Combat Reckoning, page 5
part #2 of Jock Miles-Moon Brothers Korean War Story Series
“That’s easy, sir…when you’ve got no choice but to engage a T-34 head-on.”
*****
The sun had been down only a matter of minutes when the North Koreans launched a probing attack on 2nd Battalion’s sector.
“The gooks are a little early tonight,” Patchett said, gazing down from the hilltop CP toward the Naktong River. Tracers of several colors bounced crazily into the darkening sky.
Jock asked him, “Is Second Battalion calling for artillery?”
“Negative, sir, not yet. But they’re turning their mortars loose on the likely river crossing sites. Should splash any second now.”
No sooner had the words been spoken than those mortar rounds impacted in the blackening void where the Naktong flowed. Their brief but brilliant pinpoints of light were clearly visible from the high ground of the CP, even though the explosions were over a mile away.
A field telephone to one ear, Patchett announced to the CP’s staff, “Second Battalion reports little in the way of actual contact. No known casualties yet. They got two prisoners.”
Jock asked, “Any report of vehicles?”
“Negative, sir. Nothing yet.”
“As probes go, this sounds awfully light,” Jock said. “It’s not how the KPA usually operates.”
Patchett asked, “You thinking this could be just a decoy attack, sir?”
“Maybe. Go down and have a look, Top. Let’s not get caught with our drawers down around our ankles.”
“Amen to that, sir.”
*****
Patchett and his radioman proceeded on foot to the company in contact with the KPA. The company commander wasn’t at his CP, but the first sergeant was, a man actually younger than Patchett’s fifty years but who looked a decade older. He directed them to 3rd Platoon, which was dealing with the brunt of the KPA intruders.
“That’s where the lieutenant is,” the first sergeant told them. “We might have ourselves a little problem over there.”
Patchett asked, “What kind of problem, Bob?”
“Not real sure yet, Patch. All I know is the lieutenant’s looking into it.”
They’d heard nothing but sporadic small arms fire during their entire descent down the hill. Now, as they approached where the platoon’s defensive positions near the river should be, the gunfire stopped.
They found a makeshift bunker—a long trench with overhead cover constructed of wood from ammo crates, haphazardly camouflaged with cut branches. But there were no GIs in it.
Even though they couldn’t see the Naktong through the darkness, they could hear its burbling waters. The bunker commanded a long, flat stretch of ground, with excellent fields of fire all along the riverbank. An experienced infantryman like Patchett could tell—even without being able to see much of anything around him—that this piece of terrain was a critical point in the perimeter that heavily favored the defender. Leaving it unoccupied was throwing away a gift from Mother Nature and inviting disaster with open arms.
An ancient proverb began to run through Patchett’s mind. He didn’t know its origin, but as a young soldier it had been drilled into him by a sergeant chastising his lazy troopers:
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe, a horse was lost.
Then the damn thing rambles on and on, right up the chain of command until the whole damn battle is lost.
And I reckon that’s what we’re looking at here if this hole don’t get plugged right quick.
He pushed a few branches out of his way. “Damn fools. This junk they call camouflage ain’t hiding nothing. It don’t look one little bit natural. Tree branches won’t be growing outta the damn ground.”
There’d been a .30-caliber machine gun in this bunker once; empty ammo boxes for belted ammunition were scattered around the trench. There was even a firing pedestal dug into a corner, with a few cartridges of spent brass beneath it.
But there was no machine gun.
There were wires for a field telephone, but there was no phone.
This don’t smell right.
“Call Second Battalion,” Patchett told his radioman. “Get them to cover this gap right fucking now. You and me will stay here until they do. You see the arc of fire in front of us?”
“Yeah, Sarge.”
“Good. You cover the left half of the arc. I got the right.”
His voice unsteady, the RTO asked, “Just you and me, Sarge? We’re going to cover all this?”
“You don’t see nobody else, do you, son?”
And then they waited, two lone sentries pressed into guarding a mysterious and deadly gap in the Pusan Perimeter.
*****
For an anxious ten minutes, they listened for anything that might give them a clue as to what was going on around them. Every sound of the night, be it the creaking of trees in the breeze or the flutter and shriek of birds returning to the restored serenity, seemed like an approaching army muttering in Korean.
Then they heard a sound that could only be the heavy crunching of a man’s footsteps in the undergrowth.
And then that, too, stopped. It was quickly replaced by the anguished cry, “Ah, fuck!”
Patchett told his RTO, “Stay in the hole. Cover this entire sector until I come back for you.”
“But all I’ve got is this carbine, Sarge!”
“Then use it wisely, son.”
Climbing from the bunker, Patchett crept behind it, to where he felt sure the voice had come from. Now there was another sound to guide him: someone was retching forcefully.
A few steps more and Patchett stumbled over the vomiting man, a GI staff sergeant.
Then he saw why the man was sick to his stomach: the body of a young American officer—a lieutenant—was lying supine on the ground. He’d been disemboweled.
