At the beginning of the Pass, mortar fire registered on the road and began to hit among the vehicles. Lieutenant Colonel Skeldon, the battalion commander, loaded his jeep with wounded men and sent it on. He walked through the Pass. While descending the south side, he got a ride on another vehicle. After getting to the south side of the Pass, the 2nd Battalion, without further trouble, drove on to Sunchon, and from there it went to Pyongyang.
Manning with Peploc and his overloaded jeep had now fallen behind the 3rd Battalion, 38th Infantry, which they were following when they reached the Pass. Enemy fire was coming mostly from the east side of the road. Manning, therefore, drove the jeep so that it hugged the three- to seven-foot bank on that side for defilade protection. The Pass area was beginning to get littered, and driving through it with any speed was difficult. But Manning maintained his speed. He said that Colonel Peploe "chewed him out" for his reckless driving, saying he would overturn the jeep. Years later, Peploe said he did not remember "chewing out Manning," commenting, "actually he did a marvelous job of driving."
Going into the top of the Pass, Manning went around an overturned Turkish truck and encountered a lot of debris on the road. Manning had kept the jeep in four-wheel drive all the way, and he now hurtled over the debris. Other vehicles behind him did likewise. One of them, right behind Peploe's jeep, was hit by enemy fire. Peploe had Manning stop, and they went back to push the knocked-out vehicle off the road. When they started up again they made the turn in the Pass and started downhill (map coordinate 494857). Peploc's jeep was hit several times on the left side by enemy fire coming from the east in its run through the enemy firebl ck. Three miles farther after turning downhill at the Pass, Manning and Peploe came to the Middlesex Battalion on Hill 127 (map coordinate 464848). At last they knew where this battalion was. Hill 127 was on the northwest side of the road, and just east of the railroad track and stream the road crossed a short distance farther southwest.
Their first sight of the battalion was a red flag on a British Centurion tank, with a British officer sitting on the tank holding a swagger stick in his hand. The British battalion was not under enemy fire. Manning and Peploe asked why they had not attacked north up the road. They received no reply.36
Captain Manning's information as to the location of the Middlesex Battalion when the 2nd Infantry Division was trying to withdraw through the Chinese fireblock on 30 November 1950 is the most precise that came to light in this research. It corresponds, further, with all other general information that can be credited to a source, including the IX Corps G-3 information given to Lieutenant Colonel Holden on the night of 29-30 November that the Middlesex Battalion was then just south of the 85 grid line.
How long the Middlesex Battalion stayed in this position is a mystery. Had it been active after dark with the attached American tanks and artillery, it should have been able to suppress some of the enemy mortar and small-arms fire that was so damaging to the 2nd Division column at the blown bridge bypass at the south end of the Pass. The Middlesex Battalion seems to have withdrawn from its position sometime near or shortly after dark and was of no help during the night. Col. Walker R. Goodrich, S-3 of the 2nd Division Artillery, with others of the Division Fire Direction Center, went through the bypass shortly after dark and passed the place where the Middlesex Battalion had been during the afternoon. He states, "It would appear that the British withdrew shortly after 1700 Although dark when I passed I saw no British there or S[outh] of there.""
Colonel Peploe and Captain Manning arrived at the Middlesex Battalion position about 5 P.M. Peploe spent some time at the First Aid Station talking to wounded of his regiment who had arrived there ahead of him. He and Manning thought the Middlesex Battalion was doing a good job in caring for the wounded. They took two of the badly wounded to an American Aid Station farther down the road. There Peploe left his wounded Korean orderly and never saw him again.
One factor that prevented more of the men exposed on the tank decks and in the trucks from being killed or wounded in running the enemy fireblock was the heavy cloud of dust the tanks stirred up on the road. The Chinese machine gunners on the hillsides were firing blind most of the time as the column passed them.
Colonel Peploc tells tersely of his arrival at Sunchon after getting through the fireblock:
I stayed at Sunchon that night. A schoolhouse was selected as a temporary CP for the regiment. My baggage was placed inside. I walked a short distance to the division CP to confer [with Maj. Gen. Keiser] about future plans. When I returned the schoolhouse was in flames, but some thoughtful soul had rescued my baggage and placed it in my jeep. The next morning I went on to Pyongyang and conferred with Skeldon, the 2nd Battalion commander."
