It has been the thesis of this book that while technology may change, human nature is immutable. The soldiers who went into action with Leonidas, Hannibal, Anielewicz, Roland, Harold, Röist, Zrínyi, Davy Crockett and Jean Danjou, Grant, Sitting Bull, Gonville, Gordon, and Pavlov differed in their arms and often in their tactics, but not a whit in their elemental masculinity. Even when all was lost, they turned a potential rout into a last stand by adhering to discipline, trusting in their drill and training—not to spare them from a fate that was almost certainly theirs, but from shame, disgrace, and dishonor.
Cynics may, and do, scoff that these are outmoded virtues (if indeed they were ever really virtues at all) from a bygone era, relics of barbarism, sexism, and “the patriarchy.” In an age when nuclear annihilation is just a hot button away, what does it matter if men are willing to fight to the end? That some are willing to do just that never seems to occur to them. Only a nihilist or a fatalist could believe otherwise. Rome fell because its political class was exhausted and there were not enough real Romans left to fight, and so it was up to the naturalized barbarians to do the jobs Romans just wouldn’t do: have babies and join the legions. The result was 476 A.D.
While armies are deployed in the defense of hearth and kin, in the field those are not the things men actually fight for. At Stalingrad, soldiers on both sides were fighting in macro for honor—the honor of their respective countries (not political systems or even their leaders; few were fighting for Hitler or Stalin personally, but rather for what they represented). They were not even fighting directly for their wives and children. In micro, they were fighting not even for themselves but for the men in their units, the men closest to them. In the Roman maniples, the thrust of your gladius often went to the right, into the man directly across from your buddy. One of the principal foundations of combat is the idea of “support.” In a well-regulated platoon, company, battalion, regiment, brigade, division, or corps, it is the job of each man to make sure the next man can do his job. The lowly cook is in charge of feeding the men; the commanding general is in charge of winning the war. But as brilliant as he might be, he cannot do it without the cook.
The heart of any army is its infantry, the grunts, the body of the mighty spear that is to harpoon and pinion the enemy, and then to destroy him. All the other elements of combat, such as cavalry (whether equine or air), artillery, armored units, and naval forces, support the infantry. An army can survive and even win without air superiority, as the Russians did at Stalingrad, but no army can with only air power—as the Germans discovered during the Battle of Britain. And while the Allies bombed the German cities around the clock in the last phases of the European theater, Hitler only surrendered via suicide as the Russians came rolling down the Unter den Linden, heading for the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. Even should the next war be fought with missiles, or from space, there will still be a need for the infantry, either on offense or defense in the aftermath of any nuclear exchange.
Until the infantry arrives, the war is not really over. Germany was bombed into rubble by the British and the Americans, but it was not until the Allies crossed the Rhine and the Russians crossed the Oder and finally met in Berlin that the conflict ceased. And while the Japanese capitulated after the firebombing of Tokyo and atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was the Marine Corps’ island-hopping across the Pacific, fighting an archipelagic land war, that demonstrated the Americans’ will and ability to win. At the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the U.S. Navy had torn the heart out of Admiral Yamamoto’s carrier fleet, helping clear the way for the Marines’ continuous amphibious assaults, drawing ever nearer to the Japanese homeland. However bloody it was going to be, the end was inevitable.
What lessons can we, in the twenty-first century, learn from these historical examples? Not much that comports with the received wisdom and disappointing results of the past 70 years of world conflict. Primarily, since Korea and Vietnam (in both its French and American incarnations), and continuing throughout the “endless wars” in the Middle East and the Hindu Kush that have followed in the wake of 9/11, there has been the abandonment of the concept of total victory and unconditional surrender—the notion that wars are meant to decide something, rather than be “expeditions” involving “proportionate responses” to often murderous provocations and exercises in “nation-building.” As Sherman would tell us, these are all fool’s errands that only serve to encourage the enemy and get more of our troops killed. No doubt Caesar would say the same thing.
We’ve also learned that tolerance of a great moral evil is no virtue, as Anielewicz at Warsaw and Grant at Shiloh realized; that “diversity” as a cardinal organizing principle is the death of unified societies, as the Roman Empire discovered too late; and that hate, properly channeled, can be a powerful protective emotion, as the Indians at the Little Bighorn and the Russians at Stalingrad proved. These are not lessons, however, particularly palatable to or compatible with modernity, which prizes talk over action, instinctively sympathizes with declared foes, and shies away from actual victory on the grounds that it would somehow be rude or unfair.
We’ve discovered that war heroes can be enlisted men or junior officers (Pavlov, Chard, and Bromhead); that high rank is no definitive measure of either capability or success (Varus, Roland); that sometimes the smaller force outwits the larger (Cannae, Rorke’s Drift); and that sometimes there is nothing left to do but to die (Leonidas, Gordon).
And most of all, that war may be hell but it is often necessary. This may be regrettable, but unless one is a member of a suicide cult, it does neither an individual nor a nation any good to deny. In our iconoclastic era, in which a sizable segment of the American population thinks it somehow cathartic to tear down statues of great men of the past because they lacked the foresight to see how their actions and attitudes might play out hundreds or even thousands of years in the future, there can be no disagreement with transitory orthodoxy. The animated warriors of the “social justice” movement are quite brave when confronting inanimate objects; one wonders how far this bravado would extend to an existential threat. Let’s hope we never have to find out, although one suspects they would suddenly discover the joys of conscientious objection, or a “higher loyalty” to nonviolence over their preferred goal of international, borderless brotherhood. Who knows, they might even pick up a gun, if only in inexpert self-defense.
