He contacted Battalion HQ by radio. He learned that Colonel Harrison had been hit, and the exec had taken command. The exec ordered him to hold where he was, and said he would send him another officer, a Lieutenant Chu Mon Lee.
Lee arrived, and for the balance of the night there was only sporadic shooting around the hill. But occasionally a mortar shell dropped in, and by dawn Frank Muñoz had two more wounded men on his hands. One, hit in the leg but still able to walk, he sent down the hill.
As this man limped to the defilade area behind the hill, he bumped into the ominous, hazy shape of a T-34 tank. Staring, unable to believe his eyes, the soldier saw a tank hatch open, and a North Korean blazed away at him with a submachine gun. But the poor light saved the wounded man; he hit the ground and crawled back to Muñoz on the hill.
Hearing about the tank in his rear, Muñoz said a few unprintable words. Then he got a crew of men together, and with a 3.5-inch rocket launcher they sneaked down the rear slope. It was still dark enough to permit them to crawl within a few yards of the deadly vehicle, and with the first round from the bazooka they put it out of action.
But the crew remained inside—at least, Muñoz saw no one come out.
Warily, they watched the silent steel monster, as light grew in the east and spread across the brown and green paddies. They had no more rocket ammunition.
As it grew light, Lieutenant Schmitt came up behind the hill. For a night Muñoz had held the actual command of two companies, but now, with the arrival of his boss, he reverted to exec of H.
Pointing to the tank, Schmitt wanted to know, "What's with that?"
"The crew is still inside—won't give up," Frank said.
"Hell," Schmitt said. He stood out in the open and began to yell at the tank in the Korean he had picked up during the Occupation. "Ede wha!" Come out!
The tank stayed quiet, even when Schmitt went up beside it and banged on the turret with his hand. Then Schmitt climbed up on the sponson and tried to pull open a hatch. Suddenly, then, there. was movement inside. A crewman partly opened the hatch, thrust a pistol through, and fired point-blank at the Weapons Company commander.
Unhurt, Schmitt jumped down. "You son of a bitch, we'll fix you!" he said. "Somebody give me a white phosphorous grenade—"
Pulling the pin, Schmitt dropped the incendiary grenade on the tank's back deck, over the air intake.
The North Koreans never did come out, though they made a number of unpleasant noises as they stayed inside and burned.
As exec, Frank returned to his old post at the Company CP to the rear. When he arrived, the battalion operations officer, Major Woodard, was on the phone.
"Listen, Frank," Woodard said. "George Company is in bad shape. Captain Van Oosten has been evacuated with heat stroke. G's got only one officer left, and he's demoralized. How about taking over G?"
"Well, if you tell me to take it, I'll take it," Frank said. "But I won't volunteer." G was a rifle company, like E and F, and commanding a rifle company was somewhat different than acting as exec of a Weapons Company. For one thing, it could be a hell of a lot more dangerous.
"I'm telling you," Woodard said.
So Frank Muñoz assumed command of George Company. Joining the company on the hill, he found that George had taken several frontal assaults during the recent fighting. Many men had been shot at close range with small arms; others had been hit by mortar fragments. Out of a TO strength of 213, Frank had exactly fifty people left.
He found the remaining officer, Lieutenant Hank Merritt, and told him he was the new C.O.
Merritt seemed happy to get out from under. "Glad to have you, Frank," he mumbled.
Quickly, Frank Muñoz understood that G Company was in a state of shock. The men had not been ready for the vicious combat into which they had plunged. The original men, who had been at Fort Lewis, had been on the peacetime training schedule, with frequent half-day training, heavy on athletics and sports. The newer men, the fillers they received in July, had largely come from even softer occupation duty overseas.
It had been a pleasant half-decade since the war ended, but the time had come to pay the price. The price, Muñoz thought, was a hell of a lot of dead people.
