Five men got out, running down the hill.
Men in the 2nd Platoon, dug in to the right, looked up on the hill where 1st Platoon had been. 'Who the hell put the flag up there?' a sergeant asked.
Then a shout went up. 'That's a North Korean flag!'
Shrieking and shooting, a wave of Koreans poured down from the hill toward 2nd Platoon. The platoon had not dug its position for all-around defense. It could not now fire effectively to its left flank.
'Let's get the hell out of here!'
Taking its weapons and some of the wounded, 2nd Platoon took off.
The remainder of A Company held out until dark. Then orders came to pull back out of rifle range. Early the next morning, the company crossed south of the Kum.
Here they had a breathing spell, until the NKPA boiled across the river. At daybreak on 20 July, A Company held the main road into the north side of Taejon; four men from the Weapons Platoon were down on the road with a rocket launcher. As it grew lighter, they saw three long skirmish lines of Korean infantry pass over a hilltop to their right. Looking left, they saw more enemy.
The men ran some five hundred yards back to the battalion CP There the senior man, a sergeant, reported to the battalion commander.
The C.O. remarked that the sergeant seemed a bit excited. The sergeant asked him to take a look down the road. The colonel went outside the command hut, and at that moment red flares burst against the lightening sky.
All hell broke loose. Artillery, mortar, small-arms, and tank-gun fire pelted the area.
The urge to pull out was once again irresistible.
The battalion moved south, beyond Taejon. At first A Company kept good order, but men from other units became enmeshed with them, and these men wouldn't take orders from A's officers. Soon there was confusion.
Men threw away their shoes, because it was difficult to walk in the mud. They had no canteens, and they had no food. They were tired and dispirited, and some were bitter. The sun burned out of the clouds, and now the full brazen heat of Korean midsummer baked them. Some men grew dizzy and sick.
They told bitter jokes: 'If I'm a policemen, where the hell's my badge?' And, 'Damn, these crooks over here got big guns!'
None of them had been told why they were in Korea, or why the United States was fighting North Korean Communists. None of them cared. They wanted only to get back to Japan.
Instead, they were heading for the Naktong River Line, there to make a final stand. There they would realize their government had no intention of withdrawing them; if they wanted to live, they would have to fight.
They were learning, in the hardest school there was, that it is a soldier's lot to suffer and that his destiny may be to die. They were learning something they had not been told: that in this world are tigers.
Behind them, platoons and companies from new divisions, fresh from Japan, went into line to take up the fight. These companies and platoons were manned by men like those of A Company, young Americans, no better, no worse, than the society from which they sprang. Some would do better than A Company, some less well. No matter how' they did, there would not be enough of them.
No American may sneer at them, or at what they did. What happened to them might have happened to any American in the summer of 1950. For they represented exactly the kind of pampered, undisciplined, egalitarian army their society had long desired and had at last achieved.
They had been raised to believe the world was without tigers, then sent to face those tigers with a stick. On their society must fall the blame.
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9
Taejon
— Major General William Frishe Dean.
IN THE FIRST terrible, shattering days of July 1950, casualties among officers of high rank of the United States Army were greater in proportion to those of any fighting since the Civil War. They had to be. There were few operable radios with the regiments in Korea, and almost no communication from command posts down to the front positions.
If commanders wanted to know what was happening, or make their orders known, they had to be on the ground.
And the troops themselves, who had never developed any respect for N.C.O.'s or junior officers, often would ignore their orders—particutarly if the order involved something unpleasant or unpopular.
Understandably, the junior leaders soon became defeatist. A great many of them died, recklessly, but it was not enough.
It was not because the colonels and generals had lost their minds that so many of them began to stand with bazooka teams or to direct rifle fire. There was no other way. So it was that men like Bob Martin were blown apart doing a rifleman's job, or battalion commanders like Smith of the 3rd, 34th Infantry, collapsed and had to be evacuated, and men like Major Dunn, marching ahead of a rifle company, were lost.
The high-priced help was expendable, true. They too were paid to die. But it was no way to run a war.
While the 34th Regiment was getting chewed in Ch'onan, the 21st—'Gimlets'—were in delaying position to the east, near Choch'iwon. Here Colonel Stephens—Big Six to his men—found a scene of mass confusion. Supplies for his men and the neighboring ROK troops arrived by rail, mixed together. The Korean trainmen were impossible to control; some trains, still loaded, bolted for the rear. Refugees were everywhere.
Stephens, a tough and rugged officer, was told by Dean to hold for four days. He was given an artillery battery, some engineers, and a company of light tanks. On 10 July his composite battalion, made up of men of the 21st who had not flown in earlier with Brad Smith, held a ridge along a three quarter-mile front, north of Choch'iwon.
Stephens was up on the ridge with his troops.
In the early morning, mist and fog hung over the green rice paddies to the front. Soon, Korean voices could be heard through the fog. Some of the American soldiers began shooting, wildly.
Dick Stephens roared at them to stop, and they did.
A platoon on a single hill to the left of the position now came under vicious attack. Mortar fire slashed the ridge, and men could hear tank engines in the fog. But preplanned mortar and artillery fires turned back the wave of North Korean infantry that began to dribble forward.
Gradually, the fog lifted. But now Stephens had lost communication both by wire and radio with his supporting mortars. They fell silent.
At 0900, enemy infantry tried to climb to the American positions. Now the artillery battery, firing repeatedly, drove them back again. But four tanks moved out of a small village and began pelting the ridges with automatic fire. Nothing could be done about them.
At 1100, lacking close-in mortar support, the lieutenant holding the single hill on the left was unable to keep the enemy at a distance. This officer, Bixler, radioed to Stephens: 'I need reinforcements; have many casualties; request permission to withdraw.'
'Hold on—relief is on the way,' Stephens told him.
Stephens had recalled for an air strike. Soon, the planes screamed over the hill, rocketed the tanks—without visible effect—and scattered the attacking infantry. But soon the planes expended their ammunition, and sighed off to the south.
And something else had happened during the air strike—enemy fire had cut the wife from the ridge to the altillery position, and the forward observer's radio had conked out.
