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No One-Night Stand: LT Clark’s Improbable Mission at Inchon

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They needed a team of Navy SEALs. They got a 39-year-old lieutenant and two Korean intelligence officers.

It was late August, 1950. The Korean War was two months old. Officers on General Douglas MacArthur’s Far East Forces staff were struggling to complete plans for an amphibious assault at Inchon. The invasion would land two American divisions in the rear of the North Korean People’s Army, which had pushed US and South Korean forces into a small toehold at Pusan.

Somehow MacArthur’s planners had scraped together enough ships, supplies, and men for the operation. But with less than three weeks left until the landing, planners knew next to nothing about the geography of the landing area, and what they did know was terrifying. A narrow ten-mile channel to the landing zones. Thirty-foot tides, a four-knot current. No beaches. Miles of mud flats. Had the North Koreans mined the approaches to the landing sites? Was the channel threatened by artillery? Was the area heavily defended? Could vehicles cross the mudflats? How strong was the current? Was the tidal range really 30 feet?

Inchon was occupied by North Korean troops. The South Korean government had fled in disarray. The American Far East command had never thoroughly surveyed the port. Charts and tide tables available in Tokyo were old and might be inaccurate. If a ship ran aground, struck a mine, or was disabled by shellfire in the narrow channel leading to the landing areas, the entire operation could fail.

They needed someone on the ground to survey the area, measure the seawalls, check the consistency of the mud flats, confirm the depth of the water, observe the tides, and locate defensive emplacements for pre-landing bombardments. Today, if satellite imagery and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) flights couldn’t answer their questions, they would send a team of fabulously trained, expensively equipped, and ruthlessly determined Navy SEALS.  In 1950, they sent LT Eugene Clark, a 39-year-old former Chief Yeoman assigned to the Geography Section of MacArthur’s Far East Command in Tokyo.

Right Down the Hall

While something less than an obvious choice, Clark did have a number of attributes that the planners valued. First of all, he was available. Right down the hall, in fact. Second, he had participated in amphibious landings against the Japanese during the Pacific War, so he knew the type of information the planners needed. Third, he had briefly served as captain of both an LST and an attack transport, so he was exceptionally familiar with the types of ships that would make the landing. Fourth, he had participated in clandestine operations along the Chinese coast, assisting the Chinese Nationalists in their civil war against the Chinese Communists. Fifth, he had been working on plans for the Inchon landing since July, so he knew the details of the assault. Sixth, he was – apparently – insanely courageous.

And, of course, there were no Navy SEALs in 1950. That program wouldn’t be established until 1962. During World War II, the US military had employed various amphibious scouting and Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) units to perform beach reconnaissance ahead of amphibious landings. Most such units were disbanded at the end of the war, but a handful of UDTs remained in service and two teams actually supported the Inchon invasion by landing ahead of the assault troops, scouting the mud flats, marking low points in the channel, clearing fouled propellers, and searching for mines.

But those operations wouldn’t happen until just hours remained before the landings, and MacArthur’s planners needed information now. So, on 26 August, they turned to Clark. The landing was scheduled for 15 September and Clark and whatever team he could assemble needed to be at Inchon by 1 September.

Approaches to Inchon
(Map from Naval History and Heritage Command)

No One-Night Stand

This would be no one-night recon operation: the plan was for Clark and a small team to set up a base on one of the islands in Inchon’s outer harbor. From there, they would conduct forays to the landing sites, reconnoiter other nearby islands, and obtain as much critical intelligence as they could from local residents and any prisoners they managed to capture. The fact that many of the harbor islands were already occupied by the North Koreans and that Clark and his team would have no boats of their own seemed not to matter.

Clark was no commando, and he had a comfortable job and family life in Tokyo. But he agreed to the mission, though he couldn’t tell his wife where he was going or how long he would be gone. For five days he worked with CIA planners at Far East Command headquarters to prepare for his mission. He would be accompanied by two Korean officers who had previously been assigned to the Far East staff: Korean Navy Lieutenant Youn Jong, and a former Korean counterintelligence officer, Colonel Ke In-ju.