The 2nd and part of the 3rd battalions, 38th Infantry, and the 38th Regimental command group had relatively easy going compared with those that followed. Because they and the 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry, troops who rode out on the 2nd Battalion tanks and vehicles were the first in the division column, they met few knocked-out or damaged vehicles blocking the road and few wounded on the road requiring help. These factors built up hour after hour during the afternoon and into the night as the breakout progressed, and they worked against a rapid run through the fireblock and roadblocks. This increasingly adverse situation resulted in an ever-growing physical roadblock from destroyed vehicles and debris accumulating on the road. The subsequent serials of the division had greater difficulties.
The most vulnerable of the 2nd Division, 38th Infantry, were the infantry who rode on the open decks of tanks. They suffered heavy casualties to enemy fire. Some tank decks were covered with blood. The enemy machine guns were very effective where their range was no more than 200 to 300 yards. Those placed as far away as 500 yards did little damage. Just about all the enemy automatic fire came broadside into the road; strangely, there was almost no enfilading fire. During daytime few Chinese with small-arms fire were near the road. But once darkness fell they moved there in great numbers.
E Company of the 2nd Battalion was unlucky in the run through the fireblock. Forty-two men were riding tanks that drove off and left them stranded after the first stop. It appears that only two infantrymen were able to reload on the lead tank and none on the second, when the tanks started up after the first stop. Some of the stranded men started walking down the road, others waited in the ditch hoping to catch a ride. Of the 42 men in the company that started through the fireblock on the tanks, only 17 got to Sunchon.J9
Capt. Reginald J. Hinton, commander of the 38th Tank Company, went out with F Company of the 2nd Battalion. When the company reached the defile just short of the Pass, Hinton saw an estimated 200 Chinese leave their hillside positions and charge toward the road and the vehicles. Lieutenant Colonel Skeldon was afoot in the Pass at the time, and 40 to 50 Chinese soldiers got near him. Skeldon shot a CCF rifleman at a range of about 30 yards. Three other Chinese jumped on a tank. American riflemen on the road shot two of them off. The third reached for the hatch with one hand; in the other he held a grenade that he intended to drop inside the tank. But at the moment the Chinese soldier reached for the hatch, a tanker inside pulled the hatch lid shut and clipped off the fingers of that hand. At the same moment someone outside the tank shot this Chinese soldier through the head. The situation was saved by air strikes that hit the Chinese on the road. And some of the tanks maneuvered so that they could bring their fire to bear on the Chinese who made this assault. It was a most unusual type of enemy attack in daylight during the afternoon. Very few of these Chinese escaped the combined fire of air, tanks, and the infantry.`0
When a part of Lt. Col. Harold V. Maixner's 3rd Battalion, 38th Infantry, numbering 63 men, some riding on jeep hoods, reached the Pass, enemy fire had built up. Only about 45 of the men got through.
By the time the 38th Infantry had fought its way through the Pass area, the Chinese apparently recognized that this spot was one of their best fireblock positions, as well as being an effective physical roadblock of knocked-out a
nd damaged vehicles. They now began to reinforce it with troops and weapons. The CCF buildup began about midafternoon and continued until dark. The Pass eventually became the worst fireblock and roadblock of the six-mile-long gauntlet.
Short of the Pass, Lt. Tom Turner, of the 38th Tank Company, had been knocked unconscious by an aerial rocket that hit close. When he regained consciousness he walked up the road alongside the column of stalled vehicles. He found a handhold on a truck when the column started, but enemy fire hit the bar he was holding and knocked him off. He tumbled into the ditch, again unconscious, and now with a sprained ankle. Again regaining his senses, he staggered up to the road and slumped down. He felt a prodding in his back. On turning, he saw a Chinese soldier holding a rifle, who motioned him to get to his feet. Other Chinese were only a few yards away clustered around another wounded American. These Chinese moved about in the ditch giving first aid to wounded Americans there. The Chinese leader spoke in perfect English to Turner, asking him if his sprained ankle would let him walk down the road. When Turner replied that it would, the Chinese told him to collect all the walking wounded he could assemble and make it on into his own lines. Turner collected three wounded who said they could walk. When he turned to look back, the Chinese had vanished." This was a humanitarian vignette, unexpected, in a day and night of death and destruction. One may conjecture that this group of Chinese soldiers was from one of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist divisions now fighting with the Communist Chinese. Turner, with the help of a group of ROK soldiers who followed him after Americans refused to, subsequently rushed and knocked out an enemy machine gun close to the road that was causing many casualties.
