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Single Step Part 3



The Second Korean War

Part 3 By Chris Oakley

(adapted from material submitted by the author to Jeff Provine's blog)

Summary: In the first two chapters of this series we reviewed the chain of events leading to the start of the Second Korean War and the early days of the war itself. In this segment we'll look back at the execution of Private Larry Allen Abshier, the Battle of Wonsan, and the Haeju shipyards mutiny.


******


Three months prior to Joseph Dresnok's ill-fated attempt to cross the DMZ into North Korea, another American G.I. made his own decision to defect to the DPRK. Private Larry Allen Abshier, an Ohio native who had joined the U.S. Army after a rough childhood and was facing court-martial as a result of his frequent marijuana use while on duty in South Korea, crossed the 38th parallel on May 28th, 1962 in hopes of escaping his troubles. Ironically, it was after his defection that his real difficulties began; the North Koreans never fully trusted Abshier, keeping him under constant surveillance while he tried to adjust to his new life and subjecting him to all kinds of petty abuses. When the Second Korean War broke out, any chance Abshier might have had of creating a new life in the North was effectively doomed.

On the morning of August 16th, 1962, with the war less than a day old, Abshier was abruptly detained by North Korean security forces and hauled before a hastily convened tribunal on charges that he was spying for the United States and South Korea. Details of what happened at that tribunal remain sketchy to this day, but what is known suggests it was in essence a show trial meant solely to give the Communist regime a legal excuse for having Abshier executed; there are even rumors that Abshier may have been tortured prior to his execution. In any event, he was made to sign a paper "confessing" his alleged espionage activities, then shot by a firing squad. Propaganda leaflets announcing the execution were then air-dropped on U.S. and ROK positions along the battlefront in an effort to erode the morale of U.S. and South Korean soldiers.

******


The leaflets backfired badly on the North Koreans; if anything, they usually made U.S. and South Korean troops even more determined to fight on against the totalitarian regime they saw as having first duped Abshier into crossing over to the North and then murdering him when he no longer served their purposes. One U.S. Army infantry sergeant displayed his contempt for both the leaflets and the Kim Il Sung regime as a whole by taking a handful of those leaflets and sending them back across the North Korean lines with some off-color insults scrawled on them. Other G.I.s used the leaflets for target practice or as bog rolls depending on the situation in their sector of the front.

Today the port city of Haeju is best known as the nucleus of Korea's steadily growing cruise ship industry or the home of the Korean Baseball Organization's five-time league champion Haeju Mermaids. It also boasts a film studio that singlehandedly accounts for nearly fifteen percent of all domestically produced movies seen in Korea every year. But in 1962, it was the site of a major North Korean naval base and shipyard complex. When the Second Korean War broke out the Korean People's Navy found itself in a dire quandary, as none of its ships had sufficient range to meet any of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet warships on the open sea. In a desperate gamble aimed at turning the situation at sea in North Korea's favor, the KPN's admiralty ordered the men at Haeju to load their ships with explosive charges and ram them against U.S. and South Korean naval vessels in suicide attacks. It was hoped that these suicide attacks would inflict severe enough damage against U.S. and ROK naval forces to compel Washington and Seoul to sue for peace. As it turned out, however, the only significant thing these suicide attacks achieved was to further diminish the KPN's already sparse PT boat inventory.

In spite of the Pyongyang propaganda machine's frantic efforts to spin the suicide raids as victories, the truth gradually filtered its way back to the enlisted seamen and civilian workers at the Haeju base; their grief over the loss of so many friends and shipmates soon turned to anger at the bitter realization those men had been sent to die in vain. When on August 30th, 1962 the commanding officer at Haeju gave a speech berating the enlisted men and civilians for what he viewed as a lack of proper revolutionary spirit in the wake of the suicide attacks, it proved to be the match that lit the fuse for the biggest uprising to happen in Korea in nearly twenty years. Near the end of the base commander's speech, a frustrated petty seaman threw a handful of rocks at him, precipitating a furious argument between the junior and senior officers present about how the incident should be handled. The argument came to an abrupt and violent end when the commander, incensed at what to him was a blatant act of insubordination, drew his pistol and shot the seaman point- blank in the chest.



