Second Push Ahead

"The Chinaman has gone north for a while to think it over," said a front-line commander last week. After their massive attack had been broken, the Chinese Reds had not only stopped, but recoiled. Instead of leapfrogging fresh units into the battle, they pulled back out of U.N. artillery range to regroup and catch their breath. It was surprising to some U.N. officers in Korea that the Chinese needed so much time to launch the second surge of their offensive.

The U.N. forces did not sit back and wait for the next blow. They sent out patrols and powerful armored forces to seek out and harry the enemy, disrupt his buildup. In the center, the U.N. forces actually pushed their main line forward several thousand yards, to give the scouting and harassing parties a more favorable advance base.

An Eighth Army officer took pains to deny that the Eighth had assumed the offensive: "This is not a general advance, we're just sparring for an opening."

The first powerful northward thrust of the U.N. forces last week was a tank battalion--45 big Pattons--dispatched toward Uijongbu, eleven miles north of allied-held Seoul. Its stated task: to "seek out and destroy the enemy." Its purpose was, at least in part, to deny the town, almost leveled after ten months of seesaw war, to the Reds as an assembly point and staging base.

Lieut. Colonel Wilson Hawkins of Pascagoula, Miss., commanded the battalion from a grasshopper observation plane skimming overhead. The Pattons, each with a snarling tiger painted on the front, rumbled north out of a dry riverbed. Just short of Uijongbu, the column ran into trouble. Trying to bypass a tank trap, one Patton bogged down in a marshy field. Two more got stuck trying to pull it out. A fourth hit a mine; there was a deafening blast, a big puff of smoke and a cry over the radio: "Man wounded!"

From nearby hills, the Chinese opened up with rifles, burp guns and mortars. Aided by air strikes and artillery from the rear, the tanks lashed the ridges with their machine guns and 90-mm. cannon. Meanwhile the crews were trying to get out the mired tanks. One came free with a loud, sighing whoosh, and a retriever hauled the mine-damaged tank to the rear.

As dusk approached and the Chinese did not let up, Hawkins from his plane ordered the battalion to strip and abandon the two tanks that were still stuck, and start back. As the column headed south, Chinese jumped out of foxholes and attacked the U.S. armor on foot. Some 30 Chinese were killed.

The next day the mired tanks were retrieved. And the day after, a U.S. armored force pushed into Uijongbu against only light opposition.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.