July 1950
Telling Enemies From “Friendlies”
A Navy Lieutenant arrived at Lt. Bud Biteman’s Intelligence tent the rainy day that Taejon fell, pleading with Biteman “to send some fighter support over to the west coast, beyond Taejon. He said he’d just come from there by road, and the Red troops were crossing the river estuary in small craft. If they weren’t stopped then, while still vulnerable in their little boats, they would reach the south shore and be able to sweep through the city of Kwangju and the whole southwestern end of the country. I felt very badly, not being able to help him, but we couldn’t possibly fly in the existing weather, and at that time didn’t even know the status of our primary area of concern—Taejon.”
Biteman told him that he would “try to get someone into that area to look over the situation as soon as the weather broke enough to get our ships into the air.
Early the following day, Biteman’s flight attacked troops and tanks southeast of Taejon with his bombs and rockets, then “swung wide northwest of Kwangju, to look for signs of boats crossing the western estuary.”
They saw no boats, but as they flew low over the road leading south toward Chongjun, about thirty miles south of the estuary crossing, they “ran across ten olive-drab, open-backed trucks loaded with armed troops—they were southbound. Were they North or South Korean troops?” Biteman had no way of knowing.
When Biteman made a second, “very low, slow pass to look them over, the men in the trucks displayed white cloth signal panels on the roof of the trucks’ cab—even though panel codes had not yet been established that early in the war. The trucks were headed south, not north.
Biteman was certain that they were enemy troops—why else would they be heading south, and the Navy officer had said they were crossing—ten truck loads, about 200 men. They were sitting ducks for his machine guns. It would have been a simple matter for him to halt them all in a matter of minutes. But, he dared not fire on them! There was no way to be absolutely sure that they weren’t friendly troops, so he did not strafe.
After two more low, slow passes, all the while trying desperately to find a giveaway clue as to their true identities, he gave up and flew on southeastward toward Masan at low level. He saw no other troop movements of any kind, so he turned back north to his base at Taegu.
When he filed his mission report with 5th Air Force after landing, he learned that “there were NO FRIENDLY TROOPS in the area where I’d found the convoy. The troops I had seen were the spearhead of the advance that the Navy Lieutenant had told me about.”
He could have stopped it, or at least slowed if for awhile—if he had only known.
“Troop identification was a continuing, and critical problem during those hectic, early days when the battle lines were changing from minute to minute,” Biteman explained.
“Our normal tactics, when operating in support of ground troops, would have included the use of bright-colored cloth panels displayed on the ground according to a “code of the day.” But, because there was no communications yet established with the ground troops, they used the only colored panels available—white—and they were displayed by both the friendly and the enemy forces. It was a continuing, confusing mess.”
Kwangju Falls
Kwangju, the major city on the southwest interior, fell just a few days after Taejon.
The pilots of the Dallas Squadron “were amazed at the speed and ease with which the Communists were able to take territory,” Biteman explained.
“Although we kept a daily reconnaissance over the areas, and found plenty of targets, we were able to slow down their advance hardly at all. How sorry I was that I hadn’t been able to identify those first ten truck loads of troops—things might have been different in the south.”
The main Communist thrust, down the west-central route to Taejon, had been redirected more to the east to follow the road and railroad corridor toward Waegwan. Clearly, they planned to cross the Naktong River to envelop Taegu.
In just a matter of days, the war situation became desperate for the U. N. forces.
“By the end of July our ground troops around Yongdong had managed to fight only enough of a delaying action to slow the thrust aimed at Taegu,” Biteman explained.
“Most of our close support bombing and strafing was concentrated in that area, close to our front (or ‘rear’) lines, and we were pleased with the reports from ground troops on how much damage our strikes were doing. Along those lines, however, some of those Army troops became pretty “itchy-fingered.”