Missing Dog Tags, An American GI in North Korea

By Kenneth Eaton

by Kevin Tipple in All News, Book Reviews, History News, Reviews, US News, Veterans Affairs, World Politics

In Missing Dog Tags: An American GI in North Korea author Kenneth Eaton recounts what it was like to be a prisoner of war in North Korea. His story of his capture while surviving as a corporal in the 9th Tank Company of the 2nd division, U.S. Army, begins early in 1951 with a Chinese attack on his unit. After the tank he was in was severely disabled, he was forced to abandon it. In the confusion of battle and troop movement he was unable to get onboard another tank and was soon captured while on foot as were other soldiers. Captured by the Chinese soldiers he expected to be quickly executed along with the other men of his unit. Instead, they began a forced march that ultimately would result in a nightmarish captivity that would last over 30 months under brutal conditions.  Despite three failed escape attempts, starvation, and various horrors he endured, Kenneth Eaton survived and came home to be reunited with friends and loved ones. In a blow by blow detailed fashion this book recounts the experiences of Kenneth Eaton during the Korean War. As such, the book pulls no punches as the story comes out. Those who expect a politically correct read with sanitized language regarding the enemy would be best to look elsewhere for their cleaned up history.  Corporal Kenneth Eaton bluntly tells it like it was for him in Missing Dog Tags: An American GI in North Korea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kenneth Eaton
• Release date: Jul 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781393281160

Book preview

Dedication

This book is dedicated to those 8,126 men who were missing in action or prisoners of war and have not yet been recovered, according to the Department of Defense statistics and to my dear mother, whose faith in God and His ability to bring me home safely never wavered.

Acknowledgements

This is a true account of my experiences as a prisoner of war in Korea. The reality of it might be shocking to the reader but war is not pretty, nor is being a prisoner. All the names have been changed except my own. The Chinese and Japanese phrases are all put down the way they sounded to my ear.

I would like to thank the many people who encouraged me to write this story. A special thank you to my wife, Diane, and my daughter, Sherry for all the many hours of work on my first edition publication and my daughter, April & son-in-law Gary, for all their help with the second edition publication.

Thanks to Colonel Hayward, who organized our 9th tank Reunion and for his introduction to Donald Junkins and Kaimei Zeng, who introduced my story to Bob and Patience Mason who then edited and published my first edition of Missing Dog Tags, An American

G.I. in North Korea.

I am very grateful to everyone.

CHAPTER 1

Road Block

I was a corporal in the 9th Tank Company (R.C.T.) of the 2nd Division

U.S. Army. We had a damn good record back in the 1800’s fighting Indians, I’m told. The only thing was the Chinks and North Koreans couldn’t write their own names, but they could put a 120mm. mortar shell right in your hip pocket and never scratch your back.

My platoon, the fourth platoon, was sent back into the lines after a two day rest. We’d been promised a week. We were committed to combat to support the 16th Regiment of the 8th ROK (Republic of Korea) Division. The ROK’s had been put out front as a spearhead for the 2nd Division. We were in the central sector of the peninsula of Korea, fifty miles south of the 38th Parallel near the town of Hoengson.

Chinese cavalry attacked with anti-tank guns, firing point blank into the ROK soldiers, the date was February 9th, 1951. The Chinese horse soldiers rolled their anti-tank guns out of a cave or around the bottom of a cliff, fired and rolled them back fast. Our artillery the 503rd Gun Battalion, five miles back couldn’t get a decent shot at them. Our job was to run our tanks up on the hill so we could see them when they stuck their heads out and shoot ‘em off.

We were having real good luck the first two days, February 9th and 10th. Around noon the second day, a blanket of clouds dropped down to five or six hundred feet, we couldn’t get any air support. On top of that, the Squealers, our liaison planes, couldn’t get in to tell us what the Chinks were doing.

Sheer cliff’s marked our left flank and high mountains on our right. After the clouds lowered the Chinese started moving around our right flank in the mountains, we didn’t know it. That second night they broke through the ROK’s holes and made a light attack on our platoon of tanks. I think now, that the attack was to make us think the whole body of them was still in front of us.

