The Great End Run ( Inchon, 1950)

The Great End Run (Inchon, 1950)

Oddly, the landing at Inchon was so risky that only General Douglas MacArthur and the Marines believed it would work – mere voices in the wilderness against the institutional wisdom of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other naysayers.

The approach to Inchon from the Yellow Sea was bad enough, requiring a dozen miles of precision navigation through the narrow Flying Fish Channel. Vast mudflats ruled the shoals and shallows of the port itself. But it was Inchon’s tides that proved so daunting to the U.S. Marine landing force.

Both port and channel were wildly affected by spectacular tidal ranges, up to thirty-two feet in height, among the highest in the world. Indeed, deep-draft warships could expect to attempt that passage only during three days in any month.

Because of the narrow tidal window, D-Day at Inchon had to go on September 15. MacArthur would not wait another month, and [Major General Oliver] Smith [Commander of the 1st Marine Division] fully agreed. But this meant that one of Smith’s three regimental combat teams, the brand-new 7th Marines, would not arrive in time.

It also meant that Colonel Chesty Puller’s newly formed and freshly arrived 1st Marines would have no time to train and rehearse for the complicated landing. And it meant that the 5th Marines, fully engaged in urgent combat in the Pusan Perimeter, would have precious little time to catch their breath before leaping into even more desperate fighting. “We’ll be ready,” Smith promised MacArthur. First was the island of Wolmi-do, jutting out into the harbor of Inchon as an ideal combat outpost for NKPA defenders. No landing could be undertaken against Inchon without first overwhelming Wolmi-do, and because of the drastic tides, this meant a unique and risky division of forces.

Smith recognized that Inchon had no beaches per se, just miles of seawalls along an industrial waterfront. Scaling ladders would help get the troops ashore from their assault craft, but Smith knew the bigger problem would be the convergence of two of the most difficult military operations in the book – an opposed amphibious assault, immediately followed by heavy street fighting in a major city.

Preliminary bombardment of Inchon began a healthy five days before the landing. The Marines did what they should have done at first on Peleliu’s deadly Umurbrogol Mountain: They employed Marine Corsairs to drop napalm on Wolmi-do’s hills to burn off the underbrush to reveal cave openings and gun positions.

Leathernecks use scaling ladders to storm a “beach” at Inchon on Sept. 15, 1950. The need to use scaling ladders to assault the seawall cost time and momentum.

National Archives photo by SSgt. W.W. Frank, USMC

Marines of Capt. Francis I. “Ike” Fenton’s B Company raise the American flag over the observatory in Inchon on Sept. 16, 1950.

U.S. Naval Historical Center

And the Navy borrowed a page from Iwo Jima, sending four iron-hearted destroyers through the channel to pound Wolmi-do up close and entice NKPA gunners to return fire and reveal their positions. Both strategies worked. The napalm denuded the hills and spoiled the day for many defenders. The ships suckered the surviving gunners into opening up. Two destroyers took hits, but all four blasted back with telling accuracy. So far, so good.

At 0633 Lieutenant Colonel Robert Taplett’s 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, hit the Wolmi shore, shrugged off intermittent enemy fire, and streamed inland. Within twenty-two minutes, Sergeant Alvin Smith raised the American flag over Radio Hill, Wolmi’s highest point. MacArthur smiled, put down his glasses, and said, “That’s it, let’s get some coffee.”

Ashore, the Marines fought across the humpbacked island, forcing the North Koreans from their fortified positions with demolitions and flamethrowers.

Taplett quickly mined and guarded the 600-yard causeway leading to Inchon City to hinder enemy reinforcements from the mainland.

By 0800, most of Wolmi-do was in Marine hands. The assault troops watched as the receding tide drove the amphibious task force back up the channel to the sea, as expected. Taplett and his thousand Marines completed their seizure of North Korean gun emplacements, aware they were on their own until the rising afternoon tide.

The U.S. naval bombardment resumed at 1430, setting the Inchon waterfront ablaze. The late afternoon light began to fade. As the assault craft neared shore, Inchon City was barely visible through the smoky haze.

The invasion plan called for the remaining two battalions of Lieutenant Colonel Ray Murray’s 5th Marines to land in Higgins boats with scaling ladders at Red “Beach,” a stretch of stone seawall in the heart of the city. At the same time, Puller’s 1st Marines would land by LVTs over Blue “Beach,” three miles to the southeast, a suburban industrial area with few egress ramps from the shallow water. After landing, the 5th Marines would collect Taplett’s Battalion from Wolmi-do and attack through the city while Puller’s regiment cut the highway to Seoul in the rear.

Their 5:30 P.M. landing occurred in good order, but the troops lost time and momentum having to rely on scaling ladders to debark.

The 1st Marines met less opposition but encountered more snafus in the smoke and growing darkness. Order replaced disorder, the troops moved inland, and combat cargo flowed in on their heels.

