By Steve Voynick

The following is an account of the Korean War (June 1950-July 1953) based on recollections of Mines men who served in Korea during that conflict.

The article was prepared with the assistance of Norman R. Zehr EM ’52, MSc Min ’56, Medalist ’77, Hon Mem ’98, former director of the Colorado School of Mines Alumni Association and assistant editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of the Korean War.

Photo: The 55^th Associate Engineer Company officer class, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, 1952.

In June 25, 1950, infantry and armored units of the North Korean People’s Army surged across the 38th parallel into South Korea.

The bloody, three-year-long war that followed affected millions of Americans, but none more directly than the 1.5 million American military personnel who rotated in and out of wartime Korea.

The war altered the plans and lives of more than 380 graduates and students of the Colorado School of Mines who served in the U.S. military from 1950-1953.

For those Miners who served in Korea in combat and combat-support roles, the war was a landmark event that helped shape not only their own lives, but the geopolitics of the latter half of the 20th century.

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the military was already well represented at Mines. Many students were World War II veterans who attended Mines with the help of the G.I. Bill. Some were discharged, while others maintained military connections as reservists.

Many non-veteran underclassmen had also joined reserve or national guard units to earn a few dollars to help meet school expenses.

Army military science instruction had begun at Mines in 1873. An Army Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC) program, one of the first four in the United States, was established at Mines in 1919.

In the 1930s, thanks to the prominence and excellence of its ROTC program, Mines was known as the "West Point of the Rockies." By 1950, the Mines ROTC program had graduated hundreds of second lieutenants into the U.S. Army. All non-veteran students were required to take two years of ROTC.

When the Korean War mandated a threefold increase in the size of the U.S. Army, the newly-formed Department of Defense reactivated the draft and called up many reserve and national guard units.

Photo: The main street of Chonon, Korea, May 1953.

A deferment arrangement allowed Mines students to continue working toward their degrees, provided they remained active in the ROTC program, which would lead to Army commissions and induction into active service upon graduation.

During the Korean War, most Mines men who entered military service ended up in the Army Corps of Engineers, the ideal place to apply their engineering skills. But Mines men also served in all branches of the military as everything from infantrymen and seamen to cartographers, supply officers and pilots.

During the war, not all Mines men in the military actually served in Korea. Many were assigned to duty stations in places like Europe, Alaska, Japan and the Philippines. Together, their enormously varied duties reflected both the broad scope of the Korean War effort and the buildup of national defense capability during the early years of the Cold War.

The Korean War originated in the political chaos that followed the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. When Japan, which had forcibly occupied Korea since 1910, relinquished control, the peninsula was arbitrarily divided into zones of Soviet and American occupation, north and south of the 38th parallel. The Soviets installed a communist government in the north with Kim Il Sung, a Korean exile who had lived in the Soviet Union, as premier of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

When American efforts to unify the country under a republican regime failed, the Republic of Korea—South Korea—installed Syngman Rhee as president in a free election.

North of the closed border, the Soviets trained and equipped a large army, then withdrew, challenging the United States to withdraw its troops from the south. Lacking funds to support further Korean operations, the U.S. Army withdrew its occupational forces in June 1949.

One year later, the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) crossed the 38th parallel in an attempt to forcibly unify the country under communist rule. In an emergency session, the United Nations Security Council voted to send troops to support South Korea. The U.N. troops were dominated by American forces and commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

The surprise NKPA invasion caught the Republic of Korea (ROK) troops and their handful of American military advisers by surprise. Emergency reinforcement by undertrained and poorly equipped American troops was not enough to turn back the overwhelming numbers of NPKA troops and armor that quickly captured Seoul and Taejon.

Within a month after the initial invasion, NPKA forces had advanced south more than 300 miles and were poised to take Pusan, the last United Nations toehold on the Korean mainland. In desperation, the U.N. defense stiffened, forming a flexible defensive line known as the Pusan Perimeter.

Army 2nd Lt. John H. Mason Met E ’49, who later became a lieutenant colonel, took part in that initial fighting withdrawal. A platoon leader in a 25th Infantry Division engineer battalion, Mason recalled those chaotic early weeks of the war. "Arrived in Korea in July 1950, during the withdrawal south into the Pusan Perimeter.

We provided engineer line company support during retrograde action building or blowing roads and bridges, laying mine fields to create obstacles, and fighting as infantry."

U.S.A.F. Capt. Wendell F. Edwards EM ’48, who had served in World War II in China and India, was an army engineer in Korea. He had witnessed grave suffering in World War II and was again appalled at how quickly war disrupted food supplies and services and displaced millions of citizens. "My most vivid recollections of Korea are of the extreme hardship experienced by native civilians."

