by Ian Slater
At the same time, Osan-ni ammunition dump for the Koon-ni air range on the west coast south of Seoul blew when two of the NKA’s KIS (Kim Il Sung’s) “suicide” squads drove a one-and-a-half-ton jeep packed with dynamite through the checkpoint, killing the two MPs on the main gate before slamming into the dump. The shock waves of the Osan-ni explosions were felt several minutes later in Seoul, the pall of coal-black smoke rising ten thousand feet, curdling virgin-white cumulonimbus that were sure to bring more rain.
* * *
“Hope the cavalry arrive in time,” Cahill said grimly from the control bunker, whose atmosphere had rapidly changed from alarm to near panic as the blue aura normally cast about the OPS room by the big board was increasingly pierced by the flashing of red lights, each one signifying another position overrun by the NKA troops, some of whom were now only nine miles from Seoul.
Cahill ordered the detonation of all demolition charges along the Uijongbu-Seoul highway. It was the first in a series of hard decisions. It meant that eight thousand U.S.-ROK rear guard units fighting their way down the highway were lost. But at least the demolition would force Kim’s armored columns off the roads into the flooded soft paddies, and by that time the “cavalry,” planes from the Seventh Fleet and B-52s from Okinawa, would be overhead, “pounding the crap,” as Cahill put it to General Lee, out of the NKA armored spearheads; the tanks, especially the lighter PT-76s, would be sitting ducks until the NKA could move the rubble of the demolition.
“You think the fleet planes can turn it around?” asked Lee quietly, determined to keep the tremors of impending defeat out of his voice. “How about the NKA’s mobile SAM sites?”
“They’ll get a few of our boys, no doubt,” answered Cahill calmly. “So will their fighters, but the MiG 23s are no match for our F-18s and the ‘Smart’ bombs. Anyway, General, our fly-boys are the best. And yours, of course. Best planes. Best-trained people in the world.”
This was all true, but what Army General Cahill had overlooked, not surprisingly given the myriad complexities of modern conventional warfare, was that the laser-guided “Smart” bombs can only be smart when a laser beam can be bounced off enemy targets by “real time” laser designators, or target markers. That is, a mobile laser source, like the man with a mirror signaling the cavalry in the old West, had to be in the area where the aircraft would be attacking. In any event, the NKA, fearful of the U.S. dominance of the air in both the earlier Korean, and Vietnam wars, knew this well, and its artillery, in close support behind its advancing armor, was laying down heavy hexachloroethane shells, producing dense curtains of smoke which played havoc with a laser beam, slicing it up into segments, in effect slicing up the signal.
* * *
Outside Uijongbu, Kim’s Fourth Armored was encountering stiff resistance from ROK reservists who had been carrying out maneuvers that morning near Camp La Guardia, two miles from Uijongbu. Reports to Kim’s headquarters indicated that the unexpected ROK resistance had forced an NKA column off the highway.
ROK rear guard units reported the same thing to Seoul HQ. Cahill was buoyed by the news, by what he called the “first major tactical blunder” Kim had made. Cahill was now convinced that if he could force the other NKA columns off the roads and keep them off until the weather cleared enough for his fighters to zero in, he would halt the entire advance. Stopping Kim’s legendary Fourth Division alone would mean blunting the NKA thrust toward Seoul and giving the hard-pressed retreating U.S.-ROK divisions an enormous psychological lift, for so far the NKA’s Fourth had penetrated the South Korean defenses with such stunning speed that news reports around the world of the latest NKA advance were virtually outdated the moment they were broadcast.
Cahill was equally aware that should he fail and the capital fall, the impact on the ROK, and U.S. prestige, would be devastating, the prestige of the Communists dramatically increased.
