Combat Reckoning, page 8
part #2 of Jock Miles-Moon Brothers Korean War Story Series
But it won’t be near as good a trap as we had along the railroad.
Each of his five tanks had taken a firing position on a different street, tucked into an alley or behind a building. Ramsay couldn’t see any of the other Pershings from his location, and none were able to accurately report where they’d set up because their maps were next to useless. Hastily drawn and badly translated into English, they had only vague similarities to this place. Many of the streets shown weren’t named; those that were, the Americans found difficult, if not impossible, to pronounce.
It might’ve looked like this once, but it sure doesn’t now, Ramsay fumed. And this is just some little village on the outskirts of Seoul. What the hell’s going to happen when we try to go into the city itself? It’ll be even more confusing. How are we going to navigate and maintain control then?
Not with maps like this, that’s for damn sure.
People will get lost. And when you’re lost, you fuck up.
No sooner had the last of his tanks reported in position than the T-34s appeared in the distance out of their own dust cloud, back in the column formation that should’ve made them easy pickings along the railroad embankment…
Until some Army pinhead screwed it all up.
“Let them get close,” Ramsay radioed to his platoon. “Don’t waste rounds.”
Hopefully, his tanks were spread out enough that they’d have good shots at several of the T-34s simultaneously, before this less-than-perfect ambush degenerated into a close-quarters gunfight.
The Korean tanks were still six hundred yards away when Ramsay’s radio came alive: Magic Flight—four Corsairs of the Marine Air Wing—had finally arrived on station. “Booklet One-Six, this is Magic,” the flight leader called to Ramsay. “Confirm your target is the tank column on the east-west road roughly two thousand yards south of the river.”
Before he could reply, everything went terribly wrong; the Korean tanks were drawing too close to his Marines.
It’s like watching a movie, but the film suddenly speeds up on you.
The lead T-34 came to a halt, its main gun traversing, pointing toward them like a finger of death.
One of my tanks is in her sights…
But a Pershing fired first, striking the enemy tank low in the front right quarter. There was a moment of ominous stillness…
And then the T-34 exploded viciously, her turret popping off and spinning through the air while flames shot from every opening in her hull.
The fight was on. Korean tanks broke from the column and raced toward the Pershings. Whether or not they could actually see the American vehicles yet didn’t matter; the enemy was too close for the Marines to play hide and seek anymore. To not engage them immediately was asking to be killed.
Two of the T-34s met the same fate as their leader, shot at close range through their thinner side armor.
There was so much shouting on the radio, it was impossible to make sense of it. But Ramsay was sure of one thing: the time to stand in place and fire had passed. His tanks needed to maneuver or the Koreans, with their greater numbers, would work their way behind them.
Within seconds, the fight became a swirling melee, a jousting match of steel behemoths, each crew knowing full well that one misjudgment, one ill-considered pivot, would spell their death.
At ranges of fifty yards or less, any shot could be a killing shot. You didn’t even have to be stationary to fire accurately; your adversary was too close to miss.
The Pershings scored easily, their 90-millimeter guns tearing through three T-34s at near point-blank ranges.
But Booklet Two made that fatal mistake, pivoting hard to get on a T-34’s tail, only to expose her own stern to another Korean tank. She was struck in the engine compartment and was burning in a matter of moments. Her crew escaped through the bottom hatches and ran for their lives toward the village, escaping her detonation by mere seconds.
In the sheer panic of the close engagement, Ramsay forgot all about the aircraft overhead. With the audio from multiple radios in his headphones, he didn’t even hear their repeated calls through the solid wall of terrified voices. None of the other Pershings could hear the transmissions, either, because the platoon leader’s tank was the only one equipped with a radio that shared common frequencies with the planes.
The pilots had no trouble picking out the T-34s still backed up on the road, either unable or unwilling to enter the fight ahead. The Corsairs picked off three of them, expending half their rockets in the process. Then they turned their attention to the battle raging on the outskirts of the village.
