David Halberstam - The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

America and the Korean War

For Jean, again

N OTE ON M ILITARY U NITS

The size, composition, and leadership of military units varies with time, place, and circumstances. In the early fighting in Korea, almost every unit was always understrength. Therefore, these numbers are approximations.

W EAPONS AND A RTILLERY

Every effort has been made to update the maps in The Coldest Winter to a modified version of the standard MIL-STD-2525B common warfighter symbology used by the U.S. Military. This is a comprehensive system that gives a trained interpreter instant information about a military units alignment, size, type, and identity.

In some cases, complete information was not available for specific military units, and rather than introduce inaccuracies, an easily legible shorthand has been applied. With clarity in mind, other modifications that arent standard MIL-STD-2525B have been made to improve readability.

While MIL-STD-2525B accounts for hundreds of military designations, only a few are necessary to understand the units employed in the Korean War.

The name of the unit can be displayed to the left of the unit symbol, the name of the larger group it is part of appears to the right of the unit symbol, and the size of the unit is indicated by the marking at the top. For example, the symbol for the Third Battalion of the Eighth Cavalry is:

Unless otherwise noted, a solid black line represents U.N. positions or a defensive perimeter.

O N JUNE 25, 1950, nearly seven divisions of elite North Korean troops, many of whom had fought for the Communist side in the Chinese civil war, crossed the border into South Korea, with the intention of conquering the entire South in three weeks. Some six months earlier, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in a colossal gaffe, had neglected to include South Korea in Americas Asian defense perimeter, and the only American forces then in the country, part of a tiny advisory mission, were almost completely unprepared for the attack. In the early weeks of the invasion, the Communist offensive was a stunning success. Every bit of news from the battlefield was negative. In Washington, President Harry Truman and his top advisers debated the enemys intentions. Was this, as they greatly feared, an assault ordered up by the Russians? Were the North Koreans nothing but Moscows pawns? Or was it a feint, the first in a series of what might be provocative Communist moves around the world? They quickly decided to use United States, and in time United Nations, forces to draw a line against Communist aggression in Korea.

The Korean War would last three years, not three weeks, and it would be the most bitter kind of war, in which relatively small American and United Nations forces worked to neutralize the superior numbers of their adversaries by the use of vastly superior hardware and technology. It was a war fought on strikingly harsh terrain and often in ghastly weather, most particularly a numbing winter cold that often seemed to American troops an even greater enemy than the North Koreans or Chinese. The centurys nastiest little war, the military historian S. L. A. Marshall called it. The Americans and their United Nations allies faced terrible, mountainous terrain, which worked against their advantage in hardware, most notably their armored vehicles, and offered caves and other forms of shelter to the enemy. If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location to fight this damnable war politically and militarily, the unanimous choice would have been Korea, Secretary of State Acheson said years after it was over. A sour war, Achesons friend Averell Harriman said of it.