Yet the setbacks to IX Corps were insignificant, compared with the absolute disaster taking place on the right of Eighth Army: the whole ROK II Corps, three divisions in strength, had collapsed almost literally overnight, and was falling back in chaos, abandoning guns, vehicles, equipment. Not a gap, but a chasm eighty miles
wide had thus been opened in the Allied line – if the United Nations deployment before the Chinese attack could be dignified as such – between Eighth Army in the west of the country, and X Corps in the east. An attempt by the Turkish brigade to move to the support of the ROKs was halted abruptly at a Chinese roadblock at Wawon, well behind the American flank. Eighteen communist divisions of the Chinese XIII Army Group were now committed. Eighth Army faced a desperate danger of being cut off from the south. Walker ordered his forces’ immediate retreat. But while they moved as best they could down the western side of the country, the 2nd Division around Kunu-ri, just south of the Chongchon, must hold open its own line of withdrawal, and prevent the Chinese from bisecting Korea to the south.
General Keiser, 2nd Division’s commander, only began his move back to Kunu-ri early on the 28th. By the next morning, Chinese troops were already attacking road movements south of the formation, between Kunu-ri and Sunchon. Yet still there was a reluctance in the higher command to grasp the deadliness of the threat, to understand that the retreating units faced not roadblocks, but enemy forces in strength. This, although as early as 24 November PoWs had been reporting massive Chinese concentrations in the area. When ‘Shrimp’ Milburn of I Corps telephoned Keiser that morning of the 29th, to ask how things were going, Keiser replied: ‘Bad. Right now, I’m getting hit in my CP.’ Milburn promptly urged Keiser to bring his men out westwards, via Anju. But the 2nd Division commander was unwilling to undertake such an extended diversion. He preferred the short road – directly south, to Sunchon. As Keiser’s men were falling back in disarray around Kunu-ri, infantry were struggling to sweep the enemy out of range of the Kunuri to Sunchon road – and failing. Yet even this did not convince their commanders of the seriousness of the threat on their line of retreat.
In the first two days of the Chinese offensive, there was the bizarre kidglove quality of a drawing-room game about their behaviour. Though the men in the line might detect nothing frivolous
about the communists’ assault, how could they rationally explain the repeated episodes when Americans who might easily have been killed were taken prisoner, then turned loose to return to their own lines? American officers returning to command posts that had been overrun discovered to their astonishment that nothing had been touched by the enemy. Colonel Paul Freeman was one of many commanders who were later convinced that the first days had been a test of American strength and will: ‘They came tongue-in-cheek at first, to see what we would do. Then they found what a thin line we had, how easily the South Koreans cracked. They saw what a pushover we were – that we would not even bomb across the Yalu. Then they became very aggressive, very bold – and stayed that way.’ The most savage American experience of the Korean War now began.
Major John Willoughby of the 1st Middlesex of the British 27 Brigade had spent the afternoon of 26 November soaking ecstatically in his first bath for weeks. The brigade was in reserve. He was still in the bath when an orderly brought in a signal reporting that four unidentified horsemen had been spotted near Brigade HQ, who galloped off when challenged. They were Chinese, of course. Later, when the British grasped their symbolic importance, they called them ‘the four horsemen of the apocalypse’. That night, they were warned to be ready to move, and the next morning they were moved north in a piercing wind – still lacking winter clothing – to Kunu-ri. They could see icefloes forming on the rivers they crossed as they drove.
Willoughby accompanied Brigadier Coad to IX Corps headquarters, where they found an atmosphere close to panic. The position of several American formations was marked on the big perspex map overlay with an enigmatic question mark following their numbers. In the centre, pointing south, a great red arrow had been chinagraphed in, marked ‘2 MILLION?’ The British were uncertain whether this was satirical. 27 Brigade was directed to
take up position north of Sunchon, on the road from Kunu-ri. There was no available transport to move them, so the men began to march the twenty-two miles back to the positions. It was a long, exhausting hike in the icy wind, hearing unexplained bursts of firing from time to time up the valleys around them. The young soldiers were tiring. Willoughby found himself carrying five rifles for a time. After ten miles, to their enormous relief, trucks arrived to carry them the last stretch. At 4 a.m., they lay down to sleep for an hour in the frozen paddy.
