Excerpted from The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam, published this month by Hyperion; © 2007 by the Amateurs, Ltd.

In October 20, 1950, the word was out: there was going to be a victory parade in Tokyo, and the U.S. First Cavalry Division (or Cav, as it was nicknamed)—because it had fought so well for so long, becoming the first to enter the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, and also because it was a favorite of General Douglas MacArthur's—was going to lead it. The word coming down was that they had better be prepared to look parade-ground sharp, not battlefield grizzled: you couldn't, after all, march down the Ginza in filthy uniforms and filthy helmets. The men of the Cav were planning to strut a bit when they passed MacArthur's headquarters in the Dai Ichi Building. They deserved to strut a bit.

The mood in general among the American troops in Pyongyang just then was a combination of optimism and sheer exhaustion, emotional as well as physical. The Korean War had begun in June, when Soviet-allied North Korea invaded American-allied South Korea. The Communists wanted to re-unite the country, partitioned since the Japanese surrender, under North Korean prime minister Kim Il Sung. During the first phase of the war, they had gained victory after victory over weak and ill-prepared American and South Korean forces. But then more and better American troops arrived, and in September, MacArthur had pulled off a brilliant stroke at Inchon, landing his forces behind the North Korean lines to retake the South Korean capital of Seoul. With that, the North Korean forces had unraveled. That had been a great success for MacArthur, perhaps the greatest triumph of a storied career, all the more so because he had pulled it off against the opposition of much of Washington.

Now betting pools were being set up among the soldiers in Pyongyang on when they would ship out. For some of the newest men, the replacements, who had only heard tales about how hard the fighting had been from the Pusan Perimeter, in southeast Korea, to Pyongyang, there was relief that the worst of it was past. A young lieutenant named Ben Boyd, from Claremore, Oklahoma, who had joined the Cav in Pyongyang, was given a platoon in Baker Company of the First Battalion. Boyd, who had graduated from West Point only four years before, wanted this command badly, but he was made nervous by its recent history. "Lieutenant, do you know who you are in terms of this platoon?" one of the senior officers had asked. No, Boyd answered. "Well, Lieutenant, just so you don't get too cocky, you're the 13th platoon leader this unit has had since it's been in Korea." Boyd suddenly decided he didn't feel cocky at all.

The mood was so optimistic that Bob Hope was holding a show in Pyongyang for the troops. Now, that was really something: the famous comedian, who had done show after show for the troops in World War II, telling his jokes in the North Korean capital. That night many of the men in the Cav gathered to hear Hope, and then, the next morning, they set out for a place just north of them called Unsan, to protect a South Korean, or rok, unit, led by General Paik San Yup, which was under fire. Surely, all they would have to do was clean up a small mess, the kind they believed South Korean soldiers were always getting into.

When they headed off, they were not particularly well prepared. Yes, they had gotten some of their ammo back, but there had been the question of uniforms. Should they take the ones they would wear on parade in Tokyo or winter clothes? Somehow, the choice was made for the dressier ones, even though the Korean winter—and this was to be one of the coldest in a hundred years—was fast approaching. And there was their mood: a sense on the part of officers as well as troops, even as they headed for areas perilously close to the Yalu River, the border between Korea and Chinese Manchuria, that they were out of harm's way. Many of them knew a little about the big meeting that had just occurred on Wake Island, between President Harry Truman and General MacArthur, and the word filtering down was that MacArthur had promised to give Washington back an entire American division then being used in Korea and ticket it for Europe.

MacArthur himself had shown up in Pyongyang right after the First Cav arrived there. "Any celebrities here to greet me?" he had asked when he stepped off his plane. "Where is Kim Buck Tooth?" he joked, in mocking reference to Kim Il Sung, who was seemingly defeated. Then he asked anyone in the Cav who had been with the unit from the beginning to step forward. Of the roughly 200 men assembled, only 4 took that step; each had been wounded at some point. Then MacArthur got on his plane for the flight back to Tokyo. He did not spend the night in Korea; in fact, he did not spend the night there during the entire time he commanded.

