Combat Ineffective

by William Peter Grasso

  Twenty-Sixth Regiment was as ready for attack as they could possibly be.

  The division’s other two regiments were not.

  *****

  Radios in 26th Regiment’s CP came alive with calls for artillery fire from 17th and 33rd Regiments. The voices spilling from the speakers had the shrill, high-pitched quality of men under extreme stress. The map plots of their fire missions were cause for additional alarm; the target coordinates were on the northern outskirts of Taejon, which was a good three miles behind the assigned positions of those regiments.

  With one look at the map, Jock and Patchett agreed: those units were never where they were supposed to be in the first place. Patchett expressed the logic of that assumption simply: “They couldn’t pull back that far that fast, unless they’re all world champion sprinters.”

  Don Gerard in Spectral One-Seven added another chilling uncertainty: “Are there any GI tanks on the north side of the city? I can see real good now, and the place is crawling with armor.”

  “We’re screwed again,” Jock said. “Those other regiments are getting priority with the artillery. We’re going to get shit.”

  He sketched a big red arrow on the map running due south from the airfield, skirting Taejon to the west, and ending on the far side of that city. “Start preparing a withdrawal order,” he told his staff. Pointing to that big arrow, he added, “That’s the route we’re going to take. Get on the horn and tell Division we’ve got no choice. If we don’t move real soon, we’ll be surrounded. Again.”

  *****

  The KPA infantry attacked on a front much wider than that of their tanks. Their flanking units, hidden in the mist but without the T-34s to provide protection on the airfield’s open terrain, were cut to ribbons by the M19s’ 40-millimeter guns, plus the fire of heavy machine guns and mortars.

  But none of those weapons could be depended on to stop tanks. Especially ones which could be heard but not seen.

  To Sean Moon, this fight in the early morning fog seemed like so many others he’d survived in France and Germany during the last war. They’d all devolved to a series of isolated, close-quarters skirmishes between small units, where artillery and air power were of little use. More often than not, winning or losing hinged on the pivotal actions of just a few men.

  He moved quickly from one anti-tank team to another. They’d scored some hits already; he could smell the diesel-fueled infernos consuming their victims. A 3.5 gunner told him, “When those sons of bitches pop out of the fog, they’re so close a blind man could hit them.”

  But a few T-34s had slipped through and were on the airfield. Sean could hear their engines inside the perimeter.

  “Come with me,” he told a rocket team. Then they set off in the direction of the engine noise.

  “I hear two vehicles,” Sean said. “Anybody else got a different take on it?”

  When no one disagreed, he pointed a quarter turn to the right and said, “Sounds like the closest one’s that way. Let’s haul ass and catch up with her. I think this fog’s finally starting to burn off.”

  Sean was right about the fog; it had already cleared around Sal Nuzzi’s tanks, allowing the crews to see the dark shapes of T-34s in the mist which still lingered near the river. One of them was presenting her vulnerable flank to the Chaffees. He told his number two tank, “Take her.”

  It took four rounds—all direct hits—from the Chaffee to set the T-34 ablaze. They’d aimed for her turret ring with their first shot, jamming it to prevent the main gun from being traversed toward them to return fire.

  Sean and his team were about one hundred yards from the stricken T-34. Though still veiled in mist, there was no doubt she was brewing up.

  “One down,” he said. “Now let’s find that other bastard.”

  As if someone was turning a dial, the fog melted away in a matter of seconds. The T-34 they were tracking was plainly visible now, 150 yards ahead. She was showing them her front left quarter.

  “I can take her from here,” the gunner said.

  “Nah, the angle’s for shit,” Sean replied. “Let’s move over this way and hit her in the ass. Quick, into this gully.”

  They hadn’t run fifty yards down the gully when they stumbled into another 3.5-inch rocket team. But the man aiming the rocket launcher wasn’t an ordinary GI. It was General Keane himself.

  The T-34 had seen them; the turret was traversing their way. Sean knew from hard experience that the tankers inside were frantic with the slow rate of the turret’s movement. But he also knew that to the GIs in this ditch, it was moving with lightning speed.