The next morning they were ordered to move north once more, towards the pass through which they had marched unscathed the previous night. There was talk of an ambush. A few miles up the road, they met an American jeep coming the other way, a colonel hanging dead over the side of the vehicle, two other corpses lying in the back. The British dismounted, and began to deploy. Suddenly, at the far edge of the paddy, they saw a cluster of white-clad figures leap up and begin running into the hills. There was absolute silence around them. Yard by yard, expecting a volley at any moment, the Middlesex advanced towards the southern end of the pass in front of them. At last, inevitably, the Chinese opened fire. The Middlesex began a battle which continued all day of 30 November, and cost them some thirty casualties. And as they fought, they watched a great tragedy unfold in the pass before them.
At 1.30 p.m. on 30 November, with his shrinking perimeter around Kunu-ri under violent pressure, General Keiser ordered his men to run the road south, whatever was in their way. The leading elements of 2nd Division’s great nose-to-tail vehicle convoy drove south from Kunu-ri into a storm of mortar and machine-gun fire. The horrified British onlookers to the south watched trucks keel over and catch fire, men mown down as they ran for their lives from the communist machine-gunning, occasional jeeps slewing crazily into the 27 Brigade positions laden with survivors, dead and
wounded. The Middlesex suffered several casualties from the fire of shaken Americans, driving forward unable to understand that they had passed into safety. The ‘death ride’ of the 2nd Division through the pass below Kunu-ri become one of the grimmest sagas of the Korean War. Through six miles of enemy fire, vehicles sought to smash their way past the blazing wreckage of those that had gone before. Infantrymen ran among them, seeking their own salvation, and rarely finding it. A dreadful paralysis of command and discipline overtook the division. Major Walt Killalie, commanding the division’s mobile anti-aircraft battalion, saw men sitting motionless in their vehicles, incapable even of rousing themselves to return the hail of Chinese fire, merely waiting for death. Clusters of soldiers struggled to push wrecked vehicles off the road, falling as they did so. Others screamed and shouted in pain or fear. And the unemotional communist mortaring continued. Nightfall brought infantry attacks from the Chinese, ending in desperate close-quarter fighting among the shambles of vehicles and casualties on the road. Only a handful of men like Colonel James Skeldon, commanding the 2nd/38th Infantry, kept their heads and maintained their units’ cohesion sufficiently to maintain an effective defence, and lead their survivors to safety.
Bill Shirk, a young gunner with the 15th Artillery, was newly returned to duty after a month in Osaka hospital recovering from a bullet wound he had received on the Pusan Perimeter, where he found himself in a convoy which was ambushed and almost wiped out. After that experience, he was reluctant to return to Korea. He hated the country. When the word came in late November to begin cleaning up the guns to return home, ‘like everybody else, I felt really happy to be getting out of this stinking place.’ But Korea had hardly started on the nineteen-year-old Ohian. In the pass at Kunu-ri, ‘the order came – “Every man for himself”. We dropped phosphorus grenades down the gun barrels, then we set about getting out.’ Shirk started off with a group of eighteen men, hastily shedding his gaiters to move faster. By dawn, he was running clumsily in his overcoat, alone with an unknown major. They were
trying to hide in a cluster of cornstacks when the Chinese reached them, and they were herded away into a large cave where they found some two hundred other American prisoners already assembled. A bitterness about the war, a sense of betrayal by his own superiors, was born in Shirk which remained undiminished by the ensuing two and a half years of captivity.
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Some men escaped in small groups, by taking to the hills. A few vehicles and even gun teams got through that night, or early the next morning, when American fighter-bomber support belatedly made some impact upon the enemy positions in the hills. The division’s rearguard, the 23rd RCT commanded by Colonel Paul Freeman, was successfully diverted to the Anju road. But in that one afternoon, 2nd Division lost 3,000 men and almost all its transport and equipment, on the road from Kunu-ri. The division’s history speaks of ‘a magnificent stand . . . Even in defeat, the “Indianhead” division proved to be a rock which held fast, giving other units an opportunity for survival.’ The truth was sadder, and more bitter. Much of 2nd Division fell apart in those days. It was months before the formation was considered capable of fighting effectively again in Korea. ‘In general, to achieve quick decision,’ wrote Mao Tse Tung, ‘we should attack a moving and not a stationary enemy.’
