July 22, 1950
Pohang, South Korea
Hundreds of combat boots, buckled suede, scraped and shuffled up the hatchways of the USNS Shanks. Two-pound steel helmets and sheathed bayonets, fold-away shovels and M-1 rifles brushed and butted the bulkheads. On the troopship’s decks, the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment was falling in. Heads were counted and then the combat-loaded Americans gazed out upon the Asian continent, at a dismal fishing port, at empty beaches trailing away into the haze, at green mountains marching inland through the clouds as far as their eyes could see, toward valleys, rice paddies, mud-walled villages, unseen places from which many of them would never return.
The summer sun, filtering through the overcast, still hung above the ridges when the Shanks anchored at 5:35 P.M. In drab olive fatigues damp with sweat, they stood by, awaiting orders, checking each other’s gear, nervously joking, drifting in thought. For the coal miner’s boy Ralph Bernotas, Korea’s “heavy hills” looked like the rumpled slopes of Pennsylvania. For Pfc. James Hodges, the heat in Pohang Harbor was a Florida swelter. For his platoon mate Buddy Wenzel, collector of states, here was a whole country for his list—something new and, he told himself, only for a couple of weeks.
Away to the north, faint, distant, a war could be heard. Lt. Bill Kaluf, who had finally found a medical officer to clear his ears, picked up the occasional thudding boom from the direction of Yongdok, 25 miles up the coast, where U.S. Navy warships were firing their guns in support of South Korean troops struggling to hold the town. Aboard the Shanks nerves relaxed a bit as the Garryowens realized they would be landing unopposed, far behind the lines.
They still had to negotiate their first tricky descent into landing craft, on rope ladders swinging above 40-foot-deep waters. Packs went down first, followed by infantrymen. George Company’s Sgt. John Ramirez watched the show. “Guys were hanging on for dear life. Up on deck the guys are laughing, and down below the guys are laughing. But not the guys in the middle.”
The first of the 36-foot Higgins boats, loaded with dozens of men, was away at 7:23 P.M. The boats circled and then headed in, lined up abreast. The D-Day-style run to shore ratcheted up the tension again, but it eased at the sight of a familiar bespectacled face at the dock. Sgt. Snuffy Gray had landed at dawn that day, sent ahead with his regimental reconnaissance platoon.
After the stormy five-day crossing from Japan, the Garryowens had their boots on solid ground at last. Their new regimental commander, the ex-Pentagon comptroller Colonel Nist, soon drove off to get marching orders from 1st Cavalry Division commanders. Back aboard the Shanks, the Navy’s watch officer noted in the log, “All’s well.”
* * *
Beyond those far Mountains, American troops who went into Korea before the 7th Cavalry were in desperate fights for their lives. A hundred miles to the northwest that day, a company of the 35th Infantry Regiment, almost surrounded by attacking North Koreans, had their backs against a swollen stream, and frantic young Americans were drowning in their panic to get across. Southwest of there on this Saturday evening, North Korean tanks rolled up against freshly dug-in troops of the 8th Cavalry, the Garryowens’ sister regiment. It was the 1st Cavalry Division’s baptism of fire in Korea, on the outskirts of the old crossroads town Yongdong.
The newly arrived 7th Cavalry still had hours of peace at Pohang, but it would be an uneasy, even bloody peace. The regiment’s 2nd Battalion rode by truck to its overnight bivouac site in a field five miles southwest of town. On the way, these teenagers from the U.S. heartland were repelled and mystified by what they saw and smelled, especially the heavy use of human excrement, mixed with ash, to fertilize some fields. A junior officer, writing the regiment’s official diary, noted that the men were amazed to see “half-naked” Korean women in the countryside, that they were sure “venereal diseases were as common as the common cold” in such a dirt-poor land and that “Japan was clean in comparison to this so-called Korea.” In the steamy summer night, Korea seemed a strange, primitive place to these foreign troops, its odors overwhelming, its water infected, its mosquitoes maddening, its people silent, almost sullen, hardly welcoming. The Americans’ spirits flagged, their nerves sharpened.
As the 2nd Battalion’s five companies—E, F, G, H and Headquarters Company—haphazardly staked out bivouac spots, Lieutenant Kaluf realized his company commander, Captain Chandler, had not established a defensive position, with perimeter and password. “We just flopped down. It was a totally disorganized thing,” Kaluf said. Over in his area, Snuffy Gray’s men did have a password, “Texas,” but they also had jittery trigger fingers. When Gray approached the perimeter that night after a short trip nearby, someone demanded the password, he gave it, and the response was an immediate flurry of M-1 fire. The platoon sergeant wasn’t hit.
Up in the 1st Battalion area, the aim was deadlier. That battalion had moved immediately into defensive positions north of Pohang, backing up the South Korean troops fighting farther north for Yongdok. Out of the starless night, South Korean soldiers and refugees, pulling back, approached the battalion’s lines. The confused Americans opened fire. One Korean soldier and one civilian were killed in the small-arms barrage, the first casualties inflicted by the 7th Cavalry in Korea.
That first bleak, chaotic night on the Korean coast was a portent. “They did not have the training,” an aged Colonel Heyer, 2nd Battalion commander, later remembered. “They were just shipped in there without the training.”
They were shipped without the equipment, too. Before departing Japan, the regiment wrote into the record that it was short on bazookas, mortar rounds, antitank mines, even binoculars, and the hand-me-downs from World War II were in bad shape, from machine guns to trucks. Obsolete radios would fail in combat. Some artillery pieces were inaccurate. Even the food was old, combat rations from the last war. Snuffy Gray felt obliged to steal five machine guns from the Army’s Tokyo depot just before shipping out. At least this enterprising sergeant’s men were battle-ready—except that his platoon, a reconnaissance unit, was issued no Korea maps.
The Garryowens, on their first night in Korea, were “curious and dubious as to what lay before them,” the regimental diarist noted with bland understatement. Rushed across the Korea Strait after a few days of hurried decision making in Washington and Tokyo, they were told only that they would halt communist aggression with little problem. But what lay before these untested, thinly trained GIs was a long, cruel war unlike any that Americans had ever fought, under a supreme commander, MacArthur, who knew they were unready. They were “tailored for occupation duty, not combat,” General MacArthur had confidentially told the visiting Army Chief of Staff, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, just four days before the 7th Cavalry Regiment shipped out.
There was one more sign the 1st Cavalry Division didn’t know what to expect. It landed in Korea without fingerprint kits, personal-effects bags and mattress covers, the gear of a graves registration unit. It was unequipped to handle its own dead.
* * *
General MacArthur himself was caught off guard by the war that awakened him, with a telephone call, before dawn on June 25.
The muffled bell had rung insistently in his bedroom at the U.S. Embassy residence until the seventy-year-old general picked up. After a respectful apology for the early hour, a duty officer at the other end informed MacArthur that North Korean troops had struck across the 38th Parallel at 4 A.M. MacArthur later recounted his shock: “It couldn’t be, I told myself. Not again!”—not another bolt from the blue, not another Philippines 1941.