The Pusan Perimeter was a classic defensive military action. In six weeks of intense fighting, American forces suffered their highest casualty rates of the entire war. But the Pusan Perimeter held, buying invaluable time to bring in supplies and reinforcements and to plan counteractions.

The U.N. counteractions were swift and decisive. In a risky and daring amphibious landing, MacArthur put ashore 70,000 U.N. troops at Inchon, just west of Seoul and far behind NKPA lines.

Army Col. Irvin M. Rice EM ’39 MSc Min ’47, who had landed in France on D-Day in 1944, spent a month in Japan on MacArthur’s planning staff preparing for the Inchon invasion. Rice commanded the 37th Engineer Beach Group, which stormed ashore at Inchon Sept. 15, 1950. "This landing far in the rear of the North Korean Army came as a complete and disastrous surprise to that army, then mostly engaged in far south Korea attacking Pusan. Our landing cut the North Korean supply lines and forced a hasty retreat back across the Han River."

Shortly after the Inchon landing, MacArthur received orders to cross the 38th parallel, destroy the NKPA and unite Korea under the government of South Korea. Within one month, Gen. Walton Walker’s U.S. 8th Army had fought its way north to capture the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.

An airdrop by the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team north of Pyongyang was too late to rescue a trainload of U.S. prisoners of war.

Miner John Mason, who had participated in the withdrawal to the Pusan Perimeter and was now a first lieutenant commanding a 25th Engineer Battalion (1st Cavalry Division) bridge platoon played an unusual role in the airdrop. "On the breakout of the perimeter after the Inchon landing, we supported the advance north. When we got to the 38th parallel, I was given the bridge and assault platoons. Took the bridge platoon with a floating bridge north past Pyongyang and past the 187th Airborne making its first combat jump—that was probably the first time an airborne outfit was ever supported by a bridge platoon!"

By Nov. 20, 1950, advance elements of the U.S. 8th Army had moved to within sight of the Yalu River and the Manchurian border. Meanwhile, MacArthur had opened a second front on the east coast of Korea by landing X Corp at Wonsan, which also rapidly advanced northward.

With supply lines overextended and the cold Korean winter setting in, U.N. forces suddenly faced a new and formidable adversary—the unexpected entry into the war on Nov. 26 of 320,000 Chinese regulars. Once again numerically overwhelmed, U.N. forces fell back across the 38th parallel.

John Mason, now an army captain, remembers that second retreat. "We withdrew again on entry of the Chinese in November 1950. Erected a float bridge on the river in Pyongyang for withdrawing units—the bridge was blown as last units crossed. I recall the weather after the Chinese joined. It was as cold as I have ever been and finally when it warmed up it was the opposite extreme—hot, dusty, smelly. Similarity with Vietnam. In Nam you were never really sure who the enemy was."

Meanwhile, in eastern Korea, hordes of Chinese troops forced X Corp into a withdrawal that became a brutal fight for survival. In November 1950, Pvt. Melville J. Coolbaugh EM ’54, a veteran of the Inchon landing, had advanced with the 31st Regiment (7th Infantry Division) deep into eastern North Korea.

Coolbaugh recalls the bitter fighting at the Chosin Reservoir in temperatures as low at –24°. "In North Korea we participated in the earliest actions against the Chinese at the Fusen Reservoir. As part of a regimental combat team consisting of two reinforced battalions, we moved to the east side of the Chosin Reservoir where we were attacked by what we later learned to be two Chinese divisions.

We fought them off for five days and four nights, then withdrew. I was wounded lightly three times and suffered frostbite, but survived the withdrawal to Hagaru-ri. Then I fought with the surviving provisional Army unit attached to the 7th Marines during the breakout to the coast."

In the fighting withdrawal from the Chosin Reservoir, the 7th Marines and its attached Army units suffered more than 4,400 battle casualties and 7,300 non-battle casualties mostly caused by frostbite.

After hospitalization, Coolbaugh fought again with the 31st Infantry Regiment into the summer of 1951, before returning to the States for discharge as a sergeant first class.

On Jan. 4, 1951, advancing North Korean and Chinese troops recaptured Seoul. But in February and March 1951, the new U.S. 8th Army commander, Gen. Matthew Ridgway, launched a massive counteroffensive that drove the communist forces back north to the 38th parallel. Thereafter, battle lines remained relatively stable, although fierce fighting continued for two more years.

