Word: taejon
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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...
...Stragglers. Days later, Taejon's beaten defenders were still straggling through to the new U.S. lines south of the city. More were doubtless lost but still alive in the surrounding hills. One sergeant had wandered for 33 miles through the hills in his bare feet. An Arkansas lieutenant showed up clad only in his shorts. But many of Taejon's defenders did not make it at all. Among the missing: TIME Correspondent Wilson Fielder (see PRESS...
...West of Taejon, the Reds kept right on rolling. This week they launched a heavy attack on the unprotected far left flank of the U.S.-South Korean line, rolled unopposed down the west coast almost to the tip of the Korean peninsula. The Reds who took Taejon did not stay there long. They drove 20 miles to the southeast...