The Test of Great Events

PORK CHOP HILL (315 pp.)--S.L.A. Marshall--Morrow ($5).

In Korea one evening in April 1953, the light breeze brought from the enemy ridge line the faint sound of men chanting in strange and mournful chorus. Outposted on Pork Chop Hill, the handful of Americans and South Koreans listened, then finished their chow of steak and ice cream, and listened again. "What does it mean?" asked Pork Chop's commander, Lieut. Thomas V. Harrold (Easy Company, 31st Infantry). "They're prayer-singing," the interpreter said. "They're getting ready to die." Harrold felt uneasy. "Maybe we ought to be singing too."

Shortly before midnight, two full companies of veteran Chinese Communist infantry slipped across the paddyfields behind a crushing artillery barrage, and struck Pork Chop. Harrold, afraid of seeming overanxious, delayed calling for help; by the time both his men and his superiors were fully alerted, the Chinese had overrun half his battered outpost. The question shot up the chain of command to casualty-conscious headquarters in Tokyo: Did the U.S. want to pay the price for holding Pork Chop, a barren hump of Korean ground only 150 yards across?

The Question. To hold the hill meant shielding the Eighth Army's thin defense line. The brass decided that Pork Chop was worth the price. For three days and two nights, a succession of rifle companies of the U.S. 7th Division slogged into the meat-grinder to counter waves of Chinese reinforcements. Battling for Pork Chop's shattered trenches and bunkers, some 900 Americans and South Koreans were killed or wounded, along with 3,000 Chinese. In 48 hours some 85,000 U.S. artillery rounds, plus uncounted enemy shells, blasted Pork Chop's eroded slopes --a display of firepower equal in intensity to any bombardment in either World War. Through one of the Korean conflict's fiercest infights, American soldiers held their ground in final, weary triumph--while U.N. war correspondents awaited peace at Panmunjom, only 70 miles to the west.

Watching the night flares burst above the fighting was one veteran observer of battle who had seen The Peculiar War from the start. In Pork Chop Hill, Detroit Newsman S.L.A. (for Samuel Lyman Atwood) Marshall, 56, again proves his talent for dramatizing the down-to-mud reality of the average American's experience in combat. His newest book puts the microscope to a phase of combat little known to the U.S. public: the painful, drawn-out stalemate (1952-53) that anti-climaxed the Korean war. "One funda mental question," says Marshall in his preface, "in Korea, 1953, and now, is how the American character continues to meet the test of great events."

The U.S. fighting man in Korea, says Marshall, faced some formidable, unsung handicaps, thanks to the enemy's growing battle ability and the limitations imposed by the Truman Administration. The stalemate "was a bonanza for Communist China. On that training ground, her armies became as skilled as any in the world in the techniques of hitting, evading and surviving."

Deadly Shadow Boxing. By contrast, says Marshall, the speedy U.S. rotation policy and a go-slow attitude back home left the Eighth Army barely enough men to man its single trench line. "Its people were at least 50% deficient in fighting experience . . . The Eighth Army was a mobile army, but for lack of manpower, it was compelled to use the implements of mobility simply to sit and survive . . . The fighting which resulted seemed like a deadly form of shadow boxing." Marshall gives a harrowing example: eight 7th Division newcomers went out on patrol one warm night, expecting "no sweat"; all eight were later found dead in a circle, shot in ambush by a foe so close that some victims bore powder burns. Says Marshall: "You can't beat Davy Crockett with a Boy Scout." But many of the "Boy Scouts" fought the foe to a draw:

EUR]J Long rated by his platoon as a "prize eight ball," Machine Gunner John Wol-zeak spotted a Chinese sneak attack, made "the astonishing discovery that he was a born infantry fighter," and, together with a buddy, exultantly checked the enemy. t| On Dale outpost, a badly wounded lieutenant led an uphill counterattack and nightlong defense, next morning could still jolly his men with a grin and a quip: "I already have one Purple Heart. Now they'll have to give me a dozen." t| Two infantrymen, both named Smith, were cut off from their outfit, spent the night with a wounded comrade playing possum on a shell-swept hillside while Chinese attackers swarmed over and past them. When dawn came, the two Smiths calmly brought in the wounded man, went back to the fight.

The Soldier-Reporter. To get at the Smiths' kind of war, "Slam" Marshall pioneered a method of exhaustive postbattle interviews. Young Slam joined the

Army in World War I at 16, two years later won a battlefield commission in France to become the A.E.F.'s youngest second lieutenant. Later he turned to newspapering ("I needed hot cakes"), wound up covering the Spanish civil war for the Detroit News. In World War II, as a major in the Army historical section, he went to the Pacific to cover the invasion of Makin Island in 1943. At first he used the conventional approach: copying high-level records, talking to the brass, touring the front. He learned little. Even on the battlefield, fable was rapidly substituted for fact.

Then one morning after a savage Japanese night attack, Marshall came across two U.S. survivors arguing over what had happened. To find out who was right, Marshall called in the rest of the outfit and cross-examined each man. To his astonishment, he discovered "that every fact of the fight was procurable--that the fact lay dormant in the men's minds, waiting to be developed."

As chief historian for the European Theater of Operations under Eisenhower, Marshall led scores of other Army historians in seeking the soldiers' story, often under fire. Early in the Korean war 'he took leave of the Detroit News, to analyze the new enemy's unfamiliar techniques. Out of this experience came Marshall's best book, The River and the Gauntlet (TIME, June i, 1953), an epic description of the Eighth Army's 1950 defeat by the inrushing Chinese Communist masses.

Pork Chop Hill is no epic; the drama it unfolds is played on too modest a stage. But the book again puts Marshall's fundamental question about the American soldier's mettle, and answers it with vigor and admiration. Through stalemate and stagnation, the American spirit shone bright. "In the crucible,"reports Marshall, "the metal still looked like gold."

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