The Captains (2 page)

(One)
Seoul, Korea
25 June 1950

The 38th parallel bisects the Korean peninsula. From a point near Ongjin, on the Yellow Sea, to another near Yangyang on the Sea of Japan, the parallel stretches just over 200 miles.

If the forces of the Immun Gun, the Army of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, had been spread out equally across the 38th parallel, there would have been one Immun Gun soldier every twelve feet. There were 90,000 of them. And one in three of these was a veteran of the Chinese Communist Army, which had just sent Chiang Kai-shek fleeing to the island of Formosa.

They were not, of course, spread out across the line. They were formed in Russian-style military organizations. There were seven infantry divisions, one armored brigade, equipped with the Russian T34 tank which had stopped Germany's best, a separate infantry regiment, a motorcycle regiment, and a brigade of the Border Constabulary, the Bo An Dae, North Korea's version of the Waffen SS.

They had 150 tanks in all, and 200 airplanes, large quantities of 76 mm self-propelled howitzers, and even more 122 mm truck-drawn howitzers. They were “advised” by a large contingent of Russian officers and technicians, and they were equipped with Russian small arms.

They also had boats, and they made two amphibious landings behind the South Korean lines between Samch'ok and the 38th parallel on the Sea of Japan in coordination with an attack by the 5th Infantry Division on the 10th Regiment of the Republic of Korea's (ROK) 8th Infantry Division.

The 2nd and 7th North Korean Infantry Divisions attacked the understrength ROK 6th Division at Ch'unch'on. The 3rd and 4th North Korean Infantry Divisions, reinforced by the 14th Tank Regiment, attacked the ROK 7th Division at Uijongbu. The North Korean 1st and 6th Infantry Divisions, reinforced by the 203rd Tank Regiment, attacked the ROK 1st “Capitol” Division (less the 17th Infantry Regiment) at Kaesong on the route to Seoul and Inchon. And on the extreme left of the front, that peaceful Sunday morning, the North Korean Border Constabulary Brigade and the 14th Infantry Regiment attacked the ROK 17th Infantry Regiment, which held the Ongjin peninsula on the Yellow Sea.

(Two)
The Ongjin Peninsula, Korea
0400 Hours
25 June 1950

When, without warning, the positions and the headquarters of the 17th Infantry Regiment of the Capitol Division were brought under artillery, mortar, and heavy automatic weapons fire by the Border Constabulary of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, the three American officers—a captain and two lieutenants—of the U.S. Army Korean Military Advisory Group were asleep in their quarters on a knoll overlooking the regimental headquarters, a sandbag bunker erected on the near side of one of the hills.

Their quarters, now fixed up to be as comfortable as possible, had once been a farmhouse. The floor was baked mud, through which vents carried heat in the winter, a device alleged to be the world's first central heating system. The walls were mortared stone, eighteen inches thick, and the roof was of foot-thick thatch.

Because they recognized the need to do so, the three made a valiant effort to live as much like their Korean counterparts as they could, yet there were things in the ex-farmhouse to be found nowhere else in the 17th Infantry. There was a General Electric refrigerator and a Zenith combination radio-phonograph and a Sears, Roebuck three-burner electric hotplate, all powered via a heavy rubber-covered cable by a skid-mounted GM diesel generator. And there was a Collins
BC
-610 radio transmitter and an RCA AR-88 communications receiver, used for communication with KMAG in Seoul, forty-five or fifty miles, as the crow flies, to the east.

For all practical purposes, the 17th Infantry (Colonel Paik In Yup commanding) was on an island, although the Ongjin peninsula was of course connected with the peninsula of Korea. When the Great Powers had partitioned Korea after War II, they had made the 38th parallel the dividing line. The Russian and Red Chinese-backed People's Democratic Republic lay north of it, while the American-backed Republic of Korea lay south.

The 38th parallel crossed the Ongjin peninsula very near the point where it joined the Korean peninsula; the line was fortified on both sides, and there was no land passage between the Ongjin peninsula and the rest of South Korea. All commerce (what there was of it) and all supply of the 17th Infantry had to be accomplished by sea.