From there, all hell broke loose. The other petty seamen and the base's civilian workers joined forces with some of the junior officers to rush the senior officers and arrest them. A gun battle ensued in which scores of men were killed by the base's security guards, but the guards were no match for the sheer numbers of enraged NCOs intent on avenging their comrade's death. Within minutes, most of the senior officers were dead themselves or locked up in the brig and the Haeju naval base was firmly in the mutineers' hands. The leaders of the mutiny then telegraphed the Korean People's Navy central headquarters in Pyongyang demanding the Kim Il Sung government begin cease- fire negotiations with the U.S.-ROK coalition.

Instead, the Kim regime ordered two NKPA amphibious infantry brigades to storm Haeju and crush the uprising at all costs. Though seriously outgunned and outnumbered, the mutineers resisted this assault with a determination that would have impressed any field commander and would earn the rebels a place in post-reunification Korean history as posthumous national heroes. The South Koreans were caught by surprise by the mutiny, but when the ROK Army general staff realized the strategic opportunity being presented them by the uprising they acted quickly to support the insurgents by deploying an airborne brigade to the neighboring town of Pyoksong. The paratroopers ran into heavy resistance from NKPA forces lasting until September 3rd, by which time the Haeju uprising had been crushed and the last surviving rebel fighters hanged.

The suppression of the Haeju mutiny proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for the North Korean army. While the NKPA amphibious brigades were smashing the shipyard uprising, American and South Korean marine battalions were moving into position for an amphibious operation of their own intended to capture North Korea's most important coastal city: Wonsan. Many of the NKPA forces that might otherwise have repelled the assault on Wonsan had been expended in defeating the Haeju uprising, and that fact would come back to haunt the North Korean high command.

******


Operation Diamond Star, the campaign to capture Wonsan from the North Koreans, had two stated objectives. The first was to secure a logistical opening for the U.S.-ROK coalition to bring in additional supplies, ammo, and troops for long-term operations on the North Korean front. The second was to deny the North Koreans further use of the city's harbor as a naval base for further operations against U.S. and South Korean forces. It also had an unstated purpose-- to deter the Chinese Communists from sending any troops to attack the U.S.-ROK coalition's rear flank. Although the PLA high command had yet to formulate a coherent battle plan for countering the U.S.- ROK thrust into the DPRK, the powers that be in Washington and Seoul weren't taking any chances.

The spearhead for Operation Diamond Star would be the U.S. 1st Marine Division, which had been on standby in Japan since the war started. In the beginning the appropriately nicknamed "Blue Diamond" had been assigned to act as a shield to protect Japan against the threat of Communist invasion; the course of events, however, had opened up previously unforeseen chances for the 1st to play a critical and effective role on the battlefront against the NKPA. Accordingly the Pentagon reassigned the 1st Marines to lead Diamond Star's initial landings at the mouth of Wonsan Harbor while the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Combat Brigade staged diversionary attacks against the city of Muncheon further up the coast. Once Wonsan and Muncheon had been secured the 173rd Airborne and 1st Marines would link up at the town of Kangwon for what U.S. and South Korean strategic planners hoped would be a vigorous westward coalition push towards Pyongyang.

