M14 Forum

TampaSsgt · June 12th, 2010, 08:33 PM

I thought some would enjoy this article and photographs, I apologize for its length. Also, if this should be posted elsewhere please move it to the correct location.

Quote:

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/jun...news-breaking/

Veterans of Korea recall painful 'Forgotten War' 60 years later

Quote:

John S. Manly, 80, of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., who was badly wounded in the Korean War, visits a war monument on Wednesday, June 2, 2010, on a 60th war-anniversary veterans' tour of South Korea, at Dabu-Ri, South Korea. Of a friend killed when Manly was wounded, he said, "Isn't a day goes by I don't think about him.'' (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Quote:

Troops of the First U.S. Cavalry Division land ashore at Pohang on the east coast of Korea during the Korean War. This is the first combat amphibious operation since World War II. The war that began in Korea 60 years ago, on June 25, 1950, a ghastly conflict that killed millions and left the peninsula in ruins, became "The Forgotten War" in many American minds. (AP Photo)

Quote:

American GIs fire a 105 Howitzer gun in action against North Korean invaders somewhere in Korea. The war that began in Korea 60 years ago, on June 25, 1950, a ghastly conflict that killed millions and left the peninsula in ruins, became "The Forgotten War" in many American minds. (AP Photo)

Associated Press
Published: June 12, 2010

WAEGWAN, South Korea - The old soldier stood erect on the riverbank, his cane at his side, a baseball cap emblazoned "2nd Infantry Division" square above his brow. He looked out, then turned away from the slow, silty Naktong.

"I've seen this river before," Carroll Garland said. "I don't want to remember. Too many memories."

The war that began in Korea 60 years ago, on June 25, 1950, a ghastly conflict that killed millions and left the peninsula in ruins, became "The Forgotten War" in many American minds.

To a shrinking corps of aging men, however, the soldiers of Korea 1950-53, it can never be forgotten. It damaged many physically, scarred many mentally, and left men questioning their commanders' and their nation's wisdom.

They fought many enemies — not just the North Koreans and Chinese, but also the heat, the killing cold and the cursed hills, the thirst, hunger and filth, the incompetence and hubris of their own army, and the indifference of an American homeland still fixed on the "good" war, World War II, that had ended five years earlier.

Remembering Korea today may be painful, as ex-sergeant Garland, 81, of Oxon Hill, Md., can attest. But when such men get together, the freeze frames of war's horrors and miseries, of lost comrades and paralyzing dread, inevitably emerge in sharp focus.

"At the reunions, they talk about it," said Lucille Macek, 76, wife of Shawnee, Kansas, veteran Victor Macek. "And then they break down."

In a wartime arc of desperation, triumph, retreat and final stalemate in Korea, no U.S. division sacrificed as much as the 2nd Infantry Division, losing more than 7,000 killed, one-fifth of total U.S. dead. And it is the 2nd Infantry Division that still stands guard over South Korea today.

Two days spent with a "2nd ID" group on a 60th-anniversary visit to old battlefields opened a window on the men and events of a lifetime ago, when what happened here, on the Naktong, on the Chungchon River of North Korea, in places like Kunu-ri and Heartbreak Ridge, neglected stories though they may be in today's textbooks, was nothing less than a pivotal turn in 20th-century history, when a cold war grew hot in America's confrontation with communism.

———

"We didn't have enough men," Henry Reed recalled of the division's ordeal on the Naktong.

"There were so many holes in the line, the North Koreans didn't have to try too hard. The enemy would get behind us, and we'd be fighting on all sides. Things were desperate."

It was called the Pusan Perimeter, a southeastern corner of Korea running 85 miles north to south along the Naktong, and 60 miles east to west. Here in mid-1950, in one of the most perilous U.S. military operations ever, outmanned U.S. and South Korean troops mounted a last-ditch defense against a closing North Korean vise.

It wasn't supposed to be that way. After the communist-led northerners struck south in their surprise invasion on June 25, two years after U.S. combat units withdrew from South Korea, U.S. commanders believed the simple reappearance of American troops would deter the North Koreans.

"At our base in Hawaii, we thought the war would be over and we wouldn't get our Combat Infantryman's Badges," said Marvin House, 79, a veteran of the 5th Regimental Combat Team (RCT). "Boy, were we fooled."

