The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War Read online

  There were few farms or anything that resembled grazing land, no orchards laid out. Once you got away from the coastal littoral and the land climbed, there wasn’t much of anything, roads, villages, power lines or telephone poles, bridges, conduits. Only a few huts here and there between the towns, and the towns were nothing much, eight or ten miles apart. No central market town as you might expect. The hills were formally called the T’aebaeksan Range, and there were traces here of hunters and little else.

  Was it climate denuded the place, the cold and wind out of Siberia and Manchuria, or that the soil was barren? There was no lack of water, and plentiful water usually meant people. Or had the Japanese in their forty years of occupation shifted population elsewhere? Or just killed them?

  Tom Verity was accustomed to another Asia, a-teem with people, so many there was never sufficient land or water or timber or food. Or anything. In the Asia he knew, China, they killed off girl children to hold down the size of families and blunt famine. They weren’t supposed to, but they did. Japan, too, was overcrowded. He knew that from books. And don’t even talk of India or Burma or Siam or French Indochina or the East Indies.

  In all the vast continent only Tibet and Mongolia were as empty as North Korea. Only here and in such places was the country left over to the wind and the snow and the cold. And to men who used these places as killing grounds.

  Yudam-ni sat in a bowl ringed by seven-thousand-foot mountains.

  Verity reported to Colonel Fleet, who had the point battalion of the regiment.

  “We’re the meat on the end of the stick, Captain,” Fleet said. “They’ve got us out here poking at the Chinese just to see who bites. We might just get eaten.”

  “I was told to join the lead battalion, Colonel. The closer I can get, the better radio reception.”

  Fleet was a lieutenant colonel, a regular, a dry, slender man nearing forty who had few illusions.

  “That’s fine. Just don’t get too far out. I can’t spare people to bring you back if you hit trouble.”

  “Colonel, I’m staying right here with battalion headquarters if it’s OK with you. I have absolutely no heroic tendencies.”

  Fleet permitted himself a small smile. The two men understood each other.

  It was snowing again and they sat on camp stools inside Fleet’s tent. A stinking oil stove made the interior smoky but relatively warm. Verity was glad for a chance to thaw.

  “If you can give me the general situation, Colonel, it’ll help me make more sense of what I’m hearing of the Chinese traffic.”

  “Sure. This regiment is just west and farthest north of anyone in the First Marine Division. And my battalion is the point. My job is to probe north looking for Chinese, just patrols. They’ve got orders to scram back home the minute they encounter Chinese. Grab a prisoner if they can, but come home. I’ve got other patrols out sidling west. They’re supposed to contact elements of Eighth Army, if and when. Trouble is there’s a spine of mountains running between us and Eighth Army. A dozen men moving light can get across those mountains. But you’re not going to move trucks and artillery and such over those mountains. Not in this snow. So the whole business of maintaining contact with Eighth Army is just slightly surreal. In case of trouble X Corps can’t do a damned thing for the Eighth Army and Eighth Army can’t do a damned thing for X Corps, which means the Marines. Clear?”

  “Yes.” Verity liked plain speaking, and except for that “surreal” line, Fleet spoke plain. He also permitted himself a jab at MacArthur.

  “For the life of me, and it may literally come down to that, I can’t understand what the hell General MacArthur was thinking about when he divided this army in high mountains where the two elements of the army can’t possibly support each other.”

  “I don’t understand it, either. But my orders deal only with developing intelligence on how many Chinese may be out there and just what they’re going to do.”

  “You got a cigarette, Captain?”

  “You’re welcome to a cigar.” Verity pulled one out and the colonel was really grinning now.

  “I keep trying to stop smoking to please my wife. She thinks it’s bad for me. Up where we are right now I say the hell with that. Up here everything’s bad for me.” An enlisted man came in and asked if the two officers wanted coffee. As they sat drinking it, steaming hot and bitter black, Fleet said, “Funny, but coffee always smells better to me than it tastes.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And speaking of that,” Fleet went on, “the first time you smell Chinese food, Captain, pull back.”