Cahill’s hope of help from the air was another dream quickly punctured when a squadron of twelve American F-4 Phantoms managed to scramble aloft out of the chaos and confusion that had once been Seoul’s Kimpo Field. Streaking into the rain-thick sky above the DMZ, reaching Mach 2, they suddenly found themselves in combat with fifteen MiG-23s diving on them at Mach 2.2 from the higher, thinner air. U.S. intelligence had known since late 1985 that, as part of building up the NKA’s overwhelming advantage in numbers of combat aircraft (750 to the South’s 400), Moscow had begun delivering forty-six MiG-23 (Flogger) and SU-7 (Fitter) fighters to North Korea following Kim II Sung’s visit to the Soviet Union the previous spring. And so it wasn’t the appearance of the Russian-built fighters that was a shock to the pilots of USAF’s Seventh Tactical Fighter Wing, but rather the small blips which turned out to be AS-9s, air-to-surface antiradiation missiles. The AS-9, while something of a “loafer” compared to the speed of other air-to-surface rockets, and no threat to the Phantoms, was nevertheless a potent killer of antiaircraft missile sites, and via their on-board computers, ten AS-9s homed in on the ROK’s four Hawkeye and Nike-Hercules batteries. Hurtling in at seven hundred feet a second, the two-thousand-pound missiles failed to take out the ROK’s missiles but wiped out the batteries’ radars, which provided the Hawkeye and Nike-Hercules with their launch vectors. It meant that in the first day of the invasion, ROK’s four surface-to-air missile battalions, as against the North’s fifty-four, were rendered useless.
The loss in fighters to the NKA was seven MiGs shot down by the Phantoms. It was a high price for both sides, but in neutralizing the ROK missile batteries, the North’s MiGs had opened a window for further AS-9 attacks, leaving South Korea woefully understrength in antiaircraft defense.
On the DMZ, elements of the NKA’s Second Armored, held in reserve until Fourth and First Armored had broken out into the South, were now reported crossing the DMZ in force. Despite some determined firefights, Forts Dyer, Cheyenne, and all other forward observations posts in Area 1, from Kumchon in the far west to a point forty-three air miles east beyond Alamo, a third of the entire DMZ, were now overrun. In many of the trenches leading from the U.S.-ROK control bunkers, fighting was hand to hand, and Private Long, so recently wooed by Pyongyang Polly, was one of the first Americans killed in World War III, decapitated by an NKA splinter grenade.
In terms of U.S.-ROK prisoners taken that first day, over seven thousand, the most humiliating of all was the capture of Lieutenant General Hay, commanding officer I Corps, at his Uijongbu HQ while he was in the midst of organizing his eleven ROK divisions and one U.S. division for a counterattack that never materialized.
* * *
In Seoul there was utter panic and confusion as the firing of over two thousand massed guns along the DMZ continued, the 225- and 194-pound high-explosive and white phosphorus shells tearing through the rain-gray air, thudding into the cluster of U.S.-ROK targets in and about the South Korean capital.
Millions of panicked civilians, clogging all roads leading out of the capital, prevented ROK armor and infantry from getting through to mount effective counterattacks. The fleeing mobs were soon out of control, terrorized by the thick, acrid smoke which they thought was some kind of poison gas because of its yellowish tinge, the latter in fact a result of Seoul’s polluted air and burning briquettes which many households had stored for the coming winter. Trying desperately to escape, many were caught in running battles with squads of riot police who were trying just as desperately and futilely to clear the roads for military traffic, which was now backed up as far as Chamshil Iron Bridge, Olympic Park, and the Sports Complex, the shell of the main Olympic stadium holed in several places and burning, despite the determined efforts and initiative of Chamshil’s fire brigade, who, finding water mains severed, coupled hoses and used the Olympic swimming pool as their water supply.
Three of those in the retreating millions heading frantically for the bridges over the Han were Mi-ja, her younger brother, Dyoung, and their mother. For Major Tae’s family the possibility of forced evacuation from the capital had always
been presented to them as a distinct possibility by their father, and long ago the family had reluctantly promised him that in the event of invasion, they would head south with everyone else. “For civilians,” he had told them, “there will be no honor in remaining,” warning them to “go — go as fast and best as you can.” Where her lover, Jyung-hun, was, Mi-ja had no idea. She tried to phone, but all civilian and most military lines had been cut hours before.
One of the few who were not trying to leave, and whose family was busy at work in the hole-in-the-wall rooms that he grandly called his “factory,” was the owner of the Magic Cloud Souvenir Shop off Sejongro, selling North Korean flags faster than his family could sew them.