MacArthur and the Marines had made their case. By midnight, Smith had 13,000 Leathernecks ashore, rampaging through town. The cost of this great gamble: no ships lost; 22 Marines killed, 174 wounded. Of all the major Marine landings in the Pacific War, only Guadalcanal and Okinawa had been less costly on D-Day.

Smith was discovering that the quality of enemy resistance was increasing proportionately as the Americans advanced closer to Seoul.

The NKPA troops defending Inchon had been spirited but disorganized, second-echelon troops seeing their first real combat. These were hardly a match for Murray’s 5th Marines, who had spent the previous month locked in combat with the first-line NKPA troops threatening the Pusan Peninsula. But now the North Korean high command in Pyongyang reacted to the surprise

Allied thrust at Inchon by redeploying experienced brigades and regiments to reinforce Seoul.

The night [of the second day], with the 5th Marines hanging on to one corner of the prized Kimpo Airfield, [a] North Korean tank attack erupted.

Fierce fighting raged throughout the remainder of the night, but the Marines held. With dawn they swept forward, and by mid-morning the entire 6,000-foot runway was back in American hands. Appropriately, the first U.S. aircraft to touch down that day was a Marine helicopter bearing General Lemuel Shepherd and his operation officer, Colonel Brute Krulak.

On the following day, Major General Field Harris deployed the first three squadrons of his 1st Marine Aircraft Wing ashore at Kimpo. With two more fighter squadrons flying from carriers just offshore and another night-fighter squadron providing the honors from Itazuke, Japan, Marine air was as closely committed to the campaign as their ground counterparts.

Now came time to cross the Han River. The 5th Marines would do so first, forcing a crossing west of Seoul to attack the capital through the rugged country in that quadrant. The regiment would then take up positions to cover the crossing of the 1st Marines after they fought their way through the outpost city of Yongdong-po.

The preliminary efforts came to grief.

Ray Murray refused to be dismayed by the night’s misadventures. The Marines may have been novices in crossing rivers, he figured, but all they had to do was apply the principles of amphibious assault. Murray arranged for a comprehensive plastering of the east bank of the Han by Corsairs, tanks, and artillery. Even the heavy cruiser Rochester pitched in – lobbing highexplosive eight-inch shells on the commanding high ground from fifteen miles away.

Under this protective umbrella, the 5th Marines, organized into boat teams assigned to LVTs, took off in assault formations, one wave after another. Within minutes the east bank was breached. Minutes later there were Marines signaling from the tops of the nearby ridge lines. The Army observers raised their eyebrows appreciatively.

Marine infantrymen take cover behind an M26 Pershing while it fires on Communist troops ahead. The Marine on the far left has liberated a Russian-made rifle from an enemy soldier.

National Archives photo by Sgt. John Babyak, Jr., USMC

Murray pressed on, phasing his entire 5th Marines across the Han before dark on September 20. The infantry battalions consolidated, then formed assault columns, and moved out into the eight miles of broken country between them and the capital.

But some of Pyongyang’s best fighters now lay waiting for the Marine regiments on both sides of the river.

The truth was, the 5th Marines had a hell of a fight on their hands as they battled their way through the 25th NKPA Brigade to reach the capital. In one bloody day’s engagement, Dog Company of the 2d Battalion lost 178 casualties among their 206 Marines.

Murray’s weary legions maintained the offensive, arriving on the high ground above the river in time to cover Chesty Puller’s crossing.

On September 21 the orphan 7th Marines under Colonel Homer Litzenberg arrived in Inchon, completing their long collective odyssey from Camp Lejeune and the Mediterranean Sea. All the parts of the 1st Marine Division were finally in place.

Meanwhile, far to the south, General Walker’s Eighth Army broke out of the Pusan Peninsula and began chasing the fleeing NKPA forces northward.

The final assault on Seoul kicked off on the morning of September 25 with coordinated assaults by both the 1st Marine Division and the 7th Infantry Division, each augmented by their appropriate ROK regiments.

General [Edward] Almond’s exhortations for speed notwithstanding, the huge city had to be taken block by block in slow, methodical, deadly fighting. Enemy roadblocks blossomed at every corner.

Now the North Koreans and Marines collided in midnight meeting engagements in the burning streets.

The 1st Marines shouldered into Seoul’s main thoroughfare, fighting furiously for the government buildings. Leathernecks raised the American flag over their United States Embassy with a great cheer. It felt so good they repeated the process at the French – and many other – embassies.

The battle for Seoul raged until September 28 when the collapse of the last enemy pockets ended the resistance. The charred and blackened South Korean city was at last in UN hands.

Fighting beyond Seoul sputtered on another week. The new 7th Marines got bloodied in the three-day fight for Uijong-bu, north of the capital, but began to jell as a combat team.

The 1st Marine Division and 1st Marine Aircraft Wing had done themselves proud.

The price had been steep but acceptable. Among the Old Breed, 421 died, another 2,029 suffered wounds – about half of the casualties being incurred in the street fighting for Seoul. Enemy ground fire downed eleven Marine aircraft.