A cross the strangely silent waters of Wonsan harbor four bells in the forenoon watch sounded. July 28, 1953— cease fire in Korea. From their battle stations men filed slowly out on deck, disbelief showing their strained faces. Quietly they stared at an enemy shore that would no longer shoot death.
The strokes of a pen at Panmunjom had suspended Korean hostilities and also ended the longest, most frustrating siege of a city by naval guns in history—the siege of Wonsan.
Minutes before, the batteries of the destroyers Wiltsie and Potter hit into enemy gun emplacements; over the destroyers the shells of the cruiser Bremerton had sounded their “chug-chug-chug-chug” en route to Communist troop concentrations and supply dumps. Enemy gunfire had lasted to the final whistle too, raising geysers about the ships as they twisted and turned to escape destruction.
Missions of death had so long occupied the day to day routine that new entries in the log looked odd:
“ . . . 1000—The truce between the United Nations and the North Korean Government together with the Chinese Peoples Volunteers became effective. Ceased firing. 1005—All engines stopped. 1007—Anchored in 10 fathoms of water at Wonsan, North Korea, with 45 fathoms of chain to the starboard anchor, on the following anchor bearings . . . 2015—Executed sunset. Turned on anchor lights. Lighted ship. . . .”
The stubborn struggle with enemy guns and mines, endless days of shooting, steaming, minesweeping, ducking, waiting, watching, had come to an end. The lights were on again.
Wonsan lies at the deepest indentation of the sea into the east coast of Korea. It is the halfway mark of the important railroad that leads from the Russian-Manchurian border of Korea down the length of the peninsula to its southern tip—Vladivostok to Pusan. It is similar in appearance to some of the harbors on the coast of Maine. The rugged terrain and steep-sided islands of the bay, green in summer, snow speckled in winter, bear a striking resemblance.
Before the war, Wonsan had been a popular summer resort as well as an important rail and industrial center. The harbor islands were a vacationland for wealthy Asiatics. The city was a thriving oriental metropolis of over 100,000 residents, its beautifully developed harbor a mariner’s delight, the finest on Korea’s coasts.
In the fall of 1950, the tide of battle swept north through Wonsan. By Christmas it had receded, leaving the city once again in North Korean possession. Later the infantry lines stabilized about fifty miles south of Wonsan.
The naval siege commenced on February 16, 1951. It broke an 88-year record for continuous bombardment of a city by United States vessels. At Vicksburg, Union gunboats had maintained a heavy barrage of Confederate emplacements for 42 consecutive days. Wonsan topped this in its infancy; besieged and besieger slugged it out for 861 days.
The men who were there remember the sight of the scarred earth, the sound of the gunfire, the acrid smell of smokeless powder. Daily the little wooden-hulled minesweepers cleared the channels. Destroyers prowled the confined waters within the bordering mine fields, firing on their targets, maintaining the vigil that kept the enemy troops and traffic in check, weaving among the splashes at four bells and a jingle when the enemy retaliated. Periodically a cruiser or battleship stood into the bay to bring her big guns to grips with the largest shore batteries.
Ships in fresh war-color entered the harbor and relieved those with paint scorched by muzzle blast, superstructures marked from smokescreens. But the weary rested, repaired, returned. Returned from an upkeep in Sasebo or Yokosuka, returned from a screening assignment with a fast carrier striking force, returned from a bucking-rolling patrol in the monsoon of the Formosa Strait, returned from a few months “stateside,” but always—returned.
“Why?”
It was the question of every gunner, throttleman, radarman, signalman, fireman whose ship entered the enemy port. It was the question of men who stood to their battle stations as enemy shells exploded on water with the familiar “ker-whunk” or tore into the steel of the ship.
“What are we gaining?”
The tough, hard-hitting commander of the Seventh Fleet called Wonsan the “Chicago” of Korea. Others called it the United Nations “window” in North Korea. Destroyer and minesweep men called it a lot of things, none fit to print.
In your first week of shooting and dodging at Wonsan the price seemed high for little return. After you had been there a while the return didn’t seem so little after all. The cliché, “Wonsan is our bargain in the basement of war in Korea,” began to make some sense.
Here was a traffic funnel through which must pass the materials of war en route to the front. Here converged the roads and railroads that carried the enemy’s men, food, guns, and ammunition. The corrugated mountain ridges of central Korea forced the vital routes of supply through Wonsan. There our ships met them—with a vengeance.
