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

  “Right, Captain. That’s the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ aspect of all this.”

  It was as if they were fighting one war on the ground, the real war, and another at Far East Command and in Willoughby’s and MacArthur’s heads, an imaginary war of wishful thinking.

  The roads here in North Korea were much worse than in the South—not battle damage, just maintenance. The few main roads were intelligently laid and well ballasted; that was the Japanese, as efficient as Mussolini with his on-time trains. Of course they’d worked a lot of Koreans to death doing it, both North and South. The roads also grew worse as the jeep climbed. The higher the elevation, the more winter’s snow, the greater the temperature differentials between night and midday, expansion and contraction to split and crack the macadam or even the simply oiled dirt and rock of more primitive rural roads. The air grew cooler as well. And just before 4:00 P.M. Verity and his men actually drove through another brief flurry of snow.

  Verity remembered snow in late September in Manchuria. In New England, for that matter.

  They came out again to sunshine. The driver took both sun and snow with a certain equanimity. Captain Verity reminded himself to ask Tate, when they were alone, just why in the end they’d kept Izzo. Not that Verity didn’t trust Tate’s judgment, but he was curious.

  They came up against and stalled for a time behind other Marine units. There was no shoulder onto which you could pull out to race past. But neither he nor Tate was impatient. If the Chinese were up there, they’d been there for ten thousand years and there were plenty of them and they weren’t going to go away.

  “Plenty of time, Captain. Can’t hurry tomorrow.”

  That was Gunny Tate. Verity was starting to realize how fortunate he was to have drawn a man like this, competent, cool. He didn’t need a drama queen. The driver wasn’t nearly as important, but so far Izzo, too, had been OK.

  It was cooler still as the road climbed. Verity looked at the map.

  “Four thousand feet, this pass,” he said. “You can feel it.”

  “Indeed you can, Captain,” Tate said. He could feel the air cooling. And thinning.

  They were getting higher and there were plenty of hills ahead, that they could see, that were lots higher. Tate was glad he’d bribed a supply sergeant with a bottle of Haig to draw some cold weather gear. Credit this Verity for having the scotch and for telling him to scout around for heavier clothing. Captain Verity had good sense. Tate’d looked him up. Gunnery and master sergeants had ways; they looked up their officers. If a man were going to issue an order that might kill you, you deserved to know more than his name, rank, and serial number.

  Gunnery sergeants took care of each other.

  Verity was always aware he was being measured. Marines did that. On Guadalcanal he’d been measured as a kid enlisted man; on Okinawa as a young officer. He was being measured now, much as he’d be arrogant enough to measure Oliver P. Smith. And as Smith, in all likelihood, was measuring Ned Almond and General MacArthur. The process of natural selection, Verity concluded, as if Darwin himself had donned uniform and been called up for service in the war.

  Gen. Oliver Smith had nearly eight hundred officers in his division and knew most of them. The regulars, that is—the reserves, those who’d been called up in June or July or even later, well, they were something else. The few dozen he’d met and talked with were educated college and university men. They were Marines, of course, with most of them having fought the Japanese.

  But after that, in ’45 and ’46, they’d gone home to be schooled. To start careers, marry, and raise families. A few of them to make fortunes. Now, five years later, they were back.

  Educated young men, properly reared and properly brought up.

  Killing and being killed. And, once again, becoming so damned good at both.

  Verity continued to monitor the radio. There was plenty of Chinese to listen to. He wrote it up at the end of each day and handed it in to General Smith’s people, who might make more sense of it than Verity did, since they knew some of the codes and he just knew Chinese. But there sure was plenty of traffic. There was something going on up there. He had new numbers now, new CCF divisions? That was his analysis.

  On October 14, large units of the Chinese Communist army began infiltrating into North Korea, and on the following day MacArthur and President Truman met on Wake Island. Truman expressed concern about the Chinese, but MacArthur assured him they were not a factor. On October 17, ROK troops captured the port city of Hungnam, fifty miles north along the coast from Wonsan, and pushed on against almost no resistance to Iwon, one hundred miles away. October 19, the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, fell to the U. S. First Cavalry and ROKs. Did that mean it was over?

