Keeping up continuous pressure, the Marines and infantry advanced three miles before digging in for the night. But the 9th Division was not finished—not yet. Moving onto his night defensive position by late afternoon, Frank Muñoz of George Company could see enemy troops assembling just out of effective rifle range to his west. They were moving into a number of small villages, and his request for artillery fire upon them was refused. From somewhere, Battalion had received instructions not to fire upon Korean villages, even if they held enemy.
The American way of street and town fighting did not resemble that of other armies. To Americans, flesh and blood and lives have always been more precious than sticks and stones, however assembled. An American commander, faced with taking the Louvre from a defending enemy, unquestionably would blow it apart or burn it down without hesitation if such would save the life of one of his men. And he would be acting in complete accord with American ideals and ethics in doing so. Already, in the Korean War, American units were proceeding to destroy utterly enemy-held towns and villages rather than engage in the costly business of reducing them block by block with men and bayonets, as did European armies. If bombing and artillery would save lives, even though they destroyed sites of beauty and history, saving lives obviously had preference. And already foreign observers with the United States Army—not ROK's—were beginning to criticize such tactics.
Observers from France and Britain, realizing that war was also highly possible in their own part of the world, were disturbed at the thought of a ground defense of their homelands. For the United States Army, according to its history and doctrine, would choose the lives of its men over the continued existence of storied cathedrals. These observers wrote news releases—and soon Frank Muñoz could get no artillery on the enemy assembling in plain sight in the villages below him. When he asked Battalion to fire on the village, and burn it down, Battalion replied it could not. Fortunately, such orders in Korea were soon changed.
Muñoz passed along his thinly strung: line at dark, telling his boys to prepare for a night attack. "Those people are getting ready," he said.
At 2200 his outposts came back into his perimeter. "We hear something coming out there—" they reported.
At the moment, all hell broke loose. Coming up the hill quietly, without their usual screaming and yelling, two companies of North Koreans leaped into George's lines. The perimeter erupted in fire, and within a few minutes the enemy withdrew.
Then, without flares or other signals, they drove into George once more. And this time George Company sprang a leak. With the NKPA all over them, Muñoz's people were pushed from the forward slope of the hill, retreating over the crest. Muñoz had given no order to fall back—but the enemy pressure was too strong.
On the reverse slope George Company had dug no holes—but it had positioned its supporting tanks there. And the tankers who had served with Frank Muñoz had learned one thing: unlike some infantry commanders, he did not desert his tanks in the dark, leaving them to fend for themselves until morning. The tanks opened fire, blasting the crest of the hill with machine guns and high explosive from their cannon. They blasted the enemy off the hill.
Under their fire, Muñoz was able to get his company back up into their holes. But again the Koreans swarmed up the hill at him. He had no flares, and no artillery support at this time. Again the enemy drove George back over the crest. And again the tanks tore the North Korean charge to mincemeat. If the tanks could have climbed to the crest, they could have ended the battle there. But the hill was too steep, and the armor could only support by fire when the enemy came over the crest.
With his men on the reverse slope once more, Frank Muñoz decided to use his own judgment, throw the book away. He shouted for his men to banzai back over the hill. He went first.
George followed him.
They went in and shook hands with the North Koreans. Screaming, shouting, shooting, they crashed into the surprised NKPA. Bayonet duels flashed along the crest. Some of Muñoz's boys went down; some of the sturdy small brown men shrieked and died. It was like a melee in a crowded street for a few moments. Men crashed into each other in the dark, fell down. Others bumped into unseen attackers, and rolled down the slopes fighting.
The countercharge threw the NKPA off balance. Scared and yelling as Muñoz's men were, they scared the enemy more. The NKPA broke off and disappeared into the night.
Panting, Muñoz got on his SCR 300 and talked to his platoon leaders. "Join me." He knew the enemy would hit again, and he wanted to pull all of his men together so that no repetition of the earlier loss of his 3rd platoon would occur. It had begun to rain heavily once again.
