The Korean War, 70 Years Ago, The Morning Call, Allentown PA
Korean War Weekly Front Pages
18 January 1953 – 24 January 1953
The Morning Call, Allentown PA
America has a new President.
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On Sunday UN troops smashed an attack by 400 tank-led Reds in a slashing, five-hour hand-in-hand fight on the Korean central front. A US Eighth Army briefing officer said 76 attackers were killed in the battle near Kumsong. The Chinese Communists opened up at dusk, firing on an Allied outpost with two tanks. About 150 Reds hit the outpost an hour later. The Reds reinforced with 250 men, and bayonet fighting raged while both sides laid down artillery and mortar barrages. UN troops took control and drove the Chinese off an hour before midnight.
Allied warplanes and artillery on Sunday attacked 2,000 massed Communist troops moving toward Sniper Ridge on the central Korean front and killed an estimated 220 of the Red soldiers. United Nations observation planes first spotted the large group of Communists in open terrain about 2 miles north of Kumhwa and called in Allied dive bombers and artillery fire to blast the Reds. Big guns from UN lines first opened up on the Reds, killing approximately 100 Chinese soldiers. Marine Corsairs and Skyraiders then roared down on the Communists with bombs, machine gun fire, and flaming napalm, killing an estimated 120 more.
On Tuesday American Superfortresses battered two Communist installations in North Korea with 110 tons of bombs in a renewal of daily strikes against the Red supply system. Eleven of the big bombers hit a supply area 5 miles east of Sariwon, a northwest railroad junction, and another installation at Kungdong, just north of Sariwon. Open supply stacks in a total of 70 enemy warehouses were bombed by the B-29s. Two other B-29s slammed 30 tons of bombs into Red troops positioned at the front.
Sabres led by two US jet aces shot down seven Red MIG fighters and damaged three more in big air battles near the Manchurian frontier on Wednesday. Two dozen Sabrejets on their ceaseless patrol took on 43 of the Russian MIGs, the biggest swarm of them encountered in about a week. On Saturday the Sabrejets bagged four more as waves of fighter-bombers shot up Red positions along the front and cut rail lines near Pyongyang.
Francis Cardinal Spellman, Roman Catholic prelate of New York, said, “Time is on the side of our enemies” in Korea. “They are fighting near their source of supplies. We have to transport men and supplies over great distances.”
(Photo courtesy newspapers.com, Allentown Morning Call)