As MacArthur headed back to Tokyo, it was becoming increasingly clear to some officials in Washington that he was planning to send his troops farther and farther north. They were encountering very little resistance at that point, and the North Koreans had been in full flight, so he was stretching his orders, which in this case were much fuzzier than they should have been. A prohibition issued by the Joint Chiefs themselves against sending American troops to any province bordering China seemed not to slow MacArthur down at all. There was no real surprise in that: the only orders Douglas MacArthur had ever followed, it was believed, were his own. He had told the president at Wake Island that the Chinese would not enter the war. Besides, if they did, he had already boasted of his ability to turn their appearance into one of the great military slaughters in history. To MacArthur and the men on his staff, wonderfully removed from the Alaska-like temperatures and Alaska-like topography of this desolate part of the world, these were to be the final moments of the great victory march north that had begun with the seaborne Inchon landing. But the general's confidence about what the vast Chinese armies poised just beyond the Yalu River would not do was far greater than that of the top officials of the Truman administration.

No less nervous were some of the men and officers who were leading the drive north. Colonel Percy Thompson, G-2 (or intelligence officer) for First Corps, under which the Cav operated, had good reason to be uneasy. His early intelligence reads were quite accurate: the Chinese were already in the country, waiting patiently. They knew the difficulty of the march north would make their own job easier. "On to the Yalu," General Paik's rok soldiers had shouted in late October, "on to the Yalu!" But soon after, on October 25, the Chinese struck in force. It was like suddenly hitting a brick wall, Paik later wrote. At first the rok commanders had no idea what had happened. Paik's 15th Regiment came to a complete halt under a withering barrage of mortar fire, after which the 12th Regiment, on its left, was hammered, and then his 11th Regiment, the division reserve, was hit on its flank and attacked from the rear. The enemy was clearly fighting with great skill. Paik thought it must have been the Chinese who had ambushed them. He reacted by reflex, immediately pulling the division back to the village of Unsan, thereby saving most of his men. It was, he later said, like a scene from an American Western, when the white folks, hit by Indians and badly outnumbered, circled the wagons.

In the first day of battle, some troops from the 15th Regiment had brought in a prisoner. Paik did the interrogation himself. The prisoner was about 35 and wore a thick, quilted, reversible winter uniform, khaki on one side, white on the other. It was, Paik wrote, "a simple but effective way to facilitate camouflage in snowy terrain." The prisoner also wore a cap, thick and heavy, with earmuffs of a sort they would soon become all too familiar with, and rubber sneakers. He was low-key and surprisingly forthcoming in the interrogation: he was a regular soldier in the Chinese Communist Army, from Guangdong Province. He told Paik in passing that there were tens of thousands of Chinese in the nearby mountains. The entire First rok Division might be trapped.

Paik immediately called his corps commander, General Frank "Shrimp" Milburn, and took the prisoner back to Milburn's headquarters. This time Milburn did the interrogating while Paik interpreted. It went, he later wrote, like this:

"Where are you from?"

"I'm from South China."

"What's your unit?"

"The 39th Army."

"What fighting have you done?"

"I fought in the Hainan Island battle [in the Chinese civil war]."

"Are you a Korean resident of China?"

"No, I'm Chinese."

Milburn immediately reported the new intelligence to Eighth Army headquarters. From there, it was sent on to Major General Charles A. Willoughby, Douglas MacArthur's key intelligence chief, a man dedicated to the proposition that there were no Chinese in Korea, and that they were not going to come in, at least not in numbers large enough to matter. That was what his commander believed, and MacArthur's was the kind of headquarters where the G-2's job was first and foremost to prove that the commander was always right. The drive north to the Yalu, involving a limited number of American, South Korean, and other U.N. troops spread far too thinly over a vast expanse of mountain range, was premised on the idea of Chinese abstinence. If MacArthur's headquarters suddenly started reporting contact with significant Chinese forces, Washington, which had been watching passively from the sidelines, might bestir itself and demand a major role in the war. That was most decidedly not what MacArthur wanted, and what MacArthur wanted was what Willoughby always made come true in his intelligence estimates.

When the first reports about Chinese forces massing north of the Yalu had come in, Willoughby was typically dismissive. "Probably in the category of diplomatic blackmail," he reported. Now, with the first Chinese prisoner captured, an unusually talkative one at that, the word soon came back from Willoughby's headquarters: the prisoner was a Korean resident of China, who had volunteered to fight. The conclusion was bizarre, and it was deliberately aimed at minimizing the prisoner's significance.

