International: Tonight and Tomorrow …

Within sight of the searchlights that guard Panmunjom (where the truce talks were still deadlocked last week), men of the U.S. ist Marine Division were fighting bloodily for strategic high ground. A stream of Marine wounded and dead flowed back to the collecting stations, but the Marines claimed enemy casualties higher than their own.

The weather was broiling hot. It was just two years ago, in similar weather, that the first brigade of Marines arrived at Pusan to help hold the allied beachhead. Last spring the division, now commanded by Major General John T. Selden, was due to go into reserve. But Selden, a tall, sharp-eyed Virginian who enlisted as a Marine private in 1915, asked General Van Fleet to keep the division fighting. Van Fleet agreed, and assigned the Marines to the Panmunjom sector, astride the invasion route from Pyongyang to Seoul.

Siberia & Bunker Hill. The Marines had no chance to get rusty, as General Selden had feared they might. The Chinese Reds began a “creeping war” against their positions. Fortnight ago a beefed-up Chinese platoon attacked a small Marine force on “Siberia,” an insignificant hill about four miles east of Panmunjom. In 26 hours Siberia changed hands nine times. When the enemy took it for the fifth time and showed signs of holding on, the U.S. position looked untenable. For two days, Marine artillery and planes raked Siberia. Then, early last week, the Marines occupied “Bunker Hill,” which is higher than Siberia and close to it. Since the U.S. position on Bunker made the Chinese position on Siberia unhealthy, the enemy spent the next five days and nights trying to push the leathernecks off the sandy, scrub-pine slopes of Bunker.

Item Company was sent up to replace battle-worn Baker Company on the hill; the men patched up their prefab bunkers and settled in. Captain Howard (“Spike”) Connolly, commanding, set out the bright green battle flag of St. Michael, made for the Marines by Korean orphans. In the next twelve hours, the opposing sides fired off two of the most concentrated artillery and mortar barrages of the war. On about 800 yards of front, the U.S. dropped 32,000 rounds, the Chinese 15,000 rounds. Item Company Marines waited, their eyes strained by sleepless vigilance, endless concussions and flying dust and dirt.

“That Rascal.” A little after midnight, 400 Chinese attacked in a businesslike skirmish line. It was the first wave of a sustained, methodical assault by more than 1,000 Chinese whose commander wanted Bunker Hill. The enemy infantry charged up the open ground, ducking behind rocks and bushes. They ran single file up a six-foot trench that debouched in front of a row of Marine foxholes. They ran through a screen-of flying earth and metal thrown up by all the U.N. guns within range of the hill.

A handful of Chinese popped out of the trench, killed four marines in their holes with grenades, broke through the line to Captain Connolly’s CP, where the shrapnel-torn flag of St. Michael was still flying. Connolly radioed his men to move in from each side to seal the breach, then helped to pick off the attackers himself. Shortly he was radioing back to battalion: “Lines breached, now consolidated.”

Said Lieut. Colonel Gerard Armitage, the battalion commander: “That rascal over there is a sound professional tactician. We shook him up pretty bad, but he will be back tonight and tomorrow and maybe another night, and then he will back off and shift to some other point.”