The task of laying siege to the city and its transportation routes fell to the United Nations Blockading and Escort Force, Task Force 95. An effective blockade of the coasts had denied the enemy his time-honored water highways. That very water now provided the means of harassing his overloaded rail and vehicular traffic.
The destroyers Ozbourn and Lind, 2,200 tonners, opened the show. The minesweepers had cleared a single narrow channel into the bay. It led to Kalma Gak, an arm of land extending into the bay that housed an alarming number of gun caves. The channel among the mines was so narrow that the destroyers were forced to anchor in order to commence their mission. They opened fire with the “hook” down.
The skipper of the Ozbourn said, “The minesweeps advanced the channel a little each day. We kept easing in. About the fifth day, out of ammunition, we left the harbor to replenish. The Reds must have zeroed in on our anchorage while we were gone. When we returned and settled in position, they let us have it.
“The gunnery officer and I were in CIC checking the grid position of a target. It was a few minutes after noon, the men off watch were at chow. From the bridge the officer of the deck called down the voice tube ‘Captain —there are some splashes out here, we may be under fire.’ A moment later there wasn’t any doubt. A shell went right through the Mark 56 director. It made two neat holes, in-out, then blossomed into an air burst.”
The measured clang of the general alarm sounded through the ship—Man Your Battle Stations, Man Your Battle Stations—but men alerted by the explosions were already pounding to general quarters.
Under fire at anchor! Accurate fire! Ozbourn was in a tough spot. The rules of this game didn’t say anything about sitting ducks! There was steam up. Engineers quickly cracked the throttles, warming the turbines as rapidly as they dared. In the gun mounts pointers and trainers worked their arms like pistons as they swung the guns toward the offending muzzles, smoking from the mouths of caves on the steep-sided peninsula.
Gun barrels vibrated, then steadied as switches synchronized them with the director. In the lower decks sweating crews passed shell and powder to hungry hoists. An enemy projectile ripped into the deckhouse passageway and mushroomed destruction as it detonated. Fragments tore into steel, aluminum, cloth, flesh. Competing with the blast of the guns, now hot at work, the shrill of the bo’sun’s pipe came over the amplifiers, “Fire in the deckhouse, starboard side frame 122.”
On the bridge the ship’s captain, a rough situation on his hands, said to his telephone talker, “Tell the engine room to answer bells as quickly as they are able,” and to the officer of the deck, “There isn’t time to get the anchor up, we will get under way with it down.”
A shell demolished the starboard signal searchlight. The quartermaster manning it, untouched, looked in amazement at the still vibrating standard that had been the light’s support. The bridge radio went dead, its antenna severed by shrapnel. A shell exploded in the deck structure below the bridge.
With the after gun director shot away, Chief Gunners Mate Lauer and his crew in mount No. 3 were on their own. Lauer showed his initiative and took over in local control. While his loaders rapidly fed projectiles to the heavy breeches of the twin five-inch rifles, he brought the fall of shot on target, silenced one of the enemy guns.
Ozbourn was underway now. Guns blazing, anchor dragging, she headed for the safety of the outer channel. Somewhere en route (no one remembers just where) a young reserve officer crawled out on the fo’c’sle beneath the muzzles of the forward guns, and weathering the searing blast of their rapid fire, reached the anchor capstan. With seamanship that would do credit to a warrant bo’sun, he disconnected the anchor chain at the 45 fathom shot, releasing the ship from its crippling drag.
The Ozbourn escaped the confines of the channel facing the enemy stronghold with damage that was minor in comparison to the heavy barrage she had suffered. Once in the clear she received a message from the destroyer Sperry who had witnessed the ordeal, to the effect that her blazing guns had lived up to the ship’s radio call, “Fireball.”
But the real dirty work of the siege fell to the minesweepers—“Where the fleet goes, we’ve been.” Daily the mine vessels paraded before the enemy, keeping the channels free of the deadly underwater weapon, subjecting themselves to short-range gunfire as they swept.
When the destroyers entered Wonsan to commence the bombardment, the sweeps, as usual, had already opened the gate. It was reminiscent of the sign greeting the Tenth Corps when they landed at Wonsan just five months earlier, “This Beach Is Yours Through the Courtesy of Mine Squadron Three.”
