On Desperate Ground Read online

  ALSO BY HAMPTON SIDES

  Stomping Grounds

  Ghost Soldiers

  Blood and Thunder

  Americana

  Hellhound on His Trail

  In the Kingdom of Ice

  Copyright © 2018 by Hampton Sides

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover image: U.S. troops march south from Koto-ri during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, Korea, December 9, 1950. PhotoQuest / Getty Images

  Cover design by John Fontana

  Names: Sides, Hampton, author.

  Title: On desperate ground : the Marines at the reservoir, the Korean War’s greatest battle / Hampton Sides.

  Other titles: Marines at the reservoir, the Korean War’s greatest battle

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018010543 | ISBN 9780385541152 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385541169 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Korean War, 1950–1953—Campaigns—Korea (North)—Changjin Reservoir. | United States. Marine Corps. Marine Division, 1st—History. | Changjin Reservoir (Korea)—History, Military—20th century.

  Classification: LCC DS918.2.C35 S53 2018 | DDC 951.904/242—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018010543

  Ebook ISBN 9780385541169

  v5.3.2

  ep

  WALKER AND MACK

  And the steadfast men of the Korean War Generation

  Sun Tzu says that in battle there are nine kinds of situations, nine kinds of “ground.” The final and most distressing type is a situation in which one’s army can be saved from destruction only by fighting without delay. It is a place with no shelter, and no possibility of easy retreat. If met by the enemy, an army has no alternative but to surrender or fight its way out of its predicament.

  Sun Tzu calls this “desperate ground.”

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Hampton Sides

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Prologue: Morning Calm

  BOOK ONE: SEOUL

  Chapter 1: The Professor

  Chapter 2: Traitor’s House

  Chapter 3: Across the Han

  Chapter 4: Beneath the Lighthouse

  Chapter 5: The Battle of the Barricades

  Chapter 6: The Savior of Our Race

  Chapter 7: God’s Right-Hand Man

  Chapter 8: The Tiger Wants Human Beings

  BOOK TWO: TO THE MOUNTAINS

  Chapter 9: Many, Many

  Chapter 10: King’s Envoy to Hamhung

  Chapter 11: Heroic Remedies

  Chapter 12: Will o’ the Wisp

  Chapter 13: Broken Arrows

  Chapter 14: A Powerful Instrument

  Chapter 15: Fattened for the Kill

  Chapter 16: Never Too Late to Talk

  Chapter 17: Never a More Daring Flight

  BOOK THREE: THE RESERVOIR

  Chapter 18: Easy for Us, Tough for Others

  Chapter 19: Boon Companions

  Chapter 20: Easy Company Holds Here

  Chapter 21: Where the Bullet Belongs

  Chapter 22: Gung-ho, You Cowardly Bastards

  Chapter 23: When the Lead Is Flying

  Chapter 24: A Hot Reception

  Chapter 25: The War Council

  Chapter 26: An Entirely New War

  BOOK FOUR: RED SNOW

  Chapter 27: You Will All Be Slaughtered

  Chapter 28: Kissing a Buzz Saw

  Chapter 29: Morphine Dreams

  Chapter 30: No Soft Options

  Chapter 31: One-Man Army

  Chapter 32: Every Weapon That We Have

  Chapter 33: The Ridgerunners

  Chapter 34: This Place of Suffering

  BOOK FIVE: TO THE SEA

  Chapter 35: Attacking in a Different Direction

  Chapter 36: In the Day of Trouble

  Chapter 37: I’ll Get You a Goddamn Bridge

  Chapter 38: Blood on the Ice

  Chapter 39: Taking Departure

  Chapter 40: The Bridge of Long Life

  Chapter 41: Down to Earth

  Chapter 42: The Most Harrowing Hour

  Chapter 43: The Crossing

  Chapter 44: We Will See You Again in the South

  Chapter 45: We Walk in the Hand of God

  Epilogue: In the Pantheon

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Illustrations

  PROLOGUE

  MORNING CALM

  In the misting rain, they pressed against the metal skins of their boats and peeked over the gunwales for a glimpse of the shores they were about to attack. Some thirteen thousand men of the First Marine Division, the spearhead of the invasion, had clambered down from the ships on swinging nets of rope and then had crammed themselves into a motley flotilla of craft that now wallowed and bobbed in the channel. Several of the rusty old hulks, having been commandeered from Japanese trawlermen, smelled of sour urine and rotten fish heads. The Marines, many of them green from seasickness, saw the outlines of the charred foothills that rose above the port, and caught the scent of the brackish marshes and the slime of the mudflats. Corsairs, bent-winged like swallows, dove over the city, dropping thousand-pound bombs and sending five-inch rockets deep into hillside nests where the enemy was said to be dug in. Far out at sea, the naval guns rained fire upon the city, damaging tanks of butane that now flared and belched palls of smoke.

