Daily Archives: 23 January 2004

by Joel | 23 January 2004 · 10:00 pm

The U.S. Army’s Manchu Regiment

Most people have heard of the British Army’s famed Gurkhas, but how many are aware of the American Manchu Regiment? It played a vital role in numerous key military campaigns.

[World War I:] In early October 1917, the Manchus moved to the front. The Regiment first became involved in the then static warfare in the Sous Reuvrois Sector. When subsequently moved to Chateau-Thierry, it met and stalled the Boche Purge on Paris….

The German’s attempt to make the Bevel Forest one of the fierce, slow defensive maneuvers was thwarted and their lines became utterly disorganized. This was one of three successful night moves or raids made by the Manchu Regiment within a period of days that aided considerably in dealing a death blow to the bewildered Germans.

After the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Manchu troops marched into Germany to serve as an occupation force…. The Regiment was awarded battle streamers for Aisne, Meuse-Argonne, Lorraine, Ile de France, St. Mihiel and Aisne-Mame campaigns. In 1918, the Manchus were awarded the French Fourragere for gallantry during the Meuse-Argonne offensive….

[World War II:] On 07 June 1944 (D-Day +1) the Manchu Regiment set foot on the hostile soil of Omaha Beach, Normandy and immediately moved forward to capture Rubercy. Within three days they had intercepted the main rail line between Cherbourg and Paris and had driven through the Carisy Forest….

The Manchus were operating as a hinge on the “Bulge” at the Rocherather Baracken crossroads. The Manchus fought for eighteen hours against overwhelming odds, destroying seventeen German tanks, and repulsing a key drive in the German thrust. This stand enabled two battalions of the 38’h Infantry Regiment to escape encirclement, and coupled with similar stands by other allied units, caused the German counteroffensive to falter, thereby providing time to regroup and defeat this last great German effort.

After Allied lines had been re-established in January 1945, the Manchu Regiment once again spearheaded a drive through the Siegfried Line to begin a dash across Germany. The Rhine River was crossed on 21 March 1945. The Manchu Regiment then continued its drive across Germany and into Czechoslovakia to the outskirts of Pilsen where it was engaged in combat until the last days of the war. The Manchu Regiment remained in that sector on occupation duty until July 1945, when it embarked for the United States with many decorations, including three Presidential Citations….

[Korea:] Manchu troops were the first element of the Indianhead Division to touch Korean soil when they arrived at the Korean port city of Pusan on 31 July 1950. The Manchus were immediately placed on line in defense of the Pusan Perimeter and it received its baptism of fire in the battle of the Naktong Bulge. Later they broke out from that defensive position, and began the attack Northward, when they assaulted and seized Cloverleaf and Obong-Ni Ridge on 1 August 1950….

The Manchu Regiment participated in the breakout from the Pusan perimeter and began the advance north with the rest of the Eighth Army towards the Yalu River. The soldiers thought that the war would be over and that they would be home for Christmas as they neared the end of their push northward. Those beliefs were crushed on 25 November 1950 though, when several Red Chinese Armies attacked the Eighth Army in the vicinity of the Chongehon River…. On 30 November 1950, the majority of the Manchu Regiment began to run the “Gauntlet” to Kunu-Ri with the rest of the 2nd Infantry Division. The 1st Battalion remained with the 23d Infantry Regiment to fight a rear guard action to cover the withdrawal of the rest of the 2nd Division….

After running the gauntlet to Kunu-Ri, the remnants of the Regiment were withdrawn to an area south of the Korean capital of Seoul to refit. Manchus then spent the month of December 1950 on the monumental task of reorganizing, re-equipping, re-supplying and training, while patrolling the roads east of Seoul to Hongchon, Hoengsong and Wonju….

