Word: battalion
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...first powerful northward thrust of the U.N. forces last week was a tank battalion-45 big Pattons-dispatched toward Uijongbu, eleven miles north of allied-held Seoul. Its stated task: to "seek out and destroy the enemy." Its purpose was, at least in part, to deny the town, almost leveled after ten months of seesaw war, to the Reds as an assembly point and staging base...
Lieut. Colonel Wilson Hawkins of Pascagoula, Miss., commanded the battalion from a grasshopper observation plane skimming overhead. The Pattons, each with a snarling tiger painted on the front, rumbled north out of a dry riverbed. Just short of Uijongbu, the column ran into trouble. Trying to bypass a tank trap, one Patton bogged down in a marshy field. Two more got stuck trying to pull it out. A fourth hit a mine; there was a deafening blast, a big puff of smoke and a cry over the radio: "Man wounded...
...dusk approached and the Chinese did not let up, Hawkins from his plane ordered the battalion to strip and abandon the two tanks that were still stuck, and start back. As the column headed south, Chinese jumped out of foxholes and attacked the U.S. armor on foot. Some 30 Chinese were killed...
...command at a few hours' notice; but he quickly sized up the Eighth Army and its strategic and tactical situation. Last week, while conferring with a regimental commander on the battlefront, Van Fleet pointed with his big forefinger to a terrain feature on the map. "Is your second battalion still in this position?" he asked the colonel. The officer looked astonished at the Army commander's detailed knowledge, then grinned. "Yes, sir," he said, "it still...
...Last Sunday, the Greek Orthodox Easter, the general visited the Greek battalion in Korea, who welcomed him as a vividly remembered friend. He remembered some of them, too. After the inspection, he went to a table where Metaxa Brandy and red-dyed Easter eggs were set. It is an Orthodox custom for two friends each to take an egg and strike them together; he whose egg remains unbroken is supposed to be the better man. Van Fleet tried this with the Greek commander, and there was much good-natured guffawing when the American's egg cracked...