August 13, 1950
Samni-dong, South Korea
The Naktong River rushes down from the rocky Sobaek Mountains, flattens into a wide muddy ribbon and eases south toward the sea, skirting terraces of rice and groves of apple and pear, hugging hump-backed hills and meadows of tall reeds, and dividing Korea’s far south, in its winding way, into two parts, east and west.
Private First Class Art Hunter sat by his machine gun on the east side of the Naktong, on a little rise beside an apple orchard under a sky of midnight blue, and peered out toward the dark quiet river. It lay less than a thousand yards to his front, beyond a dry bottom-land of rice stalks. Over on the west bank, across the 200-yard-wide stream, an invisible enemy looked back. For the young Virginian and the rest of the Garryowens, the Naktong could never be wide enough.
It had been 15 days since the 7th Cavalry’s teen-aged infantrymen pulled back from No Gun Ri. Few had talked about what happened there. Their days and nights had been too full of fear and fire, on the run, pursued by enemy tanks, trading blind shots in the dark with probing North Korean units, killing and being killed, until finally they reached and crossed the river and dug in, exhausted, to await the final battle. Hunter had seen and learned a lot about war since July 24, his nineteenth birthday, the day the Garryowens arrived at the front. He had even learned about war’s absurdities: The Army postal service delivered a birthday cake to his foxhole, all the way from his mother’s oven in Lynchburg.
The Naktong River was unusually shallow in August 1950 because of the dry summer. It had dropped three feet in just the past few days. In spots, a man could wade across through murky chest-high water. The North Koreans had other methods as well. Far off to Hunter’s left, the unseen enemy, under cover of darkness and unknown to the Americans, had completed an “underwater bridge,” a sunken causeway of rice-straw bags filled with rocks.
As the moonless night stretched into early morning, the nervous assistant machine gunner sensed a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, in the paddies to his left, not far from a twisted pile of girders that had been a bridge, a gateway to safety, but was now a lifeless jumble of steel.
* * *
Eleven nights earlier, on August 2, 1950, civilians by the thousands crossed that narrow bridge at Tuksong-dong, joining South Korean soldiers and men of the U.S. 24th Infantry Division pulling back over the Naktong at a spot just 55 miles from the peninsula’s southeastern corner at Pusan.
The refugees were a shuffling stream of white, 60 feet above the river’s waters, women clutching babies, children barefoot and frightened, old men riding piggyback. Some led oxcarts hastily loaded with the baggage of lives shattered by sudden war. Carroll F. Kinsman, a sergeant with the 14th Combat Engineer Battalion, was impressed at the loads women balanced on their heads. “One was carrying a sewing machine up there,” he recalled.
The stories had spread about infiltrators lurking among columns of refugees approaching the Naktong crossings. One even had it that innocent-looking Korean children were acting as artillery spotters—the supposed reason enemy shelling was so accurate. Kinsman and his men were posted on the bridge to screen the fleeing civilians. “I stayed up all night searching the refugees,” he said. They found nothing.
Shortly after midnight, trucks loaded with the men of the 21st Infantry, a regiment of the haggard, beaten 24th Division, rumbled across the bridge to head south, downriver, to take positions behind the new Naktong line. The last defending unit, the ROK army’s 17th Regiment, withdrew over the river just before the sun rose at 6:32 A.M., led by Col. Richard Stephens, the 21st Infantry’s commander. His driver, Cpl. Rudy Giannelli, brought the colonel’s Jeep to a halt on the far side of the bridge, where Stephens climbed out to talk to 14th Engineers officers.
Eighth Army headquarters had ordered all units to withdraw behind the river by this date, Thursday, August 3, and to blow up the Naktong bridges behind them, denying the crossings to the enemy. The 14th Engineers had taken two days to wire the Tuksong-dong bridge with 7,000 pounds of TNT. Now the Eighth Army deadline was pressing.
Stephens notified the engineers that the last of his forces had cleared the 650-foot span; they could do their job. But refugees still trudged across. An engineer officer ran onto the bridge, firing his pistol in the air to warn the Koreans away, and then dashed back. The white-clad throng followed, beckoned by the safety of the other side.
The declassified record shows that North Korean units had not yet been sighted near the river at Tuksong-dong. But the young soldiers who were there suddenly sensed something terrible was about to happen. “They wouldn’t stop. They were abutment to abutment.… They were average folks, ladies, children and old men, carrying their baggage on their heads,” recalled Pfc. Leon L. Denis. “There are people!” Pfc. Joseph Ipock remembered shouting to someone. “We were told to scatter,” Kinsman said. “Next thing I know they revved up the generator and threw the switch and the bridge went.” Recalled driver Giannelli, “It lifted up and turned it sideways and it was full of refugees end to end.… You saw the spans of steel flying and you knew they were killed.”
The charges had been set not only below, on the bridge supports, but above along the roadway itself. The deafening blasts pulverized bodies and showered them, and their shredded white clothing and bits of baggage and wood and oxen, into the river flowing listlessly below. The Americans roared off in their vehicles, not looking back. They knew hundreds had died, said Kinsman, Denis and Giannelli. “The Tuksong Bridge was blown at 0701 hours,” an adjutant later noted in the 14th Engineers’ war diary. “Results, Excellent.”
* * *
Twenty-five miles upriver from Tuksong-dong, at the town of waegwan, another road bridge spanned the Naktong. As daylight faded later this same day, August 3, that bridge still stood, as Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay watched the last of his grimy, weary 1st Cavalry Division troops roll across to the east bank. Thousands of frightened refugees converged on the crossing.
The previous twelve days had been “not too glorious” as his division faltered and then fell back before the skillful, determined North Koreans, Gay later acknowledged to the Army historian. In the 7th Cavalry Regiment, the withdrawal itself, from the area of Hwanggan and No Gun Ri, showed how unready the green soldiers were for glory.
As 7th Cavalrymen filtered southward from the hills around No Gun Ri, a few jittery recruits had been left behind in the predawn to cover the withdrawal of A Company, 1st Battalion. Soon North Korean tanks clanked up the road from Yongdong in the darkness, fired their cannon toward battalion positions and then disappeared. One of the rear guard, rattled, moved among the foxholes whispering for another man. The second suddenly stood up. “A shot went off, and I turned and he yelled and went down,” recalled A Company’s Tom Hacha. The first had shot his buddy, the shadow in the darkness, “right in the middle of the chest.” He was a big farm boy. They couldn’t handle the body; they left it behind. “Killed in action,” was all the company report noted.
Hour by hour as they pulled back, walking, sometimes riding trucks, the 7th Cavalrymen began to learn more about the unending dreads and instant terrors of war. Red, white and green flares popped in the skies as North Korean units hunted their American quarry. Artillery shells crashed somewhere around them, from somewhere unseen. The teenaged troopers, well disciplined in obeying orders, instinctively looked to their commanders to save them. But even their officers sometimes betrayed them with inexperience. In the early-morning darkness of July 30, some 24 hours after beginning the pullback, H Company’s mortar platoon lieutenant had his men arrayed and dangerously exposed on the forward slope of a hill three miles east of the No Gun Ri trestle. Commencing fire when they spotted enemy tanks, the mortar-tube flashes became an easy target for the North Koreans. A first tank round killed the platoon lieutenant and three privates. More tank fire followed, and nine other H Company men were wounded. Not only was the platoon unwisely positioned, but 2nd Battalion officers, hearing the approaching tanks, had spread word that it was the sound of American bulldozers working on the road.
