This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  But one howitzer had been struck by an 85mm shell, and destroyed, and a great many of the battery vehicles, which had been parked off the road, were smashed and burning. Other than Colonel Perry, only one other artilleryman had been hit.

  Farther north, Colonel Smith's infantry had lost some twenty dead or wounded to tank fire.

  After the last tank had passed, the roadside grew quiet again. The gunners sat down around their guns, resting, while the riflemen began to dig their holes deeper. The steady rain continued to come down.

  Then, after an hour had passed, Smith through his glasses saw a long column of trucks and walking infantry moving south from Suwon. At first sight he estimated the column to be at least six miles in length. Leading this new column were three more tanks, followed by trucks and miles of marching men.

  This column was the 16th and 18th regiments of the NKPA 4th Division, the conquerors of Seoul.

  For about an hour, the column closed upon Task Force Smith's position. The men were no longer cocky or happy. They were scared.

  Smith held his fire until the leading tanks and trucks were only a thousand yards away. Then he said, "Throw the book at them!"

  The North Korean column was congested on the narrow road; it was not prepared to fight. Apparently it was not even in communication with the tank columns of the 105th Armored Brigade that had preceded it down the road; and it did not anticipate trouble.

  While tough and battle-hardened, with a core of veterans, and psychologically prepared for battle, the NKPA was by no means a scientific military instrument by twentieth century standards. With no body of technical skills to fall back upon, the handling of communications and mechanized equipment, or even of artillery larger than mortars, by its peasant soldiery was inept. When its core of veterans had been exhausted in battle, the newer forced-inductees would be less reliable, and the NKPA would falter.

  But in the early months of the war, the NKPA was a better army, more ready for war, than those it faced.

  Colonel Smith gave the order to fire. Behind the ridge, mortars coughed, throwing their shells in a high arc over the ridges, sending them crashing down on the truck column. Trucks exploded and burst into flame. Shouting Koreans ran for the ditches. Machine guns ripped at them as they ran.

  Some died on the road. Others reached the ditches, and were blown apart by the 4.2 shells that fell among them. The column of North Koreans stopped and began to pile up in confusion.

  But now again Colonel Smith had nothing with which to stop the three tanks. The armored vehicles moved up close to his ridges, only 200 yards from the holes, and began to shower them with machine-gun slugs and to belt them with cannon fire. Americans began to die along the ridge.

  Now, behind the smoke of the burning trucks, Smith could see a thousand North Koreans in mustard-colored uniforms start to deploy out into the rice paddies beside the road. A wave of them started for his ridge; it was broken up by rifle and machine-gun fire.

  Surprisingly, although they brought some machine guns around, the enemy made no real effort to flank the ridge.

  Enemy artillery began to burst along his position now—but Smith had no communication with his own supporting battery. Either artillery or air could have wreaked havoc on the North Koreans congested on the road in front of him, but he had neither. Smith believed the artillery had been destroyed by the tank column, though actually only one howitzer had been knocked out.

  While the infantry fought along the ridge, the artillery sat it out. Twice Perry ordered wire parties to try to get the lines back in, but twice the men came back, complaining that they had been fired on.

  Wet and old, none of the radios would work.

  Smith, a courageous and competent officer, held his ridge as long as he dared. He held fast until the early afternoon, blocking the enemy, but he was running low on ammunition, and he realized that he was going to have to extricate his force, and soon, if he was going to save any of it from destruction.

  Not only did he have a great number of enemy in front of him, but now men with automatic weapons were flowing across his flanks.

  A withdrawal under fire is one of the most difficult of all military maneuvers. With seasoned troops it is dangerous, but with green men, undisciplined, badly shocked by the new and terrifying experience of battle, it can be fatal.

  Smith ordered his two companies to leapfrog backward down a finger ridge on his right, toward Osan. While one platoon was to withdraw, others would cover it by fire.

  C Company started back first, followed by the medics and battalion HQ.

