Second Lieutenant James M. Mitchell, executive officer, temporarily took command of Company H. When word of Cooke’s death reached 3/7’s CP, Lieutenant Colonel William F. Harris[390] dispatched Lieutenant Harris (no relation), recently returned to duty after illness, to take over the beleaguered unit. [390] LtCol Harris, son of MajGen Field Harris, had relieved Maj Roach on 11 Nov. The younger Harris, who had been out of action since shortly after the “How Hill” battle in early November, safely ascended the enemy-infested slopes of Hill 1403 in the darkness. About midnight he reached How Company’s positions and found all of Cooke’s officers wounded but one, Lieutenant Newton. The platoons of Krieg and Denny were badly depleted, but Harris moved Newton’s platoon from the left flank to the right. Newton’s men regained enough ground in a counterattack to cement the company’s position. After these first attacks against 2/5 and H/7 over the two-mile breadth of Northwest Ridge, the Chinese remained generally inactive for a period of about two hours. They had paid heavily for minor gains--so heavily that fresh battalions were called from reserve to stamp out the Marine resistance on the tip of the ridge. And at 0300, several hundred CCF riflemen, grenadiers, and submachine gunners commenced the second general assault, striking at 2/5 and Company H simultaneously. In the low ground at the center of the two-mile front, Jaskilka’s Easy Company threw a curtain of machine-gun fire across the draw in the path of 300 Chinese advancing frontally. The first enemy ranks marched into the fire lanes and were mowed down like rows of grain. The CCF soldiers in subsequent formations apparently viewed the grisly, corpse-strewn corridor with misgivings, for they stopped several hundred yards up the narrow valley and took cover. Thereafter, the main fighting in Company E’s zone involved long-range exchanges of machine-gun and mortar fire, although clashes at close quarters occasionally flared up on the flanks. Approximately 200 Communist troops had concentrated meanwhile against Fox Company on the spur to the left, where the ground afforded more cover and space for maneuver. Stumbling over a carpet of their own dead, the Reds thrust repeatedly at the center of the Marine line. They inflicted many casualties on the defenders and ultimately overran two machine-gun positions. But this was the sum total of their success; and fighting on the north half of the spur, at the edge of the gap between Companies E and F, continued sporadically for the rest of the night with neither side gaining any appreciable advantage.