CHAPTER 21
So but now with Tanks a'clatter
Have I waddled on the foe
Belching death at twenty paces,
By the star shell's ghastly glow.
November 19, 1950
Fighters from the Leyte screamed overhead. The sea was choppy and unfriendly. Something up on the beach was burning, in spite of the snow on the ground and the freezing weather. Brigadier General Lewis B. Puller missed the sounds of guns going off – this fleet included a pair of cruisers – but unfortunately this wasn’t a real invasion. Iwon had been friendly territory for a while, but the damned Chinese had made a habit of appearing where they weren’t supposed to be. The 1st Marine Division, his command since General Smith got himself shot in Pyongyang, had one standing order. “Be ready for anything, at any time and any place.”
Some of the troops would be unloading from transport ships in Iwon’s small port. Others, including most of the Marines, were going to be dropped on the beach by LVTs. Patton had made it clear he wanted as many men as possible in Iwon within twenty-four hours, and he didn’t care how it happened. If it made the invasion look like a complete shambles, well didn’t they all?
The LVT’s ramp crashed down onto the snow-covered sand. Puller knew what this meant. “Let’s go men!” he called out. “We don’t want Patton’s boys beating us to the Yalu after all!”
As the men clambered on to the beach, he heard the sound of a jeep coming to a stop. “It appears I already have! At least as far as the beaches. Hello, Chesty.” Patton said with an obvious smirk.
After they exchanged salutes, Puller decided to steal one of Patton’s favourite greetings. “Where the hell have you been?” he asked.
“Defending.” Patton replied sarcastically. “I don’t imagine Japan was any more glorious.”
“Sir, the Marine Corps’ purpose is to fight. Sitting around Japan is a waste of our talent.” Puller said. “Find us some communists to shoot, sir, and the word ‘Marine’ will become another word for fear in the Chinese language.”
“I thought my name was going to take that spot.” Patton joked. “But there’s plenty of the sons of bitches for us to shoot. Take your guys up to Pungsan, about forty miles that way.” he pointed to the northwest. “In the last war I marched my men a hundred miles in two days before sending them straight into action against the Huns. You tell the Marines that. It’ll inspire them.”
“Sir, they already know about it.” Puller replied. “They told me they’ll do this trip in less than half the time, mountains and weather be damned.”
“Then I suppose I’ll see you again on the Yalu. Make the river run red with the blood of our enemies!” Patton said, before getting back in the jeep and driving off to the east. The 7th Division had begun unloading an hour ago, but the Marines were fast catching up.
He turned to his men again. “Some of you might have just heard me talking with the general. We’re heading for Pungsan. And if we’re going to beat Patton at moving men, we’ll be there by 1100 tomorrow morning.” That was a little under nineteen hours away. “So let’s show the Army what Marines can do!”
***
November 21, 1950
Major Harry Fleming crouched in the ruins of a building in Toksil. He didn’t bother digging a foxhole. Patton’s borderline obsession with not digging them had nothing to do with it: in the ROK army his words were ignored at the best of times. Here, high up in the mountains, the ground was frozen solid. The temperature hovered around twenty below, and winter was still technically a month off. Digging in was impossible. Not that it would have made much difference anyway: a blind Chinaman could have found him. The regiment’s gasoline rations were being used to keep men warm, and his nearby fire was no exception. The tanks they were supposed to be fuelling had been left behind near the Chosin Reservoir. Those things were useless in the mountains.
A burst from a PPSh, or some other similar weapon, told him the communists were nearby. That wasn’t too surprising: Toksil was totally surrounded. Colonel Lim had received orders that amounted to ‘circle the wagons’ and to wait for help. Fleming knew that better than anyone in the 7th Regiment, or even in the 6th ROK Division. He’d heard them directly from General Coulter, who seemed to be Patton’s more diplomatic representative for commanding the Korean troops. He’d passed them on to Lim himself.
He used a broken mirror (taken from the bathroom in another Korean house last night) to peer over the crumbling walls. No Chinese were in sight. They hardly ever were. Even compared to the North Koreans, the Chinese were experts at camouflage.
Just in case, he poked his Garand over the wall and shot two rounds off into the mountains. He didn’t know if he hit anything: it was more to make the Chinese keep their heads down than anything. Then a shriek from that direction suggested maybe he had hit someone. To be sure, he fired once more, before scrambling into the next house along. The Chinese didn’t have much proper artillery (not that you’d be able to use it in this terrain), but they had almost as many mortars as they did rifles or PPShs. Those awful things were a big part of the reason Toksil was in ruins.
A Korean private came running up to him. In not-so-good English, he said “Colonel Lim, at command tent. Now.”
“Thank you.” Fleming replied in Korean – as long as the discussion was about military matters, he knew enough of the language to talk with his allies. It was one of the reasons he had this job and not some post with Patton’s army further south.
Colonel Lim Bu Taik, on the other hand, had never revealed whether he spoke any English at all. He might not have, plenty of Koreans didn’t (that had had some unfortunate consequences in 1945, when the first round of American occupiers were forced into using hated Japanese as a common language). Or he might have just been stubborn and very good at hiding his skills.