  General Smith had told Verity the same thing. He wondered who wrote their lines. Maybe Bob Hope, back at Wonsan, one hundred miles and a century ago.

  This was a good group of officers. You could tell that right away. A bad one stood out, not so much in what he did or who he was but in how the others sort of edged away from him, not wanting to catch whatever it was.

  Up in North China it had been like that, too, Verity remembered. A good group. And there was Schiftler, the bad apple. No one could really put a finger on why except he was pious and smarmy and somehow slick. But Verity remembered how drunk everyone got that first night after Schiftler was sent home. Happy drunk. They didn’t even mind that they were marooned up in North China in winter fighting bandits while that bastard Schiftler was heading back to the States.

  “Hell,” someone remarked, “we got lucky. Feel sorry for America.”

  Here in Korea so far, they all seemed to be OK, and Verity had not yet smelled a bad one among them.

  Izzo was a master at scrounging and Tate carried the gravitas of a gunnery sergeant, and between them they confiscated a small house.

  “Only a few bugs, Captain,” Izzo said enthusiastically, “and they’re all dead, froze. I’ve seen lots worse.”

  They parked the jeep out front and installed the radio inside. The house had one room and no running water or toilet, but there was a sort of combination fireplace and oven and they got a fire going. Except for the dead bugs, it was pretty cushy. There were majors, even colonels, sleeping under canvas, and Captain Verity had this house. And with a fire.

  “I could frigging get used to this, Gunny,” Izzo admitted, “if we could pick up the Eagles game on the radio Sunday.”

  Instead, they picked up more Chinese.

  “What do you make of it, Verity?” General Smith asked. He’d flown in to Yudam-ni by chopper from Hagaru for an officers’ meeting. Verity gave his report, drew certain conclusions, tried as best he could to answer Smith’s questions.

  “It’s all very strange,” the general said.

  It was that. It was the quiet that worried them; an army as big as the Chinese ought to make noise. They certainly had for a time there:

  In late October the Chinese entered the war in large numbers and with extraordinary ferocity. Forty miles from the Chinese border, a ROK battalion of the Sixth Division encountered a large detachment of Chinese and was routed. The next morning the Chinese fell upon a regiment of ROKs, which promptly abandoned all its vehicles and three artillery batteries. On the twenty-eighth, in the same area, another ROK regiment was committed. U. S. air cover supported the regiment during an all-day fight. Once night screened the Chinese from air attack, they smashed the ROKs. Of 3,500 officers and men in the regiment, 875 escaped. By the next day an entire ROK Corps had been driven back forty miles. And it wasn’t just the ROKs. The American First Cavalry Division, near Unsan, was to have its turn. To the din of brass bugles and whistles and truck-mounted rocket fire, the Chinese attacked. All day long on November 1 the lines bent and swayed and held. But by November 5 one entire American battalion had ceased to exist. All along the line the Chinese attacked. By the end of the first week of November the UN drive to the Yalu had been halted or driven back almost everywhere.

  Then, and this was the strange thing, the Chinese just melted into the hills.

  “Any new theories on that, Verity?” Oliver Smith asked.

&n
bsp; “No, sir. Not one.”

  “MacArthur continues to think they came in to make a political point, to sound a warning, and having done so, they’ve gone back home.”

  There was some discussion of that. On November 2 the Chinese announced over their own radio that the men in Korea were “volunteers.”

  “You don’t buy that, Verity,” Smith said.

  “No, sir. The division and regimental and corps numbers we’ve gotten so far are all regular army. Organized as divisions and corps. So if these are ‘volunteers,’ they ‘volunteered’ unanimously and in volume.”

  “Maybe they just ran short of ammo and food and pulled back to regroup.”

  It was agreed that was possible.

  The division’s intelligence officer read from a report. It was considered odd that while North Korean troops routinely shot wounded POWs through the head rather than burden themselves with enemy casualties, the Chinese were reported to have provided medical attention to ROK and American wounded. It was clinically primitive, but it was as good as the treatment their own wounded were getting.

  “That sounds like regular Chinese army stuff, General,” Verity offered, “not ad hoc, not what you’d expect of a bunch of volunteers.”

