The Seesaw War ( Korea 1951- 1953)

The Seesaw War (Korea, 1951-1953)

The stirring records achieved by the Marines in Korea the first five months of that miserable war – the mobile “Fire Brigade” in the Pusan Perimeter, Inchon’s bold landing, the forcible seizure of Seoul, the fighting breakout from the Reservoir – represented the Corps at its high-maneuver, unrestricted best. Then the war changed, grew conservative. The Marines shouldered into line with the other land divisions, shackled and bound like Gulliver, engaging in pointless but deadly skirmishes against the North Koreans and Chinese.

Public opinions polls after the ignominious rout of most of the United Nations forces by the border-crossing Chinese revealed that Americans had turned sharply against the joint intervention. Two thirds of those polled said that the nation’s military should get out of Korea.

The 1st Marine Division returned to Pusan following the Chosin breakout to recuperate, treat its collective frostbite, and absorb replacements.

When President Truman subsequently sacked General Douglas MacArthur for blatant disobedience, the Marines also lost their strongest (if late-blooming) advocate in the Far East.

With MacArthur’s departure went his unofficial, long-ago promise to General Lemuel Shepherd that he would never separate his Marines from the “flying artillery” of their vaunted close air support, provided in Korea by the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing.

Now the Fifth Air Force consolidated all air assets in Korea. All requests for air support had to go through the snooty Joint Operations Center. Response time for the

Marine on the ground calling for help from his buddies in the Wing lapsed overnight from an average of fifteen minutes to eighty minutes – a virtual lifetime in close combat.

Many times there was no response at all. The “JOC” was after bigger, more strategic targets.

This came as an unpleasant shock as the Marines returned to action. Operation Killer began on February 21, 1951. The 1st Marine Division jumped off from Wonju. Advancing through rocky heights and narrow valleys, the Marines entered Hoengsong after three days of hard fighting.

Operation Ripper, aimed at the recapture of Seoul and restoring the 38th parallel, began on March 7.

The Marines, spared from another urban brawl in gutted Seoul, battled across broken country well east of the capital, their advance slowed as much by drenching spring rains as by enemy fire. After a week, UN forces captured Seoul for the second time in six months. Two weeks later the Eighth Army recrossed the 38th Parallel in force. Seesaw war …

Another North Korean reservoir, the Hwachon, loomed ahead for the Marines. Beyond it, the Chinese were busily fortifying a mountain-flanked region that protected the heart of their supply and communications network. The Marines called it “The Iron Triangle.”

Oliver Smith knew the Chinese would not abandon this territory. When he recognized signs that the Chinese were trying to lure him into another trap, he deliberately slowed the advance of his regiments, looked to his flanks, and called frequently for aerial reconnaissance of the high ground ahead.

OP Frisco, 6 October 1952, by Ralph B. Sirianni, was commissioned in 1999 by Peter Bingheimer to commemorate his experience during the attack on Outpost Frisco. It is a vivid depiction of the savagery of human wave attacks on isolated Marine outposts.

General Oliver Smith’s sixth sense about the Chinese buildup proved eerily accurate. On April 22, a half-million Communist troops poured out of the Iron Triangle to begin a spring offensive aimed at the recapture of Seoul.

With their Hwachon Reservoir positions directly in line with the enemy attack, the 1st Marine Division weathered the brunt of the assaults. When an ROK [Republic of Korea] division on the flank gave way to the Chinese onslaught, the Marines suddenly faced a ten-mile-by-tenmile gap to their left. The Marines bent sharply back, their lines resembling a fishhook, but did not break.

Fighting became very intense, especially at night. Once again, the Marines experienced the telltale green flares and bugles, smothering mortar barrages, and hordes of Chinese troops swarming up the rocky draws leading into their positions. Marine artillery, mortars, and automatic weapons cut down the attackers by the hundreds, but invariably enough would survive to penetrate the lines in wild, hand-to-hand fighting. Counterattacks and fresh charges would occur throughout the night, the battle raging back and forth along the ridgetops.