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At Kunu-ri, the PLA ruthlessly implemented his dictum.
At last, quiet fell on the pass, and 27 Brigade understood that no more Americans would be coming that way. They left the great graveyard of MacArthur’s hopes, and pressed on southwards, under increasing fire. American air strikes sought to blast the hills around the road into silence, but still the shooting went on. Major Willoughby remembered an insanely irrational moment when he saw machine-gun fire striking the road around his vehicle, and opened the door to let it pass through. Yet it was somewhere on that road that they heard a news broadcast in which it was reported that the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had declared that Britain ‘has no quarrel with the Chinese’.
On the road to Pyongyang, a growing element of panic was
overtaking the whole of Eighth Army. Rumours multiplied – of 20,000 Chinese straddling the line of retreat, of a communist regiment at a ford where a patrol discovered only two dead farmers and three dead horses. A British officer was shocked to attend a briefing at which his American regimental counterpart warned his subordinates: ‘Remember – if you see a red Verey light, just get together everybody you can and head south.’ Private David Fortune of the 2/35th Infantry felt ‘numbed, stunned by the situation. We had believed that it was all over. Yet now we knew the war would end no time soon.’ Fortune was captured on 2 January when his company was cut off. ‘You guys better get out while you can,’ a fugitive shouted to his platoon as he ‘bugged out’. ‘There’s no end to them – the more you kill, the more they come.’
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Fortune spent two and a half years in captivity.
Private James Waters of the 1/35th Infantry, 25th Division, had joined the army ‘because I felt I had to get out of Joplin, Missouri’. On the morning of 26 November, his unit was marching in long files up a road some forty miles south of the Yalu, when the company commander was called to a battalion O Group. He returned two hours later. The word was passed from man to man, sitting stunned and disbelieving by the roadside: ‘The Chinese are in the war, and they’re behind us.’ There was no firing that day, but when they made camp on a hilltop, they lay awake, jumpy and watchful. An elderly NCO, Sergeant Jennings, confided sadly to Waters in the darkness: ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it. I’ve just about had it – I’m not young any more.’ Many men were taking counsel of their fears that night. The next morning, they began to walk south before dawn. Each soldier seemed to be trying to tiptoe, fearful that a rash sound would bring the communist hordes upon his head. At last, the stillness was broken. They heard the quad .50 calibre machine guns on a half-track firing, heard the shouts and screams of Chinese attackers. But still Waters’ company marched on in darkness, past an abandoned field hospital, with a jeep full of dead medics lying beside it. Daylight brought Chinese mortaring, and casualties. Most were left behind. They quickened
their pace, shedding sleeping bags, tents, heavy equipment to ease their burden. There were occasional brief scuffles with the enemy.
That day, and each day and night that followed, the sense of fear and desperate danger grew. They had no resupply, until one morning a jeep halted by the column, to disgorge cooks bearing hot chow. They had abandoned even their messkits, and held out their helmets to be filled with a mess of cereal and powdered eggs. The cooks’ impatience to be gone – shouting ‘Hurry up! Hurry up!’ as the men queued before them – heightened their own fear. As they neared Pyongyang, Waters and his companions found themselves marching among a growing host of retreating Americans: ‘Somewhere along that road, an orderly withdrawal became a disorderly withdrawal.’
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A glimpse of oriental faces became sufficient to cause a local panic, until the men were confirmed as ROK troops. Their feet were lacerated and bleeding, young officers hobbling like old men. Men lost their units, and grew frightened in their loneliness amid a mob of soldiers and refugees harbouring so much fright.
The Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders marched south in style, each company led by its piper. The British had been fortunate enough to escape a mauling from the Chinese, but they were no less prey to hunger and exhaustion than the Americans. Officers urged on stragglers: ‘The next man down this road will be Joe Stalin.’ The men called their move from Kunu-ri to Sunchon ‘the death march’. Sometimes they covered twenty miles in a night, amid the havoc of retreat all around them. Lieutenant Colin Mitchell used a map torn from the
Daily Telegraph
to brief his men – it was all he had. He and the other officers were under no delusions: ‘Under these conditions, it was pointless to stand and fight. The almost inevitable result was to be overrun.’ Even the toughest men were shattered by the experience of that withdrawal: