by Ian Slater
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
At dawn, heading south down Korea’s rugged east coast, a supertanker, the MV New Orleans, had requested ROK coast guard assistance. Several miles north of Pohang she reported that whatever it was that had struck her, a ship-to-ship or air-to-ship missile, she was badly holed in her stern, had lost control of her rudder, including the auxiliary, and was now drifting. While one of the three ROK destroyers in Pohang Harbor was ordered by ROK’s Area Five’s southern command to remain behind on picket duty, just beyond Cape Changgi, the other two destroyers were sent to assist the tanker out of fear that a massive spill oif South Korea’s famed beaches would feed the inferno on Pohang’s waterfront, or rather what was left of it after the Backfires’ sneak attack.
* * *
The tanker was now a mile from the two ROK destroyers, themselves a quarter mile apart, their captains deciding the best way to harness a towline before trying to deal with the problem of the hole in her stern, not yet visible because of the head-on angle of the tanker. As dangerous as the salvage procedure would be in the deteriorating weather, both skippers were greatly relieved at having the opportunity to haul the leviathan away from the coast. It would recoup part of the acute loss of face, which they were suffering after having failed earlier to detect the approach of the low-flying Backfires, though they guessed, correctly, that at that moment there were many others throughout the length and breadth of South Korea who could see court-martials stretching before them. Indeed the NKA infiltration units had been so successful that the problem facing U.S.-ROK HQ was that if everyone were to be court-martialed who should be, particularly those who had parked their fighters in rows instead of “staggering” them, the armed forces attorneys general would have enough work for the next ten years. However, morale was so low that Seoul HQ decided that to call so many to account at once would only further erode the army’s confidence and add to the already acute embarrassment of Seoul and Washington.
Proceeding slowly through increasing fog, the two ROK destroyers were a quarter mile from the tanker when she dropped the hinged panels on both sides of her flying bridge, launching four Exocets at what was effectively point-blank range.
The first destroyer, hit both on the bridge and in its gun-control radar antennae, managed to get off one of its eleven-hundred-pound Harpoons, the missile’s aim thrown off, however, by the cluttering images of its own bridge’s flying debris. It missed the tanker by a wide margin. The second ROK destroyer was already a mass of flame, both Exocets having exploded at the waterline, the fuel tanks ruptured, men drowning in oil. Undeterred, the tanker, jamming the picket destroyer’s radio calls for help, maintained a steady heading toward Pohang Harbor, using the southern curve of Yongil Bay, not hit by the bombers earlier in the day, as a reference point, its quaint, old-fashioned jumble of hotels rising higgledy-piggledy above neat rows of advertisers’ red, white, and green beach umbrellas.
On the golden crescent of Yongil Bay, confused and terrified tourists, including members of the local “Pohang Pelicans” who earlier had been readying for their monthly predawn dip when the Backfires had appeared, were now stunned as the city proper across the big bay and now the destroyers continued to be consumed by the fire. As the tanker appeared, emerging from the early morning haze, it appeared to be disintegrating, as if, one of the waiters from the Sun Day hotel commented, “pieces of it were peeling off.”
No information could be gained from Pohang Central, telephone communications and roads having been cut by the bombers’ raid. Only two inhabitants in all of Yongil Bay could remember anything like it — the great fires lit by the retreating U.S.-ROK forces over fifty years ago when, in pell-mell retreat from the pursuing NKA, the Americans and South Koreans had frantically gone round torching massive supply dumps, denying them to the Communists. This time, however, Pohang had been attacked not by NKA artillery but by its air force, the Backfires flown by Norm Korean veterans who had served in the Syrian air force in the Arab-Israeli wars and who, against all prediction, had come in so low on the final run before the “hop” over Pohang and Taegu that they had been no more than forty feet above the waves. It was for this reason that the USS Blaine, now approaching the area at 0817, had earlier picked up only one of the bombers as a faint and inconclusive blip on its radar.