Most of Tokyo’s Little America slept late as usual that Sunday morning. The dance band had gone on past midnight at the General Headquarters Officers’ Club. The day promised to hit a torrid 90 degrees, the hottest of the year. Many would head for the beaches. Early risers could check their newspaper for the latest on Jackie Robinson’s bid to bat .400 for the Brooklyn Dodgers, or how Judy Garland was recovering from Wednesday’s suicide attempt, or they could peruse the ads for newly arrived 1950 model cars, or scan the offerings at Tokyo’s American movie houses. A GI and his girl could catch Easter Parade, with none other than Judy Garland.
Buddy Wenzel was looking for Sunday diversions at the USO downtown when a friend showed up with a Stars and Stripes. The military newspaper had rushed out an “extra” edition, and GIs gathered around to read it. KOREA AT WAR, declared the huge headline. Up at the Grant Heights housing complex, the McKowns were returning from the PX when a neighbor sergeant dashed out to give them the news. Bill and Lois, the young marrieds, had a lot on their minds—a fourteen-month-old boy and an infant girl. “Korea? I’d heard of it,” McKown remembered. “It didn’t excite me much.”
The 7th Cavalry was soon sending Jeep patrols into Tokyo’s back streets to roust men from their Japanese girlfriends’ hooches. The brass were rounded up, too, though more discreetly. At a Sunday garden party at one American villa, word spread in brief, low conversations among General Headquarters staff officers, and one by one they slipped away to waiting cars that sped them to the Dai-Ichi building headquarters. There General MacArthur, like Sergeant McKown, didn’t seem to know what to think.
The invasion caught the United States “flat-footed,” an Army historian later wrote. “The nation had few forces immediately available and no plans for fighting in Korea.” Just a year before, the Joint Chiefs declared Korea beyond U.S. strategic interests and withdrew the last U.S. occupation troops. Just five months before, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in a major speech, excluded South Korea from the U.S. “defense perimeter” in Asia.
At first, MacArthur and his staff saw just another border incident. When its scale became clear as Sunday wore on, they fell back on the faith military advisers placed in the South Korean army. Earlier that week, the chief U.S. Army adviser in Seoul had assured Washington that “the South Korean forces could handle any possible invasion by North Korean forces.” MacArthur, misled, took a relatively upbeat view of events across the Korea Strait well into Monday.
A high-level Tokyo visitor did not. The influential John Foster Dulles, a Republican internationalist and stern anticommunist, had been dispatched to Japan as a special envoy of the Democratic Truman administration to negotiate a U.S.-Japan peace treaty. Sensing MacArthur’s inertia, Dulles cabled Secretary of State Dean Acheson: “Believe that if it appears the South Koreans cannot contain or repulse the attack, United States forces should be used even though this risks Russian countermoves.”
Back in Washington, it had been a tense spring. That was evident in the headlines of Tokyo’s Nippon Times in late June: revelations about Soviet atomic bomb spy rings, news of dozens of suspected U.S. communists being cited for contempt by the House Un-American Activities Committee. “There are now two worlds: the free world and the captive world,” Dulles himself declared in a June 22 speech in Tokyo. Just five years after their joint triumph in World War II, American leaders were branding their Soviet counterparts a global menace. The tension even crept into popular culture: In the Stars and Stripes of that Sunday, June 25, comic-strip hero Steve Canyon had a nasty encounter with a Soviet submarine.
Above all, it was the “loss” of China in October 1949 that put Washington politics on a knife edge. The communist-hunting Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy accused “subversives” in Acheson’s State Department of abetting Mao Tse-tung’s communists in their civil war victory. He assailed Acheson himself for defending alleged spy Alger Hiss, an ex-colleague. He labeled the Truman administration a virtual “bedfellow of international communism.” With it all, but with little substantiation, McCarthy and others like him won headlines.
By the time Truman flew back to Washington from Independence, Missouri, that Sunday afternoon for an emergency meeting on Korea, he and his officials had been hammered for months for supposedly “coddling” communism. Acheson’s staff had produced, overnight, a study paper weighted toward intervening in Korea. Thirteen senior U.S. officials convened over a fried chicken dinner at Blair House, the president’s home during White House remodeling. Korea “offered as good an occasion for drawing the line as anywhere else,” said Gen. Omar N. Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Acheson strongly favored U.S. action, and Truman eagerly agreed. “If we let Korea down,” the minutes showed the president saying, “the Soviet Union will keep right on going and swallow up one piece of Asia after another.… The Near East would collapse and no telling what would happen in Europe.”
None of the top Pentagon and State Department officials dissented. One, Dean Rusk, described Korea as a dagger pointed at Japan. Now Far Eastern chief at the State Department, Rusk had been one of the two Pentagon officers who drew a line on a Washington map one midnight in 1945 and split the Korean people in two.
The Blair House group ordered MacArthur to expedite weapons shipments to the South Korean defenders and deploy air and naval forces to try to save Seoul. When the group met again the next day, there was serious talk of using American ground troops in Korea. Bradley now hesitated, but the momentum had taken hold. For a start, the group announced on June 27 a widening of U.S. air support for the South Koreans. At United Nations headquarters in New York that day, the U.S.-dominated Security Council adopted a resolution urging members to “furnish such assistance … as may be necessary” to repel the northern attack.
Acheson’s study paper, minimizing the Koreans’ urge to reunite, said the North Korean invasion must be “a Soviet move,” though one unique in the postwar period. The Kremlin must consider Korea “more important than we have assumed.” The Soviets had never shown any intent to reunite Korea by force, however, and scholars later found that Kremlin leader Joseph Stalin, not wanting to confront the United States, only reluctantly acquiesced to Kim Il Sung’s invasion plans after months of opposition. It is believed Stalin eventually sent pilots to help the North Koreans, but he never sent Soviet troops.
Washington’s first announcements were kept low-key, with no hint that America was on the road to war. On Tuesday, June 27, the Army told reporters, “At the beginning, it is not contemplated that ground troops or Marines will be used.” But MacArthur was receiving dire reports in Tokyo. The ROKs—the Republic of Korea army—were collapsing before the invaders. Seoul fell to the North Koreans on Wednesday, June 28, just three days after they invaded. The next day, MacArthur flew across the strait to get a look for himself. On June 30, back in Tokyo after eight hours on the ground south of Seoul, the supreme commander advised the Joint Chiefs in Washington that U.S. ground forces would be needed to drive the North Koreans back.
It was the middle of the night in Washington when the message arrived, but Gen. Joe Collins, the relatively new Army chief, rushed to the Pentagon to deal with it. He discussed it live with MacArthur by teletype and accepted the Far East commander’s judgment. The early-rising president, ready for work by 5 A.M. at Blair House, immediately accepted it, too.
Without consulting the full Joint Chiefs, without submitting a war resolution to Congress, Truman was sending American soldiers to fight the North Koreans. But the press statement on June 30 played down what it called MacArthur’s authorization “to use certain supporting ground units,” and Truman seized on a reporter’s suggested term for the U.S. operation in Korea. Yes, the president said, it was a “police action.”
