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When Kurt Wilhelm served in the Marine Corps in Korea, he managed to be involved in:
1.The landing at Pusan and the battle of the Pusan perimeter
2. The landing at Inchon and the capture of Seoul.
3. The landing on the east coast of Korea and the battle of Chosin Reservoir.
4. Getting shot twice in the face by a Chinese soldier.
5. Rehabilitating in Japan.
6. Getting sent back to his
company on the front line.
7. Getting rotated home.
And all that happened in eight months.
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Kermit "Kurt" Wilhelm grew up in south Minneapolis, attended Roosevelt High
School, and found himself without a full-time job after graduation in 1948. He and three buddies decided to join the military together, and flipped a coin to pick the branch of service.
The coin toss
was for the Navy, and young men went down to the recruiter the next day. The Navy representative told them there were no openings right then, but there would be in a week and they would all be called in
then.
A couple of days went by, and while Wilhelm was working his part-time job he missed a phone call from the Navy. By the time he showed up at the recruiting station, his two friends were gone.
"Heck, the whole idea was that we were going to join together. So I just walked across the hallway and joined the Marines."
After recruit training, Wilhelm ended up in Guam where he spent the next two
years. "We trained and we trained and we trained. We chased each other around the jungle. It was a real challenge to try and outdo each other. It never got boring, there was always something going on.
"I think we were the best trained Marines ever. Nobody ever had that much training."
In early 1950, the men were sent back to the united States, not because of some big military plan, but because
their base disappeared. "A typhoon came along and blew our base away. All that was left were the foundations. There was green, corrugated metal all over the place."
Back at Camp Pendleton, the men did
more training. The unit also took 30 days leave, one-third of the group at a time. When North Korea attacked South Korea and the U.S. troops stationed there in June, 1950, Wilhelm's unit was sent
overseas again.
"We were supposed to go to Korea and form a division, but we were told that Korea was going to go down the toilet if we didn't get there fast." The transport went directly to Pusan.
The perimeter around the town at that point, in early August, had shrunk to about 50 to 75 miles. It was the Allies last foothold in the country.
"We were a pretty gung ho group of guys. We could
hardly wait until we got into battle. That lasted until the first fire fight."
Sgt. Wilhelm was a machine gunner and in charge of a small group including one assistant gunner and six ammo carriers.
The machine gun itself weighed 30 lbs. and the men would take turns carrying it on a long march. "After a while your arm and fingers would just be numb. Someone would have to take the gun from you
because you couldn't put it down."
The 1st Marine Brigade's job was to take the hills around the perimeter and begin to push the North Koreans back. Looking back at the situation, Wilhelm can see
that the Army personnel were in a difficult situation, lacking proper wartime training and having only been sent there as peacetime occupation troops.
At the time, though, there some animosity between
the Marines and the Army. "Sometimes we'd take a hill, turn it over to the Army, and then a few days later we'd have to go back and take it again. I remember once when we were turning over a hill to the
Army, and one of them asked where the escape route was. We asked him what the hell an escape route was."
The going was very tough at first. The men only carried ammunition and C-rations and there was
little transportation. "I think we only had hot food once or twice the first 30 days. We got pretty beat up and we lost some people. When they finally pulled us back we set up in a soybean field. Our
clothes were just rags by then. It was 95 or 100 degrees every day with humidity about the same, and the clothes just rotted off our backs. We just threw them in a pile an burned them."
Wilhelm only
carried one canteen at first, but soon acquired another. "Guys were getting dizzy and passing out from the heat. You didn't dare drink out of the rice paddies because they fertilized with human
excrement. If you did have to drink the local water, you immediately went to sick bay to get some paregoric to plug up your butt."
The basic operation was for the Marines to head down a road until
they encountered enemy fire from a surrounding hill. Then they could go and take the hill. Wilhelm usually set up his .30 caliber, Model 1918A1 machine gun in a position where he could cover the attack,
often by firing directly over the charging Marines' heads. The gun could fire 250 rounds per minute, with every fifth round a tracer so the gunner could adjust his aim.
"I loved being a machine
gunner. We had practiced so much. It was great when you set up and gauged the distance and fired off a burst and you saw the hat flying off the enemy. You knew you'd done it just right. We were supposed
to fire off about five bullets in a burst, but I figured if five was good, then six or seven was even better."
