Supported by 2,063 guns, including over two hundred Soviet-made 203-millimeter Corps-level howitzers which the South Koreans did not even know the North possessed, the invasion front now stretched seventeen miles from Kim’s tank and rifle regiments in the west to his four divisions east above Uijongbu.
A Newsweek reporter filed a story about how the big Russian-made 203-millimeter howitzers — part of the price Moscow had paid Kim Il Sung for sending a small but politically highly symbolic contingent of NKA “volunteers” in 1979 to aid the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — were all mobile, with self-contained tractor-trucks and sixteen-man crews, who were laying down huge variable-bag charges and high-explosive shells at a round a minute, hurling each two-hundred-pound projectile over seventeen miles into Seoul. When the story reached Newsweek’s Tokyo office, en route to the United States, an editor did not consider the part about the circumstances under which the USSR had given the North Koreans the guns to be of “general interest,” and that section was cut as being too dry. In fact, the circumstances under which the guns were given by the USSR to the NKA would have profound implications within the next seventy-six hours, not only for the beleaguered U.S.-ROK forces in South Korea but for the rest of the world.
Meanwhile the world looked on, stunned by the rapidity of the NKA advance and the concomitant humiliation of the Americans. In one brilliant move, primarily through the use of the tunnels, the NKA had not only succeeded in launching an attack beneath and beyond the DMZ in several places, but in doing so, had now trapped over ten thousand “forward troops” of ROK-U.S. command, which had included Major Tae and his intelligence unit. In what was already being called the “squeeze box,” caught between Kim’s troops, who were overrunning the DMZ, and his four crack divisions — over fifty thousand attacking farther south from the tunnels — the zone between the two NKA armies was to be a killing ground unless the surrounded Americans and South Koreans could somehow fight their way out through an escape corridor blasted out by the U.S. Air Force.
It was a dim hope, for at the same time as the Backfires’ attack on Pohang was taking place, all the major air bases throughout the South, including those at Ulsan and Pusan, thirty and sixty miles south of Pohang, were attacked by small, mobile heavy mortar units of activated NKA infiltrators trained in the 124th guerrilla units. At Kwangju in the southwest, an infiltrator group was caught in the process of setting up an eighty-one-millimeter mortar for a concentrated triangle of fire — fifty rounds for the mortar neatly stacked in carefully prepared and camouflaged dumps. This early alarm saved the six F-4 Phantoms normally parked at Kwangju, but the other airstrips came under withering twenty-six-rounds-a-minute heavy mortar fire, effectively destroying the core of the U.S.-ROK’s air interceptor defense, a defense that in the 1950–1953 war had blunted the NKA’s dash southward to Pusan.
The ‘50-’53 war, however, and Vietnam, particularly the North Vietnamese Communists’ siege of Khe Sahn, had taught the NKA and the 350,00 °Chinese volunteers in that war that while enemy air power alone could not win a conventional war, its ability to play havoc with your supply lines and to resupply its own troops, giving them valuable breathing space even to the point of enabling them to mount a counterattack, could be formidable. For General Kim the only answer to this was the present byorak kongkyok— “lightning war”—in which the primary objectives, the enemy’s air bases, had been taken out by the NKA’s own air strikes or, as in most cases, had been rendered inoperative so swiftly from within that the United States, even with its massive reserves in Japan and its B-52 bases in Okinawa, would be unable to catch its breath before Korea was lost.