As the NKA’s barrages were a matter of rolling, indirect fire, pinpoint accuracy was not needed, so that changes in the artillery’s fourteen “variables,” from wind velocity and humidity to gun “jump” due to barrel elevation at the moment of firing, didn’t matter as much as they normally would. It was only important for General Kim’s gunners to know whether their fire was hitting the city; the only parts General Kim did not want to hit if he could help it were the bridges, as their destruction would delay the NKA’s progress over the Han, down the Chengbu expressway to the western plain and Taejon, the southern railhead for the Seoul-Pusan and Seoul-Kwangju lines. For this reason alone, Kim instructed his gunners to be guided by the forward observers, firing no farther south than Yongsan Barracks if possible.
* * *
The agent who had escaped from the Secret Garden was one of those whose job it was to act as forward observation officer, and he was doing so from Namsan Hill, where only yesterday in the vibrant sunlight tourists had been enjoying the view of one of the fastest-growing and most westernized cities in Asia. Beyond the city’s punch bowl, the flames strangely beautiful against the scudding overcast, the agent could see that a good part of the northern suburbs was also afire, especially, he was glad to note, the area immediately around the Blue House. A few errant shells, like those hitting the Olympic sites, were overshooting, exploding buildings around the mosque, and some fires were starting in Itaewon, whose bars and girls served, or rather had served, the Yongsan base. The fact, well understood by the agent, that sooner or later he would die in the barrage, the nine-hundred-foot hill he was on being the central grid reference, or aiming point, for the artillery, was a given. He was only one of many volunteers who, with their powerful shortwave radios, were calmly reporting the dispersal pattern of the guns’ fire. Indeed, even as he spoke, he knew there were other agents atop Pugak Mountain on the city’s northern perimeter sending in their reports.
* * *
By 5:30 p.m. all the bridges over the Han except three, the Panpo and Hannam, leading to the Kyongbu-Pusan expressway, and the Songsan Bridge leading to Kimpo Airport and Inchon, were finally clogged solid with refugees, the air filled with a rancid mixture of pickled cabbage, sweat, and cordite.
The Republic of Korea was teetering on the verge of total collapse, for even if the fighting was to go on, a simple but terrible truth was becoming slowly but inexorably evident to Seoul HQ. It was one that no journalist, and certainly no politician, would utter, let alone a military commander who cared anything for his career. Nevertheless it was a fact that the best troops in the American army, as in all armies, were those who wanted to be where they were rather than those who had merely enlisted with some vague hope of learning a trade or of escaping what academics called socioeconomic ghettos. Those enlisting with the highest educational qualifications got first choice of postings, and Korea, despite all the stories of the easy availability of women in Seoul, came in well after West Germany in the GI’s list of preferred postings. And the best of those who were in Korea, those who had volunteered for duty on the DMZ, on the front line, from Fort Apache to Camp Pelham, were now trapped, gone from the big blue board in Seoul HQ, where the NKA’s overwhelming superiority had now all but turned the board red.
The remainder of U.S.-ROK I Corps’s eleven divisions, ten of them ROK, one U.S., now withdrawing from Uijongbu were simply not up to anything like the standard of the “five-year term” soldiers of the North Korean divisions. In the sudden shock of the NKA’s highly professional attack, where rapidity of movement had been everything in the early hours of engagement, these U.S.-ROK ground troops had quite simply been outclassed. And in the confusion and contagion of impending defeat, men who had been trained a hundred times in mock battles, often with live ammo being fired overhead, froze in the initial bowel-churning terror of real combat and so did not move fast enough to capitalize on any holes that did appear in the NKA advance. This was especially true in the case of three infantry battalions on maneuvers in the Whiskey Sierra Tango training area ten miles north of La Guardia and in Falling Water on the outskirts of Uijongbu, nine miles north of the capital.
By late afternoon the situation in Seoul had deteriorated so badly, with millions of refugees now choking all nineteen bridges over the Han, that General Cahill was about to make the bravest — to some the stupidest, to others the most militarily sound-decision of his entire career.
* * *
Far to the southeast off Cape Changgi, the sea mist took on the aspect of moody ghosts rising one minute, returning the next. Inside the Blaine’s combat information center, the radar operator saw two or three more blips appear in the radar sweep. Then more. Soon they were a swarm. “Captain.”
