Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  On July 14 the left of the line started to come under pressure. The night before one of the 34th’s companies, K, had been withdrawn to Taejon because it had barely a handful of men fit to fight. In the morning North Korean tanks gathered along the north bank and, with artillery and mortar batteries, began shelling L Company. American air strikes failed to drive them off. A couple miles downriver boats were spotted ferrying small numbers of enemy soldiers across the river. L Company’s commander, having lost communication with the battalion, spooked and pulled the company off the line and back to battalion headquarters. I Company was left to hold the left of the line alone that day, with no one to its left and the 19th regiment two miles to its west. That afternoon North Koreans breached the line and attacked and overran an artillery battalion three miles south of the river. That night I Company received orders to withdraw and rejoin the regiment. The 19th’s left flank was now completely exposed and Indians were in the fort.

  In the morning Colonel Meloy sent the rest of 2nd Battalion to shore up his left flank, keeping only one rifle company in reserve. All day the tense 19th line could see the North Koreans readying for a massive attack across the river. They repulsed small probing attacks several times during the day, while hearing reports of more and more North Koreans coming across in the west.

  At three o’clock on the morning of July 16, a North Korean plane dropped a flare over the river, giving the signal to attack. North Korean artillery, tanks, mortars, machine guns, and rifles fired an opening salvo the intensity of which even the regiment’s veterans had not experienced. As the regiment stood the barrage, the North Koreans plunged into the Kum to wade and swim across. For a critical period they were invisible when a howitzer stopped firing flares to illuminate the crossings. By the time it resumed, hundreds were already across, driving through the thousand-yard gap between E and C companies, turning west and hitting C with everything they had. In the east the enemy was crossing in even greater numbers. By daybreak they were swarming across everywhere and attacking 1st Battalion’s command post.

  Meloy organized a counterattack, using just about every able-bodied soldier in the regiment, including cooks and clerks, and succeeded in pushing back the North Korean advance through the center of the line. Dean had asked Meloy to hold on until nightfall and then withdraw to a position closer to Taejon. But with the enemy infiltrated behind them and, for some unexplained reason, very little to no air support, that was an exceedingly difficult request to fulfill. By late morning the North Koreans had set up a roadblock on the highway three miles behind the line, trying to trap the 1st Battalion at the river. Meloy personally led an unsuccessful attempt to clear it and was severely wounded. Most of the regiment was in combat for the first time. They had been fighting desperately for seven hours and were still crouched down in withering fire from their front, while enemy soldiers were swarming around their flanks and blocking their retreat. There weren’t enough men to hold the line and clear out the enemy behind them. By noon the temperature had reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit. They had little water and nothing to eat. Their ammunition was running low. But they had to keep fighting all afternoon. They had no other choice.

  When word of the deteriorating situation reached Dean in Taejon around one o’clock, he ordered the regiment to withdraw and said he would send a force to clear the roadblock. Second Battalion’s commander tried and failed to open the road, and his men, those who weren’t killed and wounded in the attempt, were now pinned down. No one from Taejon managed to clear it either. With the road now closed to them, the regiment’s survivors took to the hills, leaving vehicles and artillery behind. Some of the wounded were left behind too, along with the hundreds dead. A chaplain, Franciscan priest Father Herman Felhoelter, remained behind with a group of thirty wounded men after the soldiers serving as stretcher bearers became too exhausted to continue. When they reached the top of the ridge, the men looked back to see North Koreans surround Father Felhoelter and his charges. One of them shot the priest in the back of the head, while the others killed all the wounded.

  The 19th suffered catastrophic losses on July 16. Well over three hundred men were killed in action; hundreds of others were wounded or taken prisoner; thirty-four officers were killed or missing. C Company had the worst of it; its casualty rate was a shocking 70 percent. Only two companies, E and G, were in decent shape.

