WW III

explosive shells at a round a minute, hurling each two-hundred-pound projectile over seventeen miles into Seoul. When the story reached Newsweek’s Tokyo office, en route to the United States, an editor did not consider the part about the circumstances under which the USSR had given the North Koreans the guns to be of “general interest,” and that section was cut as being too dry. In fact, the circumstances under which the guns were given by the USSR to the NKA would have profound implications within the next seventy-six hours, not only for the beleaguered U.S.-ROK forces in South Korea but for the rest of the world.

Meanwhile the world looked on, stunned by the rapidity of the NKA advance and the concomitant humiliation of the Americans. In one brilliant move, primarily through the use of the tunnels, the NKA had not only succeeded in launching an attack beneath and beyond the DMZ in several places, but in doing so, had now trapped over ten thousand “forward troops” of ROK-U.S. command, which had included Major Tae and his intelligence unit. In what was already being called the “squeeze box,” caught between Kim’s troops, who were overrunning the DMZ, and his four crack divisions — over fifty thousand attacking farther south from the tunnels — the zone between the two NKA armies was to be a killing ground unless the surrounded Americans and South Koreans could somehow fight their way out through an escape corridor blasted out by the U.S. Air Force.

It was a dim hope, for at the same time as the Backfires’ attack on Pohang was taking place, all the major air bases throughout the South, including those at Ulsan and Pusan, thirty and sixty miles south of Pohang, were attacked by small, mobile heavy mortar units of activated NKA infiltrators trained in the 124th guerrilla units. At Kwangju in the southwest, an infiltrator group was caught in the process of setting up an eighty-one-millimeter mortar for a concentrated triangle of fire — fifty rounds for the mortar neatly stacked in carefully prepared and camouflaged dumps. This early alarm saved the six F-4 Phantoms normally parked at Kwangju, but the other airstrips came under withering twenty-six-rounds-a-minute heavy mortar fire, effectively destroying the core of the U.S.-ROK’s air interceptor defense, a defense that in the 1950–1953 war had blunted the NKA’s dash southward to Pusan.

The ‘50-’53 war, however, and Vietnam, particularly the North Vietnamese Communists’ siege of Khe Sahn, had taught the NKA and the 350,00 °Chinese volunteers in that war that while enemy air power alone could not win a conventional war, its ability to play havoc with your supply lines and to resupply its own troops, giving them valuable breathing space even to the point of enabling them to mount a counterattack, could be formidable. For General Kim the only answer to this was the present byorak kongkyok— “lightning war”— in which the primary objectives, the enemy’s air bases, had been taken out by the NKA’s own air strikes or, as in most cases, had been rendered inoperative so swiftly from within that the United States, even with its massive reserves in Japan and its B-52 bases in Okinawa, would be unable to catch its breath before Korea was lost.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

At dawn, heading south down Korea’s rugged east coast, a supertanker, the MV New Orleans, had requested ROK coast guard assistance. Several miles north of Pohang she reported that whatever it was that had struck her, a ship-to-ship or air-to-ship missile, she was badly holed in her stern, had lost control of her rudder, including the auxiliary, and was now drifting. While one of the three ROK destroyers in Pohang Harbor was ordered by ROK’s Area Five’s southern command to remain behind on picket duty, just beyond Cape Changgi, the other two destroyers were sent to assist the tanker out of fear that a massive spill oif South Korea’s famed beaches would feed the inferno on Pohang’s waterfront, or rather what was left of it after the Backfires’ sneak attack.

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The tanker was now a mile from the two ROK destroyers, themselves a quarter mile apart, their captains deciding the best way to harness a towline before trying to deal with the problem of the hole in her stern, not yet visible because of the head-on angle of the tanker. As dangerous as the salvage procedure would be in the deteriorating weather, both skippers were greatly relieved at having the opportunity to haul the leviathan away from the coast. It would recoup part of the acute loss of face, which they were suffering after having failed earlier to detect the approach of the low-flying Backfires, though they guessed, correctly, that at that moment there were many others throughout the length and breadth of South Korea who could see court-martials stretching before them. Indeed the NKA infiltration units had been so successful that the problem facing U.S.-ROK HQ was that if everyone were to be court-martialed who should be, particularly those who had parked their fighters in rows instead of “staggering” them, the armed forces attorneys general would have enough work for the next ten years. However, morale was so low that Seoul HQ decided that to call so many to account at once would only further erode the army’s confidence and add to the already acute embarrassment of Seoul and Washington.

