“You Can’t Fight Tanks On Foot” — How 700 Australians Fought Furthest Into North Korea

By the 29th of October 1950, the third battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, 3 RAR, was the lead unit of the brigade, the battalion out front, the one walking first into whatever sat waiting on the road ahead. 6 km short of the town of Chongju, the forward scouts came back with a report nobody wanted to hear.

 T34 tanks were dug in among the wooded ridges that crossed the line of advance, hauled down in the trees with their guns laid straight down the road. Su76 self-propelled guns covered the open ground between them and infantry sat dug in around the armor on the high ground. The men ordered to clear all of it were foot soldiers, around 700 of them carrying rifles and bren guns against a defense built on tanks.

 The T34 was the machine every soldier in Korea had learned to fear by that autumn. 32 tons of sloped steel riding on tracks wide enough to cross Patty and Ridge where lighter vehicles bogged down. It had smashed the South Korean army flat in June and driven the defenders all the way back to a thin perimeter around the southern port of Busan.

 The rocket launchers the infantry carried bounced off its front plate at anything but suicidal range. At Chongju, the North Koreans had set their tanks [music] where the road funneled between high ground so that anything moving up the center took fire [music] from both flanks at once. A man on foot had almost nothing in his hands that could stop one of them.

 The men sent to do the job had earned a reputation only a week before. In their first major action of the war, north of the captured enemy capital, they had torn into a North Korean force trying to break out toward the north and taken a share of prisoners out of all proportion to their numbers. Barely a month in the country, they had spent that month proving they could fight, as well as any battalion in the brigade.

Now the command had put them at the very front of the advance, ahead of everyone on the stretch of road where the tanks were waiting. The reputation was about to be tested against [music] something a rifle company could not simply outshoot. There was only one way to take the position in front of them, and it ran uphill on foot.

 A push straight up the road would feed the battalion into the tank guns at exactly the range the North Koreans had chosen for the killing. To get at the armor at all, the rifle companies would have to leave the road, climb the wooded ridges on either side of it, and come down on the tanks from above and behind in the trees with what a man can carry on his back.

 Infantry would have to do to armor what armor had been built to do to infantry. That was the order standing in front of three R as the light came up on the 29th. The man giving that order was Lieutenant Colonel Charles Green, 30 years old, a veteran of the New Guinea Jungle, who now ran the youngest infantry battalion in the Australian Army.

 Green laid out a careful, methodical attack, the rifle companies going up the ridges one at a time, with the American Sherman tanks and the brigades air support brought forward to work over the high ground ahead of each assault. The companies checked their gear and moved out toward the timber where the T34 sat waiting in the shadows.

 Then the first ridge opened fire. The war that had carried three R onto that road began four months earlier and a long way to the south. In June 1950, the North Korean army crossed the 38th parallel in strength and very nearly drove the South into the sea, pinning the defenders and their American allies into a small perimeter around Busan in the far southeastern corner of the peninsula.

 For a few desperate weeks, it looked as though the whole country would fall before help could arrive in any useful quantity. Then in September, the Americans landed at Inchan, far behind the North Korean lines, and the invasion came apart almost overnight. The army that had nearly won the war found itself cut off from its supplies and streaming back the way it had come.

 The United Nations force did not halt at the old border. With the North Korean army broken in the open, the command pushed its troops across the parallel and drove hard for the North, chasing a beaten enemy toward the Yellow River and the frontier with China. The talk among the soldiers was of being home by Christmas, and the fighting that remained had the look of mopping up, the running down of a force that had already lost the war.

 It was into that headlong pursuit as the cutting edge of the Commonwealth contribution that the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade was thrown. The brigade’s job was to lead and to keep moving out ahead of the larger columns coming up behind it. Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, had fallen on the 19th of October, and Commonwealth troops had been among those who took it before pushing on past it to the northwest.

From there, the advance ran up toward the Chongchan River and the town of Chongju beyond into a corner of the country that narrowed steadily as it ran on to the Yalu and the Manurian border. Every mile carried the column further from its supply heads, and deeper into ground the maps barely covered, past the wreckage of an army in full retreat.

