Word: hwachon
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...Hwachon Reservoir area, six miles above the 38th parallel, Colonel Harris' regiment was in a desperate fight for control of floodwaters-a scrap such as U.S. troops had not seen since the early part of 1945, when First Army doughfeet fought through the Hürtgen Forest to seize the Roer River dams in Germany's Rhineland...
Threat of Flood. The Hwachon dam, 275 ft. high and Korea's third largest, lies at the end of a spit of land shaped like a camel's head, between the western arm of the reservoir and a bend of the Pukhan River. U.S. officers knew that if the Chinese opened the dam's 18 sluice gates simultaneously, they would create a bothersome flood in the Pukhan valley; if they shattered the dam with explosives, a terrible wall of water, 50 to 60 ft. high, would plunge down the valley and cut the U.N. line...
Individual as well as collective U.S. valor ran high during the fight on Hwachon's camel's head. One sergeant who wanted to rejoin his unit in spite of a broken foot protested violently against evacuation. "It ain't broken, it ain't broken," he cried to a medical corpsman. "I'm going back up!" The corpsman applied pressure to the foot, moved the broken bones. The sergeant's face contorted with pain, but he uttered no sound. The corpsman shook his head, then ordered the fighter out of combat...
...week's end troops of seven nations-U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, Siam, Greece, South Korea-were in North Korea almost everywhere along the 110-mile front. Enemy resistance faded in the west but stiffened in the center, in front of the Communists' "iron triangle" (Hwachon-Chorwon-Yonchon), where the main body of their forces was believed to be poised for the big push. At one point, Chinese holed up in eight enormous bunkers drove off repeated U.S. attacks with mortars, machine guns, rifle fire and grenades...
This week U.S. doughfeet reached the south edge of the Hwachon Reservoir against the fiercest resistance of the week. The Reds opened some of the reservoir's floodgates, raising by four feet the level of the Pukhan River and sending debris banging against allied pontoons. The enemy seemed dead set on preventing any further approach to the iron triangle...