by Robin Hutton
The Anti-Tank gun was a real handful in other ways, according to John Newsom, a Marine private from Woodland, California, who served with the Recoilless Platoon. It was six feet, ten inches in length, weighed nearly 115 pounds, and “was just a tube with a breach and it sat on a tripod.”
“With the velocity of the round going out the barrel,” Newsom recalled, “and the back blast of the round, the gun just sits there when it was fired. You would have to kneel down alongside of it when fired—nobody could stand behind it. It would cook a person.”
Newsom said during target practice, Marines would stack old wooden crates and boxes sometimes ten feet behind the powerful gun. When the gun was fired, “the boxes and stuff would disintegrate, so you can imagine what it would do to a person.”
“One person would load the gun, look back to make sure nobody was behind, and yell ‘Gun up!’ and the gunner would pull the trigger and away the shell went. . . . It made an incredible amount of noise,”3 Newsom added.
With its ferocious back blast, the rifle’s firing position couldn’t be concealed from the enemy. At most, four or five rounds could be fired from one spot before the weapon had to be carried to another location, so the enemy couldn’t pinpoint the firing site and retaliate.
A Deadly Game of Leapfrog
Sgt. Willard “Ray” Berry from Hazelwood, Missouri, was a scout sergeant for the Recoilless Rifle Platoon. Berry described the strategy in which multiple Recoilless units covered each other in battle. “What happens with a 75 recoilless,” Berry explained, “is you set them up in a series of two or more guns, depending on the size of the mission, and you have a primary position and a secondary position for each of the guns.
“Gun One will fire a few rounds and then they grab the gun and disassemble it and run out and go over to another (secondary) position—because you have so much backblast, the enemy can see it and they start throwing mortars and direct fire and everything in there.
“Then . . . while they are tearing that gun down to make that move, to draw attention away, the other gun (Gun Two) opens up and they fire from another position. It’s called leapfrogging. And then when Gun One hits their secondary position and opens fire from there . . . that was the technique that you used so if (the enemy) had a broader field of fire, they couldn’t lay in that much concentrated fire on you because you might have five hundred yards between the two guns.”4
If all really is fair in love and war, you’d think anyone named Gentleman would be out of his element. That, however, wasn’t the case with battle-tested Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Gentleman. As commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines (1/5), Gentleman’s task was to thwart the creeping Chinese offensive. Gentleman was on COP2 and set up the mission for the recoilless rifle to come in, and sought help from Lieutenant Eric Pedersen who’d taken command of the Recoilless Rifle Platoon only a month earlier. Pedersen and Berry set out on a reconnaissance mission to scout location sites for the recoilless rifle.
“Pedersen and I were like two peas in a pod,” Berry recalled, “We lived together in the same bunker and we did all the scouting missions for where we were going to set up our guns and so forth . . . we would scout out the areas where we could set up and fire our missions and get the heck out of there.
“We tried to get as close to the peace circle there, and there was a road called Freedom Road, and you couldn’t fire through that zone a hundred meters on either side of the road. So we tried to get as close to that line as we could to fire from, because they couldn’t fire back at us.”5
Berry and Pedersen found a site atop Molar. The position provided the Marines a dead aim onto Kamon-dong, and the Chinese would be unable to fire back without risk of hitting the restricted area around Panmunjom. If the Chinese tried to capture the rifle platoon by force, the platoon could simply retreat to the restricted corridor, just a few yards away.
Yet something happened on that scouting mission. “We got spotted when we were out there and we got a call on our walkie talkie,” Berry remembered. “And they said, ‘Bug out, you got a platoon coming after you.’ And as we started going back to the lines, there was a hill we had to run up. And a sniper opened up—and you could just hear the bullets zinging in and we’re running up the hill—and Pedersen went down. And I was only a sergeant, and so I always referred to him as Mr. Pedersen or Sir. But I was always with him, with all the high command officers, when we’d be . . . finding out what mission they wanted us to go scout, and they always called him Pete, his nickname for Pedersen.
Soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division and laborers of the Korean Service Corps struggle with a 75 mm recoilless rifle to get it into firing position up the hilly terrain of Korea.
“So as he’s running up the hill, he went down and I was off to the side of him, behind him, and I said, ‘Are you hit, Pete?’ because I didn’t have time to say Mr. Pedersen. And we ran up and got up on top of the hill, and there were some sniper rounds coming in pretty dang close. And we got up there and we hit the deck because mortars started coming.
“I swear to you this is true: He crawled over and put his body on top of mine, and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and I joked, ‘What is this, a love affair or what?’ And he said, ‘No damn it, he spotted me. It’s my fault and if anybody gets hit, it’s going to be me.’ That’s the kind of guy he was . . . he was fearless.”6
Returning to camp, Lt. Pedersen and Sgt. Berry immediately readied the squad for the firing mission. Pedersen was known as a straight arrow who put the needs of his men first, something that inspired loyalty. Those under his command would do literally anything for him.
Lt. Eric Pedersen and two unidentified members of the Recoilless Rife Platoon demonstrate how to carry, use, and dismantle the recoilless rifle. Command Museum, Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego
Drawings by Don Ricks when he was in Korea, (L) showing Marines carrying the recoilless rifle and ammunition, and (R) then firing the weapon.
Pictures courtesy of Jeremy C. McCamic, Korea Revisited (Taylormade Printing Services, Wheeling, WV), 35–36.
The immediate challenge would be moving the cumbersome recoilless rifle and its ammunition, without going through the restricted area, which was barred for transporting weapons. The hilly terrain further complicated matters, because the route from the ammunition supply point (ASP) to Molar was impassable for a jeep. The rifle—and its supply of ammunition—would have to be hauled by men on foot. There also was the certainty of, and dangers posed by, repeat runs to the supply point to replenish the ammunition.
The best way to carry the recoilless rifle was two men walking side by side, with a third carrying the tripod. Transporting it over rice paddy levees posed special problems because space didn’t allow for the carriers’ usual positions. A single man had to bear the burden of the entire rifle on the narrow levees. While the ammunition shells were manageable in size, their weight became a factor over long distances.
Depending on the magnitude of the mission and the number of rifles to be used, generally two or more Marines at a time carried ammunition. Each round weighed about twenty-four pounds, which included the cardboard canister it was encased in. The rounds used were either WP (white phosphorus smoke), used to generate smoke screens; HEAT (high explosive, anti-tank), that gave a range of 7,000 yards in ideal conditions and armor penetration up to 4 inches; or HE (high explosive), used for countering soft targets and infantry. The canisters were roughly 4 ¾ inches in diameter and 29 inches long. Generally, each man carried two rounds strapped horizontally to a hard plastic pack board that was carried like a backpack across the back shoulders of the carrier. There were slots in the board used to tie down the canisters. While two rounds was the standard load, at times, depending on the mission and the size and adrenaline of the carrier, three rounds could be carried in this fashion, along with the other gear, which made for a heavy and dangerous load when crossing rice paddy dikes or running up steep hills while dodging enemy fire.
“These were
live rounds, ready for firing,” Colonel Walt Ford, publisher and editor of Leatherneck Magazine told me. “There is no firing pin associated with the round itself—the firing pin is part of the rifle. The RR fires a fixed round with a firing plug at the base of the round and a primer rod filled with an igniter explosive running up through the canister. The primer rod is surrounded by more explosive propellant inside the canister.
“The round is inserted in the breech end of the recoilless rifle and a vented ‘door’ is closed over the breech, thereby covering the base of the round; it’s called ‘closing the breech.’ A sharp blow or strike by the firing pin on the firing plug at the base of the round fires the primer rod, which ignites the propelling powder. In handling rounds, care must be taken to prevent dropping so that the firing plug does not set off the primer rod prematurely.”7
The distance from the ammunition supply point to the firing site was slightly more than a half mile. It was a treacherous trip, forcing carriers to pass under wire, traverse a rice paddy dike, cross a seven-foot ditch, and then make the steep climb to the ridge—all in full, perilous view of the enemy. Pedersen chose Sergeant William Cox’s rifle team for the mission. Generally, five men were assigned to a team—two or three men carried the rifle, one of whom was the forward observer who would direct the rifle’s fire. Two men were designated ammunition carriers. When the rifle went into action, the ammunition carriers were constantly in motion between the ammunition supply point and the firing site. Cox put the rifle into action right away, firing as many as three rounds a minute at Kamon-dong, about 1,600 feet away, leveling every mud hut in his sight from right to left. He finally hit pay dirt, an ammunition dump, setting off a huge explosion that covered the village with smoke and debris.
