thedrifter
12-18-02, 06:23 AM
http://www.mca-marines.org/Leatherneck/opkillerarch.jpg
leatherneck of 5th Marines checked out an enemy
emplacement during operations to push the CCF back along the central Korean front.
USMC photo
Korea, 1951
By Maj Allan C. Bevilacqua, USMC (Ret)
As January gave way to February in 1951, the war in Korea had come to resemble a large-scale shoving match. Under slate-gray skies that leaked a constant drizzle of sleet, snow and freezing rain, two armies pushed each other back and forth through a miserable goulash of snow, slush and half-frozen mud. It was one hell of a place to fight a war. Too bad; it was where the war was, and the men who fight wars seldom have any say in where they are fought.
The entry of the Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) into the Korean War in late 1950 had at once saved the thoroughly battered North Korean People's Army (NKPA) from total destruction and rolled the American and allied forces back from the northern reaches of the Korean peninsula, driving them below the 38th parallel that separates the two Koreas. There, just below the line of demarcation, friendly forces hunkered down, caught their breath and prepared to meet the next Chinese thrust.
That thrust wasn't long in coming. Beginning in late December 1950, while the First Marine Division was refitting at its camp at Masan on South Korea's south coast, nightly CCF patrols poked and probed at the thinly held friendly line that stretched for 135 miles across the entire width of Korea. Then, in the early hours of a frigid New Year's Day, seven CCF armies, the 37th, 38th, 39th, 40th, 42d, 50th and 66th, slammed into the main line of resistance (MLR) along its whole length. It was a mismatch. There were too many attackers and too few defenders. All along the line friendly troops were forced back.
The South Korean capital of Seoul, liberated from the communists in September, fell to the invaders again, as thousands of refugees streamed across the Han River seeking safety. Mixed in with them and struggling to stem the tide were the soldiers of more than a half-dozen countries: Americans, British, Canadians, South Koreans, French, Greeks and Turks. Under tremendous pressure, they were backpedaling fast, but in the words of their commander, Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway, USA, they were coming back "as a fighting army, not as a running mob. We brought our dead and our wounded with us, and our guns, and our will to fight."
It may be that they got that last part from their commander. Matt Ridgway was a Soldier with a capital "S." A distinguished airborne commander who had jumped into Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944, Ridgway had assumed command of the 8th Army in Korea when LtGen Walton Walker had been killed in a highway accident two days prior to Christmas. Despite the gloomy situation that greeted him, Ridgway's first directive to his staff was to begin formulating plans for an attack. Terrain, as Ridgway saw it, was only incidental. The objective was the destruction of enemy forces. Even as his army was being pushed backward, Ridgway was determined to do some pushing of his own. With a line at last stabilized from Pyongtaek on the West Coast to Samchok on the East, Ridgway began making preparations for that push.
A key player in Ridgway's plan would be the 1stMarDiv. Fresh from the destruction of the NKPA 10th Division in the Pohang-Andong area, the division would take on the task of clearing enemy forces from the vital Wonju-Hoengsong axis, for in Ridgway's words, "The force which holds Wonju has the situation in hand." To ensure that outcome, Ridgway was playing his high card—the division he termed, "The most powerful division in Korea."
Before the division could fight at Wonju, it first had to get there. That quickly turned into a major undertaking all its own. The road chosen for the main supply route (MSR) was, like nearly all roads in Korea, a dirt road that may have sufficed for horse-drawn carts on sunny summer days. Under heavy military traffic in thoroughly hideous weather it rapidly dissolved into a ribbon of mud in which men and vehicles floundered their way up and down the never ending hills that fill Korea from one end to the other. It was a struggle out of a logistics officer's worst nightmare.
Even before the scheduled beginning of the attack at 1000 on 21 Feb., the MSR had collapsed. The Fifth Marine Regiment, slated to join the 7th Marines as the assault force, was hopelessly delayed by the disintegrated roadway and the jumble of vehicles that clogged it. Only at the very last minute did Lieutenant Colonel John W. Hopkins' 1st Battalion, 5th Marines arrive on the scene to join the attack. Piling hurriedly from the trucks that delivered them, they advanced directly into the assault at the double—slipping, sliding and stumbling through the clinging muck underfoot.