“What have you got?” asked Ray Brentwood calmly. “Fishing fleet?”
With news of the NKA invasion flashed to all U.S. ships, the radar operator wasn’t sure whether the skipper was fooling. In any case, he pressed the computer for a readout of the unidentified blips’ speed. “Forty knots, sir.”
“Patrol boats?”
“Looks like it, sir.”
“Satellite confirmed?”
“Satellite confirmed,” answered the operator, “but no flag.”
Brentwood put down his coffee, looking intently at the small white squares with the white dots inside them signifying unknown surface ships. “Radio traffic?”
“Negative, sir.”
“Range?”
“Fifteen miles and closing.”
“Very well — send message. ‘Unknown vessels, this is a U.S. Navy warship on your zero eight five. Request you identify yourself and state your intentions.’ “
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The message was sent and the Blaine waited.
There was no answer.
“Repeat message,” ordered Brentwood.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Again there was no answer.
“Call general quarters,” ordered Brentwood.
“General quarters. General quarters. All hands man your battle stations.”
“Look for ‘skimmers,’ “ instructed Brentwood.
“Alert for skimmers,” repeated the OOD, the lookouts on the bridge’s wings lowering their binoculars, scanning the graying sea, looking for a flash in the distance, anything that would indicate a missile coming in low under the radar screen.
* * *
In Seoul, General Cahill ordered all but three of the nineteen bridges blown, and with the weather clearing, firmer ground in the offing, he could finally unleash his heavy fifty-four-ton M-1s, America’s main battle tanks, to buy time for the massive American reinforcements he was sure would come.
* * *
Major Tae had been pushed into one of the long columns of over seven thousand battle-shocked and bedraggled South Korean and American prisoners of war taken along the DMZ who were now trudging along in the mud of flooded roads, the forced march confined to side roads passing lush green paddies and brownish, shrub-covered hills, seventy miles in all, from Panmunjom east to Chorwon only a few miles south of what, just forty-eight hours before, had been the DMZ. Now they were being herded southwest again, heading back toward Uijongbu. It would have been half the distance to go straight from Panmunjom to Uijongbu, but the speed of the NKA advance was such that the administ
ration of prisoners, always low in the priorities of an attacking army, had gone awry. Tae, like other intelligence officers, with labels about their necks ticketing them for interrogation, found himself pushed from one column to another and witnessed the mounting frustration of the NKA guards. These were fanatical young reservists who didn’t seem to know where they were going themselves and took their frustrations out on the prisoners, screaming at POWs too weak to go on as if they alone had been responsible for the guards’ confusion instead of the victims of it.
At first there were enough able-bodied men among the seemingly endless columns of prisoners to aid those too weak to go on, putting them on makeshift stretchers of bamboo poles and rain ponchos. But as exhaustion and lack of food weakened the stronger ones as well, the bayoneting began, some of the guards taking obvious relish in killing those South Koreans who had showed any signs of camaraderie with the Americans. Some of the Americans, Tae saw, were obviously being killed for their personal possessions, particularly watches and much-coveted cigarettes. Tae had wanted to help on several occasions, but fear for his own safety made him hesitate.
The warning about the watches swept through the columns but did little to stop the slaughter as prisoners were now being pulled out at random by the AK-47-toting guards and searched. If they found anyone trying to secret something away or not surrendering it immediately, the prisoner’s death came slowly and brutally, the guards using rifle butts in a fury that Tae, with his coldly objective eye, recognized as a savage product of Pyongyang’s ingrained hatred and envy of Americans in general. It also came from the lingering fear of all guards in all armies that if they aren’t tough enough, the entire mud-sloshing column of prisoners might rush and overwhelm them through sheer weight of numbers, the kind of rush the Japanese had traditionally made, preferring death to the ignominy of surrender. The best way to keep control, the guards obviously thought, was to execute any prisoner for the slightest sign of disobedience. The terror of randomly being chosen for death was so palpable in the column that every now and then there was a panicky movement, like columns of ants climbing over one another, as men on the column’s edges sought greater safety by pushing farther into it.
