"The situation has developed into a major operation."
Ch'onan was a transportation hub, from which good roads ran west and south. When P'yongt'aek was abandoned, General Dean's entire left flank had been exposed, and with the capture of Ch'onan, the North Koreans had entry into most of western and southern Korea. Dean was forced now to try to defend along the Kum, which was the first large river south of the Han. It was a natural defense line, a great watery moat almost encircling the important city of Taejon.
Taejon was the last militarily important center in South Korea, with the exception of Taegu and Pusan behind the Naktong River, far to the southeast. If Taejon fell to the enemy, there was no real defense line short of the Naktong—and on that river the defenders would hold only a tiny corner of Korean earth.
More and more units were coming into Korea, and General Dean was assembling more forces. He could expect the 25th Infantry Division to go into action in a few days, and the 1st Cavalry (actually a TO&E infantry division retaining a famous name) was arriving. But for the next crucial battle, Dean would have to depend on his own 34th, 21st, and 19th Infantry regiments.
Late 8 July, Dean issued a formal operations order, confirming fragmentary verbal instructions put out during the day: "Hold Kum River Line at all costs. Maximum repeat maximum delay will be affected."
He placed his regiments, the l9th, 21st, and the now battered and bedraggled 34th, into a great semicircle along the Kum River. Dean now realized that if this line could not be held, Taejon itself, with its important roads and rail lines, was doomed.
On 9 July A Company was still north of the Kum, in well-prepared positions. During the afternoon it came under heavy shelling, and then enemy infantry struck against its left flank, held by the 1st Platoon.
Most of the 1st Platoon had stayed in their holes at P'yongt'aek, and it contained only about a dozen men. Quickly, the Innum Gun poured over it, firing at the men in their holes.
Five men got out, running down the hill.
Men in the 2nd Platoon, dug in to the right, looked up on the hill where 1st Platoon had been. "Who the hell put the flag up there?" a sergeant asked.
Then a shout went up. "That's a North Korean flag!"
Shrieking and shooting, a wave of Koreans poured down from the hill toward 2nd Platoon. The platoon had not dug its position for all-around defense. It could not now fire effectively to its left flank.
"Let's get the hell out of here!"
Taking its weapons and some of the wounded, 2nd Platoon took off.
The remainder of A Company held out until dark. Then orders came to pull back out of rifle range. Early the next morning, the company crossed south of the Kum.
Here they had a breathing spell, until the NKPA boiled across the river. At daybreak on 20 July, A Company held the main road into the north side of Taejon; four men from the Weapons Platoon were down on the road with a rocket launcher. As it grew lighter, they saw three long skirmish lines of Korean infantry pass over a hilltop to their right. Looking left, they saw more enemy.
The men ran some five hundred yards back to the battalion CP There the senior man, a sergeant, reported to the battalion commander.
The C.O. remarked that the sergeant seemed a bit excited. The sergeant asked him to take a look down the road. The colonel went outside the command hut, and at that moment red flares burst against the lightening sky.
All hell broke loose. Artillery, mortar, small-arms, and tank-gun fire pelted the area.
The urge to pull out was once again irresistible.
The battalion moved south, beyond Taejon. At first A Company kept good order, but men from other units became enmeshed with them, and these men wouldn't take orders from A's officers. Soon there was confusion.
Men threw away their shoes, because it was difficult to walk in the mud. They had no canteens, and they had no food. They were tired and dispirited, and some were bitter. The sun burned out of the clouds, and now the full brazen heat of Korean midsummer baked them. Some men grew dizzy and sick.
They told bitter jokes: "If I'm a policemen, where the hell's my badge?" And, "Damn, these crooks over here got big guns!"
None of them had been told why they were in Korea, or why the United States was fighting North Korean Communists. None of them cared. They wanted only to get back to Japan.
Instead, they were heading for the Naktong River Line, there to make a final stand. There they would realize their government had no intention of withdrawing them; if they wanted to live, they would have to fight.
They were learning, in the hardest school there was, that it is a soldier's lot to suffer and that his destiny may be to die. They were learning something they had not been told: that in this world are tigers.
Behind them, platoons and companies from new divisions, fresh from Japan, went into line to take up the fight. These companies and platoons were manned by men like those of A Company, young Americans, no better, no worse, than the society from which they sprang. Some would do better than A Company, some less well. No matter how' they did, there would not be enough of them.
No American may sneer at them, or at what they did. What happened to them might have happened to any American in the summer of 1950. For they represented exactly the kind of pampered, undisciplined, egalitarian army their society had long desired and had at last achieved.
They had been raised to believe the world was without tigers, then sent to face those tigers with a stick. On their society must fall the blame.
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9
Taejon
I have no intention of alibiing my presence in Taejon. At the time I thought it was the place to be.
— Major General William Frishe Dean.
IN THE FIRST terrible, shattering days of July 1950, casualties among officers of high rank of the United States Army were greater in proportion to those of any fighting since the Civil War. They had to be. There were few operable radios with the regiments in Korea, and almost no communication from command posts down to the front positions.
