#12: The Century's Nastiest Little War & Two New Unknowns

I reflect just a little on the fall of Kabul to the Taliban then get back to business with how the Korean War put the recovery efforts of WWII fallen on hold and after the Korean War, recovery teams were cleaning up after two wars. Because the efforts were simultaneous, the Unknows from WWII and Korea were interred in a single ceremony.

This week’s Ghost of Arlington are:

1. Marine Corps Corporal Paul Kenneth Taylor (Section 31, Grave 4501)
2. Army General Walton H. "Johnnie" Walker (Section 34, Grave 86-A)
3. Marine Private First Class Walter Monegan, Jr. (Section 34, Section 4513)
4. Army Sergeant First Class Charles Turner: (Section 12, Grave 7762)
5. Marine Staff Sergeant William Windrich: (Section 31, Grave 4856)
6. Navy Hospital Corpsman (HN) Francis Hammond: (Section 33, Grave 9011)
7. The WWII Unknown Soldier
8. The Korean War Unknown Soldier

 
Also, a very special thanks to Mountain Up Cap Company for its continued help to spread the word about the podcast on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/MountainUpCapCompany Climb to Glory!

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Transcript

Episode 12: The Century’s Nastiest Little War & Two More Unknowns

On the day I record this episode, it has been four days since Afghan government fell to the Taliban. Last weekend, in three successive days, I saw the three cities I spent the most time in during my two deployments to that country, fall: Kandahar on Friday, Gardez on Saturday, and Kabul on Sunday. The images of the population back under the subjugation of a totalitarian force is heartbreaking, as are the images of those trying to flee at the Kabul airport. I do not know what future awaits Afghanistan, but right now, I can only imagine it will be a bleak one for some time to come.

It was with all that on my mind when James, a soldier I served with in the 10th Mountain Division reached out and thanked me for taking time to give our fallen soldiers a voice again. Thank you for reaching out, James. Your comments helped me get out of a little bit of a funk, worry less about things I cannot control, and focus on the things I can, like this podcast. James’ uncle, Paul Kenneth Taylor was killed in action in Korea. I did a little bit of digging and found that Paul Taylor joined the US Marine Corps from Virginia and served in Company C, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division and was fatally wounded during the battle of the Chosen Reservoir. He died of those wound on December 1, 1950 at the age of 21. Today, Corporal Taylor lies in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 31, Grave 4501. 

My maternal grandfather, John Ireton, is a Korean War veteran out in California and turned 89 this year. When entering military service, one never knows what the future will bring. It could be a life cut short, a long life well lived, or something in between. All any service member can do is give it their all, serve honorably, and hope for the best. This week’s episode it dedicated to both my Grandpa John and Paul. Now, on with the show.

Welcome, and thank you for joining me for Ghosts of Arlington, Episode 12: The Century’s Nastiest Little War. Last week we saw how World War II altered the landscape of Arlington National Cemetery, from rapid construction of the Pentagon which technically crosses over onto a small portion of Arlington to comply with a congressional mandate, to building Ft Myer’s South Post, and tearing it down to expand the size of the post-war cemetery. We also talked about the huge effort that went into recovering and identifying war dead all over the world. And while most of the remains were identified there was still a small percentage that could not be.

In September 1945, barely a month after Japan’s surrender, legislation was introduced to have an unknown serviceman brought to Arlington and laid beside his WWI comrade in arms. Signed into law by President Harry S Truman in June 1945, called for this Unknown to be installed by May 30, 1951, in time for Memorial Day commemorations that year. Unfortunately, this 1951 commemoration did not happen. Not because there were no unidentified remains, but because recovery efforts of all WWII casualties had to be called off on June 25, 1950, when 90,000 North Korean troops plowed across the 38th parallel in a surprise assault on South Korea, a US ally. A new war broke out before the last war was cleaned up. Thus began the conflict that historian SLA Marshall called “the century’s nastiest little war,” which was fought on forbidding terrain, often in freezing conditions, against a numerically superior enemy. Truman answered the communist thrust into Asia but was worried that it might spark a larger conflict with the Soviet Union, which had just exploded its first atomic bombs. He hoped for a short, limited war on the Korean peninsula – so limited that he preferred to not use the three-letter W word and instead called it a police action, adopting the term used by the United Nations, which also sent troops to Korea.

Whatever one calls the Korean adventure, it proved costly. By the time a truce suspended hostilities in July 1953, more than 36,500 American service members had been killed, along with 415,000 South Korean combatants, and 1.5 million North Korean and Chinese soldiers. Another 2-3 million civilians are estimated to have died. Despite its steep cost in lives, the Korean War ended in a stalemate. Neither side could claim a decisive victory: the North had nearly overrun the South in the early days of the conflict but they were eventually pushed back, unable to unify the country as a communist whole; the South had repelled the North and had even pushed to the Yalu River, the border with China, but Chinese intervention pushed allied forces back and the North was not added to the fledgling democracy; after three years of brutal combat, the border between the two Koreas remained essentially where it had been before the fighting started, but with a demilitarized zone set up between the warring parties.

