The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Read Online Free PDF

them, small on a map somewhere back at headquarters, were surprisingly wide if you had to run from one unit to another, as he did.
    Urban was near Battalion headquarters on October 31 when Lieutenant Colonel Harold (Johnny) Johnson, until the previous week the battalion commander of Third Battalion of the Eighth Regiment—the 3/8—but recently promoted to the command of his own regiment, the Fifth Cav (also part of the First Cavalry Division), had driven up to check on his old outfit. One of the last things Johnson had done before they all left Pyongyang was hold a memorial service for the men of the Third Battalion who had been lost since the war began—some four hundred of them. He was joined at the service by the soldiers who had been there from the start, “a pitifully small remainder,” as Johnson put it.
    Johnny Johnson was more than admired, he was loved by most of the men in his old outfit. He had been with them from the day they arrived in country, and they felt he always made the right decisions in battle. He had an unusual sense of loyalty to the men under him, the kind of thing that ordinary soldiers notice and value when they grade an officer—and they were always grading officers, because their lives depended on it. They knew that Johnson had turned down a chance to be a regimental commander early in the fighting in order to stay with the battalion when it was new to combat, because he felt obligated to the men he had brought over.
    He was a man who had already been through his own prolonged hell. Captured by the Japanese at Bataan at the start of World War II, he had managed to survive the Bataan Death March and more than three years as a prisoner. Generally, being a prisoner of war did not help an officer’s career—this would be especially true in Korea, where the treatment of American prisoners by the Communists was unusually cruel and where, because of the brainwashing, some men had been damaged—but Johnson eventually ended up as chief of staff of the Army. “He was the best,” Lester Urban said years later, “someone born to lead men. I think he was always thinking about what was good for us. Nothing ever got by him.”
    His experience on Bataan had made Johnson less trusting of conventional wisdom, and he knew more about the consequences of undue optimism than most officers. At that moment, he had the Fifth Cav positioned as a reserve force just a few miles south of his old unit, but he was becoming nervous, hearing talk of a large enemy force moving through the area, one that might cut the road, severing the Eighth Regiment from the rest of the division. On his own Johnson had driven north to check the situation out. On the ride, the samestillness that had bothered General Paik, the fact that there was nothing moving, upset Johnson too. Something like that, he later said, made the back of your neck prickle. When he finally reached his old battalion, he did not like what he saw at all. His replacement, Robert Ormond, was brand-new to his job and, to Johnson’s eye, had dispersed the battalion poorly. Most of the men were positioned in the flat paddy land and not even very well dug in.
    Watching the two officers meet, Urban sensed Johnson’s distress. Johnson was not, as Urban saw it, a man to chew another officer out, but what he said to Ormond seemed surprisingly tough: “You’ve got to get these men out of the valley and up on the high ground! They’re much too vulnerable where they are! You’ve got no defense if you’re hit!” (“I thought he was going to whip Ormond’s butt right then and there,” Urban said years later.) Johnson assumed that Ormond would pick up on what he said and was appalled to discover later that his advice had been ignored. Nor was it just the Third Battalion that was poorly positioned. After the entire tragedy was over, many of the more senior officers would admit that the disposition of the entire Eighth Regiment had been very poorly done. The men were