4
Inchon
SMOKE COMBINED with the sickening odor of cordite filled the air as the LVT pushed into a cloud of manmade darkness. A gust of wind dispersed the smoke, and the men gazed on a panorama that looked like a Hollywood movie: Corsairs dropped napalm-filled canisters, while a nearby ship fired scores of rockets on the intended landing area. Splashes of light froth erupted as bullets and shells hit the water.
“Hey, they’re shooting at us!” a green reservist remarked incredulously as he poked his head above the metal hull of the amtrac.
“Keep your fucking head down!” a sergeant barked.
The crackle of small arms fire pierced the din of battle over the low drone of the LVT’s motor working overtime to cut through the gray-blue waves.Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick!
A machine gun zeroed in on the LVT carrying machine gunner Jack Daniels: “The bullets bounced off the armor like hailstones; several mortars landed in the water nearby,” he recalled.
As the beachhead approached, one Marine nervously turned to a veteran and asked, “How do I load my M1?” The reservists were arguably some of the most poorly trained men the Corps had ever turned out, but their spirit often made up for their lack of training.
But at its core, George Company was built around veteran NCOs and officers like Zullo. Despite the incoming rounds and comments from the newbies, Zullo was “like a sphinx”—unflappable. For a split second, Zullo’s mind briefly flashed back to amphibious assaults on Guadalcanal and Peleliu, places he had barely survived. Suddenly, a splash of foam from a near-miss snapped Zullo’s mind back to the present, as the LVTs turned closer to the beach, and a large seawall appeared in front of them.
“Ready the ladders!”
The amtracs bearing George Company bobbed up and down as the men steadied the rickety two-by-four ladders they had constructed days earlier. Those from First Platoon nudged the seawall. Bob Harbula leaned his ladder against the wall and began the nerve-racking climb up. Crack! A bullet passed near his ear.The ammunition bearer slowly climbed each rung of the ladder; he was weighed down with over a hundred pounds of extra gear: two cans of machine gun ammunition on his back on a plastic track tray, two more cans suspended from a harness around his neck, plus grenades, his carbine, and personal gear. Step by step, he made his way to the top of the ladder. Cracking his hand across the seawall, he smashed his watch as he vaulted over it.
The other members of George Company weren’t far behind Harbula, but a barbed-wire fence impeded further movement off the seawall. Someone yelled, “Bring up the cutters!”
Corporal Albert Barnes
11 quickly began cutting the wire so the rest of the Marines could get past the wall. Barnes feverishly snipped each strand.
Thud!
A sniper round struck Barnes in the jugular. He instantly bled to death and “turned gray.”
“This was a wake-up call,” remembered Harbula. “We were in a dangerous place, in a war. You always remember the first of anything—the first time someone is killed or the first time you kill someone. It stays with you for the rest of your life.”
Without hesitating, Lieutenant Carey, platoon leader of the First Platoon, grabbed the cutters and began quickly snipping his way through the wire. A round drilled a hole through Carey’s pack as he cut the final strand. “I don’t know why I didn’t hand the cutters to someone who was stronger and a hell of a lot faster, but we broke through,” he later said.
Passing through the wire, First Platoon had to cross a road. Small arms fire peppered the dirt thoroughfare. One of the squad leaders barked to everyone, “Get down!”
“Everyone hugged the ground but PFC Ralph Murphy, a ‘wise guy’ from Brooklyn. He didn’t get along with the sergeant,” recalled PFC Frank McNeive, also a native of Brooklyn and a four-year veteran of the Marine Corps, who would later rise to the rank of sergeant major. Murphy stood up and advanced across the road, but was soon killed by a sniper’s bullet that struck him right between the eyes.
12“The sniper’s up in the stack!” someone yelled.
Based on the trajectory of the rounds that struck Barnes and Murphy, the men of George Company surmised that the sniper could only be in one location—a hole barely large enough to expose the man’s head and shoulders near the top of a smokestack that jutted out of the Inchon skyline like a bayonet. Placing his rifle into the hole, the sniper enjoyed a complete line of sight on the entire beachhead.
Tom Enos’s machine gun section, attached to Second Platoon, was ordered to ready their machine guns and aim for the stack. “They had us zero in on the hole. We shot a few tracers and put quite a few rounds in. It silenced the sniper,” recalled Enos.
13Even before the men hit the beach, it had started drizzling, and clouds eclipsed the sun.The combination of fog and smoke from the explosions created a haunting, confusing atmosphere. Some units landed in the wrong places. Timing had to be perfect, and the tide and waves just right or the entire invasion force would be trapped in the mud of the harbor and easily picked off by North Koreans defending the beachhead.With no time for rehearsals, the landing was not as crisp as previous Marine landings in the Pacific. Nevertheless, the Leathernecks and MacArthur maintained the crucial element of war: surprise.
Other parts of George Company found a break in the wall and made a dry landing, while some LVTs went up a drainage ditch. The Third Machine Gun section, attached to Third Platoon, went up the ditch. “Keep your head down! Keep your head down!” Sergeant Fred Garcia,Third Machine Section leader, barked to his men.
“He [Garcia] was around at all times. We followed him around like a duckling follows its mother,” recalled Tom Powers. Powers recalled that Garcia was a family man, battle-tested yet cautious, Garcia put his men first. A quiet, reserved man, Garcia never swore. Also religious, he wore a “miraculous medal” around his neck.
Many of the men in George Company carried similar religious medals for their protective powers. Powers was festooned with dozens of Catholic scapular medals around his neck, along with his grandmother’s rosary beads and dog tags. Besides religious medals, the Irishman also came “well lubricated”; his field pack contained five bottles of whiskey that he covertly shared with his section.
