Yongsan was a small town, hardly more than a village. Two principal streets crossed it, one running east, the other north-south. The other streets were mere alleyways or paths. The thatched houses were mostly one-storied, and made of wattle, which burned smokily. The single solidly built structure in Yongsan was the schoolhouse, which faced the park and trees of the town square.
In the reeking smoke and confusion of house-to-house combat, Munoz's boys quickly ran into a new kind of trouble. Firing into burning houses, they
moved along the sides of the streets, now and then tossing hand grenades into likely nooks. Occasionally, they stepped across Korean corpses.
In three instances, the 'corpses' rose and shot one of Munoz's men in the back. Another man, picking up a hand grenade lying beside a dead enemy soldier, blew himself up. The real corpses were booby-trapped.
'Make sure the stiffs are dead!' Frank Munoz ordered.
George Company may have wasted a little ammunition, but now each corpse' was thoroughly riddled as George passed by.
Ahead of the squads rumbled the 90mm-gun tanks of the 72nd Tank Battalion. Halting now and again to fire, the tanks blew apart whole houses. Bit by bit, Yongsan was being removed from the face of the earth, a fate which, tragically, was to befall almost every town and city within Korea during the coming months.
The tanks and following infantrymen reached the center of town. Already one American tank had been hit by an 85mm round from a T-34. The crew evacuated before the tank burned; another American tank passed around the crippled one and blasted the T-34, standing three hundred yards beyond. The T-34 went up in a burst of smoke and flame.
There were more North Korean tanks in Yongsan, but the 72nd, and men with 3.5 bazookas, took care of them. The enemy tanks and their infantry were well trained and well coordinated, moving closely together. But when the United States tanks engaged the T-34's, in every case the 90mm rounds penetrated the enemy armor. With their tanks blasted and burning, the North Korean infantry dispersed.
By late afternoon 2 September, Yongsan—or what was left of it—was free of enemy. By dusk, the NKPA had been pushed back into the chain of low rolling hills to the west.
For the moment, the enemy drive into the Perimeter had been stopped.
While the 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry was clearing Yongsan, General Keiser, the Deputy Chief of Staff, Eighth Army, and General Craig of the Marine Brigade were holding conference at the 2nd Division CP. It was decided that the Marines would attack down the Yongsan-Naktong Road toward their old battleground, the Cloverleaf-Obong-ni hill mass, while the 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry attacked just to their north, trying to make contact with the 23rd Infantry, in trouble up that way.
G and F of the 9th Infantry, with A Company, 2nd Engineers, held the line of hills west of Yongsan during the night. At 0855 on 3 September, the 1st and 2nd battalions of the 5th Marines opened their attack to the west.
During heavy fighting all 3 September, the Marines slowly backed the enemy into the Bulge. At nightfall they were on a line two miles west of Yongsan. They had taken casualties: 34 dead, and 157 wounded.
That night, 3/5 Marines were ordered to pass through 2/5 and continue the attack. During the hours of darkness torrential rains began to fall, making both Marines and soldiers miserable throughout the night.
In the next two days, they were going to make the North Koreans much more miserable.
The sun on Sunday, 3 September, came up like fire, and soon the pitiful band of survivors on the knob of Hill 209 beside the Naktong, the remnants of Dog and How companies, 9th Infantry, were broiling in the breathless heat. They had a few C rations, but they had long since run out of water, and the cries of the wounded men tightened the drawn and bearded faces of the men still holding out. The enemy fire blasting the hill never ceased.
The North Koreans on the ridge above the knob directed accurate mortar fire into the ragged foxholes. Enemy infantrymen crawled close up the slopes and tossed grenades. One man was forced to leap from his hole a half- dozen times to avoid bursting grenades; on the sixth attempt, he was killed.
The wounded Edward Schmitt never gave up. He had been promised help from his battalion, and he intended to hold the hill until it arrived. Under his leadership and quiet example, the men on the knob, suffering terribly, held together. He was still directing the defense when killed by a mortar round.
Lieutenant McDoniel, the next senior officer, took command. With darkness, it seemed as if the prayers and entreaties of the wounded and dying men had been answered; great gouts of water rained from the skies.
Men turned their blistered mouths upward, gasping to drink the falling drops; they wrung water from their filthy shirttails, and drank, half-sobbing. Lieutenant McDoniel spread out two woolen blankets, and from these he wrung enough water to fill a five-gallon can. As the rain continued, most men were able to fill their canteens.
In the rain and dark, the enemy left them alone.
But the night passed too quickly, and in the dawn, again warm and clear, only half of the men who had climbed the hill were still living. The enemy still lurked about them. Their ordeal was not done.
At 0800 on 4 September, the day dawning clear and warm after a night of chilling rain, 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry, on line with the 5th Marines, jumped off again in the counterattack against the Bulge. During the rainy night the enemy had been oddly passive, and now, during the day, the advancing Americans began to come upon scenes of indescribable confusion and horror. Bodies of North Koreans, victims of American air and artillery, lay scattered all about along the roads, unburied. The advancing Americans passed abandoned equipment, including two undamaged T-34's. They came upon tents still standing, apparently the former command post of the enemy 9th Division. Now it seemed that the men of the Inmun Gun, asked to go to the well once too often, were beginning to break apart.
Keeping up continuous pressure, the Marines and infantry advanced three miles before digging in for the night. But the 9th Division was not finished—not yet. Moving onto his night defensive position by late afternoon, Frank Munoz of George Company could see enemy troops assembling just out of effective rifle range to his west. They were moving into a number of small villages, and his request for artillery fire upon them was refused. From somewhere, Battalion had received instructions not to fire upon Korean villages, even if they held enemy.
The American way of street and town fighting did not resemble that of other armies. To Americans, flesh and blood and lives have always been more precious than sticks and stones, however assembled. An American commander, faced with taking the Louvre from a defending enemy, unquestionably would blow it apart or burn it down without hesitation if such would save the life of one of his men. And he would be acting in complete accord with American ideals and ethics in doing so. Already, in the Korean War, American units were proceeding to destroy utterly enemy-held towns and villages rather than engage in the costly business of reducing them block by block with men and bayonets, as did European armies. If bombing and artillery would save lives, even though they destroyed sites of beauty and history, saving lives obviously had preference. And already foreign observers with the United States Army—not ROK's—were beginning to criticize such tactics.
Observers from France and Britain, realizing that war was also highly possible in their own part of the world, were disturbed at the thought of a ground defense of their homelands. For the United States Army, according to its history and doctrine, would choose the lives of its men over the continued existence of storied cathedrals. These observers wrote news releases—and soon Frank Munoz could get no artillery on the enemy assembling in plain sight in the villages below him. When he asked Battalion to fire on the village, and burn it down, Battalion replied it could not. Fortunately, such orders in Korea were soon changed.
Munoz passed along his thinly strung: line at dark, telling his boys to prepare for a night attack. 'Those people are getting ready,' he said.
At 2200 his outposts came back into his perimeter. 'We hear something coming out there—' they reported.
At the moment, all hell broke loose. Coming up the hill quietly, without their usual screaming and yelling, two companies of North Koreans leaped into George's lines. The perimeter erupted in fire, and within a few minutes the enemy withdrew.
Then, without flares or other signals, they drove into George once more. And this time George Company sprang a leak. With the NKPA all over them, Munoz's people were pushed from the forward slope of the hill, retreating over the crest. Munoz had given no order to fall back—but the enemy pressure was too strong.
