PDA

View Full Version : The Guerrilla Hunt



thedrifter
10-29-02, 09:31 AM
http://www.mca-marines.org/Leatherneck/pohangarch.jpg

Unrelenting day and night patrolling achieved the goal of denying the communists a safe haven and driving them into an area where they could be attacked and destroyed or captured.

Photo courtesy of the Marine Corps Historical Center


By Maj Allan C. Bevilacqua, USMC (Ret)

If you visit Masan, Korea, today you will find a bustling, prosperous, modern port city clustered about its scenic bay on South Korea's southern coast some 40 miles west of Pusan. You will have your pick of first-class restaurants and hotels and do your shopping in stores and markets stocked with the abundance of a thriving economy. You may find some of those establishments in a smart, attractive shopping center in the city's northern section, which might leave you thinking you were in Ashtabula, Albuquerque or Atlanta except for the Korean-language signs.

Surrounded by this evidence of a successful free-market economy, you would have a hard time accepting that you were standing on the site of the First Marine Division's bivouac area following the Chosin Reservoir Campaign in late December 1950. Fifty years ago the neatly landscaped steel, concrete and glass of today's shopping center was a farmer's unremarkable bean patch.

The Bean Patch, capitalized. It was always thought of that way by Marines who were there. The Bean Patch, as though there had never been any other. The Marines of the First Provisional Marine Brigade had rested and caught their breath there in-between the blistering fights along the Naktong River in the first summer of the war. In December 1950, after 13 days and nights of uninterrupted combat in the frigid mountains of North Korea, the Bean Patch was where Major General Oliver P. Smith took his 1stMarDiv. One of the first orders of business was a huge bonfire.

It wasn't the bonfire of a college pep rally or a political tub thumping. It was the practical means of disposing of the scurvy, noisome clothing that thousands of men hadn't had off their backs in nearly two months. As units arrived, there were showers, with plenty of soap and hot water. For most men it was their first shower since prior to going ashore at Wonsan back in October. As each man emerged from the shower facility, he was issued entirely new clothing: everything from skivvies and socks to dungarees and field jackets. The old clothing was unceremoniously piled in heaps, soaked with gasoline and set ablaze. There was no sense in trying to rejuvenate rags.

"Did we ever stink," recalled Corporal Florian Kovaleski, a machine-gunner with Lieutenant Colonel John Stevens' 1/5. "I had a shower on the Bayfield before Wonsan. That was sometime in mid-October. The next time I had my clothes off was at the Bean Patch in December. I had to have help getting my long johns off. They stuck to me."

Clean and free from the clinging aroma of eau de night soil, the next priority was hot chow. Day after day, meal after meal, Marines who couldn't remember their last prepared meal devoured everything that was put in front of them. Bakeries worked around the clock satisfying their appetite for freshly baked bread. In one sitting they wolfed down 40,000 rations of turkey. Then they fell in for seconds. Men who have subsisted for weeks on C-ration crackers and chocolate bars can do that.

Surprisingly, despite the unrelieved exposure to sub-zero temperatures, snow and a relentless wind that they had endured, there were few lasting health effects. The serious frostbite cases had been evacuated, and while everyone, it seemed, had a case of the sniffles, there was little in the line of serious illness. Morale was high, and the fighting spirit that had characterized the division throughout the Chosin Reservoir Campaign was undiminished. Men walked with a heads-up confidence, secure in the knowledge that they had taken on a ruthless, determined enemy and given him an old-fashioned country whipping. With a little rest and a chance to get back into condition, the division would be ready for its next assignment.

No one at Masan was aware of it, but that assignment was taking shape in an unlikely place. Even while Marines were making mess sergeants wonder if they had been set upon by a plague of locusts, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) was planning to launch a countrywide winter offensive. American and allied forces would be attacked all along the line, from the Yellow Sea on the west to the Sea of Japan on the east. As an adjunct to this attack, communist forces would be infiltrated behind friendly lines to disrupt rear areas while the main attack fell upon the front-line troops.

Among the units selected for the task of infiltration was the 10th Infantry Division of the North Korean People's Army (NKPA). Late in December, while the Marines at the Bean Patch were celebrating Christmas, the 10th Div began moving covertly through mountain defiles and winding dirt tracks into the northeastern regions of South Korea. Its mission: to cut communications and harass rear-area installations in the Andong-Pohang region while operating as a guerrilla force. Looked at objectively, both the unit and its mission were poor choices.

The NKPA 10th Div was not a first-rate outfit. Unlike the North Korean units Marines had fought the previous summer, units made up of highly trained and veteran troops who had fought on the side of Mao Tse Tung's communists in China's Civil War, the 10th Div was relatively new. One of the nine divisions formed in the spring of 1950, its ranks filled with untested conscripts, the 10th Div had been badly mauled when allied forces had broken out of the Pusan Perimeter. Reduced in numbers to little more than 6,000 lightly armed, mostly infantry elements, the division at first glance might have seemed ideally suited for hit-and-run guerrilla tactics. It was to this end that it was reorganized and trained by the Chinese.

There were problems, however. Unlike true guerrillas the 10th Div enjoyed no secure base in the Andong-Pohang area. The men of the division were not native to the area and were largely unfamiliar with it. Unlike the Viet Cong of a later war they did not blend in with the scenery. Most importantly they differed from genuine guerrillas in that they lacked the one element necessary to the conduct of a successful guerrilla campaign: They did not enjoy the support of the local civilian populace. Still, while they may not have been guerrillas in the accepted meaning of the word, they posed the potential for being seriously disruptive rear area raiders. Also on the plus side, by early January 1951 they had not yet been detected.

One thing that cannot be overlooked in warfare is the element of luck. In this respect the luck of General Lee Ban Nam, the commander of the 10th Div, took this particular moment to turn rotten. On 9 Jan., with the CCF offensive well under way, the 1stMarDiv was ordered by 8th Army to move immediately to the Pohang area with the mission of blocking any enemy penetration beyond Andong and protecting the East Coast port of Pohang. Gen Lee's mission had just taken on some interesting new dimensions that would test him to his limits.

The division was well rested, and replacements were swiftly being blended in with the veterans of the past five months of fighting. Small-unit training was well along, and the division was getting its legs back and the wrinkles out of its belly. The 1stMarDiv, barely more than a month removed from the rigors of the Chosin Reservoir Campaign, was ready to fight again.

Moving by road, rail and sea, by mid-January the division had established a 1,600-square-mile perimeter along the road network linking Pohang, Yongchon, Uihung, Andong and Yongdok. Almost immediately there were unconfirmed reports of enemy infiltrators in the area.

http://www.mca-marines.org/Leatherneck/pohangarch.htm



Sempers,

Roger