_The Assault Plan--Beginning the Ship-to-Shore Movement--Seizure of Cemetery Hill--RED Beach Secured--LSTs under Enemy Fire--Fighting on Observatory Hill--1st Marines on BLUE Beach--Ending the Ship-to-Shore Movement--Seizure of the O-1 Line_ The concept of the amphibious envelopment of the North Korean Peoples Army, together with the actual assault on Inchon by United States Marines, constituted heresy to that school of wishful thinkers which sprang to life as World War II faded in the first brilliant flashes of the Atomic Age. Widely accepted and noisily proclaimed was the belief, perhaps sincere, perhaps convenient, that the nuclear and aeronautical sciences had relegated armies, navies, and man himself to insignificant positions in the waging of war. The massing of ships and field forces, it was argued, was a thing of the past; for the next war, if humanity dared risk another, would be decided in weeks or even days with the power unleashed by electronic and mechanical devices--many of which in 1950 were still in rudimentary stages on drawing boards. This was the controversial “push-button” theory of war which left the peace-loving nations of the world unprepared in 1950 for violent aggression by the tough little peasant army of North Korea, supported by some 100 tanks and a few hundred artillery pieces. And to the premature acceptance of this theory by a large section of the American public may be attributed many of the major shortcomings of the Inchon assault, as it unfolded in the evening of 15 September. That the operation succeeded despite these shortcomings and the myriad natural handicaps amounts almost to a tactical miracle. In the words of General Smith, “... half of the problem was in getting to Inchon at all.”[128] The tremendous obstacles overcome in solving that “half of the problem” have already been treated at length; and it remains now, in the short space of a chapter, to show how the other half became history. [128] LtGen O. P. Smith memo to authors, 28 Feb 55. _The Assault Plan_ Aboard the _Henrico_ and _Cavalier_ in the Inchon narrows on 15 September were the 1st and 2d Battalions, 5th Marines, yanked out of the Pusan Perimeter ten days earlier. Having had no time for a rehearsal and only a few days for planning on the basis of admittedly sketchy intelligence, these two units would scale the sea wall of RED Beach and plunge into the dense waterfront area of the sprawling seaport.