The men were beginning to accept the carnage around them, but they still were shocked, Buddy Wenzel by the paralyzing sight of a medic’s head blown off by a heavy round (“I stood there frozen”), others by a nightmarish scene in which an officer mercifully killed one of his own men after he was horribly wounded by an incoming mortar round. The crew-cut boys who had caroused on the Ginza together and exchanged their sisters’ addresses, who had scammed and spit-polished through their days in Tokyo, were now seeing barracks buddies carried off on bloody stretchers. Each was building a picture gallery of horrors in his mind, but also of heroism.
After his mortar platoon was decimated, H Company commander Capt. Mel Chandler put himself in an exposed position and, with a last telephone line to the rear, directed artillery fire onto the advancing tanks. For eight hours, under fire, the newcomer to combat fell back on his Fort Benning infantry training to knock out tanks and stall the North Koreans.
The sight of a thick-armored T-34 tank chilled the Garryowens’ blood; they had little to stop them. But late on July 30 one of the deadly new bazookas, 3.5-inch rocket launchers, reached F Company, and Ralph Bernotas’s squad leader, Cpl. Al Clair, decided his men ought to try it out on tanks still firing on the 2nd Battalion from up the road.
Bazooka man John Boehm—at age twenty-nine, “Pop” to his buddies—was leery of the unfamiliar weapon, and so Bernotas took it over, leaving his M-1 with Pfc. Boehm. Then Clair, Bernotas and two others crept through the darkness, along the cover of a railroad embankment, to within fifty yards of two tanks. They had only four rockets and had to work quickly before the North Koreans spotted them. Clair loaded the first and tapped Bernotas’s head. The Pennsylvania deer hunter squeezed but it wouldn’t fire. They groped in the darkness and finally found and released a safety on the brand-new bazooka. Bernotas aimed and fired. It was short. The tanks fell silent, wary. Then the North Koreans opened up again, and the two GIs loaded a second rocket. “I elevated it a little bit, and boom! I was right on it,” Bernotas said. “The tank—blew it to hell. It kept exploding all night.” The little team beat it back to their own lines, more than 1,000 yards through the sunrise mist, to cheers from F Company troopers.
Such small victories would steadily transform MacArthur’s praetorian guard into a seasoned combat force, but not before many more hard days of retreat and then defense on the Naktong. Digging in each night, inching backward to the south each day, the Garryowens grew used to the tactics of “How Able,” hauling ass, that defined the GI experience of mid-1950. The rain showers that began at No Gun Ri lingered on, and fog spread over the mountain peaks as the Americans withdrew through Autumn Wind Pass, over muddy, slippery roads, behind ambulances and litter Jeeps carrying their wounded and dead. One was Pop Boehm, who had been killed with Bernotas’s rifle useless in his hands, a cleaning rod jamming its barrel.
Along the way, platoons were assigned to set fire to villages and everything else they could find, leaving a scorched-earth path of destruction for the North Koreans. Kimchon, a city of 50,000, was set ablaze by 1st Cavalry Division engineer troops on August 2. Its nighttime glow was visible for miles. What remained were columns of refugees, weary and frantic, families that had been separated, lame old people, children crying for food, all moving toward the Naktong. Soldiers remembered fields “covered with clothing” that would suddenly come alive in the mornings, to flow south again in long files of white.
The Americans, unnerved and filthy, embittered by war’s ugliness and misery, grew more hateful toward the people they supposedly had come to protect. “The refugees are cursed by American soldiers, who know they harbor enemies who cannot be distinguished from the mass of innocent,” United Press reported on August 3. Although General Gay’s intelligence staff reported only that guerrillas were “suspected” among refugees and cited no confirmed cases, the division commander himself argued to reporters that refugee infiltrators were “the North Koreans’ most potent weapon.”
As the Americans approached the Naktong, they were not pursued closely by the enemy divisions, depleted of both manpower and tanks in the five-week-old offensive. The enemy main forces were reported at least 15 miles away on August 3 as people in white flowed over the Waegwan bridge. But American commanders felt pressed by the Eighth Army timetable, and the bridge was set for demolition that day, explosives rigged to the supports of one of its 200-foot-long spans.
Gay had a rear guard attempt to hold back the thousands of refugees thronging the far shore, but every time the soldiers would make a last run over the bridge’s 15-foot-wide roadway, waves of civilians would follow. Corresponding with the Army historian after the war, Gay said he saw no alternative. “It was nearly dark. There was nothing else to be done. The Division Commander gave the order to blow the bridge,” Gay wrote of himself. “It was a tough decision because up in the air with the bridge went hundreds of refugees.”
A second Naktong bridge had been destroyed, again with Korean women and children, old men and young men, killed in an instant or dropped into the river 40 feet below to drown in its muddy waters. For American soldiers already safely across, watching from the riverside paddies, it was another sight lodged in the gallery of memory. But the deaths were not officially noted in any Army unit document.
* * *
On August 3, now across the Naktong, the Garryowens’ 2nd Battalion—the riflemen of E, F and G companies, the machine gunners, mortarmen and recoilless riflemen of H Company, the clerks and scouts and radiomen of Headquarters Company—got their gear together and trucked 25 miles southward, to dig into a defensive line near the first blown bridge at Tuksong-dong. Art Hunter’s G Company settled in around the apple orchard in front of the hamlet of Samni-dong.
In less than two weeks at war, the 1st Cavalry Division’s 11,000 troops had suffered almost 10 percent casualties: dead, wounded and missing. In the 2nd Battalion, the wounded included Wenzel, riddled with shrapnel on July 30, and Bernotas, shot through the wrist on July 31. Both were evacuated to Japan, and both wondered whether they were out of combat for good. The battalion had a new commanding officer, the battle-hardened Lt. Col. Gil Huff, who had been the 7th Cavalry’s executive officer. “Whiskey Red,” as men began calling him, took over from a devastated Lt. Col. Heyer. “Herb’s tired,” Huff remembered hearing from regimental commander Col. Cecil Nist. Heyer was brought to the rear and the regimental staff.
The men hunkering down on the Naktong’s eastern banks believed either they would be evacuated from their toehold in southeastern Korea or the full force of the U.S. military would come to their rescue. “You don’t have much to worry about,” James Hodges, Wenzel’s G Company buddy, wrote his sister Juanita on August 10. “Everybody over here is confident that this thing will be over in a couple or 3 months.” But the North Koreans, moving troops toward the Naktong in the night, had their own ideas.
“We must get to the enemy’s rear.… We must envelop and annihilate all of them,” a North Korean regimental commander wrote in a lengthy battle plan, later captured, as his fresh 10th Division marshaled in the hills across the Naktong from Colonel Huff’s battalion.
The envelopment began early on the morning of August 12, when North Korean troops slipped across the river and through a gap on the battalion’s left flank and doubled back against H Company’s forward positions. Some of Captain Chandler’s men were shot in their foxholes from behind. It took hours of counterattack and artillery to repel the infiltrating enemy, and in the end the 101-man H Company, hit hard again, lost seven men killed and twenty-three wounded. Chandler himself and No Gun Ri machine gunner Norm Tinkler were among those evacuated with wounds.
Two mornings later on the right flank, Art Hunter was seeing flickers of movement in the darkness, enemy infiltrators creeping forward through rice stalks and pea patches. As a third soldier ran off to alert the company, Hunter and his machine-gunner partner opened fire with their air-cooled .30-caliber gun, and in seconds the Tuksong-dong front exploded with small arms and mortar fire and the crisscross streaks of tracers from both sides.
