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October 25 - October 26, 2019
The Mongols had had their way with her, the Manchus, the Russians, the Japanese. Now had come the Americans,
Korea, they’d learned, was known as the Hermit Kingdom. The Land of the Morning Calm. Its national dish was a hot mess of fermented cabbage. Some Marines had read with astonishment that in parts of Korea, peasants still nourished their crops with night soil and were known to roast the occasional hound for dinner—these were some of the clichés that were passed around. Korea was said to be a dirt-poor country, mountainous, swept by Siberian winds, sultry during summer and breathtakingly cold in winter.
God created war, Twain wrote, so that Americans would learn geography,
Oliver Prince Smith, commander of the First Marine
Division, one of the great underrated generals in American history.
In his own experience, it was overconfidence, more than any other single factor, that caused men to die.
Smith’s First Marine Division was the largest, oldest, and most decorated division in the Corps.
On June 25, 1950, with little warning, North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung had invaded South Korea with his Soviet-trained, Soviet-equipped army. He quickly took Seoul and steamrolled south in hopes of seizing the entire peninsula.
(He picked Inchon mainly because it was the port nearest the capital.)
They called him the American Mikado, the American Proconsul, the American Caesar. They called him El Supremo, the Great Panjandrum.
He appeared to have insulated himself from facts he found inconvenient or unpalatable. He dwelled in a hermetic universe of his own making.
But in the end, it wasn’t so much MacArthur who worried Smith; it was MacArthur’s chief of staff, Major General Edward “Ned” Almond.
The Professor beamed with pride, too, but he kept it inside. “The reason it looked simple,” Smith later boasted, “was that professionals were doing it.”
Seoul was a city of nearly two million war-weary people, the fifth largest in Asia,
Korea had been a Japanese colony,
the peninsula was summarily divided at the thirty-eighth parallel. This line was an arbitrary one—the two “nations” shared the same culture, the same history, the same language.
Soviets would temporarily control the North and the Americans would temporarily control the South, until the country’s thirty million citizens could become reunited under one independent government. But that reunification never happened. The two separate realms were quickly remade, each in the image of its custodial nation.
In the South, the United States installed a staunch anti-Communist, pro-capitalist, American-educated leader named Syngman Rhee,
In the North, meanwhile, the Soviets had handpicked Kim Il Sung to lead the fledgling Communist nation.
Kim had been a ferocious and wily guerrilla resistance fighter against the Japanese in World War II and had become indoctrinated as a Communist ideologue. He proved a master at broadcasting his own legend, exaggerating his exploits as a fighter; among North Korean peasants, stories circulated about how Kim could render himself invisible during battles—it was even said he could walk on water.
“the sun of mankind and the greatest man who has ever appeared in the world.”
Kim vowed to unite Korea under one government—his government—creating what he called a “happy society” that would eradicate all vestiges of “American imperialists and their stooges.”
Smith was starting to see a quality in the X Corps commander that was far more concerning: an impetuosity, a tendency toward snap judgments, a willingness to ignore on-the-ground realities in favor of abstract goals.
Almond, it seemed, had only one martial modality: Attack. Planning and forethought were not his long suits. To him, war was about sallying forth, gaining ground, planting the flag. “When it paid to be aggressive, Ned was aggressive,” one observer wrote. “When it paid to be cautious, Ned was aggressive.”
Smith reckoned that his Marines could probably take Seoul by the twenty-fifth, but only by laying waste to large sections of the city, pounding it with artillery, bombing it to cinders. Seoul would be badly scarred, and the civilian death toll could be terrible.
Alpha Bowser insisted that the Marines could capture Seoul “with hardly a brick out of place.” They could encircle it, cut the enemy’s supply lines, and methodically ferret out the defenders, block by block. But this kind of fighting would take more time than MacArthur was willing to tolerate.
Silver Star was intended for those who’d performed heroic acts on the front lines, in the heat of enemy fire. “It is meant for gallantry in action,” Smith wrote to his wife in disdain, and “not appropriate for a division commander.”
