The Korean War Read Free

great throngs of refugees crowding roads and stations. Some men were sick from the local water; Lieutenant Fox was injured on the train before they heard their first shot fired, by an inglorious stray cinder from the engine blowing into his eye. All of them were savaged by mosquitoes. They learnt that Korea stank – literally – of the human manure with which the nation’s farmers fertilised their rice paddies. They watched earnest roadside rendezvous between their own officers and the smattering of US generals in the country. General William Dean, commanding the 24th Division, told the 1/21st commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles ‘Brad’ Smith: ‘I’m sorry – I just don’t have much information to give you.’
    They knew that the communist North Koreans had invaded the anti-communist South on 25 June, and had been striking ruthlessly southwards ever since, meeting little opposition from Syngman Rhee’s shattered army. They were told that they themselves would be taking up defensive positions somewhere in the path of the enemy, as far north as possible. But after years of occupation duty in Japan, the notion of battle, of injury and sudden death, seemed infinitely remote. Their unit, like all those of the Japan occupationarmy, was badly under-strength and poorly equipped. Their own A and D Companies, together with many of their supporting elements, were still at sea between Japan and Pusan. On the night of 4 July, they were ordered to take up a blocking position on the Suwon road, some fifty miles south of the capital, Seoul, which was already in communist hands. In a country of mountains, the paths open to a modern army were few and obvious. The enemy sweeping south must make for Osan. The 1/21st, the first unit of the United States Army available to be committed to battle in Korea, must do what it could to meet them. ‘They looked like a bunch of boy scouts,’ said Colonel George Masters, one of the men who watched the battalion moving to the front. ‘I said to Brad Smith: “You’re facing tried combat soldiers out there.” There was nothing he could answer.’ 1
    They moved forward, as most soldiers move forward to battle in most wars, in drizzle and darkness. The South Korean drivers of some of the commandeered vehicles flatly refused to go further towards the battlefield, so the Americans drove themselves. They unloaded from their trucks behind the hills that Colonel Smith had briefly reconnoitred that day, and began to climb, by platoons, through the rock and scrub amid much tired, muffled cursing and clanking of equipment. Their officers were as confused as the men, for they had been told to expect to meet a South Korean army unit to which to anchor their own positions. In reality, there was no one on the hill. Smith’s company commanders deployed their men as best they could, and ordered them to start digging. At once, for the first time, Americans discovered the difficulty of hewing shelter from the unyielding Korean hillsides. For some hours, working clumsily in their poncho capes in the rain, they scraped among the rocks. Below them on the road, signallers laid telephone lines to their single battery of supporting 105mm howitzers, a thousand yards to the rear. A few truckloads of ammunition were offloaded by the roadside, but no one thought to insist that this was lugged up the hills in the dark to the company positions. Then, for anuneasy hour or two, most of the Americans above the road lay beside their weapons and packs, sodden clothes clinging clammily to their bodies, and slept.
    Blinking and shuffling in the first light of dawn, the men of Task Force Smith – the grandiose title their little force had been granted in a Tokyo map room – looked down from their positions. They were just south of Suwon airfield, three miles north of the little town of Osan. They began to pick out familiar faces: ‘Brad’ Smith himself, a slightly built West Pointer of thirty-four with a competent