In the midst of it all, a Marine radioman struggled along under a load that would have foundered a mule—his trials made worse by a boot lace that had come untied and over which he kept stumbling. Suddenly a figure was at his feet, kneeling to tie the dragging boot lace. That done, LtGen Ridgway rose to his feet, patted the Marine on the shoulder and stooped to scrape some of the mud from his own clothing.
As the assault battalions jumped off, the Chinese were uncharacteristically passive. Maybe it was the weather. Physical misery is an equal opportunity employer on the battlefield, making life ugly for friend and foe alike. Maybe it was the thought that these American Marines advancing toward them might be in an utterly vile frame of mind be-cause of the weather. Maybe they were just having a bad day. Whatever the reason, the Chinese put up very little resistance, confining themselves to scattered light small-arms fire at long range. Only late in the day did any significant fighting break out, as 1/5 had a pair of short firefights with Chinese outposts.
All in all the first day of Operation Killer was marked by more opposition from the weather and the terrain than from the Chinese. LtCol Joseph L. "Moose" Stewart, commanding the 3d Bn, 5th Marines, summed it up pretty well when he described conditions as "a mixture of thawing snow, rain, mud and slush." The battalion settled down for the night in fighting holes that filled with water as fast as they were dug, each man, in Stewart's words, "wet to the bone, including his clothes, parka, weapons and ammunition." It was only the beginning. The gods of Korea, it seemed, had decreed that everyone taking part in Operation Killer was going to have some lasting memories of mud.
The second day of Operation Killer was, if anything, worse than the first. As the division continued its struggle toward Hoengsong through a sodden landscape, some wag whose name has been lost to posterity opined that the word Hoengsong was from the ancient Greek "Hoeng," meaning mud, and "Song," meaning more mud.
In the ranks of Major Webb D. Sawyer's 1st Bn, 7th Marines, newly arrived Private First Class Garland Hathaway, not long removed from his father's tobacco farm in Halifax County, N.C., saw a different geographic perspective. To Hathaway, his mud-smeared, soaking wet squadmates resembled so many Norse trolls venturing from their caves to glare balefully through the curtain of icy rain and sleet.
"About all we did was walk—walk—walk," recalled Captain Franklin B. Mayer, who commanded "Easy" Company, 2/5.
Was it walking or slogging? Most Marines would have settled on the latter. By night the rutted, saturated ground froze to the consistency of concrete, sending heavily loaded infantrymen slipping, sliding and stumbling, falling into ditches and careening down hillsides. As the temperature rose during the day to thaw the gluey mixture underfoot, it became a matter of wearily extricating first one foot and then the other from the ankle-deep embrace of the clinging muck in order to lurch a few feet forward. Then doing it again ... and again ... and again. Men negotiated the mire with the exaggerated high-kneed gait of a drunk staggering his way through a pasture, all the while trying to keep from stepping into anything.
It wasn't all walking, though. Even though it was becoming more and more apparent that the Chinese were conducting an orderly withdrawal, beginning on 23 Feb. there were more frequent contacts. Despite these collisions, by the following day, the 1st and 3d Bns of the 5th Marines had secured the twin hills south of Hoengsong that had been designated as the initial objectives. On the left, Capt Robert P. "Bob" Wray's Charlie Co, 1/1, in company with a platoon of tanks, had probed the outskirts of the town.
The operation was turning into a series of nasty little platoon and company affairs for the ownership of one piece of ground or another that the Chinese wanted to retain a bit longer. One by one they had to be pried loose from them. None of these encounters would merit so much as a footnote in the history books, but a man could be killed just as dead in one of them as ever a man was on Tarawa, Peleliu or Iwo Jima.
It was in one of these small but deadly encounters on 26 Feb. that PFC George W. Elmore, a Browning Automatic Rifleman in First Lieutenant Charles D. "Charlie" Mize's George Co, 3/5, placed his name on the Marine Corps' roll of valor. When intense enemy fire began bringing down members of his squad, Elmore left the cover of his position and moved forward into the open to where he could more effectively take the figures in the mustard-colored quilted uniforms under fire, knocking them down like tenpins.
http://www.mca-marines.org/Leatherneck/killerarch.htm
Sempers,
Roger
leatherneck of 5th Marines checked out an enemy
emplacement during operations to push the CCF back along the central Korean front.
