"We Must Hold"

The Korean war reached its grimmest and most dangerous stage. Early in the week, there was some hope in the fact that the North Koreans seemed to be in a desperate hurry. Their dead piled up in heaps before U.S. machine guns that jammed from their own heat. The North Koreans kept on coming; the Americans fought to keep their own pace, when they were driven back, to orderly retirement. It was a furious assault, and soundly based on the lessons of military history; the North Koreans were trying to turn a stubbornly fought retreat into a rout, seize the Pusan beachhead area, destroy the U.N. forces.

If this was their primary aim, they had --up to this week--signally not succeeded. But the threat was there and would be there until U.S. reinforcements (which began to land in Korea this week) were in position. Knowing the threat, and sick & tired of retreat, Lieut. General Walton Walker called his division commanders together, gave them a stern order: their troops must hold their lines or die where they stood.

Afterward, Walker said to newsmen: "We will not give up an inch of ground that is not already lost . . . There's no thought in the mind of anybody in this Army--even though we might be so disposed--that there can possibly be a Dunkirk. It would be impossible to get out."

It was hard to take this as anything more than a tough old soldier's morale-stiffening bracer for worse ordeals yet to come. At the time Walker spoke, the line was a sprawling 200-mile loop with the Reds a long way from Pusan on the east coast, too close for comfort on the south. Walker just did not have enough men to stand fast on such a line. On flat terrain a division is normally expected to hold no more than six miles of front; in rugged Korea, where routes of advance are channeled, a division might protect as much as ten miles.

This week the 2nd Infantry Division, under security wraps since it sailed from the U.S. 14 days ago, landed in Korea and fanned rapidly out to help U.S. defenses. Next day advance units of the 1st Marines also landed.

At most, for the next week, Walker could count on five or six U.S. divisions. These, with South Korean help, might hold a 100-mile front guarding Pusan--hold it in the sense of resisting pressure anywhere and sealing off any penetration --but not much more.

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