  But one platoon of B Company never received the withdrawal order. Fighting, Lieutenant Bernard, its commander, suddenly realized he was all alone on the position. He gave orders for his men to pull out after the others had already gone.

  The withdrawal immediately became ragged and chaotic. Nobody wanted to be last in a game where all advantage obviously lay with being first. The men got out of their holes, leaving their crew-served weapons. They left their machine guns, recoilless rifles, and mortars for the enemy.

  Getting up from its holes to withdraw, Task Force Smith now came under heavy machine-gun fire from the flanks, and here it took its heavy losses. At close range, automatic weapons chewed the retreating Americans, breaking them up into small, disorganized units.

  They left their dead where they lay, and abandoned the thirty or so wounded who were too hurt to walk. One medical sergeant, whose name has been lost, refused to leave the wounded. He was not heard from again.

  With his last company leaving the hill, Colonel Smith struck off toward Perry's position, to tell the artillery that the infantry was pulling out. Finding Perry, Smith was amazed to find five guns operable and only one man other than Perry wounded. But it was too late now for the artillery to take a hand.

  The artillerymen were quite ready to go. Quickly, they lifted sights and breech locks from their howitzers, and took them to their vehicles. Smith, the hobbling Perry, and many of the gunners then walked back to Osan, three miles away, where the artillery had left many of their trucks, which they found undamaged.

  But Osan was occupied by enemy tanks. The little convoy struck out on a dirt road to the east, trying to reach Ansong. Soon they overran straggling groups of infantry struggling over the hills and sloshing through the rice paddies. Covered with slime, running, these men had tossed aside their steel helmets. Some had dropped their shoes, and many had lost shirts. None of them had weapons other than a few rifles, and two or three clips of ammunition per man.

  They shouted at the trucks as they passed. The artillerymen stopped and picked up about one hundred men of this group. Then they continued eastward, away from the enemy.

  The NKPA, apparently satisfied with taking the ridge, did not pursue. Besides, the Americans had left many good things behind to occupy the victors.

  Early the next morning, 6 July, Colonel Smith could account for only 185 men. Later, the C Company commander came in with 65 more. The artillery was missing 5 officers and 26 men.

  Survivors straggled into several Korean towns for a number of days. Some men walked all the way to the east coast; some reached the Yellow Sea on the west. One man finally came into Pusan by sampan.

  Task Force Smith, designed to be an arrogant display of strength to bluff the enemy into halting his advance, had delayed the Inmun Gun exactly seven hours.

  | Go to Table of Contents |

  8

  The Late Company A

  Tragically … when the fighting was over the militiamen who had scampered remained to be war-battered heroes. Campaigners for public office told them how gallant they had been; expounded on the glories of New Orleans and the Thames and Lundy's Lane and ignored Hull's surrender, Wilkinson's fail ures, the scuttle at Blandensburg… the lessons and problems were forgot ten by people and government.

  — James E. Edmonds, FIGHTING FOOLS, concerning the War of 1812.

  AT THE TIME Task Force Smith saw its first tanks north of Osan, the 24
th Division's 34th Regiment was in P'yongt'aek, a dirty little town of wattle huts and muddy streets fifteen miles south. Bit by bit and piece by piece, the 24th Division was arriving in Korea, coming into Pusan by LST or transport, then by rail northwestward to Taejon and points north.

  And rapidly now, the burden of the war was falling on its back.

  The heart of the ROK Army, with the loss of its best men north of the Han, had broken. It had little equipment remaining from the Seoul debacle, and the troops who had been in the south were poorly armed, with old Jap matèriel. The staff had fallen into controversy, with more than one high officer shouting "Communists!" at his colleagues. Fat Chae was gone. Lee Bum Suk, who had graduated from the United States Army Infantry School, became temporary chief of staff.

  It was the Communist tanks, the ever-present, ever-leading T-34's, which could not be stopped and could not be destroyed, that wrecked every plan and every hope of the ROK commanders. Lee Bum Suk had sound notions for fighting tanks—but now he could no longer find any ROK soldiers with the heart to try them. The rash and the brave die early in a war.