Muñoz realized he had not only the problem of too few men to do the job; he had also a morale problem. Almost all of the riflemen, dug in along the rear slope of the hill, had jumped in their holes and pulled the zipper. They didn't want to come out even to shoot.
He knew many of the men by name, and he walked along the foxholes strung out over the ridge, talking to each man. He told them they were fighting for their country, and other things. It was a hard sell.
"Hell," one man told him, "you can't tell me we're fightin' for the U.S.A. ten thousand miles from home!"
Some of the men told him they didn't mind fighting a big war. Americans, he found, tend to take pride in doing things in a big way. But they had no interest in fighting a half-ass war like this one.
But he went from hole to hole, talking to every man, doing the best he could.
Muñoz was an officer, and a good one. He had no personal enthusiasm for this war, either; but he had taken the government's bread and the government's commission, and even for Truman's shilling he would give all he had in return.
He had just finished, and was walking back to his position in the middle of the line, when the NKPA pulled the plug.
Mortar shells hissed down on the ridge, bursting with sharp cracks, spewing gouts of greasy smoke, sending whining metal through the roiling dust. Caught in the open, Muñoz jumped into a foxhole. He had only a .45 automatic pistol. Realizing something was going to happen, he drew the pistol and threw a round in the chamber.
For two minutes the mortar rounds burst along the ridge; then, suddenly, the shelling ceased.
The instant he understood the mortar fire had finished, Frank Muñoz jumped from his hole and ran up to the top of the ridge, where he could see across the rice paddies to the front. Quick as he was, he was too late.
At the top of the ridge, he made eyeball to eyeball contact with a North Korean soldier. Muñoz moved first. His .45 slug killed the Korean at a range of inches. As he shot, he could see two waves of enemy infantry, bayonets fixed, charging up the slope, firing from the hip.
He went into the nearest hole, which was already occupied by a man with a BAR. "Fire to your right front!" he snapped at the BAR man.
The enemy boiled up over the hill and ran at George's thin line of holes. George Company met them with a blast of fire, stopping them only yards away. The first wave fell apart a few feet in front of Frank's own position.
As it did so, he got up and ran back to his regular post in the center of the line, joining Merritt. He had seen two of his own men leave their holes to run, and had seen both shot in the back and killed by rifle fire from the enemy. And he knew that George Company was close to the thin edge.
"Hank, call for final defensive fires!"
Then the second wave of charging Koreans swarmed over the crest. In a wild melee, some of the Inmun Gun jumped into foxholes with Muñoz's men, bayonets flashing.
Muñoz yelled at his Artillery forward observer to bring fire down on the hill. The FO, Lieutenant Hartman, yelled back, "No! I don't want to do it!"
But Frank grabbed a field phone and reached Battalion. He got the Artillery liaison officer there, and he got action—two salvos of 105's, to be put down on his own position.
Seconds later, the shells screamed down, bursting with ear-shattering noise. They caught most of the attacking Inmun Gun still swarming down the ridge.
Dug in, Muñoz's boys suffered no harm. The enemy, in the open, died. And, as suddenly as they had been attacked, George's men were all alone on the hill.
Muñoz reported to Battalion by phone. For the balance of the day there was only desultory firing about the hill. Only a few 82's dropped in.
That night, the higher-ups took George Company off the hill for two days' rest.
Trying to
counterattack, the United States forces had employed all the men and matériel at their command—and had been able to do no more than hold their own in front of Cloverleaf and Obong-ni. Colonel Hill, commanding the 9th Regiment and all other combat forces within the Bulge, had no reserve left, and no hope of maneuver.
Both he and General Church, 24th Division CG, agreed that at the moment all that could be accomplished was a continued defense in place. By 15 August they were having their hands full just to contain the Bulge, without thought of erasing it. Earlier, on the 13th, Church had tried to tell General Walker that the entire NKPA 4th Division was across the Naktong—but this Walker steadfastly refused to believe until after the bloody stalemate along the ridge had become apparent.
