Capt. Martin Markley knew an attack was coming. Intelligence had spotted Chinese forces massing behind the ridgelines, and aerial reconnaissance confirmed attack preparations were being made by the 74th Division's 22nd and 221st Regiments.
On the evening of June 10, 1953, Markley briefed his men from K Company, 15th Infantry Regiment before sending them to their posts. His roughly 150 soldiers would defend a hilltop outpost barely 400 yards wide against overwhelming enemy forces.
The Chinese artillery started just after dark. More than 20,000 shells slammed into Outpost Harry, turning the Korean landscape into an apocalyptic view of fire and shrapnel. As the Americans took cover, they could hear the whistles and bugles as enemy soldiers surged up the slopes.
"All total, there was a reinforced PVA regiment of approximately 3,600 enemy trying to kill us," Markley later said.
The battle for Outpost Harry had begun. It wouldn't end for eight days.
Holding the Line Against the Chinese
American commanders positioned Outpost Harry on a 1,280-foot hill in Korea's Iron Triangle, a strategic zone that offered a direct invasion route to Seoul. The outpost sat 425 yards in front of the Main Line of Resistance — close enough to spot Chinese movements, but it was far enough out to be dangerously exposed.
Chinese forces occupied Star Hill just 320 yards to the north. They had been watching the outpost for weeks, building up forces and supplies.
The outpost itself consisted of a network of trenches deep enough for soldiers to move unseen, connecting reinforced bunkers, a command post and forward observation positions. The communication trench ran 400 yards from the supply point at the rear up to the hilltop, where it joined a circular trench system with fortified fighting positions. The entire position could accommodate roughly 150 infantrymen — a single company rotating in and out each night.
By early June 1953, the enemy preparations on Star Hill alerted American commanders. They gave their troops one order: Hold Harry at all costs.
The First Night of Combat on Outpost Harry
During the first night's assault, Chinese soldiers broke through the wire and poured into the trenches. American defenders gunned down countless enemy soldiers before fighting them off in brutal close-quarters combat. Meanwhile, American artillery shells exploded mid-air rather than on impact, ripping apart scores of Chinese troops.
During the fierce nighttime assault, Cpl. Donald L. Menken was hit by artillery fire and reported missing in action. The 21-year-old soldier from Kentucky would later be declared killed in action.
Sgt. Ola Mize, a 21-year-old from Alabama, had already faced enemy fire to rescue a wounded soldier when he saw Chinese troops overrun an American machine-gun nest. He charged the position alone, killed 10 attackers and forced the rest to flee.
Artillery blasts knocked him down three times. Each time, he got up and kept fighting — distributing ammunition, organizing defenses, protecting wounded soldiers and directing artillery strikes on enemy approach routes. Napalm wiped out scores of Chinese troops, those that reached the American lines were engaged in fierce melee combat.
When he saw an enemy soldier step behind an American comrade preparing to fire, Mize killed the attacker and saved his fellow soldier's life. When the command post came under attack, he moved to defend it. When the radio operator fell, Mize grabbed the handset and called in fire missions on Chinese reinforcement routes.
When dawn broke on June 11, the Chinese withdrew. Only a dozen Americans walked off the hill without serious wounds. The rest were dead or evacuated with injuries.
Mize later received the Medal of Honor for his actions. He initially refused the award, insisting recognition should go to his entire platoon.
Eight Nights, Five Companies
The Chinese came back the next night. And the night after that.
U.S. commanders rotated fresh companies onto the outpost each day, pulling off the battered survivors to regroup. A pattern developed where daylight allowed for the evacuation of casualties, resupply runs and drastic trench repairs under sniper fire. At nightfall, renewed Chinese assaults would hit the outpost.
The heroics of the first night were repeated time and time again as outnumbered American troops repelled thousands of Chinese soldiers.
As Chinese fire slammed into the outpost on the second night, Pfc. Charles Johnson’s bunker was destroyed by artillery. He was injured in the blast. As he tried to return fire, he was again injured by a grenade.
Ignoring his own injuries, Johnson began treating his comrades who were hurt worse than he was. He began dragging another soldier to a different bunker, stopping only to treat wounded troops along the way. As Chinese soldiers charged his position, Johnson killed several in hand-to-hand combat.
He organized as many wounded troops as he could find into a secure bunker, then ran outside to find weapons and ammunition. Realizing the Chinese were too many, he positioned himself at the entrance to the bunker and promised he would hold the enemy back as best as he could. He killed numerous Chinese troops, but died defending the bunker.
Johnson was initially awarded the Silver Star for his actions, which saved as many as 10 wounded troops, including one of his high school friends who later attributed his survival to Johnson.
Different companies from the 15th Infantry Regiment and 5th Regimental Combat Team took turns absorbing the attacks. American forces eventually positioned tanks and infantry in the valley east of Outpost Harry as diversionary forces, drawing Chinese attacks into predetermined artillery kill zones. The tactic worked, channeling the enemy assaults into devastating fields of fire that killed countless enemy troops before they reached the outpost.
This late in the war, American casualties had mounted so high that commanders needed reinforcements that were hard to come by. Almost every battalion in the 3rd Infantry Division had been bled dry and desperately needed time to refit and reorganize.
