From its hide in the trees, a T-34 fired its main gun. The round struck the ridge in empty space about thirty yards from where Jock and Sean were crouched.
“That’s the way it’s been the last few minutes,” Jock said. “One of them pops off a round, then you can hear their engines rev as they move around. Mercifully, though, those rounds haven’t done anything but plow up some dirt, so far.”
“Why ain’t we putting some artillery or mortars on those woods, sir? Clean out that gook infantry, at least.”
“We will, Sergeant, just as soon as those tanks present a more immediate threat. Right now, the artillery’s working over that big mass of KPA well out in front of us while the mortars are hitting the ones climbing the slope. Speaking of the slopes, how’d the foo-gas do?”
“Slowed ’em down, sir. Cooked a bunch of ’em in the process, too…” He paused as another salvo of artillery streaked overhead, and then asked, “But how do we know that artillery’s doing any good, sir?”
“Because Patchett’s calling it, that’s how. He’s right on their tail…and he’s going to get priority of fire as long as we can afford it. Every gook we hit in their assembly area is one less we’ll have to deal with right here.”
Sean couldn’t argue with that logic. But one thing still puzzled him: “So they got four or five tanks with infantry support a thousand yards away down in those woods, popping off the occasional round at us. That don’t sound like them…they usually come at you all hell bent for leather. I’m thinking there’s only a few places in those trees where they’ve got decent fields of fire, and that’s fucking them up. In fact, this whole attack of theirs seems a little fucked up, don’t it?”
“Yeah, it does, Sergeant. But fucked up or not, they did manage to get behind us. Again.”
“Wherever they are, sir, I can put some hurt on those tanks if we can sweep the gook infantry off ’em. Do you know where the three point five teams are now?”
“Yeah, they’re just a little bit down this hill.”
“If it’s okay with you, sir, let me take the three point fives. As soon as Major Appling can see his way clear to cut loose a mortar section or two, he can turn those tubes around so they’re firing behind us and—”
“I see where you’re going with this, Sergeant, and it’s a good plan. But we’re still going to wait until I’m sure we’re holding off the main element of this attack. We’re sitting in a five-layer sandwich here, and each battalion of this dispersed regiment is, at the moment, technically surrounded. So we’re going to eliminate the biggest threats first.”
“I understand, sir. But I’d better get the rocket boys gathered up, anyway, just in case them tanks decide to come out of those trees. It wouldn’t take long for their guns to rip First Battalion’s position on these hills to shreds if they massed their fire. Infantry or no infantry, it’s our only chance to stop ’em.”
“Okay, Sergeant, you’ve made your point. Assemble yourself a tank-killer team, but leave several tubes to protect the highway pass, just in case more T-34s come out of the woodwork.”
“Will do, sir.”
*****
Patchett heard them first, the incongruous clatter of small engines overhead. Then he saw them, dark silhouettes creeping across the night sky, visible only because they were backlit by the light of illum rounds reflecting off clouds. He felt as if he’d been propelled back in time; the slow-moving aircraft were biplanes, just like the first aircraft he’d ever seen over the trenches of France in 1918.
Then he remembered that the North Koreans were equipped by the Soviet Union; the biplanes were PO-2s, the same type the Russians had used for night interdiction missions against the Germans in the last war. And now their Korean allies would use these mass-produced anachronisms in the same role against the Americans.
The PO-2s operated only at night. In daylight, the low and slow flyers would be knocked from the sky like clay pigeons. But in the dark, they could sneak up on ground positions, sometimes killing their engines and gliding silently through their bomb run. Then they’d restart those engines and slip away. They couldn’t carry much in the way of a bomb load, and the damage they inflicted was often more psychological than physical.
But they wouldn’t be dropping any bombs here. They were headed south, toward Major Appling’s blocking force.
Patchett interrupted the artillery adjustments he was calling in, switching frequencies momentarily to alert the regiment of the incoming aircraft.
*****
Sergeant Yarbrough was exhausting himself running up and down the hill carrying messages to Colonel Miles on the peak. The commander’s jeep—with all its essential radios—was parked far down the backslope, the only place Yarbrough could find in the darkness that seemed to offer some degree of cover for this critical vehicle. If it was knocked out, the loss to the commander’s communications capability would be crippling.
As he handed the latest message to Jock—the one that said ground attack aircraft would be overhead very shortly—Yarbrough tried to catch his breath. “Sure would be great if I had a runner, sir,” he said, “or at least a field phone link.”
Too busy reading the message to look at his driver, Jock replied, “I hear you, Sergeant, but you know as well as I do there aren’t enough of either to go around at the moment. You know what would be even greater? If we had a company or two of tanks and a few more artillery batteries.”
The last time Yarbrough had run up this hill, the message he’d carried had been from Division. It was basically a warning that 33rd Regiment, the one supposedly in the center of the division line, was crumbling and might be overrun just like 17th Regiment had been.
Jock considered that message a harbinger of disaster:
That would put my regiment in the same position it was last night—an island in the middle of an enemy sea.
Does it even pay to trade lives to hold a few inches of ground around here? You end up withdrawing anyway.