LT Eugene Clark and Korean teammates on Yongung-do.
(Photo credit: http://www.koreanwaronline.com/arms/Clark.htm)

With no real idea of the situation they would encounter, Clark and the two Koreans collected a considerable arsenal of small arms, including .45 caliber pistols, submachine guns, rifles, hand grenades, and three .50 caliber machine guns from the armory at the Naval base at Sasebo, where a former shipmate of Clark’s was now the executive officer. They asked for mortars as well, but none were available. Time was short, Clark’s mission was urgent, and it was a simpler time. Clark’s former shipmate directed the base supply officer to provide everything on Clark’s list, and if there was something on the list they didn’t have, to get it from the army. They would fill out the paperwork later.

Sacks of rice, dried fish, tents, a shortwave radio, two cases of whiskey (to assist in extracting or purchasing information), and one million South Korean won (about $550 in US currency) were also packed. On 31 August, Clark and his team left Japan aboard a British destroyer. The next day, near Inchon, they transferred to a South Korean patrol craft, PC-703, for the final leg of their voyage.

South Korean patrol craft Sam Kak San (PC-703), formerly USS PC-802)
(Official U.S. Navy Photograph, from the collections of the Naval Historical Center.)

The PC was a former US Navy subchaser that had been given to the South Koreans and was armed with a 3-inch gun and several machine guns. The patrol craft would support Clark’s team through much of its 2-week mission. At that time, the North Koreans did not have naval craft of their own at Inchon, though they operated a number of armed junks and sampans. But the North Koreans had placed artillery on several islands and there was always a chance that they had mined the navigation channel, so the PC would have to operate with care.

So would Clark, but secrecy wasn’t part of his plan.

Building an Army

The first thing Clark did was land his team on an island several miles up the channel from Inchon. You might think they would have looked for a deserted island to keep their presence hidden from the North Koreans. Not Clark. Far from being uninhabited, the island he selected was home to 400 South Koreans and was occupied by a small detachment of North Korean Army troops, part of a garrison of 300 North Koreans based on a small island about a mile away.  At low tide, it would be possible for North Korean soldiers to wade across the channel separating the islands.  Within hours of landing, Clark and his team had killed four North Korean soldiers who were trying to escape by boat. It was certain, then, that North Korean troops would be back. It was just a question of when.

But Clark and his team had brought enough weapons to outfit a small army, and that’s what they started to do. Recruiting from among the hundred or so young men on the island, they created and armed an impromptu defense force which they hoped would be able to fend off any attacks until the invasion force appeared. They realized that there were probably Communist sympathizers on the island who would betray them to the North Koreans at the first opportunity, so they would try to guard against that, as well.

Stealing a Navy

Established on the island, their next task was to develop a plan for inspecting the landing sites, the channel, the mud flats, and the island of Wolmi-do, a rocky little peak that overlooked the landing areas and would have to be neutralized before the main landings.

With a need to get closer to Wolmi-do and Inchon, and without boats of their own, they simply stole a small fleet. Using a steam-powered fishing sampan belonging to an island resident that Clark christened “the flagship,” Clark and his team motored into the channel and seized a small flotilla of sail-powered sampans and junks.

Brought to Clark’s island base, the operators of most of the captured craft were happy to provide information about the channel, the tides, the currents, and North Korean defenses. Several offered to join Clark’s growing little band, and they were soon sent out on surveillance missions, examining the port of Inchon, Wolmi-do, and surrounding areas to look for signs of enemy troop concentrations and gun emplacements.

For the next week, Clark and his team gathered critical information and radioed it back to planners in Tokyo. But each night, North Korean infiltrators crossed over to his island. Some were killed, but Clark knew that an unknown number were now at large on his base.

Staying to the End

On September 7, British warships bombarded Inchon from the outer harbor. That night, a motorized sampan and three sailing sampans filled with North Korean troops were spotted in the channel heading for Clark’s island. Clark and his team quickly set out in their little flagship, hurriedly propping a .50 caliber machine gun atop sandbags.  Although the powered North Korean vessel opened fire with an anti-tank gun, Clark bored in and destroyed the vessel and one of the sailing sampans with machine gun fire.

