Free The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam Page B

good deal of its equipment, including twelve 105mm howitzers, nine tanks, 125 trucks, and a dozen recoilless rifles. A spokesman for the Cav who talked to reporters two days after the Chinese attack was clearly shaken: “We don’t know whether they represent the Chinese Communist Government,” he said, but it was “a massacre Indian-style, like the one that hit Custer at the Little Big Horn.” It was a comparison that would occur to others.
    Pappy Miller, wounded, captured, and then carried by the chaplain, was in a small group of prisoners being moved farther north each night. During their trek to a prison camp, they arrived at a place the Chinese were using as a temporary base, and there he saw thousands and thousands of Chinese soldiers, perhaps twenty or thirty thousand. It was like seeing a secret city in North Korea filled with nothing but Chinese soldiers. Privy to a spectacular view of the enemy, he knew how completely the war had changed, but there was no one who mattered whom he could tell. He was on his way to more than two bitter years in a prisoner of war camp in which he would be beaten regularly, denied elemental medical care, and given the barest of rations.
    The UN forces, whether they liked retrograde movements or not, quickly moved back to positions on the other side of the Chongchon River. There they prepared for another hit by the Chinese forces. But the Chinese had vanished, as mysteriously as they had appeared. No one knew where they had gone. They had quietly departed the battlefield and become invisible once again. But they had not, as some people in Tokyo wanted to believe, left the country. They had simply moved into positions hidden away, farther north. There they would wait patiently for the Americans to walk into an even bigger trap, one even farther from their main bases. What had happened at Unsan was just the beginning. The real hit would come farther north in even colder weather in about three weeks.
    Unsan was a warning, but it was not heeded. In Washington the president and his principal advisers, who had been anxious for weeks about Chinese intentions, became more nervous than ever. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, responding to President Harry Truman’s nervousness, cabled MacArthur on November 3, asking him to respond to what “appears to be overt intervention in Korea by Chinese Communist forces.” What followed in the next few days reflected the growing schism between what MacArthur wanted to do, which was to drive to the Yalu and unify all of Korea, and what Washington wanted to do, which was to avoid a major war with China.
    For the question of what the Chinese were up to had become the central issue before Washington, and once again MacArthur decided to control the decision-making by controlling the intelligence. Here again Brigadier General CharlesWilloughby was the key player. He deliberately minimized both the number and the intentions of the Chinese troops. On November 3 he placed the number of Chinese in country at a minimum of 16,500 and a maximum of 34,500. (Some 20,000 men, or roughly two divisions, had hit the Americans at Unsan alone, and at virtually the same time a comparable number of Chinese had hit a Marine battalion on the east side of the peninsula, causing quite heavy casualties.) In truth there were some 300,000 men, or thirty divisions, already in country. MacArthur, momentarily shaken by the assault, tried to downplay it, and his response to the JCS cable reflected the Willoughby line. The Chinese, he cabled, were there to help the North Koreans “keep a nominal foothold in North Korea” and allowed them to “salvage something from the wreckage.”
    If he had been somewhat shaken initially by the Chinese attack, now, as they seemed to have vanished, MacArthur became more confident again. General Walton Walker, the commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, whose troops had been hit at Unsan, had cabled back to Tokyo after the attack, “AN AMBUSH AND SURPRISE ATTACK