The Korean War Read Free Page B

forward to confirm the threat. Captain Dashner, B Company Commander, said: ‘Let’s get some artillery on them.’ 2 The Forward Observation Officer of the 58th Field Artillery Battalion cranked his handset. A few moments later, rounds began to gusher into the paddy fields around the road. But still the tanks came on. The guns of the 58th possessed negligible armour-piercing capability.
    Lieutenant Philip Day and one of the battalion’s two 75mm recoilless rifle sections manhandled their clumsy weapon to a position overlooking the road, and fired. Inexpert, they had sited on a forward slope. The round did no visible damage to the enemy, but the ferocious backblast slammed into the hill, provoking an eruption of mud which deluged the crew and jammed the gun. Urgently, they began to strip and clear it.
    At the roadside, Lieutenant Ollie Connors clutched one of the unit’s principal anti-tank weapons, a hand-held 2.36-inch bazooka. In 1945, the serious defect of the bazooka rocket was well known – its inability to penetrate most tanks’ main armour. Yet even now, five years later, the new and more powerful 3.5-inch rocket launcher had not been issued to MacArthur’s Far East army. As the first T-34 clattered towards the narrow pass between the American positions, Connors put up his bazooka and fired. There was an explosion on the tank hull. But the T-34, probably the outstanding tank of World War II and still a formidable weapon, did not check. It roared on through the pass, and down the road towards the American gunline. As its successors followed, with remarkable courage Connors fired again and again at close range, twenty-two rockets in all. One tank stopped, appearing to have thrown a track. But it continued to fire with both its main armament and coaxial machine gun. The others disappeared towards Osan, to be followed a few minutes later by another armoured platoon. A single 105mmgun possessed a few rounds of armour-piercing ammunition. One of these halted another T-34, which halted and caught fire. A crewman emerged from the turret firing a burp gun as he came. The communist’s first burst, before he was shot down, granted one of the gunners the unhappy distinction of becoming the first American soldier to die by enemy action in Korea. Lieutenant Day’s recoilless rifle began to fire again, but its flash made it an easy target. An 85mm tank shell disabled the gun, and left Day reeling from blast, blood pouring out of his ears. Between 7 and 9.30 a.m. some thirty North Korean tanks drove through Task Force Smith’s ‘blocking position’, killing or wounding some twenty of the defenders by shell and machine-gun fire. The Americans could think of nothing to do to stop them.
    Around 11 a.m., a long column of trucks led by three more tanks appeared on the road from the north. They halted bumper to bumper, and began to disgorge North Korean infantry who scattered east and west into the paddies beside the road. Some of the mustard-coloured tunics began to advance steadily towards the Americans amid desultory mortar and small-arms fire. Others worked patiently around the flanks. Since Task Force Smith occupied only a four-hundred-yard front, and no other American infantry units were deployed for many miles behind them, it was immediately obvious that this action must eventually end in only one fashion. As the hours passed, communist fire intensified and American casualties mounted. Colonel Smith called C Company’s officers, west of the road, to the Company Command Post. The entire force would now consolidate in a circular perimeter on the east side, he said. The 150 or so men of Charlie Company left their positions platoon by platoon, filed down to the road, clambered up among the scrub on the other side, and began to hack foxholes and fields of fire for themselves as best they could.
    Smith’s choices were not enviable. His unit was achieving very little where it stood. But if he chose to withdraw immediately from