We pulled our platoon back about a mile that night for protection during the darkness; tanks are helpless at night. We had K-Company of the 9th Infantry 2nd Division dug in around us for protection. We never entrusted the South Koreans with this particular job because they ran off at Blood River: Taejon, Waecwan, Taegu, Ichon, Seoul and other places. They left us to fight their battles, the bastards, yet they were vicious with prisoners they hadn’t captured. For months we couldn’t get a prisoner to the rear headquarters for interrogation because of them. We pulled back around three o’clock that second afternoon, things had quieted for the night. After placing our tanks in defense positions, Sgt. Rose, my tank commander went scouting around in the deserted village, his mission, to find some chickens, a pig or cow. C and K rations get mighty hard to take after a few months. We were starved for some meat and we hadn’t got that promised week’s rest. Our platoon had been committed in every action my Company was called on. We were the only platoon of tanks that kept right on rolling most of the time without breakdowns. We had gotten into the habit of butchering livestock the South Koreans didn’t beat us to.

Sgt. Rose found a young heifer in the hands of a South Korean sergeant and two privates. This Sgt. Rose explained was plundering, it was against some cockeyed Army regulation. He tried to take the cow from the South Koreans but couldn’t, so he came back for help. Our ammo loader, Joe Rachetti, volunteered, so did I. We called Rachetti, Joe Bean because he loved beans. Every time he was eating a can of beans, the enemy decided to attack. We were getting superstitious about it.

Joe Bean and I jumped out of our tank and trotted back down to the village with Sgt. Rose. We tried to take the juicy looking little heifer with 45’s and a burp gun. Those damn gooks wanted to shoot it out. We decided to compromise for half on the spot and Rose shot it. We played dumb and cut off its hooves and tail and gave it to the gooks as their half. They didn’t like what we gave them, so they asked us to sit down while they finished dividing it.

Thirty minutes later, we were walking back up the hill to our tank. I had a little Coleman stove, someone hooked a few weeks’ earlier from the Officer’s Mess during one of our two day rest periods. Billy Silvers, our gunner, who had only one eye, had the stove going. We all kept quiet about his eye. He didn’t want to be sent to a hospital in the states and not be able to make it back to the 4th Platoon and his beloved gun. Without him our five-man tank crew would have gone to pot. We had faith in his one good eye, he was the best damn shot in the war.

We cut a steak for Silver to cook. Meanwhile, we proceeded to cut and pack the rest in fifty caliber ammo boxes lined with paper; that had been wrapped around a fruit cake Bean got the day before from home. After devouring our two inch steaks, we had some C ration powdered coffee. Bean was eating canned beans and making us all nervous.

The popping and rattling of burp guns began about three hundred yards off. Every once in a while, a slug would hit the tank or pass so close to us you could smell the burnt powder. We just sat for three or four minutes disgusted, dumbfounded and pissed off at Bean and his canned beans. A couple of burp guns rattled not a hundred yards off. Bullets splattered all over our tank. K-Company opened up with hand grenades and bazookas. Rose, Bean, Silvers, Tommy Bishop, (our driver from Alabama) all made it into the turret hatch of Tank No.4; I was on the top of the tank. Some son-of-a-bitch gook turned loose with a burp gun about 80 yards away and emptied fifty slugs at me. Luckily, that bastard couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle. I couldn’t have either, I was so dumbfounded. Rose stuck his head out of the turret and shot him. The gook fell on his face.

Rose yelled, Get your ass in here, Eaton! You might get hurt out there. I jumped flat-footed from the deck into the turret hatch and right down Rose’s back. We were being attacked from the north, the side our tanks No.3 and No.4 were covering. The other two tanks, No.1 and No.2, pulled up beside us. We had K Company all around us. I could hear their C.O., Captain Jones, calling out orders in front of us to lie down so the tanks could fire.

The Chinese were coming at us across a ravine about ten feet deep and fifty feet wide. Some of K Company was dug in right on the edge; we had to hold our fire up to clear their heads. The whole other side of the hill was moving.

We turned loose everything we had. Silvers was firing coax 30’s (two 30 caliber machine guns) mounted in the turret. I was firing a 30-caliber machine gun in the bog gunner’s hatch. Rose had climbed out behind the hatch and was firing the fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on top, Bean was loading. Tommy Bishop, our driver, had the motors running in case we had to counter attack or pull one of General Walker’s famous strategic withdrawals. The other tanks were firing likewise. I found out later that White, No.3’s tank commander, was out on the top firing his fifty and so was Lieutenant Dancer.