One of his officers, Lieutenant Murphy, was new, and in his first fight. Murphy worried Muñoz; he had told him to be guided by his experienced platoon sergeant. Now, closing in on Muñoz's CP from his position farther down the ridge, the platoon sergeant, Loren Kaufman, led the way up ahead of Murphy. Coming through the dark, Kaufman lurched heavily into a sweating NKPA scout.
Before the man could react, Kaufman bayoneted him, Then, yelling, "Fire! Fire!" Kaufman threw grenades at the dark shadows of the enemy soldiers behind the Korean groaning on the ground, and opened up with his rifle. The enemy group dispersed, and the platoon came on into George's main position.
This was the way it went till morning. Fighting, clawing viciously at the enemy when he got too close, George held the hill. In hand-to-hand fighting, Kaufman himself put his bayonet into four more North Koreans, wiped out a machine gun that had been moved forward, and killed the crew of an enemy mortar.
And finally, heavy artillery-fire support crashed down about the company, as Muñoz found the time to call for and adjust it. The shellfire kept the enemy off George's back until daylight, when other units of the 9th Infantry attacked to the west, using George's hill as a line of departure.
As the sun of 4 September sank low over the muddy Naktong west of Hill 209, Lieutenant McDoniel realized that he had come to the end of his rope. He and his remaining officer, Lieutenant Caldwell of Dog Company, discussed an attempt to break through to friendly lines. It was obvious that the weary men atop the knob could hold no longer.
Some of the men were in a state of shock. Even the more alert ones had the thousand-yard stare, looking blankly into the dusk. Several men, half crazed by their long ordeal, had leaped out of their holes and dashed at the enemy. The enemy quickly shot them down.
As night fell, each man had only about one clip of ammunition; McDoniel knew he could repel no attack pressed in any determined fashion. But no attack materialized, as the darkness deepened. McDoniel could hear an enemy officer screaming "Manzai!" at his men, but there was no charge against the feeble perimeter.
For four days and nights the enemy troops surrounding the knob had left the bodies of their men stinking in the broiling sun, as attack after attack failed, and the heart had gone out of the besiegers, too.
McDoniel and Caldwell agreed to split the remaining em, less than thirty, into parties of four men and try to scatter through the hills.
They had one problem—Sergeant Watkins, still alive, still paralyzed from the waist down from a machine-gun slug.
The Arkansan told them to leave him; he did not want to be a burden to those who still had a chance of getting away. The man who had done more than anyone to defend the hill before he fell was still brave, still cheerful.
They left him. Before they went, someone gave Watkins, at his request, his loaded carbine. They laid the stubby weapon on the paralyzed sergeant's chest, the muzzle pointing to his chin. Watkins put a hand around it and grinned at the men standing about.
"Good luck," he said.
A long time later, when the men who had been on the knob told their story, Watkins was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
All but seven of the men who left the hill reached their own lines—mostly in the 25th Division Sector to the south. Caldwell was captured. A couple of NKPA took his boots and identification from hi
m, then struck him in the head with a rock. Callously, supposing him dead, they threw his body into the Naktong. But Caldwell reached shore, and miraculously, four days later, stumbled into friendly lines.
Three weeks later, some men of the 9th Infantry climbed Hill 209. White- faced, they tried to separate and identify the decomposing corpses lying in the muddly holes; most had been blown apart or mutilated.
With this, they had little luck. Many of the men who had died on the lonely knob, like countless others who fought on the far frontier, went into nameless graves.
5 September 1950 was a day of heavy battle everywhere along the Perimeter. In the Naktong Bulge, the Marines and 9th Infantry fought their way back to the slopes of their old nemesis, Obong-ni Ridge, in the driving rain. Here they halted their counteroffensive. While. they could see the enemy digging in on the ridge, it was apparent that the combat power of the enemy 9th Division had been destroyed, and the supporting 4th had lost its ability to fight long before.
