War: THE BATTLE OF NO NAME RIDGE

TIME Correspondent James Bell was with the U.S. Marines on the Naktong front last week. His report:

NO NAME RIDGE is a barren, useless place with a few scrub bushes and a patch of reddish soil in the center, the result of a landslide in some forgotten rainy season. To the right, a dark gully scars its side. It is called No Name Ridge for the quite straightforward reason that it has no name. But No Name Ridge will not be forgotten by the U.S. Marine Corps.

Early one morning last week, a U.S. Marine assault force prepared to storm No Name Ridge. For 5 minutes, the height was pounded by U.S. artillery. Then for a quarter of an hour Marine Corsair fighter planes raked it with bombs, rockets and machine guns. After this there was another 10-minute artillery barrage; then the Corsairs came back over for final strafing runs.

So Much Guts. As the Marines advanced down the valley toward the ridge they were met with a hail of fire. From the left rear came the angry eruption of a machine gun. Then another machine gun opened from the valley floor to the right rear as the marines started up No Name Ridge. From the top of the hill came more machine-gun fire, interlaced with blasts from other automatic weapons and mortars.

Hell burst around the leathernecks as they moved up the barren face of the ridge. Everywhere along the assault line, men dropped. To continue looked impossible. But, all glory forever to the bravest men I ever saw, the line did not break. The casualties were unthinkable, but the assault force never turned back. It moved, fell down, got up and moved again.

“I never saw men with so much guts,” said Marine Brigadier General Edward Craig, as he watched through his glasses. Craig’s hand trembled slightly, but his mouth was as determined as the thin line of marines on the forbidding face of the ridge.

For more than an hour the assault force stumbled and struggled forward against a solid wall of fire. A Red mortar was knocked out by artillery, but the machine guns and automatic weapons continued without letup. As the marines neared the crest, their line ripped apart; the North Koreans rose from their positions and came forward throwing grenades. The Reds were cut down but not before their grenades had done terrible work among the marines.

The marine line wavered and paused; it withdrew a bit and waited. Then with a final thrust, some ten marines reached the northern crest. They never came back.

Finally, the assault force was ordered to withdraw. Men too exhausted to cry crawled back down the ridge with no name. For all their terrible sacrifice the ridge was still in enemy hands.

Scribner’s Characters. The ridge became quiet. Medical corpsmen, leading stretcher-bearing teams of brave and unflinching South Koreans, began to cross the valley to pick up the wounded. They carried the wounded through the valley at the foot of the ridge and up a narrow trail to an aid station just beyond the bean fields where General Craig sat sweeping the height with his field glasses. I sat there beside him, wondering if the stream of litter bearers would ever stop coming up out of that damned valley.

Craig, a cold-eyed fighter, but a kind and sensitive man, tried not to look at his torn kids. Finally he said, with sad pride: “I haven’t heard one of the wounded cry. These marines have got more guts than I have. We’ll take this piece of real estate, but the cost is going to be terrible.”

I asked Charles Scribner, Medical Corpsman of Rochester, Mich, who had just come off the ridge with a load of wounded, what it was like over there on the unnamed real estate.

“Sir,” he said panting, his fatigues dripping with sweat and his arms so weary they dangled at his side, “over there, there is much shot and much hell. We are doing the best we can. We’ll get ’em out.” Scribner couldn’t remember how many trips he had made across the valley.

Scribner waited until his South Korean litter bearers had loaded the man they had just brought up onto a jeep. He shook himself, said, “Come on, characters,” and started down into the valley and up the bloody ridge again.

The South Koreans, without a word, picked up their litters and started following him down again into this green, green valley. I tried to get their names, but no one knew. They were just “Scribner’s characters.” They were good characters to have on your side.

Private Arthur Gentry of El Monte, Calif, is a bazookaman who went across the valley and up the ridge and back again. He is very young. He was so exhausted when he returned from the ridge that he could hardly talk. “We couldn’t see where they were at,” he gasped. “They were too well camouflaged.”

I asked one marine if he had been in the last war. He looked at me through bloodshot eyes and said: “No, and I wish I wasn’t in this one either.”

The Padre Was Brave. The ridge did not stay quiet for long. As Craig prepared to order the second assault wave into the valley, U.S. artillery opened up on the Red positions once more. Then the Corsairs came roaring out of the sky again, their gull-like wings almost scraping the tops of the shabby shrubbery on No Name Ridge. Rockets burst all over the ridge with searing, orange explosions; the Corsairs’ machine guns stitched line after line of death up, down and across the ridge.

To those of us sitting on the hill with General Craig, the terrible intensity of the aerial action could only indicate a fierce, personal desire of the Marine pilots to avenge the dreadful toll taken of their comrades on the ground. The pilots seemed unable to wait long enough to finish one strafing run before wheeling their blue-black craft around in the skies for another; they jerked their planes sharply out of bombing dives, made turns so tight that we were sure some of them would crash.

Meanwhile, the heroic and unflinching South Korean stretcher bearers continued to bring the U.S. wounded out of the valley. Roman Catholic Chaplain Otto Sporrer, a Navy* lieutenant commander, stood exposed to sniper fire and two Red machine guns still chattering from the valley flanks and did what he could to help the medics. The padre spoke kind words to the stretcher bearers; when the men on the stretchers could hear him, he spoke to them too. All the while, he walked back & forth from the top of the trail to the aid station near Craig’s command post. The padre was a brave man, but so was everyone who went into the valley before No Name Ridge that day.

Last Out of the Valley. Finally, at Craig’s command, the second wave of the Marine assault force moved up the road toward the jump-off point. They moved in single file, on both sides of the road, for down the center came more wounded. They came in jeeps, four to a jeep, at 3 m.p.h. Medics riding with them did the best they could to make their wounds less painful. One downy-faced corpsman stroked an old, hard-faced sergeant’s head above his ripped face and kept saying, “You’ll be fine, Sarge.”

The men going into battle watched the wounded going the other way. It was a brutal way to move fresh troops into position, but there was no other. The new wave came up unsmiling, and with not a little fear in their young faces.

The last of the wounded were coming out of the valley as the new wave got ready to jump off for the ridge with no name. General Craig came down from the edge of the bean patch and watched the last litters. Finally he walked to a litter going by and touched a badly wounded boy on the shoulder.

“Nice work, son,” he said very softly. “Thank you.”

It is good to report that the second assault wave carried the ridge with no name and that the Marines continued to advance, taking their objectives as they went. But it will never be good to remember those kids being carried out of that valley.

*The Marines have no chaplain or medical corps. Such services are furnished by the Navy.