이것이 전쟁이다!

이것이 전쟁이다! couple serenely holding hands in their cart while their eldest son strained every fiber of his being to pull them to safety I felt nothing but shame at being bigger than all three and yet helplessly tied to the tiny camera in my hands. And I wondered whether my pictures would really make any difference. Back at headquarters Lambert told me that he had checked all sources. No one yet knew exactly what the over-all picture was except that it was bad. Apparently the North Koreans were regrouping just north of the Han River and using newly captured Seoul as their GHQ. No tanks from the north had yet been reported working the south bank of the river but no one knew how long that reprieve would last. The tanks used by the Reds in their drive south had paralyzed the defenders with mute fright and left them empty of any thought of retaliation. Just after dawn of the 29th I spotted a rather slight, somewhat stooped officer standing inside the headquarters' door. It was Brigadier General John Church, newly appointed Commanding General of the American-sponsored Korean Military Advisory Group. He smiled a little wistfully when I asked him if he would brief me on his holding forces up along the Han. He had been flown in from Tokyo only the day before and was still trying to co-ordinate his command. Apparently over one-half of all South Korean troops had been either cut off or captured that first day of the attack. Nearly all field guns had been lost, but not all due to the simple answer that they had been abandoned. On the contrary, they were weapons outranged by the Soviet-made artillery on the northern side. In order even to reach the enemy batteries it had been necessary to move those outgunned pieces right up to the front instead of having them in depth where they could fire over the heads of protecting troops in the line. The North Koreans simply laid in barrages which made the southern battery positions untenable. Then, after they had blasted everything apart, they just walked over and occupied the positions at their leisure. Those Southern Korean artillery pieces were American and were all that had been made Ⅲ. Korea 1950 l 27

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