COLUMN ONE : War and Black GIs’ Memories : Veterans of the action in Korea set out on a painful journey to erase a record of shame. The quest proves elusive.

The old soldier stared up at the formidable hill in the distance. “It’s here we got the reputation,” he said dejectedly, “the reputation we couldn’t live down.”

Oliver Dillard, a retired Army two-star general, was confronting memories of the most painful campaign of his 32-year military career, a month-long struggle that he and other black soldiers waged in the chaotic early days of the Korean War over a savage piece of terrain known as Hill 665, or Battle Mountain.

For almost 40 years the memory of the fighting--and of the Army’s official conclusion that the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment had disgraced itself by showing cowardice before the enemy--had burned inside Dillard like an ulcer. Now, surcease from that agony might be at hand. Or so he hoped.

Was the official verdict on these black troops fair? Or were they being judged by a racist Army and a racist America?

Those questions took Dillard and a team of Army historians back to Korea last month. What they found tells much about that time--about the Korean War, the racism of the Army back then, and about who gets to write history.

What they did not find, however, is evidence that would lift the burden from the spirit of Dillard, 63, and his comrades. Instead of simply cleansing the record of bias, the inquiry raised new questions and deepened these veterans’ pain.

In the summer of 1950, Dillard was a 23-year-old first lieutenant leading a platoon of the 24th Infantry Regiment, the last all-black unit in the recently desegregated Army. The outfit had been one of the first sent to Korea to administer what was expected to be a quick thrashing of an inferior enemy. The soldiers brought their dress uniforms in anticipation of a victory parade through Seoul before Christmas.

Instead, a debacle awaited them. The fiercely motivated and disciplined North Koreans drove the American forces back to a toehold in the southeast corner of the country, where they clung to a last line of defense known as the Pusan Perimeter.

The 24th Infantry was assigned to defend a sector of that line near the town of Haman, to protect the artillery-scarred ridges of Battle Mountain. What happened in those harrowing weeks of August, 1950, remains a source of bitter contention today.

According to Army records of the Korean War, the black troops of the 24th were seized with “mass hysteria” and fled at the first sign of the enemy, often before a shot was fired.

The record continues: The troops repeatedly defied their white superiors’ orders to stand and fight. Straggling and desertion were rampant. The soldiers suffered an inordinate number of self-inflicted wounds. They abandoned huge numbers of rifles and mortars and radios--anything that would slow the cowardly flight from battle.

The 4,000-man regiment was ridiculed at the time by sister units and in the press as the “Bugout Brigade” and the “Runnin’ 24th.”

The official historian’s account of the conduct of the 24th Infantry at Battle Mountain was described by military writer Clay Blair as “the most scathing indictment of an Army regiment (black or white) ever published.”

For a decade, veterans of the 24th Infantry have tried to force the Army to repudiate its public “lynching” of the black GI. They have demanded that the Army revise its Korean War record to erase the slurs and to reflect their view that the 24th fought no worse, in many instances fought better, than comparable white regiments.

They blame poor training, lousy equipment, rotten white commanders and the white leadership’s racist expectation of failure for the unit’s admitted weaknesses early in the war. They insist that after the early problems were resolved and decent officers were sent to the unit, the 24th Infantry performed valiantly and never got credit for it.

Until the Army redeems the reputation of the 24th, these angry and disillusioned veterans say, the U.S. military will never be cleansed of the stain of bigotry and injustice.

“After all the struggle and the suffering and the death that we saw and experienced, to have to read this crap . . . “ Dillard complained as he walked the old battlefields of Korea last month. “When in the hell are we going to be able to stop fighting just to be considered humans?”

Army OKd Review

Two years ago, the Army reluctantly agreed to an unprecedented review of the official history. The Chief of Staff assigned Col. John Cash, a black intelligence officer and Vietnam combat leader, to try to serve as honest broker in rewriting the record of the 24th in Korea.