USMC photo
Korea, 1951
By Maj Allan C. Bevilacqua, USMC (Ret)
As January gave way to February in 1951, the war in Korea had come to resemble a large-scale shoving match. Under slate-gray skies that leaked a constant drizzle of sleet, snow and freezing rain, two armies pushed each other back and forth through a miserable goulash of snow, slush and half-frozen mud. It was one hell of a place to fight a war. Too bad; it was where the war was, and the men who fight wars seldom have any say in where they are fought.
The entry of the Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) into the Korean War in late 1950 had at once saved the thoroughly battered North Korean People's Army (NKPA) from total destruction and rolled the American and allied forces back from the northern reaches of the Korean peninsula, driving them below the 38th parallel that separates the two Koreas. There, just below the line of demarcation, friendly forces hunkered down, caught their breath and prepared to meet the next Chinese thrust.
That thrust wasn't long in coming. Beginning in late December 1950, while the First Marine Division was refitting at its camp at Masan on South Korea's south coast, nightly CCF patrols poked and probed at the thinly held friendly line that stretched for 135 miles across the entire width of Korea. Then, in the early hours of a frigid New Year's Day, seven CCF armies, the 37th, 38th, 39th, 40th, 42d, 50th and 66th, slammed into the main line of resistance (MLR) along its whole length. It was a mismatch. There were too many attackers and too few defenders. All along the line friendly troops were forced back.
The South Korean capital of Seoul, liberated from the communists in September, fell to the invaders again, as thousands of refugees streamed across the Han River seeking safety. Mixed in with them and struggling to stem the tide were the soldiers of more than a half-dozen countries: Americans, British, Canadians, South Koreans, French, Greeks and Turks. Under tremendous pressure, they were backpedaling fast, but in the words of their commander, Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway, USA, they were coming back "as a fighting army, not as a running mob. We brought our dead and our wounded with us, and our guns, and our will to fight."
It may be that they got that last part from their commander. Matt Ridgway was a Soldier with a capital "S." A distinguished airborne commander who had jumped into Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944, Ridgway had assumed command of the 8th Army in Korea when LtGen Walton Walker had been killed in a highway accident two days prior to Christmas. Despite the gloomy situation that greeted him, Ridgway's first directive to his staff was to begin formulating plans for an attack. Terrain, as Ridgway saw it, was only incidental. The objective was the destruction of enemy forces. Even as his army was being pushed backward, Ridgway was determined to do some pushing of his own. With a line at last stabilized from Pyongtaek on the West Coast to Samchok on the East, Ridgway began making preparations for that push.
A key player in Ridgway's plan would be the 1stMarDiv. Fresh from the destruction of the NKPA 10th Division in the Pohang-Andong area, the division would take on the task of clearing enemy forces from the vital Wonju-Hoengsong axis, for in Ridgway's words, "The force which holds Wonju has the situation in hand." To ensure that outcome, Ridgway was playing his high card—the division he termed, "The most powerful division in Korea."
Before the division could fight at Wonju, it first had to get there. That quickly turned into a major undertaking all its own. The road chosen for the main supply route (MSR) was, like nearly all roads in Korea, a dirt road that may have sufficed for horse-drawn carts on sunny summer days. Under heavy military traffic in thoroughly hideous weather it rapidly dissolved into a ribbon of mud in which men and vehicles floundered their way up and down the never ending hills that fill Korea from one end to the other. It was a struggle out of a logistics officer's worst nightmare.
Even before the scheduled beginning of the attack at 1000 on 21 Feb., the MSR had collapsed. The Fifth Marine Regiment, slated to join the 7th Marines as the assault force, was hopelessly delayed by the disintegrated roadway and the jumble of vehicles that clogged it. Only at the very last minute did Lieutenant Colonel John W. Hopkins' 1st Battalion, 5th Marines arrive on the scene to join the attack. Piling hurriedly from the trucks that delivered them, they advanced directly into the assault at the double—slipping, sliding and stumbling through the clinging muck underfoot.
