Part III, Chapter 23
CHAPTER 23
And I see not in my blindness
What the objects were I wrought,
But as God rules o'er our bickerings
It was through His will I fought.
November 29, 1950
Sergeant Meeks, like almost everyone a few metres away from the Yalu, was crouched behind the trees and rocks as Patton delivered his speech. The general had insisted upon giving his speech on the river, despite it being the front line. He and some other noncoms had managed to convince most of the reporters and other civilians to take cover as best they could – this might have been a quiet sector yesterday, but it was still a battlefield. Then Patton started delivering his speech, and everyone forgot that the Chinese could be lurking nearby.
That was, until two shots rang out.
As Patton fell to the ground, Meeks feared that one of the shots had been fatal, until the general let out an incredible cry.
“God damn it you sons of bitches, you missed!”
Still clutching his sword in one hand, he attempted to stand up and, like Theodore Roosevelt all those years ago, continue his speech. Unlike Roosevelt, he was clearly struggling, and certainly at least one of the Chinese shots hadn’t missed him. He didn’t manage much more than to sit halfway up when a couple of medics reached him. It was only at that point that Meeks realised, that speech was going to get him in trouble with the President. A lot of trouble.
“Where’s the orderly?” one of the medics called out, and suddenly Meeks was no longer thinking about Truman any more.
“I’m here!” Meeks said, running up to the ice. Noticing the medic’s two bars, he added a “sir.”
“Here’s the deal.” the doc said. “He’s been hit once in each leg, and his fall gave him a hell of a shock. He’ll live, but only if we get him out of here immediately. I don’t think either shot hit anything vital. I’m most concerned about him bleeding out, and the plasma’s no good in this weather.” he finished tying a bandage around one of Patton’s wounds. The weather had convinced them to not even try removing his pants to do the job properly.
Meeks thanked God that Patton had taken to flying by helicopter. There weren’t a whole lot of them in Korea (even despite Patton asking MacArthur to “get him as many as you can, and then more”), but one was parked less than a mile away.
“Get him in the jeep.” Meeks said. “We’ve got a chopper up the road.” Then he turned to the pile of rocks and called out “John, get the jeep running!”
It wasn’t until they were flying back to Hamhung that Patton spoke to Meeks for the first time.
“God damn it! They missed.” he repeated his statement from the end of his speech, clearly in pain but determined not to show it.
“Sir, they definitely hit you.” Meeks said.
“In the wrong place.” Patton said. “That was my final battle. I went to the Yalu to die.”
“You won’t die.” Meeks promised. “Not today. The doc said so.”
“It is my destiny to die.” Patton protested. Meeks suddenly thought it was a good thing the medics had tied him to that stretcher on the helicopter’s side. Else the general might try to jump off.
“Sir, have you ever considered there might be one last battle for you to fight yet?” Meeks proposed. He knew Patton talked about the gods of war and his destiny to die in battle. “Mars might be saving you for something. Now get some rest, sir.”
Patton, for a wonder, actually listened.
***
December 1, 1950
President Harry Truman poured himself a bourbon. He didn’t drink often in the Oval Office and even less often at this time of the morning. Well, you didn’t get a surprise this shocking very often either, even as President of the United States.
“Want some?” he offered the bottle to General Bradley.
“No, thank you.” Bradley said. “What do you need today, Mr President?”
There was no use beating around the bush today. “Patton has to go. Immediately. Have you seen his speech?”
“I can’t say that I have.” Bradley said.
“Here.” Truman passed him the morning paper, which had published the entire thing. “I told him not to go running his mouth, and now he’s gone and called for us to go to war with Moscow and kill anyone redder than a light shade of pink. That’s not just disobeying a direct order. That’s burning the damn thing. I’ve spent six months trying to avoid a big war with Red China and he was ten words away from starting one!”
“I can have orders demanding his immediate resignation from Eighth Army command ready within the hour.” Bradley said. “And I won’t miss him one bit.”
Truman shook his head. “No, he’s not retiring. If he does, everyone’s going to think he’s leaving for his health. Half the country just watched him get shot on the evening news and then rise up from the dead. If he walks away from this he’ll be a hero.” Truman’s face tightened. “I’m going to fire the son of a bitch. Publicly.”
“You’re in for a fight.” Bradley warned. “It was Marshall that told him he couldn’t invade Japan, but for some reason he blamed Ike for it. A good part of his memoir is just him dragging Ike’s name through the mud, and I’m told his wife edited that down to the point that it was actually presentable.”