Walker at this time was edgy, impatient, and abrupt—but Johnny Walker had his problems. There was trouble everywhere on Eighth Army's front, and everybody was squalling for help.
On 12 August the first United Nations counterattack, Task Force Kean, had run into serious trouble at the valley called Bloody Gulch. The front to the extreme south was in a bad way. And at the same time the Bulge was getting fatter in the west, the NKPA had also forced the Naktong in front of Taegu, and were converging on that vital center. And on the far northeast, the ROK divisions on the coast were being steadily driven southward.
There was, from the second week of August, combat everywhere, and Walton Walker lived in crisis. His command decisions had to be never-ending series of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Faced with danger everywhere along his line, he had to guess where the greatest peril lay, and guess correctly, for in war there is no prize for being almost right.
Walker's military reputation will be secure, for he made the right decisions.
On 15 August, considering the Yongsan-Miryang area the most dangerous enemy axis of attack—a feeling shared by the NKPA—he told Church abruptly: "I am going to give you the Marine Brigade. I want this situation cleaned up, and quick!"
The Marine Brigade, under General Craig, USMC, had newly arrived from the States. MacArthur had wanted to hold it back for future amphibious operations, but the situation along the Naktong had been too critical; the Marines were needed for a fire brigade. At this time, the 5,000-man Marine force was Walker's principal reserve.
While 9th Infantry was being bled and battered on the hill, the Marines were ordered to attack 17 August to erase the enemy bulge east of the Naktong.
While the U.N. situation within the Pusan Perimeter looked black indeed during these critical days, it can be truly evaluated only in the light of what was occurring with the enemy. On the other side of the hill from American forces, Major General Lee Kwon Mu's 4th "Seoul" Division faced enormous difficulties.
Attacking with three rifle regiments of approximately 1,500 men each, the 4th Division had suffered frightful casualties against the stubborn American defense in front of Cloverleaf and Obong-ni. The division received replacements—often men dragged from the villages of South Korea—but many of these arrived at the front without weapons, let alone military training. As many as 40 percent of these men deserted at the earliest opportunity. The remainder, unfit for the assault elements, were used as general labor troops, digging holes, carrying ammunition, foraging, and the like.
And east of the Naktong, Lee Kwon Mu was experiencing tremendously logistical difficulties. Food was scarce. Ammunition was increasingly difficult to get to the engaged units across the water barrier—not only had the original supply brought out of the North been exhausted, but American air interdiction was beginning to strangle his overextended lines.
Chang Ky Dok's 18th Regiment, holding critical Obong-ni Ridge, was able to procure no resupply of ammunition after 14 August.
Men of the division who were only slightly wounded were returned to duty, without medical attention. There was no way to aid those hurt more severely, and without care these men were dying in high numbers.
But the morale of the North Korean squad and platoon leaders, the men who had fought in China and Manchuria, was still firm. As long as Lee Kwon Mu and Colonel Chang Ky Dok could count on their junior officers and NCO's, they could count on the performance of their units.
Courage and fighting ability come in many creeds and colors. Whatever Americans might feel toward Lee and Chang's cruel and tyrannical system, they could not deny that the Communists' courage remained high.
Lee Kwon Mu, Hero of the People's Republic of Korea, Order of the National Flag, First Class, had no intention of withdrawing.
When the Korean War broke, somewhat less than 10 percent of the small United States Marine Corps had seen combat. But fortunately for the Corps, the percentage was highly concentrated within officer and key NCO grades; most of the Marine troop leaders knew what war was like.
And the Marines, who had always been largely a volunteer organization, had escaped the damaging reforms instituted within the United States Army at the end of World War II. The public clamor rose against the Army, during the war twenty times the small, parochial Corps' size, and ignored the Marines.
In 1950 a Marine Corps officer was still an officer, and a sergeant behaved the way good sergeants had behaved since the time of Caesar, expecting no nonsense, allowing none. And Marine leaders had never lost sight of their primary—their only—mission, which was to fight.
