The 11th Marines (-), with the 196th FA Battalion, USA, attached, constituted the 11th Marine Regiment Group, an element of X Corps artillery. Throughout the training period 2/11 remained under the control of the 1st Marine Division and 3/11 was attached to the 2d Infantry Division.
The 5th Marines, 7th Marines, and KMCs were alerted to be prepared to move up to the combat areas south and west of the Punchbowl on 27 August. The 1st Marines was to remain in Division reserve, and the 11th Marines reverted to parent control.[270]
[270] 1stMarDiv HD, Aug 51, 3–5.
It was only about a five hour motor march from Tundong-ni to the forward assembly area under normal road and weather conditions. But recent rains had turned roads into bogs and fordable streams into torrents. Bridges were weakened by the raging current in the Soyang, and landslides blocked the road in many places.
The 1st Marine Division was back in action again. But it would have to fight its first battles against the rain and the mud.
CHAPTER IX
Renewal of the Attack
Crossing the Soyang in Flood—Light Resistance at First—Supply Problems Cause Delay—Resumption of Division Attack—The Mounting Problem of CAS—First Helicopter Supply Operation of History—The Fight for Hill 749—5th Marines Attack Hill 812—The Struggle for the “Rock”
It was to a large extent a new 1st Marine Division on 27 August 1951. Very few veterans of the Reservoir campaign were left, and even the Marines of the hard fighting in April and May had been thinned by casualties and rotation. Whatever the new arrivals lacked in experience, however, they had made up as far as possible by intensive and realistic training while the Division was in reserve.
The new Marine zone of action, in the Punchbowl area, was as bleak and forbidding as any expanse of terrain in Korea. Dominating the Punchbowl from the north and blocking any movement out of it was YOKE Ridge, looking somewhat like an alligator on the map (See [Map 17]). Hill 930 represented the snout. Hill 1000 was the head, and the body extended eastward through Hills 1026 and 924.