Cork & Bottle

WAR IN ASIA Cork & Bottle

Some 40 miles north of Seoul, the swift-flowing Imjin bangs its winter load of ice chunks against steep banks. Tucked into an S-curve of the river is a brown, double-crested ridge, much like the other nondescript brown lumps in the hill chain beyond. Between the two crests is a saddle, about 50 yards wide, not more than 300 yards long. One of the crests is called Little Nori; the other, 40 feet higher, Big Nori.

Six weeks ago, although well-dug-in Chinese Reds sat on top of Big Nori, South Koreans of the ist R.O.K. Division moved up to occupy Little Nori. For five weeks--up to last week--the two hostile forces lived in what passes for peace on the front lines, occasionally taking a potshot or lobbing over a mortar shell and getting a round or two in return. Both the Reds and the ROKs spent much time and energy improving their caves, tunnels, trenches, bunkers.

Last week units of the Chinese Forty-seventh Army ("Mao Tse-tung's own") replaced the enemy's Thirty-ninth Army forces on and around Big Nori. Two days later, after a devastating barrage of 8,000 mortar and artillery rounds that almost cratered the top of Little Nori, Mao's men attacked and drove the stunned Koreans off the knob. The ROKs counterattacked, retook the knob, were driven off again. Nine more times the ROKs tried to regain the lost ground, in vain.

By that time, U.S. Patton tanks had surrounded the hill mass, pouring in flat-trajectory fire from 90-mm. guns. Planes of four allied air arms--U.S. Air Force and Marines, Australians, ROKs--softened Big and Little Nori with bombs, rockets and napalm that whooshed up in hideous, billowing, orange-and-black globes. The U.N. artillery put in VT (variable-time-fused) shells for airbursts which the gunners hoped would send sharp fragments flying into the enemy ratholes. One clear morning, after Thunder jets and artillery had given the hill a final treatment, the ROKs attacked again, in single and double file, scrambling up a slope covered several inches thick with the dust of battle, kicking up such clouds that they could scarcely see one another.

This time, using grenades and satchel charges at close range, the ROKs popped the Chinese out of their lairs like rats from a burning barn. The Reds were chased across the saddle and back on to Big Nori. The ROKs might well have seized Big Nori's crest, but they could have put only a few men in the limited space on top, while the Chinese could have counterattacked with wave on wave. As a U.S. observer explained: "You can use your whole hand to hold the whisky bottle, but only a few fingers to pull out the cork." So the week ended as it began--with the ROKs on Little Nori, the enemy on Big Nori.

It was the familiar story of almost suicidal ROK bravery, of heavy enemy losses, and of heavy ROK losses. The Reds were still fighting the war of attrition, apparently profitable to them, that began nine weeks ago on White Horse Hill, then switched to Triangle Hill and Sniper Ridge, then to the two nondescript brown lumps called Little and Big Nori.

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