On 18 September 1951 the Regiment was ordered to attack the ridge lines southwest of Heartbreak Ridge in an attempt to relieve pressure on the 23rd Infantry Regiment, which was attacking up the east-west spur of the ridge. After heavy fighting the Manchus secured their objective on 23 September. The North Koreans did not relinquish Heartbreak Ridge and in late September the Manchus were ordered to attack the west-side of the Mundung-Ni Valley in a final attempt to capture the ridge. The attack was successful and Heartbreak Ridge fell on 13 October 1951….

The Regiment earned an additional Presidential Unit Citation for its gallant service in Hongchon, and the Manchus received streamers for the following campaigns while serving in Korea: UN Defensive, UN Offensive, CCF Intervention, First UN Counteroffensive, CCF Spring Offensive, UN Summer-Fall Offensive, Second Korean Winter, Korea Summer-Fall 1952, Third Korean Winter, Korea Summer 1953….

[Vietnam:] April 29th [1966] saw the battalion disembark the ship General Walker at Vung Tau, Vietnam. The Manchus got a taste of what was to come almost immediately. Within hours of their arrival they found themselves under fire as their convoy made its way to the 25th Division base camp at Cu Chi. The next day, a little more than 24 hours after arriving in country, Alpha company engaged the enemy in a firefight – setting the tone of regular contact that would characterize the Manchu experience for the next four and a half years….

On February 22, 1968 the Manchus closed the base at Katum which had served as the large forward base for the 1st BDE near the Cambodian border. After a day at Tay Ninh to prepare, the Manchus moved out to Cu Chi and eventually arrived north of Tan Son Nhut on February 25. The mission was to find and destroy rocket sites that had been used to fire on Tan Son Nhut Air Base since the Tet Offensive began nearly a month earlier. At 9:00 a.m. on March 2, 1968, the Manchus walked into what was to become one of the worst single encounter loss of life incidents in the history of the Vietnam war. Forty nine members of Charlie company were killed and 24 wounded in an ambush by a large communist force on Route 248 north and east of Tan Son Nhut near the small village of Quoi Xuan. In addition, C company suffered 24 wounded while D company suffered casualties in the fighting to reach Charlie company. Manchu Alpha, Bravo, and Delta continued operations in this area and took many more casualties until finally leaving on March 11, 1968. Rocket sites had been destroyed, and a formidable communist force had been weakened, if not destroyed. But, it had come at a great cost to the Manchus and particularly the courageous men of Charlie Company….

In the four years and six months of Service in Vietnam with the 25th Division, the 4th Battalion of the Manchus received two Presidential Citations and added 12 campaign streamers to the Regimental Colors for Combat Operations in the Republic of South Vietnam. It is estimated that 450 4th Battalion Manchus were killed in the Vietnam War. Three Manchus were posthumous recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor….

[Cold War:] On August 2, 1972 the 4th Battalion was relieved from assignment to the 25th Infantry Division and was reassigned to Alaska with the 172nd Infantry [where morale was maintained by daily repetitions of the unit motto: “Keep Up the Fire!”]….

In 1976 the 1st Manchus were deployed into the DMZ to provide security for a focus of the infamous tree-cutting incident. This incident occurred when two U.S. soldiers were killed by the North Koreans when they were attempting to trim a tree which hindered observation of the North Korean border.

Surprisingly enough, the Manchus were one of the oldest infantry regiments in the U.S. Army, first commissioned in 1798. It fought in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Little Big Horn campaigns, Cuba, the Philippines, and during the Boxer Rebellion in Peking, where it was awarded the honorary title of “Manchus” and its motto, “Keep Up The Fire.”

Tonga Favors China, But Not the Chinese

Head Heeb has an interesting post on “Tonga’s ambivalent relationship with China, one that favors the Chinese government but not the Chinese people. Overseas Chinese make up about three percent of Tonga’s population.”

A Language Freak Wandering in Siberia

If you feel the need to follow an ever farther outlier, check out this blog by pf, a language freak wandering through Siberia on his own.

