6
Yongdungpo
A DENSE, HEAVY FOG covered the rice paddies as George Company advanced in column. Suddenly, a spectral figure burst though the mist. Sergeant Henry watched in horror as a South Korean father ran past him carrying the broken body of his daughter: “Blood was all over the place.The anguish in his face has been seared in my mind’s eye for over fifty years.”
Both father and daughter were screaming and crying. A George Company corpsman tried to offer assistance to the wounded girl.The ten-year-old girl’s arm was dangling by a thread and required amputation. “Our corpsman cut off her arm with a knife,” recalled Dick Hock. The Navy medic then tenderly bandaged the young girl’s arm. The father was in a state of shock.
Despite the horrors of war, Hock didn’t lose his humanity. “I dug a shallow grave for it, and I buried her tiny arm,” recalled Hock tearfully.
On the foggy morning of September 21, George Company penetrated the outskirts of Yongdungpo. Located between the Kalchon and Han rivers,Yongdungpo lay directly on the path to Seoul, about two miles distant.The suburb of Seoul consisted of flat, open ground, filled with rice paddies, locks, and dikes, and rows of buildings that faced the South Korean capital. A key communications hub, the industrialized town also contained crucial railroad and highway bridges, which linked it to Seoul.
“If Yongdungpo is lost, Seoul will fall,” the North Korean leadership acceded in various conferences. They assigned an entire North Korean regiment to Yongdungpo. George Company marched into a buzz saw.
Initially, George Company set out marching in a column instead of a skirmish line because of the open nature of the ground. After advancing about three-quarters of a mile without any casualties, the platoons then formed into a skirmish line as they came under sniper fire. Returning fire, the company killed several North Korean soldiers.
As they entered Yongdungpo, a Corsair came in and began a strafing run. Furrows of .50 caliber bullets cut through the soft dirt of the paddies. The men dove for cover. Someone quickly pulled out George Company’s red marker panels. Luckily, the pilot recognized in time that they were friendly troops and waggled his wings in recognition.
As the Marines resumed their march forward, numerous South Korean civilians continued to spring up along the way, informing Westover that the North Koreans were dug in and waiting. Sensing a trap, George Company requested permission to halt and asked for additional instructions. The battalion radioed back that they should stay in place.
As First Squad in First Platoon rounded a corner to dig in further, Hock remembered practically bumping into two Korean soldiers armed with M1 Garands. “The men didn’t look menacing as they lowered their weapons,” recalled Hock. “We thought they might be ROKs.”
“Go get Sergeant Binaxas!” someone yelled.
“Binaxas spoke a little Japanese, and First Squad thought he might be able to communicate with them. Both North Koreans had their weapons at ‘parade rest.’” Binaxas, known affectionately as “the Greek god” for his prowess with women or less affectionately as “the God-damned Greek,” rounded the corner and barked, “Put down your rifles!”
Suddenly, with a flick of a wrist, one of the North Koreans lifted his weapon and “fired from the hip.” A gaping wound appeared in Binaxas’s stomach, as he crumpled over writhing in pain: “He aged twenty years in twenty seconds.”
In the confusion, both North Koreans took off running. The squad fired at the fleeing North Koreans, but they seemed to escape into some buildings.
14Face flush with horror, Sergeant Tillman informed the remaining members of First Platoon, “Binaxas is KIA.”
Hock reflected on the moment fifty-nine years later. “Nothing is so screwed up as combat. Binaxas was a good man—a World War II vet and very colorful.”
By midday, headquarters ordered George Company to resume its advance. Westover instructed Third Platoon, reinforced with a section of light machine guns, to head for a water gate that controlled passage from a canal to the Kalchon River. “There was a dike on either side of this canal that came into a river, which ran directly across our line of attack,” remembered Westover. In order to reach the rusted-steel water gate,Third Platoon would have to cross the canal between the two dikes and expose themselves on top of the dike—the perfect position for an ambush.
As expected, the North Koreans were dug in along the dikes. Moving forward toward the water gate, Third Platoon encountered heavy fire.The men dropped to their knees as the earthen dike in front of them erupted.
As Third Platoon crawled to the top of the earthworks, a barrage of machine gun bullets struck one Marine in the head. For over half an hour, the Third Platoon commander, Lieutenant Jarrnigan, boldly attempted to position his machine guns in a place where they could return fire. Jarrnigan fearlessly moved to the top of the dike. He placed his field glasses to his eyes and scanned the area. A second later, he lowered them. “I saw the bullet take off half his face,” recalled Mert GoodEagle.
Jarrnigan had been in a tragic automobile accident and “always seemed depressed. He seemed to want to die.All of us were convinced that moving over the dike the way he did was a suicide mission, but what were we going to do? If you didn’t follow orders, you would be labeled a coward or would be up for a court martial,” recalled Hems. “It was reckless.Why did he do it? I think he wanted to die.”
After Jarrnigan went down, another Marine PFC jumped up on the dike and heroically started firing his BAR. Raking the North Korean position and killing several of them, he drained his twenty-round clip and began changing it out as machine gun bullets ripped into his left side. Someone yelled, “Corpsman up!” But within a matter of minutes, the Marine died.
