Lifeline on Rails

Photo courtesy of the Doug Price collection.

C. 1950-51.  In a strategic sense, the rail yard in Pusan was the most valuable real estate in South Korea during the Korean War.  At the time, the nation's road network was insufficient to support the volume and variety of heavy traffic needed to sustain the U.N. forces combatting North Korea's incursion. Transportation was best achieved on the Korean rail network, developed by the Japanese during their occupation of Korea during the first half of the 20th century.  

In 1950, with the advent of the Korean War, U.S. and allied planners immediately recognized the strategic value of these railroads.  For military purposes, the port city of Pusan was the heart of this network, because it was here that maritime cargo would be transshipped to the railroads' rolling stock.

The majority of military personnel introduced to Korea approached the front lines as close as could be practically achieved by rail. Their journeys started in Pusan, which at the same time was the ultimate collection point of Korean refugees displaced by war. These refugees arrived in Pusan with few resources.  To a large extent, they survived by begging, bartering, or scavenging the refuse generated by the American and other U.N. armies.  

Thus is the setting for this photograph. For the thousands of Americans who served in Korea, their first encounter with the Korean people was achieved in this manner.

KATUSAs to the Rescue!

Desperation sometimes begets innovation.  So it was for the U.S. Eighth Army during the opening months of the Korean War.  Late 1940s budget austerity meant that most regiments entered the war at only two-thirds strength.  While replacements were thrown into the fray as quickly as possible, they were not enough to replenish staggering combat losses that the U.S. Army suffered through the summer of 1950.

And so Eighth Army planners devised a solution: infuse the enlisted ranks of U.S. Army units with Korean men - or as it so often was - boys.

Official nomenclature described them as "Korean Augmentation to the United States Army," which reduces to the "KATUSA" acronym.  KATUSAs would be fully integrated into the ranks of U.S. fighting units, thus establishing the means for their care, feeding, and utilization. There was some logic to this concept.  For one, there were plenty of able-bodied men available of (or near) fighting age, right there in South Korea.  And because they were native to the country, these same individuals brought knowledge of the landscape.  On the flip side was a virtually intractable language barrier.

The South Korea government, such as it was at the time, was fully complicit in this scheme.  The "drafting" of KATUSAs began in July 1950. This was often accomplished by constables who simply yanked boys off the street and pitched them onto the back of trucks.  "Basic training" was less-than rudimentary, accomplished in a matter of hours.

The 24th Infantry Division, which was the first U.S. Army unit dispatched to Korea, was in pretty bad shape by the end of August 1950.  The division was placed in reserve to provide its men time to recuperate. It was in this rest camp that KATUSAs were introduced to their organization.  There was no prescription for their use.  Instead, each unit fostered its own approach. In some cases, KATUSAs were limited to menial support tasks. In other cases, they learned to operate weapons; each would be paired with an American in a "buddy system."

The results were mixed, but worthy of refinement.  The Eighth Army continued to employ KATUSAs throughout the Korean War... and after.  The partnership with the U.S. Army remains in place to this day. Its administration is much refined, of course, as it develops a cadre of professional soldiers that become valuable additions to the Republic of Korea Army.

A Triple Whammy: The Newton Lantron Story

Major Newton W. Lantron, Sr. Photo courtesy of Lacy C. Barnett

At about 0930 hours on July 20, 1950, U.S. Army Major Newton W. Lantron disappeared during the Korean War’s Battle of Taejon. Army historians claim that he neither gave notice nor instructions to his staff. Lantron simply departed his command post by driving away in his jeep.

Lantron’s exit was curious, to say the least. He was the commander of the 3rd Battalion, 34th Infantry regiment (3/34), which, after only two weeks of combat in Korea, was being thoroughly routed by enemy forces. At first under the command of Lt. Col. David H. Smith, the 3/34 had already suffered formidable casualties in a delaying action at Ch’onan on July 7-8. Whereas the third battalion’s understrength rosters counted about 525 men before Ch’onan, only 175 would emerge from that engagement. Among the losses was Lt. Col. Smith, evacuated due to physical exhaustion.  This made Maj. Lantron the senior officer available in the battalion, and thus its commander.  

