Hand-to-Hand Combat in the Mountains of Korea | James Sharp

i was not sure whether i could kill a person and i found in a ditch 28 of our servicemen with their hands tied behind their back and shot in the back of the head and i changed my mind you are about to embark upon the great crusade to meet this mounting aggression and make no mistake about it good will prevail i was bored with uh going to school and everything and actually joined before i finished high school and uh i liked the army better than i did any other service went from wichita kansas to kansas city to be inducted into the army and then down to fort riley kansas for basic training and then after basic training i was sent to nco school to be trained as a non-commissioned officer but with the korean war going they shut the school down after a couple of weeks and then i was shipped out to seattle washington and from there flew from on a commercial twa airplane to tokyo japan from there i was or during that time in tokyo i made out my last will and and processed paper work when was sent to busan and then by rail and truck to join the first cavalry division and the truck came around to drop me off in the pits dark in the middle of this town told me to get out that i was at my destination and i couldn't see anything so i had to yell at the people in the company where are you where are you and i want somebody yelled back and says over here get down the enemy's on the other side of you but when i did went over and got in the foxhole with somebody and then when morning came well then the enemy had withdrawn because the marines had made the inch on invasion well i started out as a just a private but they informed me that they didn't have any just private so they promoted me to a pfc and then after we had started chasing the north koreans out of korea that was just trying to catch up with him i eventually took over the assistant squad leader because he was killed in action and he was a corporal so i moved up to corporal and later the squad leader was killed so then i moved up to sergeant to take his place my really first thing i was not sure whether i could kill a person but we got up to take gu and i found in a ditch 28 of our servicemen with their hands tied behind their back and shot in the back of the head and i changed my mind i decided that i would never become a prisoner of war if i could help it because of that reason and i had no doubts that i would then be killing the enemy the one thing that our transportation was that we had a regimental commander named lynch colonel lynch and they called it the bug out and everything was going on trucks in the back end of them that was uh carrying ammunition artillery rounds because they were pulling the or the guns in back of the truck and all the dust was flying up in the truck and everything and whenever we got to someplace where they had [Music] ground action somebody picking off it shooting at us we'd peel out of the truck and go and take care of that problem and then come back and get on the truck and we'd go on we ran off the map that we the colonel had for us and we came to a junction in a high in the road we were on one was going to the left to sew all it said the sign the other one said to the right with somewhere else but there was a little hill right ahead of us so we went up on that top of that hill and on the circle of it at the top we all dug foxholes and orders to keep uh not fire on any enemy retreating because we really didn't know where we were and we didn't want to start a fight so shortly thereafter we heard the clinking of enemy tanks retreating and coming up in troops and they paused right there in front of us and my first thought was well here we go but after a while they decided that the signs were correct so they went to the to the right to try to get out of south korea and not be boxed in down there i had a b.a.r every new man coming in got a b-a-r and then he either had a choice of carrying the ammo for a browning repeat weapon or or carrying the weapon uh i chose to carry the weapon that fires 20 rounds and uh when you carry it you sling it over your shoulder and then it's got a tripod on it and you put your fingers on the tripod here so it balances on your shoulder if you run into a problem and and uh i need some more five firepower other than a rifle or a carbine well then it comes into play because like i said you can put 20 rounds of continuing fire on an enemy and it causes uh uh a great uh deal of uh destructive power and then after that new man came along so i got rid of it and then i had a m1 grand and it has eight rounds and that is a wonderful weapon for the army uh the only problem they had with it was on that last round that you shoot in it the clip goes ping and it makes a noise about like that and the enemy got to know when that pain went that you were out of ammo shooting at them at that particular time the other thing about an m1 grand was that when the bolts back and you pushed that thing in they called it an m1 uh thumb you've got to really quick get your thumb out of the way or that bolt will clip you so that uh and the m1 grand was a great uh great weapon you could uh in hand-to-hand combat uh uh if you had several of the enemy uh charging you you could either choose to put a bayonet on the end of it or you could actually fight with that m1 grand because the butt of the rifle was uh steel stuff and you could really crush somebody's uh body either any place that you happen to hit them there the enemy's weapon was a single shot weapon and their bayonet was a uh like a toothpick so if they stabbed you with it uh a lot of times uh they get you in the shoulder or uh some other place well then it a lot of times it was not death right off the bat like an m1 grand is with a bayonet that is the worst part of any infantry's uh fighting is hand to hand and uh what you're doing a lot of times you find that the enemy is just kids uh 12 13 14 years old and they're just told to charge you and tried to take you and they the enemy comes at you in waves of attacks the uh they line up at the bottom of the hill and uh maybe uh 50 shoulder to shoulder and then a horn blows because that's their only way of communication the first wave is armed the next wave in back of them has no weapons they pick up the weapons of the fellow soldiers that have fallen and the third wave the same way in the fourth wave so they're all coming up charging up a hill at you screaming and yelling but that bugle is the first communication signal by them where we had walkie-talkies and everything like communication that they didn't have and uh you just had to uh fire everything you could and get as much concentrated fire on them to it didn't make any difference whether you got the lead man in the first wave or whether the second or third or the fourth just as long as you disturbed it so that they would uh have so many uh casualties they'd have to retreat because there was no chance of them coming up and overrunning you now when they did come up and was successful and and overrunning that's when you got into hand-to-hand combat and uh that's no fun it's uh life-threatening you just have to do the best you can we got to the 38th parallel around the first part of october and we had to stay there for two weeks while macarthur ran the