* * *
In Tokyo, amid the alerts and rumors of late June, as Truman and Acheson discussed committing U.S. ground forces to Korea, the 7th Cavalry’s commanders noted ruefully in their official diary that “training to date had not consisted of any battalion or regimental phase and only a limited amount of company phase”; that is, the units had never practiced battle maneuvers together. The 1st Cavalry Division artillery command acknowledged in its record that some gun crew members had never operated their weapons with live ammunition.
Once the word came from Washington, however, a gung-ho spirit, baseless as it was, took hold. MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Gen. Willoughby, tartly told the 1st Cavalry Division commander, Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay, that if he didn’t hurry his preparations, all he’d see when he got to Korea was “the tail end” of the 24th Infantry Division driving the enemy back north.
Right up to embarkation at Yokohama, the 7th Cavalry was organizing, down to the platoon level, with new sergeants drafted from other units, with men thrown together who had never shared a barracks or a beer before. In a final act, the men stuffed clothes and papers, letters and snapshots of girlfriends and buddies into secured footlockers—Snuffy Gray’s purloined samurai swords went into one—to await their quick return. Whether because of theft or Army bungling, they never saw the footlockers again.
Writing home to his sister Juanita, G Company’s James Hodges confessed he was worried, “although I try to convince Mother I’m not.” Then the Florida runaway added, “I went over and increased my insurance to $10,000 dollars the 1st of July. If I do get bumped off the family will be sitting purty.”
A few bunks away at McKnight Barracks, Hodges’s friend Buddy Wenzel wanted to believe it would be quick and easy. “This was going to be a ‘police action,’ right?” Wenzel later said. “We were going to go over there and straighten things out and come back. So they told us.”
But what these teenaged jitterbuggers, black marketers and spit-polished sentries were going to was a full-scale war, the first in U.S. history entered upon without the constitutionally mandated authority of Congress. More than that, it was the war that would institutionalize the Cold War for America, leading to four decades of huge military budgets, to perilous showdowns with the Soviet Union and to an even longer, costlier war for Americans, a generation after, in another corner of Asia. The rapid-fire decisions of late June overrode carefully debated U.S. positions taken on Korea in the previous year, and ignored a long-held U.S. military precept against fighting Asians on the Asian mainland. The decisions also seemed heedless of the deep unpopularity of the Rhee regime being defended in South Korea.
A “military superiority complex” was at work, a leading historian of the war, Clay Blair, later concluded. The glory of global victory in World War II, the seemingly boundless economic capacity of postwar America, the ultimate power of the nuclear bomb all combined to make any perceived challenge look surmountable.
“To back away from this challenge, in view of our capacity for meeting it, would be highly destructive of the power and prestige of the United States,” Secretary of State Acheson, patrician son of a bishop, later wrote of the hasty days of decision in 1950.
As the Shanks crashed through the Pacific’s waves with its cargo of seasick 7th Cavalrymen, President Truman was on the radio telling the American people that nothing less than U.S. national security was at stake on that poor, mountainous peninsula.
MacArthur, who wholeheartedly embraced the intervention, nonetheless wrote later, “I could not help being amazed at the manner in which this great decision was being made.”
* * *
Like the old warrior MacArthur, the young soldier Harry G. Summers Jr. was astonished to wake up to war. A corporal with the 24th Infantry Division, later a noted military writer, Summers knew his unit was a “hollow” force. “We were as surprised as Stalin and Kim Il Sung at Truman’s orders to go into action in Korea,” Summers wrote.
The 24th, in western Japan, was the closest U.S. division to Korea and got the first call. Two infantry companies and an artillery battery—promptly tagged “Task Force Smith” for their commanding colonel—were airlifted to Korea and piled into a train and then trucks for a wearying ride north to the war. Fresh from Japan’s easy life, they bumped up the peninsula’s central roadway, between endless white-clad columns of refugees and fleeing South Korean troops, detrucked 25 miles south of Seoul, and dug in on a ridge astride the main road, in a constant rain, to await the North Korean army. They numbered just 540 men.
The “military superiority complex” reigned in the 24th Infantry Division. “I remember distinctly MacArthur’s headquarters telling us as we left Japan that as soon as the North Koreans saw us they would run,” said Earl C. Downey, a young division officer at the time. From the start, however, the running, often a desperate headlong flight, was by Americans.
The Americans lacked not just numbers and equipment, but also intelligence about the enemy. Lt. Col. Charles Smith and his overconfident task force got that information on the job. From atop the scrubby ridge, at about 7 A.M. on July 5, Smith spotted eight North Korean tanks, Soviet-made T-34s, clanking down the road from the north. His artillery took them under fire, but the high-explosive rounds did nothing; his howitzers had almost no armor-piercing shells. When the tanks rumbled up abreast of them, the Americans fired their 2.36-inch bazookas, but the small rockets bounced off uselessly. Throughout, the North Korean tankers were firing their own 85mm cannon and machine guns, blowing the stunned, outgunned infantrymen out of their way, inflicting the war’s first American casualties.
About thirty tanks poured through the gap and were followed by a massive attack by North Korean infantry, a six-mile-long column of advancing troops in mustard-colored uniforms who fanned out across the landscape before Smith’s bloodied companies. The colonel ordered a pullback; it turned into a rout, as men dropped rifles, helmets and cartridge belts, abandoned the howitzers and fled cross-country through the muck of rice paddies and over hills.
This first contact slowed the North Koreans for a few hours, while other 24th Division units assembled miles to the rear. But in the end the loss of 153 of Smith’s men dead or missing meant little, because in the coming days the rest of the division would also reel and break before enemy tanks. Soldiers gave it a name: “bugging out.”
American arrogance toward the new enemy persisted, tinged with racism. One battalion commander referred to the North Koreans as “trained monkeys,” the Army historian later reported. The New York Times military editor called them “an army of barbarians,” the “most primitive of peoples.” General MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, labeled them “half-men with blank faces.”
The men of the 24th Division quickly learned, however, that they had been misled: The northern troops, the Korean People’s Army, were a formidable force, superbly trained and led, powerfully equipped. They had seven combat-ready infantry divisions and three newly activated ones, and an armored brigade with 150 T-34s, the Soviet main battle tank of World War II. They numbered 135,000 troops, including thousands who fought for the communists in China’s civil war.
Against them stood a Republic of Korea army that counted 98,000 men on June 25 but was devastated by the surprise onslaught. It was now trying to regroup with its U.S. ally standing alongside. Many ROK soldiers were willing to fight and die for South Korea, and some units were inflicting serious damage on the invaders, especially along the mountainous east coast. Many others lacked the motivation the northerners showed, however, and many ROK army officers were incompetent and corrupt. The sight of South Korean soldiers, weaponless and leaderless, pouring south with refugees outraged the first American GIs to arrive. Language problems worsened things. In one incident, a group of U.S. soldiers, seeing South Korean troops preparing to blow up a bridge the Americans wanted saved, simply seized the explosives and threw them into the river.
Top U.S. officers shunned their South Korean counterparts. For their part, the ROK army cadre had lost some admiration for the Americans since U.S. Army advisers pulled out from front-line Korean units right after the invasion, the Koreans’ hour of greatest need.