History offers us a constant reminder of Kant’s dictum, that the natural state of man is war. Our most fundamental myths and legends concern war, not peace. The destruction that results may be absolute but it is rarely useless. From the ruins of Rome sprang the diverse cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean. And, in any case, nothing will stop war, especially good intentions. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in Paris in 1928, bound its signers to renounce war. The original signatories included Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Other nations followed, including Afghanistan, Cuba, Finland, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, Turkey, and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Eleven years later, World War II broke out, rendering the treaty nugatory and resulting in the disappearance of several of the signatories.
Contemporary pacifists and feminists will argue that war is the result of “toxic masculinity,” and that in a female-dominated world disputes will be amicably settled by tribal councils of conciliation and jawboning. Why, then, are contemporary feminists so adamant about women in the military? Why do they insist, against all historical and empirical evidence, that women are the equals of men in every respect, including physical strength and the nature of their emotions? Their ideal, the now-obsolete United Nations, is a monument on the East River to the naïveté of Kellogg-Briand. What has the U.N. brought us? Wars that drag on forever with “peacekeepers” in blue helmets there to referee, a bloated bureaucracy occupying valuable Manhattan real estate, and outbreaks of rape and exploitation in various hot zones around the world. Winston Churchill never said anything stupider than “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”—rich, coming from a man who also said (of his experience on the North-West Frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan), “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
Talk rarely if ever settles anything. What it does do, though, is push the simmering resentments down into the emotions until they suddenly burst out, like a smoored fire that smolders and then catches flame once more. And then it will be up to the males to put out the flames, often literally fighting fire with fire, until the rage burns itself out in the ruins of Dresden or the ashes of Tokyo. Santayana’s oft-quoted aphorism, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it,” is in a way supererogatory: the past will recur whether we remember it or not. Remembering it and learning from it, however, at least gives us a fighting chance.
And so, in the end, we come to the heart of the matter, which is also where we began: with the fighting man himself. Throughout this book, we have heard from primary and secondary sources from Herodotus forward about the nature of war and the men who have fought it. With the World War II generation pretty much gone, we still however have access to some of the combatants of the Korean War, and it is to one of them now we turn for a firsthand account of what it was like to survive and escape a last stand, the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir.
I present some biographical details here not simply as familial history but as an insight into the upbringing and formation of a typical American warrior. Unlike in England, where the Gonville Bromheads have long had a hereditary call on the officer corps, the American military has always been far more democratic. With the exception of blacks, who were finally integrated into the armed forces by President Truman in 1948,1 boys from all ethnic groups and all walks of life could rise to command. Korea was, in fact, the first war in American history in which blacks and whites fought alongside each other as equals. And that included Indians.
When the 12,000 men of the First Marine Division, along with some units of the U.S. Army, marched toward the Yalu River on the Chinese–North Korean border at Thanksgiving, 1950, they were very much on the attack. On June 25, the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) had invaded the Republic of Korea and routed its armed forces, capturing the South Korean capital of Seoul and pushing the ROK forces into what became known as the Pusan Perimeter in the extreme southeast of the country, threatening to drive them into the Sea of Japan. The peninsula had been divided since the end of World War II, while the Soviets, having entered the war against Japan very late in the conflict, sliced off pieces of the crumbling empire, including the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin Island. At the conclusion of hostilities, the Russians were occupying Korea north of the 38th parallel, while the Americans had possession of the south. The two Koreas, acting as proxies for the U.S.S.R. and the United States, had been battling ever since. Meanwhile, a newly Communist China under Mao Tse-tung was watching warily from the sidelines.
The new United Nations condemned the attack and sent ground forces under the overall command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, whose long career had spanned both world wars, including a stint as supreme commander for the Allied Powers in Japan from 1945 to 1948—effectively the absolute ruler of Nippon, with the Emperor Hirohito allowed to continue as a figurehead. From his base in Japan, MacArthur became commander in chief of the United Nations Command for Korea, with the U.S. Eighth Army as its centerpiece and the First Marine Division under Maj. Gen. Oliver P. Smith as the tip of its spear.
The problem was, there wasn’t much of the Marine Corps left. Despite—or perhaps because of—the Marines’ pivotal role in the Pacific, there was an assiduous push by Army and civilian brass to downsize or even eliminate it, folding it into the two principal services, the Army and the Navy (the Marines are part of the Navy department). It wasn’t until the National Security Act of 1947 that the Marines’ existence was guaranteed. Calling in Marines from duty stations at home and in the Pacific, and using mostly rust-bucket American landing craft repurchased from the Japanese, MacArthur landed troops in Pusan, where they were able to stabilize the front and plan a counterattack against the North Koreans. In September, the Marines were withdrawn from Pusan, put aboard troop ships, and transported to the western port city of Inchon, where in a daring amphibious landing they secured the area and marched all the way to the occupied South Korean capital of Seoul, which was liberated on September 29.2
Emboldened by the rapid disintegration of the NKPA, Truman ordered MacArthur to destroy the North Korean People’s Army and unify the peninsula. In short order, U.N. and South Korean forces crossed the North Korean border and were moving toward the Yalu River, the border with China. Despite warning from the People’s Republic of China, acting at the behest of the Soviet Union, that it might enter the fray should the U.N. forces threaten its national security, MacArthur considered the threat empty, and so advised the president at their Wake Island conference on October 15, 1950.
That blunder set the stage for one of the greatest battles in Marine Corps history.
