By Steve Liewer
Stars and Stripes
A booming fusillade from the cannons of the cruiser USS Juneau against the city of Samchok on June 28, 1950, sent a fiery message to the North Koreans: They would not be allowed to overrun the Korean Peninsula without a fight from the U.S. Navy.
Hostilities in Korea caught the Navy nearly as flat-footed as it had been at Pearl Harbor nine years earlier. President Harry Truman had slashed the military budget by more than two-thirds since the close of World War II, and the Navy’s presence in the Far East consisted of a single aircraft carrier, a cruiser and a few undermanned destroyers, scattered from Japan to the Philippines.
Yet before the new year, the Navy would pour 400 ships into the waters surrounding Korea. The glorious Inchon invasion would hammer home to doubters the importance of amphibious assault, and waves of attacks from carrier-based fighter planes would ensure the pre-eminence of aircraft carriers within the fleet for at least the next half century.
"(The Korean) War wrought tremendous changes upon naval thinking, naval developments, naval strategy and naval policy," wrote naval officers Malcolm Cagle and Frank Manson in the preface to their classic 1957 book The Sea War in Korea. "In every field … the impact was monumental. Korea was a naval proving ground."
The Navy asserted itself as the world’s dominant sea power almost bloodlessly. While the Army and the Marines slogged it out with the North Koreans and later the Chinese in cold, bloody battles that claimed more than 32,000 American lives, the Navy lost fewer: 500 men killed and barely 2,300 injured. Only five Navy ships (four minesweepers and a destroyer) were sunk.
And in the perpetual interservice war with the Air Force, the Army and the Marine Corps, the Navy in Korea picked itself up a couple of notches for reasons more logistical than strategic. Six of every seven men who fought in Korea got there by sea, and so did nearly all of the supplies that kept them in the fight.
As Adm. C. Turner Joy, the naval theater commander in Korea from 1950 to 1952, said later: "While the Navy’s role in the war has gone unpublicized for the most part, it is sufficient to know that, but for the Navy, the war in Korea would come to a sudden halt."
Less than three months after the North Korean attack caught the Navy napping, the Navy and Marines wrapped themselves in glory at Inchon.
By mid-September 1950, North Korea had shoved the South Korean and U.N. forces farther south, until they controlled only a small perimeter around the port of Pusan.
The Far East commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, conceived a bold plan to reverse the U.N. fortunes. He’d launch an amphibious assault on the port of Inchon, then send the Marines to retake Seoul, just 15 miles inland.
If it worked, the North Korean supply lines would be cut and their army all but surrounded.
But the idea of invading at Inchon horrified most of the military leadership — particularly Gen. Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. Forrest P. Sherman, chief of naval operations.
There were a hundred reasons an assault at Inchon was doomed to failure. There were few places on Earth more ill-suited for an amphibious assault.
The port lay at the end of a long, narrow channel. That would force the landing craft to travel single file, and threaten the whole plan if even one ship sank and blocked the channel.
The port was protected by a heavily armed island, Wolmi-Do, just 800 yards offshore. It would have to be subdued before any attack on the mainland.
Six thousand yards of impassable mudflats guarded the harbor, meaning an assault would have to take place at high tide and in daylight or risk bogging down murderously in quicksand. Inchon harbor suffers some of the severest tides in the worldThe city itself and its 15-foot seawall would give any defenders a formidable natural advantage.
"We drew up a list of every conceivable and natural handicap, and Inchon had ’em all," Lt. Cmdr. Arlie Capps, gunfire support officer for the invasion task force, said later.
Using his winning combination of bullying and bravado, MacArthur persuaded his enemies that the dire circumstances called for something beyond all expectations.
Despite the staggering handicaps, the Navy and Marine invasion succeeded beyond hope. Late in the afternoon of Sept. 15, six destroyers steamed up the channel first to draw fire, then Corsair fighter planes from the USS Sicily and the USS Badoeng Strait attacked the guns of Wolmi-Du.
With the island defenses subdued, the Marines stormed ashore just before sunset — and, to their astonishment, met almost no fire. During the two-day assault, only 22 Marines lost their lives. Clearly the North Koreans never had planned for an invasion at Inchon.