Back again was the U.S.S. Incredible, sole survivor of a division of three minesweeps that participated in the amphibious landing. She had miraculously escaped destruction in that earlier visit. Since the first ship in formation is subjected to the greatest danger, she and her sister ships Pledge and Pirate had rotated that privilege daily. Pure chance had given Incredible last place in formation the fatal day that mines sent Pledge and Pirate to the bottom of Wonsan Harbor.
The same operation had stricken from her navy’s list, the Republic of Korea minesweeper 516. She triggered a mine and disintegrated in a dirty geyser of water flecked with particles that seconds before had been a ship.
The amphibious landings were followed only two months later by amphibious evacuation. Back in possession of Wonsan, the North Koreans hastily re-mined the swept waters (with mines of Russian manufacture and reported Russian technical direction). Now it had to be done all over again.
The captain of the “incredible Incredible” told me, “The Commies left us alone while we cleared the entrance channel for the siege. Everything was quiet until the destroyers arrived and spoiled the gentlemen’s agreement. It had been so peaceful that the helicopter spotting mines for us even landed on the city airfield one morning. The pilot had found need of a gent’s room. The astonished North Koreans didn’t even shoot!
“We anchored right there in the harbor every night, but once the destroyers started shooting, our immunity, ended. The shore batteries joined in. The worst of it was they always picked meal time to open up.”
Mine warfare is heartbreaking, lopsided—an unequal fight. It is cheap for the enemy, costly for us. It sustains the majority of casualties. It deals in steel cables, cutters, buoys, pulsers, sonic hammers, magnetic tails, death. Mines are worse than shore batteries. They get a ship in the belly.
Once mined you never forget. The explosive impact jars every ounce of your body. A giant has struck the soles of your feet with his sledge. Your bones reverberate the blow. Inert objects become lethal missiles—hurled by the force of the explosion. Men are catapulted—into the air if they are lucky—into the sharp steel angles and jagged fittings of the overhead if they are not.
A small ship doesn’t last long when mined. Disintegrating TNT opens a cavern in the hull. She carries down with her the badly wounded as well as the dead. A live, driving vessel becomes a circle of oil and flotsam, the oil spreading and spreading, the survivors struggling in its greasy film. This happened six times on Korea’s east coast. Our sweeps Magpie, Pirate, Partridge, Pledge, and two Republic of Korea minesweepers sacrificed themselves that their larger brothers might gain and hold the harbor, nor were the destroyers immune.
The enemy constantly devised new ways to re-mine the swept areas. Sampans operating stealthily at night could carry a mine. Fishing boats suspended mines beneath their hulls, planted by cutting the lines securing them to the boat. Floater mines were drifted down on the ships with the current. The mine boys destroyed them all.
They worked under the snouts of the shore batteries, praying that the destroyer riding “shotgun” would occupy the gunners. Back and forth they wove the geometrically precise patterns of coverage, faced with dual destruction—mines below, guns above.
At night they often sacrificed well-earned rest to form a picket line within spitting distance of the enemy for Operation Flycatcher. Lying silently in wait, engines dead, commands whispered, deck gear muffled, not so much as a binnacle light showing, they detected enemy craft filtering out to lay mines and coached the destroyers to them. Blam!
At daybreak it was “up anchor” and back to the job of sweeping. Day after day, month after month the little ships plied their trade, unheralded but effective.
Where there were minesweepers, there were helicopters. They served as the sweeps’ eyes, spotting mines. Aerial mapping, personnel rescue, air spot for bombardment, and even hydrographic survey were among their duties.
The pilots and helicrewmen, members of Helicopter Squadron ONE, San Diego, saw lots of Korea—little of San Diego—once the fighting began. They flew from cruisers and battleships near Wonsan, an island right in the harbor, and even an LST anchored nearby.
The “egg beater sailors” came under the same fire as the doughty minesweeps, and anti-aircraft fire as well. They had a good effect on morale. To the mine men they provided an assurance of rescue in a game that offered few assurances. We saw helicopters remain with their minesweepers when sea and visibility made it impossible to actually assist in mine spotting. They knew it boosted courage on the decks below and they stayed to help a gang of mine boys that rated every assist—and asked for none.
When pilots went down in North Korea, the helicopters went after them. They chopped at tree-top height through flamelicking anti-aircraft fire to snatch downed pilots from Communist reach. Thirty-one of these missions brought the helicopters back with bullet holes in them. Five helicopters did not return. A grateful Navy has awarded 135 decorations to the men of HU-1.