Furthermore, General MacArthur had other plans for the Marine Brigade, and FECOM was waiting impatiently for Walker to release it. The next day the Marines marched back to Pusan for embarkation.
The NKPA had made a dramatic breakthrough in the Bulge on 1 September—but now it had revealed what was to be a continuing weakness of the Communist armies in Asia. They could break through the U.N. lines, but they could not exploit their local successes. With poor communications and even poorer systems of supply, dependent solely upon manpower to move their resupply, the enemy could not move quickly enough to exploit, particularly in the teeth of superior airpower, armor, and artillery. To put it simply, faced with breakthrough, the U.N. forces could retreat, and counterattack faster than the Inmun Gun could press their advantage. Whenever the heavier- armed United States Army could form continuous battle lines and withhold a reserve, the Communist tactics were doomed to failure.
If the NKPA had had a mechanized force capable of moving on Miryang, and an air force able to keep the Fifth Air Force off their backs, their tough and aggressive infantry might easily have split the beachhead and precipitated a U.N. disaster.
North of the Bulge, the 23rd Infantry had been separated from its parent 2nd Division, and pushed back. But it engaged in heavy battle with the NKPA2nd Division, fighting it to a standstill, even though its 1st Battalion was pushed back against a lake, and isolated. Its sister regiment, the 38th, moved to support the 23rd from the north, and gradually the enemy threat was contained. By 9 September, the 23rd Infantry had been reduced to a strength and efficiency of only 38 percent, but the enemy 2nd Division shattered itself in fruitless attacks to break through.
One of the great mysteries of the Korean War occurred while the 23rd was making its stand. The North Korean 10th Division, over seven thousand strong, was in position to move either against the beleaguered 23rd or to drive east toward Taegu. If the 10th Division had added its weight to the assault, the pressure might well have been more than Eighth Army could stand. But the 10th Division, either through misunderstanding or ineptitude of its command, did not move at all against the Perimeter.
On the south, in the 25th Division zone, disaster had threatened from mid- night 31 August onward. But the 35th Infantry, surrounded by two NKPA divisions, the 6th and 7th, with at least three enemy battalions in its rear, held fast. The 35th's Colonel Fisher, an experienced West Pointer, explained:
"I never intended to withdraw. There was no place to go."
The 35th fought the enemy into the ground, and won a Presidential Unit Citation. Colonel Fisher, viewing the paddies strewn with North Korean dead, remarked that even the slaughter at the Falaise Gap in World War II, where ten German divisions had been trapped, could not match the horrible sights along the Nam River.
Flies buzzing over the unburied corpses of Korean dead were so thick in some areas as to obscure the sun.
South of the 35th Infantry, the enemy broke through toward Haman. The 24th Infantry broke and streamed for the rear. Colonel Check's 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry, counterattacked, and with great slaughter halted the North Korean drive, and restored the 24th's positions. Again the 24th, reconstituted, did poorly; however, the splendid fighting ability of Fisher's 35th and Michaelis' 27th regiments with the attached 5th RTC, brought the enemy threat to nothing in the south.
On the east coast, the ROK divisions came under heavy pressure on 2 September. Some ROK units were driven back, others crumbled. But again, as in August, the mountains, and supporting American air and armor, tipped the balance. The NKPA could come over the ranges, but it could not fight its troops or keep supplied within the Perimeter. The eastern front held, in spite of local breakthroughs in several areas.
And while the ROK's in the east, the 25th Division in the south, and the 2nd Division in the Bulge were fighting and dying to stem the tide, in front of Taegu the 1st Cavalry Division held a front of thirty-five miles.
And along this front, for two solid weeks, raged some of the most vicious fighting of the war. The 1st Cavalry Division lived in a constant state of crisis. The terrain was hilly, split by many small and isolated valleys, and over these hills and through the rain-fogged valleys, swirled incessant combat similar to that in the Bulge.