The Marines fought stubbornly, gave up ground only grudgingly, and prevented any major breakthroughs.

When the second phase of the Communist spring offensive began on May 16, the 1st Marine Division had a new commander. Major General Gerald Thomas, veteran of Belleau Wood and Guadalcanal, relieved Oliver Smith, whose thoughtful stewardship had given the Old Breed a new definition of the motto “Semper Fidelis.”

This time 125,000 fresh Chinese troops welcomed General Thomas with a well-coordinated offensive which swept away several adjoining ROK divisions and opened a penetration thirty miles deep on the opposite flank. Once again, the Marines hunkered down, bent (“refused”) their exposed flank, and used every bit of firepower they could muster to kill more Chinese.

This worked. The enemy offensive, weakened by heavy losses and lengthening supply lines, petered out. The weary Chinese withdrew into North Korea, leaving NKPA forces behind to fight a costly rearguard action.

The 1st Marine Division pushed steadily northward, once more passing the Hwachon Reservoir. By late June, the Marines had successfully occupied a series of ridges overlooking a circular valley nicknamed “the Punchbowl.”

The Air Force never seemed to appreciate the integrated combat power the Marines traditionally enjoyed from their distinctive air-ground team.Without their organic air component the Old Breed was dangerously undergunned to be attacking fortified enemy positions in these northern mountains.

The fighting in September 1951 to take those steep ridges by infantry was as costly and bloody as the great battles of the previous year.

The cost in dead and wounded Marines in the battles for the northern Punchbowl got the attention of Washington policy makers. With peace talks underway and the antiwar climate growing at home, General [James] Van Fleet received orders to knock off the high-intensity battles in the north. On such a sour note, the war of movement in Korea ended.

The Marines were redeployed 180 miles westward to occupy an enormous stretch of the static Jamestown Line, protecting the historic invasion approach to Seoul and, not coincidentally, overlooking Panmunjom, site of the intermittent peace talks.

Marines of F Company, 1st Marine Regiment, rest in the rain during a lull in the fighting for Bunker Hill, Aug. 26, 1952. Marine casualties were so high that an emergency airlift of reinforcements had to be made. But the Marines held.

National Archive Photo

The Marines defended their extended sector of the MLR (the Main Line of Resistance) by occupying a series of outposts on intermediate terrain features in no-man’s land. The Leathernecks were stretched thin. Most positions were defended at night by infantry squads, at best a reinforced platoon. Risky business.

The “Outpost War” would prove inordinately costly. Fully 40 percent of Marine casualties occurred during the final fifteen months of the war, the so-called “stalemate” period of the conflict.

The Marines squared off against some 50,000 Chinese in their sector. These particular Chinese were formidable night fighters, diligent diggers, and not at all hesitant to go hand-to-hand against the Marines.

A typical Chinese night attack involved a terrifyingly accurate cloudburst of mortar or artillery fire – often as much as one round per second exploding on the outpost – followed by a feint against one sector, the main attack against the opposite side, and a cunning ambush to intercept Marine reinforcements rushing out from the MLR.

Small-unit night-fighting had become the nature of warfare along the Jamestown Line in 1952-1953.

Patrols of some kind left the MLR every night – stealthy reconnaissance sweeps, larger “Cadillac” sorties looking to snatch a prisoner, the occasional big combat patrols, armed to the teeth and looking for a fight. Patrol leaders had no trouble filling their ranks with volunteers. Most Marines would rather go out and fight, even at night in the meandering minefields and stinking rice paddies, than die of boredom standing watch along the MLR.

In late October, heavy fighting erupted for control of a critical Marine position known as the Hook, a salient at the western end of the division’s sector that dominated the Imjin River.

Col. Horace Avery Chenoweth, USMCR (Ret.), witnessed the first helicopter lift of troops in warfare in September 1951, when HMR-161 Sikorsky HRS-1s delivered troops to the line and moved division recon troops to a mountaintop, and depicted it years later in Landing Zone (Korea), 1978, acrylic on illustration board.