In the coming weeks, American or rok forces repeatedly took Chinese prisoners who identified their units and confirmed that they had crossed the Yalu with large numbers of their compatriots. Again and again, Willoughby downplayed the field intelligence. Thus the men of the Eighth Cavalry Regiment were convinced, as they moved from Pyongyang to Unsan to rescue Paik's rok units, that they were pursuing the last ragtag remnants of the North Korean Army and would soon reach the Yalu itself and, if at all possible, piss in it as a personal symbol of triumph.

Know Your Enemy

Of the many professional sins of which Douglas MacArthur was guilty in that moment, including hubris and vanity, none was greater than his complete underestimation of the enemy. As Bruce Cumings, a historian of the Korean War, noted, Asians in MacArthur's mind were "obedient, dutiful, childlike, and quick to follow resolute leadership." MacArthur's China had not been touched by the Communist revolution. He seemed not to care how and why Mao had come to power, and had little interest in the forces that the revolution had unleashed. He seemed to believe that the Communists' victory in the civil war had little larger meaning. As a military force the Communists were "grossly overrated," he had told congressional representatives in September 1949, a month before Mao proclaimed his government. The way to beat them, he had said at the time, was to hit them "where they are weakest, namely in the air and on the sea." All you had to do, he added, was place "500 fighter planes, under the command of some old war horse similar to ["Flying Tigers" commander] General Chennault." MacArthur had used his airpower skillfully in his campaign in the Pacific against the Japanese, as a kind of long-distance artillery, and he seemed to believe that he would be able to use it much the same way against the Chinese.

Like many a general before him, MacArthur believed one war would be much the same as the next—even if it was against an entirely different enemy—so he failed to grasp the differences between the two great Asian armies fighting in two very different wars. In World War II, the Japanese had fielded a traditional army, fighting a conventional war, vulnerable not because of the limits of their individual soldiers' abilities, but because of the limitations of their country's industrial base. The Chinese, by contrast, were the least industrialized of major nations, understood their vulnerabilities all too well, and adjusted their tactics accordingly in Korea. Their ability to shift vast forces without detection—moving some of their divisions up to 15 miles at night without a single cigarette's being smoked, then burrowing into handmade caves during the day—caught MacArthur and his immediate staff completely by surprise.

The year before, when Lei Yingfu, the Chinese military adviser, had given Mao his briefing on MacArthur's likely assault on Inchon, the Chinese leader peppered him with questions not just about the general's tactics in the past, but about his personality as well. He was, Lei answered, "famous for his arrogance and his stubbornness." That intrigued Mao. "Fine! Fine!" he said. "The more arrogant and more stubborn he is the better." "An arrogant enemy," he added, "is easy to defeat."

The General's Court

To Joseph Alsop, a nominally sympathetic columnist, the manner of MacArthur's staff in the Tokyo years seemed like nothing so much as what Alsop had read of the court of Louis XIV. The Dai Ichi Building, which housed it, he wrote, "was proof of the basic rule of armies at war: the farther one gets from the front, the more laggards, toadies and fools one encounters." No one had more toadies and sycophants than MacArthur, and their tone with him "was almost wholly simpering and reverential, and I have always held the view that this sycophancy was what tripped him up in the end."

At the start of the Korean War, a disproportionate number of his top men had been with MacArthur since the late 1930s. It was the most exclusionary of groups: anyone who was not an insider was suspect. If he smiled, they smiled; if he frowned, they frowned. If things worked out well, it was because he was a great man; if not, it was because of sworn enemies in Washington. He had "surrounded himself," the historian William Stueck wrote in a particularly apt phrase, with men "who would not disturb the dreamworld of self-worship in which he chose to live."

Never would the weakness of his staff come back to haunt him as in Korea, especially with regard to Charles A. Willoughby. He was not just MacArthur's principal personal intelligence man, he was the only intelligence man who mattered in Korea. Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible; MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling the sources of intelligence. His desire was to have no dissenting or even alternative voices on his watch. It was always important to him that his intelligence reports blend seamlessly with what he had intended to do in the first place. In MacArthur's view, professional and unbiased intelligence estimates of the kind generated by the C.I.A. might have prevented him from doing what he wanted most: making the final drive to the Yalu. But only after Willoughby's great and catastrophic failure on the whereabouts and intentions of China's armies would the C.I.A. finally be allowed into the region.

