Give Me Tomorrow

The amphibious vehicle swerved to avoid the incoming North Korean mortar fire, while nervous Marines clenched their weapons and prayed that none of the rounds would hit the DUKWs.

Orace Edwards, a tall teetotaler from Texas who was a rifleman with First Platoon, remembered, “Our DUKW operator moved the rudder back and forth to zigzag the vehicle, making an S pattern in order to avoid the enemy mortars that were hitting the zigzag pattern where we weren’t. I sat on the seat and looked at mortar shells hitting the water, wondering if one of them was going to get lucky—and hoping it wouldn’t.”

Earlier in the day, George Company had boarded trucks and moved down toward the Han River. There they had clambered into the DUKWs. After ten minutes of successfully dodging the incoming mortar fire, the line of DUKWs hit dry land on the other side of the river.Without suffering a single casualty, the men disembarked, offloaded their gear, and quickly headed for the high ground. They dug in and spent a relatively uneventful night before the main assault on Seoul.

After Inchon, Kim Il Sung had heavily reinforced Seoul with 20,000 troops, including 5,000 battle-tested men from the Twenty-Fifth Brigade who had fought in Mao’s army. Despite the impressive number of troops Kim had brought into the city, his strategy included a major flaw: he wasted many of his precious T-34 tanks by sending them to counterattack the Marines in a piecemeal fashion. George Company had witnessed one such incident on the second day of the landing.

Nevertheless, the North Koreans held Seoul firmly and were digging in. A modern city with a prewar population of over 1 million, Seoul was one of Asia’s large cities, complete with modern stone buildings, a power grid, and a trolley system.

By September 24, two Marine regiments, the Fifth and the First, had entered the city’s perimeter, along with a regiment of Seventh Division and the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team. Colonel Chesty Puller’s First Marines would go up through the heart of the city.

Rather than enveloping Seoul, the Marines and MacArthur argued that they would have to take it block by block. That decision would result in tragic carnage. Before the development of smart bombs and other precision-guided munitions, the UN Allies would have to apply overwhelming artillery and air power in a massive fashion against the dug-in North Korean resistance.¹⁷

At 0200 on the morning of September 25, the First Marines began their attack on Seoul.

As the lead company for 3/1, George spearheaded the advance. They soon encountered their first obstacle—a railroad embankment that lay across their path. Second Platoon went under the railroad underpass. They “started getting murdered,” remembers George’s sniper “Peepsight” Pendas, and took a lot of casualties.

Orace Edwards recalls, “As we were going up the rise in the field, gunfire opened up on us, and the Second Platoon took the brunt of the attack with a lot of casualties.”

With Lieutenant Beeler’s Second Platoon and Third Platoon pinned down, First Platoon, including “Peepsight” Pendas, was tasked with breaking the enemy’s hold with a flanking maneuver. As the platoon, led by Carey and Tillman, moved over the top of the railroad embankment, they went through an open field, where they got into a violent firefight. Pendas recalls, “There was a machine gun on top of the plateau peppering us pretty bad.We couldn’t move over to Second Platoon. It seemed simple to me, if I could get around the flank of the machine gun, I could throw a grenade. I took my 03 and ran around the plateau, which seemed like winding goat trails and small ravines. All of the sudden on the path, up pops a guy with a white shirt who had hair eight inches long straight like wire. He had a rifle. He fired at me, no more than fifty feet away. I was in a small depression.The bullet hit right in front of me. Debris and a portion of the road hit me right in the face—right between the eyes.”

Pendas thought, I know I’m dead. The bullet “knocked the feet from right underneath me. I knew I was shot. Reaching up behind the back of my head, I was feeling around for a hole. The war had ended for me for about thirty-five seconds as I was trying to find out if I was alive. There was a lot of blood but no hole.”

As time stood still for Pendas, the North Korean would pop out of the hole, fire his bolt-action rifle for no more than two seconds, and then pop back into the hole, reload, and pop up again. Peepsight had trouble zeroing in on the man.The North Korean was a difficult target, so Pendas zeroed in with his telescope. As he saw the top of the North Korean’s head, he pulled the trigger. The round hit him in the chest. Pendas then crept up toward the machine gun nest and “pulled the pin on a grenade and let the spoon fly” killing the enemy machine gun crew.

Sergeant Tillman then shouted, “Come on, we’re pulling back.”

“See if you can help this man!” shouted Lieutenant Carey. Machine gunner Calvin New had been hit in the mouth with a bullet. Dick Hock recalls, “New was choking on his own blood and drowning; he was bleeding like an open fire hydrant.”

Pendas dressed his wounds and “with the strength that only adrenaline can provide,” put New in a fireman’s carry, and brought him off the field of battle. Several Marines then placed New in a poncho and took him to the rear.¹⁸

First Platoon pushed across the field, through a bean patch, and flanked the enemy troops firing on Second and Third Platoon.

George Company then began the advance up the main thoroughfare in Seoul, Ma Po Boulevard. One of the few thoroughfares in the city wide enough to accommodate tanks, the road cut through the heart of Seoul. Knowing that Ma Po would form the axis of the attack, the North Koreans had prepared roadblocks, bunkers, and other defensive positions along the gauntlet that George Company would have to pass through.

Meanwhile, to the south in the Pusan Perimeter, General Walker’s Eighth Army was breaking out after a very slow start.Walker faced the difficult task of reducing several fortified mountain strongpoints before his men could advance.

For nearly a week, the North Koreans had wisely refused to tell their troops about the Inchon landing and how the Americans were cutting off their lines of communication from the rear. Finally, by September 19, the news finally filtered down to the rank-and-file North Koreans. Feeling doomed, many of Kim Il Sung’s troops panicked and began the long retreat north. Hot on the heels of the retreating troops, Walker ordered his men to “pursue and destroy the enemy.”