  The regiment reorganized and reequipped in the town of Yongdong, twenty miles southeast of Taejon, where the division’s command post was located. Few soldiers would have felt capable of anything beyond rest and mourning their dead, but they would have to fight again very soon. The Battle for Kum River was over. The Battle for Taejon was about to start, and General Dean had only three broken regiments to fight it with.

  Dean didn’t expect to hold on to Taejon for long. He thought they could put up enough of a fight to keep the North Koreans outside the city until July 19. General Walker asked him for a day beyond that to get enough forces into position to stop the enemy at the Naktong. Elements of the 1st Cavalry Division and other units were already arriving in country. So Dean and his battered division held on until July 20, when the enemy swarmed the defenders and infiltrated into the city and T-34s patrolled its streets. It was every man for himself as the survivors again took to the hills, heading this time for the Naktong, where they hoped they would find an American line that could hold.

  In the afternoon of July 18 Dean ordered the regiment’s 2nd Battalion, which was in far better shape than the decimated 1st Battalion, to Taejon. It arrived the next day around noon and was immediately rushed to the Nonsan road west of the city at the Kapchon River, where Dean was watching the enemy envelop a company in the 34th Regiment. The 2nd Battalion’s commander, Colonel Thomas McGrail, positioned three companies to cover both sides of the road. E Company was south of the road on the left; F Company dug in on the right, on a hill north of the road, where it confronted the North Koreans that had flanked L Company of the 34th. A mile to their right 1st Battalion, 34th Infantry was positioned along the Seoul highway a mile in front of Taejon’s airstrip and was under heavy fire. Its commanding officer wanted to retreat and recommended the entire regiment be withdrawn that night. He was ordered to hold.

  The soldiers of F Company fought to hold their ground all afternoon. That night they could hear North Koreans on their right moving through the gap that separated the 19th and 34th Infantry positions. At three o’clock on the morning of July 20, enemy infantry and armor rolled down both sides of the highway, infiltrated 1st Battalion, 34th Infantry, and reached the airfield and the outskirts of the city.

  On the Nonsan road companies E and F had been fighting for hours. By daylight F Company had fallen back a few hundred yards but was still fighting. E Company, “Easy,” was holding fast but taking heavy casualties. Colonel McGrail, believing the enemy was already in the city and their road back blocked, abandoned his command post and ordered both companies to withdraw. The 2nd Battalion had suffered 203 casualties, 30 percent of its strength. F Company had lost ten men killed in action. Easy Company lost seventeen. The battalion escaped into the hills south of the road, breaking into small bands, some in pairs and even individually. A twenty-year-old private first class in Easy’s heavy weapons platoon, Ed Svach, remembered Taejon as his second worst fight in the war: “We were told to put our personal effects in a box that was to be buried and were given the option of surrendering. But we didn’t want to surrender. We’d already seen the bodies of guys who had been shot in the head with their hands tied behind their backs. We figured we had better odds trying to fight our way through.”

  Most men made their way back to Yongdong over the next two days. A few would trek for many days in the direction of Pusan, 130 miles to the southeast.

  There were no more American forces blocking the western approaches to the city. Taejon’s situation was hopeless. Dean made plans to abandon the city that afternoon, and he remained there to the end. He even hunted a T-34 himself with a weapon t
hat had finally been supplied that could actually kill one, the 3.5-inch bazooka.

  With the retreat from Taejon, the 24th Division had been pushed a hundred miles to the southeast in two and a half weeks of war. The green, unprepared soldiers who filled its ranks had in some instances given a good account of themselves under the circumstances. In other instances, not so much. Few if any had expected to fight a war when they enlisted. They were thrown into combat without any clear idea of how to achieve their mission or, in some instances, of exactly what that mission was. They had lost most of their vehicles and a lot of their artillery and suffered shortages in just about everything: armor, anti-armor, ammunition, communications equipment, rations, and water. Even uniforms were hard to come by. They were often new to the units they fought in, as were their officers. Some second and first lieutenants were nearly as green as the men they commanded, and a disproportionately high number of them were killed in those first weeks, as were many noncommissioned officers. In sum, the 24th Division had not been combat-ready when it was unexpectedly sent to war. It held on as best as it could, narrowly escaped annihilation, and delayed the enemy’s advance just long enough for the Eighth Army and retreating Republic of Korea (ROK) forces to set up a defensible line along the Naktong River and stop the enemy from driving them into the sea.