American soldiers almost universally pinned the crude word “gook” on all Koreans, whether enemy or allied, soldier or civilian. The New York Times’s Walter Sullivan reported that the U.S. troops’ contempt alienated the local population from the outset. The Americans did not understand that many South Koreans despised the government the U.S. Army was defending. In fact, as the northern army swept down the peninsula, most South Koreans stayed put in their homes. But the tens of thousands who fled before the communists became a tide against which U.S. troop movements sometimes had to struggle.
It was a pathetic tide, often soaked by the early summer rains, their white garb spattered with mud, exhausted families trudging south with bundles of clothes atop their heads, bags of food and bits of furniture piled onto back A-frames, in pushcarts, or, for the lucky ones, on oxcarts. Bent patriarchs in their tall black hats, anxious housewives in high-waisted skirts, girls with babies strapped to their backs, the old and weak being carried, the young barefoot and bewildered, all trying to escape the fighting. In the two weeks after the Americans arrived, an estimated 380,000 refugees passed through the U.S.–South Korean lines toward safety, a safety often marked by hunger, sickness and uncertainty.
* * *
The GIs of the 24th infantry division endured hardships, too, even when not under enemy fire. After months or years of routine in Japan, most of the Americans were not in shape for scaling the Korean hillsides in the humidity and mounting heat of the long July days. The terrain did not deter the enemy. “One of the big problems right now is the ability of the North Korean doughboy to take to the hills when the roads are blocked and get around our men,” U.S. diplomat Everett F. Drumright wrote the State Department from the war zone in late July.
The Americans’ Jeeps stuck in the mud. The men tumbled into the stinking sludge of rice paddies. Their rations were sometimes short, and drinking water was scarce. Local water felled many with dysentery. They got little sleep, consuming coffee and cigarettes to stay alert and alive. Under artillery fire, they learned to dig deep. But they also learned that a “million-dollar wound” could get a GI back to Japan by tomorrow. Some began shooting themselves in the foot.
After Task Force Smith’s rout, “bug-out” fever spread through the 24th Division. In the next confrontation with the advancing North Koreans, a battalion of the 34th Infantry Regiment was ordered immediately to withdraw, and the men panicked, discarding weapons, ponchos, even their wet boots in their scramble south. Young Americans also stood and fought, but often were undone by their equipment or by weak officers. In the 21st Infantry Regiment, four light tanks blew their own turrets off when they fired their defective guns at the attackers. Radios didn’t work in the rain; old bazooka rounds were duds. Infantry units were saddled with officers without infantry background, or nerve. One retired colonel recalled how, as a fresh lieutenant, he had to take over his company because its captain simply “quit.”
The cost was heavy. In the first week, as many as 3,000 Americans were left dead, wounded, missing or captured. The vacant-eyed survivors grew used to the smell of blood filling the aid stations, the sight of vultures spiraling over battle sites, the sound of whimpering from men whose spirits were broken.
A 34th Regiment medic, Lacy Barnett, tried to describe the mind-set of the GIs of July 1950: “Here they were, ill-equipped, some even with rifles with tags saying ‘combat-unserviceable.’ There were many times when American units went without food for days. In a combat situation you’re under a hell of a lot of stress anyway, and to have such things occur you become more bitter—at your own army and at the refugees streaming down the road. By the end of July there was a bitter feeling among everybody.”
Anger at all Koreans deepened. On July 13, a brief Associated Press dispatch from the front said “confirmed reports” had it that “Korean communists” were donning civilian white to infiltrate U.S. lines. The GIs were shooting at people in white seen along nearby ridges. “Korean curiosity is great. It is likely that many of the white-clad persons are farmers or refugees just taking a look,” the article said. It did not say whether reported infiltrators were North Korean soldiers or southern guerrillas, nor did it cite specific cases.
The Eighth Army intelligence staff interviewed 24th Division officers about the perceived threat. Its report said almost all refugees were searched coming through the lines and “none was found to be carrying arms or uniforms.” In fact, North Korean troops were easily circling around the 24th Division’s road-bound units, whose numbers were too thin to establish a long, solid front line. But combat officers nonetheless “strongly suspected” North Korean soldiers were entering refugee columns and somehow picking up weapons and uniforms behind U.S. lines. No evidence was cited, but this fear of all Koreans began to tighten its grip on the beleaguered Americans.
By July 13, the tattered 24th Division’s remaining troops were positioned south of the Kum River, a “moat” in front of Taejon, girding for an all-out attack on that key city. Army engineers had blown the bridges over the Kum, but the North Koreans didn’t need bridges. The river could be forded in spots. At night, watchful for enemy crossings, the American defenders filled the sky over the Kum with bursting flares. At one point, hundreds of refugees began crossing the Kum and the top officer at the scene, fearing infiltrators, asked division commander Maj. Gen. William F. Dean to order artillery fire on the white-clad throng. But the general refused, one of his operations officers, Col. Forrest K. Kleinman, later reported. The war wouldn’t be won by killing civilians, Dean said.
* * *
General Dean might not attack “People in white” along the Kum River, but the U.S. Air Force would throughout the warfront, where it controlled the skies totally after July 18, last day of any North Korean offensive air action.
Air support had been erratic, even dangerous, for the defenders in South Korea in early July. Hundreds of tons of bombs had been mistakenly dropped on ROK army troops by American and Australian warplanes, the Australians having been enlisted by Washington to fight in Korea under an allied “United Nations Command.” On July 3, hundreds of South Korean soldiers and civilians were killed south of Seoul by confused or reckless pilots. But the killing was not all accidental. In late June, MacArthur’s headquarters ordered indiscriminate bombing behind North Korean lines by the U.S. Air Force, including areas where South Korean civilians still lived. Then in July, the U.S. military went further, ordering the strafing of refugee columns moving down roads toward U.S. Army units.
This violated the laws and customs of war. The prohibition against targeting noncombatants—in this case, citizens of an allied nation—is so basic a principle that it is part of customary, non-codified international law, but it also was spelled out in U.S. military pamphlets, which cited the 1907 Hague Treaty’s admonition that “hostilities are restricted to the armed forces of belligerents.”
In mid-July, the Korea exploits of the Air Force’s 35th Fighter-Bomber Squadron won it a splashy cover story in Life magazine. Its pilots’ after-mission reports, however, declassified years later, showed that their new F-80 jets, flying in at 400 mph from Japan, were not simply attacking enemy tanks, trucks and army units. “Some people in white clothes were strafed three to four miles south of Yusong,” read one report dated July 20, 1950. A spotter aircraft, or controller, “said to fire on people in white clothes.” In reports from other missions, pilots betrayed unease over the targeting, noting that groups they were ordered to strafe “could have been refugees” and “appeared to be evacuees.” The unease spread up the chain of command in the U.S. Fifth Air Force, which had established headquarters in Taegu, in Korea’s far south. On July 25, the Fifth Air Force’s operations chief sent a memo to its acting commander, Brig. Gen. Edward L. Timberlake, that got unambiguously to the point.