  “I agree on that.”

  Smith wasn’t windy, whatever else he was.

  Ned Almond entertained his generals, hosting a Thanksgiving dinner at Hungnam. Linen tablecloths and napkins, silverware, good china, saltshakers, and pepper mills. Every appointment but finger bowls.

  MacArthur flew over and presided. The Mikado. Maggie Higgins was there and some of the other media pets. MacArthur said grace and piously asked the blessing. His intelligence chief, Willoughby, was very smooth, urbane.

  Almond spoke ripely of a last, triumphant drive north to the Yalu. And to China.

  Gen. Oliver Smith, of the Marines, whose division was extended over thirty miles of snow-covered mountains and who had six CCF divisions in his neighborhood, lacked appetite and left early, pleading an early dusk and a long drive.

  “Of course, General,” Almond said, “and my compliments to your command.”

  In the jeep heading back north from Hungnam, Smith thought how he despised Willoughby, who continued to insist the main Chinese weight was to be found in the west, opposing Eighth Army. Over dinner he had said, “There’s nothing opposite you, Smith, but a screen. You’ll brush them aside. A skirmish line will do it.”

  Oliver Smith sank his head deep into the collar of his parka against the chill as the jeep sped north, a driver, a general, and two bodyguards with automatic weapons celebrating the Pilgrims’ first harvest in Massachusetts Colony.

  Thanksgiving Day was cold and clear at Yudam-ni, and Verity and Tate took turns sitting in the jeep tuning the radio and watching Marines play touch football on a patch of flat ground. Where they got a football wasn’t quite clear, but they played with vigor and much shouting, and the occasional cry of foul for leaving your feet to throw a block.

  “In 1916 on the Somme,” Tate said, “when the English went over the top, someone tossed out a soccer ball and they kicked it toward the German trenches.”

  “They get there?”

  “No, sir. They attacked at dawn walking into the sun and lost sixty thousand men killed and wounded that first morning.”

  “Well,” Verity said, “there’ll never be another war like that. Men won’t allow it to happen; men just won’t do it, not like that. Not ever again.”

  He’d read that somewhere. Now where the hell . . . ? Then, he remembered.

  “Scott Fitzgerald wrote that,” Verity said. “Or something close. When Dick Diver took them on a guided tour of the old battlefields in Tender is the Night. . . .”

  “Yes, sir,” Tate said, not entirely sure just who “Dick Diver” might have been. It was Tate’s experience that men would always do stupid things. In wars or not. It was their nature.

  When the football game was over, a padre drove up and said mass with an altar cloth spread over the hood of his jeep. Maybe a hundred men attended. The priest wore incongrous red earmuffs throughout and his vestments flapped loudly in the wind, but Verity wished, not for the first time, that he had a religion he believed in and practiced. It seemed a comfort to men who did.

  “You pray, Gunny?”

  “Yessir, I surely do. Always have. Don’t get much to church, but I’m a great one for praying. Helped get me through the prison camp, I believe. Men stronger and healthier than me died who had no belief in anything bigger than themselves. Makes you think.”

  By Captain Verity’s reckoning from radio traffic and the unit numbers and commanders’ names he fed into G-2, the First Marine Division now received back from Almond’s corps headquarters this estimate: “There are eleven Chinese Communist Forces divisions in your area.”

  That was November 24. Two days later the Marines got this updated message: “There are now fourteen CCF divisions in your area.” General Willoughby over Thanksgiving dinner had told Smith he faced only a Chinese “screen.”

  Oliver Smith looked around at his staff, at the stunned look on even hardened faces.

  “For what we are about to receive,” he said quietly, “let us be duly grateful.”

  The following day the count of CCF divisions surrounding the Marines had risen to sixteen. Nothing Verity heard suggested this was exaggeration.

  They had fashioned a campfire somehow, which was a feat, considering the scarcity of trees, and Colonel Fleet, who was in a mood to chat, and Verity sat warming by it while other men hunkered deep in sleeping bags laid directly on the snow or, the fortunate ones, on pneumatic mattresses inflated by mouth and providing a luxurious insulation.

