On 14 October, 280 artillery pieces and over 200 fighter-bomber sorties began pummeling Triangle Hill. Unfortunately, Communist defenses proved tougher than expected, and reinforcements had to be funneled in-first one battalion, then another, and another. When the smoke finally cleared several weeks later, two UN infantry divisions (the U.S. 7th and the ROK 2d) had suffered over 9,000 casualties in an ultimately futile attempt to capture Triangle Hill. Estimates of Chinese casualties exceeded 19,000 men, but the Communists had the manpower for such fights and did not flinch from flinging men into the breach to hold key terrain. The United Nations did not have such resources.
The Third Korean Winter, December 1952-April 1953
By the time the battles for Triangle Hill and Sniper Ridge had wound down in mid-November, both sides had begun the now familiar pattern of settling down for yet another winter in Korea. As temperatures dropped so too did the pace of combat. Still, shelling, sniping, and raiding remained habitual features of life at the front, as did patrol and guard duty, so that even the quietest of days usually posed some peril. For most frontline soldiers, home was a "hootchie," the name soldiers gave to the log and earth bunkers that were the mainstay of UN defenses in Korea. Built for the most part into the sides of hills, the typical hootchie housed from two to seven men. Each bunker was usually equipped with a single automatic weapon which could be fired at the enemy through above-ground firing ports. Inside, candles and lamps shed their pale light on the straw-matted floors and pinup-bedecked walls of the cramped, five-by-eight-foot areas that comprised a hootchie's living quarters. Oil, charcoal, or wood stoves provided heat, bunk beds made of logs and telephone wire offered respite, and boxes of extra ammunition and hand grenades gave comfort to the men for whom these humble abodes were home. However Spartan, the hootchie provided welcome shelter from the daily storms of bomb, bullet, rain, and snow that raged outside.
Keeping up morale is difficult in any combat situation, but when the fighting devolves into a prolonged stalemate, it is particularly hard to maintain. Consequently, the Army developed an extensive system of personnel and unit rotations to combat soldier burnout and fatigue. Rotation began in a modest way at the small-unit level, where many companies established warm-up bunkers just behind the front lines. Every three or four days a soldier could expect a short respite of a few hours' duration back at the warm-up bunker. There he would be able to spend his time as he saw fit, reading, writing letters, washing clothes, or getting a haircut. When operations were not pressing, many companies also arranged to send a dozen or so men at a time somewhat farther to the rear for a 24-hour rest period. The ultimate rest and recuperation (R and R) program, however, was a five-day holiday in Japan that Eighth Army tried to arrange for every soldier on an annual basis.
Eighth Army complemented these individual R and R activities with an extensive unit rotation program. Companies regularly rotated their constituent platoons between frontline and reserve duty. Similarly, battalions rotated their companies, regiments rotated their battalions, divisions rotated their regiments, and corps rotated their divisions, all to ensure that combat units periodically had a chance to rest, recoup, retrain, and absorb replacements. Last but not least, the Army maintained a massive individual replacement program in an effort to equalize as much as possible the burdens of military service during a limited war.
In September 1951 the Army had introduced a point system that tried to take into account the nature of individual service when determining eligibility for rotation home to the United States. According to this system, a soldier earned four points for every month he served in close combat, two points per month for rear-echelon duty in Korea, and one point for duty elsewhere in the Far East. Later, an additional category-divisional reserve status-was established at a rate of three points per month. The Army initially stated that enlisted men needed to earn forty-three points to be eligible for rotation back to the States, while officers required fifty-five points. In June 1952 the Army reduced these requirements to thirty-six points for enlisted men and thirty-seven points for officers. Earning the required number of points did not guarantee instant rotation; it only meant that the soldier in question was eligible to go home. Nevertheless, most soldiers did return home shortly after they met the requirement.
The point system was a marvelous palliative to flagging spirits, as it gave every soldier a definite goal in an otherwise indefinite and seemingly goalless war. Every man knew that typical frontline duty would enable him to return home after about a year of service in Korea. The system also helped boost the spirits of loved ones back home. This was of some consequence in helping to maintain public support for what was an increasingly unpopular war. Yet for all of its psychological and political benefits, the program was not without its costs. The constant turnover generated by the policy-approximately 20,000 to 30,000 men per month-was terribly inefficient from the vantage point of manpower administration and created tremendous strains on the Army's personnel and training systems. The program also hurt military proficiency by increasing personnel turbulence and by producing a continuous drain on skilled manpower. No sooner had a soldier become fully acclimatized to the physical, mental, and technical demands of Korean combat than he was rotated home, only to be replaced by a green recruit who lacked these skills. This was true not only of the enlisted men, who were rushed to the front with little or no field training, but of the officers as well. Indeed, by the fall of 1952 most junior officers with World War II combat experience had been rotated home and replaced by recent Reserve Officers' Training Corps graduates who had neither command nor combat experience. In a sinister twist, the system also reduced the effectiveness of many veteran soldiers, who became progressively more cautious and unreliable in combat as their eligibility for rotation neared. All of this meant that combat proficiency tended to stagnate in American units during the course of the war. This contrasted sharply with those Communist units that had avoided heavy casualties and managed to keep their morale intact. In these units battlefield acumen steadily increased as the war progressed thanks to the Communists' rather Draconian personnel policies. In the Red Army, victory or death were the only ways home.
The disparity in combat experience between the typical American and Communist combat unit was just one factor that contributed to the Eighth Army's heavy reliance on air and artillery support. Political sensitivity at home to the war's mounting body count, the stagnant, siege-like nature of the war, and a natural desire on the part of commanders to spare the lives of their men also contributed to the United Nations Command's preference for expending metal rather than blood. The Communists understood the terrible power of America's industrial might and attempted to compensate for it in a variety of ways. They steadily increased the size of their own artillery park until it exceeded that of the UN's, though they never managed to match the technical proficiency and ammunition reserves enjoyed by American artillerists. They dug deep, moved at night, and became masters of the arts of infiltration, deception, and surprise, all to minimize their vulnerability to the awesome destructive power wielded by the UN's air, land, and naval forces. Yet when push came to shove, the Communists also had the political will, the authoritarian control, and the manpower reserves to indulge in human wave attacks. American industrial might could and did obliterate many such attacks, but ultimately it was the infantry who held ground, and, when the Communists wanted a piece of terrain badly enough, they generally had the human wherewithal to take it.
