War: The Proposition Was Simple

TIME Correspondent Frank Gibney went in with the marines who captured Wolmi. His report:

WOLMI (Moon Tip) ISLAND was a rather useless place. Its only local reputation was as an off-the-cuff summer resort for the town of Inchon, to which it is joined by a long causeway. The northern end of the tiny island had boasted a large inn, complete with swimming pool, where Inchon’s successful merchants could enjoy the summer breezes. After the Communists invaded South Korea, they set up a small guard unit on the island, ringed it with earthworks and hastily dug trenches.

Wolmi commands Inchon harbor, and enemy guns from the island could wreck any attempt to land in the port area. Thus the proposition facing U.S. planners was simple: capture Wolmi fast, or the Inchon landing would fail.

“I Was So Happy.” One battalion of marines had been assigned to capture Wolmi. They were good troops who had already fought well. The bulk of the enlisted men were youngsters of 18, 20 or 21. Slender, dark-faced Lieut. Colonel Robert Taplett, who commanded the battalion, said wryly: “Of course, this is the first time they’ve been in one of these.”

By the early morning of Sept. 15, when our LSD slipped into the channel leading to Wolmi, the atmosphere had grown tight. Shortly before 3 a.m. we saw bright, distant flashes of gunfire. The naval bombardment had begun. By 4:30 a tongue of flame was licking upward from the direction of Inchon. Aboard the LSD two lines of marines groped their way from troops’ compartments to the three LSUs. A young marine said wistfully: “Three months ago I was so happy.”

When dawn came, the marines seemed to draw encouragement from the sight of the three high-speed transports which had accompanied us, the two destroyers which stood in close to Wolmi, and the three rocket craft resting in a half-moon formation. “Lower the stern gate,” barked a loudspeaker. The marines scrambled back to the landing craft; the low barrier separating the LSD’s welldeck from the sea outside was cranked down. Slowly the tankand troop-laden LSUs backed stern first into the open sea.

“Save Us a Little.” Then, like the sound of a slammed door, the forward battery on the nearest destroyer opened fire on Wolmi. Other ships stepped up their salvos accordingly, and everything began to concentrate on the island.

By 6 o’clock the sound of slamming doors had grown deafening. Loaded with helmeted marines, landing craft from two of the high-speed transports had been lowered and were circling around their parent ships. The first and second waves were ready to go in. (We in the LSUs were the third wave.)

Meanwhile, the rocket boats had gone into action. Clouds of smoke and earth billowed on Wolmi; the land at water’s edge was no longer visible. At 6:05 the Corsairs came. They flashed down over the island to drop their bombs, and cylinders of smoke pillared up from Wolmi’s hills and the shattered remnant of the resort hotel. In the LSUs a marine shouted happily: “Save us a little of that island!”

At 6:29, nine more Corsairs dived down to lace the island with rockets and machine guns.

At 6:30 seven landing craft put out from one of the transports, headed for the beach.

At 6:35, on the heels of the first two waves, our LSU hit the deep sand at water’s edge, shuddered slightly, then grated securely on the shore.

The ramp went down. Within seconds the first tank was chugging its way across the beach. Behind it, marines worked desperately, unloading food and ammunition.

“Help Me!” As I dashed up the slope of the beach, I got my first look at Wolmi Island’s defenders. Three or four half-naked North Korean soldiers, hands held rigid over their pinched, scared faces, stumbled into one of their old shallow trenches at the command of a marine. I talked to them in Japanese. “Are you going to kill us?” stammered one. When I said we wouldn’t, he chattered to the others and a little of the fear went out of their eyes.

I left the prisoners, and went inland along a new road which a tank had just smashed out of a rubble-heaped path. I caught up with the tank just in time to see its 105 fire two rounds point-blank into a deep cave. A muffled series of explosions rumbled inside the cave, which had been used to store ammunition.

Out of the smoke at the cave’s mouth staggered a badly wounded North Korean soldier. Another stumbled behind him, then another. Amazingly, almost 30 men had survived the explosion.

Going farther along the road toward the causeway I found a desperately wounded North Korean. “Salyo chu sio [Help me!],” he croaked, waving his hands at his conquerors. Almost all his clothing had been blown off except for a pair of new Russian boots. I watched him grow weaker while he gestured. A minute later he fell back into the dust—dead.

From a small ravine, five more North Koreans, with battered Russian-style shoulder boards dangling from their uniforms, slouched forward, their hands in the air. I escorted them back to the beach.

“I’m a Christian.” By 8 a.m. the battle for Wolmi was all but over. More than 100 North Korean bodies were scattered about the island—among them that of the North Korean battalion commander on Wolmi. Well before 10 Colonel Taplett told the Navy that the island was secured. From a tall staff near the top of a hill floated the U.S. flag.

Still prisoners trickled down to the beach. I passed one group, stripped and lying by the roadside under the eyes of two marines. (It’s an elementary Marine precaution to have prisoners strip, so that they can’t hide weapons or documents.) One tall, scrawny fellow knelt by the roadside with his hands folded. When I spoke to him he called out pleadingly: “Don’t shoot me! I’m a Christian.”

At 8:24 I left the beach in an LCVP which was taking casualties back to the LSD. There were surprisingly few. Only 17 marines had been wounded in the attack, none of them fatally. The assault had succeeded so well for two reasons. It had been made where the North Koreans had not suspected we would hit in force. And the superb sea-air-land teamwork, far smoother than any I had seen in World War II Pacific campaigns, had never given the enemy a chance either to dig in his troops adequately or to bring up reinforcements.

“Heaven on One Side.” Late that afternoon I went back to Wolmi. Sitting along the road to the Inchon causeway were the marines of Taplett’s battalion, ready to jump off again. Tanks were already on the move. I climbed a small ridge with them and watched what they were going into. Inchon blazed against the darkening sky, and the air over the city was choked with fumes and cinders. But in the far west the brightness of the setting sun painted one last patch of sky a peaceful, soothing yellow. A Marine chaplain standing on the ridge with me looked first at the sunlit sky in the west, then back at the smoke and fire around us. “Heaven on one side,” he said slowly, “and hell on the other.”

As the sun set, lumbering Pershing tanks were rumbling over the causeway, and Taplett’s battalion began to march slowly into Inchon.