Around three or four o’clock in the morning, the Chinese just stopped coming. We stayed on our toes all night, expecting another attack. By daylight, there didn’t seem to be a Chink or North Korean for miles.

The C.O. of K Company, Captain Jones, didn’t like the smell of things, especially since we still had a low overcast and couldn’t get any air support. He counted around a hundred of their dead on the hill. He and my platoon leaders, Lt. Dancer, talked the situation over briefly. We were ordered to prepare to retreat for safety since we didn’t know where or what the Chink cavalry was doing.

Our platoon of tanks and K Company pulled back about six miles, a mile or so south of the 503rd Artillery’s position; we set up on the left side of the road. After an hour or two of checking our ammo equipment and guns, the mail jeep showed up and everybody got a letter but me. I got a fruit cake in a can and a pen and pencil set from Mom, two and a half months after Christmas; it must have gone to Germany first. We ate it anyway, along with a gallon of peanut butter the mail jeep had brought us.

Lt. Dancer had picked up one of those arctic tents the officers use when they are in the rear. We had it set up along with our Coleman stove. There was enough room inside the tent for eight men, we had twenty. There were five guys to each tank, so we crammed eight more in the tent leaving four out at all times manning a machine gun on each tank. We slept all day except to take our turn on guard.

Shortly after five o’clock that evening, we heard some firing going on up front where the South Koreans were dug in. Twenty or thirty minutes later, Bean who was on guard in our tank yelled, They’re coming.

We all jumped in our tanks, Lt. Dancer took a look through his binoculars. South Korean soldiers were running like chickens down the road and along the creek bottom next to the cliffs, out of the mountains north of us. Five or six trucks and a couple of Jeeps the Army had given them were packed full. Most of them had left their weapons behind. Lt. Dancer and Capt. Jones got out in the middle of the road and stopped their leader, a Korean Colonel, in charge of the 16th Regiment of the 8th Division, ROK Army. With an interpreter, he told them there were hundreds of Chinese coming through their lines. Some of the Koreans kept on running south, right past us.

Just about then, a Korean soldier came running up the road from the south. His group was being slaughtered at the pass about a mile or so south of us. The pass was a bottleneck. The cliffs on our right and the mountains on our left came together, leaving barely enough room for a road to go through. On the cliff side rice paddies stair-stepped down to the creek bottom that ran the length of the valley.

Captain Jones, Lieutenant Dancer and the Korean Colonel decided we had better get our ass out of there, it was getting dark. With the snow on the ground, we could still see pretty well. Korean nights in the mountains could get so dark that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.

Lt. Dancer came back to our tanks, he called us all out. We were going to run the roadblock at the bottleneck. We were to knock out their automatic fire so K-Company, the South Koreans and the 503rd Artillery could get through before the Chinese north of us caught us in their trap. We realized they had moved around us in the mountains under that low ceiling.

Tank No.1 was to go first and radio back, then No.2 and then my Tank No.4, Lt. Dancer in Tank No.3 would bring up the rear. No lights were to be used; we all piled in our tanks. Lt. Dancer gave the word to standby, everyone put on their earphones. We listened for Lt. Dancer to say the word for Tank No.1 to leave.

Tank No.1 got the word. We strained our ears listening for Sgt. Daniels to report that he had made the pass. In a few minutes, we heard all hell break loose. We could hear Chinese and North Koreans yelling.  We heard their 120mm. mortars going off. Sgt. Daniels was giving them hell with his coax 30’s and his big gun.

Ten minutes after he left, firing quieted down. He called back and said that it was nothing and for us to come on through. No.2, Sgt. Fletcher’s tank took off. There was a lull for a few minutes, and then it happened again, like the 4th of July at the park back home. The firing finally quieted down except a rifle now and then. We waited about fifteen minutes for Fletcher to come back, but he didn’t.

Bugles, Halloween horns, bells, rattlers and all the other junk the Chinks used at night to fluster their enemy had started now that it was pretty dark. Some of us were standing in our hatches listening, we were laughing. A Chink up at the pass was blowing some sort of mixed up mess on a horn. Clamshell, one of K Company’s colored infantry boys said, Hey man, listen to that cat. He’s playing ‘Rag Mop’.