“I don’t care if he comes after me with all the subtlety of a madman with a flamethrower, he has to go.” Truman said, although privately he did wonder if it would ruin his chances at a possible third term come 1952. “One of the key principles of this country was civilian control of the military, something Patton neglected to mention when he brought up the Revolution. If he invades Red China, any semblance of that is gone. My decision is final.”
“General Ridgway has been ready to take over for Patton since the summer.” Bradley said.
“Send him.” Truman ordered. “And order Patton out of Korea too. I think he’s in a hospital in Hamhung right now. Have him moved to Japan. His wife is already on a plane for Tokyo.”
“Yes, sir!” Bradley said.
As Truman finished his drink, he wished that he had never sent Patton to Korea in the first place. This day had been coming for a long time, and he knew it. A few days ago, Congress had been discussing whether or not to give Patton a fifth star, or alternatively the Medal of Honor, for his incredible feats of leadership as he turned the Eighth Army from clueless draftees to a force rivalling America’s best. If any such proposal reached his desk now, he vowed to throw it in the fireplace.
***
December 5, 1950
Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway had stepped into Eighth Army’s Pyongyang headquarters for the first time yesterday, and had been immediately taken aback by just how rigorously the finest details of military regulations were followed here. Everyone wore their neckties, everyone’s shoes were polished, all those other little things that really didn’t matter a bit were being followed with an almost religious commitment. It made him wonder whether Patton would be more likely to place his hand on a Bible or a West Point regulations guide if he were ever required to swear an oath.
Ridgway thought a lot of that stuff to be a waste of time, but he could also see that Patton’s staff did a first-rate job. If wearing their neckties helped them do that, that was all well and good. If not, he wasn’t going to enforce it with a $40 fine.
He spent his first morning in Korea observing the staff much more than commanding them. Then in the afternoon, he had gone out to the front (Colonel Abrams had mentioned that a visit to the front every second day was mandatory for senior officers – a rule that Ridgway largely agreed with even if he thought it a bit excessive). If the staff had been loyal to Patton, the common soldiers were devoted to him. Half of the men he asked said that they thought he was some variant of “a hardass grumpy son of a bitch”, but to a man they agreed he was the best officer they had ever served under. Their hero had just been shot, and they wanted to avenge him.
He had been marked as Eighth Army’s replacement commander if anything went wrong, and while in Washington he was briefed regularly of events going on out here. The problem was that most of those briefings came through MacArthur, and MacArthur had a habit of not giving the full story. Since coming to Korea he’d realised it was much more often MacArthur’s deputies that were actually handling things in Tokyo. The big general seemed to be much more interested in his work in Japan than he did the war in Korea.
“I told Patton that he could have as much freedom as he needed to conduct operations within the Korean peninsula.” MacArthur had said yesterday. “Now I offer you that same freedom. I know I can count on you to bring about a successful end to the war.”
MacArthur, he thought, was being optimistic (when was he not?). As he looked at the map he could see that Patton wasn’t just the man who almost won the Korean War, but also the man most likely to lose it. A headlong charge towards the Yalu, if the Chinese weren’t broken, was more likely to end in catastrophe than in victory. Even if this entire Chinese Army was obliterated, China had what amounted to a limitless supply of manpower. The Patton method wouldn’t work forever.
“I warned him about the logistics of this operation, sir.” Walter Muller said, shaking his head. “He wouldn’t listen to me.”
“What can we accomplish?” Ridgway said. “If we’re going to build a line somewhere, where would be the best spot?”
“The Walker Line, or somewhere not far north of it, would be the best.” Muller said. “I could maintain that forever if we receive a few more trucks and spare parts. Further north, it depends on how many replacements I have. And the Chinese.”
“Suppose for a moment that the Chinese retreat over the river and stay there. What would you require to hold the Yalu line?” Ridgway asked.
“If you could double my stock of trucks and the fuel allocation, and gave me the parts to maintain them, I think it could be done.” Muller said. “Alternatively, if we had control of Odaejin, and the rail net east of Iwon was fully operational, then I would just require an additional fifty percent.”
“I thought you were running a corps out of Iwon already.” Ridgway said.
“We are, barely.” Muller said. “They’ve been at the Yalu for only a week, and three weeks ago they were still in Japan. If the Chinese sent a serious attack against them, I would not be confident of their ability to hold the line.”
“There’s nothing on the other side of the river.” Ridgway noticed. “Two small tracks ten miles apart, and then nothing at all on the Chinese side for a good fifty miles either side. Could the Chinese even attack on that axis?”