“Subject: Policy on Strafing Civilian Refugees,” it was headed. “The Army has requested that we strafe all civilian refugee parties that are noted approaching our positions,” Col. Turner C. Rogers wrote. “To date, we have complied with the Army request in this respect.” The memo, classified secret, took note of reports that North Korean soldiers were infiltrating behind U.S. lines via refugee columns. But the strafings “may cause embarrassment to the U.S. Air Force and to the U.S. government,” Rogers wrote. He wondered why the Army was not checking refugees “or shooting them as they come through if they desire such action.” He recommended that Fifth Air Force planes stop attacking refugees.
Fighter pilots flying from the U.S. Navy carrier Valley Forge, off Korea’s far southern coast, had similar instructions. In an Action Summary for July 25, later declassified, pilots reported strafing a group of “people dressed in white … in accordance with information received from the Army that groups of more than eight to ten people were to be considered troops, and were to be attacked.”
On that same day, also the day Rogers wrote his memo, U.S. planes attacked a huge gathering of refugees miles behind American lines, witnesses reported decades later. Police had ordered thousands of civilians from the roads and nearby villages to collect on a broad field beside the Bongchon stream, near Kimchon, site of the 1st Cavalry Division’s rear headquarters, because of rumors that North Koreans had infiltrated the area. At 11 A.M., U.S. planes strafed and bombed the white-clad throngs, inflicting unknown numbers of casualties, witnesses said. The Air Force record, declassified decades later, shows an attack that day in that area deep in the rear that “destroyed 13 vehicles, damaged 6 vehicles, inflicted 125 troop casualties.” The 1st Cavalry Division record noted no such North Korean troop presence near its headquarters.
It is not known how General Timberlake reacted to Rogers’s memo, or whether this hidden Army–Air Force dispute over attacking refugees was kicked further upstairs, to General MacArthur, the coordinating commander. The strafing went on even though Eighth Army headquarters in Taegu had issued a communiqué on July 21 declaring, “Red infiltration has been reduced to manageable proportions and can in short order be expected to approach zero.”
The North Koreans, meanwhile, had driven the 24th Division from Taejon, crossing the Kum River at night at points where the U.S. defenses left gaps of up to two miles. One American regiment, less than 2,000 men, was scattered along a 30-mile frontage. Once again, the invaders simply outflanked the small, weak U.S. force; the Americans retreated south in disarray. William Dean himself, the commanding general, was captured. In the end, the two weeks from Task Force Smith to the fall of Taejon proved to be one of the great debacles in the annals of the U.S. Army. Of the 16,000 men who landed in Korea with the 24th Division, barely half remained, straggling southward. Historians eventually concluded with Clay Blair that the hasty U.S. intervention “was one of the most ill-conceived decisions in the history of the American military establishment.”
But an influential voice at the Pentagon, Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, a stalwart of the war in Europe and now a top Army deputy, told the military service secretaries that a withdrawal “could discredit U.S. foreign policy and undermine confidence in American military capabilities.” The U.S. Army would stay in Korea, even if Washington was still unable to put much of an army there. The Truman administration, believing the North Korean invasion a possible diversion from planned Soviet military action in Europe, feared transferring troop units needed for Europe’s defense. In the first major reinforcement of the Far East Command, units of the 2nd Infantry Division set sail from Washington State, but were not expected to reach Korea until the end of July.
Commanders normally would ease green units into combat gradually, but now it fell largely to the untested Garryowens and the rest of the 1st Cavalry Division, barely 10,000 men just arriving on the peninsula, to try to stop the North Korean drive in the southern heartland. They would take their stand in the ridge-lined area around Yongdong, a battleground since ancient times.
* * *
Lead elements of the Garryowens’ sister regiments, the 5th and 8th Cavalry, came ashore first at Pohang on July 18. “Well-trained units of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division fanned out today from their newly established beachhead,” a United Press dispatch trumpeted to American newspaper readers. But the “Cav” was a division of raw teenagers led by too few sergeants in the ranks and by men past their prime at the top. Like the 7th Cavalry, the 5th and 8th Cavalry Regiments were commanded by colonels too inexperienced and too old for the job; one was almost deaf. The division chief, Hobart “Hap” Gay, a man who swung a swagger stick and toted a shotgun in the field—“as though he was going bird-hunting,” a staff officer said—had never led soldiers in battle. Similarly in the other front-line U.S. division, the officer in charge, Maj. Gen. William B. Kean, had never held a combat command. His 25th Infantry Division had teamed up with ROK army divisions to man the right flank of a ragged “front line” reaching from the east coast westward to halfway across the 160-mile-wide peninsula.
Gay, fifty-six, may have been the most prominent example of a ranking officer awarded a prestigious sinecure in Japan, command of a storied combat division, largely because of seniority and loyal service, not necessarily because of proven ability.
A onetime horse cavalryman, the Illinois farmer’s son had spent years dealing with requisitions and supplies as a post quartermaster. When World War II broke out, however, he was tapped by George S. Patton, a polo-playing friend, to be his chief of staff in that legendary general’s drive across North Africa and Europe. It was a heady job, but Gay never held a combat command requiring instant life-or-death decisions. He even lost his rear-echelon job for a time because supreme commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had grown unimpressed with Patton’s comrade-in-arms. In Korea, Gay labored under two other handicaps, one of which, the loss of an eye in a 1929 polo accident, he had long ago accommodated. But the other would be telling in his first days of war: He had no experience of Asia, other than his nine months of occupation duty in Japan.
His two advance regiments were deployed to the town of Yongdong on July 22, 1950, as remnants of the 24th Division retreated through the area by foot or truck. Yongdong County, the Americans learned, was a place of treeless slopes and narrow valleys. Its crowded rice-farming villages were as poor as any in Korea. Through Yongdong town, equidistant from Seoul and the big southern port of Pusan, ran South Korea’s main north-south highway and railroad.
In one respect, Hap Gay’s troops were lucky: The exhausted North Korean 3rd Division, having seized Taejon, needed two days to rest, resupply and tend to casualties before sending its mustard-colored columns against the Americans again. But the defense plan from Eighth Army disturbed Gay, because it split the 8th Cavalry’s two battalions, one to block the main north-south highway from Taejon, the other on the road approaching from the southwest. Gay would have preferred to tie their flanks together in a solid front. The 5th Cavalry, immediately to the rear, backed up the 8th Cavalry by staking out positions in the hills along the main north-south road where it heads east from Yongdong before turning south again. The 5th Cavalry troops set up near a pair of villages called Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri.
What also disturbed Gay were the endless white lines of refugees filing down the main road with the haggard, dispirited 24th Division and Korean troops. Some South Korean civilians, especially landlords, government officials and policemen, were fleeing the communists in fear, but others were simply seeking shelter from the rain of artillery shells and air attacks.
The suspicions about the “people in white,” the nervousness over infiltrators, were passed on to the newly arrived division and grew into distrust of almost any Korean. General Gay told reporters soon after arriving that he saw no need to coordinate troop movements with South Korean army commanders. He ordered the Korean national police out of his division sector. The Korean military police complained they couldn’t monitor refugees because Gay’s men kept stripping Korean MPs of their weapons. The troops’ disregard for the Koreans showed itself in many ways—from denial of supplies to ROK units, to the chilling but not unusual sight of U.S. vehicles repeatedly running over the crushed body of a civilian killed on a crowded roadway.
