MEN AT WAR: The Dean Story

In July 1950, after one disastrous month of war, the South Korean army was shattered and demoralized; only elements of the U.S. 24th Division stood in the path of the Communists to Pusan and the sea. The American plan at that time was not to stop the Reds cold; that was impossible. The plan, drawn by Douglas MacArthur, was to slow them down by forcing them to deploy. That mission was entrusted to Major General William F. Dean, who had risen to be a division commander in the European theater of World War II. The mission was accomplished.

Dean was last heard from on the northern outskirts of Taejon. A survivor heard him say: “I just got me a Red tank.” After the city fell, Dean’s helmet liner was found in a rice paddy.

Last week his name turned up on the Communist list of U.N. prisoners, and this week Wilfred Burchett, Australian-born correspondent for the Paris Communist daily Ce Soir, told allied newsmen that he had interviewed Dean only a few days earlier, in a Red prison camp at Pyongyang. They had talked for three hours over drinks of gin. Burchett relayed Dean’s story:

The Sound of Water. When he got back from the north part of Taejon, Dean found himself cut off. He also found some men taking shelter from Red fire under a truck. They wanted to surrender, but Dean persuaded them to make a break for it. All could walk except one man. Exhausted and thirsty, Dean and another man took turns carrying him. When Dean heard the sound of running water by the road, he tried to find it, fell down a steep bank, hurt his shoulder, lost consciousness. When he woke up, he was alone.

Soon he ran across another U.S. officer, and they stayed together for a while, trying to get back to U.N. forces, now pulling back into the Pusan beachhead. One night, Dean and the other officer fought their way out of a surrounded house, Dean in the lead with his automatic. The general crawled to safety through fields and paddies. He never saw the other officer after that.

The Trap. For 20 days he found nothing to eat at all. His weight went down from 190 Ibs. to 130. “My arms-were sticks, my legs were sticks,” he said. “I looked like Mahatma Gandhi.” He had twelve cartridges left for his pistol, and he kept them clean and shiny. He was determined, he told Communist Burchett, to use eleven bullets to kill Reds, the last on himself.

Finally he fell in with two Koreans who promised to lead him to safety. But they betrayed him and led him into a trap. When he saw the enemy soldiers, he raised his pistol to fire, but one of his betrayers struck down his hand. He was so weak that he was soon overpowered.

Burchett said that although Dean had been very sick, he was in good health last week and had regained all but ten pounds of his normal weight. He was living in a two-room underground apartment at the prison camp, wearing a neat pin-stripe suit, playing Korean chess with his guard. General Dean still did not know that he had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the first to be won in Korea.