HEROES: A Soldier’s Soldier

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Major General William Frische Dean drove the 44th Division hard through Mannheim and Weinheim; then, swinging south toward Austria, the 44th took Lorch, Ulm (where Napoleon had routed 50,000 Austrians), Memmingen and Kempten, and cleared the Fern Pass. Obviously, the war was in its last phase, but strapping Bill Dean would not relax. He called in his regimental commanders and told them: “Our business is fighting. We will keep on fighting until we get the official word that the war has ended.”

On V-E day. Dean asked his aide for a list of the division’s total casualties. He jotted them down on the back of his immunization card: killed 968, wounded 4,390, missing 374, captured 42. Dean looked up. “Only 42 captured for the whole war?” The officer nodded. “That’s right, sir.”

Dean grinned. “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.” To Bill Dean, the worst fate that could befall a soldier was capture by the enemy.

Five years and one war later, the worst fate befell Bill Dean. In fact, he became the most famous American soldier ever to be taken prisoner, and his fame came in large part from the way in which he had conducted himself after his capture by North Korean Communists. Dean’s fellow countrymen understood that the totalitarians fight for men’s minds and use lies and torture to make prisoners cooperate with them. Dean became a new kind of hero, a symbol of the hundreds of Americans who, under fiendish pressure, had remained loyal to their country.

Returned in the prisoner exchange at Freedom Village, Bill Dean, white-haired and worn, found the praise heaped upon him hard to take. “I’m no hero,” he told newsmen. “Anybody who’s dumb enough to get captured doesn’t deserve to be a hero.” On another occasion, he said: “I expected to be court-martialed.” In his home town, Carlyle, III., he insisted that “the reports of my heroism have been greatly exaggerated.” He was reluctant to wear his Medal of Honor, won for gallantry in the battle of Taejon. “I don’t deserve it,” says Dean flatly.

He is still unwilling to talk about what he did in Korea, in battle and in the hands of the enemy. His story has to be pieced together from Army reports, interviews with his friends, bits that Dean has let fall in speeches.

Task Force Smith. On the morning of June 25, 1950, General Dean was in Kokura on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, where his 24th Infantry Division had its headquarters. The 24th was green and softened by garrison duty. Because of a housing shortage and limited space for maneuvers. Dean had never been able to bring his division together. Regimental headquarters were a hundred miles apart. Most field training had been at the squad level.

The military Teletypes that morning began to splutter with the news: North Korean Communists had invaded South Korea. General MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo alerted the 24th and the other three U.S. divisions-in Japan to brace themselves for a Communist invasion of the islands. Dean, who had been military governor of South Korea two years earlier, was not surprised when the ill-equipped South Korean constabulary fled before the Communist tanks. Following the first news of the Red advance, Foot Soldier Dean did not think that it could be halted merely by air and sea aid to the South Koreans, which President Truman had promised.

Foreseeing his next orders, Dean prepared a special task force under the command of 34-year-old Lieut. Colonel Charles B. Smith. On July i, when the orders came, Dean dispatched Task Force Smith by air to Korea with the mission of meeting an army of 30,000 North Koreans on the road between Seoul and Pusan. Smith’s force numbered only 406 men.

Dean gathered up his scattered units, got them and their gear on ships and planes. On July 4, after his arrival in Korea, he established his headquarters as commander of all ground forces. Immediately he went north, into action.

For 16 wild, sleepless days, the men of the 24th Division fought a series of desperate delaying actions designed to slow the Red flood and borrow time for the Eighth Army to unload at Pusan and establish a firm line of defense. Each hour of delay, each blunting skirmish that forced the Communists to detour or deploy, was a small triumph, paid in full with American lives. Four times on the bloody road from Seoul the G.I.s halted the Reds briefly, upsetting their timetable and flattening their warhead.

But the Reds pressed on, flanking the

U.S. roadblocks. Hordes of refugees (and Communist troops disguised as refugees) clogged the roads and infiltrated the American lines. Guerrillas sniped from the rear.

Dean knew that in these circumstances his half-trained troops needed their commander at the front. He lived hazardously and miraculously, jeeping through enemy roadblocks, leading relief columns to the front, jogging and rallying his men everywhere. Once the enemy crossed the Kum River, the pivotal city of Taejon was doomed, but Dean decided to give the Communists a real fight. He sent the bulk of his troops south to dig in for the next battle, and stayed on himself in Taejon with elements of the 19th and 34th Regiments to direct the last and greatest delaying action before the Pusan perimeter.

