Russian-built missiles slamming into the ship at six hundred miles an hour. The fires heating the aluminum superstructure caused massive blistering on and between decks, filling the air with highly toxic fumes from incinerated plastic moldings, the fumes alone responsible for half of the destroyer’s eighty-three casualties, thirteen of whom had been killed outright by the missiles’ impact.
Disgorged from their mother ship like sharks from the belly of some great whale, the armada of landing craft, 140 in all, wasted no time heading toward Pohang Beach, churning the gray sea white while a flight of twenty bulbous-eyed Kamov-25s rose from the bowels of the supertanker, their distinctive double-decker contrarotating rotors catching the weak morning light as they passed over the wakes of the assault force. Armed with air-to- surface rockets under each stubby wing and 20-millimeter nose cannon, ten of the twenty Kamovs, each carrying twelve SPETSNAZ or special force troops, ferried 120 a mile beyond the beach. The other ten Kamovs took another 120 SPETS twenty-five miles inland, south to the Kyongju junction on the vital east coast rail link between Pusan and Seoul.
To thwart any possible counterattack from what was left of the American base at Camp Libby, or from the USMC Advisory Group garrison two miles south of Yongil Beach, NKA commanders knew the beach must be reached in under twenty minutes. For this to happen, the first wave of commando-trained assault troops plus combat engineers had to be in action the moment their amphibious tracked vehicles hit shore. They would be followed, at three-minute intervals, by a second and third wave, each containing more riflemen and antitank weapons, followed by the fourth and final wave of a battalion of forty PC-76 Plavayushchiy amphibious tanks, each up-gunned to a 105 -millimeter cannon instead of its usual 76.2-millimeter gun, and sprouting a standard coaxial 7.62-millimeter machine gun atop its cupola.
But going in with the tide, as planned, the amphibious tanks, capable of ten kilometers per hour in calm water, now reached as much as thirteen kilometers per hour. The increased push of the surf helped conserve precious fuel that would otherwise have been expended in powering the tanks’ hydro-steer jets, but the saving in fuel was offset by serious steering problems as spray from the wakes of the amphibious personnel carriers ahead, now too close in front, “salted up” the tanks’ extended periscopes. This caused several of the PC-76 tank drivers to steer blind. The result in the heavy surf was over two dozen collisions, five of them fatal, as the twenty-five-foot- long, fourteen-ton tanks tore off each other’s trim boards between glacis and nose plates, each of the doomed tanks’ 240-horsepower water-cooled diesels driving them under before power could be shut off.
Despite the loss, the NKA commander knew that the advance force of 120 SPETS ferried in by the first ten helicopters held the key to success at Pohang Beach. And already he could see them through the binoculars establishing a small but highly concentrated perimeter of fire fed by hundred-round-per-minute AK-74s, PKMs (7.62 -millimeter light machine guns), heavy mortars, and if needed, twenty-five-pound “Sagger” antitank missiles.
In all, over two thousand NKA regulars, a small but superbly trained force, were involved in the Pohang strike on a one-kilometer front. The NKA’s big gamble was that if the second 120 SPETS ferried twenty-five miles inland could sever the vital arteries of the Seoul-Pusan expressway and Seoul-Pusan rail link, then Pusan, the east coast’s major naval port, would be isolated, infiltration units already having cut the alternate route between Pusan and Taegu farther inland. With the beachhead at Pohang consolidated by additional troops securing it in depth, air strikes could then be launched from Pohang field against the U.S.-ROK naval installations at Pusan. Not only would the headquarters of the ROK navy be in the hands of the NKA, but the vital sea link to Japan and its formidable U.S. garrison would be severed.
As the ragtag U.S.-ROK army unit of less than six hundred men hurriedly assembled from the remains of Camp Libby clambered into armored personnel carriers setting out to counterattack the beach, they were about to become the first victims of what, in the dry technological jargon of ballistics research, was called the development of “improved sleeve design.” It was something that the doomed and already demoralized American and South Korean troops could only have known about if U.S. intelligence had penetrated an elite Soviet guard regiment. U.S. intelligence had not done so, and consequently there was no way for the men in the U.S.-ROK counterattack from Fort Libby to know that the new sleeve design for the standard Soviet and Chinese 7.62-millimeter round increased not only the velocity of the depleted uranium bullet but also its penetration capability.
