OLA L. MIZE
Leading the determined defence of a hilltop position in South Korea on 10 June 1953, Sergeant Mize displayed tremendous heroism, rescuing wounded comrades and killing dozens of enemy soldiers
When the smoke cleared and the rattle of automatic weapons fire finally faded, 21-year-old Sergeant Ola Lee Mize and a handful of American infantrymen were left standing. Hours of brutal combat against the 22nd and 221st Regiments of the Chinese 74th Division were over, and scores of enemy bodies lay sprawled across the hillside known as Outpost Harry. Repeated enemy onslaughts had come to nothing, but the defenders had also paid a heavy price. Only 12 of the original 56 Americans manning the position had survived. Near the end of the Korean War, United Nations forces were contesting a Chinese offensive in mid-june 1953. American troops defending a 13,000-yard stretch of the front line near Surang-ni, South Korea, would eventually lose 174 killed and 824 wounded.
No ground was more bitterly contested than Outpost Harry, which was located in the ‘Iron Triangle’ about 60 miles northeast of the South Korean capital of Seoul and on the most direct route to the city.
When Mize made his way to a command post the morning after the fighting of
10-11 June had ended, officers asked who he was. The dirt and grime of combat obscured his face. He was wounded. His uniform was tattered, and some observers remembered that the vest he wore was actually smoking. When the young soldier responded, “Sergeant Mize,” an officer chirped, “You’re not Mize. He’s dead.”
Mize had survived an incredible ordeal and became an unlikely hero, ultimately receiving the Medal of Honor. The son of an Alabama sharecropper, he was practically blind in one eye due to a childhood accident and weighed only 120 pounds. Nevertheless, he would not accept the army’s initial rejection. He gained weight and practiced with spoons to pass the required vision test, deftly manipulating the paddle that supposedly covered one eye and then the other to pull off the illusion that he was switching eyes.
With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Mize was concluding service with the 82nd Airborne Division. Rather than attending college, he decided to re-enlist and requested a combat opportunity. It came on that hot June night, when Mize was a sergeant with Company K, 15th Infantry Regiment, Third Division.
Outpost Harry was located closer to the enemy, just 320 yards from Chinese lines, than the main United Nations perimeter, 425 yards away. One of three such outposts, the other two named Tom and Dick, Harry rose 1,280 feet. Holding the high ground was essential because it shielded a portion of the main United Nations line and the adjacent Kumwha Valley from Chinese observation and artillery fire.
The defence of Outpost Harry rotated with four US infantry companies and one Greek company occupying the position in turn.
For more than a week, the hill was under intermittent artillery and mortar barrages, a total of more than 88,000 shells falling on the defenders. On the morning of 10 June,
Captain Martin A. Markley of the 15th Regiment relayed orders to his command that an attack was imminent. He later commented, “All total there was a reinforced PVA [People’s Volunteer Army] regiment of approximately 3,600 enemy trying to kill us.” The Chinese attackers outnumbered Company K 30-to-1.
As night fell, Mize knew they were coming. He had seen a steady stream of Chinese trucks behind a distant ridgeline, but requests for artillery and airstrikes were denied as he was told the enemy was simply resupplying troops already in place. “Well,” he said. “If that’s what they’re doing they must have the whole Chinese Army in front of me because they have been moving trucks up at night with their lights on for the last five days.”
After receiving a call from a weapons squad leader, Mize moved up to a forward position to take a closer look. “Something was wrong near his position, and he couldn’t figure out what it was,” Mize recalled. “I climbed up and looked out over our trenchline, and there were bushes all over the place, within ten yards of our trenches. I said ‘Where the hell did all those bushes come from?’. About that time a
“M/SGT. MIZE’S CONDUCT AND UNFLINCHING COURAGE REFLECT LASTING GLORY UPON HIMSELF AND UPHOLD THE NOBLE TRADITIONS OF THE MILITARY SERVICE” Medal of Honor Citation
few of them moved. I just automatically started spraying the hell out of those bushes.