Three Precious Days. On July 18, Taejon waited in steaming silence. The Reds were grouping on the plain in front of the ramshackle city. That night, disguised in U.S. fatigues and baggy Korean civilian dress, the Communists came. The next day, Taejon rose convulsively to life in a hail of sniper bullets, a thunder of Communist artillery fire, the rising, smoky glare of burning gasoline stores. For three days. Dean and his ragged men fought in the streets and alleys and from house to house, contesting every inch of the Red advance. On the third day, Dean manned a new 3.5-in. bazooka, which had been flown in from the U.S. hours earlier. He came back to his command post elated. “I just got me a Red tank,” he shouted. He had got a lot more: a Medal of Honor for “excessive gallantry,” and three precious days (his order from MacArthur called for a two-day stand, if possible) which may have spelled the difference between victory and defeat in South Korea.

The military historian, Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall, has this to say: “To my mind, there is no doubt of the critical and decisive nature of Dean’s holding action outside Taejon. He carried out the maneuver under the worst possible conditions, was forced to feed his green forces piecemeal into the fray, but he succeeded in stopping the Communists. If the Communists had had a clear right of way to Pusan, the war would have ended right there. There is no doubt that this was one of the. great pivotal points of the war. Personally, I feel that Dean has become one of the truly giant figures among this country’s more heroic leaders.”

When the enemy had overrun the city and surrounded it to a depth of three miles. General Dean gave the retreat order and led the last Americans in a motor column south from Taejon. Outside the city, he picked up seven walking wounded, loaded them into his jeep and climbed aboard the prime mover of a howitzer. At an enemy roadblock. Dean’s aide and his interpreter were wounded. Finally the battered motorcade was stopped by a stalled truck which blocked the road. Dean ordered the vehicles abandoned, and led the men on foot across country into a bean patch. That night, as they worked their way south into the mountains. Dean dropped behind to get water for a badly wounded man. His aide. Lieut. Arthur Clarke, waited in vain for him to return. Three days later. Clarke and his party reached the American lines.

“We Will Not Kill You.” When he disappeared. Dean was exhausted and dazed. In the darkness he fell down an embankment, was knocked unconscious. Hours later, he came to with a nasty gash on his left temple, a fractured shoulder. He limped into a clump of bushes and hid until nightfall. After two days of playing hound & hare with North Korean patrols. Dean came on a fellow American, Lieut. Stanley E. Tabor.

On July 26. they found a South Korean who agreed, for $40, to guide them over the mountains. He took the two officers to his hut to prepare for the trip. As it turned out, the Korean had other plans. He sent his brother for the North Korean troops, and the following night Dean and Tabor, hiding in the hut, heard the Communists approaching. When the Reds called out in English, “Come out, we will not kill you,” Dean and the lieutenant came out shooting.

The two men made their way to a paddyfield and. with Communist bullets whistling past them, waded in. When he reached the other side, Dean discovered that Tabor was not behind him. The lieutenant was mired in the middle of the paddyfield. Dean called out. The Communists answered with machine-gun fire. He called again, and again only bullets answered. Fearful of getting shot, Dean waited silently for Tabor. At dawn he crawled along the bed of a stream, hid in the underbrush, within earshot of the North Koreans. He never saw Tabor again. (Tabor was captured a few days later, died in a P.W. camp.)

For weeks General Dean hid in the mountains by day, navigated by the stars at night, lived on raw rice, green peaches and occasional handouts from pro-American Koreans. On Aug. 20, he met two friendly farmers in an isolated cabin high in the mountains. They gave him a bowl of rice, but Dean could not keep it down. Taking pity, the farmers, brothers, offered him four days’ sanctuary in the cabin so he could get his strength back. By the second day, though, the brothers began to argue. The younger brother was nervous about harboring a fugitive, and eventually he won out. Bill Dean was told he must leave.

Four days later, after walking throughout the night, he found himself, too late, trapped on a bare hillside at daybreak in plain view of a small village. An elderly Korean discovered him, crouched in a clump of weeds, and motioned him to a hut in the hamlet. The housewife there gave him some rice, and Dean learned, through hand signals, that he was within two days’ walk of Taegu. He was elated. and set out at once, walking boldly down the road.

