Word: mortaring
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This exchange made the hearing's only headlines. Most of Van Fleet's testimony was a reprise of things he had said before. He stuck to his guns, insisting that shortages of ammunition-especially of mortar and 155-mm. howitzer shells- had made it impossible to "plan adequate defensive fire, harassing, interdiction and counterbattery, to keep the enemy from launching an attack." Asked whether he had enough ammunition to halt a Chinese offensive, Van Fleet replied: Yes, but only because "the Chinese cannot maintain an offensive for more than a few weeks. They do not know...
Early last week, just after dark, the Chinese Reds laid a painful artillery-and-mortar barrage on Baldy, whose bunkers and trenches had been softened by insistent spring rains. Under enemy fire, most of the weakened shelters collapsed. One outpost was overrun, then recaptured by U.S. reinforcements in the middle of the night. The main Red attack, however, was aimed at Baldy's summit by a reinforced Chinese regiment of 3,000 to 3,500 men, advancing in waves through a curtain of their own fire. The 7th Division units on the crest could not stand...
...situation in Korea was improving. Army Chief of Staff General J. Lawton ("Lightnin' Joe") Collins implied that Van Fleet, like most combat commanders, had an insatiable appetite for ammunition. The fact is, said Collins, that in 1952 the Eighth Army fired an average of 62,616 rounds of mortar and artillery ammunition a day-nearly ten times the enemy's average daily rate of fire. But such Pentagon efforts to persuade the Senators to look at the silver lining collapsed when Virginia's Harry Byrd put a question to Army Secretary Robert Ten Broeck Stevens...
...shakes before every attack, but I still think he's weak. His grenades are no good; they bounce around like pieces of lead pipe. They kill some of our guys, sure, but lots of 'em are duds and others don't fragment properly. Lots of their mortar shells are lousy, too. I don't mean that hitting him, really hitting him, will be easy, but I don't think he's nearly so damned rough & tough as he sounds in our own newspapers...
...Reds began shooting up Sandbag Castle, Joe canceled his own furlough, volunteered to stay and help build bunkers. He was standing in a shallow trench, filling bags with sand, when five mortar shells came in. Joe was hit from head to foot by fragments, thrown on his back. He called to his Katusa Pal Choi ("Jacky") Chang Moon: "Where are my legs? Where are my hands?" They were dangling. He was rushed to the R.O.K. hospital in Pusan, where surgeons amputated all four limbs, and he became the fourth quadruple amputee of the Korean...