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 Personal
Stories
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The Fight for
the Ridge
by Bill Wilson
Bill Wilson served as a sergeant first
class with Company I, 23rd Regiment, 2nd Division,
United States Army, in the Korean War from Aug. 22, 1950
to Aug. 22, 1952.
Preface
When recently talking about the Korean
War website with a fellow veteran we noted that there
were no stories that told of the misery that soldiers
faced in the war. The following story relates some of
my experiences on Heartbreak Ridge, one of the bloodier
battles of the war. I have eliminated some of the gruesome
parts, but it still makes you feel glad that you were
not there. Real war is not frivolous.
I was the platoon sergeant of the 3rd Platoon, Company
I, 23rd Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division from early October
1951 to early April 1952 (approximate). This is my personal
account of the fighting that took place during the second
attack against North Korean and Chinese forces dug in
along the high ridge that came to be known as Heartbreak
Ridge. Although my recall may not be accurate in minute
detail, it is accurate in substance.
Prior to the beginning of the battle, the
top of the mountain and the ridges and fingers radiating
from it had been covered with pine and spruce trees, very
similar to our Rocky Mountains. Since that time, thousands
of artillery rounds had been fired onto the peaks and
ridges. We were aware of the magnitude of this heavy shelling
by the signs we saw posted near the gun batteries we passed
as we moved up to the line. Each sign boasted of the number
of rounds that had been fired by that battery. By the
end of the battle, hundreds of thousands of artillery
rounds, ranging in size from 75-mm to 8 inch, had been
sent against the enemy. There was no tree left standing
or any piece of wood larger than a manšs forearm remaining
on the top half of the mountain or its ridges. The rocky
ground had been pulverized as though it had been plowed.
The 23rd Regiment had made an unsuccessful
attack against the ridge in the last two weeks of September.
I joined the regiment on my 23rd birthday, the 27th of
September. The new replacements spent the first week as
stretcher-bearers, carrying food and ammunition up the
hill and wounded back down. I joined my company as a rifleman
the 2nd or 3rd of October; I was not assigned as platoon
sergeant until after our return to the Regimental Command
Post (CP). The second attack against the ridge was launched
on the 5th of October. The 3rd Battalion moved up in support
of the 2nd Battalion, who was leading the attack.
The 2nd Battalion was successful in taking
the prominent peak on the ridge that was designated Hill
931. Our 3rd Battalion now moved through the 2nd Battalion's
position to secure the ridge leading north to Hill 851.
As we climbed up the narrow trail that wound up Hill 931
we saw that it was lined with the bodies of GIs, covered
with ponchos or blankets. They had been laid head to foot
as you might line a path with logs or timbers. All around
Hill 931 the mountain was littered with dead Koreans and
Chinese. It appeared that there were hundreds of them
lying everywhere. Seeing the enemy dead did not bother
me so much. I looked on them with troubled curiosity but
with emotional indifference. But every time I looked at
a dead GI I got a lump in my throat and a knot in my stomach.
While passing by the peak of the mountain, I noticed a
rifle stock that had something carved on it. It was half
buried in the loose earth, and I bent over and picked
it up. Carved on the stock was a Hail Mary that read "Hail
Mary, full of grace, Hail Mary, full of grace. Have mercy
on us snipers in this our hour of death." I felt a heaviness
in my chest and I tossed the splintered stock aside.
We moved forward of Hill 931 and occupied
positions on the ridge previously held by Company K a
week or more earlier. There we waited, but the next couple
of days passed with no effort made by the Koreans and
Chinese to counter attack. A couple of times we were brought
to the edge of tension. One night we definitely heard
movement right below and not far away. We opened up with
heavy fire from our rifles for a few minutes and waited,
but could not hear any further movement. We stayed alert
the rest of the night, and when dawn appeared we could
see two very dead wild hogs not too far below us, but
no North Koreans appeared. I am sure some Korean patrols
must have been sent out, and on occasion we would hear
rifle fire from nearby on the ridge, but none came to
our sector.
We did watch a hard fight that broke out
in the mountains on our right flank one night. I should
mention here that the battle for Heartbreak Ridge was
largely fought at night because the darkness provided
the cover essential to climbing up a mountain to dislodge
an enemy that was looking down on you. Most all assaults
were at night. A Marine Division was on our right flank
over in the Punch Bowl, and they attacked the ridges to
their front, creating a light show with tracers and shells.
We watched the ebb and flow of the fight all night. We
never learned what they were doing or how it came out.