Among those Marines fighting from Pusan to Inchon to Seoul and then into North Korean territory was my father, 1st Lt. John J. Walsh. He was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on June 1, 1926—the same day as Marilyn Monroe, as it happens. His father, Joseph, was the son of two Irish immigrants from County Clare; his mother Mildred’s parents were both Nova Scotians who had legally immigrated to America. Her father, Emanuel Dingle, had served in the Navy as an Ordinary Seaman during the Spanish-American War; her mother, Mary Adele “Addie” La Fave (LeFevre), was an Acadian-French-speaking Mic Mac Indian, always referred to by her husband—affectionately, one hopes—as “Squaw.”
John was a standout athlete at Malden Catholic High School, outstanding at ice hockey, baseball, and, especially, football. Indeed, the Boston sportswriters dubbed him “Iron Mike” Walsh, a popular slang term in the first half of the twentieth century for men who were tough and brave, and because he took the hardest hits (in the days of leather helmets) and somehow managed to stay in the game. (In typical Irish fashion, I am named after him.3)
It was a moniker well earned. A star player on the Malden Catholic high school football team, he took a particular wicked shot in the face: “Two front teeth sticking down here, nose has never been correct, no medical care whatsoever. Coach said, sit down,” he recalls. “Game is now in the last 30 seconds: go ahead back in there. So I go back in and I throw a touchdown and a friend of mine, he kicks the extra point and we tie the score. Nobody gave a damn about my injury. And that’s the way I grew up. So I guess when I had a choice to go into the Marine Corps and fight people, it was the natural thing to do.”
To this day, he marvels that he was ever accepted into the Corps. The beating he took as a high school athlete, including major knee injuries, has impacted him throughout his life. At about five feet, eight inches tall and, at his heaviest, no more than 180 pounds, he was never a big man by today’s standards. But he was extremely strong, very tough, impervious to pain, and packed a wicked left hook. A natural left-hander, he writes and shoots with his right hand, a legacy of a time in Catholic-school education in which the nuns beat left-handedness out of the children in their keep.
Every soldier’s story is the same, but every soldier’s story is different. We don’t have the first-person accounts of Lucius Vorenus and Tito Pullo, two of the men of Legion XI (the Legio XI Claudia) who fought with Caesar and whom he mentions by name in the Commentaries,4 but we do have the testimony—as I have quoted throughout this book as much as possible—of soldiers throughout history who spoke or jotted down or in interviews gave their recollections, whether contemporaneously or decades later (like Grant, in his Personal Memoirs).
As a child, growing up, I heard none of these stories. This is in part due to my father’s natural reticence, the fact that we are only twenty-three years apart in life, and that I graduated so quickly from schoolboy and college student to professional that I hardly had a chance to know him when I was young—and am just doing so now, when we are both old men. Only later in his long life did he tell these tales, not to his children but to his grandchildren and even his great-grandchildren. When you first return from a war zone, no one wants to hear your stories, if you even want to relate them at all. It is enough that you are home. So you save them, nurturing them in your breast and in your heart, until near the end they come out, in a rush, the testimony of the eyewitness, the truth at last—or at least as you remember it.
So here is the story of an ordinary, but extraordinary, soldier, one who can bring to life the major themes of this book. Why do men fight? What do they fight for? What are their personal characteristics? When the shooting begins, when the perimeters of the battlefield close in, what are the virtues and circumstances that separate the living from the dead? Courage? Training? Discipline? Chance? What separates the quick and the dead? And what, after the battle, do the survivors experience, think, and tell themselves?
I’m a loner because I was brought up that way. When I was three or four years old, my mother would ship me out across the street someplace while she and my father went to work, and my sister [Mary Lou, two years younger] would go someplace else. We were getting up and out of the house at five o’clock in the morning, and my sister was being carried, wrapped in her bundle, and we each had a paper bag, with a sandwich in it for lunch. Did we eat breakfast? I don’t know. I don’t remember. Being a loner, I had to make up my mind what my life was going to be like. My father would come home, completely exhausted just from going to work; he didn’t seem to drink during the work week, but he drank like hell on Friday night. And so at age six or seven my mother would say to me, “go down to Peroni’s beer house and get your father’s pay check.”
That, clearly, was not the life he wanted. For a man like my father, the idea of punching a time clock at the Boston Rubber Shoe factory, making Converse sneakers as his father did, was not for him. His Irish grandmother, who had learned English in America,5 had come from nothing: a stone hut on a rocky slope west of Lisdoonvarna in County Clare, with a spectacular view of the Cliffs of Moher, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Aran Islands, but not much else. She settled in Lowell, Massachusetts, and labored in a textile factory until, bused down to a social in Boston, she met a Clare man who had come in through Philadelphia. They married in Lowell in 1892 and moved to the small city of Malden, just north of Boston, where they bought or built a double-decker home on Malden Street facing Devir Park, living on one floor and renting out the other. His Indian grandmother, who spoke Acadian French as her native language, had come from even less, born in 1873 in Belleville, Nova Scotia, near Yarmouth. She married Emanuel Dingle, also from Yarmouth, in Massachusetts in 1900 (it was her second marriage) and they settled in Wakefield.
Working-class Malden in those days was largely an Irish and Italian town, very Catholic, a town of churches, bars, and bakeries, where weddings between the two groups were considered “mixed marriages,” with all of the racial overtones the phrase implies. It was also the Depression: poverty and straitened circumstances were the norm. Higher education—and in those days, that meant high school; college was a luxury beyond the reach of most—was not necessarily a given, especially for girls. His father never graduated from high school, and his mother never graduated into high school. Instead, she worked in a laundry for six years, earning $9.90 a week. For them, marriage was the way up and out.
