The Korean War, 70 Years Ago, The Republic, Kane, PA
Korean War Weekly Front Pages
2 September – 8 September 1951
The Republican, Kane PA
The fall of Bloody Ridge, and a new offensive.
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The UN revealed that three US divisions had been thrown into battle against 83,000 entrenched Communist troops to knock off balance a threatened Red offensive in Korea by a Soviet puppet army including Germans and other eastern Europeans. The US Army 7th and 2nd Divisions and the 1st Marine Division were in a bloody fight against the Communists on the east-central and central fronts. Dispatches said the Marines and the 2nd Division had stormed a key hill north of Yanggu and taken it after a fierce battle that lasted nearly eight hours at close range. In addition, UN artillery opened a big bombardment of the Communist supply center of Kunsong from heights on “Bloody Ridge.”
On Wednesday, UN troops finally captured Bloody Ridge on the east-central Korean front after 18 days of savage fighting. UN infantrymen took three remaining hills without a shot, finding only wounded and half-starved North Koreans awaiting them. The prisoners said that defending forces had withdrawn hours earlier. Bloody Ridge fell to the allies after the heaviest artillery concentration of the Korean war against a single objective. Since the start of the offensive, UN artillery men had fired 390,000 rounds and inflicted an estimate 6,500 casualties on the Reds.
The next day Chinese troops and Russian-made tanks smashed three miles into Allied lines on Korea’s western front in an ominous thrust down the classic invasion route towards Seoul. It was possibly the first move of the awaited all-out Red offensive. A force of 2.500 Chinese, backed up by two full Chinese divisions in the immediate area and thousands of Soviet puppet troops a few miles to the west, cut off one American unit which was fighting back to the UN lines as night came. They fought their way to safety after being cut off for hours. The attack was the first by either side on the quiet western front since before the truce talks began on 10 July. The attack continued late in the week as Communists drove Allied infantrymen from hills in three sectors of the western front, and were moving tanks into the cease-fire city of Kaesong.
Vice Admiral Joy coldly rejected three warmed-over Communist protests against alleged UN violations of neutrality in the Kaesong cease-fire zone, thus snarling further the cease-fire stalemate. But General Ridgway was drafting a top-level note to the Red high command which might cut through the wordy Communist propaganda barrage and open the way for resumption of truce negotiations, perhaps at a new site to get away from troubled Kaesong. His note essentially was a “put up or shut up” challenge to get the talks going again. It demanded a new conference and told the Reds to halt their “constant deceit.” A meeting on a neutral ship at sea appeared to provide the only conditions under which either the communists or the UN would agree to resume the Korean cease-fire talks. Red leaders still were silent on the US demand for a new conference site. Their truce team rejected as unsatisfactory the latest Allied notes about Kaesong neutrality violations, but the communist delegation made no new protests. Failure of the Reds to make an immediate reply to general Ridgway’s proposal for a new meeting place brought neither pessimism nor optimism. The official view is that it was up to the Reds to make the move that will either get the talks back on the road or end them for good.
Forty-nine nations signed the Japanese peace treaty in the face of a Soviet-satellite boycott backed by promises that the pact meant “new war in the far east.” Most delegates received the Soviet position with an uneasy feeling that this would mean a blazing Communist offensive in Korea.
(Photo courtesy newspapers.com, Kane Republican)