The machine-gun team’s intensive fire began to cut down enemy soldiers, but then the weapon jammed. The gunner scrambled back over the crest of the rise just behind them, to find a cartridge extractor, he said. Hunter, alone, picked up his M-1 and began firing. Looking around, finding no help, he believed the company had pulled back and left him. North Koreans kept coming. Bullets ripped past his head. He’d rather be killed than captured, the young 7th Cavalryman decided, and he stood up with his rifle and fired off clip after clip. George Company riflemen, taking cover on a back slope 30 feet behind him, were amazed to hear him shouting into the din: “Garryowen!… Garryowen!”
George and other companies were collapsing in spots but reorganizing in others. Mortar fire zeroed in on the North Koreans. Outgoing artillery shells whistled over Hunter’s head. His partner never returned, but Hunter went to work on the machine gun, using the heel of a pistol to dislodge the ruptured cartridge. He began firing again but ran out of ammunition. He grabbed an expended, 20-foot-long ammo belt, the kind that fed bullets into his gun, and tossed the fabric strip up on the crest behind him, where his platoon sergeant tied on a full box of ammunition. He dragged it down to his exposed position, loaded and fired on. Over and over, as the sun floated up over the eastern ridges, Hunter pulled more boxes down the slope and turned back to the business of killing strangers in mustard-drab uniforms. Their bullets never touched him. They counted 32 boxes of ammunition used by Art Hunter—more than 9,000 rounds. When it was over, after American tanks rolled up to blow away pockets of holdouts, “That was when I was able to sit down and get a little shaky,” Hunter recalled.
The August 12–14 defense by the 2nd Battalion was a crucial victory on the Naktong line. If the North Korean 10th Division had broken through, Taegu and Eighth Army headquarters lay just 14 miles away.
The killing didn’t end when the smoke of battle cleared. Battalion commander Huff sent platoons combing through the riverside pea patches and paddies, hunting for stranded and wounded North Koreans, and killing them. “You go down there, Sergeant, and you clean out those goddamned gooks,” the recon sergeant Snuffy Gray remembered the colonel telling him.
Heavy-winged vultures, clouds of huge black flies, the stench of bodies rotting in the sun took possession of the Naktong bottom-land. The 7th Cavalry claimed 1,500 enemy dead in the three-day fight. About 150 lay in front of G Company’s positions, many credited to Art Hunter. The Americans, too, paid a price: G Company alone suffered seven men killed and twenty-seven wounded.
The “2nd of the 7th Cav,” the men who bugged out at Yongdong, had redeemed themselves. Stars and Stripes ran photos of the heroes, one showing Lyle Jacobsen and other ragged G Company troopers picking apples in the orchard. “I have never commanded a better group of soldiers, who fought any better or more bravely,” Gil Huff later wrote of his men on the Naktong. “It was all on-the-job training,” Snuffy Gray reflected. “And by the time we knew what we were doing, we lost fifty percent of our men. But those who remained had become damned good soldiers.”
* * *
One of the most perilous U.S. military operations ever undertaken, it became known as the Pusan Perimeter, a southeastern corner of Korea running 85 miles north to south, generally along the Naktong, and 60 miles east to west. It was thinly held, not by a continuous defense line, but at strong points—hills, road junctions, river fords—manned by understrength units, sometimes a mile apart. To fool the North Koreans, combat engineers kicked up storms of dust with bulldozers and heavy trucks, the ruse of a big army ever on the move.
For the GI in this last-ditch defense, just a month from the comforts and pleasures of Tokyo, soldiering had become misery. The area around Taegu is the hottest in Korea, its midsummer temperatures topping 100 degrees. When it didn’t rain, the thick dust clogged weapons and coated sweating bodies. When it did rain, the soldier was soaked through. If he managed to nap, it was on a poncho thrown on the floor of a watery hole, amid malarial mosquitoes.
Because the Army’s food pipeline sometimes broke down, Japan’s beer-loving palace guards became lean, hungry men and boys. Tinkler said he had dropped to 156 pounds from 200-plus by the time he was wounded August 12 and shipped from Korea. The C-ration box became the GI’s staff of life: toilet paper, cigarettes, powdered coffee, tinned biscuits, canned fruit, small bars of chocolate and soap, and beans and franks or another of eleven “meat items.”
His gear grew lean with the soldier: fatigue shirt and pants, steel helmet, combat boots, his weapon and his web belt—with canteen, first-aid packet, bayonet, entrenching tool and ammunition clips attached. Up the steep hills, on long patrols, the soldier learned to travel light. At times the Eighth Army’s strained supply system even let these sparsely supplied men down. A passing Korean stole the combat boots of a sleeping Don MacFarland, an unusually small size 5. MacFarland had to keep on the move, patrolling with F Company for two weeks in stocking feet—“I fractured two toes running off a damned hill”—before the quartermasters came through with a new pair.
In their memories, six summer weeks besieged on the Naktong grew into an eternity—of two-man listening posts at the river’s reedy edge, of the chaos of sudden attacks, of silent patrols into the enemy’s midst. The patrols across the Naktong, usually squad size, were risky but necessary, to observe North Korean movements and sometimes bring back a prisoner to learn more. The squads paddled small boats or waded across the river, penetrated a mile or more, and always avoided firefights if possible. The stealthy work took a steady toll. Men drowned when boats overturned; one twelve-man patrol from the 2nd Battalion never returned from the far shore.
On their first patrol, in early August before the heavy fighting, Cpl. Al Clair’s F Company squad heard moaning in a house in abandoned Tuksong, by the destroyed bridge, and found a boy of about ten who had been shot through the shoulder. “The boy had a gaping wound, full of maggots. He couldn’t have lasted long without treatment,” Clair said. Their medic cleaned and dressed the wound, and the men left the boy some food and water. In the days to come, other patrols stopped by to check on the child, until finally he was strong enough to be brought safely across the river.
The enemy patrolled the American side as well. The Naktong days were the worst of the war, said MacFarland, and the worst of the Naktong was the morning on a listening post when he turned and saw a North Korean coming down on him with a knife. “My squad leader fired a shot from behind me and killed that guy.”
The Garryowens measured time not by dates, but by the death of a buddy, a trip to the rear, a letter from home. They daydreamed about fried chicken, about clean sheets, about women. From the August 6 Stars and Stripes, they saved a photo of “Miss Morale,” an unknown starlet named Marilyn Monroe. Later that month they ripped out a very different photo to keep in their helmets: a picture of twenty-six dead GIs found with hands tied and shot in the back by their North Korean captors. Already full of the vengefulness of war and a hatred of Koreans, the hard young men on the Naktong now had it certified in black and white. “We take no more prisoners,” they told each other.
Men broke down, from pressure and fear, in these stifling afternoons of buzzing cicadas, or on overnight outposts beneath bursting flares. The medical corps reported the rate of psychiatric admissions among GIs in the intense Pusan Perimeter fighting soared to the equivalent of 258 per 1,000 troops per year in August. Combat veterans told doctors they found the fighting tougher than in World War II. Men bugged out, showing up unauthorized somewhere in the rear. Men shot themselves in the foot. Men wondered what it was all about. “When you see buddies killed, guys alongside you killed—what the hell are we here for? Police action?” Wenzel remembered thinking. As Lois McKown and other wives and girlfriends anxiously followed the news back in Tokyo or the States, Bill McKown recalled, “most of us were wishing, ‘Why don’t they get us out of here? What are we doing here to start with?’”