It was generally agreed among the three American officers assigned to the 17th that if the gooks north of the parallel started something, they were really going to be up the creek without a paddle.

Seconds after the first artillery shell whistled in from North Korea, it was followed by another and another. Simultaneously, there came the different whistle of incoming heavy mortars, and off in the distance, the dull rumble of heavy machine guns. It was apparent that the shit had indeed hit the fan.

The three officers dressed hurriedly, in crisply starched fatigues and highly shined combat boots (laundry and boot polishing were available for three dollars per month, or the equivalent in PX merchandise) and picked up their personal weapons. Technically, as instructors of the 17th Infantry, they were supposed to be unarmed. But the North Koreans were capable of infiltration, and the South Koreans were capable of stealing anything not firmly embedded in concrete; personal weapons to defend themselves against either happenstance were as necessary to their survival as the water purification pills and toilet tissue (1,000 sheets per roll) that reached them at irregular intervals via the South Korean Navy's LSTs.

The senior instructor, clutching a U.S. .30 caliber carbine in his hand, announced that he was going over to the CP to see what the fuck was going on. His two subordinates, one armed with a carbine, the other with a privately owned Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver, turned to firing up the diesel generator (shut down at bedtime because of the horrific roar it made) and to warming up the BC-610 and the AR-88 radios.

By the time the generator had been running long enough to warm up the radio tubes, the senior instructor was back from the 17th Infantry's command post.

“Any luck?” he asked the lieutenant at the microphone. The lieutenant shook his head, “no.” The captain took the microphone from him.

“Victor, Victor, this is Tahiti, Tahiti,” he said into the mike. And he said it again and again without response for fifteen minutes as artillery whistled in to explode deafeningly, sending white-hot fragments of steel ricocheting off the foot-thick stone walls of the hootch, until the voice radio operator on duty at KMAG returned from taking a liesurely crap secure in the knowledge that absolutely nothing was going to happen at 0400 on a Sunday morning in the Land of the Morning Calm.

“Tahiti,” a bored voice finally came over the AR-88's speaker. “This is Victor. Read you five by five. Go ahead.”

“Where the fuck have you been?” the captain demanded, furiously. And then without waiting for a reply, he went on. “Victor, stand by to copy Operational Immediate, I say again, Operational Immediate.”

The radio op's voice was no longer bored: “Victor ready to copy Operational Immediate. Go ahead.”

“From Tahiti Six to KMAG Six, 17th ROK under heavy artillery mortar and heavy automatic weapons fire since 0400. Believe ground assault will follow shortly. All KMAG personnel at CP. Advise. Signature is Delahanty, Captain. You got that?”

“I got it, Tahiti,” Victor said. “Stand by.”

(Three)
Headquarters
Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG)
Seoul, Korea
25 June 1950

The commanding general of KMAG had boarded a ship the day before in Pusan to go home; his replacement had not officially assumed command. The slot called for a brigadier general, and there had been no rush among the army's one-star generals to ask for the command. Korea, “Frozen Chosen,” was generally recognized to be the asshole of the globe, and serving as senior advisor to its raggedy-assed army was not considered to be a desirable assignment.

Pending the assignment of a new general, command had been temporarily vested in the KMAG chief of staff, a colonel of artillery. When the word of the North Korean invasion reached him, when it became apparent that it was not an “incident” but a bona fide invasion of South Korea by a four-pronged land assault across the parallel and by two amphibious invasions on the east coast, the colonel had serious doubts that anything could be done to stop it. The only American troops in South Korea were his, and they were not organized in any kind of military formation that could be committed to combat. And while the colonel believed that the South Korean Army would fight, he knew better than just about anyone else that they didn't have much to fight with.

That made evacuation, or withdrawal, or whatever word one wanted to use for getting the hell out of Seoul, the only reasonable action to take. Doing that was not going to be easy. There were a thousand problems to be solved almost immediately, and among these was what to do about those three poor bastards stuck on the Ongjin peninsula with the ROK 17th Infantry.

