By Mark Peterson
In the past two years, after hearing about an unusual battle in the middle of the Korean War between a Utah National Guard battalion and two regiments of Chinese "volunteers," I've been helping make a documentary film about the battle.
Though I am a Korean historian, I haven't specialized in the Korean War, nor for that matter, in the 20th century, but this story came knocking at my door in that it involved an artillery battalion from my home state of Utah. The essence of the story is that a battalion of about 600 men was attacked by two Chinese regiments, between 3,000 and 4,000 men. The Utah boys were outnumbered not by 3,500 to 600 but 3,500 to 240 because the surprise attack came in the middle of the night upon two "batteries" — like companies for infantry, so the ratio was about 15 to 1. Three other batteries were not involved.
And in spite of the surprise nature of the attack, in the middle of the night, and in spite of the overwhelming numbers, the Utah batteries lost not one man! The Chinese tallied 350 killed and 831 captured. The battle has come to be known as the "Miracle at Gapyeong."
Gapyeong County, formerly known as Kapyong, is located 50 miles northeast of Seoul and was considered the easternmost of four major corridors — routes through valleys — into Seoul.
Seoul had been captured once by the Chinese in the winter of 1950–51 but retaken by ROK-U.N. forces in the early spring of 1951. By late spring, April and May, the Chinese started their "spring offensive" to retake Seoul. They were prevented from doing so.
The documentary we are making is going to tell the story. The 213th Artillery Battalion from southern Utah, with five batteries each from five small cities, Cedar City, St. George, Beaver, Richfield and Fillmore, was mobilized to fight in the Korean War in the fall of 1950. They were first sent to Fort Lewis in the Seattle area, where their numbers, around 450, were augmented to 600 by regular U.S. Army soldiers from around the country and where they were trained for combat.
I've learned that a documentary film has several stages — preparation, filming, editing and then screening. We've completed the filming, basically, and are in the editing stage. We have found five veterans of the battle and recorded interviews with them. Three of the five have since died. We recently found two more. These men were 20-year-olds 71 years ago. Most have been clear-headed and remember events of the war. We found two others who had no clear recollections of those days.
We've been to today's Gapyeong and filmed the location of the battle, including some dynamic drone footage.
The "Miracle" battle took place on May 26. But if one looks up "the Battle of Gapyeong," one finds a larger battle that took place in April that involved the Canadian and Australian Infantries. That battle can easily be found on the internet, and several movies have been made about it because of the valiant fighting of the Aussies and the Canucks, who fought for three days against an overwhelming Chinese invasion that saw the collapse of the ROK 6th division.
The ROK 6th reassembled — one of the great comeback stories of the war — and fought to regain its honor and sent the Chinese in the sector east of Seoul into retreat. It was while retreating that the Chinese ran into the 213th in the middle of the night.
The question arises: were the Chinese fighting harder as they attacked in April or in May as they were retreating? The retreat was necessitated by their defeats on Mount Yongmun in Yangpyeong County, south of Gapyeong. Were soldiers running for their lives fighting harder than those who initiated an attack on an objective? I think that is hard to quantify, but it was clear when they were overwhelmed by the defense and then the counterattack of the 213th that they were beaten, and thus many surrendered. The majority of Chinese prisoners of the Korean War were captured in the final days of their failed "spring offensive."
And the Miracle Battle of Gapyeong was in the middle of all of that. The 831 Chinese prisoners of war were sent to Koje Island, and many, when the war was over, were allowed to "return" — not to mainland China — but to Taiwan because many had previously been in the Kuomintang Army of Chiang Kai-shek defeated by Mao when he took over China in late 1949.
The story is incredible on many levels. If any of you know more about it or the fate of the prisoners, please let me know. And we are still looking for financial backing to finish the editing.
Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
Documentary on 'Miracle of Gapyeong' battle
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19.02.2024
By Mark Peterson In the past two years, after hearing about an unusual battle in the middle of the Korean War between a Utah National Guard battalion and two regiments of Chinese "volunteers," I've been helping make a documentary film about the battle.
Though I am a Korean historian, I haven't specialized in the Korean War, nor for that matter, in the 20th century, but this story came knocking at my door in that it involved an artillery battalion from my home state of Utah. The essence of the story is that a battalion of about 600 men was attacked by two Chinese regiments, between 3,000 and 4,000 men. The Utah boys were outnumbered not by 3,500 to 600 but 3,500 to 240 because the surprise attack came in the middle of the night upon two "batteries" — like companies for infantry, so the ratio was about 15 to 1. Three other batteries were not involved.
And in spite of the surprise nature of the attack, in the middle of the night, and in spite of the overwhelming numbers, the Utah batteries lost not one man! The Chinese tallied 350 killed and 831 captured. The battle has come to be known as the "Miracle at Gapyeong."
Gapyeong County, formerly known as........
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