Willoughby was a Prussian-born man of the far right, "all ideology and almost never any facts," in the words of Frank Wisner, the head of the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Plans. Willoughby's great hero—other than MacArthur—was the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, a true Fascist who had been supported by the Nazis in his drive to power in the 1930s and who then tilted to the Germans during World War II. The higher Willoughby rose, the more Prussian he became. On occasion, he even wore a monocle, although, as one fellow officer put it, he was more like Erich von Stroheim, the movie director, than Karl von Rundstedt, the head of the World War II German General Staff.

Apparently he had come to America from Heidelberg, Germany, as an 18-year-old in 1910 and entered the army as Adolf Charles Weidenbach. In three years he made sergeant, then left the army, went to Gettysburg College, did some graduate studies at the University of Kansas, and taught languages at girls' schools in the Midwest. He re-entered the army in 1916, served on the Mexican border, and eventually went to France, but did not see combat. After the war, he served for a time as military attaché in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. Eventually he became a self-styled military historian and intelligence officer. Somehow in the mid-1930s, while he was teaching at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a place where the army sent its most promising mid-career officers for extra training, he connected with MacArthur, and in 1940 he joined the general in the Philippines, soon becoming the intelligence expert on his staff.

The intensity of Willoughby's ideological biases made even others on the MacArthur staff uneasy, and he was despised by a vast number of other men in the command. "I was always afraid he would be found murdered one day, because if he was, I was sure that they would come and arrest me, because I hated him so much, and had been so outspoken about him," Lieutenant General William J. McCaffrey, deputy chief of staff of 10th Corps, once said.

In the internal staff struggles over the future of Japanese democracy, Willoughby was an unusually passionate player, trying to rid headquarters of the New Deal liberals whom he tended to see as fellow travelers or Communists. He was also always on the alert for any journalistic transgression against either the occupation or MacArthur personally. "Willoughby was absolutely convinced that because I was doing a good deal of original reporting on those divisions, reporting what neither he nor MacArthur liked, that I was a Communist," said Joseph Fromm, of U.S. News & World Report. "I remember one day he called me for a special one-on-one meeting, and it was a truly crazed scene. All he wanted to do was talk about Lenin and Marx, man-to-man, like we both knew what the game was, he the anti-Communist and the man of the law and me, in his mind, the Communist, and thus the outlaw, and we would be equals in this sparring, sophisticates about it, men of the world, but in the end his view of Communism would trump mine." Years later, Fromm got hold of his security file through the Freedom of Information Act. What stunned him was the amount of garbage in it about him, all of it collected by Willoughby and his people in the G-2 section, reams and reams of it, much of it incredibly inaccurate, "the kind of thing that could ruin a person's career if it was taken seriously. What it told about the man who was in charge of collecting it, the waste of time involved, and the inability of that headquarters to deal with reality, was staggering."

Later, after MacArthur had been relieved of his command, Willoughby surfaced with major connections to the extreme right wing in the United States, and began writing ever more virulent, racist, and anti-Semitic articles. When Eisenhower was about to get the Republican nomination in 1952, Willoughby told MacArthur that this proved the Republicans were part of a "clever conspiratorial move to perpetuate the vampire hold of the Roosevelt-Truman mechanism."

That was the intellectual prism through which all critical intelligence on Korea would pass in Tokyo, but the key to the importance of Willoughby was not his own self-evident inadequacies; it was that he represented the deepest kind of psychological weakness in the talented, flawed man he served—the need to have someone who agreed with him at all times and flattered him constantly. "MacArthur did not want the Chinese to enter the war in Korea. Anything MacArthur wanted, Willoughby produced intelligence for.… In this case Willoughby falsified the intelligence reports.… He should have gone to jail," said Lieutenant Colonel John Chiles, 10th Corps G-3, or chief of operations.

