and-navigation radar situated in the nose. Both sets involved using active signals, and any emissions from them could bounce high enough off the water to be picked up by low-horizon scanners, some of them on the coast about Pohang’s seven-mile-wide harbor, and one at Cape Libby, near the eastern terminal of the trans-Korea oil pipeline, another near the barracks of the U.S. Marine Corps Advisory Group south of the bay.
An ROK destroyer in Pohang Harbor managed to get off several bursts from its quad radar-controlled 127- millimeter cannon before its radar was jammed. The Backfires made only one pass over the harbor, airfield, and environs, thus denying ROK ground control a second chance to lock on to any of the planes’ infrared signatures on a second run. One pass was all the Backfires required, their cluster bombs splitting open, releasing eighteen hundred three-pound high explosive minibombs and incendiaries and six FAE pods. The pilots, now miles beyond the crater- pocked airport, could see the FAEs’ thickened-gasoline canisters bursting on impact, filling the air with a fine aerosol, covering Camp Libby and the entire dockside area. Then, in the few additional seconds it took for the silvery gasoline mist to ignite over the big oil tank farm at Camp Libby, creating a raging inferno covering several square miles, the six Backfires, one losing speed because of a hung bomb, banked in thunderous unison, streaking inland toward the big air base at Taegu forty-two miles, three and a half minutes, away. Behind them the entire city of Pohang and the storage dumps were afire, flames leaping madly hundreds of feet into the air, fanned to firestorms by the stiff east breeze that had assisted the bombers on their run in.
Of the five thousand casualties in the first ten minutes of the raid, the lucky ones were the twenty-three- hundred-odd who died outright from suffocation due to the sudden loss of oxygen as the fuel bombs exploded. For the remaining victims, flesh melting like plastic, their agony overwhelming any emergency services that were still operating, the final hours were a horror of bloodied screaming shapes, once human, stumbling grotesquely through the ruins, many of them begging the few soldiers who had survived the holocaust to end their agony with a bullet.
Still flying low, the Backfires, lighter now, came in faster over Taegu, each aircraft releasing its twelve one- thousand-pound concrete piercers, the pilots all the time half expecting to be attacked by Phantoms. But there were no American F-4s in sight — or rather none that could fly after the meticulously coordinated early morning sabotage attacks by NKA infiltrator cells all across the South, some of whom had been waiting years to hear the last two lines in Pyongyang Polly’s rendition of “Pine Trees on Namsan.”
The Backfires’ three-man crews, pilot, copilot, and electronics warfare officer, could hear nothing but the panicking radio traffic of the ROK’s Taegu ground control and the comforting scream of their bombers’ twin Kuznetsov afterburners, speed indicators moving steadily from Mach.9 to 1.8 as the planes gained speed and height over the mangled airstrip that had been Taegu base, the soot-colored spars and ashes of the gutted F-4s receding far below like spilt campfires.
Turning hard right, the Backfires climbed northwest up over the black bulk of the five-thousand-foot Sobaek range, its peaks hidden by the monsoon into which the bombers now sped. Finally the hung bomb on one of the Backfires released, disappearing into the wilderness as the bombers dropped low again over Ulchin, tandem V intact, wings swept back for maximum speed, heading fast and low over the Sea of Japan.
As dawn broke on the DMZ, Sergeant Franks could see the dead deer’s leg still trapped in the barbed wire. By the time it occurred to him to ask himself why the animal would have suddenly jumped the series of cow fences between the North Koreans and their carefully plowed minefields, it was too late.
Several miles to the west, driving wildlife frantic before them, ninety-five of General Kim’s I Corps dark green tanks, “up-gunned” Chinese versions of the Russian T-55s, were racing toward Kumchon seven miles south of the DMZ, preceded by the turretless, ungainly-looking, but highly efficient plow-and-roller T-54 mine clearers that had startled the deer and other wildlife. The deep tank traps in which ROK-U.S. command had placed so much faith were easily forded by T-54 bridge-laying tanks, their unfolding steel lattice spanning sixty-nine feet across the traps — eight feet more than ROK-U.S. intelligence had thought possible.
