Jeff Shaara - The Frozen Hours

FIRST MARINE DIVISION COMMAND POST—WONSAN—NOVEMBER 2, 1950

“You certain?”

“Sir, Tenth Corps didn’t have much to say, but our people picked up radio traffic from Eighth Army. General Puller has radioed as well, word reaching him through the ROK units in his area.”

Smith sat slowly, stared at Bowser, the other aides watching him. Bowser wiped at his nose with a handkerchief, still suffering from the cold, said, “General Almond’s HQ says it’s only panic at Eighth Army.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Me neither. This is pretty specific.” He studied the dispatch again, felt a nagging helplessness. “Eighth Army is supposed to secure our left flank. Well, it’s pretty clear they’re a long way from our flank. And no one seems to be moving this way at all.”

Bowser stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket. “It could be blown out of proportion, sir. Some nervous aide putting out an exaggerated call. The kind of thing that drives Colonel Puller up the wall.”

Smith slid through the papers, retrieved another dispatch. “This one came from Puller. Seems there’s a lot of wall-climbing going on. Everybody’s got something bad to say, except Tenth Corps. They’re pleased as anything this happened to Eighth Army.”

“But do we know what happened, sir?”

Smith tossed the papers to one side, tried to hide a nervous quiver in his hands. He stared past Bowser, the others still silent, watching him.

“All we know, Colonel, is that there’s more going on out there than anyone seems to know. And that is a dangerous way to fight a war.”

On November 1, as units of Walton Walker’s Eighth Army advanced on their mission up the western half of North Korea toward the Yalu River, one unit of the American First Cavalry Division, along with several units of ROK infantry, was suddenly struck by a heavy assault from an enemy no one expected to see. The surprise was complete, although numerous reports had been issued by both air and ROK observers that enemy columns were moving in strength toward the UN positions. Near the town of Unsan, far to the north of Pyongyang, the ROK units were quickly routed, while the American Eighth Cavalry Regiment was surrounded on three sides. In fighting that lasted all that night, the Americans were finally forced to flee into the hills, most of the cavalry units cut off from any support. Despite ongoing reports that no enemy was operating in their area, the Eighth Cavalry’s Third Battalion fought a brutal struggle for its very survival, the enemy forces having severed any avenue of escape.

For men too accustomed to pursuing a demoralized and defeated foe, the shock of the assault was absolute. But as quickly as the enemy troops had launched their crushing attack, they withdrew from the fight. The reports flew quickly, the frantic radio calls reaching Walton Walker that one part of his glorious surge toward the Yalu River had been severely crushed. But the reports offered more than casualty counts. The enemy had left their dead and wounded as well, descriptions reaching Eighth Army HQ, passed on back to Tokyo, that the assaulting troops were not North Korean. They were Chinese.

THEY HAD ENDED the march while it was still dark, and there would be no fires allowed, no smoke to betray their presence among the hills. It was routine now, the soldiers digging shallow pits, doing what they could to secure a camouflaged hiding place for the day ahead, slipping out into thickets of brush and low trees.

To the east, the first hint of dawn rose in a gray haze over a snowcapped mountain, and he shivered, the sweat of the night’s march chilling his skin. He loved the sunrise, watched intently, waited for the first burst of orange that would reveal just how many mountains there were. He glanced upward, the stars fading, and he thought, There are no clouds. It will be a good day for their planes. And so we shall stay here, wait again for dark, and when their planes go home, we shall resume the march.

The tactics were simple and direct: the army would advance only at night. When mistakes were made, the Americans seemed always to be there, swarms of dive bombers, low-flying fighter planes strafing the narrow roads. Often the targets were the innocent, North Korean peasants seeking escape from Sung’s troops, a wave of refugees who seemed to fear the Chinese army as much as they feared their own. Soon those people had learned just how dangerous the roads could be, and so they too had spread into the wooded hills, or if they brought wagons, they moved only at night.

A dozen yards down the hillside, officers were gathering together, a cloth bag of rice passing between them. Sung felt the hunger himself, fought it, knew that what he carried in his own satchel would have to last. There was privilege of rank, of course, the coolies with their A-frame packs hauling the rare tins of meat and fish. His orders could direct them to his own camp, providing a feast of sorts for his staff, for those higher-ranking officers who stayed close. But he would not enjoy that kind of luxury, not out here, not while the men around him kept up their strength with a small ration of rice and dried beans. It was pride, theirs and his own, that his army could move on such meager supplies. There were a few trucks, most of them old Soviet vehicles from the last war, unreliable, always requiring repairs that few could manage. When a truck broke down, it would remain by the side of the narrow road, its cargo piled onto the backs of the coolies. He marveled at those men, capable of carrying their own weight on their shoulders, few of them ever speaking, certainly not to him. They went about the bone-crushing labor as though it were their only task in life, and for many that was accurate. Some were North Korean, the officers keeping careful watch on them, concerned with just how trustworthy they might be, whether they would slip away in the darkness, carrying off the precious supplies. So far there had been few reports of that. He rarely saw them on the march, the men hidden by the darkness. In the camp, Sung had been surprised to see a kind of gamesmanship evolving, competitions between them. But no one forgot that those men were the bottom rung of his army’s ladder, and there had been brutality, always, low-ranking officers making use of the whip, exercising their own power against men who had no power of their own. Sung put a stop to that when he could, knew just how valuable those men and their A-frames were, the deeper they moved into Korea. For now, the soldiers carried only what they required to fight, their rifles and machine guns, some of them American made. It was the spoils of the victory against the Nationalists, captured weapons from a half-dozen countries. The most common weapon was the burp gun, a stocky machine gun that sacrificed accuracy for sheer firepower. There were American submachine guns as well, the ever reliable Thompson, a close-range weapon for men who understood that when the fight came, it would have to be nearly face-to-face. In every unit came the men who carried the grenades, all shapes, varying degrees of power. Some were merely percussion, a blast that might cripple rather than kill. Others came with a valuable knot of high explosives, and most of those were the potato-masher type, what Sung knew had been a favorite of the Germans in the last war. The elongated handle gave a man leverage, adding distance to his throw, and he had seen to their training, squads of grenade carriers practicing only with the strength of their arms, the accuracy of their toss.