The Lost Art

Americans did not invent the art of guerrilla war, but they were once very good at it. U.S. military history is studded with great guerrilla names--General Francis Marion ("the Swamp Fox"), who fought hit & run campaigns in the Carolinas and Georgia in the American Revolution; Captain John Mosby, Confederate raider in Virginia and Maryland; General John Hunt Morgan of Alabama.* In World War I, when mass production and massed firepower became an overriding factor, Americans lost interest in the art of making much of little. In Korea, the U.S. is being forced to rediscover the lost art.

By tradition, training and spirit, the U.S. unit in Korea best equipped for guerrilla-style fighting is the 1st Marine Division (by last week well recovered from the ordeal of its fighting retreat to the sea in December). Recently, the marines have been pitted against the North Korean 10th Division, which had reached the Andong area, only 50 miles north of Taegu./-

Red prisoners said that the loth had been ordered to seize Taegu after blocking the Andong-Taegu rail & road line. They never came near that ambitious goal.

Through icy streams, eroded hills and ravines, the North Koreans skulked and sniped by day & night. So did the marines. The leathernecks organized "rice patrols" --small raiding parties equipped only with portable weapons and provided with Korean money to buy food from peasants. When these parties encountered small enemy groups, they fought. If the enemy group was large, the marines faded back, brought up reinforcements, then fought.

The Americans were helped by a motley assortment of South Koreans--soldiers, militiamen, marines and "task forces" composed of non-uniformed youths wielding carbines, blunderbusses, clubs. This led to a certain amount of confusion. Yet U.S. Marine G25 estimated last week that the North Korean 10th Division had suffered 5,000 to 7,000 casualties.

/-I-Whom, the South regarded as the "Francis Marion of the Confederacy." Morgan once marched his men 100 miles across the rugged Cumberland Mountains to strike at a federal garrison in Kentucky, destroyed a huge pile of stores.

/-In Korea, "guerrilla" is a loose term which includes regular Communist army units fighting behind the front lines.

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