This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War by T. R. Fehrenbach

Author:T. R. Fehrenbach
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

22

Changjin Reservoir

Easy Company holds here!

— Captain Walter Phillips, commanding E Company,

7th Marines, on a hill above Yudam-ni.

THREE DAYS after Walton Walker’s Eighth Army found the hostiles along the Ch’ongch’on, X Corps met a Chinese buzzsaw in the east. Here again occurred some of the most savage actions in the long history of land warfare. In many respects, the fighting in the east resembled that in the west—U.N. forces were flanked, some brought to battle while others remained unscathed, and the whole position rendered untenable.

But there were differences, too.

While Eighth Army attacked on a broad front, Almond’s X Corps advanced north in four main columns. On the eastern side of Korea there were no relatively flat valleys, only deep and tortuous corridors fingering their way through bare and brutal mountains. The roads—such as there were—were dirt. In many places the arteries of communication were only cliff-hanging trails leading along the mountainsides.

Because of the terrain, contact even between the various units of X Corps was fragile. On the left, trying to close the gap with Eighth Army, advanced the American 3rd Division. Above them, the 1st Marine Division marched northwest, toward the Changjin Reservoir. The U.S. 7th Division, east of the reservoir, went straight north for the Yalu. On the far right, the ROK I Corps of two divisions moved along the coast.

It was not a steady line advancing across the savage reaches, but rather four separate fingers thrusting upward into the narrow mountain corridors. The progress made during November by each column varied greatly.

Attacking against crumbling remnants of the NKPA, the ROK Corps galloped freely toward the maritime province of Siberia. In the ROK zone no Chinese ever appeared.

The 7th Division, on the ROK’s left, met scattered opposition. By 21 November Powell’s 17th RCT of that division reached Hyesanjin on the Yalu. The village’s connecting bridges with Manchuria had been shattered by U.N. Air, and it was a ghost town. The wattle huts were deserted, and cold cattle, abandoned, lowed in misery in the frozen fields.

The Marines, marching northwest from Hungnam toward the Changjin Reservoir, met Chinese in force first week of November. But these Chinese, part of Lin Piao’s First Phase Offensive, were defeated in sharp fighting, and pushed back. By 8 November they too had melted into the looming mountains to the north. But General Oliver Smith, of the Marine Division, and his regimental commanders, Litzenberg, Murray, and Puller, were now highly dubious of what might lie ahead of them in the mysterious north.

Deliberately, the Marines slowed their advance, even though Ned Almond fretted at their lack of progress. The Marines felt that, strung out as they must be in such terrain, a pellmell rush to the Yalu was highly dangerous. The whole Corps plan of maneuver was ill advised, if more than broken, remnants of the NKPA faced it.

But, like Walker, Almond had his orders from Tokyo: push on, and end the campaign. Under Almond’s prodding X Corps, including the reluctant, exposed Marines, pushed on.

North from the Korean

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