On August 20, James Hodges wrote his sister that he hoped to be back in Japan by the end of September. “I stayed in Tokyo so long until it seems like home,” the Florida runaway wrote. He told Juanita the chaplain had visited G Company that day, a quiet Sunday. Then, before scrawling his signoff, “Love, James,” the shy younger brother finally gave his sister a glimpse into his dread. “We can really use God’s help over here.”
The first help the Garryowens and other hard-pressed units received came in the form of Marines and regiments of the 2nd Infantry Division, thrown into the Naktong battles in early August. By early September the combined U.S. and South Korean armies behind the Naktong outnumbered the 70,000 North Koreans by about two to one.
American military might was converging on a scrubby, rock-bound corner of Asia that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had dismissed barely a year earlier as strategically unimportant. Now the chiefs had endorsed full-scale war in Korea, and they were rewarded by President Truman in early September when he announced he would ask Congress to finance a huge, three-million-member military to face down what was increasingly described as a threat of global communist conquest. Truman’s Navy secretary, Francis P. Matthews, even called publicly for a preventive world war against the communist nations, saying Americans thereby “would become the first aggressors for peace.”
At the State Department, the influential George Kennan, who helped formulate Washington’s anti-Soviet “containment” policies, was deeply troubled by the incendiary rhetoric. “It implied that we could not adopt an adequate defense position without working our people up into an emotional state,” he later wrote.
* * *
From the Naktong front in early August, British journalist Christopher Buckley reported that the war in Korea was “exceptionally ruthless.” The savagery was not confined to one side, but American newspaper readers and radio listeners might have thought so.
The celebrated CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, leaving the Naktong front in mid-August, sent a radio report to New York saying the U.S. military was creating “dead valleys” in South Korea, and wondering whether the South Korean people would ever forgive America. His network, CBS, refused to broadcast it, infuriating Murrow. News organizations were operating under a self-censorship system that forbade criticism of the U.S. military; those who violated it could lose access to warfront coverage.
Murrow didn’t detail what he had seen, but many valleys in South Korea were being “killed” during those days, usually out of sight of reporters. Journalists even visited the 7th Cavalry on July 27, while the No Gun Ri killings went on, but there is no indication they ventured beyond the regimental command post, two miles from the trestle. Likewise, no outsiders were watching when the 2nd Battalion, according to veterans, killed other refugees in the days to come. In one cryptic message, an Army chaplain reported on July 28, “First Cav is taking action against the civilians … by the use of bayonets and other means of force.” A division artillery unit noted in its war diary for July 29, “Anyone seen is considered enemy.”
The Americans were leaving behind a trail of civilian dead and a charred landscape. The rockets and napalm bombs of U.S. warplanes burned down scores of villages and towns. “Effectively worked over, particularly after the 25th, were 48 villages and towns,” read the classified July report of the Air Force’s airborne controllers. One jet pilot reported a controller directed him at mission’s end to set a South Korean town afire with his rockets “rather than carry them home.” Another four-plane mission flying along the Kum River, near Taejon, reported, “Saw only 2 fishing boats and strafed them. Resulted in occupants diving overboard.”
Fleeing such devastation, reaching the Naktong, long columns of refugees found the bridges destroyed. At one point, an estimated 200,000 displaced people were spread on the western bank, stranded, caught between North Korean and American guns. Three days after he blew up hundreds of refugees at the Waegwan bridge to keep it out of North Korean hands, General Gay finally sent troops and South Korean police across the Naktong in boats to screen and allow 5,500 civilians to cross to the east side. This desperate group had gathered around a large crude sign: AMERICANS, WE ARE NOT COMMUNISTS. North Korean army units had still not reached the river in Gay’s sector.
Another three days after that change of heart, however, commanders’ fears and deadly solutions were again distilled into an order, this time preserved in a battalion log. “Shoot all refugees coming across river,” read the straightforward message on August 9 from Col. Raymond D. Palmer, commander of the 8th Cavalry, the Garryowens’ sister regiment.
That’s what American troops did, both veterans and Korean witnesses said. Air Force P-51s, propeller-driven fighters, flew routine missions up and down the river “interdicting” refugees, stitching the west bank with lines of .50-caliber machine-gun fire. Men of the Garryowens’ 2nd Battalion even began shooting refugees who did not try to cross, but merely appeared on the far shore, veterans said. General Gay himself ratified the indiscriminate shooting on August 29, as North Korean pressure built along the river. “Saber 6”—Gay’s code name—“orders all refugees to be fired on,” the divisional artillery staff noted in its log. Gay declared refugees to be “fair game,” another log showed.
Lives were extinguished on a scale both large and small. On August 16, the Air Force sent 98 heavy bombers to carpet-bomb a 27-square-mile area across the Naktong, dropping 960 tons of bombs, in hopes of randomly hitting enemy troop concentrations. In one village alone, Sachang, northwest of Waegwan, about 130 civilians were killed in the bombing that afternoon, survivors said. Unknown numbers of other villagers and stranded refugees were killed elsewhere in the zone. Days earlier, in a daylong siege on August 11 in the 25th Infantry Division’s sector, American troops fired on villagers sheltering in a local Confucian shrine, killing about eighty, survivors later reported. Aerial bombing and strafing and indiscriminate fire from U.S. ground troops killed hundreds of South Korean civilians during August 1950 around the Pusan Perimeter, Korean witnesses said. The devastation prompted the Army’s public relations office in Washington to message Tokyo about “rumors that there is promiscuous bombing in Korea.” The declassified record shows the Pentagon strongly recommended that the command stop reporting villages bombed in its communiques, and instead call them “military targets.”
The killing could be intimate, too, one on one. As the Garryowens evacuated villages to their rear, inside the Pusan Perimeter, Sgt. Lyle Gibbs in E Company was sent on a special mission. “They wanted a village emptied, and there was a woman left there,” he said. “Get rid of her,” he was told. “I went down and tried, but I was not going to shoot her.” Then “some young kid” was sent, who killed the woman, Gibbs said.
For some Garryowens, such killing became casual. “They didn’t know anything about these people. They were acting like little kids who had gotten away from their mothers,” Gibbs said. Many men abhorred what they saw. Some reviled a particular 2nd Battalion sergeant as “Baby Killer.” But the killing, both authorized and unauthorized, went on, and little hint of it could be found in American newspapers. “Most reporters were afraid to print what they witnessed in Korea, given the Cold War atmosphere of the time,” historian Bruce Cumings eventually concluded.
When the Tuksong-dong bridge was destroyed on August 3, two leading U.S. reporters were there. Hal Boyle of the Associated Press and W. H. Lawrence of the New York Times had been held back from the blast site, then went forward and interviewed Corporal Giannelli, Colonel Stephens’s driver. Both quoted Giannelli as reporting that the engineers tried to keep the refugees back, and that “when the smoke settles there wasn’t anything standing at all.” Giannelli said he went further, telling them the refugees “kept coming across … and were on the bridge when they blew it.” That was clear in his account, he recalled. But, as published, the AP and New York Times articles did not report the deaths; they simply did not address the refugees’ fate.
* * *
“Korea, 28 Aug. 50, Dear sis…”
James Hodges’s letters to Juanita were hurried notes, arriving in Florida smudged with the red clay of Korea. But in late August he managed to fill three small pages. He asked after the family. “As for me,” he wrote, “I am living.” He said G Company had been alerted to move out. He asked her to send him two pints of Canadian Club; he didn’t like whiskey, but all the guys were getting some. He signed off, “Your loving Bud, James.” Then this nineteen-year-old GI, the singing boy on the Hodges porch, had a final request: “P.S. Ask the preacher for a prayer for all George Company for we are about to move into bloody territory.”