The Korean experience has been called “a puzzling gray, very distant conflict, a war that went on and on and on, seemingly without hope of resolution.” As a veteran of the US war in Afghanistan, I completely understand the sentiment. Opposing armies advanced, retreated, reappeared, and melted away. Positions were overrun and abandoned, only to change hands again in the following months; some places shifted ownership two or three times throughout the war; which not only changed the way the United States fought through the unsettled, oscillating conflict but also revolutionized how the nation cared for its war dead.  In the two world wars, American forces had concentrated their fallen combatants in temporary cemeteries within allied lines, with the understanding that the graves would be opened, their occupants identified, and the dead reburied or repatriated as soon as the fighting stopped. 

This practice proved impossible in Korea. In some cases, enemy forces pushed forward so quickly and in such overwhelming numbers that allied dead had to be left where they had fallen. In another instance, workers in Inchon unearthed the UN cemetery, hustled more than 800 bodies onto a waiting ship, and fled to Japan just two hours before Chinese forces swooped down on the city. Living soldiers sometimes competed with the dead for space on evacuation transports, which were in short supply in the war’s early stages. One Marine private recalled that “when they ran out of truck-bed space, they laid the dead on fenders, across hoods, [or] tied to the barrels of artillery pieces.” Even when circumstances allowed for the creation of temporary cemeteries, a number of these graveyards were overrun by North Korean and Chinese troops pushing south, who stripped the remains of boots and other equipment as they went. Dog tags, taken as trophies of war, disappeared in the back-and-forth struggle for the Pusan Perimeter, where the number of unknowns sored as a result. After the first months of the war, it became obvious the US needed to rethink its recovery methods to meet the realities of Korea.

That rethinking, just underway as the Christmas of 1950 approached, was jump-started by the sudden death of Lieutenant General Walton H. “Johnnie” Walker, commander of the 8th US Army, on December 23rd. Walker, known for racing around to check on his troops was speeding north to Seoul in a jeep on icy roads when he urged his driver to pass a convoy and ended up in the lane of an oncoming truck. The jeep swerved and flipped into a ditch, killing Walker – just in time to save his reputation. Although credited with leading the UN troops’ breakout of the Pusan Perimeter earlier that autumn, he was also blamed in part for the enemy’s early success in Korea. Criticized for advancing too cautiously, Walker had been second-guessed and undermined by MacArthur’s command in Tokyo. You remember MacArthur, right? The guy who so proudly broke the back of the Bonus Army in Episode 10 and who got fired for disobeying orders in the Korean War and bringing the Chinese into the conflict? Good old Mac, the man of the hour. Anyway, just before the accident, Walker was convinced he was about to be relieved, but when death released him from the war at age 61, it not only silenced his critics but earned him a hero’s homecoming at Arlington.  

Posthumously promoted to full general, Walker was showered with honors. An Air Force plane was summoned to return to general to Washington. MacArthur turned out to pay his respects when the aircraft stopped in Tokyo. LTG James Van Fleet, commander of the 2nd Army, met the plane in Philadelphia where Walker’s widow came aboard, and an honor guard of military police stood vigil. Uniformed pallbearers took up the general’s flag-draped casket in Washington, bore him past a ceremonial guard of 50 soldiers with fixed bayonets, and saw him safely to Ft Myer on New Year’s Eve, to await his burial on January 2, 1951. Many of Walker’s old comrades came to see him off and his funeral constituted a who’s who of WWII brass: General Eisenhower, who would be president-elect in less than two years, Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall – as a side note, the position of Secretary of War was changed to Secretary of Defense after WWII – and Chief of Staff Omar Bradley, all three 5-star generals, were among the dignitaries who marched behind Walker’s new four-star flag as his horse-drawn caisson moved from the Ft Myer chapel to Pershing Hill, Section 34 Grave 86-A.

Walker’s entire procession, from his evacuation from Korea to his funeral at Arlington was well covered by the press, which touched a raw nerve in some grieving Americans. Shirley Young, the widow of a sergeant killed in Korea wrote to President Truman three days after the funeral saying “I’d like to know if a soldier’s high rank made him better to be brought home right away for burial? If I had my way, and could get to Korea, I’d accompany my husband’s body home… I’ve been very bitter about all this, and there are lots of others who feel this way… When I look around and see what little it matters to the big guys, that my daughters have lost a father, I can’t help the bitterness.” More families chimed in, calling for the return of their loved ones. Norma Potter, a war mother from Michigan also wrote Truman: “My son is gone. I can do nothing about it. But I can and will find out somehow where his body is and if possible, I will get his personal things.” Deara Eartbawey pleaded with Major General Henry Vaughn, a military aide to Truman, to send her son home from Korea: “I want my boy buried where he was born, in Boston with his father. That’s the least I could do to give him a decent funeral and that’s the least the Army could do to help me find my boy.” 