Oddly, Russia is the only country I’ve been in where you can’t find manaiacal Australian tourists scurrying out wherever you step. In Europe, you can’t find a town so small but it’s got an Australian (or, if you’ll pardon the expression, a New Zealander) in it, or having just left it, or on the way to it. Here, though, I haven’t met a single antipodean, curiously. Though a couple Indian billionaires in April stayed in the hotel I stayed at in Suntar. I was called upon to verify their English, which I pronounced to be competent, but clearly not that of a native speaker. All marvelled at my deductive powers, for indeed, the Indians had been born in India, and not, as appearances might lead to believe, in any other country.

Americans do occur up here, though. There’s one, I don’t know if I mentioned him, who lived on Kamchatka for a year in high school, and now is studying Japanese (Japanese!) at Yakut State U. (Yakut State!) for a year. There was another who came to a village near Suntar, I wasn’t clear on which, and stayed for two years, or maybe three, hung around the local museum a lot, and then went home, where she turned into a doctor of anthropology. Everybody still remembers her, and, shaking their heads, say, “We’ve lived with this museum all our lives, and she comes here, looks at it for a couple years, writes some stuff down, and gets a doctorate!” She married a local, and took him home with her, where he now makes Sakha (Yakut) jewelry in North Carolina. I’m sure you can track him down, there’s probably not many Sakha (Yakut) jewellers in North Carolina. He’s got his own wall, with pictures of him, and a special cabinet for pictures of his brothers, local jewellers, and a picture of his father, touchingly hung next to a photocopy of his death certificate.

Hat tip: languagehat

South Korea and the Vietnam-era Mindset

A Vietnam-era mindset still influences many Americans, perhaps especially longtime leftists. The same is true in South Korea. But the Vietnam era meant rather different things to South Koreans than it did to Americans.

For one thing, many South Koreans mapped their images of a divided Vietnam onto a divided Korea, and vice versa. This shows up very starkly in a novel like The Shadow of Arms, by Hwang Suk-Young, whose English translation by Chun Kyung-Ja was published by the Cornell University East Asia Program in 1994. I had the chance to write a review of the book for the journal Korean Studies in 1996.

At one point during a huge antiwar rally in San Francisco that I attended while on a weekend pass from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey in 1969, a speaker standing beneath the flag of North Vietnam began attaching conditions to his hitherto well-received calls for peace. But almost as soon as his “We demand peace” turned to “We will accept no peace until …” the more-alert members of the crowd began to chant “Peace now! Peace now!” More and more people took up the cry until they drowned out the rest of the speech. For the speaker, peace was a step on the road to partisan victory. For the crowd, it was an end in itself. The crowd won that round but, in typical fashion, the partisan peaceniks were better represented among the organizers, while the naive peaceniks were far more numerous among the organized.

Although utterly cynical about the enterprise (and especially the entrepreneurs) of war, The Shadow of Arms is not exactly an antiwar novel. It is written more in the spirit of that partisan peace activist beneath the North Vietnamese flag in San Francisco. Set almost entirely amidst the logistics-and-supply cornucopia behind the lines rather than in the more intense violence of the free-fire zones, it presents the war as essentially a struggle between self-sacrificing patriots (supported by the communist North Vietnamese) and self-indulgent profiteers (supported by the capitalist Americans). This focus on the wartime black market in South Vietnam may well reflect Hwang Suk-Young’s own experience in the 2nd ROK Marine Brigade, which was deployed to Vietnam from 1965 to 1972. But it also appears to reflect his vision of Cold War South Korea, whose greedy and corrupt military leaders presumably abandoned the goals of reunification and independence for personal profit. By implication, North Korea is the preserve of self-sacrificing patriots still wedded to nationalist, rather than capitalist, goals.

