Give Me Tomorrow

TANKS! TANKS! TANKS!” First Lieutenant Dalton Hilscher barked over the forward observer team’s SCR-300 radio, which Carlos Banks carried. “The fire team began to call in mortar and artillery fire directly in front of us.The noise was tremendous,” recalled Banks.

Shortly after 8 p.m. on the evening of September 25, the First Marine Division headquarters received a jarring message: “You will push your attack now, to the limit of your objective . . . in order to ensure maximum destruction of enemy forces.” Major General Oliver Prince Smith, a thirty-three-year veteran of the Corps, sometimes called “professor” for his studious looks and deliberate manner, stared at the order with near-disbelief. Knowing the North Koreans had been heavily defending the city block by block, he realized a night attack without proper preparation could be costly for his men and bordered on suicide.The men would be going into the heart of enemy defenses after being exhausted from a full day’s battle.

Smith requested a confirmation and received a firm response: “The order went out exactly as General Almond dictated it and is to be executed without delay.” Also relayed in the message was Almond’s information that elements of the North Korean army were retreating from Seoul.

General Edward Mallory “Ned” Almond was MacArthur’s chief of staff for the Far East and commander of X Corps, making him Smith’s superior officer.Ambitious and driven, during WWII, Almond had served as the major general in command of the Ninety-Second Infantry Division, an African-American unit that fought in Italy. Initially an outsider to MacArthur’s chain of command and not part of the “Bataan Gang” that MacArthur utilized during the Pacific War, Almond ingratiated himself with MacArthur, who had appointed him chief of staff.

It seemed to Smith that Almond had become obsessed with capturing the city in time for MacArthur’s manufactured deadline of September 25, exactly three months from the day the North Koreans launched their invasion. His order roiled an already tempestuous relationship. With only ten months separating them in age, Almond condescendingly referred to Smith as “Son.” Known for his aggressive nature, Almond was called “Ned the Dread,” which referred to his “power, brusque manner, and sometimes arbitrary actions.”

General Lemuel Shepherd, commanding general of Fleet Marine Force Pacific, summed up the relationship this way: “He [Almond] and O.P. [Smith] just didn’t get along, from the very first.They are two entirely different personalities. . . . O.P. [was] a very cautious individual, a fine staff officer who considered every contingency before taking action. On the other hand, Almond was aggressive and anxious for X Corps to push ahead faster than Smith thought his division should.” Smith’s deliberate nature would later save the First Marine division from destruction.

Reluctantly, Smith accepted Almond’s orders. Phoning his regimental commanders, Smith told them, “I want you to coordinate your attack carefully. Don’t try to advance too rapidly. Take it slow, and stay on the main avenues you can identify at night. I’m ordering a fifteen-minute artillery preparation before you jump off.”

Colonel Puller knew he was sending his men, including George Company, into a meat grinder and delayed the attack until 0200 because preparation was “inadequate.” Doing the best he could for his men, Puller ordered two fifteen-minute artillery bombardments to plaster the area in front of the assault. In fact, the Marines never made their attack. The North Koreans struck first.

At 1:53 a.m., hundreds of North Korean troops and a column of T-34 tanks and self-propelled guns barreled down on George Company’s position behind the roadblock. “You could hear the clanking of the T-34’s steel tracks as they rumbled down the street,” Dick Hock remembered.

Suddenly, the main gun on one of the T-34s cracked. An 85 mm round went down the street at a blazing 800 meters per second. The armor-piercing projectile flew into a house being used as George Company’s Command Post. Boring a hole through the wall and decapitating a battalion radio operator, it exited through the rear wall and “landed unexploded on a Marine’s shelter half several yards behind the command post.”

Voices shouted as the tanks made their way down the block: “Friendlies coming in! Friendlies coming in!” Stationed in front of the George Company roadblock, the First Machine Gun Section had a front-row view of the approaching enemy.