Shit. We must’ve walked right past the poor bastard on the way down here.
“Is this your company commander?” Patchett asked the staff sergeant.
The only reply he could manage was a nod.
“You got people coming to man that bunker over yonder?”
Another nod.
In the glow of his blackout flashlight, Patchett took a good look at the body. The disembowelment didn’t look like it had been caused by shell fragments ripping his abdomen open. It had been done surgically…
With one of them long gook bayonets, by the looks of it.
There were more man-shaped silhouettes on the ground not far away. With the staff sergeant in tow, Patchett set off toward them.
They were four dead GIs, all lying prone, hands bound behind their backs.
Each had been dispatched with a bullet to the back of the head.
Something on the ground reflected a glimmer from his flashlight. Patchett examined it closely in the flashlight’s dim red glow. It was an expended cartridge case.
“From a Jap pistol. Eight-millimeter Nambu, most likely.”
The staff sergeant asked, “How the hell can you tell that, Top?”
“Because I seen these by the bucketful back in New Guinea, the Philippines…you name it. Didn’t we tell you that some of these gooks got Jap weapons? There sure was plenty of their hardware to go around after the occupation and all.”
The dead GIs were all enlisted men. One PFC wore a holster for a .45 pistol, like a machine gunner would. But it was empty.
Patchett asked, “Are these the men supposed to be in that bunker with a thirty cal?”
The staff sergeant looked as closely as his stricken stomach would allow. Then he nodded.
Their .30-caliber machine gun was gone.
The field telephone—the one missing from the bunker, presumably—was here, lying on the ground. It was missing its two batteries.
The queasy staff sergeant managed a question: “Why wouldn’t the gooks take the whole phone, Top?”
“They don’t want the damn phone. Nothing they can do with it. But they do want the e-lectricity inside it. They can sure make use of that.”
Footsteps approached from up the hill. Five GI riflemen materialized out of the darkness. One carried a BAR.
Patchett asked, “You boys taking over that bunker?”
“Affirmative, Top,” a corporal replied.
“You couldn’t scare up another thirty cal?”
The corporal looked startled by the question. “No, Top. Nobody said anything about a thirty cal. Don’t know where we’d get one from, anyway. Every MG is already spoken for. All we were told was to get our asses down here on the double.”
The boy’s probably right about all the machine guns being spoken for, Patchett thought. That magazine-fed BAR don’t have the sustained rate of fire that the belt-fed thirty cal would. But right now, it’s better than nothing, I reckon.
“Well, have at it, boys. Go relieve my RTO and send him back this way. I reckon we got ourselves some gooks wandering around the premises.”
*****
When Patchett and his RTO returned to the company CP, the first sergeant was still its lone occupant.
But he was dead now.
So were all the field phones.
“Get Regiment on that damn radio,” he told the RTO. “Tell ’em we got gooks working their way up the chain of command. I reckon they’re headed for Second Battalion CP.”
“How the hell are they going to find it in the dark, Top?”
“They found this place, didn’t they? Ain’t too hard with all the signposts and commo wire we put down for them to follow. Even a blind pig finds hisself an acorn now and again, son.”
*****
As soon as he got the word from Patchett, Jock was on the landline to Major Harper, 2nd Battalion C.O. When told there were infiltrators within his sector—and they were, in all likelihood, seeking out his CP—Harper immediately asked for illumination rounds over his position to brighten the moonless night. Maybe then they’d have a chance of seeing and stopping the intruders before they did any more damage.
“No, Phil,” Jock replied, “I think there’s a better way. Easier too. We don’t have any moonlight tonight because there’s solid cloud cover. Division Artillery’s got a searchlight company attached now, and they’re looking for something to do. They can bounce their beams off those clouds and light up your position. It’ll look kind of like moonlight.”
“I’ve never done that before, sir,” Harper replied.
“Nothing to it, Phil. Adjust it in like you would artillery.”
*****
Kind of like moonlight.
Major Harper thought of those words as the searchlights snapped on a few minutes later. It did look like moonlight; a little brighter, perhaps, and softer, too, casting a strange but reassuring glow across his position.
Little adjustment was required to put the reflected illumination where he wanted it: a circle with a radius of nearly two hundred yards, centered on his CP.
His XO had a different thought on where the light should be. “Shouldn’t we focus on lighting up the area in front of us, sir?” the XO asked. “Maybe move the beams as far down the slope as we can?”
“You’re thinking the gooks will only come at us head-on, Mike,” Harper replied, “and that can be a very dangerous assumption. You didn’t forget the lessons of this past summer already, did you?”
*****
When the searchlights first came on, the KPA infiltrators—a squad of only six men—were stunned. They had no idea how this moonless and pitch black night could instantly change, seeming now to be lit by hundreds of lanterns casting their pale glow through lenses of smoked glass. It wasn’t like the flares the Americans usually shot into the skies, whose blinding rays painted everything and everyone the same ghostly silver. Even when caught in the open, you could hide beneath those flares by simply not moving.