Back ashore, Clark radioed for assistance from PC-703, as he was certain that a heavier North Korean attack was imminent. But the next day, instead of the South Korean patrol craft, a U.S. destroyer, USS Hanson, appeared. Hanson had been ordered to evacuate Clark and his team, but, by now unsurprisingly, Clark refused. There was still a week before the invasion and he believed he could provide more critical information. Instead, he asked Hanson to bombard the island where the North Korean attackers were based.

USS Hanson (DD 832) supported LT Clark by shelling North Korean positions before the Inchon invasion.
(Photo credit: NAVSOURCE http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/pix2/0583232.jpg )

The shore bombardment bought Clark some time, and for the next few nights he and his team surveyed Inchon and tested the mud flats to see if they would support vehicles. They wouldn’t, and Clark sent that info on to Tokyo. He also informed planners that Japanese tidal charts were more accurate than the charts the Americans had prepared and he sent information on the placement of artillery on Wolmi-do. One of his sampans even towed a handful of floating mines out of the navigation channel.

Clark’s reports were forwarded to strike planners and soon Wolmi-do was plastered with explosives from US ships and aircraft.

Lighting the Beacon

Finally, 14 September arrived. That night the invasion would begin. Earlier, Clark had figured out how to relight the channel lighthouse on Palmi-do island and had offered to do so. Invasion planners had asked him to light the beacon at midnight on the 14th. But late that day, as Clark was packing his gear, his lookouts spotted more than 400 North Korean troops approaching by boat and on foot, wading across the narrow channel.

There was no chance that Clark and his ragged self-defense force could beat back this attack. Clark hastily organized a delaying force and ordered everyone else to escape by boat while he and his original teammates made their way by sampan to Palmi-do and its lighthouse.

Sometime after midnight, Clark managed to relight the lamp in the lighthouse and the invasion was a spectacular success. The next morning, Clark and his South Korean lieutenants made their way to the force flagship, where they reported the end of their mission. Clark begged the staff to order troops to his former island base, to rescue the civilians that had refused to evacuate and the defenders that had stayed behind.

Low tide at Inchon.
(Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives.)

They Paid the Price

But it was 24 hours before Marines could be spared to take the little island. By then, the North Koreans had not only overrun the few defenders that remained, they had also executed at least fifty villagers that they suspected of helping the Americans.

Eugene Clark received the Silver Star for his efforts at Inchon. During his two-week mission, the sleep-deprived and exhausted Clark lost 40 pounds. That might have been enough for most officers. But Clark was not most officers.

For the next two months he led a series of South Korean guerilla raids along the coast of North Korea, gathering intelligence and capturing small islands that the Americans would use to rescue pilots who had to ditch damaged aircraft. On October, working near the mouth of the Yalu River, Clark’s Korean agents reported that the Chinese were massing for an enormous attack against the UN forces. Clark sent a warning to Tokyo, but his warning, like so many others, was discounted and the eventual Chinese offensive drove the unprepared UN forces south past Seoul.

In 1951, Clark led one final commando-style raid, as he and a small team came ashore at Communist-occupied Wonsan to find out if rumors of an outbreak of bubonic plague were true. Clark’s team penetrated a Chinese Communist hospital and the team doctor examined two patients, who turned out to have smallpox, not plague. That information saved UN forces the formidable task of inoculating hundreds of thousands of soldiers against plague. This mission earned Clark a Navy Cross.

Clark retired from the Navy in 1966, having risen to the rank of commander. He died peacefully in 1968.

March 25, 2019

For a full recounting of LT Clark’s mission, see The Secrets of Inchon, by CDR Eugene Clark, USN; P. Putnam’s Sons, NY; 2002.

Quintessential Cleveland

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Across the street from Cleveland’s Progressive Field lies one of the last surviving remnants of the city’s early history. The Erie Street Cemetery, established in 1826 when the city’s population had not yet reached one thousand, is an 8.9-acre rectangle of green within the slightly gritty edge of the downtown business district.

