teams armed with the newly arrived 3.5-inch bazooka scored a string of successes against the communist T-34s. Dean himself led one team, stalking a tank through the streets for more than an hour before successfully destroying it. But within a few hours, North Korean armour and infantry had broken through, and the survivors of the 24th were retreating southwards once more. Dean himself remained a fugitive in the hills for a month before he was captured, the senior American officer to be taken by the communists in the Korean War.
It was a period when there was a desperate need for heroes, and Dean was represented as one across the United States. At the end of the war, he was decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor. His courage was never in doubt. Yet some expert soldiers in Korea were dismayed, even disgusted, by the collapse of leadership in the 24th Division even before the Taejon battle. ‘Why any general would tolerate the chaos at his headquarters in the fashion that Dean did, I never understood,’ said Colonel John Michaelis, a distinguished World War II combat veteran who witnessed it. ‘There was a sense of hysteria. Nobody seemed to want to go and kick somebody in the butt. I never knew what Dean thought he
was doing, as a divisional commander, to grab a bazooka and go off hunting tanks.’
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Michaelis was among those who considered Dean’s behaviour the negation of his responsibility as a commander. He was not alone in his opinion. ‘Dean was very personable,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel George Masters, ‘but he still did not know what war was. Fundamentally, he was a silly man.’ If these seem harsh judgements, they are those by men who watched the agony of the 24th Division. It was difficult to pass any less cruel verdict upon the performance of most of the American units in the battle. ‘We had the conceited opinion that we were trained soldiers,’ said Colonel Masters. ‘Yet what we did in Korea, as we do quite frequently in our history, was to try to use civilians as soldiers and expect them to be combat-effective. We are usually disappointed.’
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Between 10 and 15 July, the US 25th Division landed in Korea. On 18 July, the 1st Cavalry – paradoxically, an infantry division – came ashore at Pohang-dong. By 22 July, they were deployed. The remains of the battered, indeed almost ruined, 24th Division was able to withdraw through their positions and at last catch its breath. In seventeen days, it had lost some 30 per cent of its strength, more than 2,400 men reported missing in action. Yet the reinforcing formations gave little ground for confidence on their first appearances in action. On 20 July, the 24th Infantry of 25th Division broke and fled after their first few hours in battle at Yechon. The 24th was an all-black unit, a relic of the US Army’s ill-fated segregation policy. The pattern of the 24th’s first action was repeated in the days that followed, with men streaming towards the rear as soon as darkness provided cover for their desertion. An inexplicable panic overcame the 1st/24th on 29 July, after facing a communist mortar barrage. It became necessary to set up roadblocks behind the 24th’s positions, to halt deserters and stragglers leaving the line. The US Army’s official history castigates the regiment for its habit of abandoning arms and equipment in the field, lack of leadership by officers, chronic unreliability: ‘The tendency to panic continued in nearly all the 24th Infantry operations west of Sangju . . .’ By the end of
July, Walker recognised that it was possible to use the 24th only as an outpost force, a tripwire in the face of communist assaults. It proved necessary to maintain another regiment in reserve behind the front, to conduct serious resistance when the 24th broke. In Washington, Collins, the Army Chief of Staff, recognised the failure of the concept of all-black units. At the earliest possible moment, black soldiers must be integrated into white units. But there was no time for that in Korea in July.