At 0823 a fisherman, trying his luck six miles off Cape Changgi in wind-scattered mist, saw that what those on Yongil Beach had thought were pieces of paint, or scales, flaking from the giant tanker were in fact swarms of APCs, amphibious personnel carriers, and other assault boats, carrying two thousand NKA marines and flanked by two Nanuchka guided-missile patrol boats. All had slid effortlessly from the tanker’s roll-on, roll-off stern cavity, each patrol boat armed with a twin fifty-seven-millimeter AA gun, a single seventy-six-millimeter AA gun, one thirty-millimeter general-purpose Gatling, and two triple-loaded N-4 (NATO-designation “Gecko”) air-to-surface missiles with a range of six nautical miles. It was not realized at the time, but these were the first Nanuchka Class IIIs the West had seen.
As soon as she understood what was happening, her radar and radio signals to the U.S. Naval Advisory Group in Pusan still jammed, the lone ROK destroyer off Cape Changgi joined battle, engaging the two patrol boats at a range of eight nautical miles. She destroyed one of the Nanuchkas with a Harpoon missile, but the other patrol boat closed in a fast “weaving” pattern to six nautical miles, putting the destroyer within range of the Nanuchka’s SA-N4s. Firing all six missiles, the patrol boat hit the Korean destroyer with three of them. It was not the explosions themselves that did in the destroyer so much as the resulting fires amid the massive structural damage, fires that could not be fought effectively, as most of the water lines had been severed or punctured by white-hot splinters, the Russian-built missiles slamming into the ship at six hundred miles an hour. The fires heating the aluminum superstructure caused massive blistering on and between decks, filling the air with highly toxic fumes from incinerated plastic moldings, the fumes alone responsible for half of the destroyer’s eighty-three casualties, thirteen of whom had been killed outright by the missiles’ impact.
Disgorged from their mother ship like sharks from the belly of some great whale, the armada of landing craft, 140 in all, wasted no time heading toward Pohang Beach, churning the gray sea white while a flight of twenty bulbous-eyed Kamov-25s rose from the bowels of the supertanker, their distinctive double-decker contrarotating rotors catching the weak morning light as they passed over the wakes of the assault force. Armed with air-to-surface rockets under each stubby wing and 20-millimeter nose cannon, ten of the twenty Kamovs, each carrying twelve SPETSNAZ or special force troops, ferried 120 a mile beyond the beach. The other ten Kamovs took another 120 SPETS twenty-five miles inland, south to the Kyongju junction on the vital east coast rail link between Pusan and Seoul.
To thwart any possible counterattack from what was left of the American base at Camp Libby, or from the USMC Advisory Group garrison two miles south of Yongil Beach, NKA commanders knew the beach must be reached in under twenty minutes. For this to happen, the first wave of commando-trained assault troops plus combat engineers had to be in action the moment their amphibious tracked vehicles hit shore. They would be followed, at three-minute intervals, by a second and third wave, each containing more riflemen and antitank weapons, followed by the fourth and final wave of a battalion of forty PC-76 Plavayushchiy amphibious tanks, each up-gunned to a 105-millimeter cannon instead of its usual 76.2-millimeter gun, and sprouting a standard coaxial 7.62-millimeter machine gun atop its cupola.
But going in with the tide, as planned, the amphibious tanks, capable of ten kilometers per hour in calm water, now reached as much as thirteen kilometers per hour. The increased push of the surf helped conserve precious fuel that would otherwise have been expended in powering the tanks’ hydro-steer jets, but the saving in fuel was offset by serious steering problems as spray from the wakes of the amphibious personnel carriers ahead, now too close in front,
“salted up” the tanks’ extended periscopes. This caused several of the PC-76 tank drivers to steer blind. The result in the heavy surf was over two dozen collisions, five of them fatal, as the twenty-five-foot-long, fourteen-ton tanks tore off each other’s trim boards between glacis and nose plates, each of the doomed tanks’ 240-horsepower water-cooled diesels driving them under before power could be shut off.
Despite the loss, the NKA commander knew that the advance force of 120 SPETS ferried in by the first ten helicopters held the key to success at Pohang Beach. And already he could see them through the binoculars establishing a small but highly concentrated perimeter of fire fed by hundred-round-per-minute AK-74s, PKMs (7.62-millimeter light machine guns), heavy mortars, and if needed, twenty-five-pound “Sagger” antitank missiles.