  General Keane still hadn’t fired.

  Time was wasting. Sean told his gunner, “Take the shot, right fucking now.”

  “No, I’ve got her,” the general insisted. “She’s all mine.”

  A split second later, the rocket roared from his tube. The sound it made penetrating her hull was the dullest of clanks, like a hammer against a distant anvil. The hole it left behind seemed impossibly small.

  But then jets of flame erupted from her hatches. Only one man escaped. Ablaze from head to toe, he was able to run toward the Americans only because the pain receptors in his skin had already burned away. A few steps more and he would collapse and be consumed by his personal inferno.

  Sean dropped him with one shot. “The gook was done for,” he explained. “Did the bastard a favor.”

  General Keane was ecstatic, as if the act of killing this single tank was a pivotal moment in history. He kept pumping a victorious fist in the air while he gave and received backslaps of praise from the GIs around him.

  Sean didn’t think much of the display. It looked so wrong, this man wearing stars on his collar cavorting with common soldiers. But the meaning of it all was ominous:

  The general’s given up. He can’t cut it no more. So now he’s trying to be one of the troops ’cause he thinks that somehow it’s gonna help keep morale up.

  But it ain’t gonna help shit.

  If we ain’t got a ringmaster for this circus, we’re all as good as dead.

  “Not to spoil the party or nothing, sir,” Sean said, “and with all due respect, but do you realize that the other two regiments are bugging out again, and this regiment’ll be pulling back just as soon as we get a little breathing space between us and the gooks?”

  Keane didn’t have to say a word. The stunned look on his face was damning evidence that he had no idea of this latest disaster befalling his division.

  “And again, sir, with all due respect, I didn’t spend those years fighting in North Africa and Europe just to buy it in some fucked-up Asian shitshow. So let me ask you, General…ain’t there something more important you should be doing right about now instead of some private’s job?”

  General Keane’s face went ashen. “The regiments…they’re collapsing?” he asked. “How do you know that, Sergeant?”

  “I just listen to the radio, sir.” He hesitated, and then added, “Maybe you should, too.”

  He knew he’d just crossed a line. But maybe it was a line that needed to be crossed.

  It might’ve been anger that flared in the general’s eyes for just an instant, but it quickly faded, smothered by the catastrophe surrounding him. Finally, he said, “I’ll do that, Sergeant.”

  But he seemed unsure how to go about it. After scanning the airfield, he asked, “Now where the hell is that jeep of mine?”

  The answer must’ve come to him because he set off on the dead run.

  Sean mumbled, “Good luck, General.” It came out sounding far less sarcastic than he meant it to be.

  Then he pulled the two anti-tank teams together. “You guys cover the flanks of the runway,” he told them. “Don’t let nothing or nobody get behind the Chaffees, you hear me?”

  A section chief asked, “Where’re you going to be, Sarge?”

  “I gotta get back to the CP.”

  “Okay, but just so you know, Sarge, when the general court-martials you for smart
-mouthing him, none of us saw or heard a damn thing.”

  Sean replied, “I appreciate that, pal. But I kinda doubt it’s gonna come to that.”

  He knew all too well that things like court-martials were small potatoes when your life expectancy was being measured in minutes.

  *****

  Though his regiment had managed to hold off the KPA assault so far, Jock knew they couldn’t keep it up much longer. There were just too many enemy tanks. They would keep coming. Without a serious armor threat of his own, sooner rather than later the T-34s would break through, and their infantry would flood in behind them.

  If the 26th didn’t withdraw, it would find itself pinned between those Koreans and the ones who’d pushed the rest of the division into the streets of Taejon.

  What happened next caught the regimental CP by surprise: the KPA tanks and infantry pulled back across the river. The battalions facing them, Colonel Brand’s 3rd and Major Harper’s 2nd, saw this as the perfect time to execute their withdrawal.

  Jock stopped them with one transmission: “Negative. Repeat, negative. Stand fast and take cover. Expect enemy artillery on your heads momentarily.”