The northern army battered the first-arriving U.S. units and shattered the South Korean divisions. It simply was better trained and better equipped, with Soviet-made T-34 tanks.

The U.S. government had shrunk the Army drastically after World War II, and training and equipment upgrades were neglected.

As the 2nd Division sailed from Ft. Lewis, Washington, toward Korea in late July 1950, "we wound up training our soldiers to fire their weapons at tin cans thrown into the Pacific," said retired Col. Ralph M. Hockley, 84, of Houston, then a young artillery officer.

"Twenty percent of our vehicles had to be towed to the embarkation point," Walter Wallis of Palo Alto, Calif., recalled of the 2nd Division deployment. "We had some real crap, four-year-old C-rations and stuff like that."

Not long after, on the Naktong, the 18-year-old radioman Wallis watched helplessly from a hilltop as a U.S. river-crossing patrol was slaughtered by the North Koreans. His batteries had failed; he couldn't call for help.

For House, a 57mm-recoilless rifleman, it wasn't quality but the quantity: none. For a month after his 5th RCT took up position on the perimeter, he had no ammunition for his gun, leaving him to help mortar and other gun crews fight off the enemy.

The North Koreans, crossing the shallow Naktong at night on barges or over underwater "bridges" built of rice bags filled with rocks, hammered again and again at the U.S. and South Korean lines in August and early September 1950.

The "lines" were more a series of hills, road junctions and other points manned by under-strength units, sometimes a mile apart. Commanders would rush up reserves to fill the gaps as the North Koreans attacked.

For the GI, in the 100-plus-degree heat, amid tropical downpours and malarial mosquitoes, with water supplies scarce, soldiering became misery. "Those weeks seemed like a lifetime," said House, of Bonne Terre, Missouri.

Time and again, the 2nd and other U.S. and South Korean divisions held the North Koreans off, sometimes fighting hand-to-hand, at great cost to the defenders and even greater cost to the North Koreans. Finally, on Sept. 15, 1950, U.S. amphibious forces landed at Inchon, far to the North Koreans' rear, cutting them off from their supplies and recapturing Seoul from the invaders.

That set off a race north by the Pusan Perimeter divisions, a "breakout" whose momentum carried them by November to the Yalu River and the North Korean-Chinese border, as overall commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. leadership sought to conquer North Korea.

"We did what we had to do. We kept them out," twice-wounded ex-rifleman Reed, 78, of Butte, Montana, said of the Naktong campaign. "But we suffered plenty. In the first month, my company" — A Company, 23rd Infantry Regiment — "went down to 78 men from 200."

More suffering lay ahead. The lunge north had been ill-conceived, putting the American army on a collision course with the might of China deep inside North Korea.

Retired Lt. Col. Lynn A. Freeman, then a lieutenant at 23rd Infantry headquarters, remembered the night in late November 1950 when a Chinese attack materialized from nowhere, "blowing bugles and whistles and making a lot of noise," and penetrating into the regimental command post at the Chungchon River.

The regiment's 1st Battalion beat them back. "The bodies of wounded Chinese were frozen in the river's ice the next morning," recalled the quiet-spoken Freeman, 87, of Concord, Calif. Meanwhile, young Wallis had an image frozen in his memory, of panicked U.S. soldiers trapped in sleeping bags and hopping down a hillside to escape the Chinese.

"The next day we went up there and saw a couple that didn't make it," he said.

But Chinese attacks all along the front forced the longest retreat in U.S. military history, a withdrawal by the entire U.S. Eighth Army some 160 miles back into South Korea.

For the 2nd Division, the pullback through Kunu-ri and the valley remembered as "The Gauntlet" was a descent into a wintry hell.

"It was sleepwalking, day and night marching, when the Chinese came in," remembered Rudy Ruiz, 77, of Las Vegas, a 38th Infantry Regiment rifleman.

Miles-long convoys of trucks, tanks and men pushed south under heavy fire from Chinese dug into the hills on both sides, fire that crippled vehicles, blocked the narrow roadway, stranded knots of doomed men. In a single day, the division lost 3,000 killed, wounded or missing.

Even for those who escaped, the frigid temperatures and biting Siberian wind of an early winter could be as deadly an enemy. Wounded men froze to death while waiting for help. Hundreds suffered frozen feet and fingertips, noses and ears. The Army had failed to deliver winter clothing to tens of thousands of troops.