In all, over two thousand NKA regulars, a small but superbly trained force, were involved in the Pohang strike on a one-kilometer front. The NKA’s big gamble was that if the second 120 SPETS ferried twenty-five miles inland could sever the vital arteries of the Seoul-Pusan expressway and Seoul-Pusan rail link, then Pusan, the east coast’s major naval port, would be isolated, infiltration units already having cut the alternate route between Pusan and Taegu farther inland. With the beachhead at Pohang consolidated by additional troops securing it in depth, air strikes could then be launched from Pohang field against the U.S.-ROK naval installations at Pusan. Not only would the headquarters of the ROK navy be in the hands of the NKA, but the vital sea link to Japan and its formidable U.S. garrison would be severed.
* * *
As the ragtag U.S.-ROK army unit of less than six hundred men hurriedly assembled from the remains of Camp Libby clambered into armored personnel carriers setting out to counterattack the beach, they were about to become the first victims of what, in the dry technological jargon of ballistics research, was called the development of “improved sleeve design.” It was something that the doomed and already demoralized American and South Korean troops could only have known about if U.S. intelligence had penetrated an elite Soviet guard regiment. U.S. intelligence had not done so, and consequently there was no way for the men in the U.S.-ROK counterattack from Fort Libby to know that the new sleeve design for the standard Soviet and Chinese 7.62-millimeter round increased not only the velocity of the depleted uranium bullet but also its penetration capability.
On the beach at Pohang this meant that the very fast eight-and-a-half-ton American-built M-114 armored personnel carriers, each powered by an eight-cylinder Chevrolet engine and capable of transporting thirteen men, were stopped dead in their tracks. The NKA’s Soviet-made 7.62-millimeter rounds fired by Soviet-made PKM light machine guns not only penetrated the M-114s’ hulls but traveled so fast that even after penetration of the APCs’ hulls, a single ricochet inside the personnel carrier was capable of killing or wounding several men. A full burst often as not put the entire thirteen-man squad out of action.
The bloody scenes described later by a few survivors of the PKM slaughter of the M-114s could not begin to convey the extent of chaos and panic inside the jam-packed carriers, falling bodies and loose weapons often doing as much damage as the ricocheting 7.62-millimeters themselves.
From that time on, even though any objective assessment of the defeat of the American and ROK troops at Pohang Beach showed that this was due as much as anything to the overwhelming force and professionalism of the attacking NKA SPETS, blame shifted quickly to the inadequacies of the M-114s’ aluminum hulls. And, though the army would not admit it, after Pohang, U.S. and ROK commanders had great difficulty in persuading men to be transported to the front in the M-114s. The army kept touting the personnel carrier’s advantages, including its unmatched speed of fifty-eight kilometers per hour, but U.S. officers in all theaters remained unsuccessful in trying to have the carriers loaded to their full capacity of thirteen, the age-old superstition about the number thirteen reinforced by the disaster at Yongil Bay.
But if the penetrating 7.62-millimeters had surprised the U.S.-ROK forces at Pohang, this was as nothing to the far greater shock that was to come.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In Seoul, 225 miles northwest of Pohang, deep in the subterranean headquarters of the U.S.-ROK defense force, the extent of the NKA’s daring initiatives was only now being fully realized as field reports slowly found their way through the nightmare of a frantic bureaucracy and broken communications. One aspect of the invasion that was becoming clearer with each new report was how successful the coordination of the NKA’s attacks had been. One of the most difficult of all the military arts, such superb timing evidenced a professionalism that even dedicated anti-Communists like Cahill begrudgingly admired. For the civilian population, towering columns of black smoke seen all over the South were testimony enough of just how widespread and effective the NKA infiltrators and regulars had been.
However, the most stunning news in Seoul that morning of August 16 was that, following the NKA’s breakout southward through the tunnels, both pincers of Kim’s army had now reached Uijongbu junction. In all, two hundred thousand NKA troops were massing less than ten miles north of Seoul for the final surge down the Uijongbu corridor.