As the earth around his position exploded with enemy machine gun fire, the gunner working with Fred Hems carefully traversed his machine gun, sending bullets arcing toward the incoming fire. An enemy round interrupted his fire. Striking the Browning M1919A4 and bending the top of the receiver into an S-shape, it exploded the cartridges inside the machine gun’s chamber. Another bullet struck the gunner’s hand. “Blood spots from the powder burns covered my face,” recalled Hems. Despite the searing powder burns on his face, Hems took over for the gunner and worked to put the damaged gun back into action.
Pinned down, Third Platoon faced obliteration. To extricate his trapped platoon, Westover decided to outflank the North Koreans and send First Platoon and Second Platoon out on the endangered platoon’s flanks. He also called in an air strike and utilized the forward observation team to put artillery fire on the target. The napalm was particularly deadly, as Westover recalls: “I remember seeing the sticky, searing gas-jelly coat their bodies. As they were trying to get it off, they were smearing it all over their bodies, burning their flesh from their bones.”
After the air strikes and artillery fire, Second and First Platoons blasted their way forward in an attempt to relieve the Third Platoon near the water gate.
First Platoon’s objective for the day was to reach a highway that paralleled the Han River. “I couldn’t raise George Westover [on the radio], and I remembered our objective was to reach the highway, so I made my decision,” recalled Lieutenant Carey. “We had to move through several dikes, which provided us cover. Then we were about five hundred yards from our objective. At this point, there were about five hundred yards of open field, with no cover.”
Carey had a very difficult mission. Across the open field, there were several warehouse buildings that contained dug-in North Koreans. First Platoon would have to cross the field in broad daylight, exposed to withering fire. “I planned to make the attack with two squads forward and one to the rear. We formed a line of skirmishers. The squad leaders would use fire team rushes, with covering fire from the third squad,” remembered Carey.
“Fix bayonets!” Sergeant Tillman yelled as the men inserted steel on the ends of their M1s. He repeated the famous line from Gunnery Sergeant Daniel J. Daly, WWI Marine hero at Belleau Wood: “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”
The men surged forward.
The Marines hit their stride and covered nearly two hundred yards at a dead sprint. The Leathernecks met intense fire, evidenced by enemy muzzle flashes from the building. Carey’s squad was pinned down. We’re in serious trouble, thought Carey. “I knew if we didn’t move forward, we would be dead in the open ground. I was on the right flank, while Tillman was on the left,” he recalled.
A natural leader and tactician, Tillman changed his direction of advance, drawing the enemy fire off Carey’s squad. Carey then shouted at his men, “Move it! Move it!”
Several First Platoon Marines went down. “It could have been from the covering fire,” recalled Hock. “But I’m not sure.” Nevertheless, Tillman remained cool under fire “in utter disregard for his own safety” as he led his squad forward on the assault. Carey later praised him saying, “Tillman acted decisively. I’m certain I would have lost a third of my platoon, had he not been there.”
15Eventually First Platoon reached the buildings and fired on the North Koreans. Several fled as the squads descended on the buildings.
After driving the North Koreans out of the warehouse, Carey’s platoon moved to their objective—the highway—as the sun began to set. First Platoon dug in along the highway, which paralleled the Han River, and Second Platoon covered the flank of Third Platoon, freeing it from the deadly North Korean crossfire.The platoons then advanced toward the Han. Eventually, the remainder of George Company joined First Platoon along the thoroughfare and dug in.
Hock found it remarkably easy to burrow through the soft dirt. His entrenching tool soon hit flesh and bone, the bloated corpse of a decomposing body resting in a fresh grave. The body seemed to be moving. “It was covered with maggots, which seemed to be moving the clothing. We got chicken and rice in our C-Rations. After that I would never eat them again,” recalled Hock.
The North Koreans were only yards away that night. “Our supply of grenades was low, so we made IED-type explosives using C-2 that we packed with nails and detonated with blasting caps as we threw them at the enemy,” recalled Carey.
During a lull in the fighting, members of George Company stumbled upon a gold mine.
“Skipper, we found a brewery,” someone informed Westover.
With a nod and a smile,Westover told his Jeep driver, “Let’s go.”
Westover and other members of the company descended on a squat, red-brick building. A massive wooden gate blocked their progress until one of the men climbed over the wall and unlocked it. They were in.
The men converged on the 3,000-gallon vats of unprocessed “green” beer like mad dogs attacking a meat shop. Not waiting for the slow flow of the taps, the men snipped “the clear measurement tubes on the side of the tanks.” A green elixir spilled onto the stone floor of the brewery. After several days of combat, everyone wanted some of the brew. “It was warm and green,” recalled Mert GoodEagle.
After days of bloody combat, “We wanted it.Warm, green beer—there was nothin’ like it,” Tom Powers recalled with a smile, fifty-seven years later.
Some of the men were a little more cautious. George Company had its share of teetotalers, and some wisely turned away after “we found a dead North Korean in one of the large vats,” recalled one Marine.
The men used their helmets as beer steins and filled jerry cans with the partially fermented elixir. The men quickly became buzzed. Within two hours, though, things took a turn for the worse. “It seemed like we had shits for a week,” recalled Bob Harbula. Men lined up in makeshift latrines as they rid their bodies of the ale.
Luckily, George Company didn’t have to enter intense combat right away. Waiting for DUKWs
16 to transport them across the river into Seoul, they remained in their positions along the highway and exchanged fire with the North Koreans, who were prepared to fight to the death in South Korea’s capital.