Two Can Play

On a moonless night last week off Korea's northeastern coast, a party of British commandos and U.S. marines put out in small boats from the fast transport Horace A, Bass. The Americans were serving with the 41st Royal Marine commandos, commanded by Lieut. Colonel Ferris Grant, a Londoner. The raiders' objective: the Communist east-coast rail line along which vital supplies were flowing from Vladivostok to Wonsan.

Near Tanchon, about 170 miles north of the 38th parallel, the party made shore under a covering barrage from the Bass and the U.S. destroyer Tingey. That part of the coast was well watched and well defended, and Colonel Grant's men ran into Red machine-gun fire. Nevertheless, they managed to blow up a tunnel before scrambling back to their boats. They left many Communist dead and their own casualties were light.

Next night, the 41st carried off a similar attack a few miles farther north. This time the raiders had to scale a cliff before reaching the rail line, but they blew a stretch of track into a mess of twisted steel. Purpose of the two attacks was not only to slow down the enemy's southward flow of war supplies, but to remind him that the lull in the Korean fighting was not by any means a total ceasefire. It was one more oddity of an odd war that after weeks of palaver over where a truce line should be, so much of last week's fighting should take place far beyond it.

On the other side of the peninsula, up north, the Chinese Reds had been doing some overwater work of their own. The U.S. Navy, after sitting on the details for four days, told how the Chinese had captured three small islands off the mouth of the Yalu. The islands had been occupied last spring by South Korean marines, and the enemy could guess that they were being used as radar and weather stations, and might become springboards for guerrilla activity against the mainland.

Last fortnight 1,000 Chinese piled into a ragtag armada of junks, sampans, rubber boats and barges, and attacked Taehwa, the largest of the three islands, in three waves. Under cover of shore batteries from Communist-held islands nearby, the attackers waded ashore through mudflats on Taehwa's north side. The South Korean defenders--among whom were a handful of U.S. liaison officers and technicians--were not only surprised but outnumbered. In 14 junks of their own they quickly evacuated the island from the south. With Taehwa gone, the" two smaller islands fell easily to the enemy. It was the first amphibious attack brought off by the Chinese Communists in the Korean war.

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