BATTLE OF KOREA: Over the Beaches

The enemy knew that a U.N. landing was hanging over him. His spies had spotted U.S. and South Korean troops embarking from Pusan. The planes and ships that raked his coasts, on west and east, foretold an invasion. But the enemy did not know where the main amphibious blow would fall.

The mighty battleship Missouri steamed far up Korea’s eastern shore, fired 16-in. gun salvos on Samchok, important port and rail town. South Korean commandos raided the beach above Pohang. Then South Korean marines struck at Kunsan on the peninsula’s west coast. But that, too, was a feint. The enemy did not suspect that the place would be Inchon, the port of Seoul, 150 miles northwest of Taegu. But Inchon it was, in spite of a formidable high tide* and a treacherous, silt-filled channel.

On the Han. Massive U.N. air strikes softened Inchon’s beaches and all land approaches to the port. As Admiral James H. Doyle’s task force approached, six destroyers gamely plowed ahead, drew and silenced the fire of hidden enemy batteries on Wolmi island. Several ships were damaged, one severely. Then the U.S. ist Marine Division hit the beaches.

Under Major General Oliver P. Smith (see below), the ist Marines had been assembled from stations as distant as the Mediterranean and as near as the Pusan front.

The enemy’s beachhead resistance was negligible. Within the first four days of their assault, the marines stormed Wolmi, swept through Inchon and seized Seoul’s Kimpo airfield. Advancing rapidly, they entered the capital’s suburbs, prepared to cross the Han River and get astride the communications to the south and the rear of the enemy’s army around the Pusan perimeter. This week the enemy rallied; on the edge of their advance the marines came up against stiffer resistance.

In the wake of the 1st Marines moved the U.S. 7th Infantry Division and South Korean marines who helped mop up guerrillas. The South Koreans made a landing of their own, from Korean naval craft, some 200 miles down the west coast, at Mokpo. From this port, U.N. forces had access to the rich rice fields of southwest Korea, which are just ready for the harvest.

Across the Naktong. In the U.N. beachhead around Pusan, General Walton Walker’s Eighth Army (four U.S. divisions, five South Korean divisions and a British brigade) went over to a general offensive. The aim was to break the enemy ring and link up with the U.N. forces fighting their way east from Inchon. Initial advances along the 120-mile perimeter were spotty. Nevertheless, at week’s end Walker’s men had established bridgeheads on the west bank of the Naktong.

But there appeared so far no clinching sign that the enemy was in general retreat or that his morale had cracked. He still counterattacked, resisted fiercely, took back several nameless ridges. He had plenty of ammo. For days his own radio kept mum about the Inchon landing. U.N. planes dropped 3,000,000 leaflets, breaking the news and calling on him to surrender or die. At week’s end his choice was still death, not surrender.

* In a Northern Hemisphere body of water opening to the south (like the Yellow Sea off Korea’s west coast), the northbound flow tide tends to swing to the east. Reason: as the water moves away from the equator, it passes points on the earth’s surface that are moving less & less rapidly toward the east in the earth’s rotation. The tidal range of Korea’s western coast is further increased because the incoming water is forced into narrow, shallow channels and heaped up there. Inchon, which lies on the western coast of the peninsula about 20 miles up a narrow channel, has an average tidal range in the time of the new and full moon of about 27 ft. On Sept. 15 the tide at Inchon rose 31 ft. But Inchon’s tides are far smaller than the world’s largest, which occur in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, where the tide sometimes rises 60 ft.