The three weeks to come would be the bloodiest of a three-year war for the U.S. Army. Needing every man it could muster, Eighth Army quickly shuttled the wounded back into the line. Hodges’s friend Buddy Wenzel returned from a hospital in Japan. “I was scared. It didn’t take much of a noise. Nothing seemed real,” Wenzel said of the tense days of incoming artillery fire and stealthy North Korean probes in the night. Fox Company’s garrulous Ralph Bernotas, his wrist wound mended, also returned to the unreal war on the Naktong. A few days later, on Hill 303 north of Waegwan, he was with three buddies when a mortar round hit. “I’m holding the can of beer we’re passing around. Brumagen and Dean are dead, and me and Berryman are looking at each other. We didn’t get a scratch,” Bernotas recounted. “It’s like, why them and not me and Berryman?”
The North Koreans were mounting a final, fierce push to take Taegu, and in a tangle of knobby and sharp-ridged hills 15 miles northwest of Taegu, men of the 7th Cavalry would die by the dozens in early September 1950.
Wading silently through waist-high waters, filing across submerged “bridges,” the North Koreans had infiltrated in strength into the hills east of the Naktong. Detecting them, the 1st Cavalry Division attacked. The enemy counterattacked, looping around the Americans. Soon the area was a maze of ambushes and deadly dead-end valleys. “We have penetrated them and they have penetrated us,” a troubled General Gay told reporters in the rear.
In heavy rains on September 6, the Garryowens’ 2nd Battalion was ordered back from forward hill positions and fell into an enemy trap. An antitank round to the head killed executive officer Maj. Omar T. Hitchner, acting as battalion commander in the absence of a wounded Colonel Huff. Captain Chandler of H Company then took charge and led battalion remnants, without water, food and proper maps, low on ammunition and at times under enemy fire, through a zigzagging, miles-long trek to the safety of friendly lines. It took 40 hours. The isolated G Company, making its own hazardous withdrawal, had to carry out its wounded on makeshift litters of tree branches and ponchos.
The North Koreans pressed on, not just against Taegu, the Eighth Army headquarters city, but at other points around the perimeter. By September 11 they stood just seven miles north of Taegu. But in the heavy heat and downpours of September, the North Korean thrust ground to a halt, its strength too diluted in widespread offensives, its long supply lines too exposed for sustained attack. A fresh battalion of Garryowens, the 3rd, counterattacked on September 12 and took heavy casualties, but also took back Hill 314, the strong-point on the North Korean line.
The North Koreans were spent, having lost tens of thousands of men since the June 25 invasion. The Eighth Army had been badly hurt, too. In ten weeks at war, it had lost 4,280 killed in action, 12,337 wounded and 2,508 missing or known captured. Ralph Bernotas was finding few old Tokyo buddies around him: By mid-September, an unreinforced F Company numbered just forty-five men, one-third its strength when it landed in Korea.
July’s parade-ground soldiers were now September’s professional fighters. But they were men who avoided making new friends, not wanting to see them die, men learning both the best and worst about themselves and their fellow man. “I got old fast,” said Wenzel. “Believe me, I was only nineteen but I got old fast.” A devoted mother’s letters still reached Art Hunter, but the machine gunner never wrote back. “I didn’t know what to say. ‘Hey, Mom, I’m being shot at today and they just missed me’?”
Then, on the fifteenth day of September, everything changed in Korea. In an end run long planned by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Marine and Army units made an amphibious landing at Inchon, west of Seoul, far behind the North Korean lines. It was now the enemy’s turn to retreat, and the Garryowens would help lead the charge out of the Pusan Perimeter.
* * *
On September 18, the men of g company, by now with South Korean “augmentation” soldiers in their ranks, joined in an attack on Hill 300, north of Taegu, to punch a hole in the North Korean line and allow other 7th Cavalry troops to roll north. Enemy mortar and machine-gun fire drove the assault force back down the hill for the night.
The next morning, South Korean soldiers scouted the slope. “They came back and said there’s a dead GI up there,” Wenzel recalled. He and a medic scrambled back up, to a spot 100 yards up the 1,000-foot-high hill. “First thing I saw was a tree splintered real bad when a mortar round hit it,” Wenzel said. Then he saw the soldier facedown in a ditch. His back had been gouged open by the giant splinters. Wenzel saw the blond hair and knew. “It was James.”
The medic checked James Hodges’s dogtag identification and retrieved his billfold, his wristwatch and his harmonica, beginning the process of getting the body into the hands of the division’s graves registration unit. Wenzel rejoined G Company, the attack resumed, and in hours of furious combat the 2nd Battalion drove the enemy from Hill 300’s commanding heights. The Eighth Army’s push north, to link up with the Inchon beachhead troops, could now jump off up the road below Hill 300. The 7th Cavalry’s war diary noted the heavy cost to take the hill: 28 Americans killed and 147 wounded. In the cold accounting of company morning reports, where casualties are registered by name, one name, strangely, was missing from the dead: Cpl. James L. Hodges, RA18304354.
Days later a package from Florida reached G Company. Disguised as “glassed fruit,” it was a bottle of Canadian Club sent to James by a disapproving but loyal Juanita. In the comfort of a Korean mud hut, Wenzel and a few others shared the bounty, toasting the memory of the quiet Browning Automatic Rifleman.
A letter Juanita sent was returned to her. In it, she pleaded with her brother to write. “It has been about three weeks since I heard from you,” she said. “I am so worried about you I don’t know what to do.” The war might be over soon, she wrote. “I do hope it is and you can come back home to see us all. You just don’t know what a happy time that will be for all of us.”
Besides “Return to Sender,” the envelope sent back to Florida bore another stamp, from an adjutant general’s office: “Verified Missing in Action.”
Buddy decided to wait before writing pen pal Dorothy Hodges, wait for Army channels to notify the family of James’s death. He didn’t know that James Hodges, on paper, had not yet officially died in the “bloody territory” of Korea.
* * *
On September 20, general Gay took the 7th cavalry away from a miscast, cautious Col. Cecil Nist and gave the command to the aggressive Lt. Col. William A. Harris, a slightly built Texan who adorned his Jeep hood with a horse soldier’s saddle and knotted a cavalryman’s yellow scarf around his neck. “Wild Bill” Harris led the Garryowens north, leapfrogging on the road to Seoul against collapsing North Korean resistance.
Along the way, American soldiers found a war always offering fresh horrors. Rolling back into Taejon, where the South Koreans slaughtered 1,800 leftists before the July retreat, U.S. troops discovered mass graves of rightist political prisoners—and at least forty American soldiers—executed by the withdrawing communists. The Army history later put the number killed by the northerners at five thousand or more, but historians questioned whether that count combined the two groups of victims.
Across the recaptured territory, U.S. troops saw the South Koreans exacting revenge against real or imagined collaborators. Riding into one village, a 3rd Engineers company found that ROK army troops had just massacred inhabitants after discovering North Korean flags in huts. “We heard the machine-gun fire and saw them burying them in this big pit,” recalled ex–engineer private Donald Lloyd. “There were women in that pit holding babies. I’d say one hundred people.”
In the Seoul-Inchon area, thousands were slain—suspected rightists or leftists summarily executed by the departing communists or by the returning army and government of President Rhee, and other civilians caught by the unchecked firepower of the U.S.–South Korean invasion force driving from Inchon into Seoul.