Rout at Unsan

The men of the Eighth Regiment of the First Cavalry Division reached Unsan without difficulty. Sergeant Herbert "Pappy" Miller had taken the news philosophically that they were to leave Pyongyang and head north to Unsan to steady the roks. Miller was an assistant platoon sergeant with Love Company of the Third Battalion of the Eighth Cav. He might have liked a few more days in Pyongyang, but these were orders and that was the business they were in, plugging holes. He had never understood why the brass had thought the roks could lead the way north in the first place. Miller wasn't worried about the Chinese coming in. What worried him was the cold, because they were still in summer-weight uniforms. Back at Pyongyang they had been told that winter clothes were on their way, already in the trucks, and supposed to arrive the next day, or the one after that. They had been hearing that for several days, but no winter uniforms had arrived.

Miller was from the small town of Pulaski, in upstate New York. He had served with the 42nd Division in World War II, gone back to Pulaski, found little in the way of decent employment, and rejoined the army in 1947. He was part of the Seventh Regiment of the Third Infantry Division, which had been detached and assigned to the First Cavalry, and he had only six months to go on a three-year enlistment when he was ordered to Korea in July 1950. In World War II, he thought everything had always been done right, but in Korea, damn near everything was done wrong. He and his company had almost immediately been rushed to the front line near the village and key juncture of Taejon, and had been thrown into the line that first day. He had been through everything ever since, which was why his men called him Pappy, though he was only 24 years old.

On the day they reached Unsan, Miller took a patrol about five miles north of their base, and they came upon an old farmer, who told them that there were thousands of Chinese in the area, many of whom had arrived on horseback. There was a simplicity and a conviction to the old man that made Miller almost sure he was telling the truth. So he brought him back to his headquarters. But no one at battalion headquarters seemed very interested. Chinese? Thousands and thousands of Chinese? No one had seen any Chinese. On horseback? That was absurd. So nothing came of it. Well, Miller thought, they were the intelligence experts. They ought to know.

On the afternoon of November 1, Major General Hobart R. "Hap" Gay, the First Cav division commander, was in his command post with General Charles Palmer, his artillery commander, when a radio report from an observer in an L-5 spotter plane caught their attention: "This is the strangest sight I have ever seen. There are two large columns of enemy infantry moving southeast over the trails in the vicinity of Myongdang-dong and Yonghung-dong. Our shells are landing right in their columns and they keep coming." Those were two tiny villages five or six air miles from Unsan. Palmer immediately ordered additional artillery units to start firing, and Gay nervously called First Corps, requesting permission to pull the entire Eighth Cav several miles south of Unsan. His request was denied.

About 1:30 in the morning of November 2, it all exploded. The Chinese hit the Third Battalion of the Eighth Cav. One moment the battalion headquarters was a center of American military activity; the next, it had been completely overrun and was filled with Chinese. At the same time, about 350 yards away, the Chinese hit Love Company and overran it. Pappy Miller was wounded and captured and would spend two years as a P.O.W., during which time he was tortured.

Of the Eighth Cav, when it was all over, there were some 800 casualties among the estimated 2,400 men in the regiment; of the ill-fated men of the Third Battalion, 800 strong when the battle began, only an estimated 200 made it out. It was the worst defeat of the Korean War thus far, doubly painful because it had taken place after four months of battle, when, it seemed, the tide had finally turned, when victory was in sight, and it had been inflicted on a much-admired American unit.

Intelligence Designs

Willoughby did all he could to minimize the overwhelming evidence that the Chinese had been the ones who struck the roks and the Eighth Cavalry near Unsan. A good many men who fought there came to believe that his refusal to act quickly on the evidence presented by the first captured Chinese prisoners and his unwillingness to add a serious note of caution to his intelligence briefings were directly responsible for the devastation inflicted on not just the Cav at Unsan but upon the Eighth Army soon after, for the loss of so many buddies, and, in some cases, for their own long tours in Chinese and Korean prisons. To them, what he represented came perilously close to evil, someone who blustered about the dangers of Communism and the Chinese, but then ended up making their work so much easier by setting the U.N. forces up for that great ambush. He was, thought Bill Train, a bright, young, low-level G-3 (or operations) staff officer who fought against Willoughby's certitudes in those critical weeks, "a four-flusher—someone who made it seem like he knew what he was doing—but in the end what he produced was absolutely worthless; there was nothing there at all. Nothing. He got everything wrong! Everything! What he was doing in those days was fighting against the truth, trying to keep it from going from lower levels to higher ones, where it would have to be acted on."

