Jennings looked through the window, and for the first time saw the boat, and the North Korean soldiers in their cotton uniforms manning what looked like an air-cooled .50 on her bow.
The partially uncovered boat caught their attention, and they fired a short burst at it.
“Shit,” McCoy said. “I was hoping they’d try to capture it intact!”
Then his Garand went off, and then again, and then again, and Jennings saw the two Koreans on the machine gun fall, one backward, as if something had pushed him, and the other just collapse straight downward.
“If you remember how to use that rifle, Sergeant,” McCoy said, “now would be a good time.”
[TWO]
ABOARD LST-450 37 DEGREES 11 MINUTES NORTH LATITUDE, 125 DEGREES 58 MINUTES EAST LONGITUDE THE YELLOW SEA 1615 13 SEPTEMBER 1950
LST-450 was now bobbling in a wide circle in the Yellow Sea about fifty miles off the lighthouse marking the entrance to the Flying Fish Channel. She was alone, in the sense that she was not escorted by—under the protection of—a destroyer or any other kind of warship, but there had always been some sort of aircraft more or less overhead since she had sailed from Sasebo, and the farther north they had moved, there seemed to be more ships just visible on all sides of her.
Not a convoy, Captain Howard Dunwood, USMCR, had reasoned, although there certainly was a convoy out there someplace, surrounded by men-of-war. What he was looking at were ships of the invasion fleet who someone had judged did not need protection as much as some other ships—an LST was not as valuable as an aircraft carrier or an assault transport, obviously—and had been placed, for the time being, far enough from where the action was likely to occur to keep them reasonably safe.
After reviewing with his men for the umpteenth time the role Baker Company was to play in the Inchon invasion, Dunwood turned them over to the first sergeant and went to the bridge. He would have a cup of coffee with the captain before the evening meal was called.
The major sent to Sasebo from Division G-3 had been— as Dunwood expected he would be—a bullshitter, but the more Dunwood thought about what Baker Company was going to be expected to do, the more he came to believe the major had been right about one thing. Baker Company’s role in the invasion was going to be critical.
You just can’t sail large unarmored vessels slowly past artillery, and that’s exactly what was going to happen unless Baker Company could (a) seize the islands, and (b) hold them against counterattack long enough for the Navy to get some cruisers and destroyers down the channel past them.
And the more often Baker Company rehearsed its role, the more Dunwood was sure that Division G-3 had come up with a pretty good plan to do what had to be done, and that the plan—now changed by what they’d learned in rehearsal—was now as good as it was going to get.
What was going to happen now was that during the hours of darkness—probably meaning as soon as it really got dark—LST-450 would end its circling and move to a position just off the lighthouse marking the entrance to the Flying Fish Channel.
There, it would rendezvous with five Higgins boats put into the water from the USS Pickaway (APA-222).
Starting at 0330 the next morning—14 September—after they had had their breakfast, Company B would begin to transfer from LST-450 to the Higgins boats. There would be twenty men and one officer on three of the boats, and twenty men under the first sergeant on the fourth, and twenty men under a gunnery sergeant on the fifth.
The naval gunfire directed at the channel islands would begin at 0400 and end at 0430. As soon as it lifted, the Higgins boats would enter the Flying Fish Channel, move down it, and occupy, first, Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do Islands, and then, depending on the situation, other islands in the immediate vicinity.
They would then establish positions from which they could defend the islands from enemy counterattack. That was the plan.
What Captain Dunwood privately believed would happen was that when the Higgins boats appeared off Taemuui-do and Yonghung-do, North Korean troops would come up from the underground positions in which they had been—successfully—shielding themselves from the naval gunfire, unlimber their machine guns, and fire upon the Higgins boats approaching their shores.
Captain Dunwood’s experience had been that light machine guns (the Japanese rough equivalent