places, punch through.
But the United Nations Command had no authority to put massive pressure on the enemy along the whole line. They had no authority to reopen the wholesale fighting; the United Nations did not want military victory; they wanted truce.
And the enemy was perfectly willing to fight to the death over a small piece of ground, seemingly forever. The fought-over hills assumed propaganda and political values out of all proportion to their military worth.
It was a case of the children's game of King on the Mountain, played with blood and bullets.
Whoever lost a hill lost face.
After weeks of fighting for Heartbreak, it was clear to 2nd Division that the ridge would have to be flanked. The 2nd Engineers worked day and night, clearing a route through a blocked defile north of the hill mass over which the 72nd's tanks could pass. On 9 October the trail was ready.
At 0600 on 10 October, the M-4A3E8 tanks of Baker Company, the old Shermans, workhorses of World War II, fitted with new high-velocity 76mm cannon, broke through the hills into the clear, and raced for Mundung- ni.
The 23rd was kept on Heartbreak, still fighting for pieces of the ridge. The 9th Infantry moved left, and the 38th struck behind Heartbreak to get a grip on the hill from which the NKPA reinforced.
This hill, called Kim II Sung Ridge, the division struck in mass, from 5 through 15 October, and overran it. Now the enemy could be reinforced on Heartbreak only through the passes around Mundung-ni.
The tanks of Baker Company, 72nd Tank, meanwhile had raved up the Mundung-ni Valley, running a gauntlet of fire. The hills and defiles swarmed with NKPA, and every available gun was turned on them.
But the tanks went through Mundung-ni, and four thousand yards beyond. From 10 October to 15 October, the 72nd ran two excursions per day through the hostile valley, ripping up the enemy rear as they passed. They branched out on the meager dirt roads, blasted dumps and concentrations of troops and bunkers, and then withdrew before dark.
They destroyed more than 600 troops, one SP gun, 11 machine guns, 350 bunkers—with uncounted casualties—three mortars, and several ammunition dumps, at a total cost of three killed, five wounded, and eight tanks lost to enemy action.
By 15 October both maneuvers had broken the back of the defense of Heartbreak Ridge.
The NPKA Corps that had held Heartbreak would not again be fit for action. There, with those lost on Bloody Ridge, it had suffered more than 35,000 casualties. The 2nd Division had leaned on the enemy, heavily.
But atop Heartbreak, the men of the 23rd Infantry could see ten miles to the north. They could see mile after mile of dark hills, growing gradually higher, hills in which lurked hundreds of thousands more Chinese and North Koreans. It was a long way to the Yalu and the Tumen, and these men knew in their hearts they were not going there, no matter how many hills they took.
On 25 October, at a new site, Panmunjom, the truce talks had begun again in earnest.
An officer writing in a battalion history, which was published in Japan, summed up their feelings: 'The heart to fight though not gone, was not the bright light it had once been.'
On 25 October the men who had taken Heartbreak came down off the hill, replaced by the United States 7th Division.
Their real heartbreak lay not in their dead and maimed, 5,600 of them, some of whom the men of 7th Division found still wedged in bunkers and crevasses, but in what had been accomplished by it all.
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32
Stalemate
— From the Russian of Josef V. Stalin.
ON 22 AUGUST 1951, the Communist negotiators had broken off the talks at Kaesong on the pretext that the U.N. had dropped bombs in the demilitarized zone declared about that town. For two months there were no plenary sessions, but the proceedings did not wholly end.
Liaison officers from the two camps met continually, to try to find a basis for new negotiations.
And in the meantime the U.N. Command carried out its line-straightening operations, leaning on the enemy. The U.N. Command, to the strident screams of the other side, refused to agree to the 38th parallel as a new line of demarcation, even though Secretary of State Acheson had mentioned this in a speech in June. The parallel was not easily defensible in most places, and the U.N. Command preferred the line of contact as a territorial basis for a cease-fire. In the meantime the Eighth Army proceeded to improve the line from the U.N. viewpoint, punching out bulges, knocking the enemy back off high ground, at heavy loss to both sides.
The losses at Bloody Ridge, Heartbreak, and elsewhere had some result. On 22 October the enemy offered to meet in full plenary session once again, and to accept the U.N. preferred site of Panmunjom for future discussions.
Panmunjom was not in Communist territory, but a tiny village of deserted huts along a dirty road in true no man's land, between the opposing lines. Here incidents or accidents, like the alleged bombing of Kaesong, could easily be avoided; the new neutral zone was tiny and easily marked by captive balloons; and the Communists could no longer gain propaganda value by bringing U.N. negotiators through their lines. Here no one was host.
On 25 October 1951 Major General Lee Sang Cho, Inmun Gun, faced United States General Hodes across the bargaining table. Item Two—where the cease-fire line would be drawn—was still as they had left it in August, undetermined.
'Now we will open the meeting,' Lee said.
'Okay,' Hodes said.
'Do you have any idea about the military demarcation line?'
'We ended the last conference before the suspension by asking for your proposal. Do you have one?'
'We would like your opinion first.'
Hodes said wearily. 'We gave our opinion many times, and asked for your proposal based on our proposal. As it was your proposal to have the Sub delegation meeting, we expected you to have a proposal. Let's have it.'
'You said you had made a new proposal, but we have heard nothing new that would break the deadlock.'
'That's right,' General Hodes said. 'You haven't.'
After almost an hour of this, a recess for fifteen minutes was called.
And finally, in desperation, the U.N. proposed a four-kilometer-wide demilitarized zone for the cease-fire line, to be based on the current battle line at the time of signing.
The other side went into a propaganda tirade. They wanted the cease-fire line drawn now, before the firing ceased.
'You … are trying to escape the righteous solution and trying to shirk the duty which has been specified in the agenda item. You use in these discussions and also in your press and radio the sophistic argument that the time of signing is unknown. By doing so you have truly revealed your true color.… I sincerely hope and think that you and we are bound in duty to show our sincerity to the peace-loving people of the world by your acceptance of our proposal of establishing a military demarcation line… .'
What the enemy wanted was to fix the armistice line irrevocably before the remainder of the agenda was solved. This, of course, would effectively relieve the Communist powers of any further military pressure while the negotiations continued; the United Nations Command could hardly launch an offensive for ground it had already agreed to relinquish.
It would enable the Communists, as Admiral Joy saw and mentioned, to talk forever if they chose, with freedom from the grinding pressure they had been experiencing at Bloody and Heartbreak ridges.
