War: Crazy Horse Rides Again

Few men now with the U.S. ist Cavalry Division were in the outfit when it sadly traded its horses for trucks and tanks eight years ago. But today’s troopers, though most of them have never straddled a horse, still cherish traditions of the days of boots & saddles and of dashing General George Custer,* who once commanded the division’s famed 7th Cavalry Regiment.

“Someone Woke Me.” Last week the past seemed to rise up and haunt the cavalrymen. On its way to bolster up crumbling R.O.K. forces in northwest Korea, the division’s 8th Regiment dug in for the night near Unsan, 80 miles north of Pyongyang. When morning came, the few troopers who were awake could not believe their ears. Said Pfc. Henry Tapper: “Someone woke me up and asked me if I could hear horses on the gallop. I couldn’t hear anything, but then bugles started playing, far away.” Pfc. William O’Rama, who was sitting in a machine-gun emplacement, heard the bugles, too—”very faint like.”

Sitting in a battalion command post, Lieut. W.C. Hill thought he was dreaming. “I heard a bugler . . . and the beat of horses’ hooves in the distance. Then, as though they came out of a burst of smoke, shadowy figures started shooting and bayoneting everybody they could find.”

The infiltrating Red force, probably Chinese, achieved complete surprise. O’Rama and his buddies were still talking about the bugles “when a hand grenade was thrown into our hole.” Some cavalryman thonght their attackers were insane. Said a U.S. sergeant: “They would stand right up in front of you laughing to beat hell.”

“We All Started Running.” At first the cavalrymen offered no organized resistance. Said one trooper: “I couldn’t see anything until a tank came along. I climbed on and fell off three times or was pulled off by others trying to get on. Then the tank burst into flames and we all started running.” Most of the men who escaped the confused, swirling battle swam the icy Kuryong River, fled to Ipsok, a village nine miles south of Unsan.

Late that afternoon tank radios came on the air from the ambush area, informed Division Headquarters that nearly 800 troopers were still holding out, trapped on a ridge near Unsan. Helicopters flew in to them, brought out 20 of the most seriously wounded. Twice, ist Cavalry Division reinforcements tried to break through to the trapped remnants, but each time the relief columns ran into “stonewall” resistance.

More than twelve hours after the attack, the relief columns gave up. By that time more than 500 cavalrymen had filtered through the Red lines to safety. To the men still on the ridge went orders to get out as best they could.

Next day a U.S. I Corps spokesman admitted that the Reds had captured 13 U.S. tanks, announced that 500 cavalrymen must be considered dead or captured. Said one newsman conservatively: “It is probably the most costly battle U.S. forces have fought north of the 38th parallel.” A bitter cavalry officer gave a more exact description: “It was a massacre like the one which hit Custer.”

* The 7th still marches to the tune of Garry Owen, a drinking song whose lilting melody strongly resembles The Campbells Are Coming. Custer, then a lieutenant colonel of cavalry, chose Garry Owen as the regimental march of the ?th soon after the regiment was organized in 1866, heard it for the last time just before the 7th rode off in 1876—to massacre by Chief Crazy Horse’s Sioux on the Little Big Horn.