  The North Koreans set up roadblocks on the main routes out of Taejon, forcing most of the retreating Americans into the mountains. Dean himself, traveling with a small party of officers and wounded, was forced off the road a few miles south of the city. Climbing a mountain in the dark that night, Dean left the party to fetch water for the wounded. He lost his footing and fell into a ravine unseen, was knocked unconscious, and broke his shoulder. When he came to he was alone. For thirty-six days he wandered the mountains trying to make his way to the American lines. For a few days he traveled in the company of First Lieutenant Stanley Tabor, who had also become separated from his unit, E Company in the 19th Infantry. At one point they were discovered by North Korean soldiers, but Dean managed to escape through a rice paddy. Tabor was wounded and died in a prison camp three months later. Dean stayed at large until August 25, when he was betrayed by South Koreans, captured, and taken north, where he remained a prisoner for the duration of the war.

  On July 23 General Church replaced the missing-in-action Bill Dean as commanding general of the 24th Infantry Division. That same day air reconnaissance discovered a North Korean column attempting to pivot east around the Eighth Army’s left flank in a drive on Pusan. Walker told Church the exhausted 24th would have to plug the gap. “I am sorry I have to do this,” he apologized. The 24th had been off the line for only a day, when the newly arrived 1st Cavalry relieved them at Yongdong. They had yet to be resupplied or receive replacements. Church instructed Colonel Ned Moore, the wounded Meloy’s replacement, to deploy the 19th to positions near the city of Chinju, a little more than fifty miles west of Pusan. They arrived on July 25, just as the North Koreans took Yongdong from the 1st Cavalry, and the front moved south again. Five days earlier a troop transport had docked in Okinawa carrying four hundred fresh recruits for the 29th Regiment, 2nd Division. They were quickly armed and equipped, assigned to companies, and reloaded on ships for Pusan.

  Hardly any of the new recruits had any combat experience or instruction other than basic training, which they had only recently completed at Fort Riley, Kansas. They had expected to receive six weeks of additional training in Japan. When the misfortunes of war necessitated their immediate transport to the Eighth Army in Korea, they were told they would receive ten days of training there before being moved into the line. Instead, after they arrived in Pusan on July 24, they were assigned to the depleted 19th Regiment and moved the next morning to Chinju.

  That day Colonel Moore received word that North Korean soldiers were entering the mountain-pass village of Hadong, thirty miles west of Chinju. He ordered Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore and 3rd Battalion, 29th Infantry to drive the enemy from the town and secure the approach to Chinju. They made camp the following night in a village three miles east of Hadong and went into combat the next morning. It was over by midafternoon, and it was a debacle. The North Koreans were waiting. They infiltrated the gaps between company positions, targeted company officers, and generally sowed panic and confusion among the raw recruits, who broke and ran back in the direction whence they came, suffering hundreds of casualties. The 3rd Battalion, 29th Regiment existed no more. The battalion was disbanded and its survivors parceled out to different units, many of them to the 19th Infantry.

  The Inmin’gun launched an advance east along a wide front the following day. An enemy column with armor poured through the pass at Hadong and on the morning of July 29 smashed into the 19th’s lines six miles west of Chinju. Pusan was now in peril. Were the North Koreans to reach the port they would cut off the entire Eighth Army from resupply and reinforcement. Two days earlier MacArthur had met with Walker at the Eighth Army commander’s headquarters in Taegu and told him there would be “no Dunkirk.” As North Korean tanks were rumbling toward Chinju, General Walker issued his famous “stand or die” order: “There will be no more retreating, withdrawal or readjustment of the lines. . . . There is no line behind us to which we can retreat. . . . If some of us must die, we will die fighting together. . . . We are going to hold this line.”