Smith’s reasoning was stark in its simplicity: Once a man entered the ranks of the Corps, race played no role whatsoever. A Marine, he said, was a Marine.
(Smith, ever modest, took a jaundiced view of the Time story, grousing that although the recognition was nice, it caused “probably more trouble than it was worth.”)
Smith believed that Almond was being reckless—not only with the lives of the men of the First Marine Division but with the lives of the citizens of Seoul.
“We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel,” Secretary Marshall assured him. The document had been approved by President Truman.
On October 1, a South Korean battalion became the first of the U.N. forces to march across the parallel.
MacArthur must remain vigilant to any indication that Red China or the Soviet Union might enter the war. At the first sign of their involvement, MacArthur was to halt his advance.
A few days later, on October 19, large formations of Chinese troops, the People’s Volunteer Army (PVA), secretly crossed the border into North Korea. The word volunteer was a calculated political fiction that gave Mao the rhetorical wiggle room to suggest that he was not sending his regular army, and thus had not formally declared war on the United States; this, Mao coyly suggested, was an organic public uprising to defend China’s Communist brethren in neighboring North Korea,
Stalin. China’s alliance with Russia, seemingly ratified by the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of February 1950, was largely a political sham—the two nations were quite wary of each other and had a delicate relationship.
In Beijing two weeks earlier, Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai had personally told India’s ambassador to China, K. M. Panikkar, that if American troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, China would certainly intervene.
But in the end, MacArthur, and Truman’s top advisers as well, dismissed the warning as mere Red propaganda, filtered through an unreliable source.
Mao also had an apparently unslakable sexual appetite and believed that orgasms directly halted the aging process. To ward off impotency, he received frequent injections of an extract made from pulverized deer antlers.
“Never did time die a harder death.”
But South Korean troops, newly arrived in Wonsan, came up with a brutal solution to the problem: They press-ganged a group of North Korean prisoners and, working in a grid, systematically marched them along the beach. “It was a surrealistic scene,” recalled Alexander Haig, who witnessed it, “with men stepping on mines and being blown to bits and the others closing the interval and marching stolidly onward.” Eventually, nearly every one of the prisoners had been killed by their own army’s explosives.
Over the millennia, countless battles had been won or lost solely on the question of supply: An army, went the old saying, marches on its stomach. A clear understanding of how to provision one’s troops was the sine qua non of any offensive maneuver, the most obvious question that any general would raise before considering an advance. But Almond had given the matter little thought.
The usual technique for moving into mountainous country, he knew, was to throw out flanking patrols to secure the highlands along the route. These flankers, forming a kind of perimeter from above, would leapfrog ahead on the ridges while the main body of men and vehicles advanced along the road below. That way, all the units progressed as an interlocking whole. But maneuvering like this took a lot of time. It would be slow going—much slower than Almond cared for.
Smith and his officers were astounded by what they regarded as the haste and heedlessness of Almond’s plan—not only the Marine part of the puzzle, but all of it. A childish naïveté permeated Almond’s ideas, they thought. He tossed around divisions willy-nilly, as though he were playing a game of jacks. “I questioned his judgment,” Smith’s operations chief, Colonel Alpha Bowser, later said. “I think General Almond pictured this in his mind’s eye as a sweeping victory that was suddenly in his grasp.”
I don’t think he understood what was happening in the field. I don’t think he cared to understand.”
General Smith was flummoxed by these conflicting signals—those coming from the field versus those coming from Tokyo. In a fog of uncertainty, Smith moved his headquarters north, to an abandoned engineering college on the outskirts of another important industrial city farther up the coast. The city was called Hamhung.
When Japan took formal possession of Korea, in 1910,
It was a grinding, stinking, spewing complex of industries designed to fuel Japan’s expansionist aims across Asia.
Through Japanese ingenuity and Korean sweat, men had built a lake that built a city.
“the black umbrella” of absolute Japanese rule.
The Soviets proved as ruthless as the Japanese,
