There was nothing that the ground forces could do but withdraw toward the line of the river Kum. Here a stand was made by 24th Division units at Taejon, an important communications center. But the enemy managed to establish bridgeheads, and the fall of the town on 20 July marked the end of the first phase.
Two days later the 24th Division, now commanded by General Church, was relieved south of Taejon by Major General Hobart R. Gay’s 1st Cavalry (dismounted) Division, which had landed at Pohang-dong on the 18th. And on 26 July the separate 29th Infantry RCT disembarked at Chinju on the south coast after a voyage from Okinawa.
The reinforced Eighth Army was still too much outnumbered to vary its strategy of delaying actions with sustained counterattacks. While the new American units and the 25th Division fell slowly back toward the line of the Naktong, the regrouped ROK divisions were assigned sectors toward the north and east, where a secondary NKPA offensive threatened Pohang-dong. Meanwhile, the exhausted 24th Division went into Eighth Army reserve.
The ground forces would doubtless have been in a worse situation if it had not been for hard-hitting United States naval and air support. Major General Emmett O’Donnell’s B-29 Superforts of the FEAF Bomber Command took off from Japanese bases to fly strikes on enemy supply routes, communications hubs, marshaling yards and other strategic targets all the way back to the Yalu.
Task Force 77, ranging along the west coast, gave Pyongyang its first large-scale bombing on 3 July. Gull-winged F4U Corsairs, leading off from the Valley Forge flight deck with 5-inch rockets, were followed by AD Skyraiders and new Douglas dive bombers. Bridges and railway yards were destroyed by raiders who shot down two YAK-type planes in the air and destroyed two on the ground.
Along the east coast the Juneau and other warships of the Anglo-American blockading force patrolled the enemy’s MSR, which followed the shoreline. Salvos from the cruisers, fired at the sheer cliffs, loosed avalanches of earth and rock to block the highway. Railways were mined and tunnels dynamited by commando parties landing from ships’ boats.
The combined U. N. efforts inflicted heavy material and personnel losses while slowing up the NKPA offensive. But it is a testimonial to Soviet and Red Korean preparations for aggression that the army of invasion kept on rolling. There was even some prospect late in July that the enemy would yet make good his boast of being able to take Pusan within 2 months in spite of United States intervention.
Requests for United States Marines
Upholding their long tradition as America’s force-in-readiness, the Marines have usually been among the first troops to see action on a foreign shore. Thus it might have been asked what was holding them back at a time when Army troops in Korea were hard-pressed.
The answer is that the Marines actually were the first United States ground forces to get into the fight after completing the long voyage from the American mainland. There were no Marine units of any size in the Far East at the outset of the invasion. But not an hour was lost at the task of assembling an air-ground team at Camp Pendleton, California, and collecting the shipping.