North Korean and Red Chinese losses were four, five, six times as many as those of the UN troops they faced. Their generals, and the commissars who told those generals what to do, didn’t give a damn. Men were as disposable to them as bullets or boots.
The really scary thing was, they could win that way. The Reds made brave soldiers-often braver than the South Koreans whose fat the United States had pulled off the fire. They swarmed forward against machine guns, against tanks, against damn near anything. From all Cade could gather, worse things would happen to them if they hung back than whatever American shells and bullets dished out.
He and his men trudged through a little village. An old man and a girl of perhaps eight sent them impassive stares. The village looked to have been fought over two or three times in the recent past: likely, once in the American push up to the Yalu and once or twice in the retreat after Chinese troops swarmed over the river and drove the UN forces back.
Cade shook his head. He wished his beard were thicker. It might keep his face warmer, the way it seemed to with some of the older guys. Lice? He’d worry about lice some other time. Or, with DDT ready to kill off the little bastards with one squirt from the spray gun, he might not worry about them at all.
He’d just thought that maybe he’d try a cigarette after all when the Reds hit them from behind. One second, everything was quiet. The next, swarms of men in quilted khaki jackets and caps with earflaps were screaming their heads off and shooting what sounded like a million Russian-model submachine guns. The damn things were good out to only a couple of hundred yards, but inside that range they’d chop you into hamburger.
His own.30-caliber carbine was a piece of junk by comparison. It was an officer’s weapon, one that fired a smaller, weaker cartridge than the good old M-1. Like an M-1, it was only semiautomatic; it didn’t go full auto. At short range, even M-1s were in deep against submachine guns. The cheap, nasty little things threw lead around as if it were going out of style.
But the platoon had a light machine gun. If the Chinks didn’t know it, they were about to get a surprise they wouldn’t like. “Johnson! Masters! Set up in this hooch here”-Curtis pointed to a not too battered hut at the south end of the village-“and give those cocksuckers what-for!”
As soon as the LMG started banging away, the Red Chinese screamed on a different note. Cade and the other American soldiers kept plinking away at anything they saw or imagined they saw. The enemy went on pushing, probing. Without the machine gun, the Americans would have died quickly-or slowly, depending.
Cade sent most of his men down the track. If they didn’t, or couldn’t, get to Hungnam, they were screwed any which way. They’d have to head south through a countryside that was a lot more hostile than anyone could have imagined before things went sour.
To the soldiers at the LMG, Curtis said, “Hang on here as long as you have to.”
“How long is that, Lieutenant?” Masters asked.
“Well-as long as you have to,” Cade answered.
People were calling it the worst American defeat since the Battling Bastards of Bataan went under in the dark, early days of World War II. It was a hell of a way to go into Christmas, only a week away now. And it was why Truman had come to Hawaii to confer with Douglas MacArthur. In October, MacArthur had flown to Wake Island to assure Truman Red China wouldn’t interfere in the Korean War. Which would have been nice if only it had turned out to be true.
Truman didn’t care for looking up at MacArthur, either. Not looking up to, because he didn’t. But looking up at. Truman was an ordinary, stocky five-nine. MacArthur stood at least six even. He seemed taller than that because of his lean build, his ramrod posture, and his high-crowned general’s cap. It wasn’t quite so raked as the ones the Nazi marshals had worn, but it came close.
Looking out a window in the airliner, Truman watched a Cadillac approach the
. “Your car is here, sir,” an aide said.
“I never would have guessed,” the President answered. The aide looked wounded. Somebody-George Kaufman? — had said satire was what closed on Saturday night. Well, sarcasm was what got a politician thrown out on his ear. Truman walked to the doorway, saying, “Sorry, Fred. I’ve come a long way, and I’m tired. The weather will be nicer outside. Maybe I will, too.”
By the look on Fred’s face, he didn’t believe it. Since Truman didn’t, either, he couldn’t get on his flunky. The weather
The limousine took the President to Fort Kamehameha, just south and west of Hickam Field. The fort had guarded the channel that lead in to Pearl Harbor. It was obsolete now, of course; the Japs had proved as much at the end of 1941. Being obsolete didn’t mean it had got torn down. The military didn’t work that way. No, it had gone from fort to office complex.
A spruce young first lieutenant led Truman to the meeting room where MacArthur waited. The five-star general stood and saluted. “Mr. President,” he rasped. The air smelled of pipe tobacco.
“At ease,” Truman told him. He knew the military ropes. He’d been an artillery captain himself in the First World War. Knowing the ropes didn’t mean he felt any great affection for them. “Let’s do this without ceremony, as much as we can.”
“However you please, sir,” MacArthur said.
They did have a big map of Korea, Japan, and Manchuria taped to the conference table. That would help. Truman stabbed a finger at the terrain between the reservoir and the port, the terrain where the American troops were in the meat grinder. “What the devil went wrong here?”
“We got caught by surprise, sir,” Douglas MacArthur said. “No one expected the Chinese to swarm into North Korea in such numbers.”
“There were intelligence warnings,” Truman said. And there had been. MacArthur just chose not to believe them, and made Truman not believe them, either. The general was finishing up his own triumphal campaign. He’d defended the Pusan perimeter, at the southern end of the Korean peninsula. He’d landed at Inchon and got behind the North Koreans. He’d rolled them up from south to north, and he’d been on the verge of rolling them up for good…till the Chinese decided they didn’t want the USA or an American puppet on their border. MacArthur’d guessed they would sit still for it. Not for the first time, he’d found himself mistaken.