If commanders wanted to know what was happening, or make their orders known, they had to be on the ground.
And the troops themselves, who had never developed any respect for N.C.O.'s or junior officers, often would ignore their orders—particutarly if the order involved something unpleasant or unpopular.
Understandably, the junior leaders soon became defeatist. A great many of them died, recklessly, but it was not enough.
It was not because the colonels and generals had lost their minds that so many of them began to stand with bazooka teams or to direct rifle fire. There was no other way. So it was that men like Bob Martin were blown apart doing a rifleman's job, or battalion commanders like Smith of the 3rd, 34th Infantry, collapsed and had to be evacuated, and men like Major Dunn, marching ahead of a rifle company, were lost.
The high-priced help was expendable, true. They too were paid to die. But it was no way to run a war.
While the 34th Regiment was getting chewed in Ch'onan, the 21st—"Gimlets"—were in delaying position to the east, near Choch'iwon. Here Colonel Stephens—Big Six to his men—found a scene of mass confusion. Supplies for his men and the neighboring ROK troops arrived by rail, mixed together. The Korean trainmen were impossible to control; some trains, still loaded, bolted for the rear. Refugees were everywhere.
Stephens, a tough and rugged officer, was told by Dean to hold for four days. He was given an artillery battery, some engineers, and a company of light tanks. On 10 July his composite battalion, made up of men of the 21st who had not flown in earlier with Brad Smith, held a ridge along a three quarter-mile front, north of Choch'iwon.
Stephens was up on the ridge with his troops.
In the early morning, mist and fog hung over the green rice paddies to the front. Soon, Korean voices could be heard through the fog. Some of the American soldiers began shooting, wildly.
Dick Stephens roared at them to stop, and they did.
Gradually, the fog lifted. But now Stephens had lost communication both by wire and radio with his supporting mortars. They fell silent.
At 0900, enemy infantry tried to climb to the American positions. Now the artillery battery, firing repeatedly, drove them back again. But four tanks moved out of a small village and began pelting the ridges with automatic fire. Nothing could be done about them.
At 1100, lacking close-in mortar support, the lieutenant holding the single hill on the left was unable to keep the enemy at a distance. This officer, Bixler, radioed to Stephens: "I need reinforcements; have many casualties; request permission to withdraw."
"Hold on—relief is on the way," Stephens told him.
Stephens had recalled for an air strike. Soon, the planes screamed over the hill, rocketed the tanks—without visible effect—and scattered the attacking infantry. But soon the planes expended their ammunition, and sighed off to the south.
And something else had happened during the air strike—enemy fire had cut the wife from the ridge to the altillery position, and the forward observer's radio had conked out.
The North Koreans started upward once again, and now friendly artillery whistled down on the American defenders. The artillery, with the idea that the enemy had overrun Stephens' ridge, had decided on their own to fire upon the ridge.
Stephens, cursing, ran to his own command jeep. He called his regimental HQ to contact the artillery to lay off—but the shells kept whooping in.
Crouching on the ridge under his own shelifire, Stephens took another message from Bixler, that Bixler was surrounded and most of his men were down. Bixler was not hear d from again.
During the fire fight, a few men here and there on the right flank of the ridge had been seen moving back. Now a yell went up.
Dick Stephens saw a number of men running to the rear. He shouted: "Get those high-priced soldiers back into position! This is what they're paid for!"
A corporal, a Japanese-American from Hawaii, did his best to stop the panic, but was able to collect only a few men.
Within a few minutes, Stephens saw that the ridge would have to be abandoned. He signaled the small group still with him to fall back, and they crossed the rear slope of the ridge and floundered through the stinking rice paddies. On the way, two American planes dived down and strafed them. No one was hurt, but the men, forced to wallow face down in the odorous night soil, lost any future love of rice.
Coming into the position of his 3rd Battalion, Stephens immediately ordered Lieutenant Colonel Jensen to counterattack the lost ridge. Jensen went forward and after a sharp fight retook the ground—all except Bixler's hill.
And on the retaken ground Jensen found six American soldiers with their hands tied behind their backs, shot in the head.
The 21st Infantry continued fighting, though it was forced back from the ridge toward Choch'iwon. The North Koreans, the veteran 3rd Division, which Kim II Sung had designated "Seoul," crashed into the 3rd Battalion early on 11 July. It was a beautifully executed assault, following the pattern of most NKPA attacks.
While heavy fire held down the American front, troops and tanks passed through and around them, setting up roadblocks. Again—as continually happened—tanks tore up the wire, and radios fizzled. Colonel Jensen and a very high percentage of his battalion staff were killed or missing in action, while more than 60 percent of the battalion went down the drain.
Overrun, the survivors streamed to the rear. The men who came out had no canteens or ammunition. They lost their shoes in the muck of the rice paddies, and threw away their heavy helmets. Nine out of ten left their weapons behind.
Behind them, Colonel Stephens had organized the remnants of the 1st Battalion—the old Task Force Smith—on new positions. Two enemy divisions—the elite 3rd and 4th—were breathing on his neck.