Before the air cleared, the crew broke down the weapon and pulled it into the protected corridor. Their work was done for the day—they’d leveled one of the enemy’s supply bases.
The men were exhausted on the drive back to base camp outside the village of Changdan—especially the ammunition carriers, privates Monroe Coleman and Jose Cordova, who had made several trips each from the ammunition supply point to the firing site. Their exhaustion gave Lieutenant Pedersen an idea: why not find a horse or mule to carry the ammunition; a horse, after all, could carry six to eight rounds faster than a man could carry two or three. He ran the idea up the chain of command and with final approval given by regimental commander Colonel Eustace P. Smoak, and Lieutenant Colonel Gentleman’s offer to lend Pedersen a one-ton trailer to transport the horse, he set about finding his packhorse. “Most people couldn’t conceive of what Mr. Pedersen conceived,” recalled Berry. “See, he saw that he wouldn’t have to put his men in jeopardy there and a horse would be able to carry more rounds a lot faster, and that was his whole idea.”8
A “Can Do” Packhorse
October 26, 1952, seemed like a perfectly ordinary Sunday. That afternoon at New York’s 46th Street Theatre, a rotund man in a funny suit stepped onstage and, playing a comic gambler named Nicely-Nicely, belted out a tune he’d performed about six hundred times in two years. The performer was Stubby Kaye, the show was the Tony-winning Guys and Dolls and the song was “Fugue for Tinhorns.” Audiences knew it better by its bouncy lyrics:
I got the horse right here
The name is Paul Revere
And here’s a guy that says that the weather’s clear
Can do, can do, this guy says the horse can do
If he says the horse can do, can do, can do
Nearly seven thousand miles away, U.S. Marine Lt. Eric Pedersen was also looking for a “can do” horse. But unlike Damon Runyon’s fictional Nicely, Pedersen couldn’t afford to gamble on just any horse; the lieutenant knew he needed exactly the right animal.
Corporal Philip Carter drove Pedersen and Scout Sergeant Ray Berry into Seoul, with the borrowed one-ton trailer hitched to their jeep. “We had the trailer all rigged up,” explained Berry. “We put side stakes up so the horse wouldn’t fall over the top of it, because it was kind of shallow.”9
They were looking for a “can-do” horse that could haul ammunition for the Marines over tough terrain and possibly through enemy fire.
According to an October 28, 1952, letter received by Lieutenant J. C. McCamic from J. H. Rinyak while in Korea, the three men stopped at the camp of the 7th Marines to advise them of their plans to buy a horse. “A buddy of mine, Sgt. Berry . . . and Lt. Pedersen of AT CO, 5th Marines, just stopped off back here on their way to Seoul to purchase either a horse, pony or mule for use as a packhorse for carrying the 75 MM Rifle thru rice paddies and other obstacles. The idea sounds good. Because I’m very much interested, Sgt. Berry has promised to let me know the results of their experience.