Within days, the Marines had stormed into Seoul, the U.S. 8th Army broke at Pusan, and the North Korean armies raced for home territory. With one deft move, MacArthur had turned the war around.
Said Adm. William F. Halsey, in a congratulatory telegram to MacArthur: "It was the most masterly and audacious strategic stroke of all time."
And MacArthur cabled Vice Adm. Arthur Struble, who commanded the invasion force: "The Navy and the Marines have never shone more brightly than this morning."
The admirals’ champagne corks had barely finished popping before the North Koreans had exposed the Navy’s softest spot: its vulnerability to mines.
With the North Koreans in retreat, MacArthur thought another bold assault might finish them off. He proposed to move the Marines by sea from their new perch at Inchon to Wonsan, on the eastern coast of North Korea.
That idea dismayed most of the admirals. They feared that ferrying the Marines to Wonson would occupy too many of the Navy’s landing craft and too much precious dock space in Inchon’s tiny harbor.
"It would take a lot of troops out of action for a long time when the enemy was already on the run," Rear Adm. Arleigh Burke said at the time. "We felt that the same objective — to seize the port of Wonsan — could be achieved by marching the (Marines) up the road leading from Seoul to Wonsan."
But MacArthur and the Army brass favored an Inchon-like assault from the sea and they prevailed. He ordered the Navy to clear the harbor for an invasion by Oct. 20, less than three weeks away.
That is how Petty Officer 3rd Class Carl Pollock, then 23, fatefully ended up on the deck of the minesweeper USS Pledge on Oct. 12, searching warily through the rangefinder of a 40 mm gun for shore batteries.
Six weeks earlier, he’d kissed goodbye his two children and his pregnant wife in San Diego. Already the Pledge had helped clear the Inchon harbor. Now it was headed for a much tougher assignment, because no one knew how many mines the North Koreans had sewn.
Navy brass had never given much respect to minesweeping, and Truman had practically obliterated the minesweeping force in the post-World War II drawdown. The Pacific minesweeping fleet had been cut from 550 to barely 20, with only seven in the Far East. Because nearly all World War II minesweepers were crewed by reservists, hardly anyone knew how to clear a harbor.
"We were operating on a shoestring," Lt. Cmdr. D’Arcy Shouldice, who commanded the Far East minesweeping squadron, said after the war. " ‘Pitiful’ is the word."
Shortly before noon Oct. 12, Pledge sailed gingerly into unswept waters, alongside the USS Incredible and just behind the USS Pirate at the vanguard of a formation of six minesweepers. A destroyer escort, the USS Endicott, brought up the rear.
Around noon, the three lead sweepers ran into trouble. In a matter of minutes, their lines had snagged 13 mines, and lookouts kept spotting more. Usually, Pollock said, the sweepers dragged the mines to the surface, cut the mooring cable and fired guns at them to set them off at a safe distance from the ship.
Suddenly, though, the sweepers had blundered into waters where the mines floated thick as seaweed. They could hardly escape without risking disaster.
Then, KA-BOOM!
Off the Pledge’s starboard bow, Pollock saw Pirate’s stern fly out of the water and settle back down in a muddy geyser. Its deck broken in two, the ship sank in four minutes.
Pledge cut loose its sweeping gear, hove to, and lowered its whaleboat to help rescue the Pirate’s survivors. But the explosion woke previously silent batteries on two islands, and suddenly shells rained down around the sweepers and the men swimming.
Then Pollock felt an unbelievable crash.
"There was a terrific concussion; it forced my face to slam against the rangefinder," he recalled in an interview in May. "It was absolutely horrifying."
No more than 20 seconds later, a shell exploded just behind the bridge. The ship’s power went out, and Pollock went below decks to see if he could help.
"The engine room was flooded. We knew the guys down there were all dead," he said. "It took all hands on board just to save the ship."
Pollock helped load the most badly injured men into the life rafts. Then he climbed up to the bridge to help destroy classified material, even as the shells kept exploding nearby.