General Cahill knew that professionally he was finished unless he could buy time to pull a “MacArthur”: launch a massive amphibious assault at a weak point somewhere along North Korea’s western coastline and push inland, cutting the NKA’s supply line, which, due to their present rate of advance, might soon become dangerously overextended.
The initial reluctance of Seoul’s state-of-the-art headquarters to believe that a full-scale disaster might befall them originated in a faith, bordering on evangelical-like confidence, in “HiT-R,” or high-tech readiness. Cahill, General Lee, and the other commanders in the top echelon had relied too heavily on such indicators as vibration sensors along the DMZ. These, however, as predicted by Cahill’s aide, proved as deficient in the spongy terrain of the monsoon as they were efficient in the hard, frozen ground of winter, when any armoR-1ed invasion was supposed to happen. Now Seoul was relying heavily on two last “aces,” the first a direct and normally “militarily sound” tactical descendant of World War II: an elaborate system of high-explosive-rigged rail lines, culverts, highways, and bridges throughout the South. Where there were no natural culverts or bridges, enormous concrete slabs had been built either side of the highways. With all roads already assigned “code black,” all Cahill had to do was order the RECDET — remote control detonation — units to pull the switch and mountains of debris would come crashing down, forcing the NKA’s armored and motorized divisions to a standstill. And if the NKA’s armor couldn’t move, its infantry couldn’t advance in the face of the U.S.-ROK 105-millimeter artillery that was answering the Communists’ barrage.
At least this was the theory. The other “ace” Seoul HQ had up its sleeve was the Cobras. Two hundred of them, armed with GAU-8 armor-piercing thirty-millimeter cannons and Walleye antitank bombs, which, once the enemy tanks were identified by the on-ground laser source, would home in, riding down the beam, blowing the tank apart. Fifty were based at Kunsan a hundred miles away on the west coast, another fifty in the center at Taegu, the remaining hundred at Osan thirty miles south of Seoul.
Cahill’s disappointment was too much for him to bear when he heard they no longer existed. Many of the captured saboteurs, immediately executed by the ROK, had been “sleepers”— working at the various air bases for civilian contractors — and it wasn’t until an hour after the first NKA shells, shuffling through the air in their strangely muted staccato, had started crashing into the South Korean capital that the first reports about the Cobras reached Cahill among the pile of other sabotage reports and assorted debacles.
And it wasn’t until the radio message from Fort Alamo, a mile south of the DMZ, came in reporting firing in the distance but no breakthrough in their sector that Cahill and his staff realized the NKA had simply bypassed many American camps on or near the DMZ, leaving the isolated American stronghold
s for piecemeal destruction later on. It was the delay in such reports reaching him, rather than the contents of the reports as later charged, that made Cahill reluctant to signal Washington with a DEFCON 1 advisory — to put all U.S. forces on a war footing. With his communications in such chaos, verification of reported conditions at the front was at times impossible, and the last thing he had wanted was to be accused of panic. He also knew it was possible the NKA was feeding false information. He had assumed, for example, in accordance with his standing orders, that at least half the Cobras would already be in the air shortly after hostilities began, with “weapons freed” clearance and in action all along the DMZ. What had actually happened, and what Cahill wasn’t told until three hours later, was that while the first messages from Osan reported only a few helos afire, in fact, most of the remaining choppers had been destroyed by either mortar splinters or infiltrator sniper fire. What had fooled those reporting the damage was that so few choppers were on fire. But this was not due to any lack of shrapnel or snipers but to the Cobra’s plastic inert gas fuel tanks, their honeycombed interior specifically designed not to burst into flame when fired upon. It was only later, after ground crew felt safe enough to go out on the tarmac, that they discovered the extent of the damage, the Cobras riddled by rifle fire that had easily passed through the thin fuselage, slicing and mashing the maze of electronics and hydraulically operated controls.
In Taegu the NKA infiltrators didn’t bother to set up mortars because of more frequent patrols operating out of the air base itself and from Camp Carroll ten miles away. Instead they simply hijacked four three-ton trucks, shot the drivers, and crashing the mesh perimeter, drove directly onto the tarmac into the line of twenty-five parked Cobras, demolishing $120 million worth of aircraft and ordnance in less than eight minutes.