Word: hwachon
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Dates: during 1951-1951
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...marines' left, in the Hwachon area, an R.O.K. division was holding eight miles of front. Although this Korean unit had fought well in other battles, its men were frightened by the heaviest artillery, mortar and small-arms fire they had ever seen, and completely demoralized by the Reds' attack signals: bugles, whistles, green flares. The ROKs broke...
...Reds attacked in the area of the Hwachon Reservoir dam (taken by U.S. troops without a fight last week before the Red drive began) and at other points farther west. On a 15-mile front, they pushed across the Imjin River, wading the waist-high water. In the extreme west, U.N. forces pulled back twelve miles to help hold the Imjin bridgehead in check. In the first twelve hours the Communist attack spread across 50 miles of front, in 24 hours across 100 miles...
...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...