Word: commanding
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...weeks the U.S. command in Korea has faced a crucial choice between two plans of battle. One was to withdraw to the shortest possible defense perimeter immediately surrounding Pusan and build up within it for a counterthrust. A shorter perimeter could have been more easily held by fewer troops, giving battle-weary G.I.s a chance to rest up in the rear...
...other bolder plan called for holding the widest possible perimeter, including Taegu and Pohang. This would mean stringing out in a thin line and shuttling units back & forth to block enemy thrusts; but for political, morale and strategic reasons it seemed to the top command important to hold Taegu, the provisional capital of the South Korean government and an important base for U.S. tactical aircraft. The hold-Taegu strategy, obviously ordered by General Douglas MacArthur and General Walton Walker, prevailed. By last week there were heartening signs that that strategy was correct...
Meanwhile, the heroic and unflinching South Korean stretcher bearers continued to bring the U.S. wounded out of the valley. Roman Catholic Chaplain Otto Sporrer, a Navy* lieutenant commander, stood exposed to sniper fire and two Red machine guns still chattering from the valley flanks and did what he could to help the medics. The padre spoke kind words to the stretcher bearers; when the men on the stretchers could hear him, he spoke to them too. All the while, he walked back & forth from the top of the trail to the aid station near Craig's command post...
Last Out of the Valley. Finally, at Craig's command, the second wave of the Marine assault force moved up the road toward the jump-off point. They moved in single file, on both sides of the road, for down the center came more wounded. They came in jeeps, four to a jeep, at 3 m.p.h. Medics riding with them did the best they could to make their wounds less painful. One downy-faced corpsman stroked an old, hard-faced sergeant's head above his ripped face and kept saying, "You'll be fine, Sarge...
...command post above the Naktong River one night last week, infantrymen of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division fiddled with a radio. They picked up a North Korean station and got the brassy blare of a Sousa march. It was followed by the honeyed words (in English) of a woman announcer, urging the boys to "go back home to your corner drugstores" and boasting of fantastic North Korean successes ("already there are 6,000 U.S. dead...