Stand at Chipyong

At Kunu last December, Colonel Paul Freeman, 43, silver-haired commander of the 23rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, covered the Eighth Army's retreat. At Wonju in January, the 23rd hung on. At Chipyong last week, Freeman and his men held down the hot corner again. With them was a tough French battalion commanded by Lieut. Colonel Ralph Monclar, a Foreign Legion veteran who had given up his general's rank to take his men to Korea.

Attacking Chinese Reds swarmed down the mountain valleys on both sides of Chipyong, the tip of a precarious but vital U.N. salient. Freeman set up a circular defense perimeter on a low ring of hills, said to his men: "There is no place to go. We are cut off and surrounded. This is a key point of the Eighth Army effort, so we will stay here and kill Chinese."

Tuesday night, three Red Chinese divisions attacked. Mortar, machine-gun and shell fire poured in from Communist entrenchments surrounding the town. Next day, the attack abated; cargo planes dropped food and ammunition into the 23rd's position, while U.N. fighters clawed Red positions with rockets and machine guns. At dusk the Chinese came in again. The 23rd's ammunition ran low. G.I.s combed the glove compartments of jeeps for spare cartridges. When the Chinese assaulted a French-held hill, the Frenchmen threw them back with a bayonet charge.

In the dark of Thursday morning the Reds almost made it. One Chinese threw a dud grenade into a G.I.'s foxhole, then walloped him with a rifle. The G.I. clubbed the Chinese to death with his Garand. Red engineers blew a hole in the barbed wire with a bangalore torpedo. As Chinese infantry charged in, Sergeant Stewart Oshell's machine-gunners opened up, and 78 enemy bodies plugged the gap.

At dawn, the G.I.s and French counterattacked. Three times ist Lieut. Richard Kotite's platoon was thrown back from an enemy hill position. Then fighter planes dropped napalm on the Reds. Said Kotite: "We picked them off like ducks."

Late Thursday afternoon, Colonel Freeman's perimeter got an iron cavalry rescue. Twenty-two 1st Cavalry Division tanks crashed through from the south, scattered the remnants of the Communist attack. Exhausted G.I.s and poilus climbed out of their foxholes. Around them they counted 1,747 enemy dead. At least 2,000 others had been captured, wounded, or buried by Communist troops in shallow graves on the mountainsides.

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