“I took over the same system that she used with my grandfather during World War I. She would bake a loaf of bread, then turn it over, cut part of it down the middle and hollow it out so there was just enough room for a fifth. I was always well equipped with Jamison,” remembered Powers.
After moving off the beachhead, Carey’s First Platoon broke through and moved toward the high ground, known as “Radio Hill”—First Platoon’s D-Day objective. The small hill lay on the left flank of the battalion. As Carey’s platoon stormed the hill, the ships in the harbor “spotted movement on top of Radio Hill.” The hill erupted in a mass of earth and dust as naval shells struck its side. The friendly fire was about to turn deadly.
Several men were wounded badly. Hock remembered the horror of seeing a Marine’s arm “hanging by a thread.” He was cradling one arm with the other and was clearly in shock.
Carey immediately got on the platoon’s radio and screamed, “You sons-of-bitches, stop firing! We’re friendlies on the hill! Cease fire!”
“It was one of the most rapid reactions I’ve ever seen. They stopped firing, but not before several of my men were badly wounded,” recalled Carey.
After the friendly fire incident, the men dug in for the night, each platoon circling the wagons “like pioneers heading West.” Carey reflected, “That night, we remained in the foxholes, and I’ll never forget how damn cold it was. I shook all night.”
Known as “the loners of First Platoon,” GoodEagle, Farr, and Hallawell would typically share the same foxhole. They had gone to radio school together and became very close friends. First machine gunner Ralph Whitney, also a loner, disappeared from the unit that night, not being able to keep up with the rest of the machine gun section, but he reappeared at daybreak.
That night, George Company was told to consider anything in front of their foxholes the enemy, unless the password “Lucky Strike” was given. “We heard movement in front of our position,” recalled Daniels. “The man in front of me yelled out ‘Lucky!’ There was no response. Several shots rang out from the Marines’ M1 Garands. A moaning voice responded, ‘I’m Lieutenant ‘so-and-so,’ clearly in pain.” It was another case of friendly fire for George Company, and it certainly wouldn’t be their last. The wounded officer was treated and evacuated from the battlefield.
As dawn broke, George Company, along with the rest of the First Marine Regiment, began expanding the beachhead to reduce the possibility of a North Korean counterattack. Battalion command gave First Platoon its own separate mission to secure some high ground on George Company’s flank. That morning, September 16 (D+1), as Carey’s platoon moved out toward their objective, the First Machine Gun Section was hit by North Korean machine gun fire. The heavy small arms fire was coming from a wooded area on the side of a hill. Turning to his right hand, Carey ordered Sergeant Tillman to conduct a classic double-envelopment. Tillman, a dashing figure who wore double-buckle combat boots, was the type of person who “everyone liked” and was also one of the youngest sergeants in the Marine Corps. “I left one squad as a base of fire to contain the center, while Sergeant Tillman and his squad moved to the left and I moved with Sergeant Gene Lilly and his squad to the right.”
With bayonets fixed, Tillman and Carey both threw smoke grenades into the open field.
The platoon charged forward into a cloud of grey smoke. The move was so well executed that they surprised an entrenched enemy platoon. Remarkably, in the midst of the battle, Carey faced his counterpart, the lieutenant leading the North Korean platoon. Stunned, the North Korean officer dropped his pistol and threw his hands up in the air. As he raised his hands, “The North Korean made a sudden move I thought was initially threatening,” recalled Carey. Carey squeezed the trigger on his .45 and the North Korean went down.
Carey thought to himself, I just killed a man who was surrendering.
Luckily, the officer was still alive. “The round I fired hit his pistol belt buckle and knocked him to the ground,” recalled Carey. First Platoon then took the enemy platoon and its commander as prisoners.
It was a classic case in which the Marines’ training and leadership paid off.The Marines were able to defeat the North Koreans without taking a single casualty. The Marines had outmaneuvered and out-fought their foe—something they would repeat in coming days.
As George Company pushed forward, they moved up a road that passed through a defile or cut. Several North Korean soldiers waited on top of the defile as most of First Platoon walked by. When the machine gun section approached the chokepoint, a grenade landed in the middle of the road with a thud and detonated, wounding several Marines.
Standing nearby was G. Pendas, a First Platoon guide whose role included managing “everything from beans, bullets, and bandages” and making sure they got to the men. A New York City native, Pendas enlisted in the Corps in 1947. With only fourteen days left in his initial enlistment when the Korean War broke out, he re-enlisted in order to serve. Armed with a Springfield Star gauge 1903 rifle with an x8 power scope, Pendas, later known as “Peepsight” for his keen eye, doubled as the platoon’s sniper.
He recalls a memory seared in his mind forever. Two of George Company’s corpsmen, who “looked no older than high school sophomores,” rushed to help the wounded men. As one of the corpsmen, Stanley Martin, reached the wounded Marines, the North Koreans hurled a second grenade, which landed only four feet from the corpsman. Martin pulled the wounded Marine into his chest and turned his body to absorb the blast. Boom! The grenade went off. Pendas remembers: “Stanley Martin got wounded in the buttocks, and here comes Doc Anderson, the other corpsman. We have three or four wounded, and he pulls down Martin’s trousers and started patching him up. Martin never quit working on the wounded man, trying to save his life even after he was wounded. I’ll never forget it—it was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Shortly thereafter, several Marines climbed to the top of the defile, flanked the enemy, and took out the North Koreans.
Second and Third Platoons also received enemy contact that day and humped a lot of difficult miles. Most of the men were exhausted from going up and down hills, over rugged terrain, and fighting the enemy.
Fortunately for George Company, the tempo of combat settled down by the evening of D+1, and the First and Fifth Marines secured the Inchon beachhead. Massive quantities of men and material were pouring through. Fear of a North Korean counterattack subsided, as the men prepared for the eighteen-mile fight to Seoul.