the joint chiefs and everybody decided president truman whether we were going to go across the 38th parallel in this period of time the two weeks it gave the koreans time to quickly put up some defensive positions along the 38th parallel in north korea so when the day came that we crossed it and started moving then we had that part of it to conquer but they didn't have enough time to really uh set up very good defenses so uh we went through those fairly easy and uh the first cavalry division was in the north korean capital hong king for first because the enemy the north koreans were just completely destroyed basically as a fighting unit so we kept moving but then the winner of 5051 started getting bad now what you got to think here a lot of people in combat units that you can go back and shower and shave and and keep everything yourself in [Music] chains of clothes and stuff but that's not the fact every day you're either advancing or retreating and digging a foxhole every night to get in you're in a foxhole with a buddy they call that the foxhole system you sleep two hours your buddy is on guard looking out of the foxhole in a rate of whenever he's seeing something and you teach these new people to start over on one side with a view and come all the way across over here if something moves in here you do not stop and look at it you come back again this way and if it moves you still don't stop when you come back that third time and it's still moving you better raise up your rifle and take a shot at it because you can anybody can look at anything and after a while it's going to move on you so we train them to do this in order to distinguish between shooting at nothing and firing an actual target the other parts of it are throwing a grenade when you pull the pin and do it like they do in hollywood reach back and cut loose like that a lot of times experience has shown that when they get back here they let go of the clip now that grenade has got a fuse in it it goes one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand four boom that's all the time it's got so when you pull the pin out of it you throw it underneath like you would be pitching a ball underneath to somebody and that way when the pin goes out as you cut loose with it but you've got that time for it to reach a destination this other way is too many john wayne movies the chinese came and hit first cavalry division first on november the 1st 1950. i was we were on a reserve right below the regular units up on the line fox company was in reserve and they called us up to help him and the best way you can describe the chinese coming at you was if you go out here on an ant hill and disturb it and see all the ants coming up and running all over the place that was what the chinese were i had [Music] several ran out of ammunition because it didn't make any difference how were you shot as long as you shot straight ahead and i ran out of ammunition and these chinese ran past me so i turned around and ran with them uh down the hill and they were going to get in back of us about five miles and set up a roadblock to uh get us in there where we couldn't get away there was a rice patty on down there on the right side rice paddies and i jumped into them and uh let everything go and then after it got dark well then i started trying to make my way back on south to uh join the units now the first calvary division is made up of three regiments and uh it's the fifth the seventh and the eighth the seventh coward division is a custer's old unit the fifth calvary regiment was way back in brief reserve and they were trying to get through the roadblocks to come up to help us to get us out of that trap but it took a couple three days for them to do that meanwhile everything was completely uh every man for himself running and trying the third battalion of the eighth calvary regiment was had 2500 men when they started they ended up with 376 survivors coming out of that battle and then after that well then we i joined my unit found them and we started a rear uh action uh policy you would uh dig foxholes on one line and then about uh a thousand yards back from that you dig another row of foxholes and then about another thousand yards from that you dig a third row of foxholes the purpose was that we would uh on that first row when the enemy hit us we'd shoot and shoot and yell and scream and then get up and run so then we'd get back to the second row of foxholes and we'd jump in the enemy would hit us again and we'd do the same thing uh the enemy then thought we have they had us in a running route they had routed us so they eased up and their weapons and everything got on the road to start coming down meanwhile we jumped into the foxholes on that third part of it and when they came around on the roads and walking and everything then they walked into our trap and we was very successful in that kind of a maneuver well ironically i joined the army on the 7th of april 1950 and i was wounded on the 7th of april 1951 by an incoming artillery round i had a new recruit with me that showed up [Music] the night before and i was instructing him of how to never get ahead of everything like i've covered before we started in an attack mode for the different companies uh easy company fox and then george and the easy company had tried to take this objective the day before and they were not successful so then it was fox company's turn so we started to take this hill but on the right of the objective there was a higher elevated hill so they it was decided that for me to take our platoon and go off to the right to see what was on the higher hill so that we would have an elevated shot at the enemy at the lower hill on the left so we're starting up that way and we come to a clearing and there's an angle naturally to the hill going up so we're out of at an angle this leg is shorter than this one because this one is because you're moving at that angle all of a sudden this new man comes up right beside me exactly and this artillery round comes in and hits he took the blunt of the incoming artillery round and that we were out of step i went in the air from the concussion of it and coming around helmet went one way rifle went another way and i hit the ground and i started to get up to get to my rifle because the enemy was was defending that top of that hill and i did not realize that i'd been wounded so i kept trying to get up but the guys in my platoon tackled me said the blood was coming out just like an oil well so they put their hand over there to do it now i said this guy man was a replacement came in and happened to be just coming right at that time to come side of me when that artery round came in the question i have in my mind is why did he do that where did he come from i checked back at when i came back from being wounded they had no replacement he's not shown on the morning reports that the company clerk makes for that day there's nobody kia that day i'm shown as wounded in action so where did he come from i think that god sent an angel you

Channel: American Veterans Center

Views: 867,386

Keywords: AVC, American Veterans Center, veteran, veterans, history, army, navy, air force, marines, coast guard, military, navy seal

Id: G6BSPqPfDXc

Length: 25min 7sec (1507 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2022