“Intelligence warns of everything under the sun,” he said now, with a not so faint sneer. “Most of what it comes up with is moonshine, not worth worrying about.”
“This wasn’t,” Truman said brusquely. MacArthur’s craggy features congealed into a scowl. The President went on, “The question now is, what can we do about it?”
“Under the current rules of engagement, sir, we can’t do anything about it till too late,” MacArthur said. “As long as American bombers aren’t allowed to strike on the other side of the Yalu, the Chinese will be able to assemble as they please and bring fresh troops into the fight in North Korea without our disrupting their preparations in any way.”
“How much good will bombing north of the river do, though?” Truman asked, holding on to his temper. North of the Yalu sat enormous, hostile Red China. Bomb Red China, and who knew what kind of excuse you were handing Joe Stalin? “Won’t they hit our B-29s hard? The Superforts were world-beaters in 1945, but they haven’t done so well against North Korean air defenses. The Chinese should be better yet on that score, don’t you think?”
“If we use ordinary munitions, we will slow them down to some degree but we won’t stop them. You’re absolutely right about that, sir.” MacArthur sounded amazed the President could be right about anything. That might have been Truman’s imagination, but he didn’t think so. His Far East commander went on, “But if we drop a few atomic bombs on cities in Manchuria, not only do we destroy their men and rail lines, we also send the message that we are sick and tired of playing around.”
“The trouble with that is, if we drop A-bombs on Stalin’s friends, what’s to keep him from dropping them on ours?” Truman returned.
“My considered opinion, your Excellency, is that he wouldn’t have the nerve,” Douglas MacArthur said. “He doesn’t have that many bombs. He can’t-he just dropped his first last year. And he must see we can hurt him far worse than he can hurt us.”
“Once the pipeline gets moving, they come pretty fast, though. And he has a hell of a lot of men and tanks in Eastern Europe, too,” the President said. “They could head west on very short notice.”
MacArthur shrugged. “We can destroy swarms of them before they get into West Germany. And how sad do you think the French and British will be if we have to use a few bombs on West German territory?”
Harry Truman’s chuckle was dry as a martini in the desert. “I’m sure they would wring their hands in dismay.” He scratched the side of his jaw, considering. “If we’d been able to get our forces out through Hungnam, I wouldn’t think of this for a minute. The atom is a dangerous genie to let out of the lamp-deadly dangerous. But now the Chinese are bragging that they really can do what Kim Il-sung had in mind-they want to drive us into the sea and turn all of Korea into a satellite.”
“Yes, sir. That’s exactly what they want to do,” MacArthur agreed. “We’d betray our loyal allies in the south if we let them get away with it, too. The enemy has the advantage in numbers-China always will. He has the advantage in logistics, too. He’s right across the river from the fighting, and we’re six thousand miles away. If we insist on fighting a war with our hands tied behind our backs, what can we possibly do but lose?”
“You’ve got something there.” Now it was Truman’s turn to sound surprised. He hadn’t expected arrogant MacArthur to make such good sense. In other words, he hadn’t looked for the general’s thoughts to march with his own so well. He’d already ordered the bomb used once, and ended a war with it. How could ordering it into action again be anything but easier?
“Come on, Linda!” Marian Staley called. “Whatever you do, don’t dawdle! We’ve got to go to the cobbler’s and then to the supermarket.”
“I’m coming, Mommy,” the four-year-old answered from her bedroom. “I’m just putting my coat on now.”
“Okay,” Marian said, knowing it might not be. Four-year-olds could dress themselves, sure, but not always reliably. And Linda didn’t have all the buttons on her coat through the buttonholes they were supposed to occupy. Marian didn’t fuss about it; she just fixed things. Then she asked, “Have you gone potty?”
Linda’s blond curls bobbed up and down as she nodded. Her eyes were hazel like Bill’s, not gray. Otherwise, she looked like her mother. “Just a little while ago,” she said.
Young children’s sense of time being what it was, that might mean anything or nothing. For that matter, it might be a fib. “Well, go one more time,” Marian said. “We’ll be away from home for a while.”
A put-upon secretary might have aimed the look Linda sent her at an obnoxious boss. But Marian’s flesh and blood went off to the bathroom, flushed, and came back. Marian didn’t think Linda had enough deceit yet to flush when she hadn’t done anything. If she was wrong, she’d find out about it.
“It’s raining!” Linda started to open her own little Mickey Mouse umbrella.
“Don’t do that indoors! It’s bad luck!” Marian said. “Wait till we get out on the front porch.”
Once they left the house, she opened her own plain navy-blue bumbershoot-much plainer than her daughter’s, but able to cover both of them if it had to, and it probably would. It wasn’t raining too hard. Everett, Washington, north of Seattle, had the same kind of weather as the bigger city. You could and did get rain any time of year at all, in other words, but it seldom snowed even during winter.
By what Bill’s letters said, Korea wasn’t like that. It was hot and dusty in the summertime, and impersonated Siberia now. He was copilot on a B-29. From things she read between the lines in his letters and from little snippets on the news, the Reds gave the big bombers a hard time. She just wanted him to finish his hitch and come home safe.
The sun-yellow Studebaker sat in the driveway. “C’mon, sweetie,” Marian told Linda. They went to the car together. Marian opened the driver’s-side door and held her umbrella while Linda shut hers and slithered across the seat to the passenger side. She sat up straight there. Even though her feet barely got past the front edge of the seat, she looked very grown-up.