Last month, Cash took Dillard and seven other veterans of the 24th back to Korea to relive those dreadful early days of the war. The trip was an emotional journey, suffused with anger at the Army for its alleged injustice to blacks and not a little fantasy about what really happened on these blood-spackled hills.

Military historians have written of the fog of war, in which the shape of battle is indistinct and the confusion of combat plays havoc with commanders’ plans. To attempt 39 years later to reconstruct from men’s ever-faulty memories events that were not clear even at the time is a daunting task.

The old soldiers’ recollections are compromised by time, and in some cases, by an effort to make of the 24th Infantry a parable of the black experience in America. The bitterness of an unwon war and the unfinished drive for racial equality render the historian’s job all but impossible.

“When I first got into this project, I thought that racism would explain it all,” Cash said, “but as I’ve gotten into the facts and the personalities, it’s not that simple.”

This, then, is a tale of myth and memory, of race and redemption.

Cash would have liked to write a little morality play in which bigoted white generals and historians of the 1950s wrongly besmirched the character of the valiant black fighting man.

But sometimes the quest for justice collides with the facts.

Cash said he found little that directly contradicts the devastating official portrait of the 24th. He hopes to weave context around a difficult and painful story to better reflect the unique problems these black GIs faced.

“Official histories are always written from the top down, from the point of view of generals and colonels,” he said. “We’re getting a worm’s-eye view.”

Cash’s interviews with more than 250 veterans of the 24th Infantry have produced overwhelming evidence that some of the soldiers did run from the enemy at times, particularly in the early months of the war.

He has unearthed records and witnesses that support the Army’s contention that, at times, the 24th was untrustworthy in battle and had to be backstopped by troops diverted from other regiments. Cash confirmed that black troops were disproportionately represented in courts-martial and other disciplinary actions. But the records of the trials generally support the convictions, although the sentences were more severe than those given white soldiers.

Cash also found that in later actions the 24th acquitted itself well, particularly in two river crossings in March and April of 1951. The official history and later accounts fail to give the unit due credit for what Cash and other officers described as “textbook operations” in difficult terrain and under harsh enemy fire. The official story also does not reflect the heavy casualties suffered by the 24th to protect white units farther down the line.

The reputation the 24th got at Battle Mountain haunted it for the rest of its days in Korea. A Saturday Evening Post article in June, 1951, recounted a story, probably apocryphal, of 24th Infantry troops sitting around a fire singing “the official song of the 24th Infantry Regiment”--the Bugout Boogie.

A verse quoted by the magazine went: “When them Chinese mortars begins to thud/The old Deuce-Four begin to bug. . . .” That such a minstrel-show caricature could be published in a mass-circulation weekly speaks volumes about the tenor of the times and attitudes in the Army.

Atrocities Recalled

The veterans’ return to Korea brought reminders of those miserable days and also jolted memories that did not always reflect glory on the black troops.

Retired Lt. Col. Charles M. Bussey of Los Angeles, one of the most strident defenders of the 24th and author of a forthcoming book, “Black Warrior: Courage and Racism in the Korean War,” recalled that two soldiers under his command killed an old Korean peasant on a bet that one of the soldiers could hit him with a single rifle shot at 600 yards.

Bussey said he didn’t report the incident because a black 24th Infantry lieutenant had just been sentenced to death for refusing an order to engage the enemy. Bussey said he did not believe his troops could get a fair trial from the whites who ran the Army.

Another retired officer on last month’s trip recalled a gang-rape of a Korean woman carried out by troops of the 24th that was widely known in the division but never reported to authorities.

And Cash’s research uncovered the mass surrender to the Chinese of an entire company of 24th Infantry troops, 136 men, after their commander--a black--asked his men if they wanted to stand and fight or wave the white flag.

“You have to take the bitter with the sweet,” Cash said last month during a long bus ride from Haman north to Seoul. “Historical research sometimes takes you to some very unpleasant places, but you just can’t ignore them.”

The trip forced Roger Walden of Detroit, a company commander during the fighting for Battle Mountain, to revisit one of those unpleasant places. Walden disputed the official account that large numbers of men from the 24th fled down the hill and could not be reassembled as fighting units.