And the artillery reports they’re running low on rounds again. If their fire gets cut off, how many KPA will climb out of their holes and come swarming at us?
What the hell kind of half-assed operation are we running here?
It’s just like 1942 all over again. MacArthur’s underestimating his enemy abilities and overestimating those of his own troops He needs to be taught respect for his adversary all over again.
But the lesson hasn’t gotten through that thick skull of his yet. Not even close, I’m afraid.
I’ll be lucky if I get half my men out of this fiasco alive.
And now another threat was closing in on them. There was so little time to get out the word of the impending air attack. To keep the warning simple and direct, Jock had Yarbrough broadcast this message: “ALL AIRCRAFT HOSTILE. REPEAT, ALL AIRCRAFT HOSTILE.”
Those who actually heard the message scanned the sky futilely. They couldn’t see any aircraft, and the odds of hearing them over the noise of the ongoing battle were slim.
If those pilots are smart, they’re above the burst height of the illum rounds, Jock told himself. We’d never see them then.
That was the trouble; everyone was looking up. The PO-2s were approaching from an altitude below the peaks on which the GIs were positioned, dodging the falling parachute flares, plainly visible now in their light…
If you were looking down.
The first signal the aged biplanes were upon them was when one crashed into the upslope just yards in front of one of Appling’s machine gun crews. With a resounding CRUNCH, it crumbled like a broken kite against the hillside and immediately burst into flames. Burning gasoline from the wreck flowed downhill in narrow rivulets toward the attacking KPA, who ran through them like they weren’t even there. When the fire detonated the four fragmentation bombs the plane carried, the only casualties were North Korean infantrymen.
The rest of the flight barely cleared the top of the hill, continuing southward into the darkness without dropping any bombs.
&nbs
p; Sean had a theory on the PO-2’s erratic arrival: “I think flying into the flares fucked up their night vision. They probably can’t even see this damn hill.”
He’d rounded up one 3.5-inch rocket launcher crew when another problem suddenly presented itself: the T-34s had begun to emerge from their hiding place in the woods. In the shadowy area behind the hill, shielded from the light of the illum rounds, they were forming a staggered, well-spaced line from which to batter Major Appling’s men.
The 3.5 crew was led by PFC Curran, the man who’d loaded for Sean last night while killing the T-34 in the rice paddy. “You’re the honcho now, Curran? What happened to Corporal Dowd?”
Curran shook his head. “He didn’t make it, Sarge.” He motioned toward some ground sheets rolled up like carpets. They could only be shrouds for dead men.
“Shit,” Sean replied. “Too damn bad.” Then he asked, “Are you up for a little more tank hunting?”
“That’s our job, ain’t it?”
Sean had been watching the movement of the T-34s, trying to figure out if they still had infantry covering them or not.
“Too fucking dark down there,” he concluded. “I can’t see shit, so let’s assume the infantry’s there.”
“How are we going to knock out those tanks if there’s infantry all around them, Sarge?”
“Carefully, Curran. Carefully. We’re gonna have to move fast and move a lot. Where’s your lieutenant? We need to take a thirty cal with us.”
He pointed to the ground sheets again. “I don’t think the lieutenant made it, either.”
“So who the hell’s running your platoon, Curran?”
“I’m not real sure, Sarge.”
“Oh, that’s just fucking swell. How about your company commander? Know where he is?”
“Yeah. Follow me.”
*****
The T-34s had been firing round after round at the hilltop for several minutes by the time Sean’s team had moved into position behind the tanks. They now had with them the .30-caliber machine gun crew he’d wanted as well as another 3.5-inch rocket team.
They’d actually made good time getting behind the tanks, encountering no KPA as they moved briskly along the highway. Cutting across open ground, they closed the distance to the closest tank. Then they settled into a ditch for an easy rear-end shot.
“The infantry will be behind and between the tanks,” Sean told his team. “No point of them having anybody in front…they’d probably just get run over in the dark. They’ll be close to the vehicles but not too close. So after we shoot the first one, we’ll cut in front of it and hit the next one with a flank shot. Then we’ll see how long we can keep going down the line before they catch on…and when they do, we run for the hill as fast as we fucking can. Any questions?”
Curran, his eye against the rocket launcher’s sight, had one: “What do you make the range, Sarge?”
“Two-fifty yards.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“Fire when ready, Curran.”
He did. The first tank in the line shuddered, and then a red glow appeared at her hatches. Within seconds, those hatches were venting her internal explosions like a volcano.
In the light of her fire, Sean and his team could see men running, too many to be a tank crew. They weren’t firing, just trying to get away from the burning T-34.
“Let’s move, boys,” Sean said. “Stay low and right on my ass.”
He figured it would take about half a minute to get to the next firing position, one that would lay bare the right flank of the next tank in line. They were halfway there when a strange sound began to fill the air: a buzzing like angry insects.
Sean looked up to see strange winged shapes sweeping low overhead, like valkyrie seeking out the dead of battle.
Then the area around the T-34s erupted in a series of small explosions that more resembled a mortar barrage than a bombing run by aircraft.
It took a second to digest what had just happened: a flight of PO-2s—maybe the same one that had passed over the hill some ten minutes ago, maybe a different one—had bombed its own troops.
