BATTLE OF KOREA: Night & Day

BATTLE OF KOREA Night & Day Just after midnight one night last week, some 750 Chinese Reds tried to storm a western-front strong point called T-Bone Hill, after stealthily cutting the U.N. barbed wire in the darkness. The next night, after an artillery and mortar barrage of 2,500 rounds, the Reds overran an eastern-front position called Luke the Gook’s Castle, were later beaten off. Both attacks served merely as harassments, but they helped to make the winter nights ugly for U.N. troops. Shivering in three-above-zero cold on the Imjin sector, an 18-year-old soldier from The Bronx said: “It’s like any other night—just too damned long.” Probably no soldiers on earth really prefer fighting at night, but the Chinese and North Koreans have good and obvious reasons for avoiding daylight assaults. The U.N. artillery, close air support and air observation function best by day. At night it takes about 20 minutes for star shells or a flare plane to illuminate a combat area, and this time is valuable to the furtive Reds. Their own artillery, though abundant, is sluggish in following a moving target.

If the Reds have good reasons for attacking at night, the U.N. has equally good ones for assaults by day. Not only do the allied artillery, air support and air observation function best in daylight, but U.N. commanders and troops like to see what they are doing and where they are going. They have found that when things go wrong at night, they can go “awfully wrong”—meaning that nocturnal confusion causes unnecessary casualties. Also, if the enemy has succeeded in grabbing a U.N. outpost during the night, it pays the U.N. to counterattack at dawn’s early light, so as to give the burrowing Reds little or no time to dig in. And if the enemy can use night harassments to rob U.N. troops of sleep, the U.N. can return the favor by harassing the enemy by day.