One of the dominant aspects of daily life
for an infantryman--seldom brought to anyone's attention
in discussions, writings, or films--is the smell of death,
of rotting flesh. This is the most repulsive, nauseating,
and sickening of odors. About two or three feet from the
edge of our hole was a dead North Korean who I would judge
to have been there a week or ten days, but it was hard
to tell with the very hot late summer weather that we
had been having. There were other bodies all around us,
and the mountain top reeked with the odor of death, but
none were so close or so ripe as this one, and the aura
of him night and day was almost more than we could bear.
We had reached the point of desperation that led us to
using our empty C ration cans to scoop dirt from the bottom
or sides of our hole to try to bury him. We never got
the job done. When we went down to the Regimental CP a
week or so later, I noticed that the smell was still with
me. My clothes and skin had absorbed the stench.
The artillery attacks against us were at
irregular intervals and happened once or twice a day,
mostly in daylight. The Koreans used the age-old system
of a rolling barrage. They started at the bottom of our
ridge and kept elevating after each fusillade to walk
the barrage up to our line and over us. We could hear
it coming, feel it hit, and hear it go. All we could do
was hunker down in the bottom of the hole and hold our
breath. Often these barrages were successful in that rounds
hit close enough to a foxhole to cause casualties, and
on occasion, a hole would take a direct hit. The worst
attack that we ever had to endure, however, was from our
own guns. A 155-mm battery shelled us late one afternoon,
causing several casualties and two or three KIAs in the
small portion of the line that I could see. My buddy,
Babe, and I scrambled out of our hole after the barrage
and ran to the hole next to us. A round had blown the
hole in on top of the guys, but they were not seriously
hurt. In the next hole, one of the GIs was standing up
with a shocked look on his face, holding the barrel of
his M1, but the wood stock had been completely torn away.
Further down, a hole had been completely blown in and
no one was to be seen, so we started digging and uncovered
one occupant, scratched up but alive. One man was missing,
and further down the line there were bodies. Artillery
was a daily fact of life almost every day that we were
on the hill.
The Brass must have been getting nervous
about the lack of action to our front. Our artillery kept
up an intensive fire with 8 inch, 155-mm howitzers and
4.2 mortars. The artillery batteries were in the valleys
behind and below us and fired very frequently over the
peaks and ridges that we occupied, particularly during
the night. On occasion, the Navy battleships off the coast
would fire their 16-inch guns over our positions. The
8 inch and 155-mm rounds that passed over our heads sounded
low enough that we could have reached up and grabbed one.
The 16-inch shells sounded like eighteen wheeler trucks
speeding down a wet highway and they shook the ground
under us. The most haunting of the night sounds was the
hollow bass boom and reverberation of the 4.2 mortars
that echoed through the valleys below us. There was something
spectral, disturbing, and, at the same time, quieting
about the sound. I can, on occasion, still hear the echoing
of them through those deep valleys. After several days
on the ridge we were taken back to the Regimental CP for
an overnight break. While there we picked up a number
of replacements.
We came back up on the ridge and were placed
in positions on a finger that faced north with a clear
view of the Mundung-ni Valley and the mountains to the
north. The fatigue, sleep deprivation, bowel movements
delayed for three or four days; forgetting to eat for
a day or two at a time; matted, twisted hair with heads
painfully sore from wearing a steel helmet night and day;
beards itching and full of C ration leftovers; leg cramps,
other discomforts too numerous or too personal to mention
continued to be the condition of our daily lives. Above
all, the stress of artillery and mortars coming down on
us added to our misery. Also, we had not forgotten the
fear of being overrun and the possibility of suffering
the fate of Company K. The evidence was still lying on
the ridge in the parts and pieces of its members. The
shelling continued, theirs and ours.
The fighting intensified, and a French Battalion
moved through us to take a Hill (851) to our front, and
there was heavy, bunker by bunker, fighting for that hill
for the next couple of days. They secured Hill 851 on
the 13th or 14th of October. The 2nd Battalion of the
23rd moved against a Hill (520) on the west end of the
finger we occupied and took it by means of one of the
few bayonet attacks of the war. We took positions on the
finger between these two battalions. I had no idea of
why we were there or what our mission was other than to
hold the ground we occupied. But we feared that whatever
was happening, a North Korean/Chinese counterattack was
certain.
