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Old 07-27-2020, 04:03 PM
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Post US Army veteran recalls almost being annihilated by Chinese Army 70 years ago

US Army veteran recalls almost being annihilated by Chinese Army 70 years ago
By: War is Boring News - 07-27-20
Re: https://warisboring.com/us-army-vete...-70-years-ago/

Photo link: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/w...an-970x350.jpg
Photo: Chaplain (Capt.) Emil Kapaun (right) and Capt. Jerome A. Dolan, a medical officer with the 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, carry an exhausted Soldier off the battlefield in Korea, early in the war. Kapaun was famous for exposing himself t… (Photo Credit: U.S. Army)

Charles Shuemate had enjoyed a Thanksgiving meal before turning in for the night somewhere between the Yalu and Ch’ongch’on rivers, where his 2nd Infantry Division was bivouacked in the winter of 1950.

An infantryman, Shuemate sealed himself in a sleeping bag as Siberian winds howled down snow-covered mountains in North Korea, plunging temperatures to 36 degrees below zero. A large and mostly undetected Chinese army waited in those mountains, intending to annihilate the Americans — a goal they would almost achieve.

“We were laying out in a field in our sleeping bags when they came through, believe it or not, and I had a heck of a time getting out of my sleeping bag,” the now retired San Antonio accountant recalled.

“By the time I did, there was rifle fire, tracers that came out of the machine guns were all over the place, and here I was out there in the middle of the field with no place to go. That’s when I really began to believe in a higher power, because I had to go all the way across that field through that fire, and that happened to me twice over there without ever getting a scratch.”

Seventy years ago this summer, Shuemate had finished training at Fort Riley, Kan., thinking he’d head to Fort Sam Houston for surgical technician school.

Then North Korea sent its 135,000-strong Inmun Gun, or People’s Army, seven infantry divisions backed by 150 medium tanks, into the south at 4 a.m. June 25.

Seoul fell in three days. U.S. and South Korean troops were defeated and pushed into a small pocket at the tip of the peninsula but counterattacked with an amphibious landing at Inchon. The North Korean communist forces collapsed and were driven out of their own capital. The Americans went all the way to the Chinese border.

But the Chinese hadn’t waited for that to happen. They had moved troops into North Korea by night. The attack, when it came, enveloped entire U.S. divisions. The war, about to wrap up after less than six months, would go far longer, and Shuemate was on the ground floor.

He did two tours there, carrying the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, more commonly known as the BAR, which provided a platoon’s extra firepower and was pronounced by its initials rather than the acronym.

The see-sawing fight for Korea, grim and bloody, drew in U.N. troops from a number of countries. It sputtered to a halt with an uneasy armistice 67 years ago today, on July 27, 1953, but was never formally ended.

San Antonio historian T.R. Fehrenbach, in a classic analysis of the conflict called “This Kind of War,” said it was a test of wills, not power, that grew from monstrous miscalculations. Neither side employed all the power it possessed, including nuclear weapons.

“The war showed that the West had misjudged the ambition and intent of the Communist leadership, and clearly revealed that leadership’s intense hostility to the West,” he wrote. “It also proved the Communists erred badly in assessing the response its aggression would call forth.”

The war drew in 1.8 million Americans, one of them a kid from Poplar Bluff, Mo. And yes, Charles Absolum Shuemate, now 87, was a kid then — just 16 when he enlisted.

He quit high school and lied about his age, intending to join the Navy with a cousin who’d been a sailor and wanted back in. Shuemate had lied before to get into the Missouri National Guard, and he briefly trained as a medic at Fort Sam. The Navy had all the sailors it needed, so the two walked down the street and joined the Army.

Shuemate had just finished infantry school when the war broke out and felt no foreboding while in Poplar Bluff for 10 days’ leave before heading out.

“I felt fine about it. I didn’t have any problem,” he said. “I was a 16-year-old that had been raised in the Ozark hills out there in Missouri. I didn’t have enough sense to be scared.”

New arrivals to Korea were asked who had experience with the BAR, a 19½-pound weapon that could fire up to 500 rounds a minute. Most didn’t. Shuemate had a little.