From the air, it was hard to tell who was who on the ground below; they could see the tanks only through a veil of smoke and dust. But Magic Leader could see one tank fairly well; it was turning in a tight circle, its turret moving, as if preparing to fire.
He was sure it was a T-34.
It has to be. She’s too far east to be anything else.
There were only a few seconds to engage the tank; if he hesitated, he’d overshoot, and a Marine tank would be lost to a Korean gun.
Stomping the rudder pedal, he slewed the nose of his ship hard right, putting the tank into the gunsight’s crosshairs. He was closer than he should’ve been, but he didn’t care:
The closer you are, the harder it is to miss.
He let a sheaf of four rockets fly.
Two struck the tank. She blew up right in front of him, the explosion a transfixing burst of fury that made him wonder what right he had to unleash such power.
Chunks of steel were flying through the air, striking his aircraft like flak, wounding her mortally.
Within two minutes, Magic Leader had crash-landed less than a mile from Kimpo Airfield, within walking distance of a Marine artillery battery. The pilot didn’t receive so much as a scratch.
Later that day, he’d learn that the tank he’d destroyed—whose crew he’d killed to a man—was a Pershing. Yellow fragments from the rockets’ casings were scattered throughout her wreckage, leaving no doubt.
Chapter Seven
The best laid plans…
Tommy Moon anxiously watched his fuel gauge as he flew another orbit over the marshy fork in the Han River, six miles southeast of Seoul. If they’d been on schedule, the flight of four F-84s he was leading—Padlock Flight—would have been on their way back to Itazuke Airfield on Kyushu eight minutes ago. Instead, they were holding in a sky crowded with American airplanes: transports tasked with keeping the Inchon force supplied and the fighter-bombers escorting them.
And in a few more minutes—whether we drop these bombs or not—we will be on our way back to Itazuke. We’re nearly at minimum fuel.
At the preflight briefing, he’d worried that the time coordination for this mission had been too tight. There was just so much American traffic in the air around Seoul and Kimpo Airfield, ten miles to its west. Fitting each flight into a rigid time slot was wishful thinking, at best. The slightest glitch in execution could create a traffic jam in the sky.
And right now, a glitch was doing exactly that. Passing beneath Tommy’s circling flight was a conga line of transport aircraft descending toward Kimpo Airfield, aerial tankers loaded with gasoline for X Corps as it fought its way into Seoul. The transports were well behind schedule. Their flight path blocked Padlock Flight’s approach to its target, a suspected KPA marshalling area near the village of P’oi-dong, where no less than six roads intersected. There was only one safe way in for the fighter-bombers; every other direction was hampered by mountains, some of their tops shrouded in patchy clouds.
That’s all we’d need, Tommy thought, smacking into some “hardcore cumulus.” A couple of F-80s flew right into a mountaintop hidden by clouds just the other day, the poor bastards.
The transports should have been on the ground at Kimpo a long time ago. Their departure from Japan was delayed by almost two hours; problems with the ground equipment pumping the payload of gasoline into their cabins’ jury-rigged storage tanks had been the cause.
The flight into Kimpo was dangerous enough, even when you weren’t a flying gas tank; all but the last few minutes were over enemy-held territory. A path of least resistance had been established over the more mountainous terrain, avoiding level ground where the Koreans could easily deploy anti-aircraft artillery. Diverting from that authorized flight path was forbidden.
No pilot in his right mind would consider diverting from it, anyway. So the right minds of the transport pilots had no choice but to fly their tardy parade directly through Padlock Flight’s time slot, blocking their approach to the target.