Lt. Dancer gave us our orders to go. Sgt. Rose said to button up the hatches. Bishop complained that he couldn’t see well enough through his scope without lights. Rose gave him the O.K. to open his hatch a little and peek through; he wanted speed if he could get it.  Our tank would do 42 miles per hour when Bishop wound her up tight in every gear, he did. The flat bushy ground on our left at the edge  of the road let some of the more anxious Chinks sneak down closer  to us, sitting waiting for our turn. We went about seventy-five yards, the Chinks opened up on us with rifles and percussion grenades. We weren’t worried about these yokels. Bishop pulled up suddenly, he said, I’m hit.

He had enough sense left before he stopped to lock his hatch. Chinks started crawling all over our tank, trying to get in. We heard an Army 45 automatic barking at them, then one set of feet on the tank and someone was yelling, open up, it’s Capt. Jones, let me in.

Rose recognized his voice and opened the turret hatches. Captain Jones stuck one leg in and an explosive shell hit our back deck and blew him off. I crawled over and pulled Bishop out of his seat, he had been hit in the head. The hatch had been open so he could see where he was driving, I thought Bishop was dead.

I slid into his seat and started driving with the hatch locked.  I couldn’t see very well through the scope, but I wound her up tight anyway. Automatic fire started hitting us. Mortar shells fell right behind. We weren’t worried about a direct hit. They were good with the mortar on a still target, but too dumb to allow for a moving target. The tank started bumping up and down. Rose yelled, "Eaton, you’re falling into holes with one track or the other. I kept pulling her out. We could hear those Chink bastards screaming. I had got into their trenches and foxholes, the very place I didn’t want to be. We had lost tanks before when the Chinks got close enough to throw a Molotov cocktail, jelled octane in a bottle. It burned the crew alive.

I made it back to the road. Rose yelled for me to stop and let Bean drive, we need more fire power and with you driving we don’t have it. Bean and I made a fast switch so I crawled back to the bog gunner’s hatch, I opened up with my machine gun, aiming for the road and ditches in front of us to keep the enemy from getting to close with high explosives. Their fifty-one caliber machine guns were raking us from the pass in front of us. Rose was loading for Silvers, since Bean was driving. Silvers said to Rose, I thought Daniels said this was going to be easy.

I was thinking, if our driver hadn’t been shot, we could have already made the pass and been in the clear, when we got one hell of a wallop in our left rear. It spun us around in the road. Bean had a hard time getting his bearings for a few seconds.

Silvers yelled, They’re firing anti-tank guns at us close range. Rose yelled back it had to be something else since anti-tank guns would have blown a hole in us.

Bean had straightened us up in the road. We were moving pretty good, approaching the culvert at the foot of the pass when  my head exploded and everything went red. I couldn’t see anything,  I could hardly breathe. The explosion deafened me. When my sight returned, I started to panic. There was nothing left inside the tank in one piece but me. A red fire roared right in the middle of the floor over the ammunition and explosives. It must have killed everyone but me. The turret carriage hung down, preventing any of the shrapnel from getting to me. All of this raced through my mind in seconds. They were hitting the tank with every machine gun they had. It sounded like hail on a tin roof. If I jumped out, I’d be cut to ribbons by their fire. If I stayed in here, I’d smother, if the tank didn’t blow up first. I pulled my head down and flung the hatch open at the same time. I jumped from a sitting position straight up through the hatch, did a jack knife and came down in front of the tank. My pistol belt hung up on the little metal strip used as a light guard on all military vehicles. My hands touched the ground, my feet stuck straight up in the air. My legs and back were cringing away from the bullets. I was so scared; I couldn’t move Only God could have been shielding me with His great hand. He lifted me off the hook and laid me on the ground. I’ll never know any other way it could have happened.

I lay there stunned for a few seconds. Then I looked around for cover. The only safety I could see was behind a rice paddy step, to the right of the road toward the cliffs, twenty-five feet away. Bullets were tearing up the snow all around the tanks. Sgt. Fletcher’s tank sat not ten feet in front of ours, stopped dead in the road. If we hadn’t been hit by enemy fire, we would all have been killed if we hit the tank. K-Company soldiers and ROK’s were sprawled over the ditches and road, some dead or dying, some still firing back, some trying to crawl out of the way, and some asking God to help them. My only chance was to crawl over behind the paddy and wait until I could climb those cliffs after it quieted down.

