12
Getting the Most Out of a Bad Situation
During July 1950, the KPA imposed one humiliating tactical defeat after another on American and ROK forces. The US Army thought that its deployment would send the North Koreans scurrying back across the 38th parallel.1 The Americans thought the KPA was a hastily assembled peasant rabble, ill equipped, poorly trained, and incapable of overwhelming the soldiers of the country that was the undisputed victor of World War II.
Hastings in 1985 interviewed Colonel Jonathan F. Ladd, who in 1950 served as a captain under General Edward M. “Ned” Almond, MacArthur’s chief of staff. Ladd, looking back on the events at MacArthur’s Dai Ichi headquarters thirty-five years later, saw the seeds being sown for later disappointments and frustrations during his service as a soldier and advisor in Vietnam:
All those officers, those generals: they really thought that they were going to go over there and “stop the gooks”—just the same as in Vietnam. Just who “the gooks” were, they didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. You could have asked any American senior officer in Korea: “Who commands the Korean 42nd Division—ROK or communist—and what’s his background?” He wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. A gook is a gook. But if the Germans had been the enemy, he’d have known.2
The first American unit to encounter the KPA juggernaut was the ill-fated Task Force Smith, and it was a shock; the action lasted no more than a few hours. Lieutenant Colonel Charles B. “Brad” Smith’s scratch battalion,3 committed from the 24th ID, had been quickly assembled in Japan, hastily and poorly equipped, and flown to South Korea. Deployed between Suwon and Osan on July 5, 1950, Task Force Smith was ordered to confront the enemy.4 This rapidly deployed unit, consisting of inexperienced garrison troops from the Occupation Army, with no coordinated artillery, no tanks, and no antitank weapons that could stop a T-34, and primarily equipped with small arms, only served as a speed bump against the enemy’s advance. The story of Task Force Smith is a staple in virtually every history of the Korean War.5
The summer of 1950 was not an abject military disaster. American and South Korean forces in seeming disarray had inflicted fifty-eight thousand casualties on the KPA between June 25 and early August. By the end of July, American and ROK forces outnumbered the KPA along a collapsing front, ninety-two thousand (forty-seven thousand of whom were Americans) against seventy thousand KPA soldiers.6
In early August, the 1st Marine Division landed at Pusan and halted the KPA advance. The front stabilized around the Pusan Perimeter, a sixty-by-one-hundred-mile rectangle on the southeast coast of the Korean Peninsula, a 160-mile line anchored along its longer western flank by the Naktong River and on its northern flank by the coastal city of Pohang (map 12.1). The Naktong River provided a natural defensive obstacle but was shallow enough to be forded by the enemy in places. Steep hills overlooked the river on both banks, an advantage for the defenders. Taegu, a major city, remained under US/ROK control in the center of the defensive line.
Map 12.1. General Walker’s Pusan Perimeter formed a sixty-by-one-hundred-mile defensive rectangle in South Korea.
Source: USMA Atlases.
On July 13, 1950, General Walton H. “Johnnie” Walker, a corps commander who had served in Patton’s 3rd Army in Europe during World War II,7 established his 8th Army headquarters in South Korea, with operational responsibility for UN forces under MacArthur’s overall command. MacArthur’s messages to the JCS started to produce delivery of the military resources he wanted, a multidivision army that could resist and defeat North Korea’s aggression.
The Battle of the Pusan Perimeter, beginning on July 29, 1950, could be called “Walker’s War.” Hastings quotes from Walker’s “ringing order of the day” on July 29, 1950, as the battle for Chinju developed and as the last of Walker’s retreating army crossed the Naktong River to defensive positions on its eastern banks.
There will be no more retreating, withdrawal, readjustment of lines or whatever you call it. . . . There are no lines behind which we can retreat. This is not going to be a Dunkirk or Bataan. A retreat to Pusan would result in one of the greatest butcheries in history. We must fight to the end. We must fight as a team. If some of us die, we will die fighting together.8
On the battlefields around the Pusan Perimeter, American and UN power slowly began to reclaim the military initiative. In early September, the KPA committed thirteen infantry divisions and an armored division,9 98,000 men against Walker’s 180,000. The KPA sustained casualties estimated as high as sixty thousand.10
In addition to superior manpower, firepower, and airpower, Walker had two other advantages: shortened interior lines and tactical intelligence. The Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) achieved what Matthew M. Aid calls the “thirty-day miracle” of breaking all of North Korea’s tactical codes and ciphers. By the end of July 1950, AFSA was cracking and translating over one-third of all North Korean enciphered messages that were being intercepted by SIGINT stations all over the world.11 The output was limited only by the shortage of Korean translators. As Aid recounted, “The net result was that AFSA’s spectacular codebreaking successes gave [General] Walker what every military commander around the world secretly dreams about—near complete and real-time access to the plans and intentions of the enemy forces he faced.”12 The SIGINT intercepts showed that the KPA’s supply system under the relentless air attacks almost stopped functioning. Ammunition shortages in enemy units around the Pusan Perimeter severely degraded the combat capabilities of frontline enemy units.
Walker was an energetic, effective commander. He worked to patch units together when he needed to reinforce one part of the line. He would borrow a battalion from one regiment to lend it to another. He frequently relied on the marines and the 27th Wolfhounds infantry regiment of the 25th ID, commanded by the effective Colonel John H. Michaelis (later general), to serve as mobile fire brigades to stanch potential KPA breakthroughs. Walker knew the enemy positions in detail, and with the AFSA SIGINT products, he could anticipate KPA attacks. He also knew the combat terrain intimately because he flew over the battle space in a small reconnaissance plane throughout the battle.13
In August, despite their heavy losses and the logistical pressures from UN air attacks, the KPA launched their last major offensive against the perimeter, making “startling gains” over the next two weeks. Kim Il Sung threw his divisions into the final battle of the Naktong River. Walker’s perimeter on the northern flank defended by three ROK divisions had to fall back south after the KPA captured Pohang in mid-August.14 The perimeter was close to breaking at multiple points, with North Korean units pressing on Kyongju, Masan, and Taegu. American commanders reported that the frontline situation was the most dangerous since the perimeter had been set up. American casualties were mounting, totaling twenty thousand, with nearly 4,300 dead by mid-September. However, the plight of Walker’s 8th Army was about to change.