Behind Kim’s armor came support battalions of motorized infantry, their 120-millimeter heavy mortars already putting down deadly fire on the flanks of the roads that the tanks used to breach the DMZ on a five-mile front. But this attack, for all its shock, was only a feint, Kim unleashing the main NKA thrust a quarter hour later farther east down the western prong of the wishbone whose junction was Uijongbu, only twelve miles north of Seoul. From here the NKA’s “historic” Fourth Division, in recognition of its blitzkrieg attack of 1950 that had so astonished the world, was assigned the task of quickly smashing its way down the Uijongbu corridor to Seoul.
And so while all U.S.-ROK attention was being focused on the smaller and totally unexpected breakthrough around Kumchon in the west, Kim’s Fourth Armored Division of 12,400 men, with the First, Second, and Third Motorized Rifle Divisions in support, half choking from the subterranean dust, streamed out of five undetected fume-laden tunnels six miles south of Fort Dyer and three other U.S.-ROK forward observation posts, overrunning the eastern road of the Uijongbu “wishbone.”
Major Tae’s sector didn’t come under attack until after the first exchange of fire three miles south of the DMZ around Munsan, at the bottom of the big “U” formed by the Imjin River before it flows into the Han estuary and then to the Yellow Sea. With the exception of a lieutenant who stayed behind to help him destroy classified files, Tae ordered his staff to head for the big shelter near the Swiss/Swede (UN observers) hut three-quarters of a mile away only minutes before a mortar shell hit the Quonset hut, ripping open its roof, leaving an enormous hole at least twenty feet across through which Tae and the lieutenant could see bruise-colored storm clouds passing swiftly overhead. In the distance they could hear the rolling thunder of the NKA artillery, Seoul’s position to the south behind them clearly indicated by towering columns of black and gray smoke rising to join the rain-laden stratus that had come streaming out of the north.
“They’ve even got the weather on the run,” said the lieutenant bitterly.
Tae didn’t respond; he was still gazing up through the hole that had once been the roof of his briefing room, where only a day or so ago he had told a contingent of visiting American officers of his fear that the NKA might invade, that in an age when nuclear war was so feared by both sides, conventional war would, ironically, be the only alternative. The one kind of war for which the democracies, particularly America, were least ready to fight. The lieutenant kept feeding the fire they’d made for the classified documents, but his attention, like Tae’s, kept wandering skyward as they waited anxiously for the reassuring “chuffing” sound of “Gnats,” the Cobra choppers on twenty-four-hour alert which should soon appear, squadron after squadron of them filling the sky, cannons spitting, their wing pods winking.
Tae told the lieutenant that coming in at over six hundred miles per hour, the effect of a ninety-five-pound Hellfire antitank missile against the armor of the older Russian- and Chinese-made T-55s and lighter PT-76s would be like watching a tin can hit with an ax. But when Tae saw only a few of the helicopters silhouetted against the rain-curtained sky to the south, he feared the worst — that the networks of infiltrators all over the south had struck in deadly unison. Though he tried not to show it, the shock was such that he did not hear the lieutenant, who was now crouching by the radio, telling him that forward American observation posts were reporting more Chinese-made T-55s crossing the DMZ in force, the U.S.-ROK minefields “unzipped” by the NKA’s “creeping” artillery barrages. As the Americans’ voices faded, radios transmitting only static, until this, too, ceased, Pyongyang’s radio signals grew in strength. Giving horrifying descriptions of the riots in the South, Pyongyang Polly repeatedly referred to the deaths of several monks and of Lee Sok Jo as “undeniable evidence” of the “unprovoked violence against our brothers and sisters in the South, who, no longer able to tolerate the oppression of the American warmongers, have called for us to come to their aid in their hour of need under the leadership of our great and respected leader, Kim Jong…”
Amid deafening, earth-shattering noise, dust, and screams that signaled the NKA’s advance on his sector, a strange calm visited Tae. It was as if now that the worst, certainly
“Sir!” The lieutenant was pointing outside.
Tae turned his hopeless gaze from the turbulent sky to the brown, dusty window of his office. Across the white cement strip that marked the old demarcation line and where several U.S. marine guards lay dead, he saw