Operation Bigswitch returned to freedom two of these men. They'are Chief Petty Officer Duane W. Thorin and Lieutenant Edwin C. Moore, captured on the same day, but on separate missions.
Chief Thorin became legend on the Korean coast when he performed the greatest shuttle service by helicopter in history. The Thailand frigate Prasae grounded in enemy territory. Thorin air-lifted to safety 119 Siamese and six Americans. Back and forth he flew his bus service, plucking the grateful men from Communist reach.
Later, when carrier pilot Lieutenant Harry Ettenger crashed south of Wonsan, Thorin took his egg beater inland to get him. Dodging rifle fire and skirting flak positions, he located Ettenger. When a landing was attempted, the helicopter crashed. Supporting planes from Task Force 77 reported the men taking cover. Effort to evade the enemy proved futile. Intelligence reported their capture.
Copter pilot Moore was shot down in an attempt to rescue Ensign Marvis Broom- head, who had gone down behind enemy lines. Moore and his observer, 1st Lieutenant Kenneth Henry, U.S.M.C., climbed from the damaged helicopter. While Navy fighters held enemy soldiers at a distance, Moore and Henry improvised a sled and dragged the injured Broomhead to temporary safety.
Next day an Air Force helicopter team attempted rescue. They located the trio. A landing was made about two hundred yards away. Lieutenant Moore, however, waved off the rescue. The helicopter had room for only two passengers. Intense rifle fire made it impossible to move Broomhead to the plane. Moore and Henry would not leave him. They all stayed and were captured.
Typical of rescues with a happier ending was that made by Lieutenant Commander Don Good and his helicrewman T. B. Smith. Air Force jet pilot Ivan Skinner had crashed in an F84. Good chopped to the position marked by circling fighters.
Hindered by deep snow and enemy riflemen, the downed pilot was unable to reach a spot where the helicopter could land. Good elected a running pick-up. The jets cleared a path. While Smith operated the hydraulic winch of the rescue sling, they glided in, scooped up Skinner in a moving pass, and headed for the coast.
Eight navy fighters strafed gun positions in the helicopter’s path as it chopped for the LST at Wonsan. When it had come to rest on the big landing craft’s deck, sailors counted twelve holes in the ’copter. Each of the main rotor blades had been hit. The rescue was the third of its kind that Lieutenant Commander Good had performed. Carrier and Air Force pilots will long remember the work of the Navy “whirly birds.”
Wonsan had its lighter moments. A succession of ship and task element commanders passed along the office of mayor, at times with mock ceremony and transfer of the key to the city. Others, scorning municipal politics, ran for county posts, commissioner of roads and railroads, commissioner of buildings and bunkers.
Lieutenant John Hadley, rough and ready gunnery officer of the Ozbourn when she opened the siege, returned to Wonsan in the destroyer Taylor. Hadley, a capable ex-firecontrolman up from the ranks, was well checked out in Wonsan’s facts of life. During his watches as gun boss he had time to devote to birds as well as war. Between fire missions John and his director crew, The Wonsan Goose and Communist Hunting Club, would engage in their second-favorite sport. With torsos projecting from director hatches, baseball caps pushed back on heads at a jaunty angle, shotgun barrels angled skyward, they held open season on Communist water fowl as well as troops.
The skipper of the destroyer O’Bannon managed to wing eight ducks with the standard army rifle kept on the bridge of every -ship to sink surface mines. A proud crew elected him Fish and Game Commissioner, Wonsan County, and in subsequent rounds of the harbor skillfully netted his ducks. But efforts to stew, broil, roast, or bake the tough, salty birds were of no avail.
Spearheading the clandestine operations that radiated from Wonsan was a battle- hardened unit of British marines, 41st Independent Commando. Filtering among Communist troops under cover of dark, striking silently, escaping before the enemy could organize, they kept the North Koreans constantly off balance. Night after night they made their way ashore in raids that varied from two men in a stolen sampan to dozens of men in rubber boats.
Their leader was lean, erect Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Drysdale, DSO, MBE, Royal Marines. A veteran of intelligence work in France and commando operations in Burma during World War II, he had served in locales as widely separated as Hong Kong and Iceland, as well as aboard His Majesty’s ships.
Colonel Drysdale’s private army was formed in the early days of the fighting. It was suggested by Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, then Commander United Nations Naval Forces. The colonel, who is noted even among marines for his precise orders, clipped speech, and fighting spirit, was whisked from duty as chief instructor of the Royal Marine Officer School and, with a nucleus of his commando unit, sent to Japan. In civilian clothes provided by the Admiralty, the commandos made their way quickly and quietly to the Orient by air.