  On this warm, humid morning of September 15, 1950, the Marines had arrived at their destination halfway around the world, to stun their foe and turn the war around: a surprise amphibious attack, on an immense scale, deep behind the battle lines. Only a few months before, these young men, fresh from their farms and hick towns, had piled into chartered trains and clattered across America to California. Then they climbed aboard transport ships, where many of them did their basic training, learning how to strip and rebuild M1 rifles, drilling on the crowded decks, practicing their marksmanship on floating targets towed from the fantails. They crossed the Pacific and stopped briefly in Japan, then heaved their way through a full-scale typhoon. They rounded the peninsula and moved in convoy up the west coast, through the silted waters of the Yellow Sea.

  By the thirteenth of September the ships had begun to concentrate, 261 vessels in all, carrying more than 75,000 men and millions of dollars’ worth of war matériel. On the fourteenth, the armada was closing in on its target: the narrow confines of Flying Fish Channel. The channel led to Inchon, an industrial city of a quarter million people, whose strategically vital but treacherous port served the capital,
Seoul.

  On the morning of the fifteenth, in the seas west of Inchon, the ships ranged along the horizon, a long line of gray bars stitching through the mist. First came the destroyers Swenson, Mansfield, DeHaven. Then the high-speed transports Wantuck, Horace A. Bass, Diachenko, and the dock landing ship Fort Marion. Then the heavy cruisers Toledo and Rochester and three more destroyers: Gurke, Henderson, and Collett. Following in their mingled wakes came the British light cruisers Kenya and Jamaica, the attack transports Cavalier and Henrico. Farther out at sea lay the fast carriers, from which the Corsairs rose into the skies to make their deadly sorties.

  By afternoon, as the Marines drew near the Inchon seawall, enemy rounds zinged across the water surface and mortar shells crashed haphazardly all around. Within a few minutes the Marines would reach the cut-granite ramparts. They would climb over, and they would set foot on the western shores of central Korea.

  What was Korea to these young men? Some fate-ravaged place, an inflamed appendix, a wattle of real estate flapping off the face of the mainland. Though some of the units approaching Inchon had spent the past month bolstering United Nations forces at the southern tip of Korea, most of the First Marine Division had no experience with the country. They had little knowledge of Korea’s tragic history, no appreciation for how faithfully this proud culture had held on through centuries of turmoil and besiegement. It was a small nation that history had pushed around—a shrimp among whales. The Mongols had had their way with her, the Manchus, the Russians, the Japanese. Now had come the Americans, nervous young men who knew next to nothing about the place, though some had passed around guidebooks filched from hometown libraries.

  Korea, they’d learned, was known as the Hermit Kingdom. The Land of the Morning Calm. Its national dish was a hot mess of fermented cabbage. Some Marines had read with astonishment that in parts of Korea, peasants still nourished their crops with night soil and were known to roast the occasional hound for dinner—these were some of the clichés that were passed around. Korea was said to be a dirt-poor country, mountainous, swept by Siberian winds, sultry during summer and breathtakingly cold in winter.

  But what did the travel manuals really know? God created war, Twain wrote, so that Americans would learn geography, and the men of the First Marine Division were about to learn a lot about this tough, sorrowful scrap of land. While some would find a deep affinity for it, many would come to hate it, for all the things it was and for all the things it wasn’t. But to most of them, more than anything, Korea just seemed a long way from home—a long way to come to fight and bleed and die, in a war that was not officially a war, for a cause that at times was not altogether clear, for an endgame that was anybody’s guess.

  The Marines had a tradition of being the first to fight, the first to kill, the first to die. They didn’t earn their reputation by asking many questions. In a few months, they would face the armies of the most populous nation on earth and would become engaged in one of the more harrowing clashes in the history of warfare. Many would never return home. But for those who survived, Korea would be forever stamped on their psyches, and on their souls. They would never forget what happened here, even if the majority of their countrymen quickly did.

  Now the assault vessels angled past the pitted harbor islands of Inchon and made for the bluff face of the seawall, where the breaking surf left a ring of bone-white foam. The bullets whined and smacked in weird patterns upon the surface. A shell screamed overhead, and the Marines crouched a little tighter into the walls of their boats.

  BOOK

  ONE

  SEOUL

  War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

  —BARBARA TUCHMAN

  1

  THE PROFESSOR

  On the Yellow Sea

  The amphibious invasion taking place off the jetties and docks of Inchon—an action officially known as Operation Chromite—was among the boldest and most technically complex engagements in modern military annals. The man who conceived the invasion, prevailing over enormous doubts in Washington, was General Douglas MacArthur, and his name would forever be associated with it. But the officer most directly responsible for executing the details of the initial landing, the unsung and largely unknown architect of the Marine assault, was in many ways MacArthur’s opposite. He was Oliver Prince Smith, commander of the First Marine Division, one of the great underrated generals in American history.