 The pace was set by how fast the leading battalions could clear the road rather than by any threat still in front of them. Chongju sat close to the limit of how far the pursuit could reasonably be pushed before the whole enterprise outran its own logistics. The drive north was a gamble, though it did not feel like one to the men making it.

 The command was betting that the North Korean army was finished and that nothing would come down from across the Yalu to replace it. Even as the columns stretched their supply lines thinner with every mile they advanced, there had been signals out of Pekking that China would not stand by while a hostile army marched right up to its border.

 And those warnings were read in the higher headquarters as bluff. So the advance kept going faster and deeper with the leading brigades pushed out well ahead of anything that could support them quickly. The 27th was one of those leading brigades and three RAR was at the very tip of it. The brigade was a mixed command.

 British and Australian infantry stiffened by New Zealand gunners and supported by other Commonwealth troops built to move fast and hit hard at the front of an advance. Three R had come to it almost by accident of where it happened to be standing when the war started. The battalion had been sitting in Japan on occupation duty, the nearest organized Australian infantry to the fighting and it was shipped across to Korea in a hurry and brought up to full strength with volunteers sent out from home.

Green took command of it that October and inside a few weeks he had the unit fighting with the steadiness of men who had been together for years. The volunteers who filled out its ranks had signed on for a war most of them knew almost nothing about. The Australians who climbed those ridges were a particular kind of soldier.

 Many had been occupation troops in Japan, regulars with peacetime habits, and the ranks had been filled out with volunteers who had put their hands up for a war on the far side of the world. In barracks, they were famously loose, slow to salute, and quick to call an officer by his first name. under fire. That looseness fell away and left a hard core underneath.

 Men who held their ground and kept their heads when the shooting started in earnest. Green had taken that raw material and welded it into a working battalion. In a matter of weeks, the battalion’s first hard test came on the 22nd of October at Yongju, north of the fallen North Korean capital. A large enemy force was trying to break out and escape northward straight across the brigade’s line of advance and three RAR caught it moving in the open.

 The Australians killed around 150 of the enemy in the fighting that followed and took 239 prisoners. The brigade gathered up 800 captives that day in all, which meant a single Australian battalion had accounted for close to a third of the entire hall for the loss of seven men wounded and not one life.

 That was the action that fixed three R at the front of the brigade commander’s mind. A week of results like that was why the point position came round to the Australians. As the brigade closed on Chongju, the battalions took their turns leading the advance on the brigade’s own roster. And on the 29th of October, the turn had come to three R.

Leading meant walking first into whatever the retreating North Koreans had chosen to leave behind, and on this stretch of road they had left a great deal of it waiting. The brigade set off from Pacchon, with the Australians out in front and the rest of the column strung out on the road behind them. The country ahead funneled the whole advance up a single road hemmed in tight by wooded hills.

 The country the advance ran through was turning hard as the year wore on. Korea in late October was already cold at night, the autumn tipping toward a winter that would soon become the worst enemy either side faced. And the hills came in endless folded ranks that funneled every road into a narrow line through high ground. For an army in a hurry, it was punishing terrain.

 ground that favored a defender who knew where to sit and wait. Each ridge had to be cleared before the column behind could move, and each one cost time the command was impatient to spend. By the time the brigade reached the approaches to Chongju, the easy part of the pursuit was behind it. It was groundade for an ambush, every bend, a place where a hidden gun could sit and wait.

 Six kilometers short of Chongju, the leading company began taking fire, and the scouts pushed forward far enough to read the position properly before reporting back. What they found was a defense built in depth across the ridges that crossed the road, far heavier than the thin rear guard a retreating army usually leaves to slow a pursuit.

 The North Koreans had anchored the line on the tanks and self-propelled guns of an armored brigade with infantry dug into the high ground around them. The whole line had been cited to break apart any advance that came straight up the center. The armor belonged to the North Korean 17th Tank Brigade, or what was left of it after months of fighting and the long retreat north from Busan.

 dug in among timber on commanding ground. Even a small number of T34s could hold up a force many times their size, their frontal armorproof against anything the infantry carried, and their guns able to break an attack apart well before it could close. The North Koreans had read the ground correctly and placed the tanks where the ridges would do half their work for them.

 Green could see plainly that the road itself was the trap they were meant to walk into. The only way through ran over the hills on either side of it on foot. What the Australian infantry carried up those hills was made for killing men, not tanks. The standard kit ran to the rifles of the day, the Bren light machine gun, grenades, and the bayonet.