In the Far East they were augmented by men of the Malaya Commando Brigade and a small picked raiding nucleus of marines and key naval ratings from the British fleet in China waters. In the course of the fighting they grew to a strength of 300, though this number required constant replacement (casualties ran high—at one time 50 per cent).
Though the operations of the commandos were kept under wraps, the one bit of publicity they did receive in England caused the men more trouble than many a brush with the Communists. A newspaper captioned the departure of the group from England “Volunteer Unit for Korea.” Drysdale was deluged with letters from angry wives convinced that their husbands had elected the duty in preference to home’s fireside!
The commandos island-hopped their way into possession of the fringe islands in Wonsan harbor, driving the enemy off. Before settling down, however, they had distinguished themselves at the side of U. S. Marines in the push to the north during the fall of 1950. It was the first time British and U. S. Marines had fought shoulder to shoulder as a unit since the Peking Legation incident of 1900.
From the rocky islands the commandos spread their mischief. The Reds never knew where to expect them; the Marines kept it that way. A vital section of railroad track would be blown up here, a truck convoy ambushed there. Enemy soldiers wandered but a short distance from their companions, never to be seen again. Beach reconnaissance, demolition, intelligence, capture of prisoners for interrogation, it was all in a night’s work.
On the midwatch of a moonless night in Wonsan our ship made a daring capture of a high speed craft cutting through the bay, only to find when we herded the prisoners aboard at gun’s point that we had intercepted a commando mission! “You can’t win ’em all.”
The commando operations held a fascination for the men in the ships. There was an air of mystery about them, an image of razor sharp, double-edged knives and stranglings with piano wire. A canoe or rubber boat moving silently past the ship at night always stirred the imagination.
But try to get a description of one of these raids from the commandos! “Oh, it was a ruddy good show.” They fought big, talked small, are still close-mouthed.
Mixed with the exciting operations were the routine operations. Ships, guns, and men must eat. Every fourth day, ships at Wonsan broke off in relays and stood out to sea where they were fed. Fuel tanks lapped up oil, magazines lapped up ammunition, freeze boxes and storerooms lapped up provisions, the crew lapped up mail. Those once-white canvas bags stenciled “Domestic mail” were the key to an air of excitement and expectation that always marked replenishment day.
Letters meant more to the men than all the other pleasures combined—food, movies, sleep. Some men ripped them open quickly, others put them carefully aside to read in a moment of privacy. Letters would be read again and again. Some letters made men jubilant. Others brought men sorrow.
Replenishment meant an exchange of movies too. Old or new, it didn’t really matter; but a new one was always a treat. Each afternoon and evening, war or no, men off watch squeezed into the mess hall below the main deck for an hour of Hollywood. No matter how cold the weather, the crowded compartment grew hot with body warmth, the air grew foul. But to a destroyer sailor Radio City Music Hall couldn’t compare.
A destroyer consumes fifty tons of stores each month exclusive of fuel and ammunition. Cabbages, rags, metal polish, tooth paste, candy bars, electronic tubes. The big ships are more demanding. Logistics, it’s called. It means a five thousand mile pipeline that collects every necessity from beans to penicillin, and transports them to Wonsan.
Ammunition was barely struck below when it was time to return and commence firing. There was always plenty of bullets but the instructions were clear—not one more round than the job requires—shells cost money.
We were late for one replenishment, and almost missed it entirely. The assistant communications officer, a young ensign, decoded the rendezvous dispatch. Concluding that a mistake had been made, he corrected “Suwandan” to read “Wonsan.” They are forty miles apart! The young gentleman is now one of the most precise coding officers in the fleet.
Pilots in trouble usually headed for Wonsan, knowing that it they could make it and ditch near the ships, they would be quickly picked up, or if they didn’t make it, the helicopters would be after them. The location was ideal for an emergency field. The United Nations command began casting about to see if one could be made. Granted the location was right, the only real estate we owned were the islands in the harbor.
In Korean, “do” means rock. Significant of the size and texture of the islands were their names: Mo Do, Hwangto Do, Yo Do, Sin Do, Tae Do. The steep-sided little chunks offered as much resemblance to an airfield site as the top of the Washington Monument.