Seoul was recaptured on September 26 after a painful, harrowing first two months of war for the Garryowen regiment, a war that had begun for them in July at a place called No Gun Ri. On September 29, the New York Times carried an obscure news note about a slaughter of South Korean civilians by U.S. troops: “One high-ranking United States officer condemned as ‘panicky’ the shooting of many civilians last July by one United States regiment.” The little paragraph was buried deep inside a larger story. It did not say where the killings occurred or name the regiment, and it was not followed up.
If they weren’t aware of No Gun Ri when it happened, high-ranking U.S. officers knew about it in general terms no later than mid-August 1950. In an internal communication dated August 2, North Korean officers reported the discovery of “barbaric” killings of civilians by American troops around Yongdong, including many found dead in a nearby tunnel. That document was captured by U.S. troops, translated by Army intelligence and distributed within the 1st Cavalry Division command on August 17, and at Eighth Army headquarters and Tokyo’s Far East Command by August 22. The declassified record gives no indication of any follow-up investigation.
* * *
Sometime, somewhere during the push north—it was still warm, he remembered, but he never knew the location—Art Hunter found his personal nightmare. George Company was sitting on a ridge; another rifle company was sweeping through a valley below. Hunter, on his machine gun, spotted an elderly couple in the valley bustling around their mud hut. He thought they might somehow be helping the enemy. A company officer was nearby. “Should I stop them?” Hunter asked, and then fired a hammering burst of .30-caliber bullets in their general direction. The Koreans froze, squatted for a moment, then began working again. He fired again, the tracers streaking past the old peasants. They stopped once more and resumed once more. “You want me to shoot them?” the machine gunner asked.
He waited for the officer’s response. “Whatever you think,” he said. Hunter took aim and opened fire. The man fell. The woman dashed here and there. Hunter fired again. “I just killed her, too.”
The young soldier never did make out their faces; they were too far off. They were left lying there, an old man and an old woman. “I never found out if they were just innocent people I killed.”
* * *
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had counseled the White House against invading North Korea because of the “grave risk of general war.” Its August 18, 1950, analysis also said that imposing the southern government on all Korea might prove impossible. “Syngman Rhee and his regime are unpopular among many if not a majority of non-Communist Koreans.” In fact, the CIA said, any free election might bring the communists to power throughout Korea.
The election the White House worried about, however, was the midterm U.S. congressional election. Republicans were still assailing Truman-Acheson “appeasement” in Asia, many in Washington concluded that the Chinese and Soviet communists would never intervene in Korea, and so the president decided to send American forces into North Korea to crush the communists.
The 1st Cavalry Division led the way to Pyongyang, the northern capital. “Wild Bill” Harris’s Garryowens regiment scored a coup crossing the Yesong River and then fought on, with steady losses, against a stubborn enemy defending his homeland. The grim, soul-searing job of soldiering grew more grim by the day as Korean temperatures fell. The Garryowens had headed north with just one wool layer of uniform. Warmer clothing was reaching them only sporadically; the Army had been caught unprepared. When supplies did come in, the 1st Cavalry Division was outrunning them, so that in early November most of its winter clothing was still in Taegu, 300 miles away. Some men had already suffered frostbite to toes and fingers.
After Pyongyang fell on October 19, the 7th Cavalry Regiment passed through the capital to seize its major port, Chinnampo, in an urgent midnight assault. The Bible-reading Gil Huff, back in command, didn’t know the enemy’s strength, but he later said he found inspiration in Gideon’s defeat of the Midianites. He had his 2nd Battalion turn on all headlights and radios and fill the night with noise, so the North Koreans would think “God’s own army” was descending on them. The defenders, it turned out, had fled. Across the front, in fact, remnants of Kim Il Sung’s army faded into the rugged wintry mountains to the north.
The capital had been seized and the enemy routed. The Garryowens thought their war was over, that they would soon be parading victoriously for MacArthur, in their yellow cavalry scarves, across Tokyo’s Imperial Palace Plaza. In Chinnampo, they settled into the comfort of living under roofs and sleeping for more than two hours at a stretch. They had regular hot meals, and counted on shipping out for home by Christmas. Bob Hope flew to Pyongyang and entertained the troops.
General MacArthur had more ambitious plans, however, for the famous 7th Cavalry, the rest of the Eighth Army, and a new joint Army-Marine command called X Corps. He ordered them north to destroy the last of the North Korean forces and to drive to the brink of the Chinese border at the Yalu River. This contravened Washington’s caution against provoking China’s intervention by putting U.S. troops threateningly on its doorstep. MacArthur had insisted to the Joint Chiefs and Truman that the Chinese wouldn’t dare take on his army, dubbed the “U.N. Command” because of the token addition of British, Greek, Turkish and other nations’ units.
The Garryowens who moved north, colliding again with the North Koreans, were a hardened fighting force ever angrier at their fate in being caught in this war between Koreans, the war that wouldn’t end. “We had a lot of hate,” said Buddy Wenzel. Men tossed grenades into village huts not knowing whether they held snipers or sleeping families. “They fire on anything moving,” G Company’s Sgt. Bob Spiroff noted in a letter home. Said Tom Boyd, then a Browning Automatic Rifleman man with F Company: “In combat you either become an animal and live, or stay timid and die. I personally killed anything in front of me when we moved up.”
But bullets couldn’t defeat the winter. As November wore on, the frigid Siberian winds blew biting snow and freezing rain into their faces. Their vehicles bogged down in muddy ruts or slid off narrow, snow-slick roads. They couldn’t get warm—no shelter, cold rain running into foxholes, too few layers of wool. Some wrapped newspaper around their midsections.
The enemy was often elusive, the combat fitful and small-scale. Deep in North Korea, more than 60 miles north of Pyongyang, the 7th Cavalry enjoyed a hot meal, from turkey to mince pie, on Thanksgiving, November 23. The regiment then retired about 10 miles south to a reserve bivouac, where the men assembled for a memorial ceremony overseen by General Gay himself. At parade rest in 15-degree cold, before the regimental colors, they heard the chaplain recite the psalm that soldiers have always heard, about the “valley of death,” with its reminder that “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” Then the Garryowens gathered up their grenades and guns and headed back into the line, to a rendezvous with the might of China, to a frozen place where goodness and mercy dared not follow.
* * *
On the night of November 29, 1950, Sgt. Snuffy Gray walked the G Company perimeter. It was frigid, just zero degrees. The Garryowens were dug in north of a town called Sinchang-ni, 40 miles northeast of Pyongyang in the heart of North Korea. Moonlight gleamed off a landscape coated with heavy snow.
“Somebody hollered at me, ‘Hey, look, Snuff! That goddamned road is turning black!’” Gray recalled. “The road was white, but sure enough it was turning black. Chinese were marching down the road in columns and they had no idea we were there.”
A Chinese army of approximately 300,000 men had poured largely undetected into the mountains of fir and spruce that run down North Korea’s spine. For four days its advance divisions had been pounding at Eighth Army and ROK army units in western and central North Korea. The 7th Cavalry Regiment had taken up position on a road running along Eighth Army’s right flank, at a point where the mountains meet the coastal plain, to help relieve pressure on the nearby 2nd Infantry Division.
This collision of armies set new tides of refugees in motion, northern Koreans this time. Earlier this day, November 29, in the morning darkness, retreating South Korean troops crossed through a 7th Cavalry roadblock, followed by thick columns of refugees. The Americans heard that enemy troops had infiltrated the civilians. When the E Company commander, First Lt. John E. Sheehan, stepped forward to inspect one group of men, they pulled out weapons and fired. Sheehan was killed, some of his men were wounded, and the Garryowens opened fire on the white-clad throng. “They were mixed in with them,” recalled Joseph Burton, a recoilless rifleman in the 1st Battalion’s D Company. “We had to open up on them—women, children, old people. It was terrible.” The regimental war diary took no note of the civilian casualties.