“So she and my father got married when she was about 20 and my dad was 22, I believe, and they soon found out it was the worst time in the world because of the Depression. They couldn’t buy a house, they couldn’t pay rent, they couldn’t do anything.” The solution was to move in with Joe Walsh’s parents in the duplex on Malden Street, which is where John became acquainted with his Irish grandfather. “I can remember the grandfather, Patrick, sitting at the head of the stairs, going upstairs through the back door with his two cats, who hated me and I hated them. That would be about 1927. And the old man would be sitting up there, black mustache, the only thing I remember—he looked like any Irishman of the time—he didn’t like me at all. So that contributed to my being almost a recluse.” Meanwhile, Mary O’Brien Walsh, her long hair tied up in a bun, would be out in the backyard where she raised chickens. At dinnertime, “she would grab one by the neck and she’d twirl it a few times, kill it, and drop it in this boiling 55-gallon drum and somehow put a torch underneath it, and then when it was ready, she would go out there, pull all the feathers off and then gut it.”
For a time, he was farmed out to his other set of grandparents, where he spent a couple of years being raised by his First Nations6 grandmother in nearby Wakefield, where he walked every day to school through the woods. She taught him much about nature, packing him off to pick berries and other edibles to bring home. He was a restive, combative boy:
I remember I was always getting in trouble. I was also fighting with the kids in the first and second grades. It became such that it was an armed combat with penknives, and it had to be that there was more of them than there was of me. At that age I took a defensive posture, a counterattack as we would say today. If they were harassing me to the point that I was fearful at that age, I would manage to trot, then run, and if that didn’t get me safely to the front porch of my grandmother’s house, I would open up the jackknife and I would sit there in a defensive mode until they chickened out and went home. I remember that very clearly.
Then it was back to Malden Street where Dan—my father’s uncle—was living in the attic, a virtual hermit.7 Across the street was Devir Park, where the neighborhood kids played and where the circus would pitch its tent when the big top came to town. But the focus of the Irish was not on recreation, but on the church: “From Lent to Easter I knew at age 12, maybe, that I was expected to be in the upstairs, kneeling down, saying my prayer, reciting all of the mysteries of the Rosary, and anything else that my Irish grandmother had brought over with her. They had statuettes of Mary, Joseph, Jesus—the only time I ever remember them displayed in the house, I think was maybe once. My grandmother knew I would be in the park someplace, running around, and she would holler out the window, ‘John, time to go home. Time to go to prayer.’ And I never disobeyed my grandmother. She had an Irish accent, and she had a complete Irish demeanor: I’m in charge and everybody knows I’m in charge.”
Perhaps the formative experience of his young life came during a near-death experience while still a schoolboy. He and some other kids had climbed a rocky bluff behind his parish church, Immaculate Conception, on Salem Street. The brothers who taught at the primary school had warned everybody not to climb up the cliff, but of course, boys being boys, a few of them did. It was around the beginning of Lent: “So me and a guy I will never forget come out of church, all authority is out of sight, we and three other guys ended up going around behind the brothers’ house and climbing to this higher level, which was flat. Cold, windy, slippery, and for some reason we were right over at the edge of it.”
Something happened. The next thing John Walsh knew, he was lying on the street below with a fractured skull, a broken left wrist, and multiple cracked ribs. With the help of some of his buddies he somehow managed to stagger, nearly unconscious, to a nearby gas station, where the attendant shouted at him to get off the property because he was bleeding so profusely. “The next I know was that I wake up in the hospital, and I’m dying. Leaning over me is a priest, and he’s giving me extreme unction.” His Irish grandmother was also by his side, intoning a prayer to St. Bridget, widely venerated in Ireland as the patron saint of healing. It worked. To this day, he believes he was pushed by one of the boys. “He says I slipped. I didn’t confront him but I had conversations with him later.”
As he healed he realized he was in the pediatric burn ward, surrounded by other kids who hadn’t been so lucky. “Every other kid was purple. Burned. Scalded. These kids had been victims of their mother or their father or themselves. When I left there, I know they were still there and some of them must have died there. I don’t have a scar to speak of. But that started me on my adventure through life.”
Now all the elements of the warrior were in play: the loner, the outsider, the wounded child who had already received the last rites of the Church, the man of faith with something to prove to society and to himself. The Romans would have recognized him immediately as the kind of man they needed as a centurion in the Legions. The kind of man who, already bloodied, could be counted on in combat. Who, having cheated death once, would no longer have any irrational fear of it. And so, after attending the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester under the accelerated V-12 Navy College Training Program, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps in 1947.
His early fortitude served him well: at Inchon on September 15, 1950, a concussion grenade (also called a percussion grenade, or a “flash-bang”) exploded very near him as he scrambled up and over the wooden ladder of his LST and onto the concrete seawall. The grenade knocked him down and almost out cold; behind him, eleven of his men were wounded so badly they had to be evacuated to the aid station at sea. “The Gunnery Sergeant asked if I was okay and I answered yes. He said I was strong as steel. I was now one of the team.” Iron Mike had come to Korea.
Something else happened on that beach at Inchon after it was secured, something not entirely uncommon in war, even in a hot zone, and yet always remarkable: “Sporadic enemy activity was ongoing. In the semi-darkness, a much distressed Korean 18-year-old mother, plus or minus, with baby and two-year-old child, appeared looking very confused. Instinctively, I picked up the two-year-old and by hand signals directed the mother to an area out of the path of other USMC coming ashore. Communist propaganda portrayed Marines as criminal bad guys, so she was probably scared to death when I grabbed the child; she likely thought we would kill and eat the baby. At dawn the next day my platoon was on the move toward Seoul. To my surprise about 20 Korean civilians, including the girl, were in the area smiling and waving to us. I guess my good deed with the babies proved that the communist propaganda was false.”
