if he held two days was fading. The dispirited defenders were beginning to straggle back into town, and the ring of gunfire was drawing tighter.
Then, just after dawn, Dean heard that North Korean tanks were in the town. Dean was at the CP of the 34th Infantry. The 34th had now no further contact with its two battalions—as usual; it did not know where the flanks were, or even where the war was. For the first time in days Bill Dean had no command decisions to make.
He decided to go tank hunting. He did not know it, but Colonel Beauchamp, to whom he had just given command of the 34th, was doing the same. Like Colonel Martin, Beauchamp had found everyone deathly sick of the T-34's, but now things were just a bit better, for a few of the new 3.5-inch bazookas, designed to stop any known armor, had been flown in from the States.
With Beauchamp guiding and directing a team, the 3.5's knocked out one tank west of Taejon.
Inside the city, Dean, with his aide, Lieutenant Clarke, and his ROK interpreter, Kim, found a soldier with one of the new rocket launchers and went tank hunting.
The little party found two on a street, just behind a burning American ammunition carrier. The tanks opened fire with machine guns, forcing the hunters into buildings along the street. But the smoke lay so heavily over the city now that Dean and his men were able to creep up closer, and to the rear of the tanks.
The tanks turned around, and started to come back toward them. The bazooka man took aim, but he was shaking too badly to hold true. When he fired, he blew up the street a few yards in front of him.
He had only one round of ammunition.
Arrogantly, like all the tanks of the Inmun Gun, the T-34 waddled on past Bill Dean and party. Dean lost his temper. Pulling out his .45 automatic, he emptied the magazine at the monster as it clanked past.
Then Dean and party got the hell out of there.
Meanwhile, hundreds of North Korean soldiers, disguised in the white robes of farmers, were infiltrating into the city. Once inside, they threw off the misleading civilian attire and opened fire on American troops. Soon snipers were everywhere.
Using HQ and service personnel, American officers were having very poor success in rooting them out. Most American boys no longer knew how to play cowboys and Indians, particularly with live ammunition.
By afternoon, Dean had located another bazooka man, this time with an ammo bearer.
Dodging sniper fire, shooting a few snipers on the way, his party hunted up another tank. But this target was covered by North Korean infantry, and rifle fire kept them from getting close. Dean and the bazooka men sneaked back through a Korean courtyard, and climbed up to the second story of a house facing the street.
Here, cautiously looking out the street window, Dean saw the muzzle of the tank's 85mm gun pointed at him, not more than a dozen feet away.
The bazooka man aimed where Dean pointed, and fired. The blowback from the rocket shook the whole room. The shaped charge burned into the tank at the juncture of turret and body.
From the tank came a shrill, horrible ululation.
'Hit 'em again!' Dean said.
After the third round, the screaming ended abruptly, and the T-34 began to smoke.
Somehow, the long day drew to an end. Dean knew now that it was time to pull out of the city, and at the 34th's CP he also found that there was a roadblock across the escape route east. While he was preparing to shoot his way out of Taejon, several light tanks from the 1st Cavalry fought their way into town to assist Dean's withdrawal.
Dean sent the HQ of the 34th out with them, and soon heard them firing from the edge of town.
It was now dark. Colonel Pappy Wadlington, who had remained with Dean, suggested it was time for Dean to get out himself. He wanted to send a message asking for more tanks to assist the general's retreat.
Dean didn't buy it. It smacked too much of asking for help personally. He did send a message for armor to reduce the roadblock east of Taejon, and then he and the remaining men around him got into their vehicles and started down the street the tanks had gone.
Soon, they reached the earlier convoy. It had been ambushed, and burning trucks filled the streets. The buildings on both sides of the streets were afire, and American infantry was engaged along the side in a vicious battle with enemy troops.
Dean's jeep hurtled through, screeching around the stalled and flaming trucks, while the heat seared him and the men with him. The driver poured it on, and a block farther on, roared through an intersection. Lieutenant Clarke, Dean's aide, shouted, 'We missed our turn!'
But sniper fire was smacking the pavement all around; it was impossible to turn the jeep about. Dean ordered the driver to keep straight ahead; they would take the long way around to safety.
It was the long way around indeed. Because he took the wrong turn, Bill Dean would not rejoin the American Army until September, 1953. Thirty-five days later, after wandering lost in the hills, after making heroic attempts to reach his own lines, Bill Dean was betrayed to the Inmun Gun by Koreans. When they jumped him, he tried to make them kill him, but they put ropes around his wrists and dragged him to a police station. There they threw him in a cage, the sort reserved for the town drunk.
Only much later did the Inmun Gun realize that the old-looking, filthy, 130-pound emaciated soldier they had captured was an American general.
General Dean once said that he wouldn't award himself a wooden star for what he did as a commander. His country saw more clearly.
It gave him the Medal of Honor.
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10
Retreating
— Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, commanding Eighth Army, to Major General Hobart R. Gay, CG 1st Calvary Division, July 1950.
AT NOON 22 JULY, the units of the 24th Division holding at Yongdong east of Taejon turned over the front to the 1st Calvary Division. At the same time General Walker ordered Major General John H. Church to assume command in the absence of General Dean.
In seventeen days of combat, the 24th Division had been driven back one hundred miles. It had lost enough materiel to equip a full-strength infantry division. Its losses in personnel had amounted to more than 30 percent, of which an unusually high portion had been senior officers. More than twenty-four hundred men were missing in action.
But had it not been committed, the balance of the United States Forces could never have established themselves in Korea. Without the extra days General Dean gave Walker at Taejon, the final defense of Pusan probably would have failed.
There had been hundreds of acts of heroism in the 24th, as well as acts that reflected no credit on the service. But most of the heroic actions had been those of individuals, of single officer or men who fought bravely and well. Because without tight discipline their bravery could not be coordinated into a team effort, many of these men died in vain.
Every American fighting man, seeing the decimated, dirty, exhausted, and weaponless 24th Infantry Division pushed back beyond Taejon, could only say to himself, 'There but for the grace of God go I.'
For the 24th Division was certainly no weaker than the Army as a whole. The other divisions from Japan, the 25th, the 1st Cavalry, the 7th Infantry, displayed the identical weaknesses of the 24th as each was committed to action.
None of them were equipped, trained, or mentally prepared for combat. For the first time in recent history, American ground units had been committed during the initial days of a war; there had been no allies to hold the line while America prepared. For the first time, many Americans could understand what had happened to Britain at Dunkirk.