  Colonel Fleet was talking. About the Corps, which surly enlisted men sometimes called the Crotch, but for which Fleet manifested a fierce love. Verity had heard words like these before, much of it grandiose crap. But when Colonel Fleet said them, there was a difference.

  “We’re a ferocious little confraternity, we Marines. A violent priesthood. You aren’t simply enrolled but ordained. If I ever become commandant, which is hardly likely, along with those first gleaming gold bars every new second lieutenant will be anointed with holy oils and prayed over, while superior officers wash his feet, symbolic of Jesus with his apostles just before he died. Incense rising and choirs chanting.”

  “Yes, well . . . ,” Verity said, a bit ashamed to know so little of religion. He agreed the Corps was a magnificent body of fighting men, but a lot of bullshit went along with it. Though not, he hastened to correct himself, that Fleet was talking bullshit. The colonel took Captain Verity’s silence for encouragement. This was at Yudam-ni, with Verity temporarily on Fleet’s staff.

  “Read the New Testament, Verity, especially the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You could be reading the Guidebook for Marines.

  He was a southerner, a VMI man like Puller, like so many of them in the Corps, and had an easy grace. “We could have done worse than hooking up with this outfit,” Verity told Tate in the morning, and the gunny agreed.

  “They have a good feel to them, Captain, and it ought to be cushy once we get to know them.”

  They never got to know some of them.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The first Marines off the hill had a couple of Chinese prisoners, small, glum-looking men in their padded cotton suits. One of them had no left arm, and the side of his uniform was rusty with dried blood. “Sumbitch won’t die,” one of the Marines accompanying him said in wonder. “Must of been the cold stopped the bleeding.”

  It was November 26 that Eighth Army, as military historian Joseph Goulden would later write, began falling apart. There was one startling victory in a sea of defeats, routs, flights, and panic. The five-thousand-man Turkish Brigade, in Korea only a few days and without orientation or acclimation, with no South Korean interpreters or American advisers and guides, was rushed into action by a desperate Gen. Walton “Johnny” Walker. ROK regiments were throwing down their
weapons and running, entire regiments, not just a few men here and a platoon there, leaving adjacent. American units with their flanks in the air and the Chinese coming on. The American Second Division seemed especially imperiled, and it was to its flank that they hurriedly ordered the Turks, with their reputation for ferocity and martial ardor.

  It worked. Meeting the onrushing Chinese face-to-face, the Turks not only held their ground and turned back the enemy with bayonets; they also captured hundreds of Chinese prisoners. The Second Division rushed its interpreter, a South Korean lieutenant, to question the Chinese POWs. The “Chinese” turned out to be South Koreans, survivors of a ROK regiment attempting to flee south, survivors then mowed down by the ferocious Turks. All the dead and captured “Chinese” were South Korean allies of the Turkish Brigade.

  There was a sort of retribution the very next day when the Turks encountered authentic Chinese and were themselves nearly wiped out. It took only a day for the proud Turk Brigade to be smashed. That’s how fast the Chinese were moving and how good they were.

  “No one ever accused Almond of being lazy. Or lacking guts.”

  No, thought Oliver Smith, or of having good sense.

  It was morning at Hagaru, November 27, and Almond had ridden a jeep sixty miles north from Hungnam to see Smith as his Marines jumped off from Yudam-ni toward the west to link up with Johnny Walker’s hotly involved Eighth Army. It was the second day of the renewed CCF attack, and Eighth Army was already in travail. That’s why the Marine offensive was crucial, so it might relieve Eighth Army by drawing off major Chinese units.

  Fourteen or fifteen miles to the north, as Smith and Almond conferred, the Fifth Marines under Murray moved out on the attack. It was zero degrees Fahrenheit, with heavily falling and wind-whipped snow that blinded the advancing infantrymen as well as grounding the planes and masking the artillery forward observers. One rifle company commander reported: “Canteens burst; plasma and rations freeze solid; mortar base plates crack in the cold; carbines and most BARs are inoperable. Only the machine guns and rifles are working.”