This is just an interesting story...
When he became a company commander in the Korean War, serving as a captain in the 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, he seemed a visage from battlefields past with his red handlebar mustache. On Feb. 7, 1951, he employed a tactic of bygone wars with a fury that overwhelmed the enemy.
During the fighting near Osan, South Korea, Captain Millett’s unit encountered Communist troops atop a spot called Hill 180.
It would be remembered as Bayonet Hill for what the military historian Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall would call “the most complete bayonet charge by American troops since Cold Harbor,” a reference to the carnage at an 1864 Civil War battle in Virginia.
After ordering his men to fix bayonets, Captain Millett charged up the hill in front of them in the face of heavy fire, blasting away with his carbine, throwing grenades and, most spectacularly, wielding his bayonet when he encountered three enemy soldiers in a V-shaped gun position.
“I assaulted an antitank rifle crew,” he told Military History magazine in 2002. “The man at the point was the gunner. I bayoneted him. The next man reached for something, I think it was a machine pistol, but I bayoneted him — got him in the throat.”
The third soldier had a submachine gun.
“I guess the sight of me, red-faced and screaming, made him freeze,” he recalled. “Otherwise he would have killed me. I lunged forward and the bayonet went into his forehead. With the adrenaline flowing you’re strong as a bull. It was like going into a watermelon.”
Captain Millett was wounded by grenade fragments, but his men took the hill. President Harry S. Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor in July 1951. As the citation put it, “His dauntless leadership and personal courage so inspired his men that they stormed into the hostile position and used their bayonets with such lethal effect that the enemy fled in wild disorder.”
Read the full obituary here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/us/19millett.html?hpw
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