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By then both sides had created seemingly unassailable extensive defensive lines. It was as if the Chinese, who had been so cavalier with their manpower in the earlier months of the war, had morphed their troops into a different kind of Army in the previous two years, skilled at this different kind of warfare. Given UN air and artillery supremacy, they had gradually adjusted their style of fighting. They had created quite exceptional tunnels, triumphs of raw, primitive engineering (and eventually to be copied and perhaps exceeded by the North Vietnamese, first in their assault on the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and then in time in their war with the Americans). In Korea these tunnels went from Chinese positions relatively removed from the point of assault to the very mouth of an attack point. They allowed the Chinese relative immunity from UN firepower until the very last moment of an attack. In addition, the Chinese had their artillery pieces, usually ones captured during their civil war, hidden away, virtually invisible to detection even from the air. They were positioned on the back side of the mountains, often in caves laboriously carved out of the mountains themselves. A given artillery piece would be slipped out periodically, would fire about twenty rounds of frighteningly accurate fire at the American positions, and then be wheeled back into the cave. “By the time our counterfire guys could fix its location, their gun was safe and its crew was safely back in the cave too, sucking down their rice,” said Hal Moore, who had commanded a rifle company in those days. Their defensive positions were exceptional, “very tough to crack—they were hard-core, heavy duty, professional diggers,” Moore said. “Their lines were built around deep caves, catacombs with large underground rooms sometimes twelve or fifteen miles behind the front lines. Because of that our artillery, bombers, and close air support had little or no effect on them.” Their troops were much admired by the American commanders in the field for their discipline and tenacity. The Americans were rotating their frontline people more and more quickly because it was such an unpopular war, but the Chinese were more often than not keeping the same units and the same troops engaged on the line for extended periods,
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
But neither belligerent was eager to exchange bombing raids, and although nightly blackouts added inconvenience and apprehension to the wartime burden of the people of both nations, the implicit truce held until mid-May 1940. Then within a week two events triggered British action. German raiders targeted for French airfields at Dijon lost their way and bombed the southern German city of Freiburg instead, killing fifty-seven people; the German Ministry of Propaganda brazenly denounced the bombing as British or French and threatened fivefold retaliation. Blacker and more violent non sequitur destroyed the city center of Rotterdam. Dutch forces were holding out stubbornly as late as May 14 in the northern section of that old Netherlands port. The German commanding general ordered a “short but devastating air raid” that he hoped might decide the battle.1347 Negotiations with the Dutch advanced, the air raid was canceled, but the abort message arrived too late to stop half the hundred Heinkel lll’s ordered into action from dropping 94 tons of bombs. The bombs started massive fires in stores of fats and margarine. The first official Dutch statement, issued from the embassy in Washington, placed casualties in the devastated city at 30,000, and the Western democracies responded with outrage. Actual deaths totaled about 1,000; some 78,000 people went homeless. The British retaliated on May 15 by dispatching ninety-nine bombers to attack railway centers and supply depots in the Ruhr. Busy with the Battle of France, Hitler did not immediately strike back, but he issued a directive that prepared the way. He ordered the Luftwaffe “to undertake a full-scale offensive against the British homeland as soon as sufficient forces are available.”1348
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
A friend who visited Walt’s office at the time asked Walt if he was making any money. “You smiled and said, No, but you was having fun. Again I thought, Will he ever grow up?” Walt Pfeiffer said that the group arrived at the office at nine each morning and stayed until midnight. “It was more fun than pay,” he recalled. “You didn’t look at it as work.” Adolph Kloepper spoke of the “happy spirit that existed that we could still laugh and appreciate a good gag. I well remember too that we all had many belly laughs when discussing a story or material and Walt would explode some wild gag to incorporate in the story.”
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