Before long he met two Koreans, Han Doo Kyoo and Choe Chong Bong, and asked them to guide him through the mountains. He offered them U.S. occupation scrip and promised other gifts when he reached safety. The Koreans wavered, finally agreed. As the three men started off, the Korean in the lead suddenly motioned to Dean and his companion to halt. While they rested on the roadside, the first Korean went ahead. Presently he came back with 20 North Korean soldiers.

Surrounded, Dean reached for his .45 automatic, but the Korean with him grabbed his arm. The enfeebled general (he had lost 60 Ibs. in his flight) was quickly overcome. For betraying him, the two Koreans got 30,000 won ($5) each. After 35 days. Dean’s long wanderings had come to an end, near Chinan, 35 miles from Taejon, 55 miles from the American lines.

As a prisoner, Bill Dean was up against one of the century’s retrograde movements. The lot of prisoners, improving over the centuries, had taken a sharp turn for the worse as a result of the totalitarian determination to use any means to control the minds of men. In the compounds of North Korea, no attention was paid to the Geneva Convention of 1949 regulating the treatment of war prisoners. Atrocities and brainwashings were twin specters that haunted the prisoner and left him, if he survived, either a new kind of hero or a tragic zombie, mechanically repeating the words the Communists taught him. The physical hardships of the battlefield, General Dean was to discover, were nothing when compared to the mental torture of imprisonment.

The Interrogation. After his capture, he was brought north in short stages. Seated on a chair in the back of a truck, he was paraded ignominiously through the streets of Seoul. Twice on the journey Dean’s drivers provided him with unscheduled thrills, drove off the road and wrecked their vehicles, forcing him to walk to the nearest town.

In Pyongyang, he met Lee Kyoo Hyun, a cheerful young Korean who was to be his interpreter. He got perfunctory medical treatment and was allowed to exchange his filthy fatigue suit for fresh U.S. khakis. For 48 hours he rested and slept. Then he was taken to an abandoned Roman Catholic church in Sunan, and his interrogation began. At the first, says Lee, “the Communists tried to convert him. After that, it would be simple to get the secrets from him.” But when Dean stubbornly refused to become a “hero of the masses,” his interrogator went into a rage. In the end. the inquisition boiled down to one big question: What were the defense plans for Japan? Dean knew a lot about the answer, but he kept his secrets.

The first interrogation was conducted in Sunan by a North Korean colonel, who quickly became angered, threatened to kill Dean. Dean was unmoved. The colonel threatened to cut his tongue out.

“O.K., cut it out,” replied General Dean coldly. “Then you can’t force me to broadcast.”

The colonel finally gave up, sent Dean back to Pyongyang for a tougher session at MVD headquarters. “I swear that I have no military information,” the general insisted, “and even if I had any. I would not divulge it, as I do not want to be a traitor to the United States of America. So help me God.” The MVD officers sent him back to the church in Sunan to think it over. Two days later. Dean wrote out his famed answer: “Fortunately I have no military information, and even if I had any, I would remain faithful to my country.” (Signed) William Dean, Major General U.S.A.

Thoroughly annoyed, the MVD officers came to Sunan for a third try which went on intermittently for six days and ended in total failure for the Reds. For the first session, which lasted for 68 hours, the Communists brought four teams of interrogators to question Dean in relays. The questions went on, with time out only for Dean to go to the latrine (as often as 36 times a day, because of his dysentery). But Bill Dean wore them all out. After the tenth hour his teeth began to chatter. “Are you cold?” asked an MVD officer. Dean nodded. “I’ll show you what cold really is,” said the officer, and ordered Dean to strip down to his shorts (the Reds wore overcoats). Then he had the general’s cot taken away, and for hours Dean sat on his hands until they were swollen and numb.

After nearly three days, the Communists tossed a blue Korean army blanket at Dean and allowed him to rest on the floor for 24 hours. Then the questioning began again. The second session lasted 44 hours, was followed by another 24-hour rest period. The third interrogation continued for ten hours, ended with Dean’s tormentors frustrated and furious. The exhausted general was allowed to rest in a chair for 14 hours, but a barefooted guard kicked him whenever he fell asleep.

That night the chief interrogator came to Dean and told him he would be tortured in the morning. He thought of splinters to be thrust under fingernails and set afire to make a man talk. Dean, who had become increasingly depressed, decided to commit suicide. “Dean,” he told himself, “you don’t know whether you can take it or not. You might talk. You’d better kill yourself.”