“There were bodies falling all over the place, and about that time they kicked off the artillery, and I thought the end of the world had come.” Mize had killed an estimated ten enemy infiltrators who had crept close, but the agony of Company K was just beginning.
An all-out, battalion-sized infantry assault followed the artillery barrage. “For the next two hours,” Mize remembered, “all I was doing was shooting Chinese as fast as they came over that trench line and filling the trench up with them.” He came across one of his men armed with a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle), swinging the weapon like a club at six Chinese soldiers. Mize shot all six of them.
When he heard that a soldier manning a listening post had been wounded, Mize set out with a corpsman to rescue the man and returned safely. He proceeded to organise a defensive system that disrupted the Chinese attack. Despite the fact that all Company K officers were dead or wounded, Mize and a few other soldiers maintained steady fire and hurled grenades at the enemy. They moved from bunker to bunker to give the impression that the Chinese were confronting a much larger defending force.
The concussion of enemy mortar rounds and exploding hand grenades knocked Mize off his feet three times, but he regained his composure and relentlessly fought the enemy, which regrouped and charged Outpost Harry repeatedly. When a Chinese soldier stepped behind an American and prepared to fire, Mize
shot him dead with a single bullet and then continued to encourage the men around him while distributing precious ammunition.
The Chinese wave overran several American positions. Mize remembered seeing a comrade’s throat cut and later described his response as going “battle crazy”. As enemy soldiers leaped into an American machine-gun position, Mize hurried to the scene and killed ten of them, putting the rest to flight. When he returned to his original position, his men were amazed that he was still alive.
A story of the sergeant’s combat prowess later circulated, asserting that he had dispatched the last of the Chinese soldiers in the machine-gun position with an entrenching tool after emptying the magazine of his M-1 carbine. Accordingly, a bronzed entrenching tool was hung proudly on the wall behind his desk in later years. Hand-to-hand combat was indeed common during those desperate hours.
Mize provided cover for several wounded men who could not immediately be evacuated. He found a radio and directed artillery fire on the attackers milling around the base of the hill. As the sun began to rise, he quickly pitched in to organise a counter-attack that finally drove the enemy back.
By the time the fighting of 10-11 June had ended, Company K had been reinforced by Companies C and E, 15th Infantry, and a platoon of tanks. Battered but unbroken, Mize’s men were soon relieved. For seven more days, the Chinese hammered away at Outpost Harry.
Their fury spent unsuccessfully, they withdrew after sustaining an estimated 5,250 killed and wounded. United Nations losses amounted to
655 dead and wounded and 44 missing in action.
Sergeant Ola Mize is believed to have singlehandedly accounted for 65 of the Chinese killed in defence of Outpost Harry. “I thought
I’d bought the farm,” he said in a postwar interview. “I just knew I was going to die. I knew it. I accepted it. All I wanted to do was take as many of them with me as I could.”
Sergeant Mize completed his tour of duty in Korea and was recommended for the Medal of Honor soon after the drama at Outpost
Harry. Initially, he refused his country’s highest honour for bravery in combat, stating that those who really deserved it were the men who died defending the desolate hill.
Promoted to master sergeant, Mize did accept the Medal of Honor from President Dwight D. Eisenhower on 7 September 1954. “I was scared to death, a country boy from northeast Alabama meeting the President of the United States,” he recalled. “He stood there and talked to me and put the medal around my neck. He saw I was nervous and said, ‘I would be too if I was as young as you are looking at an old crow like me.’”
Mize remained in the US Army, and along with 27 other Special Forces soldiers splashed ashore on a Normandy beach as an extra in the motion picture The Longest
He completed the Special Forces Officers Course and subsequently three tours of duty during the Vietnam War.
He led several Special Forces advanced training programmes and developed the Combat Divers Qualification Course. Leading Detachment B-36 of 3rd Mobile Strike Force Command in 1969, he was awarded the Silver Star for valour.
After 31 years of service, Mize retired with the rank of colonel in 1981. He died of cancer on 5 March 2014 at the age of 82.
Day.