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

Chinese artillery and mortars delivered a staggering 15,500 rounds on the semiexposed positions. Hills were lost, then regained. The fighting, much of it at night, was as brutal and costly as any seen at the Pusan Perimeter or Chosin Reservoir.

The threat to the integrity of the MLR was so critical that the JOC for once provided ample close air support during the day. Seventy-two aircraft (sixty-seven of them Marines) circled and swooped, shooting rockets and dropping napalm. It was almost like old times. In the end, the Marines repossessed the Hook, having taken 500 casualties.

Against such effective siege tactics the Marines’ policy of defending undermanned outposts at dangerous distances from the MLR proved flawed. Marine valor and derring-do could not indefinitely withstand the ability of the Chinese to surprise an outpost with smothering fire and overwhelming numbers at the point of attack.

In March 1953, a Communist offensive exploded against the Eighth Army’s outposts all along the MLR. Heavy concentrations of Chinese fell upon the right side of the line, in an area manned by the 5th Marines, ten miles northeast of Panmunjom. The attacks were centered on the “Nevada Cities” outposts – Reno, Vegas, and Carson. The PLA 358th Regiment attacked the outposts with great mass, firepower, and velocity, outnumbering the Marine defenders by as much as twenty to one.

Outpost Reno fell first, the Chinese sealing some Marines up in their caves with as much brutal efficiency as the Leathernecks had applied to the Japanese in the Central Pacific islands. The defenders of Vegas and Carson held on for dear life. Colonel Lew Walt led his 5th Marines out from the MLR. The Chinese bloodied the reinforcements with ambushes and hellacious mortar fire, but Walt kept the momentum, and the battle raged.

In the end, Outpost Carson held, though only after a vicious round of close combat with knives and bayonets. Vegas, lost, regained, lost again, was finally and convincingly recaptured on the fourth day. But Reno, closest to the original Chinese and 1,600 yards from the MLR, was lost for good.

A tattered American flag fluttered proudly over smoking, reeking Vegas, but Marines began to question the cost.

The Marines, no dummies in tactical combat, then abolished their exorbitant system of fortified outposts.

As the summer of 1953 bled on, the end of the damned war seemed almost palatably close at hand. Yet the Chinese unleashed a series of sharp attacks against the Jamestown Line in order to influence the final boundary.

One of the bloodiest of these occurred against the Marines at terrain features along the MLR known as Boulder City and Hill 119. These were not mere outposts. Loss of these key positions would make the Eighth Army forfeit a huge chunk of territory and part of the Imjin River to the Communists.

No Marine wanted to be the last man to die as the peace negotiators waited for the ink to dry on the armistice agreement that hot July, but the Chinese were attacking in enormous waves and the fighting was abruptly as desperate as ever.

The PLA forces suffered 72,000 casualties in carving out substantial pieces along the MLR, but they failed to budge the 1st Marine Division from Boulder City or Hill 119. The successful defense of the positions cost the Marines 1,611 men killed, wounded, or captured.

The Korean War lasted three years, one month, two days. During that time fully 60 percent of the Marine Corps saw action, either with the division, the air wing, the offshore islands, or the ships of Task Force 77. Marines losses were substantial – 4,267 killed, 23,744 wounded – more than double the losses of the Marine Brigade in World War I.

Forty-two Marines received the Medal of Honor; twenty-six posthumously. The Marines lost 436 aircraft in action.

Their performance prompted President Truman to sign Public Law 416 in 1952, a landmark statute that defined the Corps as a separate service within the Department of the Navy, sized at a minimum three divisions and three air wings, and awarded primacy in amphibious warfare. The Marines, fully into jet aircraft, transport helicopters, and body armor, now had the legislative legitimacy they had lacked the first 177 years. It was a great Marine victory that does not appear on their battle flag.