Hot Pursuit

From Alexander the Great's victory at the Granicus (334 B.C.) to Gettysburg and on to the Battle of Midway, military commanders have often been criticized for failing to "exploit the retreat"--that is, for not pressing after a beaten enemy. No such reproach could be made against Lieut. General Van Fleet and his Eighth Army last week. When the battered Chinese Reds ran out of steam in the second phase of their futile spring offensive, they acted as though Van Fleet might be ceremonious and give them a breathing spell. Instead he attacked, and when the Reds withdrew, he chased them and destroyed unit after unit.

Early last week, apparently not satisfied that the valiant U.S. 2nd Division (TIME, May 28) was impregnable, the Chinese were still feeling it out with probing attacks, which were beaten off.Farther east, they attacked R.O.K. units and as usual forced them to give ground. Van Fleet sent the U.S. 3rd Division (which he had apparently held in reserve) to the aid of the ROKs, and the 3rd stopped the Reds in their tracks. Then the Communists began a retreat which by week's end seemed to be a rout.

"It Means Nothing ..." For the third time in the war, U.N. forces pushed into North Korea, regaining almost all the ground for which the Chinese had paid so heavily in blood. Said Van Fleet: "The 38th parallel has no significance in the present tactical situation. It means nothing to me. The Eighth Army will go wherever the situation dictates in hot pursuit of the enemy. We intend to exploit every advantage in carrying out our objective to find and kill them."

The Reds had no defensive positions in which to stand against the quick U.N. counteroffensive. At first they tried to slow the pursuers down by nastily laid mines, by a few long-range artillery fires, by delaying and screening actions which at some points were fierce and stubborn. Evidently they would have liked to move by night and hide by day. But there was no time for that; the allies' round-the-clock artillery gave them no peace. When the Chinese moved in the open by day, the airplanes hit them. The retreat, which had been orderly at first, began to grow panic-stricken and disordered. Some Chinese truck drivers were in such frantic hurry to get away from the planes that they ran down their own men on the roads.

Football Tackles. The Chinese seemed unwilling to make a stand even on the river lines. One day a U.S. gun battery, hard up for targets, opened fire on eleven Chinese plodding north with an oxcart along a road. Some of the shells fell wide of the mark on a hill. Chinese in a column which had been hidden on the hill thought they had been spotted, broke wildly from cover, got caught by the planes.

The swiftly advancing U.N. spearheads abandoned the old safety rule of not moving along roads until the ridges had been secured. The precaution was not necessary; the Reds in the hills were taking too cruel a beating from artillery and planes to make any serious trouble. Disheartened Chinese began surrendering in the largest numbers since the war started. On the western front, Negro doughboys of the 25th Division's 24th Regiment overtook a score of Chinese who threw down their weapons and ran. The Americans disdained shooting the unarmed, fleeing men, brought them down with football tackles.

When the allies reached Hwachon and Inje, across the parallel on the east-central front, they cut off an estimated 60,000 Chinese from escape by road. Most of them would probably filter out along tortuous mountain trails, but could take almost no equipment with them. The enemy had already abandoned huge caches of arms and other supplies. On the Imjin River, a U.N. unit came across a Chinese dump containing 200 machine guns and several hundred tons of ammunition, some of it previously captured from U.S. forces.

Ninety Thousand Plus. In the short space of two weeks, the Chinese suffered a double beating--first while attacking, then while retreating. Army Chief of Staff Collins estimated the Chinese casualties for six days of their offensive at 90,000, and last week they were losing more thousands every day. This week their resistance had stiffened noticeably, and the "rout phase" of their retreat seemed to have ended. But Van Fleet still had about 90 more miles (roughly to latitude 39DEG 30') in which to grind them down before a rapidly widening front would create new problems for the U.N. forces.

Although the Chinese still had uncommitted reserves, a U.S. officer guessed that they would not be able to attack again for three months. It was quite possible that, so long as the war was confined to the narrow Korean peninsula, the Chinese would not again attack South Korea.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.