  On the morning of July 30 two 19th Infantry companies, Easy and Fox, were forced to pull back several miles. The Battle for Chinju was over twenty-four hours later. The North Koreans took the city, and the 2nd Battalion retreated across the Nam River, accompanied by hordes of refugees. The regiment’s losses were staggering: seventy-five killed in action and hundreds wounded in two days of fighting. Walker ordered all Eighth Army and ROK units to begin to pull back and cross the Naktong, blow the bridges, and prepare for a last stand. The enemy waited a day before advancing on Masan, the last city west of the Naktong River and the North’s penultimate objective. If it took Masan, the North Koreans could drive directly on Pusan. On August 2, at the Battle of the Notch, the 19th redeemed itself. It repulsed several North Korean attacks on a mountain pass outside Masan. The victory ended the offensive against the Eighth Army’s southern flank. American lines would now consolidate behind the Naktong, while more troops and supplies arrived daily at the port that so many Americans had already died to protect.

  The 19th Infantry had received some replacements and new equipment and, finally, some tanks before the Battle of the Notch. More men had just arrived at Pusan. One of them, assigned to Easy Company, should have arrived with the earlier replacements. He had been unavoidably detained, however, and missed the boat to Okinawa. All things considered, he probably didn’t regret his tardiness, though he would have wished its cause had been more benign.

  CORPORAL CHESTER DAY “PETE” Salter Jr. was hitchhiking from his family’s home in Pleasant Valley, Iowa, to Fort Riley, Kansas. His furlough after completing basic training was over, and he had to rejoin his unit, a replacement battalion bound for Korea. They were leaving for the West Coast in a few days, and from there to Japan and on to Korea by sea. The three men who had just picked him up seemed friendly. One of them had gotten out of the front passenger seat when they pulled over and given it to him. The driver was quiet, but the two men in the back engaged Salter in conversation. They said they had friends at Fort Riley. They were obviously veterans.

  One of them hit him hard on the back of his head with something made of metal, a sap or a length of pipe or a pistol butt. They took his wallet as he struggled to stay conscious. When one of the men in the back instructed the driver to turn off at the next road so they could “finish him,” Salter was alert enough to open the door and roll out when the car slowed for the turn. He ran into a cornfield and hid until they drove away. Then he made his way to the nearest farmhouse and collapsed.

  Two days passed before Fort Riley received word of what had happened. The army had already declared Salter absent without leave. He was hospitalized for t
hree weeks, and his battalion sailed without him. His fellow replacements had already been assigned to their new units, and some of them had just reached Chinju, by the time Salter boarded an airplane flight, his first, for the coast. From there he flew to Okinawa, then on to Pusan by transport ship with a large group of replacements.

  Salter was born and raised in Iowa, the first of three children to an upper-middle-class family. His father was a good man, firm but not severe, unpretentious, hardworking, and generous. He raised his children to be respectful and respectable people. His mother had been the more impatient parent, sharper in her criticism and more sparing in her affection. When Pete grew to be a handful, a little rebellious, his mother thought instruction at a military academy would correct the deficiencies in his character that taxed her patience. He was sent to Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota, for three years of secondary education. There he learned something of martial discipline, though not so much that it noticeably affected his behavior. He was a good-looking kid, athletic, and popular with both sexes. He smoked, drank, fought, and broke a few other rules. He wasn’t much of a delinquent, just a little willful and given to misadventure for the fun of it. One of his friends at Shattuck, Marlon Brando, perhaps anticipating some of the roles he would play early in his film career, was the more determined rebel. There had been some trouble at a high school in Omaha, which is why he found himself unhappily enrolled at a military academy in Minnesota. He wasn’t there long, Salter remembered. Shattuck too eventually expelled him.