The importance and value of a good, independent intelligence man in wartime can hardly be overemphasized. A great intelligence officer studies the unknown and works in the darkness, trying to see the shape of future events. He covers the sensitive ground where prejudice, or instinctive cultural bias, meets reality, and he must stand for reality, even if it means standing virtually alone. Great intelligence officers often have the melancholy job of telling their superiors things they don't want to hear. A great intelligence officer tries to make the unknown at least partially knowable; he tries to think like his enemy, and he listens carefully to those with whom he disagrees, simply because he knows that he has to challenge his own value system in order to understand the nature and impulse of the other side.

In all ways, Charles Willoughby not only failed to fit this role, but was the very opposite of it. He would have been considered a buffoon, thought Carleton Swift, then a 31-year-old intelligence officer, if the impact of his acts had not been so deadly serious. Swift, a C.I.A. man (who had come out of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the C.I.A.), operated with State Department cover as a consul in the U.S. Embassy in Seoul and so was beyond Willoughby's reach. "There was an arrogance to Willoughby that was completely different from the uncertainty—the cautiousness—you associate with good intelligence men," he recalled. "It was as if he was always right, had always been right. Certitude after certitude poured out of him." Swift had been in Kunming during the Chinese civil war and had come away with a healthy respect for the military abilities of the Communists. He still had some good sources in China, and in dealing with your sources in those days, he believed, it was all about instinct and trust. He knew that the Chinese were gathering along the Yalu in huge numbers, and that their leadership had said they were going to enter the war. Best to take those promises seriously—especially since everything he picked up from his agents indicated that they were going ahead with their plans to enter the war. But Swift knew something else as well. "None of this was going to affect Willoughby. The Chinese were not going to come in. He knew it. And he was never wrong!"

In fact, Willoughby was not only stopping the combat-level intelligence machinery from sending its best and most consequential material to the top in Korea, he was also blocking other sources of intelligence, and keeping a careful eye on the small, bare-bones C.I.A. operation that in 1950 existed in Tokyo. It was being run by a man named William Duggan, an intelligence operative who had worked previously in Europe. From late September well into October, Duggan was receiving some exceptional information from his colleagues in Taiwan on what the Chinese Communist Army was up to. Some of the old Nationalist units, now incorporated into the People's Liberation Army, still had their radios. Sometimes they would manage to slip away at night and make contact with Taiwan to describe where they were and what they were doing. The messages all had a theme: we are all heading north to the Manchurian border; the field-level officers believe the decision has already been made to cross the Yalu. A young C.I.A. operative on Taiwan named Bob Myers was also picking up these reports from some of the Nationalists he was working with and passing them on to his superiors, and he knew that they had reached Duggan in Japan. What he did not learn until later was that Willoughby had found out about this and had threatened to close down Duggan's tiny shop and run him out of Japan unless he stopped trying to notify anyone higher up about the intelligence he had.

Meanwhile, within the Eighth Army, a fierce bureaucratic battle over the intelligence was taking place. The unfortunate man caught between Willoughby above and the growing doubts among intelligence men working on the ground in North Korea was the Eighth Army's G-2, Clint Tarkenton. "He was a Willoughby man … and you must not underestimate the importance of that. You must remember the enormous power that Willoughby had in that overall command structure," said Bill Train, the young officer in the First Cav's G-3 shop, who was convinced that the Chinese had entered the country in force, and that a major tragedy was in the making. "It was MacArthur's command, not a U.S. Army command, and if you crossed Willoughby it was not just a ticket out of there, it was probably a ticket straight out of your career." So Tarkenton followed the line from Tokyo that, as Willoughby had reported in an intelligence estimate on October 28, three days after the capture of the first Chinese prisoner in the Unsan area, "the auspicious time for such intervention has long since passed; it is difficult to believe that such a move, if planned, would have been postponed to a time when remnant NK forces have been reduced to a low point of effectiveness."

Train, however, was quite alarmed about what had happened at Unsan. Technically, intelligence was not even Train's area, but how could you do plans as a G-3 if you did not know who or where the enemy was? He had been pulled into some of the intelligence work because the G-2 section was shorthanded. Now he saw undeniable evidence of what appeared to be a large-scale Chinese entry into the war. It was not something that you scoffed at, as Willoughby's shop was doing; it was something that sent a chill through you and made you want to come up with even more information.