The 1st Cavalry Division got its first taste of combat late Saturday, July 22, when North Korean tanks rolled south toward the 8th Cavalry Regiment’s 1st Battalion. Armed with new, more powerful 3.5-inch bazookas, the Americans destroyed three of the T-34s, previously all but invincible. The attackers backed off.
The next day, as civilians streamed past out of Yongdong, division headquarters advised the 5th Cavalry command post to screen refugees closely because “from indications forward, many were armed.” A communications log and an operations journal for that date, July 23, include some terse and cryptic entries from the 8th Cavalry as that forward regiment was hit repeatedly by North Korean artillery, mortar and tank fire, as well as infantry attack. Air reconnaissance reported “approximately 400 white shirts advancing along draw,” said one entry. Another said only, “two platoons posing as farmers.” A third said enemy troops were “believed” to be filtering into the 1st Battalion area, and they were “both civilians and nk trps [North Korean troops].” Another noted, “driving Korean refugees back.”
The division war diary did not clarify whether these feared threats from “people in white” proved real. In fact, the diary, a unit narrative compiled later from various sources, did not mention these particular episodes at all. The next day’s entry did describe one “reported” incident in which, it was said, a refugee’s apparent pregnancy was found to be a concealed radio, which was said to have been used to advise the enemy on American positions. That July 24 diary entry also said many refugees turned out to be North Korean soldiers transporting ammunition and weapons in wagons and packs. But neither it nor the front-line regiment’s log cited specific cases. Writing later in the 1950s, official Army historian Roy E. Appleman did not repeat that unsupported statement, although he wrote that the refugee crowds “undoubtedly helped” the North Koreans infiltrate American positions at Yongdong.
Pentagon observers who reached the front on July 26 called the reports of infiltrators disguised as refugees “unconfirmed.” This Army observer team from Washington stressed more conventional, less risky “infiltration” tactics by the North Koreans in its report. “The frontages were enormous and precluded a continuous line of defense. This facilitated outflanking and penetrating operations by the enemy,” they wrote.
At this point, three weeks into the U.S. intervention in Korea, as the 1st Cavalry Division struggled to hold Yongdong, decisions were made that may have led some attentive newspaper readers back in the States to pause and reflect on where their army was headed in this sudden war in this distant place.
On July 23, all Korean civilians were ordered out of the war zone, “to be sent to points far behind American installations,” the Associated Press reported in a dispatch datelined “An American Advance Post in Korea.” The article then added matter-of-factly: “In an area once cleared of civilians, anyone in civilian clothing may be shot.” It said infiltrators disguised as civilians had been harassing American troops. “All Koreans, North and South, look alike to the Americans. Soldiers sometimes pot shot at suspicious white clad figures.” The brief report also said American troops were shelling and burning South Korean villages to deny cover to enemy troops. “How many people stayed too long in their thatched roofed cottages is not known.”
What was unfolding in the 1st Cavalry Division sector appalled Harold Joyce Noble, third-ranking U.S. diplomat in South Korea. A Korea-born son of missionaries, Noble had been decorated for bravery as a Marine officer in World War II. In July 1950 he was monitoring warfront developments for the U.S. Embassy and coordinating with the South Korean government. In a 1952 memoir, Embassy at War, Noble noted that civilians had already been ordered to stay in their homes—and not clog the roads—unless their safety was directly threatened. Now General Gay had ordered that all must leave their villages, but many peasants simply would not abandon their land, Noble wrote. “Thousands of men, women, and children remained in the division area, and they were not enemy agents.” He called the “dogmatic” Gay’s approach “absurd.”
Even more fundamentally, any order to shoot civilians indiscriminately would violate the laws of war. A specific order came the next day, July 24. The 8th Cavalry log noted receipt of instructions from a liaison at division headquarters:
“No refugees to cross the front line. Fire everyone trying to cross lines. Use discretion in case of women and children.”
The division war diary later made no mention of this order to shoot refugees, or of what its immediate consequences were.
Meanwhile, North Korean commanders had capitalized on the weaknesses in the 1st Cavalry Division line to loop around behind the 8th Cavalry’s 2nd Battalion, cutting it off, while hammering the 1st Battalion with frontal attacks. On July 25, Gay’s troops retreated from Yongdong, in some disorder, after suffering heavy casualties. One sign of the confusion: American advisers with the South Koreans reported the 1st Cavalry Division inflicted “numerous” casualties among the allied troops. “They are trying to straighten out green troops,” the telephone message said of the division.
Three years later, corresponding with Army historian Appleman, Gay did not cite civilian-clad infiltrators in explaining his defeat at Yongdong, but rather “the thing the Division Commander most feared”—sweeps by enemy units around his unguarded flanks and through the gaping hole, seven miles wide, separating the 8th Cavalry’s two battalions.
Douglas MacArthur’s prized 1st Cavalry Division was faring no better than the hapless men of the 24th Infantry Division. Now it would fall to Gay’s third regiment, the 7th Cavalry—the undertrained, understrength Garryowens—to move into the line. First they had to find a way to get there.
* * *
After their jittery first night in bivouac near Pohang, the 7th Cavalry’s 2nd Battalion waited hours on Sunday, July 23, before a South Korean train was found to transport them 100 miles northwest to the warfront. The men used the time to recheck and clean their weapons and stock up on the staples of war: eight-round M-1 ammunition clips for their cartridge belts, water for the canteen, C rations, rumors—of where they were headed, what they would face, when they might return “home” to Japan. “I was eager, I was eager,” Ralph Bernotas said. But if any of them found a recent Stars and Stripes, the eagerness may have faded. The newspaper carried pictures of four U.S. soldiers captured by the North Koreans and slain, hands tied behind their backs.
The battalion’s five companies, a trainload, finally set out from the harbor town at 6:30 P.M., some men in open gondola cars, the luckier ones in small passenger cars with wooden seats and a hole in the floor for a toilet. With multiple stops for water and other needs, the trip took 20 hours. The young soldiers, their bravado evaporating, sank into silence, thoughts of home and, mostly, sleep.
They awoke next morning to the strange new countryside of low earthen huts capped with thatch, of rice paddies steaming in the sun and waving green in the rare breeze. From the rocking train they caught glimpses of a dusty road paralleling the tracks, and of oxcarts, clumps of weary refugees, military trucks, men in uniform. “Seemed like everybody was heading back one way,” said H Company trooper Ed Klinedinst. “And we were heading the other way.”
The weather had cleared. The mud of early July was now the dust of late July, a grit that would plague the cavalrymen in the coming days, getting into their mouths, noses, ears and M-1 muzzles. Usually more than a foot of rain falls in southern Korea in the July monsoon, but July and August 1950 were abnormally storm-free. It remained humid, however, and was unusually hot, at times over 100 degrees. For the overloaded Garryowens, many out of shape, it would be an oppressive tropical purgatory. Soldiers collapsed from heat exhaustion from the first day.
