leavin'. Out!'
Munoz, whose dark eyes were deceptively pleasant in his hawk-nosed face, was furious. He thought,
There was nothing to do but to move out, however. Right or wrong, he had his orders. He took stock. He had taken some fifteen NKPA prisoners during the night, most of whom were wounded, and he also had a large number of wounded of his own. These men he put in the three deuce-and-a-half trucks parked behind his hill.
At about 1600, George Company moved out. Munoz formed his men into a long column of twos. At the head of the column he placed two of his support- ing tanks, with the remaining two at the rear. He ordered small parties to go ahead to secure the hills on either side of the road to the east.
As he moved out, he could clearly see the North Koreans climbing the hills all around him. They made no move to halt the retreat, nor did they fire on him. They merely stood on the surrounding hills and watched calmly as G Company marched away.
During the night, the NKPA had passed between the 9th and 23rd regiments, and while the 9th was taking its lumps, C of the 23rd was overrun and destroyed. Only an effort by Headquarters and Service Company personnel halted the enemy advance—the same units that had brushed past the right of Munoz's hill—close to the 23rd Command Post.
By midmorning, Major General Keiser, CG of the 2nd Division, realized his division was split in two—the 23rd and 38th, which was so far untouched, in the north, out of contact with Division HQ and the reeling 9th Infantry to the south. The enemy 9th Division was locked in heavy combat with the 9th Regiment, and now Keiser had intelligence that the NKPA 2nd Division had also crossed the Naktong and was on high ground in the 23rd Regiment's sector.
At 0810 he telephoned Eighth Army HQ in Taegu, and reported the crisis.
Within a few hours Eighth Army was aware that a hole more than eight miles deep and six miles across had been sliced into the middle of the 2nd Division front and that the front-line rifle battalions of two of the division's regiments had been hit hard and in some cases were disintegrating. Communication everywhere along the front was spotty or non-existent.
General Walker at 0900 requested Fifth Air Force to make its maximum effort in front of the 2nd Division, and to try at all costs to prevent reinforce- ment and resupply of the NKPA spearheads across the Naktong. The Far East Command immediately asked the Navy to support this air effort, and at FECOM's request, naval units steaming to strike against the Inch'on-Seoul area were turned back.
Once again, as so often during the long, hot days of summer, Walton Walker had a critical command decision to make. Since the night before his Perimeter had been broken in two places—in the 2nd Division zone and in the 25th Division area in the south. In the south, the 25th had deep trouble, but in the Naktong Bulge the enemy was almost at Yongsan, only twelve miles west of Miryang and the main highway and rail lines linking the Perimeter.
This day and the next few were to test Walton Walker to the utmost. Walker was short and snappish, but under tremendous pressure he was a bulldog of a man. He was not demonstrative and had absolutely no flair for the dramatic, no personal traits that could make him beloved or admired as with a Patton or a Ridgway.
He was facing a situation that no American high commander had faced for a long time. He was fighting a last-ditch defense, largely with troops who would have been glad to depart Korea, and with commanders under him who in many cases were profoundly defeatist. Very few American generals under- stood the true condition of the Inmun Gun in early September. Behind Walker the Korean civilians of wealth and prominence were preparing to depart for Japan, and the Chinese merchants—those barometers of the Orient—were disposing of their property hastily and booking passage for Taiwan.
Walker, under pressure, never relented in his determination to hold the Pusan Perimeter. He spoke to his field commanders pungently and often sharply, and was not popular with them. He gave the troops stand-or-die orders, and lessened his popularity in that quarter. He had no use for the press, who got in his way, and was not adverse to letting the press know it. But whatever Walton Walker's popular image, his military reputation for the defense of the Perimeter must remain secure. And his pugnacious temperament, whatever it did to those around and beneath him, added to the defense the one thing it needed most at this point—stubbornness.
On 1 September Walker had in Army reserve only three weakened regiments, but compared to earlier times this was a princely force. He had the 5th Marines near Masan, the 27th Infantry, and the reconstituted 19th Infantry near Taegu. All these units he alerted. Then understanding that the salient in front of the 2nd Division was the most critical threat, he ordered General Craig to prepare the Marine Brigade to move into the Bulge area.
Afterward, at noon, Walker proceeded to the 2nd Division front, and riding up and down in his jeep with its special guard railing-fitted so that Walker could stand while traveling—and carrying an automatic shotgun in case of ambush, Walker told the 2nd Division to stand or die.
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14
The Turn of the Tide
— Colonel Henry G. Fisher, commanding 35th Infantry, 1 September 1950.
TO FACE THE CRISIS in front of Yongsan, Friday, 1 September, General Keiser had only a few elements of E Company, 9th Infantry, the 2nd Engineer Combat Battalion, the Division Reconnaissance Company, and elements of the 72nd Tank Battalion. These other divisional units he attached to the 9th Infantry, and during the day they engaged the NKPA in the low hills and broad, rolling rice paddies surrounding the town.
The engineers, fighting as infantry, inflicted heavy casualties upon the enemy north and south of the town, but by night North Korean soldiers had entered Yongsan. By the morning of 2 September the edges of Yongsan and the hill south of town were littered with enemy corpses and burning equipment. The engineers also suffered. In D Company, 2nd Engineer Battalion, only one officer remained on his feet at dawn.
Meanwhile, the 9th's C.O., Colonel Hill, had gathered together the scattered remnants of the front-line companies that had been overrun 31 August. Among them were Munoz's G Company, and F Company, which had also escaped the brunt of the enemy attack. By mid-afternoon these troops had been reconstituted into the 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry, and, supported by the 72nd's tanks, they received orders to attack through the hard-pressed lines of the 2nd Engineer's Able Company south of Yongsan.
Before the attack, Frank Munoz had been sent a great number of South Koreans, and ordered to integrate them in his squads. Munoz didn't like the idea. The ROK's spoke no English; he couldn't communicate with them; and they seemed to have no clear understanding of which end of a gun the bullets came out.
But, desperate for manpower, the Eighth Army had decided to try to utilize the thousands of able-bodied young South Koreans that could not be readily absorbed in the ROK Army within its own ranks. The concept was never successful. The language barrier remained, and the cultural gulf between Korean and American was impassable. Lacking understanding of their allies, American troops refused to trust them; lacking training, the behavior and performance of the Koreans was spotty at best.
Munoz protested, but was told to make the best of it. He put the KATUSA—Korean Augmentation United States Army—to work the way all other commanders put them to work, on labor details.
The attack jumped off through the engineer lines about one mile south of Yongsan. The NKPA had occupied the town, but had made no serious attempt to move farther east. Spreading out widely across the broad rice fields, Munoz led his men toward the wattle-walled, grass-roofed city, which was already afire.
At the edge of Yongsan, they were hit by small-arms fire.
Munoz brought a tank forward, and moved two squads in behind its armor protection and firepower. With the tank grinding ahead, the small spearhead broke through the edge of Yongsan, and now the fighting devolved into house-to-house combat.
