The social problems, of course, were not solved. A solution to these can be anticipated only when all men look alike, hold the same views, or are so apathetic that it no longer matters.
And some time later, General Bull Boatner heard that the Eighth Army had relieved the corps commander because of the trouble on Bloody Ridge.
There are times, not only in the Army, but in Washington and General Motors, when somebody, somewhere, simply has to go, to take off the heat.
On 13 September 1951, with the harsh heat of summer fast fading this high on the eastern coast of Korea, the 23rd Infantry and its attached French Battalion moved against the seven-mile-long hill mass running perpendicular to Bloody Ridge, on its north. The high parts of this ridge, running north and south, pointed daggerlike into enemy lines. It was felt its capture would knock the enemy back some ten miles, and deny him use of a road net even farther back.
Because of the terrain, the assault was frontal, piecemeal, and bloody.
Again it was work for riflemen, grenadiers, and flamethrower operators. Tanks could support by fire only from the base of the hills, and artillery alone could not demolish the deep NKPA fortifications, though the 2nd Division Artillery fired 229,724 rounds.
The 23rd Infantry moved due north, then attacked the ridge line from the east. It struck for the knobs rising bare and ugly along the spine, and on this gloomy ridge the 23rd Regiment, as had the 9th Infantry the month before, brushed a hornets' nest.
Whatever the new ROK Army was like, the reconstituted Inmun Gun was fanatic, tough, and stubborn. The contested ridge line could easily be reinforced from a series of hills still farther north, near the town of Mundung-ni, and the Inmun Gun seemed willing to pour men onto the smoking, reeking slopes from a bottomless well.
The 23rd, whose show this battle was until its last stages, left its blood along every step of the way up the ridge. Again the fighting was close-in, brutal, dangerous, while mortars and artillery punished each side without respite. Again and again American companies of the 23rd fought their painful way up the slopes, blasting bunkers, killing enemy in their trenches—and again and again, reaching the crests exhausted, decimated, and low on ammunition, they were knocked off by a howling charge of fresh North Koreans.
Companies sometimes stood at less than thirty men, before the fresh-faced replacements came in from Japan. They were killing the enemy at a ratio of close to nine to one because of the superior American artillery—but to the men dying along the ridge there was small satisfaction in that. Few of them were really interested in killing North Korean peasants.
The fate of one American company characterized the whole action. Captain Pete Montfort's men attacked toward the northern knob of the ridge under blazing automatic fire, continually slammed by enemy artillery.
They went up the hill painfully, leaving dead and wounded behind all the way. Just at dusk, with a mighty effort, Pete Montfort and company overran their objective.
But Montfort's men were almost out of ammunition, and in the dark, and under the curtain of fire, no more could be brought up the mountainside to him. Montfort reported back by radio. He was determined to stay.
The division could support only by fire. General De Shazo ordered Divarty, 'Put a wall of steel around those men!'
All night Divarty fired; the wall of steel went up. But that night Pete Montfort was overrun and his weakened company wiped out, to the last man.
Later, when a new company fought its way up to the position, they found the Americans sprawled stiffly all along the crest. Pete Montfort lay across a machine gun that had run dry. There was not a round of ammunition remaining in any dropped rifle or in any bandoleer.
Again and again the division commander received reports that a crest or knob was taken. Again and again the report proved false, as the attackers were knocked back down the slope.
By now, the reporters were writing of a place called Heartbreak Ridge.
Each time a group of one hundred or more replacements entered the division, Brigadier General Boatner, the ADC, met them, and talked with them.
It was little enough to do.
These men who came in now were selectees, for the most part. They knew there was a war on; they knew it would be hard, which was a help. Most of them knew very little else. A great many of them did not last long enough to learn more.
Boatner, personally, began to feel a deep regret for the recalled reservists who were now filling the junior- officer slots of the division. Many of them were overage, lieutenants in their thirties, captains near forty. They had accepted commissions in the big war; they had done a job that had to be done, and gone home. Most of them had not remained active; they had new businesses, new families, other concerns.
But the Judge Advocate General had ruled that any man who had once held a commission, whether he had kept it active or not, could be legally recalled. And the Pentagon, when the Chinese poured across the Yalu, had made an incalculable error, one that would damage the Army Reserve Program for a decade. Never certain that a big war would not start any minute, the Pentagon called, not the officers and men in Table of Organization units, receiving pay and training, but the bulk of the inactive reservists, men who had received neither, and whose interest was less. The inactive individuals could be called lip for fillers; the units were kept in reserve for a bigger war, which never came.
Most of the forty thousand Reserve officers recalled involuntarily and sent to Korea had never expected service short of all-out war. They never quite understood why they were taken, when hundreds of thousands of National Guardsmen and others, organized in units, were kept at home.
Guardsmen and many Reserve units were called, but according to the needs of the moment. The six Guard divisions called to federal service, a handful of the many, often felt they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And because of rotation, few new units were sent to Korea. Hundreds of thousands of officers and men were sent as individual replacements. They arrived in their new divisions friendless and alone. Most of them never developed any feeling for a division in which they had not trained, in which they merely put in their time, until they could rotate out once more, again as
individuals.
There have been few reunions of veterans of the Korean War.
And there was a final tragedy, affecting many of the recallees. Reserve officers, recalled from jobs and businesses for two years, on top of the loss of time during 1941—1945, often had no career to return to. Many elected to remain in the Army. But when Korea ended, and Washington, determined once again never to fight a ground war, shrank the Army back below a million men, the Army had no place for these men.
Thousands would have to return to civilian life, short of qualifying for pensions, to seek new jobs after the age of thirty-five or forty.
Of all the officers Haydon Boatner met on entering the division, only one asked to be sent on line. What they asked made no difference; it was division policy that all newcomers went forward—the rear-echelon jobs were filled from survivors of the line. Ironically, the one man who asked to fight, a West Pointer, Boatner had to relieve.
Brave enough himself, eager to advance his career, this officer was a moral coward. He could not be tough enough on his men.
For twenty-seven days the 23rd Infantry assaulted Heartbreak. They took knobs, and lost them. They took stretches of the hill mass, but they could not secure the ridge.
For the NKPA poured in men from the north, without counting.
A new pattern, the one that would characterize most of the following hill battles, was being set. On the disputed terrain, generally a small area, the fighting was hell itself. Artillery fire such as the world had never seen was massed against single hills, day after day. Because of the limitation of the fighting area, units were committed piecemeal, and the committed units were generally quickly cut to pieces, and replaced.
A few miles to either side of the disputed hill, the front lay quiet and brooding, without more than routine activity. And behind regimental headquarters, few men even knew there was a war on.
Action of this kind was contrary to all American military doctrine. The solution to success on Heartbreak, as later on Baldy, Pork Chop, Arrowhead,
T-Bone, and a dozen others, would have been to hit the enemy elsewhere, knock him off balance in a dozen