After Hills 520 and 851 were secured we
launched no further attacks nor pulled any patrols. We
dug in our positions, along the northern-most point of
the ridge, rode out the artillery and mortar barrages,
watched and waited for them to come, listened to the fighting
around us--but they didn't come. One night, about a week
after we had returned to the ridge, the constant shelling
stopped and all was quiet. The next morning dawned, a
bright and clear mid-October day, but the enemy guns did
not fire, and the quiet continued all day. Although unnerved
somewhat by the silence, we were eager to get out of our
holes to stretch, and since the quiet had lasted so long,
by afternoon we felt it worth the risk to raise shoulder
high above the rim of our holes. Some were even sitting
on the edge of their foxholes, looking around and taking
in the warm sun. In the very late afternoon, only a few
minutes before dusk, we heard the rumbling of tanks coming
from the valley far below us and to our left. All the
time we had been on the ridge we had never seen anyone
or anything in that valley and we weren't sure whether
the tanks were theirs or ours. The action had always been
to our front or in the valley to our right in the direction
of the area called the Punchbowl. We thought the appearance
of tanks in the valley was strange and our concern and
curiosity was tempered with fear. With great relief, they
turned out to be ours. I later learned that this breakthrough
was the result of those first explosions that we heard
the day we left Division Headquarters to move up to the
23rd Regiment. The Engineers had succeeded in blasting
open a road from the Sat'er-ri Valley through a North
Korean generated landslide that blocked passage into the
Mundung-ni Valley.
The tanks rolled into view from behind the
hills to our rear and headed north up the valley. The
clanking of the tracks and the roar of the engines grew
ever louder until there were a bunch of them moving at
a high speed, kicking up a large cloud of dust. When they
had moved up almost parallel with us, all the artillery
batteries to our rear opened up with all guns directed
on the mountains to our front. As if on signal, the tanks
opened up with their guns at the sound of the artillery.
It was not long before the Korean and Chinese artillery
answered, taking out some tanks. The tanks raced at high
speed up to a point about parallel to our position, fired
all their ammunition, then turned and raced to the rear,
I presumed to reload and return. Tanks were coming and
going at an almost frantic rate. We had a ringside seat
on our ridge high above the valley, with a clear view
of the mountains erupting from the intensity of this attack.
Although all the action made us nervous, we were fascinated
by this spectacle and continued to watch as dusk deepened.
As darkness descended, we saw a very large
column of what appeared to be North Korean civilians string
out in a file across the valley a mile or so north of
the tanks. It appeared that they were starting to dig,
but it soon got too dark to see anything other than the
muzzle flashes of the tank guns and the impact of the
artillery rounds. The artillery had zeroed in on the Korean
column and kept up a continuous, concentrated fire all
night. When the sky had lightened enough to see the valley
again, it revealed an unimaginable scene. A ditch had
been dug across the valley from the mountains in front
of us to the hills on the other side of the valley that
must have been a mile distant. On top of the banks of
dirt that had been thrown out of the ditch, and in the
ditch, were bodies. A large number of bodies. Our artillery
had kept up a steady fire at the ditch all night. At the
crack of dawn, the tanks rolled up again and opened fire.
When they had advanced to the ditch, some tanks with dozer
blades filled in portions of it, and the column continued
on to the village of Mundung-ni. The spectacle went on
all that day and night. We received no further fire from
the Koreans or Chinese for a day or two.
It probably wasn't more than two or three
days later that we received word that the 23rd was being
relieved. At dusk one evening, we were told to leave our
holes and move back to the peak and down the trail to
the Regimental CP. I experienced a momentary fright when
I first got out of my hole and started to walk up to the
peak. My knees buckled from being too long confined in
a foxhole and I went down under the weight of my gear.
The one desire I had in life was to get off that mountain,
and it looked like my legs weren't up to the task. My
first thought was, "I'll crawl off this damned mountain
if I have to," and I started to crawl. The muscles in
my legs soon began to function and I willingly surrendered
the ridge to the Ethiopian troops that came up to relieve
us. My platoon made one more trip up on the ridge a couple
of days later, taking four or five casualties from artillery
fire.
-----
Note: From Army records it is reported that
the 2nd Division had suffered over 3,700 casualties during
the Sept. 13 - Oct. 15 period, with the 23rd Regiment
and its attached French Battalion incurring almost half
of this total. On the enemy side the North Korean 6th,
12th, and 13th Divisions and the CCF 204th Division all
suffered heavily. Estimates by the 2nd Division of the
enemy losses totaled close to 25,000. Approximately half
of these casualties had come during the fight for Heartbreak
Ridge. It was also reported that the tank and artillery
attack had caught 3 fresh Chinese divisions moving in
to position to renew the attack against the ridge. They
were badly mauled. .
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