Also playing a key part in the landings at Wonsan would be the British SAS, who'd been tasked to clear the way for the invasion force by knocking out Korean People's Navy outposts on the islands of Ryo-Do and Sin-Do. The Ryo-Do and Sin-Do raids would mark the first major combat operations of the war for Britain; securing the SAS' participation for Diamond Star had been a bit of a challenge, as Britain had serious regional conflicts of its own to worry about in the Persian Gulf and Africa. Eventually, however, after some delicate behind-the-scenes negotiations between the Pentagon and the Chief of Defence Staff's office, the British Army had been persuaded to lend both 22 and 23 Special Air Service Regiments to the U.S.-ROK alliance in return for a White House guarantee of increased U.S. arms sales to Britain. While ground forces were being moved into position for the landings, U.S. and ROK fighter jets stepped up their bombing strikes against North Korean military and industrial targets in the Wonsan region.

After weeks of planning and preparation, General Guy S. Meloy Jr. gave the go-ahead signal to launch Operation Diamond Star in the early morning hours of September 20th, 1962. 22 and 23 SAS Regiments struck the first blow of the campaign, knocking out the KPN base at Ryo-Do and occupying Sin-Do in a matter of minutes; while the North Koreans were recovering from the shock of the Ryo-Do and Sin-Do attacks, American and South Korean forces landed at Wonsan and Muncheon along four fronts. Around 12:30 PM that afternoon three ROK tank brigades opened up a fifth front with an overland thrust from along the NKPA's vulnerable southern flank. As had been expected, the U.S. and ROK forces fighting to take Wonsan proper encountered heavy resistance from NKPA troops, but by 5:00 Wonsan Harbor was secured and U.S. forces were starting to push into the city with the aid of ROK infantry and Korean civilians who, tired of the repressive nature of Communist rule, had organized anti-Marxist guerrilla cells to harass the NKPA rear flank.

******


Modern historians have called the Battle of Wonsan the bloodiest single engagement fought over a city since the German 6th Army besieged Stalingrad during World War II, and it's not hard to agree with that claim. Nearly one- quarter of all U.S. 1st Marine Division casualties incurred during the Second Korean War were sustained during the fight for Wonsan, and on the other side of the coin at least eight NKPA battalions are known to have been wiped out during the struggle for control of the city. "They came at us like maniacs." a U.S. soldier would tell the New York Times after the battle had ended. "We had to put them down like rabid dogs." This was especially true when it came to the hastily organized suicide squads sent by Kim Il Sung to blow up South Korean and U.S. forward positions using homemade bombs.

Not all NKPA soldiers were quite so fanatical, however. In fact, it was during the Battle of Wonsan that the United States scored one of its biggest propaganda triumphs of the Cold War when an entire NKPA artillery regiment deserted to the U.S.-ROK side en masse rather follow Pyongyang's orders to massacre innocent civilians who had accepted emergency food aid from a U.S. Army field kitchen unit. The regiment's defection was a black eye for the Communists; it provided proof of Koreans' growing disaffection with the Kim Il Sung dictatorship at a time when that regime was desperately trying to convince the world its people were monolithically unified against the U.S. "imperialists" and their ROK "lackeys". To add insult to injury for the Kim regime, most of the defectors were subsequently accepted into the ROK army to fight for the South against their former Communist masters while many of the rest went to work for the United States assisting the CIA in spreading anti-Communist messages among the North Korean civilian population. Before long a steady stream of defectors and refugees would be pouring across the U.S.-ROK lines, eager to get shut of Kim Il Sung's tyranny.

By dusk on September 25th all but one square block of Wonsan was under U.S.-ROK coalition control, and within twelve hours U.S. tanks would start to encircle that square block as coalition forces prepared to eliminate the last pockets of NKPA resistance in the city. At 8:30 AM on the morning of September 26th, 1962 the tanks opened fire on these beleaguered remnants of Wonsan's NKPA garrison; just before 10:00 AM, the 1st Marine Division would accept these holdouts' surrender. Heavy fighting still lay ahead elsewhere in North Korea, but with the U.S.-ROK victory at Wonsan a crucial corner had been turned. Only 41 days had elapsed since the Second Korean War started, yet in those 41 days the Democratic People's Republic of Korea had suffered a blow from which it wouldn't recover....



To Be Continued

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