With the heavier hitting left to the mortars, and the support weapons further back against a T34 buttoned up and dug in, none of it could do much from the front. The only answer was to get close, to come at the tanks from the flank or the rear where the armor was thinner and the crew half blind, or to drive the men out and leave the machines as scrap.

That meant closing the last stretch on foot in the open under whatever fire the position could still bring to bear. Charles Green knew this kind of fight from the inside, learned the hard way in another war. He had led men through the jungle of New Guinea against the Japanese in country that taught the same lesson Korea was now repeating that patience and ground will beat a frontal rush every single time it is tried.

 At 30 he was younger than many of the officers serving under him and he ran the battalion with a quiet exact authority that the men came to trust completely. He was careful with their lives in a way that soldiers notice and remember. He built the Chongju attack as a sequence of company actions. Each ridge taken in its proper turn with the Shermans and the aircraft doing the heavy work against the armor while the riflemen closed the last 100 yards on foot.

 The attack went in with the rifle companies climbing into the high ground on the flanks of the road. They worked their way up through the timber under cover of the tank fire and the fighter bombers overhead while the mortars and the machine guns kept the enemy crews pinned down in their holes. The North Koreans held hard from their prepared positions, and a great deal of the fighting came down to close work among the trees, rifle, and grenade at a range of a few yards.

 Down on the road, the Shermans traded fire with the Dugin T34s to hold their attention while the climb went on above. The first ridge changed hands by the early afternoon. The first day’s fighting closed with the Australians holding ridges they had taken at close range, dug in among enemy dead and knocked out vehicles, with more of the same waiting in the dark ahead of them. The night was cold and tense.

 The men listening for movement on ground that had changed hands only hours before. There was no question of the attack being finished. The North Korean position still had depth in it. More ridges and more guns between the battalion and the town, and the work would start again at first light. Sleep came in short, broken stretches, if it came at all.

 At first light on the 30th, the companies went at the next line of ridges. The North Koreans had pulled back onto reverse slopes where the air strikes could not reach them cleanly, and the riflemen had to come right over the crests and down onto the guns to finish the work. It was slowgoing, one a position at a time, with grenade and bayonet among the trees.

 Each ridge sat higher and harder than the last, and the men were going on a night with almost no sleep behind them. The town of Chongju still lay beyond the high ground with the heaviest of the armor between. The tanks were the heart of it, and the tanks had to be taken at arms length. A T34 loses most of its menace once foot soldiers get in among it in close country.

 Blind to anything its turret cannot swing onto in time and deaf inside its own engine noise. The Australians used the timber to work right up to the hulls close enough to put fire through the vision slits and force the hatches open. Crews who stayed with their machines were dealt with where they sat. The ones who broke and ran left their tanks behind them among the trees.

 The American support did exactly what Green needed of it through both days of the fight. The Shermans could not beat a T-34 in a straight duel of gun against gun, but they could put accurate fire onto the enemy positions and hold the heavier armors attention while the infantry worked around above it, and the fighter bombers broke up each ridge in turn before the riflemen reached it.

 By the afternoon of the 30th, the defense began to come apart along its length. Once the infantry were in among the tanks, the whole carefully sighted line started to fold inward on itself. The surviving North Koreans pulled back through Chongju and out beyond it, leaving their dead and their wrecked vehicles scattered on the slopes.

 By the end of that second day, the ground belonged to three R, and the figures were set down plainly in the wreck. The battalion had killed around 162 North Korean soldiers across the two days of fighting at Chongju and taken 10 prisoners. Its own cost came to nine men lost and 30 wounded. The tanks that had blocked the way sat wrecked or abandoned among the trees and the road into the town lay open at last.

The 27th British Commonwealth Brigade moved up and took possession of Chongju. The cost told the story of how Green had fought the battle. That tally was a hard one for a single battalion, but a small one against a defense built on tanks and dug into ground chosen for killing. A push straight up the road would have fed company after company into the muzzles of the T34s and left far more families with a telegram on the way.