By July 20, the U.S. Army’s combat presence in Korea was committed to a tenuous front line defense just north and west of Taejon, South Korea. The 3/34 was an integral component of that line.  By this point, the men – and especially, most of the officers – had been functioning for days without proper sleep. This would become evident in lapses of judgment and decision-making. This situation was made worse by poor communications between command levels, a consequence of worn, broken, or otherwise unreliable radios and signal equipment drawn from World War II surplus stocks.

Regimental headquarters became aware of Lantron’s disappearance about two and a half hours later. But by that time, the headquarters staff had more pressing distractions to contend with.  A number of North Korean T-34 tanks had by then infiltrated the grid of Taejon’s streets.  Clerks, cooks, mechanics, medics and other rear echelon men all became riflemen as they encountered enemy infiltrators. Those troops not already fighting for their lives were now preparing a hasty exit, either packing up their trucks or setting fire to what they could not readily transport. In the midst of this confusion, the disappearance of a battalion commander was of no immediate concern. A 29-year-old captain, Jack Smith, was regimental command’s emergency choice to lead 3/34 after Lantron’s disappearance. 

Newt Lantron, a tall and lanky 35-year-old Alabamian by birth, joined the Army before World War II. He entered combat as a company commander with the 36th Infantry Division in Italy, only to be captured by the Germans on September 9, 1943. He was interned at Oflag 64 in Poland for the duration of the war in Europe. 

The post-war continuation of his Army service placed him by 1950 with occupation forces in Japan, and subsequently, with combat forces in Korea. The enervating crisis in Korea was only exacerbated by the U.S. Army’s unpreparedness, as it lacked reliable and effective equipment, while its men lacked sufficient spirit and physical fortitude for combat. Field-grade officers like Lantron were further stressed by their awareness of top commanders’ impossible expectations. On July 7, division commander Gen. William Dean sacked the original commander of the 34th Regiment’s Korea deployment, Jay Lovless, for an apparent lack of aggressiveness.  Lovless’ replacement, Bob Martin, lasted all of 15 hours as he, armed with an ineffective 2.36-inch bazooka, lost a duel with an enemy T-34 tank in Ch’onan. 

Now on July 20, Lantron’s orders were to hold the defensive line north of Taejon until notified to do otherwise. Lantron was in the same fix as Red Ayres, his counterpart who commanded the 34th’s first battalion.  While obediently holding his position through the previous night, Ayres, detected the ominous clatter of enemy armor and troops bypassing his position in the dark.  But without proper command communications, mission assignments were not forthcoming. Like Ayres, Lantron would have to react to rapidly evolving events on the ground around him. A lack of sleep ensured that his decisions did not always comport with sound military doctrine.  These were the circumstances that immediately preceded Lantron’s sudden departure.

The Army suffered staggering losses on 20 July. Lt. Col. Red Ayres managed an effective escape for a portion of his command, which would regroup and continue the fight later that summer along the Pusan Perimeter.  Newton Lantron, however, would not return to duty until September 1953 – three years later.

The U.S. Army would learn, several weeks after the battle in Taejon, that Lantron had evaded the enemy for two or three days before he was taken prisoner by the North Koreans. Other American prisoners would later testify as to Lantron’s heroics in saving the lives of several of his fellow captives, both on the forced march to North Korea and by his food scavenging efforts in the prisoner of war camps. 

Having endured two separate wartime internments, Lantron suffered yet again when his son, Netwon Jr., age 24, died of a brain tumor in 1964 while serving with the U.S. Army in West Germany. Newton Lantron, Sr. died in 2003 at the age of 88.

Brothers in Arms

Courtesy of the Doug Price Collection.

1953. South Korea.  U.S. Army Private Philip Thomas Hughes gave his life to protect South Korea and its inhabitants, including these little fellows.  While the identities of these children are unknown, they pose in a scene that reveals the humble, vernacular life style of mid-20th century Korea.  The wattle hut was reasonably durable, as long as someone was diligent about maintaining the thatched roof - hence the ladder leaning on the foundation. The inhabitants of this home maintained a garden with beans and other vegetables.  Its very likely that some domesticated livestock were housed with the family under the same roof. You can guess what the drainage ditch in the foreground was for. To the rear is a rice paddy.  Beyond that are hills - not only ubiquitous features of Korean topology, but also the nemeses of the many American and other United Nations soldiers who scaled these slopes to fight and die so far from home.