As a short mortar bombardment shelled a nearby block of ruins, Colonel Lim asked “where are the Americans” in his native tongue.
“I do not know exactly, sir.” Fleming replied. “I only know what I’ve told you before, Patton is driving north as quickly as he can.”
“It needs to be soon.” Colonel Lim said grumpily. “I knew it was a bad idea hiding up in here. Your Patton is using us as bait. We die and then he takes the glory of killing Chinese all for himself.”
Fleming knew that a lot of Koreans agreed with that feeling. Patton had been unpopular with the Koreans since the day he shot that mule. Still, he had to at least convince the colonel to hold out. “Sir, Patton is a talented and experienced general. He is ordering us to hold out here because he believes it will better serve the Republic of Korea than a retreat would have.”
“Hold out with what?” Lim said. Then angrily, he repeated himself. “Hold out with what? Our supplies are running out and there’s a million Chinese out there!”
“Just how many supplies do we have?” Fleming asked. He knew the regiment would not lack for food, as a significant store of pre-cooked rice was found when the town was occupied. Everything else was being used up much more quickly than had been anticipated. This Chinese attack was relentless.
“Twenty percent.” Lim said. “Enough until the sunset. Then we fight only with knives.”
“I’ll ask General Coulter where the troops are at.” Fleming said, but before he could pick up the phone, he heard a familiar bangbangbang sound that could not have come from either the Koreans’ Garands or any of the weapons the Chinese were known to use.
“Those are grease guns!” he exclaimed. Then, switching back to Korean, he said “sir, I think the help has arrived.”
***
November 22, 1950
“King Kong is gone.” Oscar Koch announced. “Dead or replaced, I don’t know, but he’s gone.”
Eighth Army headquarters fell silent. Kang Kon had been the North Koreans’ top commander. Patton had called him ‘their Rommel’ a few times, and while he hadn’t been nearly so successful as Rommel, the bastard had no doubt been a tough opponent.
“How do you know?” Patton asked. “I don’t imagine they announced his replacement over the radio.”
“In a way, they did.” Koch replied. “Our signals units north of Toksil have intercepted a number of messages attempting to organise the remnants of the NKPA. Every one of them is signed Kim Chaek. He either commanded a division or corps before this, but seeing as we also got a message north of Pungsan and another near Onjong, it is unlikely he’s just got a corps.”
“They announced the name of the commander over the radio?” Patton was surprised by that. Ike had thought Third Army had poor radio discipline! “You don’t think these are dummy messages meant to trick us?”
“What would they have to gain from it?” Koch asked. “The NKPA is at best a broken shell. They haven’t offered effective resistance in six weeks. Telling us that they’ve got a new commander doesn’t change anything about that.”
“They could be trying to make us overconfident so that we walk into a trap?” Patton proposed. “The damned Hun Chinese just did that to the ROKs.”
“Could be,” Koch agreed. “but unlikely in my opinion. Besides, the B-29s raided Kanggye a couple of days ago. My guess is, Stratemeyer got him.”
Raided, Patton knew, was a very tame term. He’d seen some of the photos, there wasn’t a whole lot of town left. Undoubtedly, the North Korean government was operating from either a cave or some sort of bunker these days. Rhee’s partisan hunters had uncovered several PPSh factories hidden in mountain caves further south, untouchable by air. Kim Il-sung had to have one just like it.
“I want to capture that son of a bitch.” Patton said.
“Kim Chaek?” Koch asked.
“The dictator bastard.” Patton corrected him. “He’s going to go crying back to Moscow soon, there’s nowhere left in this dump of a country for him to hide, so we ought to capture him before he has a chance to. Then what we do is, when we reach the Yalu, I’ll stand him up there on the edge of the ice somewhere, and I’ll stare into his eyes as I put a bullet right between them. Then, once the corpse has fallen into the river, I’ll piss in it.”
Koch just ignored Patton’s grand statement about pissing in the river. For one, the river was frozen solid at this time of year, so there probably wasn’t any ‘edge of the ice’ where he could do what he described. For another, he said that he would piss in the river at least once a day now, and was getting increasingly creative about how he would do so. In five minutes, he would forget he ever made this particular statement, so Koch was glad when Colonel Landrum came in and changed the subject.
“Sir, reports from the front.” Landrum said. “In the west, we control both banks of the Kuryong River near Onjong.”
“Is it bridged?” Patton asked.
“Frozen over.” Landrum replied. “General Gay reports continued heavy resistance on the east bank, but believes we should be able to push forward in strength soon.”
Patton swore under his breath. The American reaction to the Chinese second offensive had been intended as three lances piercing the flesh of the enemy, the same way that English lance had gone through his guts at Crecy. Instead, the western force had run straight into a wall of Chinese soldiers. The UN forces now held an advantage there, but it was slim.
“What else?” Patton asked.
“In the east, Puller and the Marines report a breakthrough northwest of Pungsan. The Chinese troops there have been routed.” Landrum said triumphantly.
- BNC