Hopeless? Not to the Seabees. An airstrip was needed, an airstrip would be had.
Least uneven of the island clumps was Yo Do, key of the Wonsan gate. The saddle in its ridge would become an air field.
Several days later an LST disembarked a Seabee detachment with the grading equipment and explosives that are the stock-in-trade of the construction sailors.
Scraping, blasting, scooping, dozing, they chewed dirt and rocks. Work commenced at the water’s edge. It ended at the water’s edge—on the opposite side of the island. The saddle, reduced nearly to sea level, had become an air strip. Chief Petty Officer Constructionman E. T. Weatherford recorded in the log, “In this rock it takes about four hours to drill a hole 18 inches deep in order to do any blasting, the going is very slow.” Slow! Perhaps by Seabee standards, but in twelve days the “can do” boys created an air field from a chunk of Asiatic rock that few thought could be hewed into landing space for a sea gull.
The enemy had laid down a barrage of mortar shells on the island in an attempt to end the work. Construction continued, spanning every moment of daylight.
Two days before the strip was complete, customers arrived. Seven Corsair fighters, low on gas, swept into the field within seconds of each other, braking to a stop amid clouds of dust before they reached the segment of rock still to be removed. The Seabees knocked off earth moving to man-handle aviation gasoline drums from a barge—refuel the planes. By the following morning all seven were back aboard their carrier steaming with Task Force 77 in the Sea of Japan. Seven lives—seven planes—saved. Cripple Chick had made a profit before completion.
As the LSD (landing ship-dock) Comstock nosed out to sea from Yo Do with the Sea- bees embarked, transport aircraft of the First Marine Air Wing were landing on the field, initial flights in what became routine supply and ambulance trips.
The air strip was like an alley among tall buildings; you couldn’t see it until you were in front of it. As our ship was making her first entry into Wonsan harbor, a crippled torpedo bomber from the carrier Princeton appeared over the crest of the steep mountains that made a bowl of the bay. With smoke trailing from her fuselage she plunged in desperation for the harbor below. From the bridge we watched, watched with that sinking feeling at the pit of the stomach as the plane hit the side of Yo Do. Bitter dust rose from the island. But as we rounded the turn in the channel, the dirt “alley” airfield opened its corridor to our surprised eyes; at its end the torpedo bomber, a swarm of U. S. Marines and South Korean civilians helping the pilot to safety from his burning plane!
Navy, Marine, and Air Force pilots on missions over North Korea now had an anchor to windward. The edges of the field became lined with wrecked planes. But an equal number were repaired and flown back to carriers or airfields.
The garrison of Yo Do did a double-take one August day in 1952 when newspaper correspondent Marguerite Higgins, clad in her familiar army fatigues, climbed from a transport plane. Refused permission in half-a- dozen headquarters to visit besieged Wonsan, she had simply thumbed a plane ride!
Her traditional luck held. Boarding the destroyer escort Lewis she was made welcome by the amazed Division Commodore. Minutes later, as the Lewis resumed her fire mission, the shore batteries opened fire. They planted shells all around the ship but got no hits. The show completed, Miss Higgins disembarked.
“Hell’s fire,” said a gunner’s mate, “she didn’t even flinch.”
That division commodore is a man who likes action. Outwardly, his zest for it is camouflaged by a quiet manner and soft speech. A recipient in World War II of the coveted Navy Cross, the normal hazards of Wonsan seemed too quiet for his taste.
Borrowing a whaleboat from a ship of his division, he made nightly trips to the beach. There, under cover of dark, he lay-to within a stone’s throw of enemy emplacements and in whispered tones kept the gun control personnel of his ships informed by radio of train or truck convoy movement. The nightly expeditions came to an abrupt halt when rumor of them reached the task force commander. The blockade force could ill afford the capture of one of its most capable unit commanders.
Hour after hour, as days became weeks, months, years, the gunsights of the ships focused on command posts, pillboxes, gun caves, trains, warehouses, factories, artillery pieces, power stations, targets big and small. The ridiculous mixed with the sublime. One day we tried in vain to hit a troop drinking well (reportedly important target) on Hodo Pando, without success. The following day while dueling with an enemy gun—a “well done” from the shore fire control party. The drinking well had been hit and demolished!