But whatever they came up with in terms of the Chinese presence, Willoughby had an answer for. If the roks reported killing 36 Chinese during a battle, and the bodies were still on the battlefield, then the answer came back that it was all just an Oriental way of saving face, that the roks had fought so poorly they had to claim a certain number of dead Chinese as a matter of pride. If Train came up with evidence that seemed to point to the presence of five or six Chinese divisions in a given area, the answer was invariably that these were different, smaller units from different Chinese divisions, now attached to a North Korean unit.

A Deadly Discrepancy

On October 30, after the attack at Unsan, Everett Drumright, in the Seoul embassy, reflecting the G-2 position quite precisely, cabled State that two regiments' worth of Chinese, perhaps 3,000 men, were probably engaged in the North. That was his honest attempt to answer what was the burning question of the moment for his superiors. The next day he cabled again, giving a smaller figure of only 2,000 Chinese troops. By November 1, after lower-level interrogators showed that there were troops there from several different Chinese armies, Tarkenton, following the Willoughby line, said that it was because smaller units from those armies but not the full armies themselves had showed up.

On November 3, as the reality of Unsan gradually set in, Willoughby upped his figures slightly. Yes, the Chinese were there in country, minimally 16,500 of them, at a maximum 34,000. On November 6, Tarkenton placed the total figure of Chinese aligned against both the Eighth Army and 10th Corps at 27,000. In reality, the number in country was already closer to 250,000, and growing. On November 17, MacArthur told Ambassador John Muccio that there were no more than 30,000 Chinese in the country, while the next day Tarkenton placed the number at 48,000. On November 24, the day the major U.N. offensive to go to the Yalu kicked off—instead of sensing how large the Chinese presence was and getting into strong defensive positions—Willoughby placed the minimum number at 40,000, the maximum at 71,000. At the time there were 300,000 Chinese troops waiting patiently for the U.N. forces to come a little deeper into their trap. It was, as Train put it, "the saddest thing I was ever associated with because you could almost see it coming, almost know what happened was going to happen, those young men moving into that awful goddamn trap."

It was as if one vast part of the army, the part not commanded by Douglas MacArthur, knew that trouble was imminent as the other part kept moving forward. On Thanksgiving Day, General Al Gruenther visited Dwight Eisenhower, his old boss from Europe, at Eisenhower's residence at Columbia University, of which Eisenhower, biding his time for a run at the White House, was then president. Gruenther's oldest son, Dick, class of 1946 at West Point, had a company in the Seventh Division, some of whose men were very far north and headed for the Yalu. On November 17, four days before his senior officers reached the Yalu and pissed in it, Dick Gruenther (who had been sure they were already fighting the Chinese) was severely wounded in the stomach in one of the small battles that preceded the main Chinese offensive. Al Gruenther, Eisenhower's former chief of staff, had just finished a tour as director of the 100-man Joint Chiefs staff, which meant that he was aware of all the warning signals that MacArthur was now ignoring.

At first General Eisenhower's 28-year-old son John thought it odd that Gruenther was there for Thanksgiving, because Gruenther had a family of his own. But later he decided that Gruenther was there because Eisenhower was still the man you talked to—he had that special status—when something this serious was going wrong at so high a level. John remembered that a shadow hung over that Thanksgiving Day meal, something that he himself did not entirely understand. Gruenther had told his father that the American forces were simply too exposed and far too vulnerable. When Gruenther left, the general turned to his son and said, "I've never been so pessimistic about this war in my life." John was teaching at West Point at the time, and when he left his father's residence to drive back to the academy, he turned on the car radio and heard a report about how MacArthur was promising the war would be over by Christmas.

In late November, the Chinese and North Koreans launched a major offensive, driving the U.N. forces south and eventually taking back Seoul. General MacArthur was removed from command for insubordination by President Truman in April, causing an uproar in the U.S. The front line would shift back and forth until the conflict became a stalemate in July, with the front eventually settling around the 38th parallel. Peace negotiations began, but major combat operations, including large-scale bombing of the North and its population, continued. In 1952, President-Elect Dwight Eisenhower, who had pledged in his campaign to end the war, visited Korea to assess the situation. On July 27, 1953, a cease-fire agreement was reached. By that time 36,940 Americans had died and about 92,000 had been wounded.

David Halberstam was a Vanity Fair contributing editor.