  Then, ominously, on October 25, near Unsan to the west, a Chinese attack took place. A prisoner reported there were very large numbers of Chinese troops in the area. He was not believed. And on the very next day an ROK reconnaissance outfit reached the Yalu River in the west near Chosan. The Yalu was the border with China. And it was on that day and over the following two days that the First Marine Division had finally come ashore at Wonsan.

  There were plenty of Smiths in the Marine Corps of course, even several Generals Smith, one of them named “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, who, during the Big War, had some difficulty with the American army, and they didn’t like him nor he them. But the Smith of concern to Tom Verity was Gen. Oliver Smith, commanding officer of the First Marine Division. General Smith reported to an army general, Ned Almond, who commanded X Corps, and both Almond and the Eighth Army had to check with MacArthur in Tokyo to do anything very significant. So here was one army divided in two, with each half required to consult someone hundreds of miles away in another country before putting on any sort of big show. It was to Gen. Oliver Smith, who was not at all happy with these arrangements, that Verity had been told to report.

  “Sit down, Captain, while I read this.”

  Smith read through the brief letter from Headquarters Marine Corps.

  “So you’re to attach yourself to my staff as an expert of sorts.”

  “I’m not much of an expert on anything, General. But I speak and understand Chinese. I was born there, grew up there, and I teach Chinese history in college back home.”

  “And you listen to the radio and translate Chinese for us. Question prisoners. Attempt to assess Chinese participation.”

  “That’s pretty much it, yessir.”

  Smith sat down now, too. “OK, Verity. I’m sending Litzenberg’s Seventh and Murray’s Fifth north toward Hungnam. I’m keeping Puller and the First here in Wonsan for now. The old Quantico school solution: two regiments up, one back.”

  Verity smothered a smile. He could have completed the line: “Two up, one back, take the high ground, and don’t piss in the stream, boys; we’ll be drinking that water tomorrow.”

  Smith read his thoughts. Then he sobered, leaning forward toward Verity.

  “Captain, we already know there are Chinese in North Korea. Question is, how many and how serious? Bodies have been brought in. You know what General Willoughby said? ‘Another goddamned Marine lie.’ General MacArthur’s intelligence chief says we’re lying. I’ve been ordered to send the division north against a defeated North Korean army and mop up the remnants. But I say, ‘General, what about the Chinese up there?’ and he says, ‘Smith, there are no Chinese.’ ”

  Oliver Smith had no histrionics. He wasn’t MacArthur, wasn’t even Chesty Puller. Very quietly he said, “My impression of your job, Captain, isn’t to convince me of anything. Or Headquarters Marine Corps. It’s to convince that bastard Willoughby and his boss. I want unit names and numbers and the names of ranking Chinese officers, that sort of specific information. Not just, well, there are a couple of hundred Chinese encamped at such-and-such. You understand? Specifics that Tokyo will believe. Give me those and you’ve done the job.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  “Follow Litzenberg and Murray. Whichever goes d
eeper into enemy territory, stick with him. The closer you get to the Chinese, the better. It’ll make your job easier.”

  Verity may have made a face.

  “Well, you know what I mean, Captain. Easy may not be the right adjective, is all.”

  He was dismissed then, but Smith did shake his hand. Verity wondered if that was a good omen or a bad.

  When he emerged from Smith’s HQ, it was into a stiff breeze from the north. Verity had never been to Korea before, but he knew the country just a few hundred miles from here, in North China, Manchuria. The wind came out of Siberia, and that was what made the cold so bad. Behind that wind were five thousand miles of plain and steppe and frozen lakes and snowdrifted forest; behind that wind was Siberia, ice box to the world. On the first cold morning in Wonsan, Captain Verity wondered if anyone else, MacArthur or Oliver Smith, even suspected what was coming, and he thought about starting a diary, a personal account, strictly unofficial. There were rules against diaries, in case you were captured.

  But he was writing daily letters to Kate.

  She couldn’t read yet, but in a lovingly irrational way he wanted to tell her where he was and the places and things he was seeing and that he was OK and missed her and sent love. Madame would translate. She was intelligent and would understand.