American commanders turned to the Greek Expeditionary Force for assistance.
The Spartans Answer the Call
The Greeks who arrived at Outpost Harry carried a proud lineage. Their battalion had been named for ancient Sparta, and the parallel to the Battle of Thermopylae — where 300 Spartans held a mountain pass against a massive Persian army — was not lost on anyone.
Greek soldiers had fought alongside American forces since December 1950, when 849 volunteers arrived in Busan after a long voyage from Athens. All had been hand-picked from Greece's 1st, 8th and 9th Infantry Divisions. Their officers were selected based on World War II and Greek Civil War combat experience and English fluency.
Over the previous two and a half years, the battalion had proven itself in brutal fighting across Korea — at Hill 381, Hill 489, and most notably at "Scotch Hill" in October 1952, where they'd suffered 105 casualties but held their ground against Chinese counterattacks.
Now, in June 1953, they called Outpost Harry by the name "Haros," after Charon, the mythological ferryman who carried souls across the river Styx to the underworld. It was dark soldier humor to explain the reality of what the small hill had become.
On June 16, Company P of the Sparta Battalion moved into the sector. They spent the daytime hours repairing trenches and reinforcing positions alongside engineers from the 10th Combat Engineer Battalion. Then the engineers withdrew, leaving the Greeks to face whatever the night would bring.
The Greeks Hold the Line
Chinese commanders spent June 15 and 16 assembling what remained of their 74th Division for one final push. The division had been shattered over the previous week of fighting, but they scraped together nearly 3,000 soldiers for a last desperate attempt to take the outpost before the ongoing armistice negotiations concluded.
The assault began around midnight on June 17. Chinese artillery pounded the hilltop, then infantry charged from the northeast and northwest simultaneously, moving through their own barrages and U.N. artillery fire. The Greeks opened fire.
The attackers quickly gained footholds on the northern slope and pushed into the trenches.
Like the Spartans at Thermopylae, Company P refused to withdraw. The Greek soldiers counterattacked immediately, meeting the Chinese in hand-to-hand combat in the narrow trench lines. They drove hundreds of attackers off the hill.
The Chinese regrouped and attacked again, retaking sections of the trench line in a second wave. Again, the Greeks launched heroically violent counterattacks. As the close-quarters battle raged on the hilltop, Greek forces dispatched a platoon to the east of the outpost — this lured enemy reinforcements into the American artillery kill zones, where they were again cut down before reaching the hill.
For two hours, the battle continued in the darkness — grenades, rifle fire, bayonets, and entrenching tools were used as weapons. Greek and Chinese soldiers grappled in the trenches while artillery from both sides flew overhead and napalm lit up the landscape.
Finally, the surviving Chinese pulled back. By the morning of June 18, the attacks had ceased entirely. The 74th Division retreated from the area, virtually wiped out during the battle.
It was the last Chinese assault on Outpost Harry.
The Price of Holding Outpost Harry
Over the eight-day battle, Chinese forces fired more than 88,000 artillery and mortar rounds at the small outpost. Impressive considering less than 200 troops occupied the hill at a time.
American and Greek artillery responded with 368,000 rounds. U.S. intelligence estimated that the entire Chinese 74th Division — approximately 13,000 soldiers — participated in the attacks.
When the battle ended, that division was combat ineffective. Chinese casualties reached roughly 4,200 killed and wounded, with many more missing.
Allied losses totaled 102 killed, 553 wounded, and 44 missing. The Greek battalion alone suffered 15 killed, 36 wounded, and one missing.
For their defense of the outpost, five U.N. companies received Presidential Unit Citations — four American and one Greek, marking the first time in U.S. military history that so many units earned the decoration for a single shared mission. The American units honored were Companies K, B, and A of the 15th Infantry Regiment, and Company F of the 65th Infantry Regiment.
Why Outpost Harry Mattered
Just 50 miles away at Panmunjom, negotiators were hammering out the final terms of a Korean War armistice. The fighting at Outpost Harry occurred during the war's last month of active combat.
Chinese commanders wanted the position to gain leverage in negotiations and improve their observation of American lines. American commanders needed to demonstrate resolve and deny the enemy any strategic advantage before the ceasefire.
Both sides paid dearly for it. Aside from Outpost Harry, thousands of troops were killed leading up to the armistice.
On July 27, 1953, the armistice took effect, and the fighting ceased under the agreement's terms. But the successful eight-day defense had helped ensure that when the fighting stopped, the front lines favored United Nations forces.
Sgt. Ola Mize went on to serve three tours in Vietnam with the Army Special Forces, eventually rising to the rank of colonel before retiring in 1981. Pfc. Charles Johnson’s Silver Star was later upgraded to the Medal of Honor and presented to his sister by President Joe Biden in January of 2025.
Cpl. Donald L. Menken's remains were finally identified and repatriated in 2022 — nearly 69 years after he fell defending Outpost Harry. He was laid to rest in his hometown in Kentucky.
More than seven decades later, that hilltop sits in the middle of the Demilitarized Zone. Despite its small size and seemingly insignificant strategic value, Outpost Harry saw some of the heaviest fighting of the Korean War. Unlike Thermopylae, though, the Greeks — and Americans — managed to hold their position. They even destroyed an entire Chinese division in the process.