In the Army’s official history of the early part of the Korean War, “South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu,” civilian historian Roy E. Appleman described what he called the disgraceful conduct of units of the black regiment at Battle Mountain. He quotes one white officer as complaining that: “Companies of my battalion dwindle to platoon size when engaged with the enemy. My chain of command stops at company level.”

Accounts of Cowardice

The commander asked that the number of officers in his battalion be doubled, because “one officer must lead and the other must drive” the frightened troops back to the front lines.

One black company commander had to threaten to shoot a platoon leader to make him return to his position in the line and fired a shot between his feet to make his point, the historian said. Several 24th Infantry enlisted men were killed running through a mine field in their pell-mell flight from battle, he wrote.

“The fact is that shortly after the enemy attack started most of the 2nd Battalion, 24th Infantry, fled its position. . . . The 2nd Battalion was no longer an effective fighting force,” Appleman wrote of the action on Battle Mountain on Aug. 31, 1950.

His history, published in 1961, became a source of dozens of popular histories that adopted his view that the 24th was useless as a fighting unit. The black veterans charge that Appleman’s book has perpetuated the old lie that “Negroes won’t fight.”

Walden, a black career officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, insisted: “My company didn’t disappear. We were up there all night long, fighting.” He said that on that endless night, his outfit took 50 casualties out of a total of about 130 men.

“The North Koreans pushed through with so much force it just disrupted everything,” he recalled as he walked along a road at the base of the hill. “But I saw no one break and run. We were catching hell and the next sector over was pretty well mauled.”

He said that the return to Battle Mountain, the scene of so much misery, “brings back terrible memories. It was something I thought I could forget. It taught me something about combat: Don’t get close to anyone, because they’re sure to get killed. I lost a lot of men on this position. After that, I never got close to anyone.”

David K. Carlisle of Los Angeles, a black West Point graduate who fought alongside the 24th Infantry with the all-black 77th Engineer Combat Company, called Appleman a racist who relied on a handful of bigoted white senior officers as his sources. He says Appleman ignored the high battle casualty rate of the 24th, the execrable quality of its mostly white officer corps and the weak performance of white outfits in the same engagements.

“The performance of all regiments in Korea was questionable,” said Carlisle, an amateur historian who for years was the lone voice complaining about mistreatment of the 24th in the official account. It was his persistent effort that drove the Army to reconsider its verdict.

Why was the 24th singled out for criticism? “It’s as simple as this--because the troops were black,” Carlisle charged. “It’s the product of racist-tending historians goaded on by racist senior army commanders. The bad-mouthing of black soldiers’ combat performance is a continuation of a pattern that went on in this country starting with the Revolutionary War.”

Joseph Hillyer of Columbia, S. C., a retired Army captain, was one of two white veterans on the trip. He said that he hopes a new look at the 24th will “remove a lot of the bias” from the original account.

“If we can show the terrible conditions, the difficult assignments we had, maybe it will help to explain--not justify, but explain--why we did what we did,” he said.

“Some of the things that happened (in the 24th) also happened elsewhere, but were not used to indict an entire group of people, an entire race of people. I hate to have a whole race of people stamped as cowards. You and I know that’s not true, but that’s what the official history says.”

Even the regiment’s champions admit that the troops had problems adjusting to Korea. They had been garrisoned in Gifu, Japan, a cushy occupation post where they trained only half a day and reserved the rest of their time for sports. The 24th was known throughout the Pacific Theater for the athletic prowess of its members, among them the Army’s heavyweight boxing champ and many of its premier football players.

The unit’s biggest battles in Japan were fought against drunkenness and venereal disease, numerous veterans recalled.

“When I joined the 24th, we didn’t have training. . . ,” Bussey said. “There were women, there was booze. . . . We weren’t trained to fight at night or in the cold, and in both areas we were an abject failure.”