  Lee's successor, Chung II Kwon, dropped the whole problem in the Americans' laps. They were here now; their advisers had talked endlessly about the insignificance and vulnerability of Soviet tanks—now let the men from Mikuk, the Beautiful Land, fight the Communist tanks.

  At the first the men from Mikuk were not worried. They were pretty well convinced that they were better than any gooks, North or South.

  On 5 July, as the 1st and 3rd battalions of the understrength 34th Infantry closed in on P'yongt'aek, General Dean realized that he must make a strong defense of the P'yongt'aek-Ansong line. Here an arm of the Yellow Sea protected his left flank, and to the right there were mountains and poor roads. The main communications to the south came through P'yongt'aek and Ansong. South of them, the peninsula broadened out in all directions, particularly in the west, making defense much more complicated there than along this line.

  Dean, who had flown in Korea 3 July, ordered 1st Battalion, 34th Infantry, north of P'yongt'aek to block the main road. The 3rd he sent to Ansong, a few miles to the east.

  The young men of 1st Battalion resembled those of Task Force Smith. Already they had seen all of this stinking country they wanted to. They were ready to head back to their nice billets in Japan where their Japanese girl friends were probably already growing restless.

  All of them were convinced they would be only a few days in Korea, at most. They had been told very little, for their officers themselves didn't know much. But as everyone said, "Just wait till the gooks see an American uniform—they'll turn around and run like hell!"

  Coming north on the train from Taejon, 1st Battalion had picked up a new C.O., Lieutenant Colonel Ayres, who had had a fine record in Italy. Ayres confidently told his company commanders:

  "There are supposed to be North Korean soldiers north of us. These men are poorly trained. Only about half of them have weapons, and we'll have no difficulty stopping them."

  It was never disclosed who had briefed Colonel Ayres.

  The company officers went back to their men and told them that this whole affair was only a police action and that, before long, everybody'd be back in good old Sasebo, Japan.

  It is not certain that the young Americans knew what a police action was—but it is certain that none of them associated the term with combat.

  The battalion marched north of P'yongt'aek in the same cold rain that soaked Task Force Smith. It halted in the green, grassy hills two miles north of town. Here both the highway and railbed ran through a cut with a low hill on each side, a good spot to defend. Colonel Ayres put B Company to the east of the road, and ordered C into reserve.

  Captain Leroy Osburn's Able Company he placed on a hill to the left, with its line running down the hill through a rice paddy to the highway and railroad cuts.

  A Company dug in. The reddish-brown earth was coarse, and turned easily, but in the pelting rain the foxholes began to fill with cold, dirty water. And because the front was wide for a weak company, the holes were far apart. The men of Lieutenant Driskell's 1st Platoon, down by the road, could not see the company CP up on the green hill.

  The 2nd and 3rd platoons dug in along the hill; Weapons Platoon went in generally behind them. A Company's roster carried only 140 names, less than two-thirds its authorized wartime strength. For in America it was still peacetime, and had been for five years.

  Each soldier carried either an M-1 rifle or a carbine, with less than 100 rounds of ammunition. The company had three light machine guns, with four boxes of ammunition for each gun. Each platoon had only one Browning Automatic rifle, with a total of 200 rounds per weapon.

  The Weapons Platoon dug in only three 60mm mortars. It also had 75mm recoilless rifles, but these it could have left behind, for the powers that be had issued no ammunition for them.

  Nor were there any hand grenades.

  When their holes were dug, the young men of A Company sat outside them in the rain, occasionally shouting back and forth to one another. During the day nothing happened.

  A small reconnaissance force went north on the road and reported back that there were tanks south of Osan. Then, after dark, four tired and somewhat incoherent survivors from Task Force Smith stumbled into Colonel Ayres' CP. They told a rather wild story, which Colonel Ayres didn't exactly buy.