The steam engine finally chugged up over the 600-foot-high saddle of Autumn Wind Pass, gateway for Japanese invaders centuries earlier, and on into Yongdong County and the war. The cool, crew-cut Capt. Mel Chandler of H Company warned his men aboard the train that disguised enemy soldiers might lurk among Korean refugees. This reinforced the impression some had from briefings aboard the Shanks, when they were told “this was guerrilla warfare,” F Company’s Herman Patterson said. “You won’t see a soldier in uniform, or armor. I pictured civilians.”
The battalion commander’s own inexperience with war became clear in an odd moment on the train, when Lt. Col. Herb Heyer, the ex–Iowa postmaster, cautioned officers not to damage the farmers’ fields in the area. “Here we are advancing into combat, and he’s worried about this farmer’s beans,” platoon leader Bill Kaluf said. “He simply was not too aware of things.”
At 2:20 P.M., July 24, the 2nd Battalion detrained several miles behind the Yongdong front. Men from the 24th Infantry Division, worn down, in filthy fatigues, some wounded, boarded the train for the return trip. The sight of the soldiers they were replacing shook the new arrivals. “They looked like totally beaten men. You could see it in their faces,” Bill McKown said. “You’re looking at this. ‘What am I getting into?’” McKown was grateful he was a mess sergeant, not a rifleman.
Stories quickly circulated in the Garryowens’ ranks about saboteurs, grenades, guns among the civilians. “We heard so many rumors,” G Company’s Joe Jackman said. “Everybody had that morbid fear: ‘Here they come. They’ll get in the rear.’” In North Korean–occupied Seoul, what they were hearing were tales of American brutality. That day a warfront report in the newspaper Liberation Daily concluded, “The Americans do not recognize Koreans as human beings.”
* * *
The 2nd Battalion marched forward to where the 7th cavalry staff was setting up its regimental command post, about four miles short of embattled Yongdong. In his first combat command, Colonel Nist gave patrolling orders to Snuffy Gray, his tough reconnaissance platoon sergeant. “I remember standing there while he tapped on the map with the stem of his pipe,” Gray said, “and he’s tapping on three grid squares and he’s telling me to take your platoon out and cover those squares. Three whole grid squares!” A staff officer later quietly scaled down the impossible assignment. “He didn’t know anything,” Gil Huff, regimental executive officer, later said sympathetically of Nist. The lower ranks were not so sympathetic. They began joking about “Nist’s Nest” because the colonel made the men build up sandbag walls around his tent with each of the many command post moves.
Confusion arose at division headquarters, too, over how to handle refugees. Early on July 24, General MacArthur’s command in Tokyo asked the divisions to report on how they were controlling refugees. Orders were already out declaring a shifting war zone off-limits to its civilian inhabitants, under the threat of being shot. Eight hours after the 1st Cavalry Division received the MacArthur query, word went down from division headquarters, as recorded at the 8th Cavalry Regiment, to shoot refugees—“fire everyone”—trying to pass through the front line. Then, just 15 minutes after that “shoot” order went out, the division sent a confused reply to the MacArthur query. First it said refugees were being collected and sent south, but next it reported that leaflets were being dropped on small villages telling their inhabitants to head north or “be treated as enemy” in the combat zone.
Hearing this, the Eighth Army staff further complicated matters by ordering the division to suspend leaflet-dropping until it had Eighth Army–approved leaflets. South Korean army intelligence at the same time reported to the U.S. command that “it is practically impossible to stop the refugees” fleeing from small and isolated villages.
The disarray prompted Eighth Army to schedule a high-level meeting for the next day, July 25, at its Taegu headquarters to work out a policy on refugee control, attended by top Eighth Army staff officers and representatives of the South Korean Cabinet. The contradictions were glaring even in an Eighth Army internal memo July 24 saying the staff consensus was both to “cease” refugee movements and to “control” them. In addition, the Air Force, which at the Army’s request was already attacking refugee columns from the air, was not invited to the Taegu meeting.
Out on the dusty road leading to the south from Yongdong—it turns east there for nine miles to Hwanggan, the next crossroads town—the men of the 1st Cavalry Division were meeting the problem face-to-face, in long files of grim, white-clad villagers and townspeople, with babies or towering loads on their backs, fleeing the fighting enveloping Yongdong, dodging U.S. military vehicles withdrawing southward. Whatever confusion gripped headquarters, whatever bloody chaos was unfolding at Yongdong, refugees just to the rear were making their way southward.
“The civilians were so scared and they had the North Koreans behind them, and they didn’t know where to go,” said Tom Boyd of the 7th Cavalry Headquarters Company. “They were scared to death.”
Late that night, July 24, as the fear of infiltrators swept through the 7th Cavalry, Lieutenant Kaluf would have another kind of encounter with refugees. He took a dozen-man patrol out on a flank of the 2nd Battalion to establish a security post. In the moonlight, they spotted the white clothing of a refugee group approaching down a road. He radioed the battalion command post and was told to shoot the civilians, Kaluf said. But on this he decided to use his own judgment.
“I had them fire on an area. We didn’t touch the civilians. We let them come on through,” he said. “We had enough enemy to shoot at in uniform without shooting civilians.”
* * *
The Battalion, taking positions that first night not far from the regimental command post, was still a few miles behind the Yongdong lines held by other troops. But “combat spooks,” as regimental supply officer Maj. Lucian Croft called them, descended on the green infantrymen nonetheless. “When darkness came … all around soldiers started shooting,” Croft wrote in a private memoir. “Tried to quell the panic. It was useless so I took cover and waited out the night.”
The young riflemen startled at every sound. They wondered whether their left and right were occupied by friend or foe. They assumed anything in front was enemy. The crack and bursts of fire from the semiautomatic M-1s echoed through the blackness. “The kids were scared and they were firing all night long,” said Lyle R. Gibbs, an E Company sergeant. “The kids were firing on everyone.”
In the early daylight, the jittery teenagers of E Company saw their first dead man—one of their own second lieutenants. His body was brought down off their hill on a stretcher. “Somebody said he lit up a cigarette or something and somebody shot him,” said Charles Leavitt, the company clerk. The young officer, who had only recently joined the regiment, was the Garryowens’ first “killed in action” in Korea. Men in other companies heard from their officers about the lieutenant felled by his own men in Easy Company. In death, he became a lesson, but the regiment never noted this KIA, and at least one other casualty that night, as caused by friendly fire.
Events along the Yongdong-Hwanggan road now entered a period, July 25–29, 1950, when such evasions and contradictions in the official record, combined with the incomplete memories of old soldiers, leave gaps in any reconstruction. For one thing, the 7th Cavalry’s communications log, a key document, vanished at some later point. As a result, the picture that emerges is a mosaic of bits of reality seen from many perspectives. From the distance of time, however, that mosaic blends into a singular whole, stark and black.
The record says General Gay, the division commander, rode up to the 7th Cavalry command post along the Yongdong-Hwanggan road at 8:20 on Tuesday morning, July 25, and told regimental commander Colonel Nist that his 2nd Battalion should be ready to move forward to cover the 8th Cavalry and 5th Cavalry Regiments in their retreat from Yongdong. The battalion did not move out until 6:50 that evening. The record does not specify where its companies took up positions, but 2nd Battalion veterans said they dug in on a hill above a long railroad tunnel paralleling the road. The only such spot, a 2,000-foot-long tunnel carrying the main-line tracks through a mountain’s lower slope, lay about 3½ miles short of Yongdong. Major elements of the 5th and 8th Cavalry were still farther forward that night, toward Yongdong and the enemy.