The only sure way to get them out was by air, by Stinson L-5, a single-engine aircraft used by the army to direct artillery fire from the air, to supervise movement of armored or logistic columns, and as sort of an aerial jeep. But it would take either three L-5s, or three flights by one L-5, because the tiny aircraft were capable of carrying only one passenger at a time. Furthermore, the colonel realized that he had better things to do with his L-5s. They were not only the best eyes he had, but they were absolutely essential to carry messages. Communications, never very reliable, had already started to go out, probably because of sabotage. He was very much afraid that he was going to have to leave the three KMAG instructors to fend for themselves.

And then the colonel remembered that there was a Supreme Commander, Allied Powers (SCAP) L-17 Navion sitting at Kimpo Airfield. One of MacArthur's palace guard, a colonel in military government, was enamored of a State Department civilian lady at the Embassy, and had arranged to fly over from Tokyo to see her. It was a four-passenger airplane, big enough to pick up the three officers at the 17th ROK Infantry CP. The colonel considered begging the use of it from the SCAP colonel, but decided not to do that. The SCAP colonel, probably still asleep in the arms of love, might very well decide that the Big Picture required his immediate return to the Dai Ichi Building. There was time, the colonel decided, for the L-17 to rescue those poor bastards on Ongjin, and then fly the SCAP colonel out.

He motioned a master sergeant to him.

“Take a jeep and go out to Kimpo, and find the pilot of a SCAP L-17, and ask him to go get the officers with the 17th ROK,” he said. “If he won't do it, you get him on the horn to me. At pistol point, if you have to.”

(Four)
Kimpo Airfield
Seoul, Korea
25 September 1950

Captain Rudolph G. “Mac” MacMillan, Army Aviation Section, Headquarters, Supreme Commander, Allied Powers (SCAP), had flown one of SCAP's L-17 Navions to Seoul from Tokyo the day before, landing just before noon after a two-day, 1,000-mile flight.

MacMillan was Scotch-Irish, out of Mauch Chuck, Pennsylvania. He had enlisted in the army ten years before, at seventeen, after two years in the anthracite coal mines where everybody else he knew worked out their lives. He had no idea what the army was going to be like, but it couldn't be worse than the mines. The possibility of becoming a commissioned officer and a gentleman had never entered his mind. His vaguely formed dream then was to get up to corporal in four years, so he could marry his sweetheart, Roxy, and maybe up to staff sergeant before he had thirty years in. With a staff sergeant's pension, he had dreamed, he could save enough money to buy a saloon, and then he and Roxy would be on Easy Street.

World War II had changed all that.

There were three L-17s in the fleet of army aircraft assigned to the U.S. Army of Occupation in Japan. The Navions (from North American Aviation) had been bought “off-the-shelf” with funds reluctantly provided by Congress, less to provide the army with airplanes than to assist North American Aviation in making the transition from a manufacturer of warplanes (North American had built thousands of P-51s during World War II) to a manufacturer of light aircraft for the civilian market.

The L-17 Navion bore a faint resemblance to the P-51. There was a certain sleekness in the Navion that no other light aircraft, except perhaps Beech's “Bonanza,” had; and the vertical stabilizer of the small aircraft looked very much like the vertical stabilizer of the P-51. But it was a civilian airplane, despite the star-and-bar identification painted on the fuselage and the legend
US ARMY
painted on the sides of the vertical stabilizer.

The seats were upholstered in leather, and the instrument panel, probably on purpose, looked like the dashboard of a car. There were four seats under a slide-back plexiglass canopy. There had been a notion among certain North American executives that all it was going to take to fill America's postwar skies with Navions flown by business executives and salesmen, and even by Daddies taking the family out for a Sunday afternoon drive through the skies, would be to convince the public that the Navion was nothing more than a Buick or a Chrysler with wings. They had designed the Navion to fit that image.

An airplane, of course, is not a car, and the idea never caught on as people hoped it would, but a number of Navions were built, and about forty of them were sold to the U.S. Army. They were used as transport aircraft for senior officers who wanted to fly, for example, from Third Army Headquarters in Atlanta to Fort Benning when there was no convenient (or available) means to do so by commercial airlines.