The Marine Corps was not made pleasant for men who served in it. It remained the same hard, dirty, brutal way of life it had always been.
The Marines may take little credit, either for courage or foresight, in remaining the way they were. The public pressure simply never developed against them in the years after the war, pushing their commanders into acquiescence with the ideals of society. Not long after the end of the Korean conflict, after an unfortunate incident one night at a place called Ribbon Creek, the commandant of the Corps showed no more ability to stand up for his rights in front of a congressional committee than had the generals of the Army.
It is admittedly terrible to force men to suffer during training, or even sometimes, through accident, to kill them. But there is no other way to prepare them for the immensely greater horror of combat.
In 1950 the Marines, both active and reserve, were better prepared to die on the field of battle than the Army.
Asked immediately for a full division by the Joint Chiefs, the Corps could at first put together only a brigade out of the 1st Marine Division, Fleet Marine Force. Ships and shore were scoured for men; all ground reserves were called to the colors. While the Corps made every effort not to send unprepared men into combat, it was still forced to consider the needs of the service first; a certain number of new recruits with less than desired training sailed for the Orient, both in the summer of 1950 and later. And a large number of reservists, just getting started in civilian life, found the callup just as painful as the reserves of other services.
Bitter feelings remain in the Corps, as in other arms, but they have not been so well publicized.
But bitter or not, believing in the reasons for the war or not, the Marines went, and they obeyed orders.
The 5th Marines, Lieutenant Colonel Raymond L. Murray, moved from dusty Masan in the south to Miryang. Here Murray and General Craig discussed their attack plans, while the tired and sweaty Marines bathed in the brownish waters of Miryang's river, received new clothing and equipment to replace that which had rotted in the slime of rice paddies, and speculated on their mission.
These men had seen only limited combat in the south, but they had already sweated off their shipboard fat, and were beginning to lick the heat. At first they had been no better prepared for the violent sun than had the Army, but, like the Army, they were adjusting.
And these men walked with a certain confidence and swagger. They were only young men like those about them in Korea, but they were conscious of a standard to live up to, because they had had good training, and it had been impressed upon them that they were United States Marines.
Except in holy wars, or in defense of their native soil, m
en fight well only because of pride and training—pride in themselves and their service, enough training to absorb the rough blows of war and to know what to do. Few men, of any breed, really prefer to kill or be killed. These Marines had pride in their service, which had been carefully instilled in them, and they had pride in themselves, because each man had made the grade in a hard occupation. They would not lightly let their comrades down. And they had discipline, which in essence is the ability not to question orders but to carry them out as intelligently as possible.
Marine human material was not one whit better than that of the human society from which it came. But it had been hammered into form in a different forge, hardened with a different fire. The Marines were the closest thing to legions the nation had. They would follow their colors from the shores of home to the seacoast of Bohemia, and fight well either place.
General Church, to whose 24th Division the Provisional Marine Brigade was attached, considered both Cloverleaf, where the 9th Infantry was engaged, and Obong-ni Ridge parts of the same enemy hill mass; however, Colonel Murray asked for permission for the Marines to reduce Obong-ni before a general assault was made upon the Bulge. Murray felt the Ridge could be quickly and easily reduced, and, secured, it could be used as a line of departure for a general attack. In this he was wrong, but General Church agreed to the proposal.
The Marine order of attack was organized. Lieutenant Colonel Harold S. Roise's 2nd Battalion would lead, followed by 1/5 and 3/5 in that order. A little after midnight 17 August, 2/5 moved into an assembly area in front of Obong-ni Ridge.
D and E companies of 2nd Battalion had been selected to lead the assault. They moved forward in the freshness of early morning, and by 0700 were in position to see their objective, a long, unprepossessing ridge, covered by shale and scrub pine, with six riblike spurs running down from it into the sodden rice paddies. Between the spurs and the low hills behind which the Marines gathered lay a long expanse of open rice fields.
This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History Page 19