This is Your Korean War

A U.S. Army forward aid station in Korea, July 1950. Photo Courtesy of Mr. Lacy C. Barnett

You are a teenage American boy in 1950.  The U.S. Army welcomed you to its ranks after releasing so many World War II veterans.  Officially, the Army enlists boys as young as seventeen, but a few kids are even younger than that, thanks to recruiters’ lax scrutiny.  Someone had to staff overseas military commitments in the face of a growing Cold War.  The Army looked like a good deal when you enlisted as a high-school dropout seeking escape from a remote coal mining hamlet or a grimy industrial city.  You found a rather cushy billet in Japan, where you enjoyed three hots and a cot – and your dollar went a long way in the local economy.

But at the end of June, word came that Russian-equipped North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel to invade U.S.-backed South Korea.  Almost overnight, America would have to demonstrate its resolve with a true military commitment.  You’re with the 34th Infantry Regiment on Japan’s Kyushu Island, closest to the Korean Peninsula.  So you are the among the first troops to go. The Army prepares you as best it can with weapons, equipment, and food drawn from storage warehouses crammed with leftovers from World War II.  You are issued a rifle with a tag affixed to it that reads “Combat Unserviceable.” 

Great.

You quickly find that Korea is inhospitable in many ways. Before you even meet the enemy, you contend with climate extremes, insects, malodorous rice paddies, and those hills… one steep and scrubby hill after another. The highest hills must be scaled to deny them from the enemy. That enemy is no push-over. He is physically conditioned to dash up these slopes.  You and your colleagues are not. You rely on trucks for mobility and supplies. Many enemy formations advance on foot. Others drive Russian tanks. They work together to outflank, divide, and encircle you, pressing attacks on your units that are cut off.  You have tanks, but they are too late, too few, and no match for those of the enemy.

You are outnumbered from day-one. Your leadership – all the way up to General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, know this. While it’s not explicitly stated, the job of the first Americans sent to Korea is not to defeat the enemy, but merely to slow him down until reinforcements can be shipped over from the States.  So you hold a hill or a crossroads as long as you can, pulling back only as your encirclement is imminent.  It’s a thankless task, one for which there is little or no direction in the Army manuals. We call it “bugging out.” It is a routine that some clever truck drivers have memorialized in a song, “Bug-Out Boogie.”  The dark humor of its lyrics is a bulwark against the madness that engulfs you. 

You really want to go back to Japan.  Or just get out of Korea. 

The last thing you want is to become immobilized on the front line as the enemy is bearing down on your position.  Even before you were wounded, you were exhausted. Your head throbbed from heat stroke. Your bowels were knotted by dysentery that you contracted by drinking water from the rice paddies, because dammit – it was the only water available.  Now you are immobilized on a stretcher. You smoke a cigarette, in part because the smoke wards away flies that want to crawl up your nostrils.

You anticipate only the next step in your deliverance. A hospital? To the Japanese girlfriend you left in Sasebo? Or maybe even… home.  If you are lucky, the boys from your squad hoist you to an aid station just behind the line. There, a combat doctor stabilizes your wounds so that corpsmen can stack you and four or five other guys in a Dodge ambulance that rumbles back to the nearest Korean rail depot.  Hopefully, you would not have to wait too long to be loaded on one of those old wooden train coaches that will lurch southward between the hills on its way to the port of Pusan – the filthy city that has now become the beloved exit from Korea and all its attendant nightmares. 

Private First Class Maurice Francis O'Kain

The O'Kains struggled to start a family. Joe, a Pittsburgh electrician, and wife Irma suffered the loss of two infant daughters in the early 1920s. They finally welcomed four sons to the family.  Following the example of their father, who was a veteran of the First World War, three of these boys would seek opportunity in the military. The youngest son, Maurice, and the next oldest, Robert, went to Korea with the U.S. Army.

Only Robert would return home alive.