Approximately 400 effective soldiers of the 38th Infantry reached the Middlesex Battalion in the afternoon. Throughout the night, stragglers made their way to Sunchon. Before midnight about 500 men of the regiment had passed through Sunchon and were assembling with the Service Company at the edge of Pyongyang. Later, between 500 and 600 men of the regiment were counted there.
The experiences of the 2nd Division units that followed the 38th Regiment showed that enemy driven from their positions by that regiment and air strikes during the first part of the afternoon were back at the same positions a short time later, often reinforced by new Chinese arrivals. The buildup of Chinese forces at the fireblock and the number of automatic weapons and mortars there grew larger as the afternoon wore on.42
During 1 December, Captain Manning returned from Pyongyang to Sunchon to learn how many of the last serials of the 38th Regiment had come in during the night. He found stragglers from the regiment still arriving at Sunchon. Lt. Col. William Kelleher's 1st Battalion was the last of the regiment to get out. It followed the 1st serial of the Division Artillery. Some of the battalion walked out, arriving at Sunchon during all hours of the night and on into daylight of 1 December."
In an interview at the IX Corps CP on 21 August 1951 in Korea, then Brig. Gen. Peploe, IX Corps chiefofstaff, told the author that, in hindsight, he thought
the 2nd Infantry Division should have established a regimental boundary between the 9th and 38th regiments, with each regiment responsible for the ridges on one side of the road, with at least one battalion sweeping the ridges and another in reserve-that the movement through the fireblock should have been a division attack. But Pcploc thought the combat intelligence available at the time was misleading. He said that, when he entered the fireblock, Chinese on the west side were firing at close range into the road. Later the heaviest fire came from the cast side. He said he and the division expected his regiment would meet the Middlesex Battalion about a mile down the road. General Peploe blamed very poor intelligence from higher authority in causing the 2nd Division to take the course it did to get through the fireblock. Both he and General Keiser, he said, thought the road was open at the time the 38th Infantry started down the road for Sunchon. The IX Corps had given them that impression. Otherwise, he said, the 38th Regiment would have taken a tactical formation, with tanks interspersed in the column. Peploe felt that the Chinese could have caused more damage than they did if they had developed their fireblock farther south on the road and enveloped more completely the 9th and 38th regiments. He said that the air strikes on 30 November were of the greatest help to the 2nd Divison, that they were effective."
Somewhere behind the 38th Infantry, Colonel Chang led his ROK 3rd Regiment's survivors down the road at a dogtrot, according to observers, and if any of them fell to the ground, the others stepped over them and kept going. Other ROKs, many wounded, and most of the Turkish stragglers, wounded or stranded on the road, clambered on board any vehicle or tank where they could get a handhold. One Turkish soldier jumped right into a bunch of wounded in a truck. They clobbered him and threw him back on the road.45
The 2nd Division Headquarters Runs the Fireblock
For men in the 2nd Division Headquarters Company at the 2nd Division CP, the morning of 30 November was one of constant rumors about the enemy fireblock down the road, of American planes flying overhead and attacking adjacent hills and the ridges to the south, and of uncertainty as to just what they were to do. At 9:30 A.M., the men were told to load on vehicles and to move out. But they were then ordered to get off the vehicles and to go back to their perimeter defense positions. Finally, at 11:30 they were ordered back on the vehicles.
