War: On the Hill This Afternoon

TIME Correspondent Frank Gibney was in Pusan last week when the first troops of the U.S. 1st Marine Division, confident and well equipped, arrived from the U.S. and moved out to the front. Later, Gibney went up to join a regiment of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, which had been fighting steadily for 31 days. What he saw, a platoon-eye view of the war, gave a very different picture from sweeping communiques of how the Americans were doing in Korea. Gibney cabled:

JAMES SHELTON, a 21-year-old private from Company D, 1st Battalion, 19th Infantry Regiment, was awakened from the sleep of the exhausted by the zing of Communist bullets over his foxhole. For an hour before, confident Communist infantrymen, their conical Russian helmets sticking up like mushrooms through the early morning mist, had marched along a steep dirt road to a mountain pass commanding the U.S. positions. Wakeful U.S. sentries heard the Reds singing snatches of Communist marching songs as they pulled an aged, creaking, Russian heavy machine gun up the steepening slope.

As the lead platoon of Communists approached the pass, some overeager G.I.s opened fire, instead of waiting to trap the next unit. “I was asleep when they cut loose,” Shelton said, “then the next thing I knew, enemy bullets were coming into my hole.” But the suddenly awakened soldiers discovered that their buddies had the situation under control. Blasts from U.S. BARs and salvo after salvo from 75-mm. recoilless rifles ripped into the advancing Reds, pinning some to the clifflike wall of the pass, hurling others into the roadside ditches. Within minutes, the first wave of the Communist attack had been shattered.

“Mansei!” Almost on the heels of the first wave of Reds came a U.S. counterattack. Spearheaded by five tanks and two M-8 reconnaissance cars, truckloads of G.I.s from the 19th Infantry Regiment roared through the pass and down into the valley below. Heavy Communist fire damaged the two recon cars and three tanks. The G.I.s, supported by covering fire from the pass, spilled out of their trucks, began fighting a day-long melee in the valley and on the crests of the surrounding hills.

Slowly the weight of two full Red regiments pushed the undermanned U.S. units back toward the pass. But at the pass, the G.I.s stuck. Time & time again, Red charges smashed against the Americans’ guns. As the Reds rushed up reserves, frantic G.I. gunners manning 13 guns lobbed a torrent of 155-mm. and 105-mm. shells into masses of green-clad North Koreans trying to move up along the hillsides. But the Reds kept on coming. Two “Mansei” (the Korean equivalent of the Japanese “Banzai”) charges rolled up against the U.S. positions—and broke.

The Gun They Never Served. By late afternoon the battle was almost over. A Sherman tank stood watchfully around the bend of the road at the head of the pass. On the slopes of the nearby hills, mortar crews and machine-gunners looked out over the valley, which was quiet now. Beyond the pass there was an eerie silence. All our outposts had withdrawn to prepared positions. The wounded had been removed from the field during the fighting, thanks to the heroic efforts of Army Medical Corpsmen who drove jeeploads of groaning soldiers back from the front, heedless of enemy fire.

The slopes leading down to the valley belonged to the dead. Along the wall of the cliff in the pass lay the hideously twisted bodies of North Korean soldiers. Red machine-gun crews were lashed in death to a gun they had never had a chance to serve.

This battle was not an isolated encounter; it was the same battle which the 19th had been fighting day after day ever since that sunny 12th of July when two battalions of bright-faced boys, fresh from cozy occupation duty in Japan, had moved up to man the Kum River line. Now they presented the saddening but noble spectacle of brave men who have fought to exhaustion and must still fight.

“Too Bad About the Sergeant.” Sitting on the roadside and munching their cold rations, the G.I.s discussed the battle. Some meager loot—a few Russian Tommy guns and occasional pistols—was the object of interest. Three G.I.s in a jeep posed grandly for a Signal Corps photographer, with a North Korean flag taken from a fallen enemy. But G.I.s had found, in the pockets of dead Korean Reds, all too many reminders that the Reds, for their part, had looted the American dead. One G.I. said wryly: “Every time I hit one of those bastards, I get a fresh package of Lucky Strikes.”

They spoke of the dead with a quiet casualness that seemed callous. “Too bad about the sergeant,” two boys said to me as they watched stretcher bearers carry the blanketed form of their platoon sergeant downhill towards an ambulance. The sergeant had been killed by a mortar shell a few minutes before. “Hey, Al, your buddy got it,” shouted a jeep driver at a G.I. eating by the roadside, “down on the hill this afternoon.” The G.I. looked at the driver and nodded; then he went back to eating. Many men had died; it was not an unusual thing.

Alongside the road, their faces buried in the grass, lay the exhausted. soldiers who had dropped where they stood, for precious minutes or hours of sleep. Most of them had not had anything that could pass for sleep in four days. One stubby G.I. looked sadly at an officer and said: “Major, if they’d just put me up on top of that hill and in a foxhole, I’d fire that gun. But my legs just can’t make it.”