This novel thus evokes the shared fate of Korea and Vietnam. It does not explore the motives (other than profit) for South Korean participation in the war, nor the reactions of individual Koreans to the experience. There is no hint, for instance, of the kind of introspection found in Ahn Junghyo’s [war novel] White Badge, where the protagonist is reminded of his own childhood picking through the garbage of the American soldiers when he sees Vietnamese kids sifting through the rubbish of the Korean troops. Nevertheless, Hwang’s novel is an engrossing tale of individuals caught up in blackmarket plunder within a command economy during the chaos of war. (Although Hwang appears to consider such plunder typical of capitalist economies, I suspect–having spent a year in Romania under Ceausescu–that it is typical of any economy in which an elite has monopoly control of crucial resources, whether that elite meets in corporate boardrooms or in people’s palaces.)

For many Koreans, their participation on the American side during the Vietnam War was quadruply shameful. Not only did they fight on the losing side, but they fought to preserve a divided country, they fought for capitalism, and they fought in a mercenary capacity. Many others, of course, were eager to combat communism and to repay a debt to a vital ally.

The mercenary issue is particularly nettlesome. It’s a toxic label. But it’s hard to deny that, to a certain extent, the Vietnam War provided the same kind of stimulus to South Korea’s postwar economy that the the Korean War did to Japan’s earlier postwar economy (and European wars did to the U.S. economy even earlier). That’s why the same review also considered a related book, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags”: The Hiring of Korean, Filipino and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War, by Robert M. Blackburn (McFarland, 1994).

The mercenary nature of foreign involvement in the war is the central theme of Robert M. Blackburn’s fascinating nonfiction account of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to beg or buy international support for South Vietnam under “The Free World Assistance Program” (commonly labeled “More Flags”), which began in 1964. Blackburn, like Hwang, is a Vietnam War veteran who “had the good fortune to fight alongside, though never with, some units of the ROK Marines, and was never bothered by what label they wore” (155). He is careful to distinguish the soldiers who fight wars from the politicians who make wars, observing that any stigma attached to the word mercenary belongs to the leaders, not to the soldiers.

However, Blackburn offers a more subtle analysis of the status of mercenaries. He notes that individual soldiers may choose to fight for a foreign country for reasons other than simply pay, although the pay itself defines their status as mercenaries. Soldiers-of-fortune may fight for the thrill of it. Others enlist because they believe in the cause they are being paid to fight for. Much the same can be said for entire military units, or even for nations that inject their own troops into foreign wars. “In the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, for example, Franco’s Moroccan battalions fought only for pay, while the opposing members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought for a cause. Both units, however, … shared the common status of mercenaries” (146).

Australia and New Zealand sent military units to Vietnam at their own expense (and therefore not as mercenaries) and for their own reasons. In fact their support for South Vietnam began before Johnson’s More Flags program. Both countries had helped fight communist insurgencies in the Malay Peninsula, and both were alarmed by what Sukarno and his Communist Party allies were doing in Indonesia. Each apparently considered it in its own national interest to help assure the survival of a capitalist South Vietnam. South Korea had at least as much national interest in the survival of South Vietnam as those two countries did. But it also had a “debt of honor” (46) to repay to the allies who helped assure its own survival little more than a decade earlier.

Other countries contributed varying amounts to South Vietnam, from Morocco’s “10,000 cans of sardines worth $2,000” to Japan’s “$55 million worth of economic assistance from a World War II reparations agreement” (141). Most contributed medical supplies and equipment. Costa Rica (actually the Costa Rican Sugar Growers Association) sent an ambulance (143), and South Korea’s first military unit to arrive was a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) [emphasis added] (159). However, of all the More Flags allies, South Korea committed the most troops (50,000 out of the 65,000 in 1968 [158]), suffered the most casualties (4,407 out of the 5,241 killed [xiii]), and reaped the greatest economic benefits in return. Blackburn (64-65) estimates that South Korean soldiers received about $1 billion just in pay, allowances, and benefits alone in 1967-73. A ROK private with a base pay of $1.60 a month could earn $1.00-$1.25 for each day’s service in Vietnam. Still, each ROK soldier cost the U.S. only about half as much as a comparable American soldier.

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