Still, he was plagued by physical problems, the legacy of his early injuries. “The walk from Inchon to Kimpo resulted in my bad knee swelling and becoming very painful. I could not walk as the ‘replacement’ platoon leader—with three whole days of combat. I was embarrassed. What to do? I told my problems to my senior NCO [noncommissioned officer; in other words, a high-ranking sergeant] so that he could tell the platoon. I rode in my Jeep for the next two days. I called for help from above [i.e., from God] and as we were nearing Kimpo, the help came. The knee, believe it or not, was pain free and remained that way for my next nine months in Korea.8 An officer who cannot do what the troops are doing is not much respected or followed.” On September 18, on the road to Seoul, at Kimpo, a city near Inchon, he captured Maj. Ju Yeong-bok, one of the North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung’s staff officers and translators, along with two NKPA enlisted men; Major Ju, a valuable security asset, remained as a prisoner of war in South Korea until 1953.
The first battle of Seoul was as brutal as they come. Dad was a mortar man, fighting with the 2/5—the most decorated unit in Marine Corps history, whose famous motto, “Retreat, Hell!” dates back to World War I. To this day, he does not vouchsafe much information about it. Door to door and house to house, it was urban fighting at its worse. Captured Americans could look forward to brutal interrogation and then a bullet in the back of the head. Korean civilians, including old women, would yank AK-47s from underneath their skirts and shoot the Marines in the back. Almost no one could be trusted. The fog of war combined with the darkness of the Korean night made it almost impossible to distinguish friend from foe. “In the black of night the security problems became intense,” he recalled. “It was difficult to fight with POWs everywhere. Many times the thought of killing POWs was considered but never implemented.”
After Inchon and Seoul, the Marines were put back on ships and transported around to the east side of the peninsula, to the port city of Wonsan, which was in U.N. hands. They had to wait a while for mines to be cleared. At this point, it was obvious that the Chinese had crossed the border and were now actively supporting the retreating North Korean troops. Whether they would attack Americans directly, and in what force, remained to be seen.
The Marines made their way north to Hungnam and then set out for the Yalu River, on the Chinese border. MacArthur wished to deliver a killing blow to the North Korean People’s Army, and so, along with elements of the U.S. Army’s X Corps, the 12,000 men of First Marine Division under the command of Maj. Gen. Oliver P. Smith began marching into the interior, heading for Haguru-ri, located at the base of the Chosin Reservoir.9 At Hagaru, the Army split off, pushing north along the east side of the man-made reservoir, while the Marines took the west side, heading for Koto-ri and, ultimately, Yudam-ni. As in World War I, “Home for Christmas” was the watchword.
The enemy, however, also gets a vote. On the night of November 27, 1950, despite MacArthur’s assurances to Truman that they would not enter the war, the Chinese arrived en masse—wave after wave. As at Stalingrad, the first wave was armed; the second wave would pick up the weapons from the dead and dying; the third wave consisted of commissars with burp guns ready to shoot any strays, sluggards, or cowards. At some points along the front, the Marines found themselves outnumbered ten to one. MacArthur’s was a blunder born of overconfidence and hubris on the scale of Sherman’s refusal to credit the scouting reports at Shiloh, or Custer’s surprise at the Big Village:
Simultaneous Chinese attacks occurred at Yudam—Hagaru—Koto-ri on 27 November. My battalion (2/5) was to fight at these towns from 27 Nov.–8 Dec. 1950. This time frame to me was “The Reservoir.” After that it was over the bridge10 to Hungnam and the ships.
Yudam-ni lies in a valley about four miles long and one and a half to two miles wide. In this valley, surrounded by eight or nine hill masses four to five thousand feet high was the town. The 2/5 was positioned three miles west of Yudam-ni. For two days (27–28 Nov.) thirty thousand Chinese11 and ten thousand USMC fought and left about ten thousand casualties in minus-30 temperatures on 29–30 November. USMC headed south and the Chinese followed. Subsequent major battles occurred along the MSR12 over fifty miles during the next ten days.
At Yudam-ni my 81mm platoon was positioned within the Fifth Marines perimeter and expended over one thousand mortar rounds in an area fronting the rifle companies. As the Chinese probed for weak spots in our perimeter, rifle companies were moved to strengthen these areas. During the mid-night of 27–28 November, I moved all 81mm mortars about one to two miles east toward the Yudam Valley. The Chinese had penetrated our northwest perimeter and we were under direct fire which results in one killed in action at our mortar site and also some short 105mm rounds from our Marine artillery which was attempting to kill the Chinese who had penetrated our defense.
We stayed in this position until 28-29 November when the 5th and 7th Marine Regiments were preparing to “bust-out” of Yudam-ni. I could see at this time that hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Chinese had overrun the 7th Marine perimeter in the valley and if not contained, they would cross the valley, seize the MSR and destroy our artillery, supply, our casualties and my 81mm platoon. Fortunately, this did not happen.
His terse matter-of-fact description, of course, cannot do justice to the experience. As a child, I never heard him discuss the war. I knew he had been in Korea, but I had no conception of what that meant, or what it had entailed. So in April 2019, I asked him about it, asked the questions with which we have been concerned throughout this book. At last, here was someone who had actually been at a last stand to respond to them: Were you scared? Did you fear death? What was going through your mind? His answers probably will come as no surprise:
I don’t ever remember being too excited. I remember that at the time that the Chinese did attack—I don’t remember the details but we must have gotten a phone call from the battalion headquarters, which was about a mile and a half away from where I had the guns [mortars], and they were talking about, it looks like we’re going to be overrun, and so—as far as I remember, being not too excited,13 I gathered my two staff sergeants together and I said, “I’ve just been told that we’d better prepare.” We’re a quasi-infantry unit, meaning that we don’t have barbed wire and we don’t have mines, we don’t have claymore mines, things that are designed to meet a charging enemy and kill him fifty yards or a hundred yards away. All we had was our own side arms and I said to the sergeants: you’re infantry and I’m infantry but we’re not equipped to take a thousand Chinese on, but what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna line up like Civil War types, because we had no depth to go into, and as I remember it was just a cool exchange between two sergeants who had been with this unit for two years at Camp Pendleton [between San Diego and Los Angeles] and me brand-new, since we went to Inchon. And so we came to the conclusion about three in the morning. So we went to work.
