Stiffening

The Communists kept on rolling. Some times they were stopped, temporarily; more often they advanced. At midweek, tank-led Red columns drove through Chinju and on toward Masan, only 30 miles from the main U.S. supply port of Pusan. West of Masan the grim and battered G.I.s of the U.S. 24th Division threw themselves into the line once more, and the Red advance ground to a halt. Lieut. General Walton H. Walker hastily moved the 25th Infantry Division to the southern front to shore up the 24th. This week the 24th had moved north, was facing another Red assault on the Naktong River.

Across the River. Earlier, a reconnaissance battalion of a regimental combat team made a daring dash 22 miles behind Communist lines, captured valuable documents, maps and Russian-made equipment. The U.S. force came within a hair's breadth of annihilation by heavy enemy fire when Red artillery shells killed or wounded the crews of its two lead tanks and the rest of the column piled up behind them. But Private Ray Roberts, a 19-year-old ex-bulldozer operator who had started the reconnaissance as a bazooka man, took over the controls of the lead tank (although he had never driven a tank before), led the column through heavy enemy fire to U.S. lines.

On the western front, the Communists launched flanking movements in an effort to trap the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division in the Sobaek Mountains. But the 1st Cavalry, in a crafty withdrawal across to the east bank of the Naktong River, escaped a two-pronged Red drive from the west and north. While the G.I.s of the 1st Cavalry dug in, the Communists made a series of bloody, small-scale thrusts across the river. Their goal : the South Korean provisional capital of Taegu, only seven miles from the Naktong.

At week's end the Reds were still trying. Their estimated casualties in this action alone: 2,400 dead and wounded. Major General Hobart R. Gay, the 1st Cavalry's commander, reported that the Communists were using hordes of civilians, armed only with sharpened sticks, to shield the advance of their regular troops.

New Mood. The Communists last week produced a picture of what they described as the first U.S. prisoners of the war. The Americans themselves were beginning to take more Korean prisoners. Almost for the first time since the fighting started, small bands of North Korean troops came forward under white flags to surrender. An incident at one U.S. command post highlighted the slightly changing mood of battle.

A U.S. sergeant, guarding three captured Reds, waved the barrel of his M-1 rifle at one of the prisoners, a sulky shaven-headed youth obviously not out of his teens. "This kid's a speed boy," the sergeant said to a U.S. correspondent. "We flush these three out of a paddy field, and this one tries to cut out. I don't want to shoot him, because we want to question him. So I just run him down. He was talking English like a professor from Yale College when we caught him," said the sergeant. "Come on, speed boy, talk English to the man." The young soldier glared at the sergeant, but did not answer.

New Threat. As the week wore on, fresh troops of the newly arrived 1st Marine Division and the 2nd Infantry Division moved up to bolster U.S. positions on the southern front.

A U.S. regimental commander looked up wearily from his battle maps and said: "It looks as if something interesting might happen here tonight. Frankly, everybody has everybody else surrounded."

The commander was right. The next morning, G.I.s of the Army's 5th and 35th Regimental Combat Teams, the 5th Marine Regiment and some South Korean commando units launched the first relatively large-scale offensive of the Korean war. Starting from a point 35 miles west of Pusan, the offensive was preceded by a heavy artillery barrage and continuous-strafing and rocketing of Communist positions by U.S. fighters. About 7 a.m., the G.I.s and the marines left their foxholes and advanced to meet the enemy.

The enemy was ready & waiting, apparently tipped off in advance by its own intelligence. The U.N. troops continued to advance, but only in the face of intense and accurate Communist fire.

By the end of the offensive's first day, the U.N. forces had advanced about four miles, and had temporarily stalled a powerful Red counterattack on their right flank. In Tokyo, General Douglas Mac-Arthur's headquarters announced that another major Communist threat was building up about 14 miles to the north, where the Naktong River makes a big bend to the west. The new threat probably had as its major objective the vital rail line between Pusan and Taegu.

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