American disagreement on war policy became apparent in April 1951, when President Harry Truman relieved MacArthur of command for making unauthorized statements that advocated all-out victory. Ridgway replaced MacArthur as commander of U.N. forces, until he was replaced by Gen. Mark Clark in May 1952.

Peace talks began July 1951, but broke down repeatedly. Meanwhile, bitter fighting continued, and names like Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge became part of the military lore of the Korea War.

Army Sgt. H. Boyd Moreland EM ’56, who fought with the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division, remembers being "cold, tired, hungry. And hot, tired, wet and scared. Once or twice traveled by foot, on top of tanks, by truck and plane from the Naktong almost to the Yalu. Then walked south. Then back north to the Chorwon vicinity and the Imjin River. We defeated a large communist Chinese force at Singchang-ni on the night of 29-30 Nov., 1950, thus helping to prevent encirclement of the 8th Army. There were numerous other actions. I was a rifleman, machine gunner, gunner on 60mm mortars, assistant squad leader, assistant platoon sergeant, and commo sergeant. I was a BAR [Browning automatic rifle] man the longest—six months."

First lieutenant Alfred A. Lee EM ’50 was one of many Mines men who put their engineering skills to use for the U.S. Army. "Designed and built double-line aerial tramways to carry ammo up and wounded down, one of which we named ‘A Bridge to Mars.’ Cleared minefields of Chinese wooden box mines, and was awarded the Bronze Star. Cleared minefields in advance of the 6th tank battalion in the drive toward Kumsong."

Army 1st Lt. Spencer R. Titley Geol E ’51, Medalist ’75, who served with the 194th Combat Engineer Battalion, remembered the general discomfort and the repetitive construction and destruction. "Built and blew up bridges; built and blew up roads; built fortifications and blew up fortifications. Laid mine fields and blew up or took up minefields. Laid wire and blew it up. Got hot and wet and learned all about cold, and all about hot dust and cold dust, and warm mud and freezing mud. Learned how to traverse a rice paddy quickly in summer and how to hide in one in winter. Learned what they smelled like and why. Learned that there was no way to bridge a river in flood and that a floating bridge cannot sustain a current in excess of 12 ft/sec (in spite of what they say). Learned about engineer reconnaissance in the light of the moon, and the dark of the moon."

Army 1st Lt. Tyler Brinker PE ’50 served with the 3rd Engineers, 24th Infantry Division. "We built tramways for medevac and supplies up the Korean mountains, just like at Silverton [Colorado] for the mines."

In Korea, the U.S. Army actually had two jobs—fighting a war and training the ROK Army. Robert W. Meader Geol E ’51, a first lieutenant engineer officer served with the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) as an instructor with the ROK Army Engineers School at Chinhae.

When the war began, accurate, reliable maps of Korea were nonexistent. Maps used for tactical purposes literally had to be made from scratch, a job that utilized the skills of Mines men like Army 1st Lt. Paul J. Fritts Geol E ’52, a cartographer with the 420th Engineer Aviation Topographic Battalion.

Fritts’s classmate at Mines, Army 1st Lt. William F. Oline Geol E ’52, a pilot with the 30th Engineer Aviation Topographic Battalion, felt fortunate not to experience combat. "Since nobody shot at me and I loved flying, my service time was generally enjoyable."

But Korea offered more than enough combat to go around. Marine 1st Lt. James D. Jerrell EM ’52 faced combat as a forward observer with the 11th Marine Artillery Regiment, 1st Marine Division.First Lt. Robert W. MacCannon Met E ’51 EM ’54 saw combat as an engineer officer with the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team.

James V. Bonds EM ’52, a first lieutenant with the 1169th Combat Engineer Group, distilled his recollections of Korea to what he felt were its basic fundamentals. "Mud, snow, ice and water."

Photo: Lt. Bob "Tex" Owen ’51 (left) and three Korean laborers at the Paris Mountain road construction site near Mochan, Korea in 1953.

Keith G. Comstock Met E ’50 MSc Met ’58, a first lieutenant with the 3rd Infantry Division who later became a colonel, took things a bit further, summing up his Korean wartime experience in words with which most servicemen would certainly agree.

"My recollections of Korea are of being cold most of the time and devastated by the constant casualties."

Steve Voynick is a freelance writer from Leadville, Colo.

His most recent book is Climax: A History of Colorado’s Climax Molybdenum Mine.

During 1964, Voynick served with Charlie Battery, 4th Bn., 76th Artillery (7th Infantry Division) at Munsan-ni, Republic of Korea.

Mines Magazine, Winter 2000 Vol. 90, No. 1