The Chinese held off that night. The Marines, however, were still under constant fire. But note the term “work.” Soldiers from time immemorial have regarded combat as work—grim and grisly work, to be sure, but work nonetheless. There is nothing glamorous in it, just old-fashioned resolution. The randomness of injury and death in combat is something no soldier can prepare for—sometimes the bullet bounces off your sword, as Grant discovered, and sometimes it goes through your brain. The safest and best thing is to do your job. If you do, you might get killed, but if you don’t, you will get killed.
The surprising truth is, most men are not killed in battle. In any enumeration of casualties, the number of wounded and missing outnumber deaths on the field. One’s chances of surviving any given battle are actually relatively good; disease, or a wound that might otherwise have been attended to and thus rendered nonfatal, is usually the Grim Reaper. At Shiloh, Albert Sidney Johnston might have lived had something as simple as a tourniquet been applied to his leg after he was shot. Instant death on the battlefield came from the thrust of a gladius, an encounter with a halberd, the cleave of the Dane axe, a bouncing cannonball, the fatal lacerations from canister shot, an arrow through the eye, or a bullet to the head. Instantaneous, and thus not feared because you never saw it coming. One minute you were doing your job, and the next moment you were gone, eyes still open, staring blindly at the sky. Before the battle, you might prepare—write a testament or a letter to your girl or your parents, and then ask your buddy, should he survive and make it back home, to deliver it. Like William Penn Symons, you died facing the enemy.
The history of military warfare tells us this, over and over again. You do your duty. You obey the dictates of your discipline. You do what you have been trained to do. This is exactly what we should expect. When everything is falling apart, the one fixed point in a rapidly changing environment a soldier has to cling to is his training. You do the job—which is to say, you kill the man in front of you. And then you do it again until the fighting stops, one way or the other.
’Twas ever thus. The Greeks knew it was coming, the hail of arrows that would blot out the sun and allow them to fight and die in the shade. So did Vercingetorix at Alesia, invested twice over, against an implacable foe in Caesar who would, after the Roman fashion, show no mercy to a man who was defying him. Ditto Roland, fighting until his temple burst. Harold, felled by an arrow to the eye, sagging, leaning, falling. Custer, unable to form an effective perimeter and, like Gordon at Khartoum, waiting for help that never came. And yet, even in the midst of the action, there is hope of survival. It’s hard to hit a human target, even one that is relatively stationary; the reserved seats on the Paris Metro to this day are for the mutilés de guerre, the wounded war veterans from as far back as the First World War, and perhaps even those still hobbled by the Franco-Prussian War 30 years before the Metro opened, should those ghosts need a ride.
Few civilians understand how loud war is. The shell-shocked veterans of the Somme were not reacting to the carnage so much as to the ear-splitting noise produced by the big guns and personal firearms. It is literally deafening, which is why shooters on a gun range are forced to wear ear protection during target practice. There is a memorable moment early in Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Saving Private Ryan where it takes Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) a few moments to shake off the effects of gunfire as he lands on Omaha Beach during Operation Overlord in 1944. Of such moments are the fog of war made. To live or die is not a matter of courage but of luck, born of discipline and preparation. “Tell everyone I died facing the enemy” is about all any warrior can ask.
And so, on the night of November 27, 1950, the Chinese attacked in full force, shooting off rockets and sounding gongs and noisemakers as they charged down the hills to attack. Mao’s goal was simple: to annihilate the First Marine Division and thus effectively destroy the entire Marine Corps. In temperatures that were as cold as 30 degrees below zero, he came very close to succeeding.
Let Lieutenant Walsh describe it in his own plain words, for this is as close as a modern reader will ever get to a living eyewitness account of Thermopylae, the Swiss Guard at the Vatican, or Rorke’s Drift:
I don’t ever remember getting “what if” about it, except to say up and down the line: if you see a bunch a people, we’re going to assume they’re not friendly. We only had ammunition enough for—I would guess we had six or eight cartridge bandoliers, probably seventy rounds of ammunition apiece. I had since made up my mind that I was going to do an M-1 rifle in addition to my .45. I had shot expert in both of them and I had confidence in them, but with a .45 your best bet is within 25 yards, with your M-1 your best bet is within 300 yards. I liked that. The other thing about the 300 [the M-1]—we call it “battle sight”—the rise and fall of the bullet is almost flat, so you don’t have to screw around, you just set your weapon at battle-300 yards, and you know that somebody coming up at five and a half, six feet tall, you’re going to hit somebody.
So what came across is a couple of Chinese regiments—this was 20–30 degrees below zero—dressed in their quilted uniforms. Other Chinese, who were coming down from the hills across the valley two miles away, had frozen to death. Otherwise they would have come in between our artillery which was in our southern perimeter, and our infantry people and all of their fighting might, but absent of air support, absent of artillery, no tanks. Just bazookas and M-1 rifles. The main thing for artillery in the perimeter is what they can do for perimeter defense, so when you can know the enemy is coming, you just throw everything you got at them.
