War: Another City

TIME Correspondent Dwight Martin, in Seoul again before it fell to the Communists, cabled:

SEOUL was all but dead. During the day, occasional bands of laborers trudged off to the north to work on the city’s last-ditch defenses. The rest of the remaining population seemed to be mostly kids, some hawking U.N. and South Korean flags from sidewalk stands, others having the time of their lives propelling themselves about frozen pavements and ponds on little homemade sleds which they rode squatting on their haunches. Seoul’s black-marketeers went imperturbably about their chores, blowing their whistles and semaphoring energetically with their hands whenever a jeep or oxcart hove into sight.

At night, the city lay black, empty and desolate in the moonlight. The crack of small-arms fire rang incessantly through the streets, much of it directed at jeep thieves who worked steadily every night. Seoul’s Capitol Club, where,, two weeks ago a plate of potato chips had sold for $2.50, was dark and deserted. In its stead, a few blocks away, stood Seoul’s last-ditch nightspot, the Consolation Club, which advertised “Fifty Beautiful Women Fifty.” Inside, a dozen odd bedraggled beauties gyrated round a scarred dance floor, their swirling Korean skirts revealing singularly unattractive expanses of olive-drab G.I. long Johns.

Beaver & Velvet. To anyone who had watched the death of Nanking in 1949, the death of Seoul was a familiar tale: the empty streets, the one or two deserted trolleys that rocked forlornly along the main stem, the last tired oxen plodding patiently southward, were all sharply reminiscent of similar scenes in China. At week’s end the wealthy, who could afford to wait until the last minute, were packing up to get out. In front of upper-class Korean houses and stores, merchants in beaver-collared coats supervised the loading of their more valued belongings. A beautiful girl in a rich velvet skirt and cloak glided gracefully into a waiting auto.

As the last refugees took their leave of Seoul, both the week and the year came to an end. Here & there, there were signs of a celebration. In the skies the bright winter moon was waning; U.S. officers guessed that as the nights darkened, the Reds would renew their attack.

Two days later, from morning till night, the retreating U.N. forces rolled back down the two main roads through Seoul—down the same roads on which outnumbered South Korean troops and a handful of U.S. advisers had fled six months before.

The retreating R.O.K. soldiers were the most miserable troops I ever saw. They had fought a valiant rearguard action for two days and two nights, but few of them would fight again for a long time to come.

Many of them were just barely able to hobble. They put one frozen, straw-shod and rag-bound foot in front of the other, at a pace that could not have exceeded a few hundred yards an hour. Some of them wept with pain as they walked, others lay sprawled grotesquely on the frozen stubble by the roadside, in the deathlike sleep of utter exhaustion. One R.O.K. rifleman was crawling on his hands and knees, his Garand still slung across his back, when some G.I.s with an I. and R. (Intelligence and Reconnaissance) platoon found him and packed him off in a jeep.

Teacups & Christmas Trees. Fires were raging the length & breadth of Seoul, the result of vandalism, carelessness, or both. The Bon-Chong, the old black market, went up, and with it went at least three square blocks of ramshackle stores and dwellings. By 9 p.m. the fires were sending showers of sparks cascading down on the steel-shuttered U.S. Embassy and on the tile-roofed Chosun Hotel, where a South Korean flag hung limply in the cold. The hotel itself was completely deserted. The staff had fled during the day, and the building had the queerly disturbing air of a ghost ship. There were two half-filled teacups on the room clerk’s desk, two heavily tinseled Christmas trees in the lobby, and exactly four lights burning on the telephone switchboard.

The wide intersection in front of the city hall was lighted up like a movie set by the flames that crackled through a front of shops. The place was completely deserted except for a small boy in a lamb’s-wool cap, who stood weeping forlornly in front of the city hall steps. I walked over to him and asked him his name. He said his name was Hong Kiu He, that he was eight years old and that he had no father or mother. We put young master Hong in our jeep and drove down Mapo Boulevard to the Toyoda Apartment Hotel.

I had been in the Toyoda once before— last September, after Seoul was captured by United Nations forces. Then, the only occupant of the building had been a dead North Korean soldier who lay on the floor to the right of the entrance to the dining room. Now, in the same spot, an exhausted G.I. was grabbing a few minutes’ sleep in front of a small stove.

Maps in the Dining Room. The G.I. belonged to Colonel John (“Mike”) Michaelis’ proud 27th Infantry Regiment, which had put the fear of the U.S. Army into many a North Korean soldier. Now it was screening the U.N. retreat in this section of the city. Michaelis had set up his command post in the dining room. He stood before his tactical maps with his division commander, Major General John Church, commanding officer of the U.S. 24th Division. There had been some concern that the Chinese—who had started to move into the city from the north and northeast that morning—might cut off the pontoon bridges over the Han which the U.N. forces would need for their retreat. General Church turned away from the maps and grinned. “We’ve been in lots tighter spots than this before,” he said. “We’ll get out all right.”

By 11 a.m. the Chinese were well into the northwestern sector of Seoul. Baker Company of Mike Michaelis’ ist Battalion was having a hot fight. The last frantic surge of refugees spewed forth across the ice of the frozen Han.

A few minutes later the last of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders came out across the railroad bridge; in another quarter hour the span itself went down with the roar of eight tons of explosives. Farther to the west, at the southern end of the last remaining bridge across the Han, Mike Michaelis operated his C.P. from a jeep parked on the sandy approaches of the Han. Michaelis had just been told that his Baker Company had been cut off on the other side of the river.

Overhead, F80 Shooting Stars and F51 Mustangs wheeled and dived into the oncoming Chinese. Along the northern bank of the river, a platoon of Michaelis’ troops and some ROKs lay strung out in a thin line, rifles and BARs pointed to the north. Michaelis got some good news: Baker Company had lined up with the one other U.S. rifle company still across the river, and was on its way out.

A Flag for City Hall. Just after 1 p.m., Baker Company’s commander, Captain Gordon C. Jung of Cincinnati, came out with his men. Said he: “They’ve been hitting us pretty steadily since 7 a.m. Some of them came in uniform, and others came in disguised as single ‘refugees.’ Just as we pulled out they raised the biggest goddamned North Korean flag you ever saw over the city hall.”

By 2 p.m. the pontoon bridge was blown and the last of the outnumbered and defeated U.N. army was on the dusty, snow-fringed road toward the south. At Kimpo Airfield enormous fires boiled up from abandoned U.S. fuel and ammunition dumps. Along the river road, U.S. and Korean troops went through the motions of digging in, but no one thought they would stay for long. We headed our jeep south for Taegu. That night the victorious Chinese army came over the ice of the frozen Han River.