  Brigadier General Barth, who was acting division artillery commander of the 24th while awaiting the arrival in Korea of his own 25th Division, stopped by the CP Barth had talked with Colonel Perry of Task Force Smith after his escape from Osan. Now Barth—who was not in communication with Dean and who did not know Dean's plan of maneuver—put an oar in proceedings at P'yongt'aek. Somewhat shaken by the disaster that had overtaken the delaying force north of Osan, Barth ordered Ayres to hold only as long as he could, and to take no chance of being flanked or surrounded.

  "Don't end up like Brad Smith," he told Ayres.

  Then Barth went on to the 34th Regiment's CP, and suggested to its commander, Colonel Lovless, that the regiment should consolidate its battalions to the south at the town of Ch'onan. Lovless did not know exactly where Barth stood in the chain of command or general scheme of things but Barth was a brigadier general, and Lovless now made a tremendous error. He sent word to his 3rd Battalion to pull back from Ansong, although the battalion had not yet made contact with the enemy. The right flank was left exposed.

  Lovless had inherited the 34th only a short time before from an officer who had been relieved for incompetency.

  The rain continued: to fall on the waiting 1st Battalion all night. A few of the men, hearing rumors, grew nervous. They were told emphatically by an officer, "This is a police action, nothing more!"

  Captain Osburn of A Company figured an attack was possible, but not likely. He had received word to be on the lookout for stragglers from Smith's battalion, but somehow these instructions did not get down to the platoons.

  Daylight came 6 July, and now all the foxholes were filled with water. One man, PFC James Hite, told his platoon sergeant, "I'd sure hate to have to get into that hole."

  A newly joined platoon sergeant, SFC Collins, who had been in combat before, walked up and down his line of holes. He told his men that they'd better eat while they had the chance, and to break out the C's. Then he took out a can of cold beans and sat down to eat it.

  The morning was misty and foggy, but Collins, half through his beans, thought he heard the sound of engines to the north. He took up his field glasses and made out the faint outlines of several tanks on the road. Behind the tanks, he saw a great number of brown-uniformed infantrymen spreading out in the varicolored green rice paddies.

  He called to his platoon leader, Lieutenant Ridley, "Sir, I think we got company!"

  Ridley answered that what he saw must be part of Task Force Smith withdrawing down the road.

  "These people got tanks. The 21st Infantry hasn't any," Collins yelled back.

>   Meanwhile, Colonel Ayres walked up to Captain Osburn's command post. From there both officers could see the infantry spreading through the rice fields, but visibility was too poor for them to identify the troops.

  Osburn and the colonel agreed these must be some of Smith's boys, and continued to watch them for several minutes. Only when they had counted more than a battalion of soldiers deploying, with more beyond, did they come awake.

  Immediately, Ayres called for the mortars to open fire. The first rounds burst in the fields, and the oncoming infantry spread out a little farther. It did not stop advancing.

  Sergeant Collins, up on the hill, saw the turret hatches of the lead tank slam down. The long, wicked tube of the tank's 85 swung toward him.

  "Here it comes!" Collins bellowed to his men. "Get down!"

  The shell screamed into the hill, burst, and showered mud over the cowering riflemen. The men began jumping into their holes, sounding like frogs diving into a pond.

  "Commence firing! Commence firing!" Collins shouted. Two other men, who were veterans of World War II, took up the shout.

  The Americans on the hill could see the advancing Koreans plainly now, but almost no one fired. Collins turned to the two riflemen in his own hole.

  "Come on! You got an M-1—get firing! Come on!" He jabbed one of them sharply.

  But most of the men stood slack-jawed, staring at the advancing Koreans, as if unwilling to believe that these men were really trying to kill them. For many minutes, only the squad and platoon leaders did any shooting, and more than half of the men never got off a round.

  Back in the Weapons Platoon, PFC Hite was still sitting beside his hole. He saw explosions on the hill near Captain Osburn's CP, "Must be short rounds—"

  "Hell! That isn't short—that's an enemy shell!" his platoon sergeant told him. With a great splash, Hite turned and dived into his watery hole. The platoon sergeant joined him.