On the beach at Pohang this meant that the very fast eight-and-a-half-ton American-built M-114 armored personnel carriers, each powered by an eight-cylinder Chevrolet engine and capable of transporting thirteen men, were stopped dead in their tracks. The NKA’s Soviet-made 7.62-millimeter rounds fired by Soviet-made PKM light machine guns not only penetrated the M-114s’ hulls but traveled so fast that even after penetration of the APCs’ hulls, a single ricochet inside the personnel carrier was capable of killing or wounding several men. A full burst often as not put the entire thirteen-man squad out of action.
The bloody scenes described later by a few survivors of the PKM slaughter of the M-114s could not begin to convey the extent of chaos and panic inside the jam-packed carriers, falling bodies and loose weapons often doing as much damage as the ricocheting 7.62-millimeters themselves.
From that time on, even though any objective assessment of the defeat of the American and ROK troops at Pohang Beach showed that this was due as much as anything to the overwhelming force and professionalism of the attacking NKA SPETS, blame shifted quickly to the inadequacies of the M-114s’ aluminum hulls. And, though the army would not admit it, after Pohang, U.S. and ROK commanders had great difficulty in persuading men to be transported to the front in the M-114s. The army kept touting the personnel carrier’s advantages, including its unmatched speed of fifty-eight kilometers per hour, but U.S. officers in all theaters remained unsuccessful in trying to have the carriers loaded to their full capacity of thirteen, the age-old superstition about the number thirteen reinforced by the disaster at Yongil Bay.
But if the penetrating 7.62-millimeters had surprised the U.S.-ROK forces at Pohang, this was as nothing to the far greater shock that was to come.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In Seoul, 225 miles northwest of Pohang, deep in the subterranean headquarters of the U.S.-ROK defense force, the extent of the NKA’s daring initiatives was only now being fully realized as field reports slowly found their way through the nightmare of a frantic bureaucracy and broken communications. One aspect of the invasion that was becoming clearer with each new report was how successful the coordination of the NKA’s attacks had been. One of the most difficult of all the military arts, such superb timing evidenced a professionalism that even dedicated anti-Communists like Cahill begrudgingly admired. For the civilian population, towering columns of black smoke seen all over the South were testimony enough of just how widespread and effective the NKA infiltrators and regulars had been.
However, the most stunning news in Seoul that morning of August 16 was that, following the NKA’s breakout southward through the tunnels, both pincers of Kim’s army had now reached Uijongbu junction. In all, two hundred thousand NKA troops were massing less than ten miles north of Seoul for the final surge down the Uijongbu corridor.
General Cahill knew that professionally he was finished unless he could buy time to pull a “MacArthur”: launch a massive amphibious assault at a weak point somewhere along North Korea’s western coastline and push inland, cutting the NKA’s supply line, which, due to their present rate of advance, might soon become dangerously overextended.
The initial reluctance of Seoul’s state-of-the-art headquarters to believe that a full-scale disaster might befall them originated in a faith, bordering on evangelical-like confidence, in “HiT-R,” or high-tech readiness. Cahill, General Lee, and the other commanders in the top echelon had relied too heavily on such indicators as vibration sensors along the DMZ. These, however, as predicted by Cahill’s aide, proved as deficient in the spongy terrain of the monsoon as they were efficient in the hard, frozen ground of winter, when any armoR-1ed invasion was supposed to happen. Now Seoul was relying heavily on two last “aces,” the first a direct and normally “militarily sound” tactical descendant of World War II: an elaborate system of high-explosive-rigged rail lines, culverts, highways, and bridges throughout the South. Where there were no natural culverts or bridges, enormous concrete slabs had been built either side of the highways. With all roads already assigned “code black,” all Cahill had to do was order the RECDET — remote control detonation — units to pull the switch and mountains of debris would come
