Brigadier General Barth, who was acting division artillery commander of the 24th while awaiting the arrival in Korea of his own 25th Division, stopped by the CP Barth had talked with Colonel Perry of Task Force Smith after his escape from Osan. Now Barth—who was not in communication with Dean and who did not know Dean's plan of maneuver—put an oar in proceedings at P'yongt'aek. Somewhat shaken by the disaster that had overtaken the delaying force north of Osan, Barth ordered Ayres to hold only as long as he could, and to take no chance of being flanked or surrounded.
'Don't end up like Brad Smith,' he told Ayres.
Then Barth went on to the 34th Regiment's CP, and suggested to its commander, Colonel Lovless, that the regiment should consolidate its battalions to the south at the town of Ch'onan. Lovless did not know exactly where Barth stood in the chain of command or general scheme of things but Barth was a brigadier general, and Lovless now made a tremendous error. He sent word to his 3rd Battalion to pull back from Ansong, although the battalion had not yet made contact with the enemy. The right flank was left exposed.
Lovless had inherited the 34th only a short time before from an officer who had been relieved for incompetency.
The rain continued: to fall on the waiting 1st Battalion all night. A few of the men, hearing rumors, grew nervous. They were told emphatically by an officer, 'This is a police action, nothing more!'
Captain Osburn of A Company figured an attack was possible, but not likely. He had received word to be on the lookout for stragglers from Smith's battalion, but somehow these instructions did not get down to the platoons.
Daylight came 6 July, and now all the foxholes were filled with water. One man, PFC James Hite, told his platoon sergeant, 'I'd sure hate to have to get into that hole.'
A newly joined platoon sergeant, SFC Collins, who had been in combat before, walked up and down his line of holes. He told his men that they'd better eat while they had the chance, and to break out the C's. Then he took out a can of cold beans and sat down to eat it.
The morning was misty and foggy, but Collins, half through his beans, thought he heard the sound of engines to the north. He took up his field glasses and made out the faint outlines of several tanks on the road. Behind the tanks, he saw a great number of brown-uniformed infantrymen spreading out in the varicolored green rice paddies.
He called to his platoon leader, Lieutenant Ridley, 'Sir, I think we got company!'
Ridley answered that what he saw must be part of Task Force Smith withdrawing down the road.
'These people got tanks. The 21st Infantry hasn't any,' Collins yelled back.
Meanwhile, Colonel Ayres walked up to Captain Osburn's command post. From there both officers could see the infantry spreading through the rice fields, but visibility was too poor for them to identify the troops.
Osburn and the colonel agreed these must be some of Smith's boys, and continued to watch them for several minutes. Only when they had counted more than a battalion of soldiers deploying, with more beyond, did they come awake.
Immediately, Ayres called for the mortars to open fire. The first rounds burst in the fields, and the oncoming infantry spread out a little farther. It did not stop advancing.
Sergeant Collins, up on the hill, saw the turret hatches of the lead tank slam down. The long, wicked tube of the tank's 85 swung toward him.
'Here it comes!' Collins bellowed to his men. 'Get down!'
The shell screamed into the hill, burst, and showered mud over the cowering riflemen. The men began jumping into their holes, sounding like frogs diving into a pond.
'Commence firing! Commence firing!' Collins shouted. Two other men, who were veterans of World War II, took up the shout.
The Americans on the hill could see the advancing Koreans plainly now, but almost no one fired. Collins turned to the two riflemen in his own hole.
'Come on! You got an M-1—get firing! Come on!' He jabbed one of them sharply.
But most of the men stood slack-jawed, staring at the advancing Koreans, as if unwilling to believe that these men were really trying to kill them. For many minutes, only the squad and platoon leaders did any shooting, and more than half of the men never got off a round.
Back in the Weapons Platoon, PFC Hite was still sitting beside his hole. He saw explosions on the hill near Captain Osburn's CP, 'Must be short rounds—'
'Hell! That isn't short—that's an enemy shell!' his platoon sergeant told him. With a great splash, Hite turned and dived into his watery hole. The platoon sergeant joined him.
Colonel Ayres, standing at Osburn's CP, watched the attack for a few minutes. Then, shaking his head, he told Osburn to withdraw his company. Ayres then left the hill, walked back to his own CP, and ordered it to move back.
NKPA soldiers were coming across the fields in numbers frightening to the Americans on the hill. B Company, on the right, was also under attack. More than a dozen tanks converged bumper to bumper on the road, a beautiful target, and on the hill SFC Collins cursed because he had no ammo for the 75's.
He called for fire from the battalion's 4.2—mortars-but a tank cannon shell burst near the single mortar observer, not harming him, but shocking him into speechlessness. No one else knew how to direct the mortars, and in the confusion the tubes stood idle.
Now the advancing and firing North Koreans were only a few hundred yards away, so close Collins could see them stop to load fresh cartridges into their long rifles. B Company began to move down off its hill on the east, withdrawing to the south.
Captain Osburn shouted down to his men, 'Prepare to withdraw—but stay to cover B Company first!'
A Company was still putting out only a ragged volume of fire. The men just watched, seemingly dazed. The Weapons Platoon, hearing Osburn's shout, immediately got up and moved to the rear.
Then the two rifle platoons on the hill, not worrying about B Company, began to get out of their holes. The men left their field packs behind, and most of them forgot their spare ammunition. A few even left rifles in the rush. They started down to the south side of the hill, where a small village of straw houses stood in the mist. Here Captain Osburn and his officers started to organize A Company for withdrawal.
As the last two squads came off the hill, an automatic weapon snarled at them. The two squads panicked. Men started running.
The running men tore past Osburn, and some of the men with him began to run away, too. The panic was contagious.
Osburn and the other officers screamed at their men to halt. A few did stop, but the majority kept going. Running about, Osburn got together as many men as he could.
The 1st Platoon, dug in the flat ground toward the road, was more exposed to fire than the two on the hill. Hearing orders to withdraw, four men jumped up and ran back across the soggy green fields. Rifle fire hit one of these men in the back. The rest of the platoon now were too afraid to desert their holes, and refused to move.
Seventeen men under Lieutenant Driskell had been dug in along the railroad embankment and could not see the rest of A Company from their position. Now they did not even get the withdrawal order.
Suddenly they saw NKPA soldiers standing on the hill to their left. Understandably, Driskell became nervous. He asked his sergeant, a combat veteran, 'What do you think we should do now?'
'Get the hell out of here,' the sergeant replied.
Driskell ordered his men to move back along the railway embankment. A large number of them, however, confused and frightened, refused to move. Driskell, after moving to the rear, missed these men, and went back to get them. A few minutes later, while searching the Korean mud houses for possible wounded, a squad of North Koreans surrounded him and the four men with him. Driskell tried to surrender.
One of the NKPA shot him dead, and then the enemy fired on the other four, killing three. The fourth ran away.
The men who refused to leave their holes were not seen again.
A couple of miles to the rear in P'yongt'aek, Captain Osburn began to get his company back under control. The long run took most of the steam out of the men, and they recovered from their panic. They stood waiting in the rain until Osburn came to break them down into some semblance of order for a further retreat.
Sergeant Collins, disgusted that so many of his men hadn't fired on the enemy, went among his survivors,
