The Korean War, 70 Years Ago, The News-Herald, Franklin and Oil City PA
Korean War Weekly Front Pages
28 October – 2 November 1951
The News-Herald, Franklin and Oil City PA
A breakthrough at last.
*****
US soldiers charged that Chinese communist troops deliberately fired on UN stretcher parties and Korean civilian refugees. The snipers let combat troops pass unscratched to concentrate on medics carrying wounded, walking wounded, and North Korean refugees during recent fighting south of Kumsong, the soldier said. “I’ve seen dirt in this war,” said Sergeant James Cannon of San Francisco, “but this is stooping to a new low.” Medics said they tried for four hours to cross a 100 foot wide area.
Chinese Communists rushed a fresh division into the Kumsong area Monday as UN troops won a series of sharp engagements. A new Chinese division was shifted from eastern Korea to bolster badly mauled Red troops around Kumsong. The location of the front lines in that area was one of the points at issue in the cease-fire talks at Panmunjom. Midweek, Red troops drove UN forces off hills southwest of Kumsong in a pre-dawn attack and the Allies tried all day to recapture them. The Reds hit with machine guns and small arms after a mortar barrage. The UN units held fast for nearly an hour, then fell back to stronger positions. In Kumsong itself, a UN tank patrol stabbed into the city on reconnaissance. They found no trace of the three Red tanks that had been reported to be there by an infantry patrol. Northwest of Yonchon on the western front, UN units carved out gains of 800 to 900 yards, meeting only light resistance. Nearly 800 screaming Red troops hurled themselves at UN forces west of Punchbowl Valley, only to be thrown back. Another counterattack was repulsed above Yanggu and two more northwest of Kansong on the east coast. Despite the lull in the fighting since the resumption of talks, an Eighth Army spokesman said UN forces were killing nearly 1,000 Reds a day.
On Monday, UN truce negotiators rejected a Communist offer to trade two swampy peninsulas in western Korea for central and eastern mountains captured by the UN at a high cost. The rejection came during a “completely inconclusive” meeting of a subcommittee set up by the UN and Red armistice teams to find a mutually agreeable cease-fire line across Korea. The next day brought no progress as the Reds stuck stubbornly to their demand that the Allies give up what a UN negotiator called “a couple of hundred Heartbreak Ridges.” The Reds had made “no concessions, no trades, and no offers for a reasonable solution in six days of talks.” On Wednesday, the Communists sent hopes for a truce soaring as they offered a compromise proposal to end the war along a line only two to three miles from the cease-fire line sought by the United Nations. A UN spokesman said the surprise offer at a subcommittee meeting brought the two sides closer together to an agreement than at any time since the truce talks began in July. Still in dispute, however, was possession of Kaesong, invasion gateway to Seoul and present site of the Communist truce delegation’s base camp. Both sides claimed it. By the next day, the truce line had been fixed across the eastern half of Korea, but arguments over Kaesong and Heartbreak Ridge still continued. The former was particularly divisive, as the UN offered to withdraw from all Korean islands north of the 38th Parallel, evacuate the Kumsong Bulge, and pull back south on the east coast to obtain Kumsong. “The Reds have taken everything and given nothing,” a UN spokesman said. “We will adopt a quite firm stand on the Kaesong issue.” At the end of the week, the UN proposed that Kaesong become a neutral city. The Communists did not immediately turn down the proposal.
(Photo courtesy newspapers.com, Franklin and Oil City News Herald)