Watching the procession of transports file past thousands of feet below him, Tommy couldn’t help but feel he was watching a futile effort:
I remember how difficult it was to keep the Allied forces in Europe supplied with fuel. There was a constant stream of ships bringing fuel to England and France, which fed it to thousands of tanker trucks, railroad cars, even Jerry cans and fifty-five-gallon drums—any way to get the gas to the front lines. Hell, in the last months of that war, we even built pipelines to bring the stuff through France and Germany…
And it was never enough. They brought us millions of gallons of fuel, but we were always on the verge of running dry. Yeah, we used airplanes to transport gas in emergencies, too, but they could never supply more than a drop in the bucket. They just can’t carry very much.
Here at Seoul, it sure looks like these tanker planes are the only game in town. Even if they could park ships off Inchon, there’s no quick way to get their cargo of bulk fuel onshore. Not yet, anyway.
So we’re depending on airplanes.
And just like in Europe, it’ll never be enough. If you put the loads of all those transports below us together, they wouldn’t keep an armored battalion rolling for more than a few hours.
The brass tell us that Tenth Corps is going to seal off South Korea so the KPA can’t escape back into North Korea. I don’t think there’s a prayer in hell that they’ll be able to move far enough across the peninsula to do that.
They won’t have the gas.
The last of the transport planes was passing below now, a C-54 reflecting brilliant glints of midday sunlight off its silver wings. Tommy checked the clock on the instrument panel. Then he checked the fuel gauge.
We can still make this bomb run happen if we start right now.
Leading Padlock Flight in a steep descent, he took one last look down at the trailing C-54. She was still shimmering in the sunlight…
But the shimmering suddenly became a rapid series of bright, white-hot flashes. Those flashes quickly dissolved to a tight ball of dense black smoke shedding orange streamers, each a flaming fragment of what used to be an airplane.
The other ships in his flight saw her explode, too.
His voice nearly a shriek, Padlock Three asked, “What the hell just happened? Did flak get her?”
Tommy had been watching the transports too long to believe that. There had been no puffs of flak visible, no tracers from heavy-caliber triple-A, no shouts of warning from the transport pilots; just a grim acknowledgment over the radio that Firebird Two-Six was gone.
Firebird…that was a pretty ominous choice of call sign, too, Tommy thought. Might as well have called them Fire Trap.
He was sure of what had happened; he’d seen it before:
I saw a B-24 lugging fuel blow up just like that once. One second it was flying along, minding its own business. The next it was vaporized.
Tankering fuel can be a real dangerous business. It doesn’t take much to do you in when you’ve got a cabin full of gasoline. A leak, an arc from a bad connection, an overheating pump—that’s all it takes to light her off.
He told his flight, “Negative on the flak, boys. She blew herself up, plain and simple. A spark must’ve done it, just like the Hindenburg. Just plain ol’ bad luck.”
Shaking off the horror of what they’d just witnessed, the pilots of Padlock Flight streaked down on the marshalling area. From 10,000 feet the target zone had looked innocuous, but as they dove closer, a beehive of activity materialized before their eyes. Seconds from bomb release, streams of tracers rose to meet the F-84s.
Climbing away after the drop, Tommy breathed a sigh of relief as each pilot reported that he’d emerged from the gauntlet of triple-A with no apparent damage.
*****
In just ten days, 26th Regiment had advanced over eighty miles north, more than halfway to the 38th Parallel, the dividing line between North and South Korea. The withered KPA facing the 26th hadn’t yet had the opportunity to stop and mount any semblance of a delaying action; the Americans, their infantry fully motorized and led by a battalion of armor, were hitting them too hard and pushing them too fast for the North Koreans to do anything but run.
But Jock suspected that might change as his regiment approached the South Korean city of Cheongju, which had been virtually demolished during the Americans’ headlong retreat to the Pusan Perimeter just two months ago. He told his assembled staff, “Aerial recon indicates Cheongju is being defended by KPA units from the north, with armor, who’ll reinforce the Koreans we’re pushing into the city from the south. Just looking at the map tells us we’re not going to be able to bypass the place. To the west is nothing but swamp and marsh, and there are the hills to the east, so our armor can’t do anything but stay on the road and drive straight into the rubble of the city.”