A little after noon, the Division Headquarters group pulled out of the compound, with General Keiser wrapped up in a parka, suffering from a bad cold. Brigadier General Bradley led the way. Some members of the G-2 and G-3 staff, with the command radio vehicle, were in the group. The command group went forward with Colonel Pcploe of the 38th Infantry to meet Colonel Sloane and coordinate the reduction of the roadblock, if it was still in place. Colonel Epley, the chief of staff, remained behind and has written, "I did not see the CG or the G-2 and G-3 again until I reached Sunchon hours later. The remainder of the Division staff was in the CP area until about 3:00 P.m. I had available to me the Signal Company radio vehicle for communication.""
There was a shortage of vehicles, and the men of the Headquarters area who rode out with the command group jumped on any vehicle where they could find a scat or hold on for a ride. One of them, Pfc. Arthur J. Cohen, rode on the back of a G-4 trailer that was hitched to a G-4 jeep.
At the time the 2nd Division Headquarters left its CP and started for the fireblock, about two companies of Turkish soldiers with some of their officers had gathered at the CP. They followed the command group to the edge of the fireblock. There General Keiser ordered the Turks to try to clear the enemy from the ridges cast of the road. They did go, and they cleared the enemy from the first ridge, but on attacking the second ridge, the Chinese there in unexpected force drove the Turks back. They drifted back to the road. There, they either trudged south on foot or tried to get a ride on any vehicle that came along. In this manner they became badly mixed up in the various division units trying to break out along the road. This body of Turks was only a fraction of the brigade that had by now fragmented. This group seems to have been the last Turks lcft in the Kunu-ri area. Private First Class Cohen said that, as the Division Headquarters group moved out of its CP, a Turkish officer came alongside the column and motioned to the men riding on the vehicles to come along with him, pointing to the hills. They waved him off and said, "Good-bye."'
A Military Police jeep led the Headquarters column, with five or six jeeps behind it; then came a tank, after it General Keiser in a jeep, General Bradley, some members of the G-2 and G-3 staffs, and more vehicles. Generals Keiser and Bradley and Colonel Epley had relinquished their vans so that they could be used to haul wounded. Epley arranged for personnel to accompany them and get the wounded into the vehicles. They were the most commodious and comfortable vehicles in the 2nd Division column. Planes were overhead pounding enemy positions. About a mile down the road the Division Headquarters column was slowed by the sound of firing ahead, and soon they came in range of enemy bullets hitting on and around the road. Cohen, wh
o kept a diary of the last days of November, said of this serial's passage through the fireblock:
The planes were continually flying over and dropping their napalm, rockets, and machine gun fire at the enemy at a dangerously low position. It appeared as though we could touch the wings of the planes because of the low range at which they were flying. Along the road was scattered just about every piece of equipment that the army had in Korea. Anything from a .45 bullet to an 8" shell could be found, every small arms weapon and some artillery pieces, vehicles of every nature, but worst of all, men. We made an attempt to get all the wounded out we could and even the dead but we didn't even have space to put in our own men and it hurt just about everyone of us to know that we had to leave even our own dead back there. Near the end of the pass, a mortar was shelling the road. At one time I counted 7 spotter planes out looking for it. They finally found it and an F-80 destroyed it with napalm."
Most of the way through the fireblock, the 2nd Division Headquarters staff and personnel moved by spurts-their vehicles running pell-mell down the road until enemy fire stopped them. Then the men jumped into the ditches to return the fire and waited until air strikes or a lull gave them a chance to go on for another short distance-then back to the ditches. This they repeated until they reached the Pass, losing some killed and wounded on the way. At the Pass the mortar fire held them up until the F-80 had destroyed the enemy weapon. Then about 5 P.M., nearly dark, the column moved on without further trouble, passed through Sunchon, and stopped ten miles south of that place. Nearly everyone lost all his possessions except the clothes he wore and his personal weapon. They could not sleep in the cold that night, so they built a bonfire and grouped around it, including even General Bradley. The next day, 1 December, the Headquarters group loaded up at 2 P.M. and started for Pyongyang. They passed through Pyongyang about 6 P.m. after several hours of slow going in the heavy traffic, which traveled both directions on the road. The Headquarters group stopped for the night about 14 miles south of the North Korean capital.
Disaster in Korea Page 40