It was some 20 hours later that the white road intersecting the 7th Cavalry’s 2nd and 1st Battalions darkened with Chinese troops. Exchanges of fire exploded into a chaotic nighttime battle, the Garryowens’ first with the Chinese. The attackers’ vanguard drove the center of the 7th Cavalry line back, reaching the 2nd Battalion command post in a building on the edge of Sinchang-ni, where machine gunners finally cut them down. The regiment remained hard-pressed by masses of Chinese troops, blowing bugles, sounding whistles. Dozens of American wounded soon jammed the aid station, a small village house, where U.S. Army doctors did their best to save lives by flashlight.
Second Battalion commander Huff took up a forward position with his Jeep and called in barrage after barrage of artillery fire on coordinates where he thought Chinese would be maneuvering. The shelling went on for hours, into the morning. “Whiskey Red” Huff was unsteady. “He was stone drunk, leaning up against his Jeep calling in the coordinates,” Gray recalled. “But he was a better soldier drunk than other people were sober.”
The wall of artillery and the raking machine-gun fire from line companies stopped the waves of Chinese attacks. The next day the 7th Cavalry counted 350 Chinese dead. Hundreds more bodies were strewn outside the regiment’s perimeters. Thirty-eight Americans were killed, and many more were wounded or missing. Huff, the man who hated war, had shown again how to fight one. But across the warfront, from the ROK army troops beside the Yellow Sea to U.S. Marines at the Changjin Reservoir in the far east, fighting spirits wavered before the formidable new enemy, an army of great numbers and brave attacks. MacArthur’s command began a general withdrawal.
The 7th Cavalry Regiment joined in this vast winter retreat unprecedented in U.S. military history—a “retrograde movement,” the planners called it; “the Big Bugout” to the men. Demoralized soldiers, blank faces behind frozen beards, trudged down the bruising roads, or clambered onto overloaded tanks or trucks that sometimes broke down in the cold or keeled over into roadside ditches. The hellish cold and wind left men with frozen feet and fingertips, noses and ears. Some 1,500 “weather casualties” were reported across the front over nine days of the pullback in December, including 300 men who lay wounded in the snow and ice for hours or days.
Once more, Eighth Army “scorched the earth” on its retreat, burning houses in the broad swath of its path, destroying livestock and food, wrecking machinery. “We burned everything,” said F Company’s Ralph Bernotas. “Food—whatever the hell—they left nothing. It was just like the Civil War, the same as the Russians and Germans in the Ukraine.” Korean peasants and townspeople, faced with freezing and starvation in the northern winter, stacked what they could on their A-frame backpacks and flooded south.
Retreating back through Pyongyang, the Americans left the city in conflagration. The engineers set U.S. supply depots ablaze; up to 30,000 gallons of gasoline were ignited, and ammunition dumps blown. They dynamited a warehouse full of fruitcake, whiskey and other rations for the “victorious” army’s Christmas feast. Quartermasters gave away supplies to retreating units. Buddy Wenzel, riding through the North Korean capital, picked up a case of fruit cocktail, every GI’s favorite, and clung to it, atop a tank, through a 100-mile journey south. Korea’s oldest city, Pyongyang burned to the ground beneath flames towering into the winter sky. The U.S. Air Force later destroyed what was left.
The Eighth Army pulled back 120 miles in ten days, and the 7th Cavalry stopped at Nakpon-ni, just north of Seoul. The Chinese had made little contact with the withdrawing divisions, but they were clearly massing for a push south.
Back in the United States, popular support for the war collapsed. A Gallup survey that had shown 66 percent backing when the 7th Cavalry landed in July indicated only 39 percent of Americans now supported U.S. involvement in Korea. On December 15, a somber President Truman told the nation in a radio address that it faced a threat of general war with aggressive communism, and must rely on a vast, permanent military establishment. “Our homes, our nation, all the things we believe in, are in great danger,” he said. America was “in deadly peril,” declared Sen. Millard Tydings of Maryland, a Democrat.
The Garryowens, at least, were in peril, on a ragged defense line stretching eastward from Seoul. Hearing snatches of holiday songs by Bing Crosby or the Andrews Sisters on radios sent up from the rear, veteran fighters longed more than ever for relief and for home. It was a bleak Christmas for a battered American army.
Buddy Wenzel finally wrote to Dorothy Hodges, to tell her how sorry he was about James’s death. Not long after, his captain summoned Wenzel to the company command tent; the distraught Hodges family had written to the Army for an explanation.
Asked how he knew James Hodges had been killed, Wenzel recounted the September 18 events to the captain. The surprised officer told him his friend had somehow been listed as missing in action, and the family so informed. Buddy now signed an affidavit attesting to the death, and the family at least could rest assured about James’s fate. The remains of the Florida sharecropper’s son still lay somewhere unknown in the turmoil of the war, misplaced or misidentified.
Another soldier’s death got more notice. Three days before Christmas 1950, Lt. Gen. Walton H. Walker, Eighth Army commander, was killed in a road accident near Seoul. Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, a renowned paratroop commander in World War II, flew in from Washington to take over. In one of his first acts, Ridgway decreed a halt to scorched earth tactics, no more “destruction for destruction’s sake.” But the mass killings and the destruction went on, particularly from the air.
* * *
In January 1951, some 90 miles southeast of Seoul, an observer aircraft circled over a cave, and then four planes streaked in and dropped incendiary bombs, suffocating or burning to death about 300 refugees sheltering there. That bombing was one of dozens of such U.S. air attacks on refugee columns and concentrations in South Korea in 1950–1951, reported by survivors decades later. Most of the attacks came long after the Fifth Air Force’s operations chief, Col. Turner C. Rogers, recommended to the generals in late July 1950 that the practice be halted. Let the Army shoot them if they’re afraid of them, Rogers had said.
American journalists saw lines of bullet-riddled refugee bodies along roadsides in South Korea, but little more than hints of what was happening ever got to American newspaper readers. Military censorship was now stricter, even threatening courts-martial for reporters who “bring our forces into disrepute.” Those who were there bore witness, however. “The most horrifying part of this last advance has been the hundreds of refugees killed by our strafing,” Associated Press correspondent Stan Swinton wrote to his parents in a January 30, 1951, letter among his posthumous papers. “The children weren’t hit; they just tumbled off the mothers’ back and froze to death by the roadside.… Do not the enemies we make among the civilian population counterbalance and more than counterbalance the damage we do to the Reds?”
* * *
“Don’t let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop you,” MacArthur’s right hand, Maj. Gen. Edward Almond, told a subordinate at the start of the Chinese offensive in November 1950. By late that winter, the Chinese had stopped the Americans. They and their North Korean allies had MacArthur’s forces locked in a debilitating seesaw war over Korea’s midsection, a war in which the 7th Cavalry and other U.S. and South Korean regiments climbed and fought and died for the next ridge, or peak, or barren dome, only to abandon it the next day, or be driven from it with more men wasted.
On January 21, 1951, Gen. Ridgway issued a “Letter to the Men of the Eighth Army,” invoking God and “Western civilization” and the fear of “Godless” communism, to try to explain why they were fighting. He also invoked the pitiful Korean refugee, saying the war would determine “whether the flight of fear-driven people we have witnessed here shall be checked, or shall at some future time, however distant, engulf our own loved ones in all its misery and despair.”