I can’t remember being, oh Jesus we’re all going to die, or what’s going to happen. The thought might have crossed my mind that I don’t want to be taken prisoner. I don’t want to be a prisoner of war. I’m sure that happened.
We knew we were in deep trouble because the Chinese had the high ground this time. And once you lose the high ground, and you gotta move trucks and troops and all that stuff, otherwise forget it. You’ll have survivors and stragglers but you won’t have a militarily operational unit coming back.
In the freezing conditions, the Marines stacked the dead bodies of the Chinese to use them as both breastworks and windbreaks. Many of the Chinese had essentially frozen alive, the only sign of life being their moving eyeballs. The Marines shot them. They relieved the dead of any usable clothing and unspent ammunition.
Normally you go into a war with a three-day supply of whatever you think you need—350 rounds per mortar was a good estimate. I had six guns. That’s almost two thousand rounds. You take with the guns a day’s unit of fire, as they call it. And you have a day’s worth backing that up a couple of miles away. Illumination, WP [white phosphorus], high explosives. At Hagaru we probably had about ten days of supply. Smith, the general, was thumbing his nose at the Army, who were telling him to hurry up, hurry up and get up to the Yalu River and don’t worry about your resupply and all that. On the contrary, Smith was quadrupling the ammunition, quadrupling everything, so we had I would guess ten days of supply, and we damn near expended the whole thing in two days.
All mortars had an adjustable fuse, to explode upon impact or to explode ten or fifteen feet above the ground. I’m now a mortar man, first time I’ve been one in my life, and there were thousands of Chinese, trying to get to where I was through the infantry I was supporting. I had an observer for each pair of guns that I had. So I had an observer with A company, B company, C company, Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, and they were spread out in an arc over three miles, I would say.
The observer during the first day getting ready for the Chinese to come to us was marking out targets by grid coordinates, six-digit kind of thing, and coordinating back to his pair of guns, to his sergeant. And his sergeant and the other two sergeants doing the same thing were communicating with the two gunnery sergeants that I had back in my little command post, which was a tent, which was nice because I had it close in to the infantry so we could turn it into an aid station for the wounded about halfway through this two days of constant work, whatever your job was.
The only moment of trepidation came when friendly fire from the Marine artillery rained down on his head:
During the night, when the fighting was at its heaviest, my guns were off a road between the 5th Marines and 7th Marines and as we were firing I could hear this whistle from something that I knew was a 105 mm howitzer shell from our guns which were five miles over in the valley away from us. And they had the wrong coordinates and all of a sudden: boom boom boom boom. And I yelled out: everybody get off the guns and get back on the cover of the hills. Looking back on it, it was kind of silly, because artillery comes in this way [from above] and they don’t recognize hills too much. So after about four or five minutes after this barrage, I discovered that’s what it was: one battery of four guns had misinformed a gun of the correct coordinates to shoot over there instead of over here. Scared the shit outta me.14 They were about fifty yards away, and the range killing zone on a 105 is about thirty to forty yards. Awful close. That scared the hell out of everybody. But I listened, and then I said we’d better get back on the guns, because there wasn’t any follow-on. And then we resumed killing the Chinese, for the support of the Fifth Marines.
During the first night our positons were mutually supporting within the battalion, but then the Chinese decided sometime during that first night that they were coming from the west, the north, and the east. For some reason—I think they coulda whipped us right there—they moved their western attacks and backed up their north to south and east to west attackers, because they were taking a beating and they needed some unplanned-for reinforcements rather than having reinforcements back five miles to call in. So when they moved some time that night or early morning, when the Chinese pull back normally, because they don’t like [to fight in] daylight, I decided to move my whole contingent—all the vehicles, the tent, everything—about 1,500 yards east. That’s probably what screwed up the artillery, I didn’t tell anybody, lesson learned, don’t do that. Let everybody know where you are, because they’ve got bigger guns than you have. That turned out to be a very good move because it shortened my resupply line, guns and so forth. I was able to converse with the forward observer that I had up with the colonel who commanded the battalion.
The next night the Chinese really came in full force. I’m sure that the guns that I had for the area were so effective that the company commanders, when the battle was over, they were all happy. I didn’t know any of them and they didn’t know me, and I’m a recluse, so I didn’t go out and say I’m so and so, and I did this, so I never got to meet ninety percent of the officers who were in the weapons company. I didn’t give a shit what they were doing and I assumed they didn’t care what I was doing. But I was doing my job, and so in the middle of the second night, when we were really harassed, I changed my firing attitude and, after talking to the FO [forward observer], I said, I’m gonna put an illumination shell up, and I’m going to fire what we call search and traverse missions. That means that each of the two guns in support of that company’s sector on order would fire at nine points in a 100-yard square.
By this time the Chinese are pretty compressed,15 trying to get into our weak spots. Now, what are they going to do? They’re going to stand still, not gonna move. They got white coats on, snow is on the ground, hard to see ’em. I said I’m going to fire one round, which was different than firing the nine rounds before, and then they’re going to stop someplace. And as soon as I got word of that, I would fire 20 seconds later the other eight shots, and then repeat that by moving at fifty yards time and time again. And I swear that, according to those guys, we must have killed a couple of thousand Chinese. Their political guys were killing them if they didn’t attack; once they said you’re gonna attack here, that made it easy for us to say OK: target number so and so. That to me was one of the significant moves that made it easy for us. If the Chinese hadn’t tried to fortify what was the weakest part of our defense, if they hadn’t done that, if they had reinforced just enough to get through our weak spots [on the west side] it would have been a different game. They would have had what we call double envelopment.