The North Koreans entered Yongdong at 8 P.M. “and immediately took up defensive positions at the eastern edge of town,” expecting a U.S. counterattack, Appleman’s official Army history says. Meanwhile, something else was happening miles away to the 1st Cavalry Division’s right. A regiment of the 25th Infantry Division that had been under North Korean pressure that day needed to execute a strategic pullback that night. To keep the U.S. defense line straight, Gay would have to withdraw his troops farther from Yongdong than he anticipated.
The hillsides were abrupt and the ground inhospitable for the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, too hard for many men to dig more than “scratches” in which to spend the night. At 10 minutes past midnight, battalion commander Heyer reported to Colonel Nist, “No enemy contact.” At 1:20 A.M., Heyer reported the Yongdong-Hwanggan road clogged with refugees and said an unidentified vehicle, “possibly a tank,” had passed his position.
The men were edgy. Ralph Bernotas, with Fox Company high above the tunnel, could hear the “clang, clang” of people and animals on the move. The eighteen-year-old corporal thought he knew what the North Koreans were doing. “They were running cattle, and I could hear all the commotion down through the valleys of pushing refugees ahead of their infantry,” Bernotas said.
Off through the darkness somewhere, a battalion radioman, Sgt. Larry Levine, was on a two-man outpost when he was startled by a voice in the empty night saying, “Hey, Joe.” He didn’t know any “Joe.” All the tense young trooper could think of were World War II movies and tricky Japanese infiltrators speaking English. He hunkered deeper in his hole.
Then, just 10 minutes after Heyer’s last report, urgent word came from the regiment: Everybody up, everybody pull back. General Gay was adjusting the lines. But somehow the Garryowens’ inexperienced officers got the impression the North Koreans had made a “serious breakthrough,” as the regiment diary put it, on the right flank, where the 25th Division was making a planned withdrawal. Now the plan collapsed into a rout.
Shots rang out. Men streamed down the pitch-black hillsides, sometimes tumbling, twisting ankles, losing weapons, sometimes throwing them away. “It was like a madhouse. We just bugged out,” said F Company’s Herman Patterson. Officers also lost their nerve. Edwin Byles, the lieutenant who had seemed so troubled aboard the Shanks, reached the valley floor with his men and then, when gunfire erupted, “just froze,” F Company veterans said. Other officers also lost control, or at least lost their way.
Bernotas and others said they had crossed paths with a tank and North Korean soldiers. If some didn’t actually see a tank in the darkness, they saw “balls of fire” unleashed by a cannon over their heads. Don MacFarland, the tailored Tokyo guardsman now carrying a 16-pound Browning Automatic Rifle with F Company, saw it differently: “We were actually firing on our own men. What outfit they were in, I don’t know, probably from the Cav. We were firing on them and they were firing on us.” If so, they most likely were 5th Cavalry or 8th Cavalry soldiers withdrawing down the road past the Garryowens’ hillside positions.
Lieutenant Byles had disappeared, and young Corporal Bernotas sensed a need for leadership. He shouted to another corporal about setting up a defense line on the railroad tracks at the bottom of the hill, “and I remember this one cook coming up, and literally grabbing me and threatening me that I was going to get everybody killed,” Bernotas said.
Some pulled back in an orderly way. Some didn’t get the order immediately. For most, apparently, it was “every man for himself” as they groped rearward through the night, skirting past other men in uniform and white-clad civilians, any of whom, they felt, could be a threat. “We started running down the tracks, scattering like hell,” said radioman Larry Levine. In Easy Company, clerk Charlie Leavitt picked up discarded bandoliers of ammunition as they scrambled away from Yongdong.
Some have unexplained memories. “They said stay off the road and low on the ground, so I was crawling with my machine gun. I didn’t know what was going on,” said G Company’s Art Hunter. In the moonlight, he looked over into a field. “You could hear all these babies and all crying over in this field, and you could look over there and there was all this white clothing.” A field full of dead civilians, the young Virginian decided.
The regimental war diary later said the 2nd Battalion came under attack this night, and blamed “enemy infiltration with refugees.” Appleman’s official history dismissed this and called it a “panic” in the rear by an untried unit. In a seeming reference to it in his later correspondence with Appleman, General Gay said the battalion became “somewhat hysterical.”
Finally H Company’s Capt. Mel Chandler began picking 2nd Battalion men off the road to organize them. He led some 300 down the tracks, and by 8 A.M. on July 26 they had taken up defensive positions astride the main road, Chandler later wrote in a regimental history.
Stragglers still came in long after dawn, their sweating faces caked with dust from the haze kicked up by retreating vehicles. Officers sent a detail in Jeeps and trucks back up the road, and they returned with more than 160 rifles, machine guns and other weapons abandoned by the battalion.
* * *
The record shows the 2nd Battalion, 7th cavalry, positioned that day, July 26, about 1½ miles west of Hwanggan, near a sturdy concrete railroad bridge. The Japanese had built the double-arched trestle to carry the main line over some water, a languid little stream that simply trickled across the nearby main road that paralleled the tracks.
A path from the dirt road, through a trestle archway, led to a cluster of farmers’ mud huts a few hundred yards away, on the battalion’s right. This hamlet, fringed by wet and lush rice paddies, was entered into the battalion’s morning reports as “Rokin-Ri,” one possible transliteration from the Korean alphabet. This was No Gun Ri, a name corrupted from a centuries-old one that signified “forest” and “deer.” Little of either remained in the area.
After less than 48 hours at the front, the Garryowens were exhausted, unnerved, hungry and still unsure of what was going on. Rumors spread. Some heard that a “refugee woman with a radio,” hidden under a baby, it was said, had been discovered nearby. Some heard talk that refugees tossed a grenade at men in the next company or the next battalion—somewhere.
The Yongdong “woman with the radio” report may have multiplied across the warfront. Gil Huff, the regimental executive officer, heard the story over and over. “I never saw one,” he said years later. “But it makes a good story, a colorful story.”
That previous night, while these teenaged troopers were clambering up Yongdong County hillsides, Eighth Army staff officers and Korean civilian officials were meeting in Taegu, far to the rear, to work out their plan for controlling refugees. In his makeshift office elsewhere at the Taegu headquarters, the Air Force’s Colonel Rogers had written his memo urging the command to cease attacking civilians.
In the morning, at 10 A.M., July 26, the Eighth Army plan came down to the divisions by radio. The lengthy order detailed a program for eventually collecting refugees for organized movement south. But the key passage, for immediate action, lay in its first fourteen words: NO REPEAT NO REFUGEES WILL BE PERMITTED TO CROSS BATTLE LINES AT ANY TIME.
The temperature was rising this day in late July 1950. Above the cinders of the railroad embankment, the air rippled with heat. Around midday, off in the distance, over their gunsights, the infantrymen of the 2nd Battalion could make out a large patch of white. It was moving their way.