BATTLE OF KOREA: Damn Good Job

At 6:30 one morning last week, two U.N. columns jumped off for the final assault on the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. The 5th Regiment of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division drove out of the mountains 16 miles south of Pyongyang. The R.O.K. 1st Division punched in from a point eight miles southeast of the city. The R.O.K. troops were commanded by Brigadier General Paik Sun Yup, a man with a grim ambition to be the first into Pyongyang. Five years ago the city’s Communist rulers had sawed off the head of General Paik’s baby.

Meeting Up. The cavalrymen, firing from their vehicles, drove swiftly through Pyongyang’s outer defenses, left the enemy on their flanks to be mopped up by the men who followed them. At 11 a.m. the 5th’s 2nd Battalion blasted its way into the southern edge of Pyongyang.

About the same time, soldiers of the R.O.K. 1st Division entered Pyongyang’s handsome, tree-lined streets from the east. While diehard North Korean snipers blazed away, U.S. and R.O.K. troops met on an avenue flanked with burning buildings. Brigadier General Frank A. Allen Jr., assistant commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, sought out General Paik. Said Allen: “The 1st Cavalry Division wants to congratulate you on a wonderful job.” Paik, a veteran of the Japanese army, slapped the back of every American, in sight, repeated exultantly: “Damn good job. Damn good job.”

The first entry had been made into the southern section of Pyongyang. During the night cavalry troopers and R.O.K. soldiers pushed across the Taedong River, which cuts Pyongyang in two, knifed into the northern part of the city. By the next morning Pyongyang’s business and administrative districts had been liberated.

Sealing Off. U.N. commanders, who had expected to pay heavily for Pyongyang, found the city dotted with carefully prepared 76-mm. gun positions and innumerable sandbag barricades. But many of the positions had been left unmanned, and most of the Red soldiers who had been assigned to defend Pyongyang quickly threw up their hands. On the roads running north from Pyongyang, U.N. pilots spotted some 20,000 North Korean troops, some fleeing afoot, some by truck or by oxcart.

U.N. forces moved quickly to cut the escape routes. On the day that U.N. troops first entered the North Korean capital, Douglas MacArthur had called five newsmen to his Tokyo office, explained that he was about to launch another hammer & anvil maneuver. The next morning, on the sixth anniversary of his World War II landing at Leyte, MacArthur took off for Korea in his new Constellation, the SCAP.

Over Korea the SCAP joined an armada of 80 C119s and 40 C-47s which carried the men and equipment of the 11th Airborne Division’s 187th Regiment. From Seoul’s Kimpo Airport the airborne task force flew deep into North Korea. There, while MacArthur’s plane circled overhead, one battalion of paratroopers dropped on Sukchon, 26 miles northwest of Pyongyang, another battalion at Sunchon, 28 miles northeast of Pyongyang.

Dangling from multi-colored parachutes, 4,100 men and their jeeps, trucks and artillery dropped onto flat, dry rice fields. Within an hour the drops had been completed and Red troops in the drop area driven off. Within another hour the paratroopers had sealed off the two highways and rail lines along which the routed North Koreans had hoped to escape from Pyongyang. Said MacArthur: “It looked perfect to me. It looks like it closed the trap.”

In high spirits, MacArthur flew back to Pyongyang. Waiting to meet him there was Lieut. General Walton Walker, commander of the Eighth Army. Quipped MacArthur: “Have you got any celebrities here to greet me? What about Kim Buck Too?”

Walker laughed, admitted that Kim II Sung had escaped him. To Walker, MacArthur gave orders that South Korean forces should begin an all-out drive for the Manchurian border. Then the 70-year-old supreme commander boarded the SCAP again, headed back to Tokyo.

Muscling In. The drive for the Manchurian border was well started. Six hours after the air drop, the R.O.K. 6th Division had linked up with the paratroopers, was rolling northwest from Sunchon. Next day, while 1,800 more paratroopers jumped in to reinforce the Sunchon area, 1st Cavalry Division spearheads raced up from Pyongyang to join the airborne units. Supported by the British Commonwealth 27th Brigade, the cavalrymen and paratroopers began to move up the west coast.

In line with MacArthur’s orders, the deepest northern penetrations were made by South Korean troops. On the right flank of the U.S. forces, the R.O.K. 1st, 7th and 8th Divisions joined the R.O.K. 6th Division in a swing northwest of the enemy’s main line of retreat, then cut back to the northeast along the Chongchon River. By week’s end the 6th Division was north of Huichon, about 50 miles south of Manchuria.

On the east coast the R.O.K. Capital and 3rd Divisions had moved north from the Hamhung-Hungnam industrial area, were forcing disorganized Red units into Korea’s highest mountains, 65 miles south of the Yalu River. Traveling light, the R.O.K. troops often marched as much as 30 miles a day, sometimes outran their communications.

Earlier in the week northeast Korea had been put under the command of Major General Edward Almond, who led the U.N. landing at Inchon. Almond, whose X U.S. Corps was no longer needed for a seaborne landing,promptly moved his U.S. 1st Marine Division to Wonsan, thereby freeing for combat duty the R.O.K. troops which had been garrisoning the city. This would put more muscle behind the drive into the northeast.

None of the northern drives faced serious opposition. The Communists fought, fled or surrendered by detachments without overall plan or direction; in one 24-hour period U.N. forces captured 26,000 prisoners, bringing their total bag to more than 120,000.

At week’s end the North Korean Communist radio announced that Red Premier Kim Il Sung had established a provisional capital at Sinuiju, just south of the Manchurian line in western Korea.