  “Damn right, sir,” Patchett said. “That’s all we need—two battalions running around in the open when the shit starts raining down. Now, how far out is that air support?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Tommy Moon almost wasn’t on this morning’s mission. The flight surgeon wasn’t going to return him to flying status after the battering he’d taken in yesterday’s shoot-down and crash of Moon’s Menace V.

  “For cryin’ out loud, Doc,” he’d argued, “I’ve already been back in the air, flying that FAC T-6 to Taegu. And I was up in the air again in that liaison ship to get back here to K-9. So it looks like I can handle being upstairs, doesn’t it?”

  Afraid it might poison his argument, he hadn’t said what was really on his mind: My brother’s in the shit down there and I’ve got to help him out.

  Better to keep that to himself; he’d seen too many pilots grounded when a surgeon knew of or suspected ulterior motives that were coloring a man’s judgment of his own fitness.

  Reluctantly, the surgeon had relented. As soon as dawn broke, Tommy was leading Banjo Flight back to the fight in a borrowed, no-name F-51.

  The radio traffic en route to Taejon left no doubt a major battle was in progress. “Your target is four miles northwest of Taejon,” Spectral One-Seven told Tommy, “but give yourselves a wide margin west of the airfield. A lot of lead in the air around there.”

  “Roger,” Tommy replied. “What are we hitting?”

  “Artillery, all nice and neat in a tight line running southwest to northeast. Coming out of the southwest should give maximum results. They’re in the open. You shouldn’t need any smoke from me to find them. They’re making plenty of their own.”

  The Taejon airfield slipped by well off their right wingtips, covered in the smoke and dust of the KPA artillery barrage. If the pilots glanced at the right moment, they’d see the twinkling flash of explosions at impact and the rapidly expanding rings of their shock waves along the ground.

  Tommy envisioned the trajectory of those rounds like the arc of an imaginary rainbow with his target at the distant end. He was still too far out to see the guns, their muzzle flashes, or their smoke, but he had a pretty good idea where they were.

  “Spectral from Banjo Leader, I make the target west of the river and due north of the railroad intersection. Confirm?”

  “Roger, Banjo. You’ve got it nailed.”

  “Outstanding. Any flak?”

  “Not sure, Banjo Leader. They won’t shoot at me. They’re saving it for you, I guess.”

  “Banjo Flight from Leader, we’ll do it in pairs. Come in low, guns only. Save the bombs and rockets for hard targets. On me, break on three...”

  Tommy wished Gerard had only been joking when he said They’re saving it for you. He could see the tracers from anti-aircraft guns rising up now as they bore down on the line of artillery pieces. But the triple-A scored no hits; Banjo Flight was too low and too fast to be easily tracked.

  That looks like big-caliber stuff, Tommy told himself. If it does hit you, it just might turn you inside out.

  The leading pair of F-51s—Tommy, with Ted Waleska on his right and slightly behind—raced across the closely spaced battery, its guns lined up as if on a parade field. The target was so compact they only had time to deliver two short bursts each before they were past it. As they climbed away, Waleska said, “That’s pretty damn stupid, lining all those guns up like that. What a turkey shoot!”

  “Like I said before,” Tommy replied, “they use Soviet doctrine all the way. That’s a couple of batteries’ worth of artillery down there, probably a battalion. The only way they can coordinate their fire on one target is to line them up hub to hub, just like the Russians do.”

  The second pair—Al DeLuca and Pete Sublette—pulled up at the end of their strafing run, climbing to rejoin Banjo Leader.

  Tommy asked, “Anybody get hit?”

  Once the chorus of negatives was over, Tommy asked Gerard in Spectral One-Seven, “How’d we do?”

  “Looks like an excellent job, Banjo. Still got a little bit of movement, though, like maybe they’re trying to put a few guns back into action. How about another pass?”

  “Roger, we’ll give it another go.”

  He didn’t want to attack from the same direction again, but the terrain gave him only two choices: hit them from the right, as they just had, or hit them from the left.

  Or maybe we do both ways together, Tommy thought.