The unit had been issued poorly maintained World War II surplus weapons. There wasn’t enough open land in Japan for large-scale exercises. Officers were rotated in and out on brief tours, making it impossible to create small-unit cohesion and loyalty, the two factors that seem always to produce superior performance in combat.

“For a man to fight effectively, he must have absolute faith in his commanders,” Bussey said. “And they didn’t. Not at all. These replacements were deliberate,” he said, meant to punish inferior officers and to prove the whites’ belief that blacks can’t fight.

During the first three months the regiment was in Korea, there were 13 changes of battalion commanders--an average of one a month in the three battalions--and even more rapid turnover at the company-commander level. The regiment’s excellent, combat-hardened noncommissioned officer corps was decimated in the early fighting and was replaced by less experienced men.

“This was 1950,” said Dillard. “You’ve got to remember that. We just were not first-class citizens. How can you get camaraderie when you’ve got white officers up there with them who didn’t believe they were human, who wouldn’t even use the same latrines? If the guy who’s leading you thinks you’re inferior, then how can you be motivated?”

Several former 24th Infantry officers noted that since the Army was still officially segregated, the regiment got virtually all the Army’s black draftees, many of whom were high school dropouts from poor rural and inner-city areas.

Gustavus Gillert Jr., a decorated white World War II commander who served as a junior officer in the 24th in Korea and rose to the rank of colonel before retiring in 1977, estimated that 70% of the men under his command were illiterate.

Gillert, whom the other veterans on the trip considered free of racial bias and a superior field officer, left Korea deeply troubled by what seemed to him to be some veterans’ efforts to revise history to fit their own agenda.

“There’s a lot of fantasy here, 40 years later,” he said one day early in the trip. “Is the record of the time wrong? We have to be careful not to rewrite history.”

As the trip neared an end, Gillert concluded: “It’s become more of a racial question than a historical one.”

End of Segregation

On Oct. 1, 1951, the 24th Infantry Regiment was disbanded and with it ended the shameful legacy of official segregation in the American military.

Since the Civil War, blacks in the armed services had been set apart, separate and unequal, assigned demeaning and demoralizing tasks. They served as stewards and servants, cooks and launderers, drivers and porters for white warriors.

In combat, the record of segregated units was mixed. The black 159th Field Artillery Battalion compiled one of the best records of all artillery units in Korea, never losing a gun in a year of running up and down the peninsula. Elite black units such as the 555th “Triple Nickles” parachute battalion fought brilliantly during World War II. The “Blockhouse Soldiers” of the 24th Infantry charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt. The black “Buffalo Soldiers” earned numerous decorations during the long Indian campaigns of the late 1800s.

Other black outfits were judged failures by the white Southerners who for generations dominated the American military and who wrote its histories. And yet these same senior officers were reluctant to assign blacks on equal status with whites throughout the services.

While much attention was paid to analyzing and criticizing the performance of segregated units, the Army was slow to recognize that it was perhaps segregation itself that caused the problems. Men who are told often enough that they are inferior begin to believe it.

As the emotional 10-day trip drew to a close, Gen. Dillard was asked to address a group of young black Army officers serving in Korea, to explain what the black veterans had been through 40 years ago and what lessons they could pass on.

An Old Soldier’s View

Dillard, whose last assignment was as chief of military intelligence for the U.S. Army in Europe, noted in his valedictory that the Army had become one of the broadest avenues of advancement for blacks in America.

But the old soldier’s thirst for justice remains unquenched.

“I’m an old man who entered the Army when it was mired deep in segregation and discrimination,” he told the young officers. “What we are trying to do now is prove again a truth--what should be a self-evident truth--that men, soldiers, when treated decently, when given justice, when given honor and dignity, will fight and die for their country.

“Unfortunately, that truth is not obvious. There are people who believe that black men and black women are--to quote a three-star general of that time--’inherently different.’ What he meant was inherently inferior.

“But we love our country, we fought for our country and we died for our country,” Dillard said.

“Am I bitter? You never get over it,” he told the hushed gathering. “When I went down some of these hills and saw where some of my soldiers were killed--well, you just never get over it.”