Sean Moon raised his hand. “I’m not so sure we can’t go around it to the east, sir. Yeah, it’s hilly—and our Pershings ain’t worth a damn in the hills—but with our latest additions, we’ve got enough Zippos on hand now to—”
Jock stopped him to ask, “Zippos, Sergeant?”
“Yeah, sir…Zippos are what we GIs called Shermans back in Europe. The Limeys had a nickname for ’em, too. They called ’em Ronsons.”
“After the cigarette lighters?”
“That’s right, sir. You know the expression…they light first time, every time?”
No one in the CP van needed to hear any more. They all understood the fiery analogy completely.
Sean continued, “I think we can get the Zippos through the hills and behind the gooks in the city at night as long as we distract them with an artillery barrage. Make it as noisy as we can. Then, when the sun comes up, we hit ’em from both ends.”
Jock said, “Work it up on paper. Let me see what it’ll look like. You’ve got ten minutes.”
Patchett had one question. “I’m guessing you want to hit Cheongju at first light tomorrow, sir?”
“Affirmative, Top.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t jump off until a couple hours after sunup so we can move another battalion up on line, too? We’re kinda strung out on this highway, and it’ll be too dark soon to do it tonight.”
Jock shook his head. “You saw the same messages from Division that I did, Top. They’re breaking my chops to go tonight. They’re in a big rush to get to the Thirty-Eighth Parallel so Tenth Corps doesn’t get all the glory. But they can go to hell if they think we’re going to launch an urban assault in the dark, so we’ll go at first light—one battalion up, two back—with a possible envelopment by the Shermans on the back side of the city.”
“As you wish, sir,” Patchett replied.
*****
On paper, it looked like a good plan. The Shermans only needed to travel five miles through the hills to get behind the KPA strongpoint at Cheongju. It would take the two tank platoons—a total of ten vehicles—a few hours to make the trip in the dark, moving in slow single file over narrow, rocky trails made for oxcarts rather than armored vehicles. “My recon boys have already been over the route,” Patchett said. “It’s a little steep in spots, but the trail’s wide enough to handle the Shermans. Once they’re behind Hill Three-Four-Niner, nobody’ll be able to see them from the city. And we know the gooks ain’t got no OP on that hill because Recon’s already been up there.”
Jock liked what he saw, but he needed a few issues ironed out first. “All the dozer and flamethrower tanks will be among those ten Shermans, won’t they?”
“Affirmative, sir,” Sean replied.
“Do you think it’s a good idea to have all that versatility on the far side of the battle, Sergeant?”
“I don’t think that’s the issue, sir,” Sean replied. “The way I see it, we need to put as many tanks on their back door as we can, because we ain’t sure just how many they got. I kinda doubt it’ll be more than a dozen or so, but…”
“Okay, I see your point,” Jock replied. “I’m adding one more condition to this plan, though. I want a minesweeping team to go ahead of the tanks. The KPA’s had more than enough time to lay some mines…and maybe some gook is thinking the same way we are about how to encircle them.”
Sean checked his watch. “If they’re gonna sweep for mines on foot, sir, they’d better leave the minute the sun goes down. Otherwise, we’re gonna run over those guys along the way.”
The engineer officer jumped up and said, “I can have a minesweeping team ready to go within the hour, sir.”
“Good,” Jock replied. “Let’s do this.”
As the staff dispersed, Patchett remained at the big map, studying it intently. Jock asked him, “Something on your mind, Top?”
“I was just doing a little figuring, sir. If we keep moving like we been, we’re gonna be at the Thirty-Eighth Parallel in about two weeks, give or take a day or two.”
“Yeah, I agree, Top. So?”
“This Tenth Corps…from what we’re hearing through the grapevine, they ain’t even got all of Seoul under control yet, irregardless of what the man in Japan says. Where the hell are they gonna be in two weeks’ time? And what KPA units are they planning on cutting off?”
