By Scott Graber
It is Friday, early, and it is cold this morning. Yes, I said, “cold”; not “brisk” or “cool.” This morning I have my coffee and a print-out from my laptop-generated Artificial Intelligence.
Several days ago I asked AI where my father served during the Korean War. I knew he was with a medical unit — maybe a mobile army surgical hospital — but I didn’t know where.
My mother had told me about cuff links she sent to Dad that had been “captured” when the Chinese made their appearance. Years later I also met a TAC officer (at The Citadel) who told me about father when they were both arrived in Pusan.
But I didn’t know much. So I asked AI, “Where did Capt. Charles D. Graber serve during the Korean War?”
AI took about 30 seconds to tell me that he was attached, as a bacteriologist, to the 8228th Army Unit stationed at the massive Geoje-do POW Camp on Koje Island — an island that came with 150,000 Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war.
“While he was attached to the military hospital Graber worked directly on controlling a massive epidemic of bacillary dysentery and the salmonella outbreaks in the camps. His intensive laboratory work evaluated how these infectious strains responded to early antibiotics like sulfadiazine, chloramphenicol and streptomycin.”
As I read this AI report, I remembered terms — Shigella, Salmonella, Aureomycin and Terramycin — that I frequently heard as a child and later, when I would “streak” plates in his laboratory.
While my father was doing his study of Shigella and Salmonella on Koje Island Gen. Douglas MacArthur — the Supreme Commander of all UN troops in Korea was riding high. He had successfully trapped a big part of the North Korean Army with his landing at Inchon; and the 8th U.S. Army together with the X Corps were working their way up the Peninsula towards the Yalu River.
By October, 1950, the drive was going well as UN Forces captured Pyongyang, McArthur telling his commanders to “drive forward with all speed and full utilization of their forces.” But as allied forces neared the Yalu River (and the Chinese border) there was worry in Washington that McArthur’s advance would provoke the Chinese to enter the war. Truman, concerned, issued a statement that “We have never at any time entertained any intention to carry the hostilities into China, so far as the United States is concerned.” (American Caesar, William Manchester, 1978)
And there were other worrisome signs — a South Korean unit approaching the Yalu was almost wiped out by “troops that seemed to come from nowhere;” and a “unit of the 1st Calvary found itself in a firefight with Chinese riflemen who, “abruptly broke off action and faded into the hills.”
By November, McArthur, himself, said it was impossible to “appraise the actualities of Chinese Communist intervention” but thought there were many logical reasons against it. Then, on the spur on the moment, McArthur decided to fly the length of the Yalu and see what was happening on the river’s north bank.
McArthur’s aerial tour encountered neither flak nor enemy aircraft. In fact, “they saw nothing except a dismal, glazed, empty landscape …” Lin Piao’s camouflaged Chinese had already crossed the Yalu, completely undetected, and now more than 300,000 Chinese troops occupied the heights between the 8th Army and X Corps.
Suddenly McArthur, the man who had beaten the Imperial Japanese Army; who had liberated the Philippines and saved Australia was being driven back down the peninsula by the Communist infantry — maybe a million of these lightly armed men in quilted, tan-colored jackets with no insignia.
For President Harry Truman and the Pentagon this disaster belonged entirely to McArthur and was the final act of a man who had been favorably compared with Caesar and his conquests.
Truman “relieved” him and directed he board the first flight out of Seoul with a brief stop in Tokyo to gather up his family.
Back on Koje Island Captain Charles David Graber was finishing up his study — “Bacteriologic Studies in an Epidemic of Baccillary Dysentery in Korea” that, according to my AI printout, “saved countless military and civilian lives.”
My father never mentioned this study; nor his World War II discovery that American combat jackets contained gas gangrene bacilli (at the Battle of Attu Island) that often led to lethal infections.
After Korea, my father tried his best to develop my uneven, unpredictable (tennis) backhand; and to get me into medical school.
He failed in both of these efforts.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.