Fire For Effect!

“At about eleven o’clock the barrage started, and it was heavy enough to tell me something big was in the wind, so I got out in the trench. I never observed out of the bunker, ever. And that barrage continued all night, off and on, I mean maybe there would be a five, ten minute pause and then it would start up again, and it was fairly heavy, and it lasted as well as I can remember, till five o’clock Monday afternoon, that would have been the 6^th, and about six or seven o’clock, it was still light enough to see, the Chinese started coming after us, and going toward White Horse. Lt. Joseph Adams called me, he was on the O.P. located right on the front of White Horse Mountain, and I was already out in the trench watching, and the nickname I had with my unit was ‘Cabot’. He called, and at that time we had a landline, and he said ‘Cabot, look at the foot of my hill’. I looked and I said it looked like wheat, but it can’t be wheat. And he said, ‘No, I got reports that the Chinese are moving there’. And I said ‘Well, just a minute’, so I got my BC scope, which was twenty power, and you could see Chinese moving abreast and what they were doing was flanking the outposts and coming up and attacking the flanks where he was. The hill runs north and south, and what they were doing was they were running down the east flank of that hill and cutting up the base or the end of that hill, in their efforts to make penetration and outflank the outposts and a large portion of the defenses. And at the same time, another group appeared and started heading towards my position, on Hill 284. His hill was convex and Joe couldn’t see them, but I could, so I began shooting the mission on the troops and I told him, ‘This is where the assembly area is I think, can you see that?’ And he began shooting at that, but of course he couldn’t see what the effect was. But I could see what my effect was, and I would see the rounds impact. There would be a very low order explosion, after the round had skipped, in other words it hit the soldiers, knock them up in the air like bowling pins, and then hit a second time and then go off, but it was very low order. The shells were being fired without fuses. They had run out of fuses. It was just the impact that was making it go off like that. I kept calling the battalion and telling them we kept getting low order explosions, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ And it was only after the battle that I found out they had run out of fuses.           

The first night we began firing flares, and at some part of that fight, because it was so hard to see, there was so much dust in the air, but I do remember seeing people on top of Joe Adam’s bunker. And Joe called and said that he was being overrun, there were people on top of his bunker, and I said ‘I’ll dust you off with Victor Tare’, VT fuses, variable time fuses. And he said ‘Alright’, and I did that. By this time, his radio operator had taken one or two rounds into the radio, so it was dead, and that’s the reason I couldn’t hear from him, and I was just really torn up because I was sure that I had screwed up and killed him. It wasn’t until I came off the hill that I realized he was alive. And I think I slept about four hours between Sunday night and the following Friday night, so I was a little delusional. I went down to the battery, and was in the tent and was taking off the rags that I had been wearing, and a medic was there to clean me up and stuff, and Joe walks in with this bottle of whiskey. And he said ‘Hello Cabot’, and I just ignored him because I was convinced this was another one of my delusions, and I took the whiskey, I think one shot, and then I discovered that I had worms because my stomach began to hurt, and then I passed out. I think they said I slept for about eighteen hours. They didn’t come close to me that first night, they had got to the base of the hill, and they had put a sniper down at the base of the hill. And as I said I never went into the O.P. bunker, I was always crawling around on the hill, and if they started shooting I’d go into the nearest bunker. But this sniper, every time I would move, he would nail me, and you could just, you could really hear it crack. And I finally decided that if I don’t get him, we’re all going to get killed, because I can’t direct the artillery fire. So I got to where I was sure that he would be able to see me, and I started to rise, and then I dropped, just enough time for him to take aim and get off a shot. He hit the left lip of the bill of my helmet, coming across my right cheek, up across the bridge of my nose. I lay there, and figured this sucker has to be in these ruins down there, some farm houses and some structures there at the base of Hill 284. He was probably two hundred to three hundred yards, no more than that. So I called Battalion and told them what my problem was. And I said to them ‘I want one battery with VT, one battery with Fuse Quick’, a contact fuse, ‘I want one battery White Phosphorous Fuse Quick, and I want a ToT’. Well I got it, and I lay there for a few minutes, and decided to do the same thing again from new location, and I did that. I did that twice from that location, and I never heard anything, and I thought that that sucker could be faking out, and waiting for another good shot. So, I made another move, and didn’t hear anything, and it was then that I was sure I got him, and I didn’t hear from him again through the rest of the fight.”