Saturday marked the 60th anniversary of the armistice that ended America’s “forgotten war,” the 3½ years of fighting on the Korean Peninsula that for many Americans is remembered as a few pages in their history textbook between World War II and the Vietnam War. Most of us were probably unaware the anniversary was approaching.
President Obama commemorated the occasion by reminding us that the sacrifices of Americans who fought in Korea deserved greater recognition than they have received. The following is a brief account of the sacrifices made in the first year of the conflict by one infantry company, E Company, 2nd Battalion, 19th Regiment, 24th Infantry Division, 8th Army.
It’s hard to imagine a year in U.S. history that saw harder fighting and greater reversals of fortune than 1950. Advance elements of the 24th, mostly light infantry, arrived in South Korea on July 3. Easy Company got there on July 12, during the disastrous battle of Taejon.
The Americans, mostly raw recruits and draftees, were poorly trained, armed and equipped -- and proved little match for North Korean tanks. Nearly 4,000 Americans were killed or wounded and another 3,000 captured, including the division commander, Maj. Gen. William Dean, who was also wounded. He and his men did manage to slow the North Korean advance long enough for other elements of the 8th Army to establish a perimeter around Pusan. Easy Company helped hold the line for two months, stopping the North Koreans from pushing the Americans into the sea, stubbornly resisting ferocious North Korean offensives at the Naktong Bulge, Pohang-Dong, and Taegu.
Douglas MacArthur’s daring Marine amphibious landing at the port of Inchon began on Sept. 15 and quickly swept aside the North Korean defenders. The Army’s X Corps, spearheaded by the legendary 1st Marine Division, advanced west, acting as the anvil of the American offensive, while the 8th Army broke out of the Pusan perimeter to be the hammer, trapping most of the North Korean invaders between them.
Seoul was liberated on Sept. 25. Americans crossed the 38th Parallel into North Korea by Oct. 1. The 24th Infantry, including 19th Regiment’s Easy Company, helped capture the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, on Oct. 19. American and South Korean troops then advanced to the Yalu River on the Chinese border.
On Oct. 15, Gen. MacArthur met with President Truman on Wake Island, and assured him reports that China was about to enter the war were false. MacArthur was wrong. The first full-scale combat between American and Chinese forces occurred two weeks later. Gen. William Walker, the 8th Army’s commander, ordered his forces to pull back and consolidate south of the Chongchon River north of Pyongyang. Easy Company and other companies of the 19th Regiment were ordered to protect a river bridgehead in coordination with the 27th British Commonwealth Regiment, comprised of mostly Canadian troops.
On the night of Nov. 5, 1950, Easy Company’s commander, Capt. William Conway, ordered his men to stay alert as they dug in for the night on a hill designated 123, on the east flank of the regiment’s line.
Although MacArthur still didn’t believe China had entered the war, Conway and his men knew they had fought against Chinese troops two nights in a row -- and assumed they might have to do so again that night. Most of Conway’s exhausted, hungry men, short on rations and sleep and dressed in summer uniforms, scraped out shallow depressions in the hill’s frozen soil and collapsed. The night was bitterly cold, with a sharp Siberian wind dropping the temperature to near zero. One young corporal, despite having grown up in Iowa’s freezing winters, couldn’t sleep in the cold. He kept digging his foxhole deeper in an attempt to stay warm.
Conway ordered his best soldier, Mitchell Red Cloud, to man a listening post. The other men in the company looked up to Red Cloud and not only because he was friendly and competent: He was also a decorated Marine veteran of World War II. He came from the Winnebago Indian reservation in Wisconsin, and was called “Chief,” naturally.
Red Cloud knew the Chinese favored the tactic of attacking by staging a diversionary assault on the front while the bulk of their forces attacked from the side and rear. So he and his assistant machine gunner set up their post to cover the side and rear of the company’s position, below the company command post, looking east to the five-mile gap separating them from the 27th British Commonwealth Regiment. “It’s like hunting those Wisconsin deer,” Red Cloud told another Easy Company soldier. “I can smell them coming.”
At 3:20 a.m., Red Cloud saw the first soldiers of a Chinese battalion from the 355th Regiment pour through the gap, following field telephone wires that led them to Hill 123. He let out a warning shout. The Chinese saw him, attacked his position and killed his assistant machine gunner. Red Cloud stood up and began firing his Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) into the swarming enemy. While he was trying to hold them off he was twice wounded in the chest, but kept firing.
Red Cloud’s quick action and warning didn’t save most of Easy Company’s men, many of whom were sleeping when the attack began and were killed where they lay. A few, including the corporal from Iowa who was still awake and digging his hole when the attack began, were up and fighting. But E Company was being overrun, as was A Company, dug in a short distance west of Easy’s position. A medic reached Red Cloud and put compression bandages on his wounds before leaving to treat other wounded men. Red Cloud refused evacuation. He asked the Iowa corporal and another man to use a belt to tie him to tree and help keep him upright; resting his BAR in the crotch of the tree, he opened up a crossfire with another BAR gunner, PFC Joseph Balboni, that protected a draw to the south that Easy’s survivors used to get off the hill.
The battle lasted a little more than hour. Red Cloud and Balboni were both killed. Easy’s survivors, no more than 20, fought desperately in retreat -- hand-to-hand in some cases. The corporal from Iowa made it. His rifle had jammed, and armed with a trench knife and his bare hands, he had fought to the death four Chinese who had surrounded a comrade’s foxhole.
Later than morning, the survivors were part of an assault ordered to retake the hill and retrieve the stripped bodies of their fallen comrades. They found Red Cloud and Balboni where they had made their last stand, scores of dead enemy troops in front of them.
The corporal was wounded by mortar fire during the attack to retake the hill and was evacuated to a hospital in Japan. He returned to duty a month later, and fought in other desperate battles during that cruel and chaotic first year of the war. None of them were worse, though, than the battle for Hill 123. He was my father, Chester “Pete” Salter of Pleasant Valley, Iowa. I, too, owe my life to the courage of Mitchell Red Cloud and Joseph Balboni, and to my father’s courage, which a grateful nation ought to commemorate more than once every decade.
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Correction: In a previous column, I claimed that in a CBS interview, National Review editor Rich Lowry had called the argument that only a comprehensive immigration bill could pass Congress “silly.” I have since learned from Lowry that he was referring to the argument that Republicans had to support a comprehensive bill or lose the Latino vote forever. I apologize for the error.