 By taking his men over the hills instead of up the road, Green had carried a position that should have cost him dearly and paid only a fraction of the bill. The action proved what every armored manual denied, that determined infantry on the right ground can beat tanks on foot. Chongju was the high water mark of the entire advance.

 No part of the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade would ever push further north than the ground three RAR took that day. With the Yalu River and the Chinese border barely a 100 kilometers ahead and the maps thinning out into country, no United Nations soldier had yet crossed. For a few hours, the battalion stood at the leading edge of a war that looked all but finished.

 The unit that had gone deepest into North Korea and broken an armored line with men on foot. The mood along the column ran close to triumphant as the brigade settled into the captured town. Not one man in it could see what was already gathering in the cold to the north. The fighting ended on the 30th. That same night, as the battalion bedded down in the captured ground, and the men looked forward to nothing worse than the cold and a few hours of sleep, North Korean guns, still within range, began dropping shells onto the Australian

positions. It was the ragged parting fire of a beaten force rather than a fresh attack. But a beaten force’s artillery can still find a man in the dark. One round came down close to the tent where Green was resting after the battle. It was the kind of stray chance that a fight keeps back for the hours after it is supposedly over.

 A fragment from that shell tore into Green’s abdomen as he lay in his sleeping bag. The most capable battalion commander the Australians had in Korea was down, struck in the quiet hours after the assault. The wound was the sort that in 1950 carried off most men who took it. He was lifted out of the line as fast as the broken ground would allow.

 With the urgency of it running through a battalion that had only hours before come through its hardest fight of the war, the men who had followed him up those ridges now waited on word from the surgeons working behind the line. Green was taken back to an American field surgical hospital at Anju and operated on through the night.

 For a time it looked as though he might come through it after all. He regained consciousness after the surgery, lucid enough to speak with the men around him, and the battalion took a threat of hope from the word that came back. Green passed on the evening of the 1st of November, 2 days after the fragment had found him in the dark.

 He was the most senior Australian officer to lose his life in the whole of the Korean War. For the men of three RAR, it was a bitter loss, the harder for having come once the battle was already won. They had handed him a victory only hours before, the deepest advance any battalion in the brigade had made, and the same night the war took him for it by pure blind chance.

 There were no speeches made over it, and no time for any. The battalion buried its commander and took on a new one, then turned back toward the north, where the next danger was already moving. None of them yet understood the size of it. What was coming was China. Through late November 1950, the Chinese army entered Korea in enormous strength.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers crossing the Yalu under cover of darkness and falling on the exposed United Nations columns that had pushed too deep in their hurry to finish the war. The advance that had carried the brigade all the way to Chongju was first halted, then thrown hard into reverse. By the new year, the line had broken back south of the 38th parallel and past Seoul, giving up in a matter of weeks every mile the autumn drive had cost so much to take.

 The war had turned completely over on itself. The reversal turned the brigade from a spearhead into a rear guard almost overnight. Through the bitter winter that followed, the same units that had raced north now fought a long withdrawal back down the peninsula, holding one position after another to buy time for the columns moving behind them in cold that froze weapons and wounded men alike.

 Three R took its place in that fighting retreat without the commander who had carried it through Chongju. The triumphant march of October had become a grinding effort just to keep the line from breaking apart altogether. The war that was meant to end by Christmas had barely begun its second act.

 Chongju went with all the rest of it. The furthest north anyone in the brigade had ever walked was abandoned and never taken back. Left far behind a Chinese front line that now ran well to the south of it. A month after the battle, the town was worth nothing at all on any map that counted. The ground that nine Australians had lost their lives to take, and that had cost the battalion its commander, had been swallowed whole by a war, moving faster than any plan ever made for it.

 That was the shape Korea would settle into for the men who fought it. Ground bought at a steep price one week and handed straight back the next. Three R went on without green, and it went on to harder fighting still. The following April, the battalion held a hill above the Capyong Valley against a Chinese division driving for Seoul, fighting through a night and a day until the attack broke apart against it, and the stand earned the unit an American presidential citation.

6 months after that, the same men stormed the heights of Marangan in one of the hardest infantry actions Australia fought anywhere in the entire war. Three of the toughest battles any Australian battalion saw in Korea, all carried by a single unit inside one year. Beginning on a road outside Chongju with a line of dugin tanks and 700 men sent up the ridges to take them on