"The worst was the cold. I've never been so cold," said Ruiz. "You'd dig a hole in the snow and you'd all huddle together."

The "Big Bugout" retreat left the Eighth Army holding a line below the 38th Parallel, the North-South divide.

In February 1951, the Chinese mounted an all-out offensive, but were turned back at Chipyong-ni by the 2nd Division, ushering in a final long phase of the Korean War, the "war of the ridgelines," as the two sides jockeyed for advantage, winning hills, losing them, winning them back, while truce talks went on.

It was at Heartbreak Ridge, in September 1951, that "we got into trouble, when we tried to move north," recalled Ed Reeg, ex-machine gunner with the 23rd Infantry. "The night of 19 September, Love Company was under real heavy attack, and Lt. Monfore called for a machine gun."

Reeg climbed to Love's position, set up his .30-caliber gun, and suddenly the North Koreans were charging out of the darkness along the ridgeline. Reeg's team tried to hold them off, dodged their grenades, but finally "they found the mark," a bullet hitting him above the hip, sending him rolling in pain.

As Love beat back the attack, at the cost of Lt. Monfore's life, Reeg was carried to a spot on the hillside, injected with morphine, roughly bandaged, and left lying there, as the sun rose, peaked and began to set.

"Here I'm thinking, it's over. What's my mom going to think?" In late afternoon, passing GIs realized he wasn't dead and sent him off to a medical station. The war was over for Ed Reeg, who would be awarded a Silver Star for bravery.

———

Too many memories.

This May 31, Reeg, 82, of Dubuque, Iowa, stood with his wife and son atop a ridgeline south of Korea's dividing Demilitarized Zone, and looked out toward Heartbreak.

"To think we were so close to where I lay dying 59 years ago," he reflected later. "I never thought I'd get back here."

It wasn't the only pilgrimage this old soldier has made. In 2003, he found Lt. Peter Monfore's grave in Springfield, South Dakota, and met with his family. "It seemed like my duty to go find him."

Duty and doubts, flashbacks and nightmares, pride and uncertainties — veterans of killing fields, in Korea or elsewhere, are often torn by conflicting feelings. Many Korea vets are open about the psychic legacy of their war.

"I had night sweats for years," Ruiz said. "Whatever, it's still blocked out." Reeg believes a nervous breakdown he suffered in 1960 may have stemmed from his time in Korea.

In their foxholes 60 years ago, many questioned why their lives were being risked in a far-off civil war. "As a young fellow, I did wonder what we were doing here," said the big Montanan and ex-rifleman Reed.

Their anniversary tour supplied an answer for some, as they gazed upon a prosperous and — in recent decades — democratic South Korea, whose government subsidizes such veterans' visits.

"This makes me feel it was worth it," said Reeg. "To see this country built up. It's amazing."

They recognize the picture is incomplete, however, since the peninsula remains divided. "That's one thing I'm sorry for," said Reed.

In fact, John Manly long thought he would wait for Korean reunification before returning. Finally, at age 80, the old 23rd Infantry rifleman came, despite obvious misgivings about his war and its results — "I am almost a pacifist," he told a reporter.

Equally obvious, as he spoke of a wartime friend killed in action, was his love for his fellow soldiers.

"Isn't a day goes by I don't think about him," said Manly, of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "I'm glad to be alive. A lot of the guys in there tonight are happy to be alive," he said, nodding toward a banquet hall filled with fellow veterans.

That evening it was Manly's tenor voice that silenced the hall, drawing the gray heads of old soldiers together in thoughts only they could share, as he sang, to the tune of the World War II favorite "Lili Marlene," lyrics someone had improvised in 1952 as their own war dragged on:

"When the war is over and the world is free,

We'll relive proud memories of bloody Kunu-ri.

Sayong and Heartbreak will be retold,

And Bloody Ridge will make us bold.

Our hearts will always be

With the 2nd Infantry."

CCKen · June 19th, 2010, 02:33 PM

Thanks for posting that article TampaSsgt.

My oldest brother was in the Korean War fighting the communists. He was a Squid aboard aircraft carriers USS Valley Forge, CV-45, and the USS Philippine Sea, '51-'52. He was in Composite Squadron 61 (VC-61).