And so we come full circle, back to Thermopylae and Cannae and to the most elemental aspects of military tactics and strategy. Surround your enemy, cut him off from his supplies and reinforcements, and then crush him. What the Marines did in their “advance to the rear” was to elide their own last stand, escape under constant and heavy fire, and return home. It wasn’t easy. As the 2/5 abandoned Hagaru, my father found himself in the rear guard:
As the 2/5 attempted to break contact, the commanding officer, Lt. Col Roise,16 ordered me to stay in the 81mm mortar firing position until further ordered. At that moment, about three or four hundred Chinese soldiers came off the high ground north of Hagaru about four hundred yards from my position. They stopped in Hagaru to forage. The Lt. Col ordered me south to rejoin the 2/5. As far as I know, I was the last Marine out of Hagaru.
There were some harrowing moments along the main supply route. As the frozen and wounded Marines made their way back to the Allied lines on foot or by Jeep, some of the men were too exhausted even to sit upright. “I was walking along the convoy when I saw a body fall from a vehicle and roll off the road toward a dropoff. I ran toward the Marine (semi-conscious), a Second Lieutenant. As my Jeep came by I loaded him in the front seat and moved up and down the convoy to check on the 81mm vehicles. About five or ten minutes later, he fell out a second time and was in danger of falling down a slope and over a steep cliff. I managed to get him the second time, put him in my Jeep, tied him in and told him there would be no third fall and that I would kick his butt if it happened again.” The man survived.
On December 12, the 2/5 boarded ship at Hungnam and headed for Pusan to rest and regain combat capability. At this point, my father weighed about 140 pounds, and had severe bronchitis. There was still more fighting to come, but the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir was over. He stayed in Pusan for about a month until, along with the rest of the battalion, he was deemed fit for combat again. On May 9, he received orders to leave Korea, traveled by ship via Japan to San Francisco, where he landed on May 25, and was assigned to Marine Barracks, Eighth and I Streets, in Washington, D.C., the oldest Marine post in the country, the location of the commandant’s official residence, and its principal ceremonial grounds.
From September to December 1950, my 81mm platoon had one killed in action, eleven wounded in action, and zero frostbite. Personally during that time, I was knocked down by a fragmentation grenade and struck by bullets which hit my cartridge belt and my backpack. No body wounds, no Purple Heart.
Among infantry lieutenants the casualty rate was over sixty percent. Considering these numbers I was “lucky” with lots of help. Long time believers in the protective power of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Nancy and I had a grotto for the BVM visible from our homes’ kitchen windows for most of our sixty-eight years married. Nancy gave me a pocket-sized Blessed Virgin Mary which I carried always in Korea. I came out of Korea in one piece thanks to two blessed ladies … the Blessed Virgin Mary and Ann Patricia Walsh.
This is about as good an explanation of why he fought as we’re ever likely to get from him or any other soldier. In retrospect, the elements of his personal biography certainly seem to have pointed the way toward a military career, a framework from within which he could shed his sense as an outsider17 and indulge his natural aggression. Had he been just a year or so older, he might have fought in the Pacific during the last year of World War II; as it was, he was just the right age to see action in both Korea and Vietnam.
Among his personal and unit awards were the Bronze Star18 for heroism, the Navy Commendation, a “Combat V,” six Korean War battle stars, and four presidential unit citations. He returned home from Korea to father four more children, see service in Southeast Asia (including a stint as a military representative to SEATO), retire from the Corps in 1967, and continue working in the Navy Department in Washington, D.C., until 1982, finally retiring for good to Florida, where he lives today.
He’s had a long time to think this over. A voracious reader, even with only one good eye (he lost the other to botched cataract surgery some years ago), he devours books on military history, trying to fit his own first-blood infantryman’s-eye-view of war with the view from 30,000 feet afforded by the best military historians. In his opinion, war always has and always will boil down to its most elemental factor: “As long as there’s two guys and they’re fighting each other, one’s going to win over the other one. I don’t think that the way to fight has ever changed from a man-to-man basis.” He muses that perhaps the best way to settle disputes is the ancient ritual of single combat: “Two champions, one on this side and one on that side. Why don’t we go back to that?”
Unrealistic, to be sure. But perhaps here endeth the lesson, where we began, with war at its most elemental, man to man. With Kant’s dictum and Hobbes’s evocation of Genesis. With the Greeks at Thermopylae, combing out their long hair and sharpening their weapons against the final assault they knew they would not survive. With the Swiss Guard, desperately fighting its way from the steps of the Vatican, across the Tiber. With Zrínyi and his men mounting one last desperate charge into the Turkish ranks. With Gordon in his study at Khartoum, defiantly illuminated as he watched the sands of time run out.
Try as man might, he has not yet found a way to elide the fates of Cain and Abel: not through the various peaces of Westphalia et al.; neither via the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, nor the United Nations. Not through negotiations, or even “peace through strength.” The Pax Romana failed; so will the Pax Americana, and whatever follows it. In the end, it seems, there will be blood.
And then it is up to the warrior. The warrior is as the warrior does. In the field, the warrior does not negotiate, beg, or bargain, for it is no use. The warrior fights because it is his job. The warrior kills, or is killed, because that is part of the job too. History in retrospect may regard him as hero, villain, or simply anonymous cannon fodder. His bones may be honored or ground to powder. His sacrifice may be honored or mocked.
Whether he lives or dies, however, the warrior stays true—to his country, his tribe, his family, his comrades, and most of all to himself. No matter how distasteful we may find it, this is his code, and we abandon it at our civilizational peril, otherwise, there can never be peace.
Si vis pacem, para bellum, indeed.