Another Triangle

On four main corridors leading into North Korea, the Communists stood last week and fought ably, stubbornly. Well-executed Chinese counterattacks frequently stopped allied spearheads and turned them back. At some points, U.N. and Red infantrymen lobbed grenades at each other from strongpoints several yards apart. A Negro squad leader of the 25th Division's 24th Regiment, asked by telephone if he was in close contact with the enemy, answered: "Close contact, sir? We're eyeball to eyeball."

The Chinese brought up artillery and laid down heavy barrages. In the mountainous center, they were defending the approaches to another "iron triangle," somewhat smaller and farther to the north than the one through which they had staged their spring offensive. On a stretch of road south of the triangle, 1,600 Chinese shells fell in the space of 75 minutes. For four days in a row, U.S. columns attacking toward the triangle's western corner were stopped in their tracks.

New Pastime. East of the Hwachon Reservoir, the Chinese held open their escape routes while most of their stragglers got out of South Korea.

Heavy rains of the beginning monsoon season mired the roads and hampered air support. This week, nevertheless, the Eighth Army stood approximately on the line, well across the parallel along most of the front, which it had occupied in April when the Reds launched their bloody spring push. Washington's estimate of enemy casualties for the second phase, including those inflicted by allied air action, soared to 162,000. Added to the 90,000 estimated for the first phase, this made a total of a quartermillion. U.N. soldiers found a grisly new way to occupy their time, when they were not fighting: counting the enemy dead whose bodies drifted past them in Korea's muddy, rain-swollen streams. At one point on the east-central front, one G.I. counted 80 in a single day.

"The Last I Saw . . ." The toll included a bag of 10,000 Chinese prisoners--more than three times as many as had surrendered in all the previous months since Red China's intervention. Early last week, while the Red defense was just firming up, a group of 300 Chinese surrendered to U.S. airmen. They had been hit hard by artillery, and when the planes came over they leaped out of their holes, waving white cloths or holding their hands over their heads. While the planes circled, the Chinese walked to a British infantry position and gave themselves up.

One Chinese tried to surrender to Major General Clark Ruffner, pugnacious commander of the U.S. 2nd Division. "This guy stepped out of the woods," said Ruffner, "and walked up to my jeep with his hands in the air. I couldn't stop to fool with him, so I motioned him to sit down beside the road and wait for the approaching column. He did. The last I saw of him, he was still squatting there waiting for someone to take him in."

But neither one nor 10,000 Chinese prisoners remotely suggested that Red China was finished.

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