BATTLE OF KOREA: Is This It?

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Near Yonchon on the western front one night last week, a U.S. battalion was hit without warning by what one officer called "the damndest mortar and artillery barrage I know of." A few hours later a screaming, bugle-blowing Chinese regiment attacked the Americans and cut them off. It was the heaviest fighting on the western front since the truce talks in July.

The attacking Chinese were helped by Russian-built T-34 tanks and by planes, apparently propeller-driven Yaks. Two T-34s were wrecked by swarming allied planes. A U.S. armored task force rushed to the rescue of the trapped battalion. The tanks took up the American dead and wounded and, with machine guns sweeping the roadsides, charged three miles back to the U.N. main lines. Then the battalion also fought its way out in an 18-hour battle. Said Lieut. Colonel Robert Demers, the battalion commander: "We got all our men out—the living, the wounded and the dead. And we left dead Chinese piled up like cordwood."

G-2 Didn't Know. Other Chinese attacks sputtered from Kumsong, the main Red buildup base on the central front, almost to the Yellow Sea. At the top of the "Iron Triangle," onetime Red bastion, the Eighth Army's line was bent back. At Korangpo in the extreme west, the Reds punched forward, despite heavy U.N. artillery. By week's end, the Eighth Army recaptured all the lost ground and pushed on.

As the fighting erupted in one sector after another, U.N. combat commanders asked their G-2s, "Is this it?" The G2s didn't know, but the portents were strong. Red motor traffic behind the front was the heaviest of the war. Allied airmen destroyed or damaged 4,364 vehicles in one week—but they could not claim to have stopped more than a fraction of the traffic.

The Eighth Army's General James A. Van Fleet told of 17 days' hard fighting on the eastern front—with three U.N. divisions pitted against 83,000 Reds—as a result of which "partial exhaustion" had been inflicted on the Reds in that sector.

Bloody Ridge. The 2nd Infantry had a hard fight for "Bloody Ridge," a triple-peaked 3,000-ft. hogback north of Yanggu. By last week the Red positions had been shattered by a tremendous torrent of artillery—390,000 rounds. When the doughfeet got on top, they found nothing alive but a few wounded and half-starved North Koreans, abandoned by their comrades. By U.N. count, the Reds had lost 10,500 men, including 930 prisoners.

The enemy's big push, if it comes in the next week or two, will probably be launched in the flatter terrain of the west. From the central mountains to the U.N.'s western anchor on the Imjin, troops and unit commanders braced themselves every day and every night.