“I could hear a tank coming up closer as I started to run down the street back toward the roadblock,” First Platoon Rifleman Orace Edwards remembered. “Automatic weapons spat and sparks from bullets hit the street surface around my feet. That made me run faster.”

Ammo bearer Bob Harbula was taking turns with the machine gunner manning a gun. “All of the sudden, Edwards, this six-foot-two Marine, landed directly on top of my head,” recalled Harbula.

Positioned on the left-hand side of the road, which was bisected by two trolley tracks, Hock leaned against a telephone pole behind the barricade, with his M1 rifle pointed directly at the oncoming tank. Suddenly, a Marine he didn’t know dove behind the barrier. The Marine shouted, “Does anybody have any M1 ammo?”

“I never wanted to be caught unprepared, so I always carried extra bandoliers of ammunition. I moved away from the pole and back to my pack laying on the ground a few yards behind the barrier,” remembered Hock. While Hock scrounged for the ammunition, the young Marine took over the rifleman’s old position behind the telephone pole and fired the remaining rounds in his M1 at the oncoming tank.

“As I was reaching for the extra bandolier, the T-34 fired another round,” remembered Hock.The armor-piercing round went through the center of the telephone pole, taking off part of the other Marine’s head. Dirt and pieces of sandbag flew everywhere, and the round threw the Marine’s body back several yards from the pole. The dead man’s helmet landed several feet from his body. “I reached for him, but I knew he was dead,” recalled Hock. “Everyone opened up on the tank, lighting it up like the Fourth of July.”

The tank fired a second round, and its heavy steel tracks clanked closer to the barricades. Earlier in the day, an engineer unit with the assistance of George Company had laid antitank mines in a random pattern in front of the roadblock. Remarkably, the tank threaded its way through the minefield without hitting one.

Ominously, the thirty-ton behemoth bore down on the First Platoon, its coaxial machine gun spewing out lead like a garden hose watering a lawn. While the tank undoubtedly readied another round in its main gun, Hancock squeezed the trigger on the bazooka, hitting the tank in its barrel and halting its movement. Hancock’s teammate feverishly loaded another round and tapped him on the shoulder. The Marine bazooka-man squeezed the trigger again, hitting the tank in the turret.

Pelted by the bazooka rounds and small arms fire, the tank backed up and hit a mine, throwing its right track. “It backed up in an arc and came to a stop on the side of the street next to a schoolyard wall,” remembered Hock.

Behind the lead T-34, three other North Korean tanks and a self-propelled gun rumbled down the boulevard, along with a battalion of infantry troops pushing several antitank guns. Harbula and the other members of the First Machine Gun section, along with the rest of the members of First Platoon, opened up with everything they had on the incoming North Korean assault. One of the machine gun barrels burned out because of the massive volume of fire. Hock recalled that the gunner had to twist the rounds on the belt “to stop it from firing and jam the gun because it wouldn’t stop firing.” The gun was literally firing itself.

In the maelstrom, a small George Company patrol, led by Corporal Chuck Collins of the Second Platoon, was trapped behind the lines.With a mission to make contact with the Fifth Marines, Collins’s small squad of men made their way through the North Korean positions. When suddenly confronted by scores of enemy troops that were making the counterattack, Collins heroically ordered his men to filter back to George Company lines, in an attempt to hold off the North Koreans while his men escaped. Evading North Korean patrols and, more miraculously, thousands of incoming Allied rounds, Collins slipped through the next morning in a clever manner. He found women’s civilian clothing and reported back to George Company in drag.

As the first fingers of crimson crept over the blown and blasted bits of George Company’s roadblock, the attack finally subsided. During the night, the forward observer team had assisted in calling in thousands of artillery rounds, making it even larger than some of the artillery bombardments at Guadalcanal.The Eleventh Marines laid on one of the largest artillery barrages of the war up until that time.

That morning when the melee was over, Hock covered the fallen Marine next to him with a poncho.Two stretcher bearers soon came to carry away the dead man. As they were positioning the body, “his brains slid out,” recalled one of the Marines nearby.