  “Letter to your wife, Verity?” another officer might ask.

  “Yeah.”

  In a way it was. Kate was what he had left of Elizabeth, and explanations were still painful.

  Sometimes as they traveled north the column moved by night and as they drove, if there was no snow and the wind was down, it was very nearly pleasant.

  Verity could see the pale hills by moonlight, covered in snow but not threatening. Vermont looked much like this along Route 7, with small, well-lighted towns every ten or twelve miles. Except that here the towns were dark and called Sudong and Chinhung-ni and Koto-ri and Hagaru.

  He recalled driving north once with Elizabeth on Route 7 toward a ski vacation at Stowe and rooms at the Green Mountain Inn. They were in the little MG, cramped close together, and she snuggled next to him in the cold and he tossed a casual arm around her shoulder as they drove, the road straight and reasonably flat and the pavement dry, and she became playful, shifting slightly so that his hand fell to her breast and she responded, turning to kiss him quickly and just once, so as not to hamper his driving, and then rested a mittened hand on his thigh.

  “Dammit, Elizabeth, cool it. I’m trying to stay on the road.”

  She laughed. And then he laughed and hugged her tighter with his free arm and she snuggled even closer as they sped north.

  The difference was at Stowe, when you finally got there, there was no one waiting to kill you.

  After Wonsan, their next stop was another port, Hungnam, about fifty miles north.

  When he wasn’t listening to the radio, Verity wandered through Hungnam, needing the exercise and wanting to get the feel of Korea. Except for the port, Hungnam wasn’t much of a town.

  “I’ve seen better neighborhoods around Camden,” Izzo said sourly.

  “And I’ve seen worse,” Tate remarked, a country-bred man uneasy with cities, who had fought in the Pusan perimeter, Pusan where the Marines sang:

  “Old Pusan U.

  Old Pusan U.

  She asked me what my school was.

  I said, ‘Old Pusan U.’ ”

  “That’s pretty good, Gunny,” Verity, who enjoyed a good ditty, said.

  “Why, thank you, Captain.” Tate had a singing voice and he knew it.

  “What was it like at Pusan?” Verity asked. “Pretty wild?”

  “Yessir. Before things got stabilized when the Marine brigade came in, it was chaos and then some. They was still talking when I got there about the army Thirty-Fourth Regiment. They were there all dug in and the North Koreans appeared and they just got up and left. Didn’t fire a shot. The new colonel they brought in, I forget his name, arrived from Europe wearing an overseas cap and low shoes and not even owning a side arm. It was the Thirty-fourth Regiment that left General Dean up in the air with no flank for a couple of miles, General Dean who later got captured out there carrying a rifle and playing private. That’s who screwed up down there on the Naktong and in the perimeter.”

  “Hills?”

  “Yessir, but not like these, not so high. And hot. Hot as hell. And the smells coming up out of the villages and the paddies and the vegetable patches. I don’t know about the rice paddies, but they fertilize their fruits and vegetables with shit, human waste. They keep it in what they call honey pots.”

  That, at least, both Tate and Verity realized, was like China.

  CHAPTER SIX

  There was some of Nathan Bedford Forrest in most of the Marine generals and colonels . . . all of them professional killers. Forrest had been one of Lee’s generals. Even Forrest’s fellow Southern generals were afraid of him. If you crossed Forrest, he would kill you.

  And now, as the division saddled up to move north, word came from the States to Smith: Chesty Puller was finally a general.

  When they notified Puller of the star his officers gathered to congratulate him.

  Puller was fifty-two years old, not young for a brigadier. Blame politics for that. Or Puller himself, for being a damned difficult man. Over drinks there was some grousing, some laughter, much genuine pleasure, warmth, and love and admiration.

  One officer, in drink, remarked that Custer, another flamboyant, was a brigadier at twenty-three and a major general at twenty-five.

  “Yes,” said Puller, contemptuous of the army, “and at thirty-seven Custer was dead and mutilated by squaws.”

  Around him Marine officers nodded in agreement. Better a late star and to live to fifty-two.