Prodded by this outpouring of public sentiment and faced with combat conditions that made American cemeteries vulnerable in Korea, the United States realized that if it could bring a general’s body home, it could do the same for colonels, captains, sergeants, and privates, and adopted a policy known as concurrent return. The Nation’s war dead would now be collected on the battlefield, transported to Japan, and shipped home for a timely burial. Announced by Secretary of Defense Marshall two months after Walker’s funeral, this new policy made the Korean War the first in which America’s dead were repatriated during ongoing hostilities, a practice continued in each subsequent conflict. As the first funeral ships arrived in the port of Oakland in the Spring of 1951, newspapers noted the historic nature of the moment with approval. Not only were the dead being returned during wartime, but the caskets of officers and enlisted were stored side by side without regard to race or rank, proof that the nation had recovered its sense of democratic propriety. Briefly undermined by the handling of General Walker’s funeral.

Much like the war in Afghanistan, the Korean War initially had broad public support but lost popular backing as it dragged on with no clear end in sight. It was not the sort of war America was accustomed to fighting and in a short time, over 60% of Americans supported withdrawing from the peninsula. It became known as the forgotten war, fought on obscure terrain under restrictive conditions. Madeline Smith, the mother of a dead airman, wrote Truman saying, “It is murder to send boys to fight with their hands tied behind your ‘limited police action.’ Have you forgotten how America fights?” If the president had forgotten, US service members had not. They fought with determination and distinction in Korea, even as patience faded on the home front and the first wave of dead arrived at Arlington. Those joining General Walker were Marine Private First Class Walter Monegan, Jr, who single-handedly took out two enemy tanks before he was gunned down near Sosa-ri; Army Sergeant First Class Charles Turner, who dashed through rifle fire, took an exposed position on a tank, and repelled enemy forces until his platoon could safely counterattack at Yongsan; Marine Staff Sergeant William Windrich, twice wounded and refusing evacuation near Yudam-ni, where he guided his platoon to a strong defensive position and held the ground until he lapsed into unconsciousness; and Navy Hospital Corpsman Francis Hammond, who exposed himself to enemy fire while treating wounded Marines near Sanae-dong – all perished in Korea, all came to rest at Arlington, and all received the Medal of Honor for their heroism.

They had not won the war, but they helped turn back the threat to South Korea, which finally made an uneasy truce with the North in 1953. When the shooting stopped, the Army’s identification specialists arrived on the peninsula and in time recovered 30,425 service members, identifying more than 29,500 of them. This rate of identification – only 3% remained unidentified – was unprecedented. A modern laboratory was built near Yokohama, Japan where remains were brought and specialists collected and collated information for each dead service member including a dental profile, hair color, height, shoe size, skin pigmentation, and fingerprints. X-rays were taken for each of the dead, which revealed old injuries that also helped with identification.

The few Americans who ended the war as unknowns – there were 848 in total – were held at an allied mortuary in Japan, where they remained until 1956 when officials began casting about for a suitable burial site. Initially, the Army proposed that they be buried at the UN cemetery in Pusan, South Korea, but unsure if the North would ever try to invade again and potentially overrun that cemetery, thoughts soon turned to the Philippines, where the United States maintains a WWII cemetery. Officials didn’t think the US public would accept that decision, so Arlington was considered for the nearly 850 remains, but Arlington was once again running out of space – even after its recent expansion – and it was thought that a mass burial of so many unknowns would take away from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. With all other options extinguished, the Army finally settled on the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii, an old volcanic crater known locally as the Punchbowl. There, in May 1956, all of the unknowns from Korea were buried alongside more than 2,000 from WWII.

I have been fortunate enough to visit the Punchbowl a few times over the years and it is a beautiful, idyllic place. Even before I started this podcast, I contemplated including stories of those buried in Hawaii so it is very possible that there will be some Ghosts of the Pacific tales joining the Ghosts of Arlington in the future.

In August 1955, after receiving requests from various veteran’s groups, the secretary of defense asked the Army to resume looking for a WWII unknown soldier to bring to Arlington. The next year, Congress authorized the burial of an unknown from the Korean War. Both would be repatriated at a joint ceremony at Arlington on Memorial Day 1958. Plans were made to excavate two new crypts, each to be marked by a flat marble slab to be placed in the shadow of the WWI monument. While construction began at the amphitheater, teams scattered overseas to exhume a number of nameless servicemen from both wars, examining each candidate for identifying features or personnel effects, and destroying all paperwork associated with each burial to ensure anonymity. 

