The newly activated I Corps, General Milburn, was to make the major effort in the center of the Naktong Line. Its route of advance lay roughly over the same roads and through the same towns through which Eighth Army had been pushed south in July and August.
Major General Frank Milburn's I Corps was given the 1st Cavalry Division, the 24th Infantry Division, 1st ROK Division, 5th Regimental Combat Team, and the British 27th Infantry Brigade, plus supporting troops. The U.S. 2nd and 25th divisions on the south were to remain under Army control until 23 September, at which date they would come under a newly organized IX Corps HQ.
The ROK divisions remained under their own corps HQ, although they were now fighting under almost complete United States direction.
At 0900 on 16 September, H-Hour for the breakout, there was little change in the battlefront. Under dark skies and heavy rains American divisions and People's Army were still locked in close combat, and in many places the North Koreans were yet attacking. Instead of jumping off in assault, many American units were on the defensive, repelling assaults of the enemy.
Then, suddenly, the front began to break apart.
George B. Peploe, a few weeks from being fifty, commanded the 38th Infantry, the 2nd Division's Rock of the Marne Regiment. Stemming from a family of fruit farmers near Waterport, New York, Peploe was a graduate of the Military Academy in 1925. In Europe he had served as G-3 of XIII Corps in Simpson's 9th Army, and he was within fifty miles of Berlin when the war ended.
A medium-sized, soft-spoken officer with thin gray hair and blue eyes, Peploe was still a colonel in 1950. He was unassuming, without the slap and dash of some professionals—but he had a consuming belief in the importance of hard training for soldiers.
Peploe felt soldiers should train in peacetime exactly as they trained in wartime. For an army has only two functions, to fight, or to prepare to fight. But Peploe faced the basic problem all officers who thought his way faced in the postwar years—hard, realistic training was unpopular, and it sometimes resulted in injuries.
While everyone admitted realistic training resulted in fewer dead upon the field of battle, a man injured or killed by accident on the training field soon had Congress down about an officer's ears. And the people up above showed no willingness to back their juniors up. Many a general who would have walked up a hill blazing with enemy fire without thinking twice quailed in his polished boots on the receipt of a congressional letter.
Under the Constitution of the United States, Congress holds the power of life and death over the military, and no one would have it otherwise. History has shown very clearly that for democracy to continue, the people, and not the generals or even the executive authority, must have control over the military. The people must dictate its size, composition, and its use—above all, its use. But control does not imply petty interference.
The problem seems to fall eternally upon the ground forces. While few men, legislators or otherwise, have felt down the years that they could command ships of the line or marshal air armies without specialized training, almost any fool has felt in his heart he could command a regiment.
And throughout history, the men in the ranks have been the ultimate victims of such philosophy. In the eighteenth century, when the British Navy, hard-bitten, professional, and competent, ruled the waves, His Majesty's regiments—'The thin red line of heroes, led by fools'—left their bones scattered across the world.
In the summer of 1950, while 80 percent of the officers of Peploe's 38th Infantry had seen combat in World War II, many of his new fillers had never so much as thrown a live grenade. Some of them were not even infantry by branch. Immediately and energetically, Peploe went to work. He put his men in the field, and he was always in the field with them.
The Division CG, General Keiser, was frequently annoyed because he could not find Peploe in his office or near a phone.
The 9th Infantry went to Korea first, then the 23rd, and the 38th had an opportunity for a few days' additional preparation. When they sailed, the 38th had been told they would stage in Japan, but they arrived in Pusan instead, bound for Naktong. Here Peploe abandoned a mountain of baseball bats, footballs, and other peacetime athletic equipment, and marched for the Perimeter. In late August he relieved the 34th Infantry, 24th Division, on the northern edge of the Nakton Bulge.
The front was 30,000 yards, many times that which a regiment could adequately hold. Peploe put all three battalions on line, kept only his regimental tank company in reserve. Fortunately the 2nd Division, unlike the first- committed occupation units, came over at full strength.
In August and early September, the 38th missed the desperate fighting that engulfed its sister regiments. 1/38 had a few scraps, and the tank company helped pull a battalion of the 23rd out of a hole, but on the whole the regiment went through the worst of the Naktong battles unscathed.
And 16 September, when the orders came to move west, the 38th was ready.
At this time the Air Force was not flying planes out of Korean bases—they had withdrawn their fighter squadrons to Japan. This meant that the supporting aircraft could remain over the front for only limited times—and Peploe figured that the man who asked first got the air support.
The Air liaison officer with the 38th became resigned to being kicked out of the sack an hour before dawn. But when the planes arrived over the Naktong, he was ready with his requests, and the strafing, rocketing, and napalming ahead of the 38th cleared the way for its advance.
The 38th began to push forward rapidly against crumbing resistance. South of them, the 23rd and 9th met heavy resistance and moved slowly, but in front of the Rock of the Marne the NKPA 2nd Division moved westward in disorder. Once a flight of Australian pilots flying American F-51's roared in so close to his leading company that Peploe was concerned. The lead company commander disagreed.
'Leave 'em alone,' he begged Peploe.
With the fighters spreading havoc ahead of them, Peploe and the 38th suddenly found themselves at the Naktong. All along the roads they had passed abandoned AT guns and enemy dead.
Looking at the wide, twelve-foot-deep Naktong before him, on 18 September Peploe called Lieutenant Colonel Swartz, Division G-3. 'Where are the boats?'
Swartz said, 'There aren't any boats.'
Peploe ordered Skeldon's 2/38 to send patrols across the river and to secure a bridgehead on the west bank. A dozen of 2nd Battalion's hard, eager young men stepped forward, volunteering to swim across and secure the far shore.
These men stripped, and under the guns of their comrades went into the muddy brown water. Halfway across, one of the volunteers floundered and had to be rescued by another soldier. Hauled gasping back to the bank, he admitted he didn't know how to swim.
Moving cautiously along the west bank, the patrol found no enemy. And hidden in a large culvert beside the river, they found a cache of NKPA weapons, several collapsible boats, and one large boat capable of carrying thirty men.
Two squads went across in the two-man rubber reconnaissance boats, while Peploe talked to Division HQ again: 'Let me go across in force.'
At noon, Colonel Epley, Division Chief of Staff, gave him permission to cross one battalion.
Within three hours E and F and 2/38 had crossed and had taken the high ground a mile west of the river. Behind them, combat engineers built rafts to float over the heavy weapons, then a bridge for the regiment's vehicles.
Striking the disorganized enemy by surprise, the advance companies took more than a hundred prisoners, including a major and seven other officers. They also captured more than a hundred tons of ammunition, and many arms.
After an ordeal of six weeks, American forces had at last broken out of the Pusan Perimeter.
North of the Bulge, in I Corps zone, the 5th RCT moved against crucial Hill 268 on 16 September. In a vicious two-day battle, the hill was overrun, and the town of Waegwan flanked. Leaving hundreds of their dead on 268, and on the terrain between the hill and the Naktong, the NKPA 3rd Division showed signs of imminent dissolution.
Like a rubber band that has been stretched one time too many, the People's Army suddenly began to go slack.
In five days of savage fighting, the 5th RCT smashed the enemy's line in front of Taegu, and secured a crossing site on the Naktong for the 24th Division.