September 10, 1950. Having already completed two years of his enlistment, 20-year-old Maurice was assigned to the 19th Infantry Regiment during the darkest days of the Korean War.  Along with Pvt. Philip Hughes and the other riflemen of K Company, Maurice attempted to hold a lonely portion of the Pusan Perimeter known as Hill 300.  It was there, during a hellish nighttime battle, fought in the rain, that Maurice was killed in action. His remains eventually came back to be interred in his home town on Monday, September 3, 1951.

The O'Kains - infant daughters included - rest together now in the Christ Our Redeemer Catholic Cemetery.  Robert was the last to join them in 2016.

The Vocation of Herman Felhoelter

Lt. Herman G. Felhoelter, 1913-1950.

July 16, 1950. Just north of Taejon, South Korea.  It was the day before Lieutenant Herman G. Felhoelter’s 37th birthday. But now, 11 days since he set foot in Korea with the U.S. Army, this Catholic chaplain knew he was in a tight spot. He was attached to the 19th Infantry Regiment, dug in along the Kum River to resist the onslaught of numerically superior North Korean forces approaching Taejon and its crucial railyard.  

The 19th had taken a lot of casualties.  The lucky ones were shuttled by ambulances down to the train station in Taejon.  But there were too many stretcher cases - men immobilized by wounds – and not enough ambulances. The North Koreans outflanked and gradually encircled the forward aid station where Lt. Felhoelter assisted medics with the living. When necessary, the Louisville, Kentucky native administered last rites for the dead.

Herman Felthoelter’s military vocation was rare in 1950. Just five years earlier, at the end of World War II, the U.S. Army boasted over 8,000 chaplains among its ranks. Demobilization during the late 1940s rapidly diminished those numbers.  At the end of 1947, just over 1,100 chaplains remained, and almost half of those would be transferred to the newly-established U.S. Air Force.  By June 1950, the Army had no more than 706 chaplains on active duty.

The unfavorable tactical situation was obvious to Felhoelter and Captain Linton Buttrey, the regimental medical officer staffing the aid station.  Korea was unbearably hot in July, the kind of conditions that precipitated heat stroke.  Supplies, and especially water, were nearly exhausted. They regiment had already functioned for days with little or no sleep. By noon, the men of the aid station knew their position was surrounded. The only road-bound path for escape was cut off by a North Korean roadblock. The only chance for the 100 or so able-bodied Americans was to escape on foot, through the hills.  Their biggest problem was the disposition of 30 litter cases.  They would have to be carried out by hand.

The group set out by about 1:00 in the afternoon. Following orders, the able-bodied carried stretcher cases with them. They moved in scattered teams in the direction of a pre-determined rallying point on a distant hill.  But soon, the hot sun challenged the endurance of these men.  As a result of cruel calculus, the litter cases were gathered for abandonment on an intermediate rise.  There were pleas, shouts, and tears. And there were choices that would haunt the survivors for the rest of their lives.

Lt. Felhoelter and Capt. Buttrey remained with the immobilized wounded.  But in short order, their position was approached by a North Korean patrol.  While Felhoelter was dressed in army fatigues, he wore an armband with a large, white Latin cross that identified him as a chaplain.  Buttrey, a 43-year-old Tennessean, wore a simillar brassard with the red cross of a medical professional.  Under international law, both men were non-combatants, and they carried no weapons.

The North Korean patrol that approached them consisted of boys in their early teens.  It’s very likely that they had little training.  They were probably unaware of international conventions regarding the conduct of warfare. However, several of them were armed with Russian-made PPSh-41 burp guns. Spoting the oncoming patrol, the American chaplain and doctor made a quick agreement: Buttrey would dash forward to retrieve help, if possible.  Felhoelter would stay with the wounded. The enemy nicked Buttrey, but he otherwise made a good escape.

From the rallying point atop the hill, the Americans overlooking Felhoelter’s position could see everything unfold. Felhoelter knelt to pray over the wounded.  In the final analysis, this was all – or rather everything – he could do. The distant Americans then watched in horror as the young North Koreans shot the wounded at point-blank range, as well as the priest who cared for them. The enemy, who probably anticipated the retaliation of artillery, then withdrew from the position as quickly as they had taken it. 

The remains of Herman Felhoelter, and those of many of the wounded men, would be collected the following September after the Americans finally regained these positions. Most would eventually be shipped back home for final interment on U.S. soil.