A grey sandstone arch, inexplicably Gothic, crowns the cemetery’s entrance and the perimeter of the grounds are marked by a time and soot-darkened stone wall. Inactive as a cemetery for decades, but unlocked each day by the city, a visit to the cemetery provides the quintessential Cleveland experience: a dizzying combination of rich history, neglect, resilience, and unfulfilled potential.

For 25 years after the arrival of the first hardy settlers, burials in the village were conducted at an undeveloped parcel near Public Square. But in 1825, as the city population was increasing, the owner of the property made plans to build on the site and forbade further burials. The village then purchased a ten-acre tract on Erie Street, that was, at the time, so far out of town that some villagers complained.

Purchase price for the ten acres was one dollar, which indicates how valuable Cleveland real estate was at that early date.  Of course, today the city land bank will sell you an abandoned city lot for $200, and as recently as 2009 the city sold more than 100 foreclosed homes for $1 each, so property bargains are still available.

For the next fifteen years Erie Street Cemetery was the city’s only cemetery and many of the community’s most notable early residents were – and remain – buried there.

It is necessary to note that many remain, because internment in those early years was sometimes less than permanent.

The first residents of the Erie Street Cemetery were actually prior residents of the informal burial ground near Public Square. They were evicted to make way for progress and they found themselves parked in two long lines just inside the new cemetery’s main entrance. A monument listing the names of some of those wanderers can still be seen in the cemetery.

For many decades Erie Street remained a popular destination for persons in need of its specialized services.  It was near the center of the growing city and was well-maintained. In 1870 the city surrounded the cemetery with an iron fence and constructed a monumental stone arch over the main entrance on Erie Street – now called East Ninth Street. 

The fence is long gone, replaced by a stone wall built of sandstone blocks recovered during the 1939 razing of a portion of the Superior Viaduct – the first high-level bridge to cross the Cuyahoga River – but the arch remains.

By the turn of the new century, however, Erie Street had fallen on hard times, and many residents were moved to newer cemeteries in outlying neighborhoods. By then, city officials saw the cemetery as a waste of developable land in the heart of the city and they began to buy vacant plots to discourage further burials. Eventually, they sold off portions of the cemetery to allow creation of new streets, forcing the eviction of many long-time residents who had probably expected to remain there somewhat longer. Even the original owner of the land, Leonard Case, and his family were moved to the city’s more upscale Lakeview Cemetery.

In the 1920’s as plans were being formulated to construct the Lorain-Carnegie bridge (since renamed the Hope Memorial Bridge), city officials proposed routing the bridge approaches through the center of the cemetery. But that idea, like a 1960’s proposal to build an interstate highway through the middle of the verdant Shaker Lakes, failed and since then the city has apparently abandoned the idea of converting the cemetery to other uses. For now, at least, Erie Street residents can rest in peace.

They certainly are not at risk of being disturbed by city maintenance crews. Today the cemetery is, how can we say it, slightly unkempt. The unpaved roadway is uneven and many headstones are broken or overgrown with grass or weeds. Damaged trees are common and several large trees are clearly dead. Although a sign hopefully provides headstone and decorating guidelines, few persons seem inspired to decorate any of the thousands of graves.

Such neglect is disrespectful toward anyone, but it is especially discouraging considering the important roles played in the city’s early development by some of the folks still buried there.

Most prominent, perhaps, is Lorenzo Carter, the first permanent resident of Cleveland and for a time quite possibly the busiest white man west of the Appalachian Mountains. Carter died in 1814 at age 47, but before then he built a large log cabin which served as an inn and a jail; he operated a ferry to take travelers across the river; he built the city’s first tavern; he built a 30-ton schooner, the Zephyr; he built the first frame house in Cleveland and the first log warehouse in the city; and he served as the village constable and as a major in the Ohio Militia. As if that wasn’t enough, in his spare time he and his wife, Rebecca, produced nine children.

But don’t look for a handsome monument to the city’s most energetic founder. Lorenzo Carter is buried – reburied, actually, since he died before the cemetery was established – with Rebecca under weathered stones set in a deteriorating concrete slab a few paces inside the cemetery gates.