Later he slipped into the next room where his guards were dozing, grabbed a Russian burp gun. He planned to fire three bursts: one to bring his chief interrogator, whom he hated, into the room; the second to kill him; and the third into his own mouth, to end his life. Before he could get the gun to work, a guard heard him fumbling with the safety and sprang on him, knocking him down. “There is a brave man,” said General Dean when he saw the guard later.

The Conversion. After that, there were no more questions. General Dean had won his personal battle with the Communists, and, although he did not know it at the time, his courage had persuaded a North Korean to choose democracy. As the questioning proceeded, Interpreter Lee became more and more impressed with the general. “I never believed a man could be so brave or love his country so much,” said Lee. “His brave attitude steadily encouraged me to take a brave action which I had never dreamed of.” At last, Lee decided, “I had to shake off Communism even if I was to risk my life. And every time I got frightened, I thought about the general. I would think, if democracy can produce a man like that, then democracy must be good. Then democracy is what I want, too.”

After a month, the Communists, apparently suspicious that he was coming under Dean’s influence, detached Lee and sent him back to Pyongyang. At the first opportunity, he escaped from his ditchdigging detail and hid out in the ruins of the city until the American Army arrived. It was from Lee that U.S. intelligence learned positively that Dean was still alive.

After Lee left. Dean was shunted from one prison to another. As the U.N. forces drove north, he was moved to a small Chinese hotel across the Manchurian border. After the Chinese Communist “volunteers” entered the conflict, he was moved south into North Korea again. There were no further interrogations, but the Communists applied other pressures. The worst to bear was the isolation: Dean was always lonely, but never alone. For three years, he saw no other American, was under the constant armed surveillance of eight North Korean sergeants. For a year he had no pencil, whiled away the time working out mathematical problems mentally. “If I didn’t,” explained Dean, “I felt I would lose my wits.” For a time he had a Chinese checkerboard, but when his guards kibitzed too much, he broke the board in a fit of anger.

A Spoonful of Cheese. The food, which he secretly shared with his guards, varied from rice and grass soup in his first P.W. days to Rumanian cookies and meat three times a day when the Communists were trying to fatten him up before his release. Throughout his imprisonment, he suffered intensely from dysentery, deteriorating teeth and a cyst on his left eye, but medical treatment was meager. Every 17th day his guards shaved him. One of the worst privations for Dean, normally an active man, was the lack of exercise. Much of the time he was forced to remain seated on the floor during the day, but he managed to pace off five miles a night, walking in his 12-by-12-ft. cell. Twice he made plans for escape; each time a new onslaught of dysentery prevented it.

In December 1951, after the North Koreans publicly admitted that Dean was a prisoner, Wilfred Burchett, the correspondent for the Paris Communist newspaper, L’Humanite, came to interview him, bringing some “excellent beer” and a jar of Wisconsin cheese which Dean rationed himself, a spoonful a day. Later the North Koreans made Dean a veiled offer: he could have command of a division or corps if he would only fight for their side. Dean laughed at their naivete.

In the last month of his captivity, he was moved to Kaesong, where he willingly collaborated in the fattening-up campaign, bathed in a waterfall and walked twelve miles a day. By the time he was released, he was in fair physical condition, but the haunted eyes under quizzical brows told eloquently of the mental anguish he had endured. When the time came to return to the U.S., General Dean wept.

A Child’s Dream. Soldiering has been on Bill Dean’s mind most of his life. As a kid of five, he was taken to the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, and saw real, live soldiers for the first time. He spent hours watching the West Pointers and regular troops drilling. “I wanted to go to West Point,” says Dean, “ever since I could talk.” Back home in Carlyle, he set out to prepare himself for the great day.

Carlyle (pop. 2,700) remembers him as a serious, quiet youngster. The eldest of four children of the town dentist, Bill lived a typically middle-class life in a typically middle-class town. He was a persuasive door-to-door magazine salesman, stoked the furnace and rang the bell at the Christ Episcopal Church, and dived for mussels in the Kaskaskia River every summer. A clumsy, gangling youngster, he was constantly engrossed in body-building courses and consumed large quantities of a breakfast food called Force, the Wheaties of its day. In high school he took up oratory and developed a parade-ground voice.