“If an American force attempted it, we would struggle.” Muller said. “Unfortunately, the Chinese seem better able to operate on a small logistical tail than we are. I wouldn’t count the possibility out.”
He then had similar discussions with Oscar Koch, who seemed to have amassed more intelligence reports than MacArthur and Willoughby, or anyone in Washington, put together, as well as Creighton Abrams. All three suggested that Patton had made it this far north on pure force of will, and had seemed determined to push to the Yalu because that was the only way to end the war.
At 1800 (apparently an hour later than Patton would have done it), he called a staff conference and laid out what the strategy would be.
“The Yalu is no longer our final objective. West of the 128th meridian, I would like to order all of our forces to begin preparing to fall back to a fortified position following the Chongchon River as far as Yuwonjin, then the road through Yongnimdong to the Chosin Reservoir, and then to maintain the gap between the Reservoirs to Handaeri. In the east, X Corps is to maintain its position on the Yalu River, and ROK forces east of it are to continue as far as the Soviet border.” Ridgway said. “All of the mines, barbed wire, and other defensive materials in Pusan are to be moved north with the greatest practicable haste.” He was less surprised that Patton hadn’t used them than he was that Patton hadn’t just shipped those things back to Japan, or dumped them in the sea, as soon as they arrived.
“Sir, if you don’t mind my asking, why are we pulling back?” Abrams asked. “Our offensive thus far has been successful.”
“Think of the Yalu like you would the Roman Antonine Wall.” Ridgway said. “It costs a lot to take it and even more to hold it. Even if it might be possible to hold it indefinitely, we don’t need to, and don’t want to, to achieve our goals. West of the 128th, we are better served by falling back to our version of Hadrian’s Wall. The mountains on that line are just about impassable: even the Chinese didn’t attack through them in their first or second offensives. And east of them, the terrain on the Chinese side of the border is worse than it is on the Korean side, so we have an advantage and can hold the line there once the logistics are shored up a bit more. Holding a position on the Yalu will prevent the Chinese from demanding a rump North Korea, and such a state wouldn’t be viable with the scrap of land they have left. This war is as good as won, and unless the President orders me to finish the conquest up to the Yalu, I see no reason to lose men going there.”
- BNC
And I see not in my blindness
What the objects were I wrought,
But as God rules o'er our bickerings
It was through His will I fought.
November 29, 1950
Sergeant Meeks, like almost everyone a few metres away from the Yalu, was crouched behind the trees and rocks as Patton delivered his speech. The general had insisted upon giving his speech on the river, despite it being the front line. He and some other noncoms had managed to convince most of the reporters and other civilians to take cover as best they could – this might have been a quiet sector yesterday, but it was still a battlefield. Then Patton started delivering his speech, and everyone forgot that the Chinese could be lurking nearby.
That was, until two shots rang out.
As Patton fell to the ground, Meeks feared that one of the shots had been fatal, until the general let out an incredible cry.
“God damn it you sons of bitches, you missed!”
Still clutching his sword in one hand, he attempted to stand up and, like Theodore Roosevelt all those years ago, continue his speech. Unlike Roosevelt, he was clearly struggling, and certainly at least one of the Chinese shots hadn’t missed him. He didn’t manage much more than to sit halfway up when a couple of medics reached him. It was only at that point that Meeks realised, that speech was going to get him in trouble with the President. A lot of trouble.
“Where’s the orderly?” one of the medics called out, and suddenly Meeks was no longer thinking about Truman any more.
“I’m here!” Meeks said, running up to the ice. Noticing the medic’s two bars, he added a “sir.”
“Here’s the deal.” the doc said. “He’s been hit once in each leg, and his fall gave him a hell of a shock. He’ll live, but only if we get him out of here immediately. I don’t think either shot hit anything vital. I’m most concerned about him bleeding out, and the plasma’s no good in this weather.” he finished tying a bandage around one of Patton’s wounds. The weather had convinced them to not even try removing his pants to do the job properly.
Meeks thanked God that Patton had taken to flying by helicopter. There weren’t a whole lot of them in Korea (even despite Patton asking MacArthur to “get him as many as you can, and then more”), but one was parked less than a mile away.
“Get him in the jeep.” Meeks said. “We’ve got a chopper up the road.” Then he turned to the pile of rocks and called out “John, get the jeep running!”
It wasn’t until they were flying back to Hamhung that Patton spoke to Meeks for the first time.