"They shelled the living heck out of us," Pollock said. "We were just a sitting duck out there."
The Pledge settled lower in the water, and eventually the captain, Lt. Richard Young, ordered his men to abandon ship. Pollock doesn’t remember how he got into the water, but he held onto the edge of a life raft.
The remaining ships couldn’t get close enough to rescue the survivors for fear of entangling themselves in the mines. The Endicott sent its small boat, but Pollock — who had survived the sinkings of two destroyers in four days during the World War II Battle of Leyte Gulf — floated in the 55-degree water for 4½ hours before someone picked him up.
"Thank God there weren’t any sharks, like there were in the Philippines," Pollock said. "When they picked me up, I was shaking so bad, I couldn’t get a cigarette in my mouth."
Of 136 sailors on the two ships, 13 died and 79 were injured. Pollock ended up on a hospital ship and was discharged from the Navy two months after the Pledge sank.
The Wonsan fiasco quickly reverberated as far as the Pentagon. The mighty U.S. Navy had been stymied by a field of 3,000 mines, laid that summer under the guidance of Soviet naval engineers.
"Let’s admit it, they caught us with our pants down," Sherman, the Navy’s top admiral, told a newspaper columnist at the time.
With much of its minesweeping force out of commission and the amphibious assault a week away, Navy commanders gathered a mosquito fleet of small boats to scout for mines. Even some sympathetic North Korean fishermen helped.
By Oct. 25, a channel had been cleared wide enough to allow the impatient Marines to land, although an estimated 2,000 mines still floated in the harbor. Long before that, South Korean troops had seized Wonsan.
"The main lesson of the Wonsan operation," Joy later said, "is that no so-called subsidiary branch of the naval service, such as mine warfare, should ever be neglected or relegated to a minor role in the future."
In the end, none of it mattered. The same day Marines landed at Wonsan, the Chinese launched their first attacks against U.N. forces near the Yalu River. China soon retook both Wonsan and Seoul. Beginning in February 1951, an array of Navy ships would turn their guns on Wonsan. Aided by fighter jets from carrier air wings, they would lay siege to the strategic port for the rest of the war.
Although the ground war settled into a stalemate, no one seriously challenged the Navy’s control of the seas around Korea again. Unopposed at sea, the Navy turned its guns ashore. Ships fired deck-mounted guns at highways and troops while carrier aircraft joined Air Force jets in attacking more distant targets in the hope of halting the flow of supplies to the Chinese front.
The interdiction strategy temporarily slowed the communist advance, but the Chinese and North Koreans quickly adapted to the constant bombardment. Troops burrowed deep underneath the country’s rugged terrain, covering vast subterranean camps with thick layers of concrete. They also took advantage of bad weather — when pilots and gunners couldn’t see — to fire their ordnance.
The North Koreans mobilized repair crews, who seemed to fix bombed-out roads, bridges and railroads just as fast as the carrier jets could knock them out.
"It was really astounding," Adm. Andrew Jackson told author Robert W. Love. "We would bomb a section of the railroad and take photographs before the end of the day, and the railroad would be cut in eight or 10 or 15 or 20 places. They would keep rails alongside, and then they had all this manpower, and they would come in at night and repair it overnight."
The Allies hammered ports, oil refineries, even dams. They tried focusing massive amounts of fire on just a few key targets, but North Koreans always found a way around. Terrain and weather favored the defense. Plus, the Koreans had a long open border with China and the Soviet Union, which the United States didn’t dare threaten for fear of bringing the Soviets into the war.
"The interdiction program was a failure," said Vice Adm. J.J. Clark, the 7th Fleet commander, after the war. "It did not interdict. The communists got the supplies through; and for the kind of a war they were fighting, they not only kept their battle line supplied, but they had enough surplus to spare that at the end of the war, they could even launch an offensive."
By war’s end, the Navy had dropped far more rockets and ordnance and nearly as many tons of bombs on the enemy. Its superior sea power brought it only frustration, in the short term. But the Navy’s performance ensured it a place in the next "limited war" more than a decade later, in Vietnam. That war would bring the U.S. military even more frustration.