  With a hard campaign ahead of them, men sorted out the priorities.

  It was an odd-looking column of Marines that went north, piebald and eccentric.

  Some winter clothing had arrived and been parceled out. Overcoats, windproof trousers to be tugged on over kersey pants. Long Johns. Felt-lined hats with earmuffs. Scarves. Heavy socks. New gloves. Mittens.

  Not enough of any of them. There were even rarer novelties, better lines of merchandise, but only for the fortunate. There were new boots, thermal in design, proof against not only subzero temperatures but also immersion and sweat, shiny black boots, swiftly nicknamed, “Mickey Mouse.” There were down parkas no one, save an alpinist, had ever seen before.

  Yet several thousand men, veterans of the Pusan perimeter and the Naktong River campaign in the heat of August, were still clad in field jackets and fatigues, no gloves or long Johns or earmuffs or windproof trousers.

  The effect was so colorfully wrong, driving top sergeants and old professionals like Puller to frustration and near tears, turning enlisted rebels giddy with unaccustomed freedom, that the Marines themselves were confused. They wanted liberty; they were muddled by license.

  A goddamned vaudeville show! So went the official howl.

  Rarely had there been such a dog’s breakfast of uniforms. Lee’s men, perhaps, after Antietam. Or Coxey’s Army, or the bonus marchers demanding veterans’ benefits from Herbert Hoover’s Washington. Or the homespun and leather and tanned skins of the farmers and hunters and bargemen and trappers who went north under Benedict Arnold to Saratoga to defeat “Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne” and the splendid royal army with which he was to split Washington’s rebels and divide New England from Virginia and the rest of the South.

  But if the uniform code was being sadly neglected, other things were not. As they marched north, Murray and Litzenberg had patrols ranging far out front and flank patrols high above on the ridges and hillsides, a thousand feet or so higher than the road and the column itself, rifle platoon-size patrols moving fast, staying up with the column or even ahead, and guarding its flanks against ambush and attack. You had to have discipline to get men to climb that high and that fast on steep slopes with snow and then to keep up and keep watch.

 
Please do not think of Oliver Smith, for all his pipe smoking and courtesy, or of these Marine colonels, his battalion and regimental commanders, as kindly, avuncular, courtly, and graciously aging old gentlemen. Some of them were those excellent things, of course, but all of them were professional killers, employed in a hard trade: tenacious, cunning, resourceful, cold, cynical, and tough, not the kind of men who waited patiently for the Chinese to come and kill them.

  There was some of Nathan Bedford Forrest in most of them. Forrest had been one of Lee’s generals, a cavalryman capable of killing enemy soldiers at close or long range, with his regimental artillery at a mile’s distance or face-to-face-with sabre and revolver. Even Forrest’s fellow Southern generals were afraid of him. If you crossed Forrest, he would kill you. Toward the end of a battle he once raged at his men, urging them to finish off a beaten federal corps: “I did not come here to make half a job of it. I mean to have them all.” By that, Forrest’s men understood, he meant, “I mean to kill them all.”

  It was said Forrest was disappointed when Union troops surrendered and at Fort Pillow he killed prisoners. Nathan Forrest was not a nice man. Oliver Smith’s division contained men of equivalent ferocity. Not all, of course, but many. And many who had already killed.

  Tate had killed people, one of them a Japanese prison guard, others down on the Naktong in August’s heat. Izzo had killed on the Islands during the War. Maybe again in Korea; he was vague about that. Verity, too, had killed.

  It was the work Marine infantrymen did.

  Headquarters in Hungnam was a stone building two stories high with a tiled roof and a sort of center portico with chintzy pillars that attempted to convey grandeur. Windows had been shot out or blown by near hits, but otherwise the place was sound, and it was here Oliver Smith called his staff together, mostly colonels and majors, all armed, shoulder holsters mostly, which seemed this year’s style. One officer standing near Smith bore an iron face, as Boswell once said of an attorney, another barked an alehouse laugh, most were bluff and ruddy, but that was being outdoors and in the wind and, Tom supposed, aboard ship.