For WWII candidates, the Army picked finalists from both the Atlantic and Pacific Theaters of Operation. 13 candidates from across North Africa and Europe were transferred to a cemetery at Epinal, France where one was chosen, loaded onto the USS Blandy, one of the Navy’s newest destroyers, and returned to the United States in mid-May 1958. At the same time, a second WWII candidate was selected at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii from candidates exhumed from the Fort McKinley American Cemetery in the Philippines and the Punchbowl in Hawaii. The Pacific Theater candidate joined the Korean War Unknown, already designated, and flew from Oahu to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were loaded onto the Navy cruiser USS Boston. 

The Boston met the Blandy off the coast of Virginia on May 26th when the unknown from WWII was selected by Navy Hospital Corpsman 1st Class William R, Charette, a Medal of Honor recipient from the Korean War, who placed a wreath on one of the two caskets. The runner up was taken eight miles out to sea, wrapped in a traditional sailcloth shroud, and committed to the deep – disappearing into the ocean to the sound of Taps. With this ritual complete, the Unknowns remaining – one from WWII and one from Korea – were placed side-by-side on the Blandy in flag draped caskets and journeyed up the Potomac River to the Washington Navy Yard, following the same route taken by their WWI predecessor 36 years before.

For three days, thousands of dignitaries and private citizens passed through the Capitol rotunda to pay their respects. On May 30, 1956, Memorial Day, some 100,000 spectators lined the streets of Washington to watch the Unknowns travel to Arlington. At precisely 1:00 pm, the caskets left the Capitol Building, the WWII Unknown leading the way, and an artillery battery at the Washington Monument commenced booming salutes that would continue every minute until the Unknowns arrived at the Memorial Amphitheater. The matching black caissons, each draped in black velvet and pulled by six gray horses from the Ft Myer stables, rode side-by-side, preceded by the national colors. At the cemetery gates, the procession paused, the WWII Unknown moved into the lead, and the unhurried uphill trek continued in single column, ascending Arlington’s lush green hills as 20 fighter jets and bombers passed overhead, each flying the missing man formation.

After the caskets entered the amphitheater, those in attendance filed in and the nation’s most prominent WWII veteran, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, took his place as chief mourner. It was a hot and humid early summer day. Several spectators reportedly swooned – I am going to take that to be an old timey euphemism for fainting or other symptoms of heat stroke – including an associate chief justice, but President Eisenhower, dressed in a black suit, soldiered through the heat and glare, impressing at least one reported who wrote, “The President’s capacity for standing at attention and sitting in prayerful attitude during the long ceremony was notable. Others fanned themselves with their programs. Many did not display the sixty-seven-year-old President’s stamina.” 

Once Ike presented the two Unknowns with the Medal of Honor, the ceremony moved to the amphitheater terrace where hundreds of service members stood at attention with bayonets fixed and medals gleaming in the sun. Casket teams lowered the Unknowns into their crypts. Watching solemnly, President Eisenhower stood before the WWII Unknown’s grave, while Vice President Richard Nixon, himself a WWII Navy Veteran of the Pacific Theater, stood before the Korea Unknown. After seven Soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Regiment fired their three-volley 21-gun salute, a lone bugler sounded Taps as dusk descended on the cemetery. 

In his book On Hallowed Ground Robert Poole says “With their arrival, each of the century’s three major wars took its place on the amphitheater plaza, where three tombs symbolized a distinct phase of the nation’s evolution – one from the era of Black Jack Pershing, biplanes, and doughboys; one from the time of Pearl Harbor, Ike, Normandy, and the mushroom-shaped cloud; and one from the false hope of Inchon and the confusion of night fighting, long retreats, and limited war. Having used the ultimate weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the United States could not easily unleash it again – nor, for that matter, could the growing number of nations in possession of that power. The specter of nuclear holocaust, hovering just over the horizon, ensured the last wars of the century would be small, costly affairs of containment, limited in scope, and unsatisfying in outcome, with few obvious winners. Total war was unthinkable, the future uncertain.”

Back in Episode 9, I said that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was Arlington’s most visited site. Apparently the show needs a better fact-checker because I recently found out I was wrong. Next week, we are going to step away from wars and Unknown Soldiers briefly and talk about what IS the most visited site at Arlington National Cemetery, the grave of President John F. Kennedy.  

Thank you so much for downloading this week’s podcast. If you need more Ghosts of Arlington in your life, there are photographs and more information about every episode on the show’s website: www.ghostsofarlingtonpodcast.com. Ghosts of Arlington is also on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and links to those sites are in the show notes. As always, I encourage you to leave the show a five-star rating on iTunes or wherever you stream from, this helps other people find the show and if you don’t think I merit a five-star review, I would love your feedback. The show’s email address is ghostsofarlingtonpodcast@gmail.com. And remember, fear not death, for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal. <PLAY TAPS>