Big Push

Early last week the Communists unleashed a relatively large-scale attack on the northeastern port city of Pohang.

Pohang held, but only after U.S. units from other sectors had been moved up to support the underarmed South Korean defenders. Three days later, North Korean Marshal Ch'oe Yong Gun opened up on the southern and western fronts with everything he had; he had a lot.

Communist artillery on the southern front opened fire just before midnight Thursday. First the Reds fired at ten-minute intervals, then six, then three, then one. By 2 a.m. the Communist artillerymen were laying in a shell every five seconds. U.S. field commanders watched in amazement. For the first time in the Korean war, the Communists were using the textbook tactics that call for a massed, synchronized artillery barrage to precede an infantry assault.

Big Punch. Shortly after 2 a.m., the Reds struck out for the battered little U.S.-held town of Haman, 35 miles west of Pusan (see map). To the north, another Red assault force blasted its way across the Naktong River in an attempt to cut the Taegu-Pusan railway. At 4 a.m. a third major Red attack headed down the Naktong valley for Pusan itself. By dawn the Communists had thrown more than 40,000 men into action, along a front that stretched from Haman in the south to within twelve miles of Taegu in the north.

During the first few hours. Communist spearheads cut the U.N. forces' defense lines at 17 points. Some U.S. units were overpowered in the moonlight before they had time to recover from the Reds' pre-attack artillery barrage, which carried a big punch.

The Reds' heaviest blows hit the U.S. 2nd and 25th Divisions along the line from Masan to Changnyong. Near Masan the Communists advanced nearly two miles into 25th Division defenses. The G.I.s fought back desperately with rifles, grenades, knives and fists, in some of the bitterest hand-to-hand fighting of the war. By midmorning of the first day, the U.S.-held town of Haman, near Masan, was surrounded. One cut-off unit radioed back: "We have no ammunition left, but we have fixed bayonets . . ."

All along the front, U.S. and South Korean troops gave ground. Two Red battalions crossed the Naktong at Tuksong, twelve miles southwest of Taegu. Near Changnyong two more enemy battalions crossed the river at three points, and advanced for more than a mile before heavy U.S. fire forced them to dig in. South of Changnyong the Reds made their deepest penetration, pushed a full ten miles east toward Yongsan.

Blast from the Air. On the second day, every United Nations plane that could fly was ordered into the air to blast the advancing Reds. On the ground the U.N. troops gradually stiffened against the seemingly endless waves of Communist infantrymen. On a hill near Haman, U.S. infantrymen watched happily as whistling F80 jets and shark-nosed F51 Mustangs passed over them to spray Communist positions with rockets and machine guns. "The Air Force is what's beating hell out of 'em," gasped one G.I. A grimy BAR man wheeled and growled: "And what do you think we're doing?"

As the U.N. forces began to hold, their commanders ordered a series of daring, small-scale counterattacks, to rescue units cut off in the first phase of the Red assault. Near Masan, a counterattacking rescue battalion smashed through heavy North Korean forces to save the remnants of a unit whose steadfast refusal to yield a razorback ridge near Soehon played a major part in stalling the Reds' southern drive. The ridge was a key position controlling the broad valley of the Nam River down to its junction with the Naktong.

When the rescuers arrived, they found only twelve men still able to fight. The unit had been cut off for 38 hours, had lost all of its officers during the numberless Red attacks.

One of the unit's heroes was a Japanese-American corporal named Hideo Hashimoto, who had spent World War II in a Japanese internment camp in the U.S. Hashimoto, a right-handed pitcher for his regimental baseball team, had crept out on the edge of the ridge, hurled grenade after grenade with deadly accuracy at the advancing Reds. In one attack, Hashimoto was throwing grenades at Red troops less than 20 yards away. When he ran out of grenades, Hashimoto pitched rocks.

This week, two tank-led enemy columns sliced through South Korean defenses in the northeast, threatened to outflank both Taegu and Pohang. But in the southwest, counterattacking G.I.s of the 25th Division had driven back to their old positions west of Haman and Masan. The big push was checked.

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