None of the early city notables who remain at Erie Street fare much better.  Scattered around the site are four Cleveland mayors, two Indian chiefs, and 168 military veterans from the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War. But none of their graves are maintained especially well, and no signs or markers help visitors find them.

If there are visitors. Certainly, the place is exceedingly ill-equipped to handle them. Besides the lack of signs, the cemetery has no benches, landscaping, curving paths or memorial gardens. There is not even a flagpole.

But the cemetery – and its residents – have not been completely forgotten. In 2005 the Early Settle’s Association replaced a vandalized bronze plaque commemorating the Carters with a granite marker. In 2013 the city paid a contractor to refurbish the entrance gatehouse and arch, and in 2014 the Early Settlers erected a monument to the cemetery’s veterans.

Like the city itself, the Erie Street Cemetery has seen good times and bad, but somehow, it keeps plugging away.

May 15, 2019

Ulysses S. Grant and the Ku Klux Klan

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He didn’t free the slaves, but he offered them a glimpse of a better future.

Ulysses S. Grant, who served as president from 1869-1877, is best known as the Union general who finally defeated Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War. Grant is also acclaimed for his earlier victories at Ft. Donelson, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. Grant’s presidency has not been highly regarded, as his two terms were marred by corruption among appointed officials and a faltering economy.

But his reputation is rising.  Grant has always been recognized for his personal honesty, and historians today are increasingly crediting Grant with courage and moral resolve for his efforts to protect the rights of freedmen – freed slaves.

Grant took office following the highly contentious administration of Andrew Johnson. By Grant’s inauguration seven of the eleven Southern states which had formed the Confederacy had been re-admitted to the union and the four remaining states would be re-admitted in 1870. But while southern states rejoined the union, they fiercely resisted efforts by Republicans, both northern and southern, to grant the rights of citizenship to the freed slaves.

Upon taking office Grant began receiving a steady stream of letters begging for federal help in protecting southern blacks and white Republicans from the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations.  Southern Republicans reported that a “reign of terror” was spreading across the south, with blacks and whites being murdered with impunity.

Northern Democrats joined Southern Democrats in opposing any federal action to protect the rights of freedmen, and, of course, the newly formed state governments were dominated by whites who were happy to use intimidation and violence to preserve the pre-war social order.  Meanwhile, Northern Republicans were exhausted by the unending sectional strife and were increasingly content to ignore Southern depredations.

Grant quickly recognized that the governments of the southern states were unwilling to protect blacks and southern Republicans, but he did not believe that current federal law gave him the authority to intervene.  So, he sought and received additional powers through legislation, including the 1871 “Act to Enforce the Provisions of the 14th Amendment,” popularly known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.

The Act gave the federal government the power to prosecute state officials for civil rights violations in federal courts and to suspend habeus corpus when state authorities were unable or unwilling to protect civil rights.

Passage of the law gave Grant the tools, but he still needed to supply the moral and political will to use that power. That he did so is to his everlasting credit. Grant suspended habeus corpus in nine counties of South Carolina and dispatched federal troops and marshals. Federal forces identified and arrested hundreds of KKK terrorists, while many others fled the state.  Grant’s actions broke the power of the Klan and other violent groups in South Carolina and the demonstration of federal power and resolve crippled Klan efforts across the south. Political violence in South Carolina and throughout the south declined dramatically.

But while overt violence was reduced, preserving white supremacy remained the highest priority of local governments throughout the south, and they eventually succeeded in disenfranchising black voters and imposing a brutal regime of legal segregation. Black Americans in the former Confederacy wouldn’t regain the basic rights of citizenship until the federal government again stepped forward in the 1960’s.

Grant’s impact was recognized by many of his contemporaries, including Frederick Douglas, who wrote, “To [Grant] more than any other man the negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. In the matter of the protection of the freedman from violence his moral courage surpassed that of his party; hence his place as its head was given to timid men, and the country was allowed to drift, instead of stemming the current with stalwart arms.”

Douglas quote:  http://thepresidentsatbigmo.blogspot.com/2007/10/number-18-ulysses-s-grant.html

Grant photo: Library of Congress / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulysses_S._Grant_1870-1880.jpg

April 27, 2018