“God damn it! They missed.” he repeated his statement from the end of his speech, clearly in pain but determined not to show it.
“Sir, they definitely hit you.” Meeks said.
“In the wrong place.” Patton said. “That was my final battle. I went to the Yalu to die.”
“You won’t die.” Meeks promised. “Not today. The doc said so.”
“It is my destiny to die.” Patton protested. Meeks suddenly thought it was a good thing the medics had tied him to that stretcher on the helicopter’s side. Else the general might try to jump off.
“Sir, have you ever considered there might be one last battle for you to fight yet?” Meeks proposed. He knew Patton talked about the gods of war and his destiny to die in battle. “Mars might be saving you for something. Now get some rest, sir.”
Patton, for a wonder, actually listened.
***
December 1, 1950
President Harry Truman poured himself a bourbon. He didn’t drink often in the Oval Office and even less often at this time of the morning. Well, you didn’t get a surprise this shocking very often either, even as President of the United States.
“Want some?” he offered the bottle to General Bradley.
“No, thank you.” Bradley said. “What do you need today, Mr President?”
There was no use beating around the bush today. “Patton has to go. Immediately. Have you seen his speech?”
“I can’t say that I have.” Bradley said.
“Here.” Truman passed him the morning paper, which had published the entire thing. “I told him not to go running his mouth, and now he’s gone and called for us to go to war with Moscow and kill anyone redder than a light shade of pink. That’s not just disobeying a direct order. That’s burning the damn thing. I’ve spent six months trying to avoid a big war with Red China and he was ten words away from starting one!”
“I can have orders demanding his immediate resignation from Eighth Army command ready within the hour.” Bradley said. “And I won’t miss him one bit.”
Truman shook his head. “No, he’s not retiring. If he does, everyone’s going to think he’s leaving for his health. Half the country just watched him get shot on the evening news and then rise up from the dead. If he walks away from this he’ll be a hero.” Truman’s face tightened. “I’m going to fire the son of a bitch. Publicly.”
“You’re in for a fight.” Bradley warned. “It was Marshall that told him he couldn’t invade Japan, but for some reason he blamed Ike for it. A good part of his memoir is just him dragging Ike’s name through the mud, and I’m told his wife edited that down to the point that it was actually presentable.”
“I don’t care if he comes after me with all the subtlety of a madman with a flamethrower, he has to go.” Truman said, although privately he did wonder if it would ruin his chances at a possible third term come 1952. “One of the key principles of this country was civilian control of the military, something Patton neglected to mention when he brought up the Revolution. If he invades Red China, any semblance of that is gone. My decision is final.”
“General Ridgway has been ready to take over for Patton since the summer.” Bradley said.
“Send him.” Truman ordered. “And order Patton out of Korea too. I think he’s in a hospital in Hamhung right now. Have him moved to Japan. His wife is already on a plane for Tokyo.”
“Yes, sir!” Bradley said.
As Truman finished his drink, he wished that he had never sent Patton to Korea in the first place. This day had been coming for a long time, and he knew it. A few days ago, Congress had been discussing whether or not to give Patton a fifth star, or alternatively the Medal of Honor, for his incredible feats of leadership as he turned the Eighth Army from clueless draftees to a force rivalling America’s best. If any such proposal reached his desk now, he vowed to throw it in the fireplace.
***
December 5, 1950
Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway had stepped into Eighth Army’s Pyongyang headquarters for the first time yesterday, and had been immediately taken aback by just how rigorously the finest details of military regulations were followed here. Everyone wore their neckties, everyone’s shoes were polished, all those other little things that really didn’t matter a bit were being followed with an almost religious commitment. It made him wonder whether Patton would be more likely to place his hand on a Bible or a West Point regulations guide if he were ever required to swear an oath.
Ridgway thought a lot of that stuff to be a waste of time, but he could also see that Patton’s staff did a first-rate job. If wearing their neckties helped them do that, that was all well and good. If not, he wasn’t going to enforce it with a $40 fine.
He spent his first morning in Korea observing the staff much more than commanding them. Then in the afternoon, he had gone out to the front (Colonel Abrams had mentioned that a visit to the front every second day was mandatory for senior officers – a rule that Ridgway largely agreed with even if he thought it a bit excessive). If the staff had been loyal to Patton, the common soldiers were devoted to him. Half of the men he asked said that they thought he was some variant of “a hardass grumpy son of a bitch”, but to a man they agreed he was the best officer they had ever served under. Their hero had just been shot, and they wanted to avenge him.