  He brought the flight north, where hills would block the anti-aircraft gunners’ view of what they were doing. Using the same pairs, he and Waleska split from the low orbit to attack from the left in a turning approach around the hills that would minimize their straight-in run and expose themselves to the triple-A as briefly as possible.

  DeLuca and Sublette would buy time by flying one more orbit and then attack from the right with the same turning technique. By the time they were on their strafing run, Tommy and Waleska, having come from the opposite direction, would be clear of the target area.

  “If we do this right,” Tommy said, “we won’t bump into each other head-on and mark the target with burning F-51s.”

  He’d meant it to be dark humor. He didn’t expect any laughs.

  Barreling around the last hill on his circular course to the target, Tommy saw what the FAC had been talking about: trucks were moving in the battery area. He lined up a group of three in his gunsight and started firing.

  The bullet strikes were obvious; pieces of trucks were flying in all directions. Just before passing over his quarry, he could see men running away.

  He was beginning the climb-out when his ship shuddered violently. It wasn’t like being struck by anti-aircraft fire. He knew what had happened: a tremendous explosion in the target area was buffeting his plane.

  Ted Waleska was on his gun run when the trucks Tommy had strafed exploded. He had no choice but to fly through the cloud of smoke and debris.

  He could hear things hitting his airplane. It sounded like a stack of pots being dropped in a kitchen. The stench of explosives filled his cockpit.

  As he pulled back on the stick to climb out, the ship’s response was uncharacteristically sluggish. The engine sounded different, too. An unnatural vibration shook the aircraft as if she was trembling.

  But he could deal with all that. Then he noticed the engine’s coolant temperature rising.

  “I just flew through a pile of crap,” he told Tommy. “Those trucks must’ve been loaded with ammo. My girl’s pretty banged up…and it looks like they got the radiator, dammit.”

  They were a long way from Pusan or Taegu.

  And Taejon Airfield—the place that had been Tommy’s salvation yesterday—didn’t look like it was open for business anymore.

  “Get as high as you can without red-lining the temp gauge,”
Tommy told him. “Let’s figure out a safe place to set her down.”

  Spectral One-Seven had a solution. “Follow the west highway toward Taejon,” Gerard said. “Montana’s fixing to bug out from the airfield and head south. They’ll be passing along there and should be able to pick you up. I’ll let them know you’re coming.”

  *****

  The sudden demise of their artillery must’ve caught the KPA troops attacking the airfield by surprise. They didn’t relaunch their attack for ten critical minutes, allowing 26th Regiment to start pulling back. As the Korean tanks and infantry finally began storming across the river again, they ran into a delaying action by the two M19s and Sergeant Nuzzi’s Chaffees.

  That delaying action froze the attackers in place on the west end of the airfield just long enough for them to be pummeled by the bombs, rockets, and guns of Banjo Flight—down to three aircraft now—and the four F-51s of Trombone Flight, who’d just arrived on station from K-9. Under the umbrella of this fighter-bomber protection and the flights that would relieve them when they returned to base to rearm and refuel, the regiment withdrew. Skirting the west side of Taejon, it would take up new positions on that city’s southern outskirts. From there, they could block—at least temporarily—the main highway and the rail line, both of which ran south to Pusan.

  But depleted as the regiment was, it would be spread thin covering both routes. Jock told his commanders and staff, “If the weather stays good and we can keep getting good air support, we might be able to hold out for a couple of days, until First Cav can get up here from Pusan and help us out.” Then he asked his operations officer, “Do we have any idea where the other regiments are? And what about our artillery?”

  The ops officer didn’t know the answer to either question. But as the troops of 26th Regiment dug in along the highway and railroad, Jock’s questions answered themselves: included in the steady stream of civilian refugees spilling out of Taejon were the disorganized remnants of 17th and 33rd Regiments as well as what was left of the division’s artillery. When word passed down the column that they were approaching an organized roadblock of American forces, some GIs abandoned their vehicles in a panic and set out for the surrounding hills on foot to bypass it, afraid they’d be pressed into combat service with some other outfit.