In the midst of it all, a Marine radioman struggled along under a load that would have foundered a mule—his trials made worse by a boot lace that had come untied and over which he kept stumbling. Suddenly a figure was at his feet, kneeling to tie the dragging boot lace. That done, LtGen Ridgway rose to his feet, patted the Marine on the shoulder and stooped to scrape some of the mud from his own clothing.
As the assault battalions jumped off, the Chinese were uncharacteristically passive. Maybe it was the weather. Physical misery is an equal opportunity employer on the battlefield, making life ugly for friend and foe alike. Maybe it was the thought that these American Marines advancing toward them might be in an utterly vile frame of mind be-cause of the weather. Maybe they were just having a bad day. Whatever the reason, the Chinese put up very little resistance, confining themselves to scattered light small-arms fire at long range. Only late in the day did any significant fighting break out, as 1/5 had a pair of short firefights with Chinese outposts.
All in all the first day of Operation Killer was marked by more opposition from the weather and the terrain than from the Chinese. LtCol Joseph L. "Moose" Stewart, commanding the 3d Bn, 5th Marines, summed it up pretty well when he described conditions as "a mixture of thawing snow, rain, mud and slush." The battalion settled down for the night in fighting holes that filled with water as fast as they were dug, each man, in Stewart's words, "wet to the bone, including his clothes, parka, weapons and ammunition." It was only the beginning. The gods of Korea, it seemed, had decreed that everyone taking part in Operation Killer was going to have some lasting memories of mud.
The second day of Operation Killer was, if anything, worse than the first. As the division continued its struggle toward Hoengsong through a sodden landscape, some wag whose name has been lost to posterity opined that the word Hoengsong was from the ancient Greek "Hoeng," meaning mud, and "Song," meaning more mud.
In the ranks of Major Webb D. Sawyer's 1st Bn, 7th Marines, newly arrived Private First Class Garland Hathaway, not long removed from his father's tobacco farm in Halifax County, N.C., saw a different geographic perspective. To Hathaway, his mud-smeared, soaking wet squadmates resembled so many Norse trolls venturing from their caves to glare balefully through the curtain of icy rain and sleet.
"About all we did was walk—walk—walk," recalled Captain Franklin B. Mayer, who commanded "Easy" Company, 2/5.
Was it walking or slogging? Most Marines would have settled on the latter. By night the rutted, saturated ground froze to the consistency of concrete, sending heavily loaded infantrymen slipping, sliding and stumbling, falling into ditches and careening down hillsides. As the temperature rose during the day to thaw the gluey mixture underfoot, it became a matter of wearily extricating first one foot and then the other from the ankle-deep embrace of the clinging muck in order to lurch a few feet forward. Then doing it again ... and again ... and again. Men negotiated the mire with the exaggerated high-kneed gait of a drunk staggering his way through a pasture, all the while trying to keep from stepping into anything.
It wasn't all walking, though. Even though it was becoming more and more apparent that the Chinese were conducting an orderly withdrawal, beginning on 23 Feb. there were more frequent contacts. Despite these collisions, by the following day, the 1st and 3d Bns of the 5th Marines had secured the twin hills south of Hoengsong that had been designated as the initial objectives. On the left, Capt Robert P. "Bob" Wray's Charlie Co, 1/1, in company with a platoon of tanks, had probed the outskirts of the town.
The operation was turning into a series of nasty little platoon and company affairs for the ownership of one piece of ground or another that the Chinese wanted to retain a bit longer. One by one they had to be pried loose from them. None of these encounters would merit so much as a footnote in the history books, but a man could be killed just as dead in one of them as ever a man was on Tarawa, Peleliu or Iwo Jima.
It was in one of these small but deadly encounters on 26 Feb. that PFC George W. Elmore, a Browning Automatic Rifleman in First Lieutenant Charles D. "Charlie" Mize's George Co, 3/5, placed his name on the Marine Corps' roll of valor. When intense enemy fire began bringing down members of his squad, Elmore left the cover of his position and moved forward into the open to where he could more effectively take the figures in the mustard-colored quilted uniforms under fire, knocking them down like tenpins.
http://www.mca-marines.org/Leatherneck/killerarch.htm
Sempers,
Roger