But this strange new light unnerved them. There would be no hiding in plain sight now. They needed to be back in the darkness but weren’t sure how to get there. The leader—a sergeant—dropped the stretch of commo wire he was using to guide them up the hill, signaled his men to follow him, and started running.
The Korean sergeant couldn’t believe that this simple mission had gone so wrong: The night was our ally, for the Yankee criminals are terrified of the darkness. All my squad had to do was cross the river, find an American command post, and capture an American officer. Something we’ve done a number of times before.
Three other squads made decoy attacks farther down the American line, diverting attention so we could slip through. They did their job well, sounding like a company or more in the confusion of night.
But those first Americans we stumbled across surrendered like frightened schoolboys. That schemer Pang told me they were officers, so it had to be a command post we’d just conquered. We could take them all prisoner—a bonus, four instead of just one—and go back across the river, our mission done.
Then I realized Pang’s deceitful intention: he and his comrades would be back to snoring on their sleeping mats, and I’d be the fool in front of our commander.
I should have shot him on the spot.
To atone, Pang shot all four of the “officers.” Masking the sound of the shots was no problem. Americans all around were firing at ghosts.
And then that lieutenant came. He must have mistook us for his men.
He was so close to me, so imposing…and so startled once he was able to see my face. Even in the darkness, I could see that bar on his collar glistening.
He lunged at me, the brave fool.
I had no choice but to stab him.
But it was Pang who gutted him with that Japanese bayonet he carries.
Still atoning for his deviousness, I suppose.
We found a command post, but there was no officer there, only an old sergeant.
He died squealing like a pig, riddled with bullets from the American machine gun we’d stolen.
But still we hadn’t accomplished our mission.
And now this cursed light…
He wasn’t sure in which direction he and his men were running anymore.
*****
The searchlight company commander was getting nervous. “We’ve had these lights on for nearly fifteen minutes, sir,” he told Jock over the landline. “That’s way too long. Their artillery’s had more than enough time to get a fix on our position.”
“Relax, Lieutenant,” Jock replied. “You’re behind a hill that blocks any sight of you from the KPA side of the river. Even if they could triangulate the base of your light beams—which they can’t see, anyway—their artillery hasn’t exactly been prolific lately. So keep those damn lights on until I tell you otherwise.”
As he put down the phone, a messenger entered the regimental CP.
“Where are you from, Corporal?” Jock asked him.
“Division, sir.” There was a large envelope in his outstretched hand. “Orders from General Bishop, Colonel.”
Stamped on the sealed envelope—in big red letters—were the words URGENT and EYES ONLY.
*****
The KPA infiltrators found the darkness again. In its veil, the mystery of the strange glow in which they’d been bathed was solved. Towering beams of brilliant white light rose into the sky like columns holding up the heavens. Their source was a collection of vehicles arrayed behind the hill the Koreans had just skirted.
What a great victory it would be if we could destroy those beacons, the sergeant thought. Maybe then we can avoid the shame of not capturing an American officer.
Confident in their invisibility once again, the Koreans set out over open terrain toward the searchlight company…
But realized too late that they were walking right past the shadowy outlines of great steel behemoths. The intruders had blundered into a GI tank park.
When challenged for the password, the Koreans replied with a wild burst from the captured .30 caliber. Then they turned and ran.
Only one of them would be spared by the bullets spitting from a Pershing’s machine gun.
*****
On the landline to the regimental CP, Sean Moon told Jock, “We might’ve just iced your gook infiltrators, Colonel. I got five dead ones littering my tank park. Better send the intel boys down here to check ’em over.”
“Let’s hope you got them all, Sergeant,” Jock replied, “but tell Captain Stokely to get the tanks ready to roll. In the middle of all this bullshit, we just got our marching orders. We’re attacking across the Naktong at first light.”
Sean’s reply: “It’s about fucking time, sir.”
*****
They hadn’t gotten them all. One Korean—the devious Pang—made it back to the river. Unable to find even one of the boats they’d used earlier, he swam across.
Chapter Five
It shouldn’t be this easy. Not as screwed up as this plan is.
That’s what Gunnery Sergeant Jim Ramsay, USMC, told himself as his Pershing tank rumbled across Green Beach. It was 0800 on 15 September 1950. The first wave of US Marines—a battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment, augmented by two platoons of Pershings—had landed on Wolmi-do, a small island sitting a few hundred yards offshore from the port city of Inchon, South Korea.
After weeks of speculation, MacArthur’s big thing had finally revealed itself; this was its first phase.
Those Navy gunners must’ve done one hell of a job with the pre-landing prep fires because we’re getting surprisingly little resistance. I don’t think there were very many live gooks left on this stinking little island when our guys hit the beach. They told us on the LST sailing up here from Pusan that those gunners, plus Marine and Navy pilots, have been pounding the shit out of this place for the past two days.
And we haven’t seen a T-34 yet.
On paper, this assault looks like a fucked-up nightmare. Yet it seems to be working so far. Not that I’m complaining.
