It is remarkable that the Chinese
Army (CCF) accomplished anything at all against
the modern arms, mighty artillery and
overwhelming air superiority of UN forces. For
the first year of the war, the CCF was armed with
a baffling array of small arms of varying degrees
of effectiveness. These did include the Russian
PPSh 'burp guns', but mostly consisted of
US and British arms captured from the
Nationalists, and weapons taken from the Japanese
following WWII. Each Chinese division had only
one b attalion of pack weapons, no tanks or towed
guns, and for anti-tank weapons relied on satchel
charges of TNT, which in reality were no defense
at all
The North Koreans, however, had
been extensively prepared over a long period by
the Russians, and were thoroughly equipped with
Soviet arms. In addition to T34/85tanks and SU76
self-propelled 76mm guns, they had a formidable
array of effective small arms, some of which are
shown above. Even the 7.7mm Japanese rifle shown
is more lethal than the 6.5mm Japanese weapons
sometimes used by the CCF.
Two weapons possessed by both the
CCF and the NK were terrible indeed: The 7.62mm Maxim, usually with
its steel shield for protecting the crew, and the
120mm mortar. The
effective range of the Maxim was over a mile, in
the hands of experts, and the veteran communist
armies were certainly expert. In addition, unlike
the US, the communists had smokeless powder. When
firing the Maxim from long distances, they were
undetectable by either sound or puffs of smoke.
The first inkling our troops often had was seeing
their comrades spinning and falling, their bodies
and faces savagely torn. The huge 120mm mortar
round, with its great explosive power, similarly
came from great range and had great
destruction.
When falling back, the communists
routinely sighted their almost undetectable
Maxims to place grazing fire on the forward
slopes we would occupy, and registered their
mortars on the reverse slopes we would fall back
to once we came under machine gun fire.
The communists suffered greatly
from our superior artillery and air power, but
they knew how to fight as infantry. And they did
it very, very well.
