War: With Task Force Growdon

As paratroopers of the 187th Airborne Regiment floated to earth near Munsan, an armored force 30 miles away was moving to join up with them. With the overland operation was TIME Correspondent Tom Lambert. His report:

GOOD Friday morning was cold, brisk and sunny. Lieut. Colonel John S. Growdon of San Antonio moved his task force of Patton tanks through the South Korean 1st Division lines a few miles north of Seoul and headed for the D.Z. (drop zone) at Munsan.

There was little opposition at first. Master Sergeant Arthur Tucker’s Patton hit a mine about eight miles north of Seoul while reconnoitering a bypass around a blown bridge. Its left tread peeled off like a snake’s discarded skin; the men inside crawled out to shiver in the sunlight. Then an armored scout car, with a British bridge-building detachment, hit another mine, bounced up & turned over. Two groggy but otherwise uninjured Britons climbed out. A South Korean jeep coming over to inspect the double mishap struck a third mine, was blown into a tangle of steel, rubber and wire. The rest of Task Force Growdon clanked on.

Colonel Growdon, a lean, carrot-topped tanker with the cold blue eyes and competent air of a professional fighting man, rode at the van. His Pattons snorted through desolate villages, past a British Churchill tank destroyed in the defense of Seoul last year, past South Korean civilians whose tentative manseis showed their bewilderment over this latest thrust of armed forces through their countryside. There was little sign of the enemy. Occasionally a single rifle shot, or a flurry of shots, rang out. Once a jeep, hustling around a sweeping curve, hit a Russian-made wooden-boxed mine; in a thundering flash the jeep sailed into a roadside paddy field. One man was led, stumbling, from the wreckage; another was laid face down on a litter and quietly covered with a blanket. At 6:30 p.m., Task Force Growdon linked up with the paratroopers. “Boy,” said the men of the 187th, “we’re sure glad to see you.”

Voice from Home. In the twilight, infantrymen moving forward on tanks, armored-personnel carriers and trucks, buttoned their field jackets against the chill and dug into canned rations. Some huddled close to their vehicle’s radio, listening to reports of a California basketball game. Task Force Growdon rolled on toward Munsan.

Enemy artillery bellowed through the night. Two Pattons flared fiercely under hits. Two others struck mines. The column rolled into battered Munsan through vicious enemy rifle and machine-gun fire. Throughout the night, Reds to the north and east shelled and mortared paratroopers and rangers who were stalking the rear elements of a North Korean motorized regiment which had been retreating north when cut off by “Operation Tomahawk.” The Red guns were still going throughout the next morning. Helicopters threshed in to dusty landings in the D.Z. and whirred up again with wounded men. In the sunlight, the red, blue, green, yellow and white cargo chutes and mottled green personnel chutes, dropped the day before, gleamed vividly against dun-colored fields. A giant white chute that had floated an artillery piece to the ground rustled silkily in a tree.

Behind one cluster of huts in a small gulch, the paratroopers had collected a bag of approximately 130 North Korean soldiers and a lone Chinese straggler. The P.W.s gaped at the drop zone, now bristling with the tanks, soldiers and guns of Task Force Growdon. Along the ridges and on the paddy fields within the paratroopers’ perimeter lay some 300 dead North Korean Reds.

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