Word: taejon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...morning of the third day, Communist tanks broke through the city's northern defenses. Inside Taejon, North Korean guerrillas who had infiltrated during the night opened fire with rifles, light machine guns and mortars. Other Red assault troops outside the city began driving in the defenders' flanks...
Through it runs a double-tracked trunk-line railroad, which twists 125 miles through the mountains to Pusan, the U.S. buildup port in the southeast. Last week the North Korean Reds arrived at the city's outskirts. U.S. troops of the 24th Division were supposed to hold Taejon two days ; they held it for three...
Dead at the Wheel. The Communists moved swiftly. They were aided by one of the classic tragedies of warfare : the head quarters of General William Dean (see below), U.S. commander in Taejon, had sent a message to the commander of his reserve, calling for help to hold the southern rail and highway escape routes open. The reserve commander never got the message; it showed up, hours later, at another headquarters far to the rear. By midafternoon the Communist flank attacks had cut the escape routes...
...streets of Taejon, some of the trapped Americans fought the Reds at close quarters (see cut); others battled desperately to reopen the southern escape lines. Overhead, U.S. Mustangs and F80 jet fighters wheeled and roared down to attack Communist tanks with rockets. Dense clouds of oil smoke boiled up from detonated U.S. fuel supplies; as ammunition stores exploded, great orange flashes broke through the smoke clouds. Occasionally a U.S. jeep veered crazily off a street and crashed into the side of a building, its driver dead at the wheel...
Dead at the Throttle. At the burning Taejon railroad station, a locomotive engineer who had been tooting his whistle frantically throughout the early hours of the fighting finally decided to make a break for it; his train got through, but a hospital train that tried to re-enter the city later, to take out the wounded, was driven off. The engineer was shot dead at the throttle...