On the 23rd of April 1953 shore batteries opened a particularly heavy fire on Tae Do. Marine sergeant Harry Leyland of Mechan-icsville, N. Y., was critically injured. Corporal Romeo Barraes of Honolulu, Lieutenant Wilbur Smith of Philadelphia, and Sergeant Charles Edwards of Chicago were less seriously hurt but also required prompt medical attention. Tae Do had no doctor.
The destroyers in the harbor were informed by walkie-talkie. As the shore guns continued the heavy barrage, the tin cans went to work.
U.S.S. Owen approached the island to evacuate the wounded. The Henderson subjected the offending guns to heavy counterbattery fire. Air support from the carriers headed in to bomb and strafe the guns. Commander East Coast Blockade Group ordered the cruiser Manchester to Wonsan at best speed and directed the destroyers Epperson and Gurke to break off their bombardment of Hungnam and assist.
While Owen’s whaleboat proceeded to a cove to pick up the wounded marines, dodging enemy fire as she crossed the few hundred yards from ship to island, a helicopter brought the medical officer of the LST 735 and lowered him in a sling to the Owen. He would assist the division medical officer already on board.
Enemy gunfire focused on the Owen now, as the boat regained her parent through intense fire. The destroyer, quickly underway, zig-zagged toward safety to permit immediate surgery.
In the wardroom, where the mess table doubles as an operating table (the huge lamp overhead, the sterilizer nearby, a reminder at every meal of the grim dual function) the two doctors, assisted by men of the Owen, set quickly to work.
At nine o’clock that night a safe transfer of the patients was made to the cruiser Manchester where more adequate facilities were available. All recovered.
At Wonsan the healing art often had an international character. The night of May 26, 1953, a young South Korean marine was stricken with pain. His island commander asked for help. In the black of the darkened ship the destroyer Shelton took the boy aboard. The division doctor examined him in sick bay—appendicitis.
The Shelton put out a call for another doctor and an operating room. Scotch Surgeon Lieutenant Baird of the Australian destroyer Anzac bombarding Songjin would assist. The fleet oiler Navasota, steaming with the replenishment group forty miles at sea would play host (she had an excellent operating room but no doctor). Two hours later, doctors, patient, and hospital rendezvoused for successful routine surgery.
The best efforts were not always enough. Fireman Frank Cataldo of Des Moines was critically wounded when the destroyer Maddox became the target of more than 150 rounds of enemy shells in Wonsan harbor. Efforts to save this fine sailor brought into play every branch of our national defense team, including civilians at home who donated blood.
The destroyer’s doctor did all that his limited equipment and conditions permitted; then Cataldo was transferred by boat to a waiting Air Force ambulance amphibian. One hour and forty minutes later he was in the Army’s 121st evacuation hospital. Thirteen pints of plasma (and blood donated aboard ship by his shipmates) had been transfused to the wounded man by the time he reached the operating room of the Army hospital. He died. Are these efforts to save life that divert ships and aircraft, risk other lives, cost thousands upon thousands of dollars futile? Communists might think so.
Frank Cataldo did not know that the fighting was almost over. Peace talks were reaching their goals, issues long unsurmounted were finding solution.
The conclusion of a truce agreement and establishment of a time of cease fire freed enemy forces at Wonsan from the threat of amphibious invasion, a threat that had hung over their heads for two and a half years. An estimated 30,000 combat troops who would otherwise have been at the front had been tied to Wonsan.
In the short time that remained until “cease fire” the enemy could expend quantities of ammunition previously held back to repel a landing. He expended it with a flourish, making it hot for the ships standing the final watch.
As the clock-hands moved toward the terminal hour, destroyers and minesweepers twisted and wove evading the fire. The Wiltsie and Potter replied with full salvos. The Bremerton added the weight of her eight inch guns to the final duel. The roar of gunfire lasted until a minute before the deadline.
At 0959, July 28, 1953, after 861 days of siege, the final round was fired. The fighting ended, not in victory, nor in defeat, but in compromise. All was quiet at Wonsan.
Graduated from the U. S. Naval Academy in the Class of 1941, Commander Kinney was Gunnery Officer of U.S.S. Sturtevant in North Atlantic escort work until that vessel was sunk in May, 1942. He commanded U.S.S. Edsall (DE- 129) and U.S.S. Bronsteln (DE-189) and served as ASYV officer on ComDesLant Staff in World War II. He commanded the destroyer Taylor in action against the Communists at Wonsan. Presently he is on duty in the Executive Department, U. S. Naval Academy.
This is Commander Kinney’s seventh article to appear in the Proceedings.