Ⅳ. The Hill OF ALL the days that had been terrible for the Eighth Army, few were more critical than those of the first week in September. Since mid-August there had been increasing evidence of a build-up of North Korean forces which pointed to but one thing-an all-out drive against the still thinly-manned Pusan Perimeter. Enemy attacks had probed, then dented, then nearly crushed the ROK divisions trying to hold the northeast end of the line, near Pohang Dong. Apparently only the physical exhaustion of their men, empty ammunition boxes, and an emergency transfusion of American soldiers had kept the Communists from breaching the line and ending their attack at the port of Pusan itself. On the western front, along the Naktong River, the Perimeter had been badly buckled when Reds forded the stream, under cover of darkness—by the use of submerged pontoon bridges—then rammed the soldiers of the 24th Division back from hilltop to hilltop until it seemed that they next would cut the main PusanTaegu highway, the road over which moved almost all supplies to all fronts. Taegu was also headquarter s for the Eighth Army, and the provisional capital of South Korea—to have lost it would have been disastrous. In the south, Leathernecks of the First Marine Brigade had been arming and equipping replacements for those men lost during the earlier, much-publicized Chinju Offensive—a drive that had been inexplicably called off at the moment when they were finishing the fight and securing their lines along the ridges dominating the target city. Ordered by Eighth Army to return to Masan, halfway to Pusan, they could do nothing but comply—and look down bitterly at the feet of the men ahead as they marched back over the country they had just fought so desperately to win. They had scarcely spread their shelter-halves around Masan than they were rushed north to meet the Reds' threat to the highway. They stopped them . . . 76 l Ⅳ. The Hill This is War!
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