Griffin W.E.B. - The Corps 09 - Under Fire

Lieutenant Theodosus Korakulous, now Acting Chief, Homicide Bureau, had called Louise and offered to take her and the kids to Union Station.

"If you're with me," Teddy had told Louise, "we can get through the barriers. Traffic told me it looks like a lot of people are going to be there."

He had not wanted to go back into the main room to try to smile confidently at one more wife/mother/spectacular girlfriend and assure her he would take good care of the Family Marine now going off to war.

He wasn't at all sure that he could do that. He was a Ma-rine captain, he had thought at least a dozen times that morning, but he really knew zero, zip, zilch about being a Marine Infantry company commander.

So he'd been more or less hiding in his office when Lieutenant Paul Peterson had come in to show him a story in the Post-Dispatch he "thought he'd like to see."

THE MARINES ARE COMING!!! BUT IN TIME??

By Jeanette Priestly

Chicago Tribune War Correspondent

With the 24th Infantry Division in Korea

Taejon, Korea-July 16-(DELAYED) The Eighth United States Army provided a Jeep for this correspondent to cover the war. Two Marines, saying they needed it more than I did, stole it from me. Within hours, on the front lines of the 34th and 19th Infantry Regi-ments of the battered and retreating 24th Di-vision, I was glad they had.

When Marine captain Kenneth R McCoy and Marine Master Gunner Ernest W. Zimmerman commandeered my Jeep, they told me bluntly that this was no place for a woman, and only with great reluctance agreed to take me with them wherever they were go-ing. Their only other option was to leave me on the side of the road. The Marine Corps code of never abandoning their dead or wounded was extended in this case to include a female war cor-respondent.

Where they were go-ing was the front lines of this war, sent to see how the Eighth U.S. Army and particularly the 24th Division was handling the North Ko-rean invasion.

The Marine Corps sent two experts to in-vestigate. Both McCoy, a lithe, good-looking of-ficer in his late twenties, who is known as "the Killer" in the Marine Corps, and Master Gun-ner Ernest W. Zimmer-man, a stocky, muscular man a few years older, served with the leg-endary Marine Raiders in World War H.

What they-and this correspondent-saw was not encouraging. Within minutes of arriving at the command post of the 34th Infantry, we learned that in the pre-vious 48 hours, the 21st Infantry, one of the two other regiments making up, with supporting units, the 24th Division, had lost over half its strength in combat.

Worse, their breakup and retreat in the face of the North Korean on-slaught had been so quick and complete that the enemy had been able to overrun the 65th Field Artillery Battalion, which had been in their support. Almost a thousand officers and men, and their intact cannon and a large sup-ply of ammunition, fell into the hands of the North Koreans.

There were three North Korean prisoners at the 34th Infantry Command Post. An American patrol had captured them on a re-connaissance mission. They had not been in-terrogated, as no one in the 34th Infantry spoke Korean, and calls to di-vision headquarters to pick up the prisoners had gone unanswered.

McCoy and Zimmer-man:-both speak Ko-rean-not only uncovered that one of them, who was wearing a private's uniform, was an officer, but got from him the en-emy's intentions for the rest of the day, including the units that would make the attack.

Taking the officer with us, we moved to the 19th Infantry com-mand post, where the attack was supposed to take place at three the next morning. McCoy and Zimmerman went to the regiments' most forward outposts to see if they could take an-other prisoner.

This correspondent was taken to an artillery forward observer post by a major, who prom-ised to have me tied up if I tried to go farther forward. From there I could see Zimmerman and McCoy making their way to a machine-gun outpost, beyond which was only the en-emy.

Through powerful, tripod-mounted binoc-ulars, I could clearly see a half-dozen North Ko-rean soldiers wading across the Kum River. When I asked why the enemy was not being fired upon, the major explained that it appar-ently had been decided to conserve artillery and machine-gun ammuni-tion for the expected at-tack.

"And they're out of rifle range," die major added.

At that moment, through my binoculars, I could see McCoy un-limbering the.30-caliber Garand rifle he carried slung from his shoulder. Most Army officers arm themselves with the.45 Colt pistol or the.30-caliber carbine.

"He's wasting his time," the major said.

McCoy opened fire, dropping three, possi-bly four, of the North Koreans in less than a minute, and sending the survivors scurrying for safety on the far bank of the river.

Darkness fell then, and the major insisted we go back to the regimental CP. Two hours later, when McCoy and Zim-merman hadn't shown up, I grew concerned. The major, without much conviction, told me he was sure they would be all right.

An hour after that, they appeared, calmly leading two North Ko-rean prisoners.

At three in the morn-ing, the North Korean artillery barrage-the terrifying prelude to the attack to follow-began.

We were all then sitting on the floor of the com-mand post. McCoy calmly took a long black cigar from his pack. Zim-merman looked at it hungrily. McCoy took a lethal-looking dagger from its sheath, strapped to his left arm, calmly cut the cigar in half, and gave half to Zimmerman.

The artillery and mor-tar barrage lasted an hour. The only thing McCoy had to say, a professional judgment, was that some of "the incom-ing sounds like 105," which meant the North Koreans were using the 105-mm howitzers cap-tured from the 65th Field Artillery against the 19th Infantry.

Shortly afterward, Mc-Coy went outside the CP, listened in the darkness to the sounds of the bat-tie developing, and re-turned to announce that it was time for us to go.

Taking the North Korean officer prisoner with us, we drove-using blackout lights only- back to the 24th Division headquarters. McCoy learned that he could not turn the prisoner over to the POW compound there because there was none. The military police who would normally run the compound had been pressed into service as re-placement riflemen. The provost marshal himself had been pressed into service as an infantry of-ficer.

We then drove back to Eighth Army headquar-ters in Taegu, where McCoy was finally able to turn the North Ko-rean officer over to the military police. They ex-changed salutes and shook hands.

Communications at Eighth Army headquar-ters were overwhelmed by high-priority mes-sages reporting to Tokyo the disaster that was taking place all over the peninsula. McCoy realized that he could deliver his report to his superiors in Tokyo quicker if he went to Japan, rather than wait-ing for Eighth Army to find time to transmit it, and announced he was going to Pusan to see if he could find a plane.

There was zero chance that this reporter's dis-patches could be trans-mitted from Taejon, so I went with him. We drove to Pusan and flew out for Tachikawa Air Base, outside Tokyo, just after midnight on an Air Force C-54.

In Tokyo, we learned not only that the 19th and 34th Infantry Regi-ments had been forced to "withdraw" to new posi-tions farther south, but that the 24th division commander, Major General William F. Dean, had not been seen since he had personally gone out with a bazooka to use against North Ko-rean tanks, and it was feared that he had been captured or killed.

McCoy and Zimmer-man are by nature taci-turn men, and they certainly were not about to offer their opinion of what they saw to a war correspondent. But it wasn't at all hard, during the time we spent to-gether, to read their faces. And what their faces said-the individ-ual courage of the offi-cers and men aside-was that the Eighth United States Army was not prepared for this war, is tak-ing a terrible beating, and may not be able to halt die North Koreans.