The long training on Guam had allowed Wilhelm to become more than familiar with his
weapon. "I probably cleaned that thing a thousand times. I think I still could take it apart today with my eyes closed."
Wilhelm has seen movies where the machine gun is fired while somebody is
holding it, but he said he only did that once. "We had some bad ammo sometimes. Most of it was from World War II, and it had been packed back in 1942 or 1943. I was firing up a hill one day when the gun
jammed. It had baked an empty brass shell casing. I was busy prying it out, and we were coming under pretty heavy fire. The Marine next to me was an Indian, and he got hit in the neck and it came out his
armpit. The Chief never even knew he had died.
"Well, I just got the gun cleared out when the officer said, 'Let's go.' I didn't have time to put it on the tripod, I just held it with my asbestos
glove and sprayed the hillside, and up we went. That was the only time I did the John Wayne thing."
The success of the Marines in pushing back the North Koreans was due in part, Wilhelm said, because
most of the Marine officers and NCOs were World War II veterans with a lot of combat experience. "One of them was Gunnery Sergeant Perez. He had eyes like an eagle, and he saved my life more than once."
Wilhelm said his unit probably took 15 or 20 hills in 30 days, and each one was a challenge. "Guys would get to the top of the hill when it was over, and they'd just be babbling. The adrenaline was
going so fast. It just took a while to slow down and to realize that we're on top of the hill and we're alive."
In the process of taking the high ground one day, a North Korean truck came within
range of Wilhelm's machine gun. "I had one lucky burst. One bullet hit the rear view mirror, one bullet took out the windshield, one bullet killed the driver and one bullet killed the passenger. The
truck just rolled into a ditch, but it wasn't damaged. For a while, G Company had a truck. Our supply sergeant had a truck."
With the perimeter secure around Pusan, the regiment was pulled out of
Pusan and put on a ship heading for Inchon for the major landing there on Sept. 15, 1950. The landing was the plan of Gen. Douglas MacArthur who was in command of the UN forces in Korea.
Wilhelm's
unit was assigned the task of taking Wolmi-do, an island that strategically controlled the port at Inchon. The island had been hit by shelling for several days before the landing.
Most of the North
Koreans who had survived the shelling were in bunkers and caves, and had to be coaxed out. "I remember one of our flame thrower guys came up and asked us for cover. He got up there pretty close and hit
the trigger for his flame thrower and nothing happened. He had forgotten to turn his tanks on. He turned about as white as a piece of paper. It wasn't funny I suppose, but he had that look on his face
and we had to laugh. There are times in combat when there's real humor.
"We took the island in two or three hours, and then we were done. There was kind of dome shape on the island, and we sat there
and watched the landing at Inchon. It was like watching movie. It was too far for us to fire, so we just sat and watched. It was a great show."
The fighting moved through Inchon and up into Seoul. "At
one point, they dumped us off in a field and the North Koreans were all around us, running in all directions. We felt like Custer at his last stand. It was a hell of a wild fire fight that lasted maybe
three or four minutes. That was one of the wildest times I remember in Korea."
In Seoul, Wilhelm's unit happened to be the one that captured the national capitol, and the men were able to raise the
American flag at the capitol building. The area was soon host to Allied dignitaries. "Yeah, we saw MacArthur and all those other officers with the chrome (helmets.) Dugout Doug, I saw him in Seoul. He
had an ego as big as a truck. He had an opportunity there to back off, but he didn't . Once the Chinese intervened, it was three or four more years of war."
Not long after, Wilhelm and the Third
Battalion, Fifth Marines, were brought back to Inchon, loaded on transports again, and brought up around the other coast of Korea. They headed up to Hagaru-ri on the southern edge of the Chosin Reservoir
and then took a position on the east side of the Reservoir for a couple of days before being relieved by an Army unit.
Wilhelm and his comrades then marched up the west side of the Reservoir to a
spot near Yudam-ni, about 14 miles from Hagaru. It was about 15 degrees below zero at night. The Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division was the northernmost force on that day, Nov.
27.
"It got kind of wild and wooly. I was sleeping on a frozen rice paddy, and I just had time to get my boots on when a whole bunch of Chinamen came around a hillside. We were kind of lined up
along a road, and the Chinese were on the other side of the road."
