Five days after the North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, I landed in South Korea singularly ill-equipped for what lay ahead. After covering the occupation of Japan some years earlier, I was still accredited as a press representative by General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo, so when I arrived there from my Singapore base there were few formalities to delay my departure for the front. I didn’t even pause to pick up Army fatigues.

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Wearing green suede shoes, light linen trousers and a sport coat, and carrying a new small typewriter and the minimum of necessities–including paper, carbon and toiletries in a briefcase–I took a car to Tachikawa military air base, about 25 miles from Tokyo, and hitchhiked a ride on a Douglas Dakota to Pusan, at the southern end of the Korean peninsula.

‘No flights north of Pusan,’ said the sergeant at the Tachikawa terminal. ‘There are too many goddamned Yaks [Soviet-built Yakovlev fighters]. If you want to go to Pusan, we can put you aboard, but you won’t find any planes flying north from there.’

Pusan, I found, was in chaos. The small airstrip, rarely used after the Japanese had abandoned it at the end of World War II, consisted of a narrow strip of metal in a sea of rice. The metal was already cracking under the weight of the supply planes. Hundreds of Koreans stood by with long baskets filled with rocks and sand on their backs to fill in the holes knocked in the runway by each incoming aircraft, tamping down the repairs with their bare feet.

Backing them up were hundreds more, the A-frames on their backs loaded with stones and sand to refill the baskets of the strip repairers. Tons of supplies lined the side of the airstrip, where aged charcoal-burning cars, trucks, oxcarts and more peasants with A-frames loaded up to carry the supplies over the 12 miles of clay road to the railhead. For some, the journey took hours.

At Pusan station, there were no trains to move the supplies piling up and no scheduled departures or arrivals. No one had any idea when the next train might arrive or leave. ‘Maybe we lost all the trains in Seoul,’ said the station master. But at least the ticket office was open. I bought a single ticket for unreachable Seoul, valid for an unscheduled train, and sat down to wait.

I attached myself to a young American major with urgently needed radio and radar equipment for Taejon, about 150 miles to the northwest, where, he told me, the U.S. Army’s 24th Division had established its headquarters. For five hours he had been trying to arrange for at least an engine and a freight car to take the equipment. We waited for another three hours, when at last a special train came in–an engine and one carriage–all for the major, his equipment, half a dozen American soldiers and me.

Or so we thought when we began the journey north in mid-afternoon. But we were not alone in our haste to get to the war. Before the evening shadows settled over the green rice fields and even greener mountains, hiding the villages, we were riding a full-fledged troop train. As the miles passed by, carriages and freight trucks joined us. At all the stops new recruits pushed and shoved through the carriage.

Most of them brought old, long-stocked Japanese rifles, with five or 10 rounds of ammunition in clips on their belts. They came running to the little village stations as the train approached, waving their rifles to stop us, buckling on equipment, saying goodbye to their families and tripping over the swarms of little brothers and sisters to whom the occasion was all great fun.

Korean girls in long white trousers and wearing the armbands of local women’s auxiliaries brought us tea and fruit and rice cakes at each station. Since I had eaten nothing since a quick 4 o’clock breakfast in Tokyo many hours before, I joined in happily.

Just before dark, an American missionary, a tall, angular man who popped up here and there for months during the war, joined us with a band of Korean first-aid girls headed for Suwon, about 20 miles south of Seoul, where, it was believed the Americans and South Koreans had formed a line. In the night, with the lights doused for fear of an air attack, they began to sing hymns. One by one the troops joined in until almost everybody was singing in English or Korean. In fiction, this scene would have seemed ridiculous; in fact, we rattled our way to war to the tune of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’

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