The Korean War, 70 Years Ago, The Evening Gazette, Indiana PA
Korean War Weekly Front Pages
7 October – 13 October 1951
The Evening Gazette, Indiana PA
Heartbreak Ridge finally falls to the Allies.
*****
General Ridgway accepted in principle the Communist proposal that Korean cease-fire talks begin anew near Panmunjom. The Supreme Allied Commander said a site in the immediate vicinity of that Red outpost, six miles southeast of Kaesong, would meet the “fundamental condition of equality of movement and control.” The Reds had broken off the talks at Kaesong on 23 August. Ridgway said he was instructing his liaison officers to meet with the Reds Wednesday to hammer out details for re-opening talks. On Wednesday Allied and Communist liaison officers agreed on the location. There was no immediate announcement of when the armistice negotiations would be re-opened, or even whether the time had been set. In a further setback, Friday the Reds summoned their Allied counterparts to Kaesong to investigate new neutrality violation charges. The Reds said that a UN plane had attacked the Kaesong neutral zone only an hour and a half after the truce talks had ended at Panmunjom. Still, another meeting in dusty little Panmunjom was scheduled for Sunday.
A thin line of dog-tired American infantrymen edged toward the top of the last Red-held peak on crabby Heartbreak Ridge in eastern Korea. Last reports put them within 200 yards of the summit. Communist grenades and machinegun fire poured down from Red bunkers above as the troops from the US Second Division’s 23rd Regiment fought forward foot by foot and bunker by bunker. Across the Mundung Valley to the west, the 9th Regiment fought fiercely-resisting North Koreans for possession of Kim Il Sung ridge, named after the North’s premier. Chinese Reds were shifting east to halt the Allies, who had gained up to 15 miles there since the talks were broken off. Fierce hand-to-hand battles were taking place on the western front as well, as First Division cavalrymen hacked out gains of more than a mile near Yonchon.
On Wednesday fifty American tanks led thousands of US infantrymen on a surprise attack that smashed eight miles through Chinese lines in eastern Korea. Green Chinese troops turn and ran in the face of the American onslaught. It was hoped that this would be the end of the Heartbreak Ridge fighting. Indeed, on Friday the ridge finally fell to the Allies, climaxing the longest and most costly hill battle of the war. Mopping up actions there took place on the weekend, which also brought renewed assaults by the Allies in western and central Korea. US and South Korean divisions gained up to two miles in the center and a captured Red officer in the east said that the North Korean Army that had started the war 21 months ago was “practically nonexistent.”
The use of atomic weapons in Korea was reported to have been given serious consideration by US military leaders but to have been laid aside for the present. The question of using such weapons was one of the reasons for the recent hurried trip to Tokyo and the battlefront by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Bradley. He had apparently recommended against the use of the A-bomb because the prospects for a Korean truce seemed to be brighter.
Brothers Melvin and John Richard Barnett, who played together as boys and fought together as men, returned to their hometown of Batesville, AR on Tuesday. They were killed in action on the same day and in the same engagement, and were the first instance in the current conflict of two members of the same family falling in the same battle.
(Photo courtesy newspapers.com, Indiana Evening Gazette)