Perhaps the burning tank had acted as a beacon for the pilots…
Or they were just disoriented.
Either way, the fragmentation bombs they’d dropped decimated the KPA infantry around the tanks. The tanks had stopped firing at the hill as if they, too, were trying to sort it all out.
But Sean thought he knew what had happened: the tank commanders, exposed in their open hatches, had also fallen victim to the bombs. Their crews were now leaderless and confused.
His team killed two more tanks before the last two T-34s pivoted hard left to make their escape, spraying machine gun fire wildly into the night.
It was a risky maneuver, which exposed their flanks and rear ends to the 3.5-inch rocketeers.
Both tanks quickly met the same fate as their sisters.
Chapter Fourteen
Jock wasn’t surprised in the least when, just before dawn, his regiment was ordered to pull back into the city of Taejon. There was little point in continuing to hold their blocking position; the two other regiments of the division had already fled into the city during the night’s fighting, leaving Jock’s 26th Regiment with no one covering its left flank and the dubious protection of a ROK division on its right. There’d been no contact with that ROK division. For all anyone knew, it was nothing but a little flag on the general’s map table.
Sean Moon summarized everyone’s feelings on the tactical situation: “If the ROKs are covering you, you’re as good as surrounded.”
Patchett’s recon patrol of the past night had scored a double success. Not only did the artillery fire they’d directed disrupt the attack of the KPA forces, but the pockets of the North Korean officer he’d killed had yielded a gold mine of intelligence. Around 0400, once the North Korean formations he’d been tracking withdrew back across the Kum River, he’d come directly to the regimental CP with the captured documents.
The ROK interpreters had no doubt that the man Patchett had killed was at least a regimental commander, perhaps even a division commander. That would explain the quality and quantity of the documents he’d carried. Far and away, the most important piece of intel gleaned from those documents were the locations of the KPA forward supply hubs, the places from which all ammunition, fuel, food, and other essential supplies were dispensed. Those locations were in the hands of the Air Force before sunrise.
When Jock arrived at the Taejon railroad station, the division commander was incredibly upbeat. He couldn’t imagine why.
“General MacArthur is very pleased with what this division achieved last night,” Keane said.
“I don’t understand that, sir,” Jock replied. “Two of its regiments folded and ran. Our casualty rate is unsustainable. We’re practically out of ammunition again. My men are exhausted from two straight nights of combat.”
“There you go with that negativity again, Miles. The Seventeenth and Thirty-Third Regiments had a rough go of it last night, but they’re regrouping in this city as we speak. Don’t confuse a successful retrograde operation with a rout.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but I believe I’m being objective, not negative. Call last night’s action what you will, but whatever respite we gained is only temporary. Even in the unlikely event that the Air Force wipes every last one of those KPA supply depots off the face of the Earth, they’ll build them right back up and continue pushing us back. Sooner rather than later, too.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Colonel,” Keane said. “We’ve gained critical time. All we’ve got to do is keep it up a little longer so the Pusan buildup can take effect.”
“With all due respect, sir, we’ve bought ourselves a day, at best. They’re prepared for this fight. We’re not.”
Jock had drifted toward the map table. Something on it didn’t look right to him. When he got closer, he saw the problem clearly.
“General, you don’t really expect to
mount an urban defense in this city, do you? Our troops can’t even fight effectively in advantageous terrain, yet you expect them to fight house-to-house? They don’t have the combat discipline for chaos like that.”
Keane seemed startled by the question. “What choice do we have, Colonel?”
“There’s nothing within the city itself worth dying for, sir. For openers, it’s a firetrap made entirely of wood. If we take up fixed positions, we can be easily burned out of them. To make it worse, they’ve got tanks. We don’t. Their infantry will be protected behind those tanks while they function as both direct-fire artillery and bulldozers. Our soldiers will be cowering behind tissue paper walls.”
“But the main highway and rail line to Pusan run right through it,” Keane protested. “We must keep them out of the North Koreans’ hands. We can defend them both at the same time if we hold this city.”
“It would only take a properly emplaced battalion to block the highway anywhere you choose, sir. Same with the rail line. It doesn’t have to be in the city itself. The only other thing critical to us in Taejon right now is the airfield. We need to keep that open as long as we can. That’s the only fast, efficient way we’re going to get resupplied. Short as we are on everything, if we don’t give priority to the airfield, a platoon of Boy Scouts on bicycles could drive us out of here.”
General Keane was unmoved. He fiddled with some of the markers on the map and then said, “Our orders are to conduct a delaying action here at Taejon, Colonel, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. As far as the airfield you’re so worried about, several ROK battalions are already assigned to its defense.”
“Then may I make one suggestion, sir?”
“Shoot, Colonel.”
“Let’s beg the Air Force to fly in every last crate of ammunition they can today, because by tomorrow the airfield will be out of our hands.”
“What’s the matter, Colonel Miles? Don’t you have any faith in our allies?”
“Afraid not, sir. As a matter of fact, the only ROKs I’ve seen in Taejon are mobbing this railroad station, looking to jump on any train headed south.”
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