For the Garryowens and other GIs, the loftiest goal was staying alive, and the life of combat, of flashes and deadly thunder in the night, of screams from the wounded, became life itself. “Hey, Joe! We’re coming!” the enemy would shout in the blackness. Then came the chilling blare of tinny bugles and brass gongs, and finally the “Chinks,” rushing up the slopes into the American guns.
War’s sheer inhumanity was now routine. In the 2nd Battalion, with a courtly lieutenant colonel named John Callaway as new commander, and the tough survivor Mel Chandler, a major now, as executive officer, the men were taking few prisoners, battalion veterans said.
The grisly ironies of war also became routine. One day the clerks found themselves assigning dead men to 2nd Battalion companies. An enemy shell had hit a truckload of replacements, killing every green private before he could be processed, but the Army paperwork went on.
Through it all, these cold-eyed young men couldn’t shake their own humanity. Art Hunter remembered “seeing little kids laying in ditches, starving. We’d be on trucks moving through. Nobody stopping. Kids laying in ditches with mud all over them and dirt. Nothing but bones. It was tough … tough.” The medics reported the psychiatric casualty rate climbed sharply again among Army troops in the early weeks of the “Chinese war.”
* * *
“Let’s run down that damned gook kid!” white GIs in a Jeep had spotted Suey Lee Wong walking back to Fox Company from a field hospital. The wounded rifleman, who didn’t have his weapon with him, sometimes felt he also didn’t have a place in a white man’s army. He jumped out of the swerving Jeep’s way.
A Seattle-area immigrant, son of a real “Chinese laundryman,” the small, tough, intelligent corporal joined the Garryowens in January 1951. “No one would even talk to me. I was the only Oriental in the platoon,” he recalled. He soon felt he was “fighting two wars”—against the enemy out there, and against bigots around him, men like the platoon mate who ranted at him, “I don’t know what we’re doing over here to help you gooks!”
Corporal Wong, born in China, fought a third war, too, over his own feelings about killing young men who looked like him while he was striving to be “American.” During one assault, he scaled a ledge and quickly killed two Chinese at the top. Then he shot a third who reared up. “His guts were on the ground. He was in agony, writhing in pain, and so I then put two or three more rounds in him,” he said. Their deaths weighed on him. “Maybe in a couple of weeks,” he reflected, “a mother in a village would get a notification that they’d lost the son to farm. In a Chinese village, it’s tragic. Who would grow the rice? Who would work the fields and harvest the crops? Who would look after the family and keep the name going?
“That day I felt remorse,” he said.
Many white comrades, in a war with people of another color, felt little remorse, Wong learned. “The GI attitude was basically, ‘They’re just a bunch of gooks. Shoot them.’” In fact, the replacement corporal heard from old hands about the Garryowens’ shooting of a “bunch of gooks” months before down south, under a railroad trestle somewhere. It was one bloody event among many, but one that somehow stayed with them.
* * *
Bolts snapping, bandoliers slapping over backs, water splashing into canteens—the overture to combat could be heard around G Company in the morning fog. It was April 10, 1951, and the 7th Cavalry, with “George” on the point, had drawn a high-profile assignment: Capture the towering, 826-foot-wide Hwachon Dam. The Chinese had begun to open its gates, and the U.S. command feared they planned to flood American positions on the Pakchon River, just above the 38th Parallel.
George and Fox Companies attacked up a rugged half-mile-wide tongue of land, with the Hwachon Reservoir on their right, ending at the dam, and a loop of the meandering river on their left. They soon ran into strong resistance, mortar and machine-gun fire that pinned them down.
On high ground behind G Company’s forward elements, Buddy Wenzel lay with an M-1 fitted with a telescopic sight. He was a sniper now, his job to pick off troublesome Chinese. “I enjoyed it. I had the edge.” Trapped GIs were running back under fire, and Wenzel rose to shout at them. A machine-gun round ripped through his right hand—his gun hand, his writing hand. As he was evacuated, a friend told him, “You’re the last one.” The G Company boys who had landed at Pohang nine months earlier were now mostly dead or maimed or broken men.
The attack was failing and men were dying. Two of the 2nd Battalion’s five company commanders were killed. Beginning at 3:45 the next morning, April 11, Army Rangers paddled quietly across the dark, mile-wide reservoir to try a flanking attack. They were mauled on shore and were ferried back. Frustrated commanders next ordered F Company to send men over the lake in boats. Ralph Bernotas, three times wounded in Korea, soon to rotate to the States, had always felt like a survivor, but “that was the only day that I sort of gave up,” he said. “I said, there’s no way we’re going to get out of this. We’re sitting ducks, in broad daylight, on the water.” Men, feeling their time had come, entrusted personal items to friends or officers.
Then word came from the rear: Break off the attack. The threat of flooding appeared less than feared. “It was a miracle,” Bernotas said. How many friends had died? Brumagen and Dean, “Pop” Boehm and Cole, how many others? But Ralph would live.
Marines moved in and the regiment headed to Eighth Army reserve. A historian would later describe the Hwachon operation as “an insignificant gesture.” Few knew that in the midst of it, Colonel Callaway, 2nd Battalion commander, was seen off alone, weeping.
* * *
The day of Ralph Bernotas’s miracle was the day President Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur of command in the Far East. The general had agitated one too many times for a global war against communism. The 7th Cavalry fought on, and replacement Garryowens died, until the unit returned to Japan in December 1951. It won a unit citation from the South Korean government “for outstanding and heroic performance of duty on the field of battle.” In all, Custer’s regiment suffered 1,080 men killed or missing in Korea.
Losses to the people of Korea during this time proved incalculable. A classified report to Truman said almost 400,000 homes had been destroyed in South Korea alone in the war’s first year. The number of Korean civilians killed, including those killed by the U.S. military, was unknown. But the killing went on into 1951.
In the 7th Cavalry itself, during the pullback from North Korea in December 1950, the regimental staff ordered troops to use mortar and artillery fire against refugees trying to head south through their lines, the declassified record shows. The highest command in Korea, Eighth Army, sent similar instructions across the warfront—one declassified document dated it to December 1950, another to January 1951—telling corps commanders, “You have complete authority in your zone to stop all civilian traffic in any direction. Responsibility to place fire on them to include bombing rests with you.”
Not every top officer accepted such tactics. A memo from the intelligence staff to the operations staff at Far East headquarters in Tokyo in December 1950 said indiscriminate killing of refugees was “extremely prejudicial to the UN cause, which is largely founded on the humanitarian principle of protecting Koreans from Communist aggression.”
In April 1951, however, still further instructions went down from Eighth Army to shoot refugees trying to cross front lines, and one regimental intelligence officer objected. The 38th Infantry’s Capt. Rizalito Abanto reported to his commander that the directive was difficult to carry out, because of “the hesitancy on the part of the younger soldiers to fire directly upon groups of old men, women and children.” He recommended that refugees be let through the lines. The record gives no indication his words were heeded. In fact, three years later, after the armistice, a U.S. Army War College study on lessons learned in Korea on handling refugees stated, “Strafing fire from low-flying aircraft is very effective in clearing a road.”
Surviving Garryowens began rotating home in the spring of 1951. At the time, researchers in the United States were growing more interested in the impact of combat on men’s minds. At the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Cincinnati, a research team reporting new findings said the wartime killing of defenseless civilians, in particular, triggers “traumatic war neurosis.” It engenders guilt, they reported, great and long-lasting.