I passed this article along to him.

Candyman · June 21st, 2010, 07:00 AM

It is a shame that there are so many today that have forgotten the price that has been paid for freedom in our pass.

The men that fought in Korea paid a high price to stop the spread of communism. If America does not wake up soon, that price will have been paid in vain.

God bless the men that fought in The Korean War and may they find peace in the end.

The Pistoleer · January 10th, 2011, 03:01 PM

I just read a book detailing what George company 1st Marines went through from Inchon to the Chosin and back.. It is a must read for Marines and others interested in military history.

The book is "Give me Tomorrow"

RET DEP 04 · January 10th, 2011, 03:38 PM

My dad was a fighter pilot off the Kearsarge flying photo recon in Banshees. I still have the patch off his flight jacket, "The Sundowners". He is going to be 89 in a couple of months and still is sharp. His stories are amazing.

Trung Si · January 10th, 2011, 05:02 PM

It's a Downright Shame that we forgot this War, but like everything else, we seem to forget Everything in this Country anymore,I would Bet You that WAY OVER 50% forgot 9/11 already, We are WAY too Self Absorbed, and it will come and BITE us in the A$$ in time to come,Mark my Words!

kevin · January 10th, 2011, 07:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Pistoleer

I just read a book detailing what George company 1st Marines went through from Inchon to the Chosin and back.. It is a must read for Marines and others interested in military history.

The book is "Give me Tomorrow"

This is one I finished a few months ago I think you would be interested in.......damn good book.
"The Last Stand of Fox Company" its about Fox 2/7 1st MARDIV. holding the Toktong Pass during the Chosin Reservoir breakout.

racedraper · January 11th, 2011, 07:32 PM

My uncle Frank Draper was a POW in Korea ,he told me it was his fault. The story was he was in supply and well sold bunch of stop that he over ordered and got busted. He was reduced rank and shopped to Korea. I believe 2 weeks later China crossed the border and his General surrendered and went home and he spent 3 years in China POW camp.
We have letters from when he was in the camp, My father donated them to VFW headquarters here in Kansas City. Sad thing he never received anything like purple heart or anything. He was released after the war

http://www.koreanwarexpow.org/info/camp_7.html

Old Sarge · January 12th, 2011, 05:07 AM

Thanks for posting this. I had a couple of uncles that were in the Korean War and my dad served in the Air Force in Alaska during the war. I served a year in the ROK, 1980-81. About a year ago I bought a very early Korean War production M1 rifle from a forum member, and it is one of my favorite M1's, in honor and memory of my father and uncles.

Korea is a very bad place to fight a war. Too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, and the terrain is all up and down. Any flat terrain is rice paddies, fertilized with "you know what".....

Grumbler · January 13th, 2011, 08:26 AM

I served in Korea in 1968-1969 with the 2d Infantry Division and can confirm the weather. Summers were long and hot and the winters were very cold. I slept under 9 blankets during the winter and still was cold. Korea, at that time, reminded me of Japan in the mid '50s.

My roommate had served during the Korean War and carried a BAR. He had some interesting stories to tell about his earlier visit to ROK. Although Korea is the "Forgotten War" the vets did not have to suffer the abuse heaped upon returning vets from NAM. I'll never forget my return to CONUS, through Seattle, and the comments made to myself and others in uniform.

RightHand · January 13th, 2011, 08:45 AM

My dad kept a journal during the 1951-1952 period as an Army Aerial Observer around the 38th parallel.

If anyone is interested, you can read it and see the many photos at Korea Journal

Grumbler · January 14th, 2011, 11:36 AM

Thanks for posting your Dad's Diary and pictures. I really enjoyed both. Our parent's generation truly "was the best".

CCKen · January 20th, 2011, 02:23 PM

RightHand,

Very interesting read. I see by the photos that your Father flew on the L-19 Birddog during his tour. The designation of the L-19 changed to O-1 in 1962. I was a crew chief on O-1 Birddogs in Vietnam. That airplane, certainly served us well in both Korea and Vietnam.

A crisp hand salute for your Father. An American Hero.

RightHand · January 20th, 2011, 02:39 PM

CCKen - I can't reply to your PM - see your User Controls to allow incoming PM's