By 5 September the threat along three-quarters of the Perimeter had eased, but in front of Taegu the situation worsened. Eighth Army moved its HQ and signal equipment—irreplaceable, if captured—south to Pusan, along with that of the ROK's. General Walker, however, remained in Taegu, pre- pared to fight as Bill Dean had fought two months earlier.
By 8 September, the enemy 1st and 13th divisions were only eight air miles from Taegu. The Cavalry Division was so depleted that one battalion commander said that any company that could muster one hundred men immediately became his assault company for the day. And a critical shortage of ammunition was developing. The expenditures of 105mm artillery shells had to be sharply curtailed, and from Tokyo General MacArthur urgently trumpeted requests that ammunition ships en route to FECOM proceed at all speed consistent with safety.
By 12 September, the 13th Division, Inmun Gun, had occupied the critical Hill 314, known as the key to Taegu. From this ridge, the enemy could see the vital city, and commanded the terrain about the Taegu Valley. The hill mass surrounding 314 was a mile in length, characterized by steep slopes on all sides. Against the enemy troops on this hill, at least 700, 1st Cavalry Division threw Lieutenant Colonel James Lynch's 3rd Battalion, 7th Cavalry.
The effective combat strength of the 3/7 stood at 535. Because of the short- age of 105's, there could be no artillery preparation preceding the attack. In an earlier attack, against another hill, the 3/7 Cavalry had failed badly.
Colonel Lynch, however, massed his companies so that maximum rifle fire could be thrown against the enemy ridge. After an air strike against 314, at 1100 on 12 September, the battalion moved out in the attack.
L and I companies, leading, ran into immediate 120mm mortar fire. The huge mortar shells burst among their thin ranks with great gouts of greasy black smoke as they walked forward; then the air was alive with the green tracers of NKPA machine guns and the snap of rifle bullets.
Many of the two companies' officers went down. But Captain Walker of Love Company, and Lieutenant Fields of Item, without regard for their personal safety, reorganized the two companies and led them on. And under the brilliant example, many men kept on on their own initiative even after their platoon officers were gone.
The officers and men of the 7th Cavalry were not happy with their behavior under their first baptism of fire, when many men had shown shock and fear against Hill 518. Each of them knew that the situation in front of Taegu was desperate and that around Taegu South Korean policemen were moving to the outskirts of the city and digging foxholes. And, as in the south, "There was nowhere left to go."
On 314, the 3/7th Cavalry, which had failed its first test, wrote one of the more splendid pages of American military history.
They fought their way up the steep
slopes under heavy fire. Officers and N.C.O.'s, wounded, refused to relinquish command and retire. Many men, with minor hurts, refused treatment. As Love and Item neared the crest of 314, still under heavy mortar fire, the enemy rushed out at them in violent counterattack. Hand-to-hand fighting raged along the high slopes of the ridge; twice men of Love and Item reached the crest and were thrown off.
A new air strike roared in, blasting and searing the enemy on the top. When the planes went high again, Captain Walker of Love led a small group to the crest for the third time. Here he stood and shouted down the hill:
"Come on up here! You can see them here. There are lots of them, and you can kill them!"
All the officers of Item were down, including Fields. But the men sprang up the steep slope with those of Love Company; they ran into the North Korean positions, shooting, bayoneting. They swarmed over the face of the hill, and the enemy disintegrated.
At 1520 Captain Walker reported Hill 314 secured. He had forty men left in Love Company, and about the same in Item, and no officers. In the first two hours of combat, 3/7 had taken 229 battle casualties.
On the hill Love and Item found more than 200 enemy dead, wearing American uniforms, boots, and helmets, holding American M-1s and carbines. They also found the bodies of four American GI's, hands bound, shot, and bayoneted. And they found one officer, tied hand and foot, lying charred and blackened beside an empty five-gallon gasoline tin. He had been burned alive by the retreating enemy.
This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History Page 23