About one week prior to the Inchon
invasion, a joint CIA-military operation "Trudy
Jackson" sent in a tough guerilla unit led by Navy
Lt. Eugene Clark, an Old China hand ex-CPO. His team
included an Army captain, three EMs and two Korean
military specialists, and landed on Yonghung-do, a small
island at the mouth of the channel, ten miles from
Inchon. Helped by the small civilian population,
Clark's men scouted the tides, mud-flats and
seawalls, getting vital last minute information for the
assault. They were completely successful in this, even
reconnoitering fortified Wolmi-do!
The NK soon found the guerillas were
there, and sent an assault craft with 16 infantrymen to
attack them, but Clark met them in the channel with a .50
machine gun on a sampan, and sank them all. In a major
accomplishment, Clark got an old light-house working on
Palmi-do, which provided a critical navigation point for
our Naval forces.
The down side, when Clark moved his small
unit to Palmi-do, the NK came back unopposed to
Yonghung-do, lined up 50 South Koreans who had helped
Clark, and murdered them. A favorite NK tactic. (My major
personal regrets about the KW are that we never rounded
up the guys who did tens of thousands of murders like
those, and hanged them all. )
Bert Kortegaard,
Inchon veteran
