Seventh Infantry Division - Yearbook (South Korea)

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From cover in shell-iorn thickeis . . . . . . . . lo barren fields, members of the 7th Inf. Div. fire on enemy positions. Probing for land mines in u field in order to safely drive their field pieces off the road. f-M. 4 1 X ff J ' ,hgiieli g -'2- 2'?S?'s- , fifQrfa,,?,3,s:4?:EQ.?-A 4 y E 5 Q! E i 3 i E

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ness chopped him down. The line was ablaze with gun- fire and alive with Reds who had broken through and were active behind them. When word was rushed back to Faith that Haynes too was dead he telephoned the Company's executive officer, Lt. Smith, and ordered him to take command of che Company. It's your baby now, the Colonel told him. That was to become a byword during the bitter Chosin Reservoir fight. Officer after officer fell under the withering Red fire. During that first night, casual- ties were alarmingly high and a disproportionately high number of them were officers and noncoms. But Faith continued to send new officers into the line as replace- ments fell before the Red onslaught. The most critical loss of the night was a prominent knob along the bound- ary of the two companies east of the road. CDiagram A., As dawn broke, Lieutenant Richard H. Moore led his platoon in a counterattack and it fought back to the base of the knob. Several times during the day, how- ever, the fanatical Chinese-many of them firing Ameri- can-made weapons--drove the platoon back. Moore screamed for mortar fire and got it and the air around the knoll was alive with flying steel. Bodies piled up at the base of the important knob. During the morning, carrier-based Corsairs swept down on the hill to assist Moore in his repeated see-sawing attacks. That afternoon, Colonel MacLean came forward to While members of an Engineer Unit repair bridge, a Korean civilian washes clothes

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the battle-entangled battalion to observe the action in person. As he prepared to return that evening, however, he was trapped at a Chinese roadblock. Fighting his way back to Colonel Faith's headquarters he grimly an- nounced that the enemy had surrounded his position. There was no alternative but to remain at the forward position. By nightfall, Moore had managed to recover most of the ground around the strategic knob. But now a new threat faced the beleaguered battalion. Faith and Mac- Lean knew that the Chinese would repeat the sangui- nary performance of the night before and attack in full force under cover of darkness. The knob gained added importance. Lieutenant James G. Campbell, a platoon leader in Company D, set up two machine guns aimed at the knob. A live-man squad was between the guns and the Red position but Campbell knew it could never hold a concentrated Red attack from the hill. Enemy A 57-mm reeoilless rifle team hits its target. r i