이것이 전쟁이다! Ⅳ. The Hill l 77 turned them . . . drove them back toward the Naktong River. Their final assault upon the last hill at the river’s edge developed into the bloodiest fight yet seen in Korea, and went down in American military history, as “The Battle of No-Name Ridge.” No sooner had the Marines crushed the Communists' thrust across the Naktong, then returned the river positions with their controlling fields of fire to the soldiers, than the North Koreans struck again, at almost the same place . . . and now swept the defending soldiers of the 2nd Division from the hills, overran their lines and surged ahead once more toward the heart of the Perimeter. The photographs in this chapter, “The Hill,” were made when the Marines were ordered to destroy the enemy break-through. The Marine replacements who disembarked at Pusan were mostly young men of almost no actual battle experience, for only very few of them were veterans of World War II. However, unlike those other battle-innocent young men who had been soldiering on Occupation duty in Japan, and who now were deep in combat along the Perimeter, these tobacco- chewing, raw-knuckled, bristly-headed youngsters in already-faded khaki were coming to fight in Korea with two great advantages. They were led by sergeants and officers who were all veterans of campaigns involving battles as violent as any ever fought, and who had been carefully selected out of those men wanting to remain in the Marine Corps as a career following the end of the Japanese War. Then, too, these youngsters from farms and factories, forest tracts and fishing craft, drugstore comers and homes of wealth, from all the places which are America—these young men had another enormous advantage, one that no one yet has been able to pin down and fully define—they were UNITED STATES MARINES! They were Marines from their closely cropped heads and jutting ears, to the tightly-laced, traditional khaki leggings wrapped around their boot tops. Each had volunteered to try to become a Marine, firmly believing that they were
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