The Marines beat off the Chinese attack and recaptured a hill that overlooked the valley they were in.
As the fighting continued,
Wilhelm was at his machine gun and the bullets were whizzing by. "The assistant gunner was bringing up more ammo, but he got wounded. I got up to get the ammo. I had just picked up the other can and I
was asking Palmer how he was when the lights went out. The next thing I knew I was on my hands and knees and there was a singing in my ears. It was like a siren going off. And there was blood everywhere."
One bullet had passed through Wilhelm's parka and cut a pack of cigarettes in half. Another severed the chin strap of his helmet. A third hit him in the cheek, slicing through the bottom of his nose.
A fourth bullet glanced off the middle of his forehead. "It just sort of bounced off this thick head of mine. I'll never know for sure what hit me, but I'm almost positive it was a Russian-made burp gun."
"We called for a corpsman, and I was helping Palmer and he looked at me and said, 'Christ, Kurt, they shot your nose off.' I wanted to put my hand there and touch it to see how bad it was, but I
couldn't. I didn't have the courage to touch my own face."
The corpsman gave Wilhelm a shot of morphine, and wrapped bandages all around his head leaving only a narrow slit to see through.
Wilhelm
walked down the hill with three or four other wounded men. "It was just about dark, and we were hanging on to one another as we were going down that hill. The walking didn't bother me, but I had a really
bad headache.
"The aid station was in a farmhouse or a barn, and the doctor rebandaged me with some smaller stuff. I wanted a cigarette, and that was when I saw that my pack had been shot in half. A
corpsman took me over to a corner and gave me a little pill and one of his cigarettes. I took three or four drags, and that was the last thing I remember until the next morning."
Wilhelm was strapped
to the hood of a jeep in a sleeping bag, and the Marines began their slow withdrawal from the Yudam-ni area. "The heat from the engine kept me warm, but after a couple of days there was some guy who was
shot up really bad. I told them I could walk and this other guy got my spot on the jeep. I walked and I rode on a trailer full of dead Marines and some wounded for a while.
"It took us four days to go
16 miles. We weren't moving too damn fast."
As the column neared Hagaru, an officer began gathering up all the walking wounded into a temporary unit. "He got us organized, and we marched into Hagaru.
I heard someone say as we marched by, 'Look at those magnificent bastards.'"
The temperature was still sub-zero, and Wilhelm was taken into a hospital tent with a heater. "I hadn't eaten in three or
four days, and I was just so damned tired. But there was a big bowl of Tootsie Rolls there, and we helped ourselves. Within minutes, the whole group of us were asleep. Half the guys fell asleep with the
Tootsie Rolls in their mouths."
The next morning, Wilhelm was flown out on a C-47 to the Korean Coast. "I went up to a corpsman and asked if I could have something for my headache. He said he couldn't
give me anything, but then the went in his own pocket and pulled out a bottle of Anacin. A couple of those did the trick."
He was then flown to Japan. "It was just so nice to be warm again. We were in
an Army hospital, and guys were still wearing their parkas and ammunition belts. Sometimes a grenade would go rolling across the floor."
Wilhelm spent January and February in Japan and then rejoined
his company. But this time, his unit was in central Korea, not far from the line that was later drawn to separate North and South Korea. He was back for three weeks, when they announced a rotation
schedule. Because of his Purple Heart, Wilhelm was near the top of the list.
"The last day in Korea, we were involved in a fire fight. We had been sent out to rescue a patrol. As it turned out, the
enemy was on one side of the hill and we were on the other. We were lobbing hand grenades back and forth at each other. All of a sudden a runner came up and said Gunny Perez and I were to report to
headquarters to be sent home.
"I took my last grenade and threw it over the hill and then I walked down. That was the end of my career at war."
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He finished his
duty at NAS Memphis, and was honorably discharged from the Marines in August of 1952. "I signed up for three years, and they gave me four."
Wilhelm became a surveyor in civilian life, and was a chief
surveyor in a nine-state region for the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife. He retired in 1986, and he lives in Burnsville. He will be 73 in March. He and his wife, Fern, have two daughters and a
grandchild.
It has taken four operations over the years to allow Wilhelm to breath through his nose correctly.
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