“Lt. Pedersen mentioned that he spoke to you of the idea and I was just wondering what you thought of it; I’m interested in hearing all the pros & cons on the subject.”10
Lt. McCamic didn’t have a copy of his reply, but he did remember taking it up with his platoon, and “there was some laughter and such questions as: ‘Are we going to get six horses—one for each squad or just one up for grabs? Who is going to take care of the animal? Who will feed it, curry it, wash it down, see to its hooves etc., etc.?’ Then some real in-company humor—let Sgt. Moyers (company scrounger and sometimes forward observer) or Cpl. Nau (company jeep driver) do it. Since . . . the rice paddies were not in use and were dry, we concluded it was not worth the trouble of getting the horse, our weapons carriers could continue doing their good job.”11
The three Marines then made their way to the headquarters of the Army Purchasing Mission. While they found no horses or mules for sale there, the lieutenant in charge suggested they try the racetrack, just on the other side of town. According to Berry, they picked up an interpreter at the PX who would help them negotiate the sale before leaving for the racetrack.12
Kim and Choi had just given Flame a rubdown and feed after finishing an exhilarating run on the overgrown, weedy track, when Pedersen, Carter, Berry, and the interpreter approached and told them they need a horse to carry ammunition. Choi understood English, and the interpreter translated for Kim, whose first instinct was to hide Flame, who was in her stall. But it was too late; Choi was already leading the Americans to the horses in their stalls; Pedersen had said he was willing to pay for a horse in American cash.
Eric Pedersen loved horses. He’d spent most of his life around them, having grown up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Prescott, Arizona. The lieutenant had a good eye for equines and knew instinctively the traits required for the unusual job he had in mind. In the first stall, Pedersen saw a thin, straggly horse with scabs from harness sores. The next three horses were in better shape—but not what he was looking for. The last horse he saw, the fifth horse, was the ticket. Here was a well-groomed filly that possessed “an intelligent eye and fine head.” She reminded him of a horse he had as a boy in Arizona—only this one, he soon realized, was much more impressive.
The American approached the horse and put out his hand. To his surprise, Flame wasn’t afraid. In fact, she began moving toward him. Pedersen checked her teeth for any problems, then asked the horse’s age. Choi told him four years, three months.
Pedersen thought he had his horse; now it was all a matter of price. When the Marine lieutenant asked how much, Choi responded with a question of his own: how much was he was willing to pay? Pedersen held up a forefinger and bent it. “One-hundred-and-fifty dollars.”
Choi was insulted and said so. He called Flame “the best horse in Chosin” and gave him an angry lecture on the horse’s fine blood lines and history. Pedersen didn’t haggle. “Pete said, ‘Look, I’ve got limited funds, this is all I’ll pay,”13 recalled Berry. Pedersen declared that $250 was his final offer. That figure was more to Choi’s liking. Kim was sickened at the thought of losing Flame; he wanted the men to leave. But when Choi told him the American would pay 250 American dollars for Flame, Kim could barely speak. He finally managed to choke out
a question: “Will that buy a leg for Chung?”
Yes, said Choi, $250 would buy a beautiful leg for Chung Soon. Kim agreed to the sale, but asked to be alone with Flame to say goodbye.
Kim stepped inside the stall and closed the door. Flame pushed her head into his chest as he held her close, one last time. He fought back tears. He helped load his beloved horse into the trailer, watched as she was driven away, then walked into Flame’s empty stall and collapsed in tears.14
CHAPTER 3
FROM FLAME TO RECKLESS
Everybody wondered what the hell was a horse doing here and we soon found out.
—Sergeant Chuck Batherson, Anti-Tank Company, 5th Marines
In just a few hours, Flame had left her old life behind and, as Reckless, began a new one.
“As we drove into camp the MPs said, ‘What are you going to do, eat that horse?’ They couldn’t figure out what we were doing with a horse,” Sergeant Ray Berry recalled. “They thought we were going to take it back and eat it!”1
Sergeant Chuck Batherson was playing softball when the platoon’s newest recruit arrived and the men erupted in cheers. “Everybody wondered what the hell was a horse doing here and we soon found out. To this day, I can see them pulling into camp.”2
“When we saw he had bought a horse, I think we all just kinda wondered if he [Pedersen] was okay,” recalled Sgt. Ralph Sherman, one of the gun crew leaders of the platoon, “because we couldn’t imagine how that would fit in with whatever we were doing. But then of course, as he explained the purpose behind it, to allow the horse to carry ammunition and how it could carry much more and much faster than we could, all that made a lot of sense.”3
