On the reverse slope George Company had dug no holes—but it had positioned its supporting tanks there. And the tankers who had served with Frank Munoz had learned one thing: unlike some infantry commanders, he did not desert his tanks in the dark, leaving them to fend for themselves until morning. The tanks opened fire, blasting the crest of the hill with machine guns and high explosive from their cannon. They blasted the enemy off the hill.
Under their fire, Munoz was able to get his company back up into their holes. But again the Koreans swarmed up the hill at him. He had no flares, and no artillery support at this time. Again the enemy drove George back over the crest. And again the tanks tore the North Korean charge to mincemeat. If the tanks could have climbed to the crest, they could have ended the battle there. But the hill was too steep, and the armor could only support by fire when the enemy came over the crest.
With his men on the reverse slope once more, Frank Munoz decided to use his own judgment, throw the book away. He shouted for his men to
George followed him.
They went in and shook hands with the North Koreans. Screaming, shouting, shooting, they crashed into the surprised NKPA. Bayonet duels flashed along the crest. Some of Munoz's boys went down; some of the sturdy small brown men shrieked and died. It was like a melee in a crowded street for a few moments. Men crashed into each other in the dark, fell down. Others bumped into unseen attackers, and rolled down the slopes fighting.
The countercharge threw the NKPA off balance. Scared and yelling as Munoz's men were, they scared the enemy more. The NKPA broke off and disappeared into the night.
Panting, Munoz got on his SCR 300 and talked to his platoon leaders. 'Join me.' He knew the enemy would hit again, and he wanted to pull all of his men together so that no repetition of the earlier loss of his 3rd platoon would occur. It had begun to rain heavily once again.
One of his officers, Lieutenant Murphy, was new, and in his first fight. Murphy worried Munoz; he had told him to be guided by his experienced platoon sergeant. Now, closing in on Munoz's CP from his position farther down the ridge, the platoon sergeant, Loren Kaufman, led the way up ahead of Murphy. Coming through the dark, Kaufman lurched heavily into a sweating NKPA scout.
Before the man could react, Kaufman bayoneted him, Then, yelling, 'Fire! Fire!' Kaufman threw grenades at the dark shadows of the enemy soldiers behind the Korean groaning on the ground, and opened up with his rifle. The enemy group dispersed, and the platoon came on into George's main position.
This was the way it went till morning. Fighting, clawing viciously at the enemy when he got too close, George held the hill. In hand-to-hand fighting, Kaufman himself put his bayonet into four more North Koreans, wiped out a machine gun that had been moved forward, and killed the crew of an enemy mortar.
And finally, heavy artillery-fire support crashed down about the company, as Munoz found the time to call for and adjust it. The shellfire kept the enemy off George's back until daylight, when other units of the 9th Infantry attacked to the west, using George's hill as a line of departure.
As the sun of 4 September sank low over the muddy Naktong west of Hill 209, Lieutenant McDoniel realized that he had come to the end of his rope. He and his remaining officer, Lieutenant Caldwell of Dog Company, discussed an attempt to break through to friendly lines. It was obvious that the weary men atop the knob could hold no longer.
Some of the men were in a state of shock. Even the more alert ones had the thousand-yard stare, looking blankly into the dusk. Several men, half crazed by their long ordeal, had leaped out of their holes and dashed at the enemy. The enemy quickly shot them down.
As night fell, each man had only about one clip of ammunition; McDoniel knew he could repel no attack pressed in any determined fashion. But no attack materialized, as the darkness deepened. McDoniel could hear an enemy officer screaming
For four days and nights the enemy troops surrounding the knob had left the bodies of their men stinking in the broiling sun, as attack after attack failed, and the heart had gone out of the besiegers, too.
McDoniel and Caldwell agreed to split the remaining em, less than thirty, into parties of four men and try to scatter through the hills.
They had one problem—Sergeant Watkins, still alive, still paralyzed from the waist down from a machine-gun slug.
The Arkansan told them to leave him; he did not want to be a burden to those who still had a chance of getting away. The man who had done more than anyone to defend the hill before he fell was still brave, still cheerful.
They left him. Before they went, someone gave Watkins, at his request, his loaded carbine. They laid the stubby weapon on the paralyzed sergeant's chest, the muzzle pointing to his chin. Watkins put a hand around it and grinned at the men standing about.
'Good luck,' he said.
A long time later, when the men who had been on the knob told their story, Watkins was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
All but seven of the men who left the hill reached their own lines—mostly in the 25th Division Sector to the south. Caldwell was captured. A couple of NKPA took his boots and identification from him, then struck him in the head with a rock. Callously, supposing him dead, they threw his body into the Naktong. But Caldwell reached shore, and miraculously, four days later, stumbled into friendly lines.
Three weeks later, some men of the 9th Infantry climbed Hill 209. White- faced, they tried to separate and identify the decomposing corpses lying in the muddly holes; most had been blown apart or mutilated.
With this, they had little luck. Many of the men who had died on the lonely knob, like countless others who fought on the far frontier, went into nameless graves.
5 September 1950 was a day of heavy battle everywhere along the Perimeter. In the Naktong Bulge, the Marines and 9th Infantry fought their way back to the slopes of their old nemesis, Obong-ni Ridge, in the driving rain. Here they halted their counteroffensive. While. they could see the enemy digging in on the ridge, it was apparent that the combat power of the enemy 9th Division had been destroyed, and the supporting 4th had lost its ability to fight long before.
Furthermore, General MacArthur had other plans for the Marine Brigade, and FECOM was waiting impatiently for Walker to release it. The next day the Marines marched back to Pusan for embarkation.
The NKPA had made a dramatic breakthrough in the Bulge on 1 September—but now it had revealed what was to be a continuing weakness of the Communist armies in Asia. They could break through the U.N. lines, but they could not exploit their local successes. With poor communications and even poorer systems of supply, dependent solely upon manpower to move their resupply, the enemy could not move quickly enough to exploit, particularly in the teeth of superior airpower, armor, and artillery. To put it simply, faced with breakthrough, the U.N. forces could retreat, and counterattack faster than the Inmun Gun could press their advantage. Whenever the heavier- armed United States Army could form continuous battle lines and withhold a reserve, the Communist tactics were doomed to failure.
If the NKPA had had a mechanized force capable of moving on Miryang, and an air force able to keep the Fifth Air Force off their backs, their tough and aggressive infantry might easily have split the beachhead and precipitated a U.N. disaster.
North of the Bulge, the 23rd Infantry had been separated from its parent 2nd Division, and pushed back. But it engaged in heavy battle with the NKPA2nd Division, fighting it to a standstill, even though its 1st Battalion was pushed back against a lake, and isolated. Its sister regiment, the 38th, moved to support the 23rd from the north, and gradually the enemy threat was contained. By 9 September, the 23rd Infantry had been reduced to a strength and efficiency of only 38 percent, but the enemy 2nd Division shattered itself in fruitless attacks to break through.
One of the great mysteries of the Korean War occurred while the 23rd was making its stand. The North Korean 10th Division, over seven thousand strong, was in position to move either against the beleaguered 23rd or to drive east toward Taegu. If the 10th Division had added its weight to the assault, the pressure might well have been more than Eighth Army could stand. But the 10th Division, either through misunderstanding or ineptitude of its command, did not move at all against the Perimeter.
