Crunching Advance

The Peking radio admitted that Seoul had fallen, but called it a "temporary withdrawal." General Ridgway had been wisely unwilling to accept the casualties of a frontal attack. Instead, he had put a bridgehead across the Han east of the capital. When the bridgehead outflanked the Red defenders, they pulled out.

In the central mountains, the Red rearguards put up more of a fight. When they did pull back, they left behind mines, booby traps, even dummies to man their abandoned positions. Hongchon, Pungam and some other towns fell to Ridgway's careful, crunching advance, which was approaching the important Red base at Chunchon (see map), which the Reds this week were reported to be abandoning. Of the captured towns, the most important was Hongchon, once thought to be the headquarters of the Chinese 39th and 40th armies and probable origin of the Red assaults on Hoengsong last month. TIME Correspondent Tom Lambert cabled this account of Hongchon's fall:

Doffing their parkas in the warm midday sun, marines moved carefully toward the town. On the west, the tanks of the ist Cavalry Division kept pace with and sometimes outsped the leathernecks. The cavalrymen flanked Hongchon on the west, and the marines hauled up for the night a short distance south. The town was quiet.

Next day the marines edged up to the town, which is bisected by the shallow, blue Hongchon River. There was no small-arms fire from the enemy, but at least three Communist field pieces, one far up a valley to the east, had the area under fire. One company of marines was ferried across the shallow river on tanks. While this was going on, the Red guns got down to business.

Twenty to 30 rounds of high-velocity shells whistled over the ford, toward the marines advancing from the south and the ist Cavalry's tankers. A chow line around the ist Cavalry armor abruptly disappeared as the men climbed in and buttoned up. In the marine area the cry for a medical corpsman was heard, and dirt began to fly from entrenching tools.

When the marines seized and cleared Hongchon, they were still under fire from a knob to the north. The regimental commander appraised the situation calmly. "We've got the town," he said. "We control the roads. We'll get that knob."

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