  From the decks of the command ship USS Mount McKinley, Smith watched the proceedings as best he could through shifting curtains of smoke. He squinted into his field glasses as the ship heaved in the swells. In the distance, the small landing craft, having butted against the seawall, were in position. In the bow of each vessel, Marines raised a pair of scaling ladders, and the waiting boats treaded the water like enormous bugs with antennae quivering. The leathernecks began to scale the ladders and vanished from view. But the radio reports that came in from the spotter planes were all positive. The Marines were moving into the city now, swarming over the causeways and saltpans, already seizing industrial complexes and other installations along the ruined harbor.

  Smith’s division was a formidable fighting force. Though it had been hastily thrown together at Camp Pendleton, California, most of the division’s officers and noncoms were seasoned warriors, men of the Old Breed who had served in the bitter World War II battles of the Pacific—at places like Guadalcanal and Okinawa. “They could load jeeps with their decorations,” said one account, and would “need a truck to carry off their Purple Hearts.” Battalion for battalion, the First Marine Division was as fierce and as disciplined as anything the United States had to offer. “It was the strongest division in the world,” boasted one Marine captain who served under Smith. “I thought of it as a Doberman, a dangerous hound straining at the leash, wanting nothing more than to sink its fangs into the master’s enemy.”

  Smith was enormously relieved by the progress of the invasion. The resistance was proving tepid—either the North Korean defenders had been caught off guard or they were overwhelmed by the intensity of the firestorm. But Smith stopped short of celebrating. He was superstitious of good fortune. As an assistant division commander at the World War II battle of Peleliu, he had witnessed a senseless loss of life—the result of intelligence failures and strategic mistakes not of his making. Scarred by the events at Peleliu, he tended to proceed with a thoroughgoing sense of caution. In his own experience, it was overconfidence, more than any other single factor, that caused men to die.

  He felt a little uneasy that MacArthur had invited a gaggle of journalists aboard the Mount McKinley to follow the invasion. It struck Smith as unseemly to have assembled so many members of the press to capture what MacArthur’s people confidently expected would be his moment of triumph. “This is a public relations war,” Smith wrote in disdain. “We are overrun with onlookers.”

  Smith had spent a lot of time with MacArthur aboard the Mount McKinley. During the past few days, as part of the larger convoy, they had steamed over from Japan in this 460-foot floating command center, a plush flagship tricked out with all manner of radar, radiotelephones, and other advanced communications equipment. Smith found the supreme commander initially impressive, occasionally entertaining, but ultimately insufferable. MacArthur, he said, is “a born actor” who “puts a lot of drama into his conversation.” He “has to his credit many outstanding accomplishments,” Smith allowed. “However, the pomposity of his pronouncements is a little wearing.”

  * * *

  Major General Oliver Prince Smith, fifty-six years old, was a cerebral, soft-spoken man whose habits seemed atypical of a gung-ho Marine. There was no bluster in his demeanor. A Berkeley graduate who incessantly smoked a pipe, he had a reputation in the Corps as an intellectual. People called him “the Professor.” One Marine historian described him as an “ascetic thinker and teacher.” He was fluent in French, drank sparingly, read the classics, and never cursed. An expert
gardener, he cultivated roses in his spare time. He was an incessant notetaker; he kept a small green notebook on his person and wrote in a cryptic shorthand. Reed-thin and tall, his sharp-featured face set with piercing blue eyes and topped by a nimbus of prematurely white hair, he spoke deliberately and with precision.

  But for all his gentleness and reserve, Smith was tough. As a young man, he had been a winch operator and then a crew foreman at a rough-and-tumble logging camp in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. He knew hard work, and his hands showed it. He had climbed his way from an impoverished background to become a scholarship student while steering his family through several tragedies—most notably the death of his only sibling, Peggy, who was found raped and murdered in a cabin at Yosemite National Park, the perpetrator unknown.

  On the battlefield, Smith believed in ruthless efficiency. One Marine called him “a professional killer, employed in a hard trade: tenacious, cunning, resourceful, cold, cynical, and tough.” He took a dim view of those who brought an exaggerated sense of chivalry to war. Engagements were won by systematically destroying the enemy, not through flamboyant acts or the symbolic capturing of ground. At Quantico, he was famous for giving a lecture that analyzed the effectiveness of the bayonet charge during modern wars; after crunching the numbers, he proclaimed it, by and large, a pseudo-heroic waste of energy.