He had been marked as Eighth Army’s replacement commander if anything went wrong, and while in Washington he was briefed regularly of events going on out here. The problem was that most of those briefings came through MacArthur, and MacArthur had a habit of not giving the full story. Since coming to Korea he’d realised it was much more often MacArthur’s deputies that were actually handling things in Tokyo. The big general seemed to be much more interested in his work in Japan than he did the war in Korea.
“I told Patton that he could have as much freedom as he needed to conduct operations within the Korean peninsula.” MacArthur had said yesterday. “Now I offer you that same freedom. I know I can count on you to bring about a successful end to the war.”
MacArthur, he thought, was being optimistic (when was he not?). As he looked at the map he could see that Patton wasn’t just the man who almost won the Korean War, but also the man most likely to lose it. A headlong charge towards the Yalu, if the Chinese weren’t broken, was more likely to end in catastrophe than in victory. Even if this entire Chinese Army was obliterated, China had what amounted to a limitless supply of manpower. The Patton method wouldn’t work forever.
“I warned him about the logistics of this operation, sir.” Walter Muller said, shaking his head. “He wouldn’t listen to me.”
“What can we accomplish?” Ridgway said. “If we’re going to build a line somewhere, where would be the best spot?”
“The Walker Line, or somewhere not far north of it, would be the best.” Muller said. “I could maintain that forever if we receive a few more trucks and spare parts. Further north, it depends on how many replacements I have. And the Chinese.”
“Suppose for a moment that the Chinese retreat over the river and stay there. What would you require to hold the Yalu line?” Ridgway asked.
“If you could double my stock of trucks and the fuel allocation, and gave me the parts to maintain them, I think it could be done.” Muller said. “Alternatively, if we had control of Odaejin, and the rail net east of Iwon was fully operational, then I would just require an additional fifty percent.”
“I thought you were running a corps out of Iwon already.” Ridgway said.
“We are, barely.” Muller said. “They’ve been at the Yalu for only a week, and three weeks ago they were still in Japan. If the Chinese sent a serious attack against them, I would not be confident of their ability to hold the line.”
“There’s nothing on the other side of the river.” Ridgway noticed. “Two small tracks ten miles apart, and then nothing at all on the Chinese side for a good fifty miles either side. Could the Chinese even attack on that axis?”
“If an American force attempted it, we would struggle.” Muller said. “Unfortunately, the Chinese seem better able to operate on a small logistical tail than we are. I wouldn’t count the possibility out.”
He then had similar discussions with Oscar Koch, who seemed to have amassed more intelligence reports than MacArthur and Willoughby, or anyone in Washington, put together, as well as Creighton Abrams. All three suggested that Patton had made it this far north on pure force of will, and had seemed determined to push to the Yalu because that was the only way to end the war.
At 1800 (apparently an hour later than Patton would have done it), he called a staff conference and laid out what the strategy would be.
“The Yalu is no longer our final objective. West of the 128th meridian, I would like to order all of our forces to begin preparing to fall back to a fortified position following the Chongchon River as far as Yuwonjin, then the road through Yongnimdong to the Chosin Reservoir, and then to maintain the gap between the Reservoirs to Handaeri. In the east, X Corps is to maintain its position on the Yalu River, and ROK forces east of it are to continue as far as the Soviet border.” Ridgway said. “All of the mines, barbed wire, and other defensive materials in Pusan are to be moved north with the greatest practicable haste.” He was less surprised that Patton hadn’t used them than he was that Patton hadn’t just shipped those things back to Japan, or dumped them in the sea, as soon as they arrived.
“Sir, if you don’t mind my asking, why are we pulling back?” Abrams asked. “Our offensive thus far has been successful.”
“Think of the Yalu like you would the Roman Antonine Wall.” Ridgway said. “It costs a lot to take it and even more to hold it. Even if it might be possible to hold it indefinitely, we don’t need to, and don’t want to, to achieve our goals. West of the 128th, we are better served by falling back to our version of Hadrian’s Wall. The mountains on that line are just about impassable: even the Chinese didn’t attack through them in their first or second offensives. And east of them, the terrain on the Chinese side of the border is worse than it is on the Korean side, so we have an advantage and can hold the line there once the logistics are shored up a bit more. Holding a position on the Yalu will prevent the Chinese from demanding a rump North Korea, and such a state wouldn’t be viable with the scrap of land they have left. This war is as good as won, and unless the President orders me to finish the conquest up to the Yalu, I see no reason to lose men going there.”
- BNC
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