One of the projects I’m working on these days is a documentary film about a Utah National Guard battalion that fought several major battles in the Korean War and yet returned home miraculously with no fatalities. I’ve written about the 213 Field Artillery Battalion here before, but today, I thought I’d bring you up-to-date on what we are finding in our background research for the film.
Lately, we’ve been looking at the “enemy” — the Chinese unit that was so beaten up by the Utah National Guard. In one battle, “The Second Battle of Gapyeong,” on May 26, 1951, the Utah battalion, actually two batteries of the battalion, faced a surprise attack from a Chinese division, or at least a regiment or two of that division, maybe 4,000 soldiers. There were 240 on the Utah side, and though greatly outnumbered and caught off-guard by the surprise attack in the middle of the night, and though they had to fight with their small arms and machine guns — they couldn’t use their artillery in those close quarters — the Utah soldiers were able to kill 350 Chinese and capture 831 prisoners, without a single fatality on the Utah side — “the Miracle of Gapyeong.”
In doing the research on the film,........