I started crawling and some Chink saw me. He had a burp gun and he used it. Bullets hit all around me, but I made it without a scratch. I lay there and played dead for a few minutes, afraid he might throw  a grenade over the paddy. My heart beat so hard, I felt like it was pitching me up and down, and I might get shot every time it beat. I felt for my forty-five, it was gone. It must have fallen out of my holster when I was hanging upside down on the front of the tank.

How in the hell was I to defend myself? I couldn’t get out from behind the paddy. Bullets were just clearing my back and hitting the snow beside me, not a foot away. I could smell burned powder and feel them cut the air behind my back. I knew that any second one of them would spill by blood in the snow. I had never given much thought to death. Even now, it didn’t bother me as much as the thought of being wounded and not being able to crawl out of this mess.

Everything a man could think had passed through my mind as I lay there and waited for those Chinks to stop shooting so I could crawl out. I kept coming back to one thought, what was I going to do when some Chink walked up and shot or bayoneted me in the back? Down the paddy in front of me, I saw this slant-eyed mother’s son crawling toward me. I grabbed for my forty-five and remembered it was lost. Feeling around the snow, I dug up a rock. If I lay still, he’d think I was dead. When he came over to shake me down, I’d clobber him if I could.

He got about ten feet from me, then cut loose with a broken record of, What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? It was Rose, he was in shock. He must have asked What are we gonna do? Fifty times before I could get him stopped, he was close now; his head looked burned from the explosion in the tank.

Without thinking, I said, The Lieutenant’s tank is coming. We will get in it when he comes off the road to get around our tank and Fletcher’s tank.

I realized I could hear the Lieutenant’s motor coming down the road. I knew he would come on this side of the road to get as much shelter as he could while he slowed down to get around the enemy. The Chinks had switched their fire from us to him. I told Rose to crawl behind me.

We needed to get closer to our knocked out tanks, so we could jump on when the Lieutenant slowed down. The last thing I heard him say was, They’ll kill us! They’ll kill us!

They’ll kill you anyway if you stay here, Rose. Come on, I said. Here he is."

I jumped up and started running toward the Lieutenant’s tank as it came between the hill and me, there was a man running beside the tank, directing it around and moving the wounded out of the way.

When he heard me running thought the snow, he wheeled around to shoot me with his forty-five when I yelled; It’s Eaton! It’s Eaton!

He motioned for me to get on as he climbed aboard. The tank was rocking back up into the road as I grabbed for it. There wasn’t a chance of my getting on that iron bull after it got to the ditch. I knew it. I jumped anyway and landed flat on my face in the snow as it roared off. That left me in a spot. The Chinks cut up enough snow around me with their machine guns to cover me up. How they missed me at that range, I’ll never know. It couldn’t have been more than fifty yards. It got so hot there in the ditch; I decided to move over beside the tank, twenty feet away. If the Chinks saw me move, they would get me sure as hell. I decided after a couple of minutes, surveying the situation thoroughly, to move a couple of inches at a time.

After a couple of deep breaths, I made about a ten or twelve inch move. The Chinks had stopped all automatic fire. Very little rifle fire was going on. I heard them talking up there on the hill above me and even closer, now that I was listening for them. I figured the closest one to me was forty or fifty yards away. They weren’t moving around yet. They still had a few South Koreans trying to sneak through. Most of the South Koreans who weren’t killed had pulled back up the valley. They were fighting Chinks at that end within two miles of the pass, I figured, by the sound of things. These Chinks were sitting tight. When their buddies pushed them on down; they figured to slaughter a couple of hundred South Koreans when they got this far. I didn’t want to be here when that happened.

I made a couple of short moves, waited a minute or so and did it again. This time it didn’t work. I heard a couple of Chinks chattering excitedly just the other side of the road. I kept hoping they hadn’t seen me, but I knew they had. One of them jumped up and came running across the road with his rifle and bayonet fixed. I knew he would stick that toad sticker in me. He got to the ditch where I was hiding and reared up high with his gun to make a pretty sight for his buddy across the road. Someone nearby shot him. His buddy jumped up and started yelling so I made a run for my tank.

I landed on my belly behind my tank. I was crawling like a snake right back to where I was before the Lieutenant’s tank had come, behind my rice paddy. Not a Chink fired. I looked up the paddy ledge and couldn’t see Sgt. Rose. Maybe he had tried to make the Lieutenant’s tank and got shot. I eased my