At 1200, 12 July, he radioed General Dean: "Am surrounded. 1st Bn, left giving way. Situation bad on right. Having nothing left to establish intermediate delaying position with am forced to withdraw to [Kum] river line. I have issued instructions to withdraw."
The retreat was orderly. At 1600, except for a few inevitable stragglers, the 21st had crossed south of the Kum. On the south shore Stephens took up a new blocking position. He could put a total of 325 men on line—the total fighting strength of the 1st and 3rd battalions combined.
For three days Stephens had delayed the best of the North Korean Army. His was the first impressive American performance in Korea; some Gimlets had run, but the majority had fought and died.
The Gimlets had done well, but they had paid.
Falling back, they passed through the lines of the newly arrived 19th Infantry, the "Rock of Chickamauga," which had been rushed forward on Dean's orders.
The Chicks needn't have hurried. They were going to get their turn.
The Kum River is the first wide, deep, defendable stream south of the Han in southwestern Korea. It flows around the important city of Taejon, 120,000 people in 1950, sixth in South Korea, which lies some ten to fifteen miles below it. Between the river and the city is no terrain suitable for any hopeful defense.
If the Kum River were lost, Taejon must inevitably follow, and the American army could ill afford to lose Taejon, with its road and rail network leading to all South Korea.
General Dean was determined not to lose it.
By 12 July he had ordered all his troops to cross to the south bank of the Kum, and to blow all bridges behind them. Along the great arc, a sort of horseshoe bend that the river made about Taejon, he placed the three regiments at his disposal, the 34th Infantry on the left, the 19th on the right, and what was left of Colonel Stephens' 21st in a reserve blocking position on the southeast.
On arrival in Korea, the regiments had been at 70 percent strength—but worse, their tactical integrity had been destroyed. Each regiment had only two battalions, instead of the normal three, and American doctrine and training supposed three battalions. In any situation now in Korea, the regimental commanders could have only one battalion on line and one in reserve, or two on line and no reserve at all.
No American officer had had any experience with this kind of arrangement. The Army schools, assuming that before being committed to action the Army would get its "fat" restored, had developed no new and startling ways of making do with too little, too late.
Facing now its hardest test, the 24th Division was already in poor shape. The 21st Infantry had lost 1,433 men; 1,100 remained. The 34th had 2,020; the 19th, 2,276. With supporting troops the division numbered 11,400.
Attacking this battered American division were the hardened 3rd and 4th divisions, NKPA, supported by at least fifty tanks. The North Korean units stood at from 60 percent to 80 percent strength at this time; they had not fought all the way from the Ch'orwon Valley unscathed. A full-strength NKPA division numbered 11,000 officers and men—therefore, the North Koreans had not quite two-to-one superiority over the Americans.
No staff and command college in the world teaches that a military force with not quite two-to-one numerical superiority has any assurance of success. An attacking force needs heavy superiority in numbers. But staff and command colleges teach also that men are not ciphers. Fighting against great odds, American fighting men have proved that fact time and again. Again and again they have defeated foes vastly superior in manpower.
But in Korea in July 1950, before Taejon, the American 24th Division was on the brink of disaster, and not because of the enemy's numbers.
On the left side of the American defense line, 3rd Battalion, 34th Infantry, held the south shore of the river. It had dug in Companies L, I, and K, with the mortars of M—Weapons Company—between them. Two and a half miles to the battalion's rear, the 63rd Field,
105's, stood ready to give fire support. Still farther back, what was left of the 34th's 1st Battalion rested in assembly areas.
The 3rd Battalion had no communications—none between battalion HQ and the companies, very little between company HQ's and platoons and squads. There was no wire for the few phones—most of it had been lost on former positions—and batteries for the old radios had gone out of style. At least, it was a waste of time requisitioning any.
The Love Company Commander, Lieutenant Stith, looked high and low for just one radio with which he could talk to Battalion. He couldn't find it.
The command situation throughout the regiment had, in military parlance, worsened. After Colonel Martin's death, the regimental exec, Wadlington, had taken over, and Pappy Wadlington was doing a good job. But the 3rd Battalion commander, Smith, had exhausted himself and been evacuated, and both the regimental Operations and Intelligence officers had come down with combat fatigue. All through the regiment, command and staff positions were now occupied, from Pappy Wadlington on down, by officers not exactly prepared for them.
And during the first night along the Kum, K Company—now only forty men—had to be withdrawn and sent to Taejon for medical disposition. The company had reached such a state of deterioration that Wadlington felt they would be more liability than asset.
That left only Item and Love holding the river. Item and Love knew that there was no one west of them and that it was some two miles from their right flank to the 19th Infantry on their right.
All night 13 July, it rained on them, and they approached the dawn with no great enthusiasm. Then, early on the 14th, they heard tanks across the river.
Soon, tank cannon began to crack, flailing them with fire and steel. But the T-34's couldn't swim, and the shellfire did no great damage.
This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History Page 13