![]() At Kimpo Airbase, his squadron found itself run through by North Koreans. On September 15, 1950, Whited’s unit moved quickly after the Inchon landing. His plan? To land troops behind enemy lines at Inchon, a port city just west of Seoul, and retake the South Korean capital. and its allies transformed Pusan from a ragtag refuge to holding a well-equipped point of departure for General MacArthur’s boldest and most successful strategic move in the Korean War. forces held no more than 10 percent of the Korean peninsula. ![]() coalition in an effort to push back North Korea’s invasion of its southern sibling nation on June 25, 1950.īy early August, when Bob Whited arrived in Pusan, on the southeastern corner of the Korean peninsula, U.S. Neither man had given any thought to Korea when they learned that the U.S. ![]() Robert Whited in Guam prior to his deployment in Korea “If we had to go fight a war somewhere, we packed up and went.” “We concentrated on what our job was,” Whited recalls. Nor did they pay heed to the escalating events of the Cold War-like the 1945 division of Korea into two superpower-backed spheres of influence, separated at the 38 parallel. Neither paid attention to world events or followed the nation’s politics of building a new world order in the wake of WWII. “I was good at what I was doing, and I was making progress at it, so I thought it might make a good career,” White remembers. Two years later Whited, at 18, he joined the Corps, which deployed him to the Marine Brigade in Guam after training in San Diego.įor the two men, the Marine Corps began as a job. “I got as far as the Denver recruiting station when my parents caught up with me. I was only 16, but big enough,” says Whited, who was working as a chaser in a bull ring in Wyoming when he made his first attempt. With his father working in the Oakland shipyards and relatives fighting the war in Europe and the Pacific, Whited was chomping at the bit to enlist. Like many Midwesterners, his family moved to California where preparations for World War II were revitalizing the economy. Robert Whited, two years White’s junior, also spent his childhood in the heartland, in Nebraska. Even bullet wounds sometimes froze, keeping soldiers from bleeding out until they went inside heated tents. Feet froze into blocks of ice inside boots. In a place where it was too frigid to dig foxholes without explosives and bulldozers, combatants piled frozen bodies in lieu of sandbags. In a surprise attack, more than 100,000 Chinese troops trapped American forces in some of the harshest, most remote territory of the region-in temperatures that regularly fell to 25 degrees below zero. Then, Communist China entered the conflict at “frozen Chosin,” shifting the war’s momentum again. Military leaders talked of ending the war by Christmas and reuniting the nation under democratic rule. But by the end of that summer, a coalition of South Korean and United Nations forces, led by the United States and General Douglas MacArthur, had regained territory and made significant inroads into the north. The Korean War began in June 1950, when communist-backed troops from the north of the recently divided nation stormed into the Western-aligned south.
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