His unit joined the counteroffensive launched Sept. 16 against the Inmun Gun, pushing north to the Yalu River with Company C of the 2nd Infantry Division’s 23rd Infantry Regiment. It was under Col. Paul Freeman, “one of the best leaders in the war,” wrote historian and retired Army Lt. Col. Conrad Crane.

Shuemate was the lowest man on the totem pole — a green replacement soldier.

Disaster loomed. Gen. Douglas MacArthur and his commanders had chosen to disregard warnings, including intelligence suggesting large numbers of Chinese massing for an attack.

China had moved 260,000 soldiers into Korea more than a month earlier, as MacArthur stretched his men and supply lines closer to the Yalu, a violation of orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On Oct. 20, the 1st Cavalry Division took Pyongyang. Comedian Bob Hope gave a show there.

In his book “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War,” historian David Halberstam wrote that Col. Perry Johnson, the G-2, or intelligence officer, for the division’s 1st Corps, knew the Chinese were in North Korea because of prisoners taken in an Oct. 25 battle.

Maj. Gen. Frank “Shrimp” Milburn immediately reported that fact to 8th Army headquarters. From there it went to Brig. Gen. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s G-2, “a man dedicated to the proposition that there were no Chinese in Korea, and they were not going to come in, at least not in numbers large enough to matter,” Halberstam wrote.

“That was what his commander believed, and MacArthur’s was the kind of headquarters where the G-2’s job was first and foremost to prove that the commander was always right.”

An Army history said the first major battle, which began at dusk Nov. 1, saw large numbers of Chinese pour out of the hills near Unsan. As the Americans learned, battles would start with the blowing of bugles at night.

“The Chinese seemed to come out of nowhere as they swarmed around the flanks and over the defensive positions of the surprised United Nations troops,” destroying two U.S. battalions, the history stated. But the Chinese withdrew into the mountains and stayed hidden for weeks, and U.S. intelligence officials still weren’t convinced that it was a full-scale intervention.

Shuemate expected to head north the day after his Thanksgiving meal and replace soldiers who had held the line at the Yalu. He was fast asleep when the Chinese assault began Nov. 25. Fellow soldiers ran to nearby rock walls for protection while he wrestled with the sleeping bag.

“I think that was the last time I was in a sleeping bag until I got back to the United States,” he said.

Before the offensive closed, an estimated 19,000 to 30,000 Chinese were killed. American losses were roughly 2,500 killed, 5,000 wounded and nearly 8,000 injured by frostbite.

Shuemate fought into the next year. He didn’t worry much about his safety until getting ordered to Heartbreak Ridge, an area of high mountains around a punch bowl near the 38th parallel.

The first battle there ran Sept. 13 to Oct. 15, 1951, with the 2nd Division’s 23rd Regiment suffering 3,700 casualties, the most of any unit, said historian Crane, chief of analysis and research with the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center.

The lines by then were static. Troops paid dearly for even meager gains.

The day he was to fight at Heartbreak Ridge, a troubled Shuemate was approached by a jeep.

“We were getting ready, already geared up, and one of the units had already gone onto Heartbreak Ridge,” he recalled. “I was ready to start up the hill, and that is when the jeep came through from company headquarters and someone said, ‘Get up here, you’re going home.’”

When the armistice came, 36,574 U.S. troops were dead and 7,577 were unaccounted for, most of them missing soldiers whose remains continue to be found and returned home for burial. Even today, a state of war technically exists between the two Koreas.

For Shuemate, the jeep was the first leg back to Poplar Bluff and, in time, his marriage to Evelyn and the births of two children, Charles Steven and Debra. Armed with an accounting degree, he ditched thoughts of making the Army a career and brought his family to San Antonio, working as a CPA.

Shuemate developed a strong faith in God after his close calls, one of which came while relieving himself in a rice paddy.

“How could I run holding my pants up? Running across the rice paddy to get back to the tanks, and there was a couple of enemy machine guns up there on the ridge shooting at you, and you don’t even get a scratch? If that won’t make a believer out of you,” he said, laughing.

“Some of these things that happened over there, it convinced me that there was somebody looking out for me.”

———

©2020 the San Antonio Express-News
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O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"
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