Bill Dean has always been his own severest critic. When he failed to get an appointment to West Point in 1917, he was perfectly candid. “Maybe I wasn’t smart enough,” he said. (He attributes his survival as a P.W. to lack of self-pity: “I never felt sorry for myself. Self-pity is the way to crack up.”) Shortly after the U.S. entered World War I, Dean entered the University of California. The war increased Bill’s military yearnings. He tried to get a commission, to enlist in the Army and the Marines. But he was under age, and his mother refused permission. Bill paid his own way through college with a series of night-shift jobs: as a streetcar motorman, a stevedore, a short-order cook in an off-campus hash house, and a policeman.

Bill studied law at the university, but failed the course in contracts and had to substitute an A.B. degree for a law career. In the hour of his disappointment, an old love reappeared in the opportunity for a direct commission in the Regular Army. Dean grabbed it gratefully.

Bedside Romance. As a garrison officer, Lieut. Dean was a stickler for physical fitness and intensive training. The path of promotion was snailish, and Dean was a lieutenant for twelve years, a captain for five. On his first assignment at Fort Douglas, Utah, he played polo and, like most officers of that day, kept a couple of horses of his own. One day a young woman, Dorothy Welch, was thrown from one of Dean’s horses and critically injured. For ten days, as she lay in her bed at home with a fractured skull, Bill Dean kept a vigil at her door. Another friend of the injured girl, Mildred Dern, the daughter of a prominent Salt Lake City family,* joined Lieut. Dean in his long watch. The vigil bloomed into romance, and after their friend recovered, Bill and Mildred were married.

For the next 14 years, the Deans were transferred from post to peacetime Army post, raised a boy (now a third-year man at West Point) and a girl (now the mother of Dean’s two grandchildren, the wife of an infantry captain). At last, in 1940, Dean was promoted to the rank of major and arrived at the turning point of most military careers—an assignment at the War Department. He was attached to the General Staff under General George Marshall—a rare opportunity which Dean muffed completely. Marshall needed brainy strategists and smart operators around him, and Dean, a dedicated field soldier, was neither. After 14 months, he was relieved of his job.

War in Slacks. After two more years of desk work under General Lesley McNair, Dean in February 1944 succeeded in finally getting assigned as executive officer of the 44th Division, which was staging for combat in Europe.

Dean plunged into the combat training with his customary vigor. He had a theory that by the time the 44th reached the Siegfried Line most of the enlisted men who knew how to operate flamethrowers would probably be dead. He organized a flamethrower school for junior officers so they could train new technicians as the division moved along. At one of the training sessions, a young captain spilled napalm on his uniform, which promptly burst into flame. Dean knocked him down in the dirt to extinguish the fire, and some of the flaming liquid spilled on his own leg. Dean was hospitalized, and for a while it looked as though he would miss his cherished dream of battle after all. But when the division embarked for Europe, Brigadier General Dean hobbled away from the hospital on crutches “without much authority,” and climbed aboard too. His leg did not heal for seven months, and Dean entered combat in France wearing slacks and a low-cut combat boot.

After two months in Europe, General Robert L. Spragins, the division commander, was invalided back home with arthritis, and Dean took over. By that time his front-line daring was the talk of his sector of the Western front, and Corps Commander “Ham” Haislip was moved to warn his daring general: “Dammit, Dean, stay off the front lines!” Dean’s exploits in battle won him a D.S.C., D.S.M. and a Bronze Star.

No Retirement. Division commanders were a dime a dozen in World War II, and Dean, though he earned a solid professional reputation, came out of it with no public acclaim. It took defeat and captivity to give him that.

In his three years of captivity, Bill Dean decided that he would quit the Army if he ever got back. But on his first night home, Mildred Dean helped him change his mind. “Bill Dean,” she said, “you are not going to retire. You just wouldn’t be happy away from the troops.” Dean agreed. “I had planned to retire,” he explained later, “feeling that perhaps progress—I mean, I had been sitting on the sidelines so long that I would no longer be acceptable.” But the Department of Defense and the Commander in Chief felt differently, and next month, after the first vacation in his Army career, Old Soldier Dean, 54, will be back with the troops as deputy commander of the Sixth Army, at San Francisco’s Presidio—where, 30 years ago, he raised his right hand and said: “I, William Dean . . . do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same . . . and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

* Her uncle, the late George Dern, was elected governor of Utah in 1924, later became Franklin Roosevelt’s first Secretary of War. In the gubernatorial campaign, Dern beat his Republican opponent, Governor Charles Mabey, with a well-remembered slogan: “What the State of Utah needs is a Dern good governor, and I don’t mean Mabey.”