Proceeding slowly through increasing fog, the two ROK destroyers were a quarter mile from the tanker when she dropped the hinged panels on both sides of her flying bridge, launching four Exocets at what was effectively point-blank range.

The first destroyer, hit both on the bridge and in its gun-control radar antennae, managed to get off one of its eleven-hundred-pound Harpoons, the missile’s aim thrown off, however, by the cluttering images of its own bridge’s flying debris. It missed the tanker by a wide margin. The second ROK destroyer was already a mass of flame, both Exocets having exploded at the waterline, the fuel tanks ruptured, men drowning in oil. Undeterred, the tanker, jamming the picket destroyer’s radio calls for help, maintained a steady heading toward Pohang Harbor, using the southern curve of Yongil Bay, not hit by the bombers earlier in the day, as a reference point, its quaint, old- fashioned jumble of hotels rising higgledy-piggledy above neat rows of advertisers’ red, white, and green beach umbrellas.

On the golden crescent of Yongil Bay, confused and terrified tourists, including members of the local “Pohang Pelicans” who earlier had been readying for their monthly predawn dip when the Backfires had appeared, were now stunned as the city proper across the big bay and now the destroyers continued to be consumed by the fire. As the tanker appeared, emerging from the early morning haze, it appeared to be disintegrating, as if, one of the waiters from the Sun Day hotel commented, “pieces of it were peeling off.”

No information could be gained from Pohang Central, telephone communications and roads having been cut by the bombers’ raid. Only two inhabitants in all of Yongil Bay could remember anything like it — the great fires lit by the retreating U.S.-ROK forces over fifty years ago when, in pell-mell retreat from the pursuing NKA, the Americans and South Koreans had frantically gone round torching massive supply dumps, denying them to the Communists. This time, however, Pohang had been attacked not by NKA artillery but by its air force, the Backfires flown by Norm Korean veterans who had served in the Syrian air force in the Arab-Israeli wars and who, against all prediction, had come in so low on the final run before the “hop” over Pohang and Taegu that they had been no more than forty feet above the waves. It was for this reason that the USS Blaine, now approaching the area at 0817, had earlier picked up only one of the bombers as a faint and inconclusive blip on its radar.

At 0823 a fisherman, trying his luck six miles off Cape Changgi in wind-scattered mist, saw that what those on Yongil Beach had thought were pieces of paint, or scales, flaking from the giant tanker were in fact swarms of APCs, amphibious personnel carriers, and other assault boats, carrying two thousand NKA marines and flanked by two Nanuchka guided-missile patrol boats. All had slid effortlessly from the tanker’s roll-on, roll-off stern cavity, each patrol boat armed with a twin fifty-seven-millimeter AA gun, a single seventy-six-millimeter AA gun, one thirty-millimeter general-purpose Gatling, and two triple-loaded N-4 (NATO-designation “Gecko”) air-to-surface missiles with a range of six nautical miles. It was not realized at the time, but these were the first Nanuchka Class IIIs the West had seen.

As soon as she understood what was happening, her radar and radio signals to the U.S. Naval Advisory Group in Pusan still jammed, the lone ROK destroyer off Cape Changgi joined battle, engaging the two patrol boats at a range of eight nautical miles. She destroyed one of the Nanuchkas with a Harpoon missile, but the other patrol boat closed in a fast “weaving” pattern to six nautical miles, putting the destroyer within range of the Nanuchka’s SA- N4s. Firing all six missiles, the patrol boat hit the Korean destroyer with three of them. It was not the explosions themselves that did in the destroyer so much as the resulting fires amid the massive structural damage, fires that could not be fought effectively, as most of the water lines had been severed or punctured by white-hot splinters, the