As liaison with them, Clark Ruffner detached his Chief of Staff, Colonel Rupert Graves, to give the ROK's all the help they needed to convince the world that they had come to maturity.
Behind the 36th ROK's stood Colonel Lynch's 9th Infantry, ready to support by every means of fire available to an American regiment.
The ROK's were brave, and they tried hard.
They advanced onto steep slopes plowed by a maze of deep trenches, thorny with hidden bunkers. The bunkers were fortified to withstand air and artillery pounding, and some had room for two platoons of NKPA. Others sheltered small cannon and mortars. Dug into a rubble of partially wooded slopes, obscured by morning mists, the North Korean positions were almost impossible to detect.
Until it was too late.
The ROK's were brave, and tried hard, and in ten days the 36th took a thousand killed and wounded. They also took the middle peak, 940, and spread over the ridge that by now ran freely with their blood, on 25 August 1951.
Seeing the decimation of the ROK's, and the desperateness of the NKPA defense, American observers reported to Major General Ruffner that the ROK's needed help. Ruffner called Lieutenant General James Van Fleet for permission to move 9th Infantry onto the ridge with the ROK regiment.
Van Fleet was furious. He had made the rehabilitation of the ROK Army a personal project, and he was determined to demonstrate the project's success to the United Nations and the world. He told Ruffner, 'You're trying to hog the glory from the ROK's!'
A few hours later, a massive NKPA counterattack rolled out of the east and sent the ROK survivors of the 36th Regiment stumbling from the hills.
Now there was nothing to do but commit the 9th. The demonstration was shot to hell, but at least the Americans could come in and save the ball game. On 27 August the 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry, attacked toward Peak 983 of the ridge. It went forward with utter confidence that somehow the rok's had managed to blow an easy one.
It went into the maze of trenches, hidden bunkers, and stubbled trees along the slope, and it was stopped cold.
Bleeding, the battalion pulled back, out of range.
The 3rd Battalion struck from the east, toward Peak 773. The 3/9 failed to reach even its initial objectives. When night came, the North Koreans counterattacked, and 3/9 fell back on top of 2nd Battalion.
As 1/9 prepared to make its own attack, no part of the hill mass was in friendly hands. And a number of people in high places were becoming distinctly annoyed.
On 30 August, 1/9 and 2/9 attacked the spiny ridge frontally, determined to overwhelm the stubborn resistance quickly. In recent months Eighth Army had grown unaccustomed to this kind of difficulty, and there was complete determination up above to end it at once. The four organic battalions of 2nd Division Artillery, supported by three additional howitzer battalions, two heavy-mortar companies, two regimental tank companies, and a company from the 72nd Tank, registered in on the ridge, and stood ready.
In all, artillery fired 451,979 rounds. The ridge turned into a flaming hell of whining steel and searing flame. The trees were splintered to stubs, and fresh earth gaped where communications trenches were tumbled.
North Koreans died, by the hundreds. But many were deep in bunkers where no shelling could reach them, until they came out to close with the advancing Americans. And they had artillery of their own, too, firing to protect the ridge—more than any American had so far seen in Korea.
And something else had happened. While the enemy had dug into the hill, the U.S. Army had gone down it. Rotation had removed too many men who had learned the answers; companies were shot through with new, green men and, worse yet, new green officers.
The 9th Infantry was no longer a team. And even the All-Stars, most days, can be licked by any team in the league.
Attacking onto the ridge, the situation grew worse. Able Company, 1/9, was 100 percent casualties three days running. New replacements were fed into the shattered companies while they were still in action, and teamwork and cohesion became even more sporadic.
Conventional supporting weapons have not been invented that can dislodge a stubborn enemy from deliberately prepared positions. The only way to reduce the long ridge was bunker by bunker, at close range, with rifle and grenade. It was horrible, bloody work.
And each night, from ridges running to the north, the NKPA sent fresh men pouring into the disputed positions. Soon, 9th Infantry identified corpses from six separate regiments of the Inmun Gun.
All the artillery, and most of the energy, of an American division and an NKPA corps, were being focused on one small area of bloody earth. Here, at what the correspondents were now calling Bloody Ridge, a new pattern of Korean warfare was being set—one that resembled more than anything else the hideous, stalemated slaughter on the Western Front in World War I.
The 9th Infantry was being decimated. Ruffner sent 'Bull' Boatner forward, up to the 9th. Ruffner felt that perhaps the difficulty with the regiment lay with its C.O., and one job of an assistant division commander is to act as hatchet man for his chief. Besides, General Ruffner was eager to promote the executive officer of the 38th Infantry, and was not loath at having a chicken-colonel vacancy in the division.
All this Bull Boatner, a light-haired hooked-nose man, small for a general, whose pale eyes could stab like ice daggers from behind his glasses, and whose high voice could cut like a whip, understood.
Boatner found trouble, and lots of it.
Pushing against Bloody Ridge, the men of 1/9 and 2/9 were being cut to pieces. The troops and leaders were often green. They were brave and, like the ROK's, they were trying hard. It wasn't enough.
They needed flamethrowers to reduce the deep enemy bunkers, and they didn't have them. Worse, few if any men knew how to use them. Boatner set up a school in the use of the flamethrower, and ran men through, quickly. Now, deep in hitherto safe bunkers, soldiers of the Inmun Gun died shrieking in searing flame, as American infantrymen crawled close under fire and sprayed them with newly issued weapons.
Replacements were wandering up to engaged units, and getting killed the first hour, before they could report in. Boatner ordered replacements to be kept in the replacement company at least one day, and to have five or six days' special training before being sent into combat. Men new from the States were often soft. They were to get conditioning exercises, and it was mandatory that they zero their weapons.
This practice the Eighth Army later made mandatory for all divisions.
Boatner met with each group of new replacements. He talked with them calmly, and joked with them. And then, his eyes hard, he told them:
'Let there be no question: it will be tough. You had better do what your N.C.O.'s tell you, if you want to stay alive. And remember three things: when you're on the hill, if you stand up you'll get your ass shot off; if you get off the paths, or roam, you'll get your ass blown off by mines; and when you take a hill, you'll be tired as hell, you'll want to poop out, slap your buddies on the back, and take it easy—but remember, as soon as you take a hill, just as water comes out of a spigot, the mortars come in on you, and blooey!—it's too goddam late then!'
The 9th Infantry tried hard, but it was shattered against Bloody Ridge. The entire 2nd Division was reshuffled. On 2 September there was no attack—and then the brutal, frontal attacks were stopped. Since the action had been conceived of as limited, units had been committed piecemeal, into a small area. Now the 23rd Infantry was sent around the flank, to envelop Bloody Ridge from the side and rear, while the dazed companies of the 9th, filled again with new officers and men, probed once more to fix the enemy.
On 5 September, having lost an estimated 15,363 men, 4,000 of them dead, the NKPA voluntarily relinquished Bloody Ridge. The ROK 35th Regiment went onto 773, and Colonel Bishop's 1/9 occupied peaks 940 and 983 without opposition.
The enemy had not fled. He had merely pulled back to positions on the next prominent ridge line that ran perpendicular to Bloody Ridge, some 1,500 yards to the north.
It had cost the ROK's more than a thousand men, and the 2nd Division almost three thousand, to secure three insignificant knobs among the hundreds that thrust up along the line.
Now the ROK's and 2nd Division rested several days, licking their wounds and eyeing the gloomy peaks to their north. Soon they would move forward against those peaks.
And there the hearts of some men would break.
