sive to allow time to reinforce Seoul and withdraw troops from the south. Though warned that the process of taking Seoul would allow remaining NKPA forces in the south to escape, MacArthur felt that he was bound to honor promises given to the South Korean government to retake the capital as soon as possible.
On the second day, vessels carrying the U.S. Army's 7th Infantry Division arrived in Inchon Harbor. General Edward "Ned" Almond was eager to get the division into position to block a possible enemy movement from the south of Seoul. On the morning of September 18, the division's 2nd Battalion of the 32nd Infantry Regiment landed at Inchon and the remainder of the regiment went ashore later in the day. The next morning, the 2nd Battalion moved up to relieve a U.S. Marine battalion occupying positions on the right flank south of Seoul. Meanwhile, the 7th Division's 31st Regiment came ashore at Inchon. Responsibility for the zone south of Seoul highway passed to 7th Division at 6:00 pm on September 19. The 7th Infantry Division then engaged in heavy fighting on the outskirts of Seoul.
Before the battle, North Korea had just one understrength division in the city, with the majority of its forces south of the capital. MacArthur personally oversaw the 1st Marine Regiment as it fought through North Korean positions on the road to Seoul. Control of Operation Chromite was then given to Major General Edward Almond, the X Corps commander. It was Almond's goal to take Seoul on September 25, exactly three months after the beginning of the war. On September 22, the Marines entered Seoul to find it heavily fortified. Casualties mounted as the forces engaged in desperate house-to-house fighting. Anxious to pronounce the conquest of Seoul, Almond declared the city liberated on September 25 despite the fact that Marines were still engaged in house-to-house combat (gunfire and artillery could still be heard in the northern suburbs).
The last North Korean troops in South Korea still fighting were defeated when General Walton Walker's 8th Army broke out of the Pusan perimeter, joining the Army's X Corps in a coordinated attack on NKPA forces. Of the 70,000 NKPA troops around Pusan, more than half were killed or captured. However, because UN forces had concentrated on taking Seoul rather than cutting off the NKPA's withdrawal north, the remaining 30,000 North Korean soldiers escaped to the north across the Yalu River, where they were soon reconstituted as a cadre for the formation of new NKPA divisions hastily re-equipped by the Soviet Union. The allied assault continued north to the Yalu River until the intervention of the People's Republic of China in the war.
The Battle of Inchon was the subject of the 1981 movie, Inchon, featuring Sir Laurence Olivier, although it did poorly critically and at the box office amid controversy over it being financed by a company, One Way Productions, affiliated with Unification Church leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon. A companion novel, Oh, Inchon! by Robin Moore, was also published.
The battle was briefly featured in the 1977 film, MacArthur, starring Gregory Peck.
The song "Inchon," by Robert W. Smith, depicts the battle.
The W.E.B. Griffin novel, Under Fire, gives a fictionalized account of the political and personal maneuvering that occurred during MacArthur's development of the Inchon invasion plan.
All links retrieved May 17, 2016.
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