Chapter Eleven

Black Snow

You may come to the moment when you will have to fight

with all the odds against you and only a

precarious chance of survival.

Sir Winston Churchill

Dawn, 30 November. South of Hagaru-ri.

A lone figure in bulky khaki trudged through a white wilderness: Corporal Dave Brady. The commando who had escaped ‘Hellfire Valley’ was lost among the hills, but as the temperature inched up with sunrise, appetite asserted itself. He sat, dug into a pocket, fished out a tin of rations and cracked it open: frozen fruit. He shovelled it down. Then, in shock from the previous night, exhausted from his exertions and knowing that the hills around were infested with enemy, Brady subsided into a depression in the snow. Common sense and commando training told him this was suicidal in the savage cold, but he was past caring. He curled into a foetal position.

Brady dreamed. In his dream, he was soaring high above the snowscape: a ground attack pilot. Looking down, he saw a figure below: himself. Realisation: He was indistinguishable from a Chinese. Terror of napalm jerked him awake. His subconscious had saved him. He struggled to his feet – then dropped back into the snow.

Figures had appeared on a ridge ahead. ‘This is it!’ he thought. Then he caught a glimpse of colour: green headgear. Brady’s heart jumped. He staggered forward. The big joker – one of the most visible characters in 41 Commando – was recognised instantly, and welcomed by a half a dozen commandos, led by Captain Pat Ovens, his troop commander. But this was no time for a joyous reunion. The group set off through the hills, plodding south, parallel to the road.

Among them was a US marine, shot through the leg; the commandos took it in turns to assist him. Despite his wound, the American remained cheerful, lifting Brady’s spirits. The landscape was motionless; only the commandos moved through the silent hills and valleys. A clatter above: A helicopter! The aircraft circled, then began to descend. A hidden machine gun spat a burst of fire – invisible enemy were still wide awake – the helicopter, vulnerable to ground fire, lifted away. Ovens’ group walked on. Looking around their faces, Brady was reminded of post-battle photos he had seen: Each man wore a harrowed expression, but Ovens’ bloodshot eyes retained a spark of determination.

For hours, they walked. Once again, light began to die. Mindful that darkness would summon the enemy, Brady – no churchgoer – found himself praying. ‘Let me survive,’ he pleaded under his breath. The religious conversion was interrupted by a metallic click ahead: a weapon. There followed a whispered conversation between Ovens and someone – someone with an American accent. In the gloom, Brady made out holes occupied by marines. It was the Koto perimeter. ‘Thank you, God!’ Brady exulted. Ovens had led them to safety.¹

Other members of the Assault Engineer Troop had greeted sunup in different circumstances. Marine Andrew Condron, the Scottish commando separated from Ovens in the chaos, remained huddled among the Americans who had escaped the road. Some had lit fires. By dawn’s light, Condron recognised a wounded US marine driver. The man had been shot in the hip, so Condron dragged him over to a fire, cut away his trousers, shook disinfectant powder into the bullet hole, and dressed the wound. Kneeling in the snow, tending the marine, he heard a grunt behind him. Looking round he saw a South Korean in a snow cape. ‘This chap was standing there pointing a Thompson at me, so I ignored him,’ he said. Another grunt. Condron guessed the man was shell shocked, but was getting fed up; he unslung his own rifle and was about to ‘have a go at him’ when an American said, ‘Hey buddy, you better throw down that rifle – we’ve surrendered!’ The ‘South Korean’ was a Chinese. Enemy appeared all around. He and the Americans stood glumly around the fires as Chinese relieved them of weapons. Then they were marched off into the hills.

In another desolate group was George Richards, the corporal who had expected to meet only ‘stray guerillas’ in North Korea. He gazed wistfully skyward. To the north, aircraft were circling, objects dropping from their rears. Parachutes flared as supplies in swaying lines drifted down to the airhead that had been the taskforce’s target.

* * *

Those commandos who had battled through to Hagaru – many still coming down from the adrenalin peaks scaled while running the gauntlet – gazed around as dawn illuminated their surroundings. The village-base was as bleak as Koto, but more open to the elements. There was the settlement itself: Several hundred wooden cottages and huts; a handful of brick buildings; a sawmill cutting timber to strengthen defensive positions. Around the buildings were hundreds of grey-green US marine tents, canvas roofs sagging under snow. Equipment – ration boxes, ammunition crates, fuel drums – was heaped everywhere. Radio aerials jutted skyward; elevated artillery barrels pointed at the hills. Splashes of yellow, orange, red, blue and green enlivened the bleakness: parachute silks draped over the terrain. Engineers’ bulldozers were still grinding though the snow, dredging the emergency airstrip from the deep-frozen terrain. Dotted all around, on the ridges and the low ground, was a ragged necklace of foxholes, with, among them, stationary, snow-coated tanks, cannons outboard. Looking across the frozen Changjin River, with its stone bridge, was the great bulk of East Hill, dominating Hagaru like an ogre’s castle, its crest scoured by the ferocious winds the marines called ‘the Siberian Express’.

The outlook remained grim. The break-in through Hellfire Valley had entangled them further in the Chinese net, 11 miles deeper in enemy territory. Hagaru was no sanctuary: it was surrounded, besieged. Germans on the Eastern Front in the Second World War would have dubbed Hagaru a kessel – a cauldron. Taskforce Drysdale’s survivors had exchanged the frying pan for the fire.

Among those checking the lay of the land was Lieutenant John Walter, the officer whose first driving experience had been the night before. After crashing through into the base, Walter had crashed out in a peasant hut. Beside the hut was a large, marquee-style tent; stacked outside were weapons of every calibre. Walter – armed with the derided carbine that so many men found lacked stopping power in the cold – ‘went rummaging’, acquiring a Colt .45 and a .45 calibre sub-machine gun. ‘A .45 does the job marvellously well,’ he said. But it was no armoury that Walter had stumbled upon. Those inside the tent had no further use for their weapons. This was a field hospital.

None of the twenty-five wounded members of 41 Commando at Hagaru would ever forget the medical conditions inside the cauldron. Gordon Payne, who had waded across the river then crunched for hours through the snow on frozen feet, had been taken directly to the dressing station with the rest of his party. ‘I could not feel my feet at all,’ he said. ‘They were absolutely dead.’ Stumbling through the frosted canvas flaps and into the tent’s dim interior, Payne was taken aback: This was not the well-equipped MASH that UNC troops had come to expect.

Petrol lamps illuminated a Crimean scene. Stretchers were strewn everywhere, piled with young men reclining in various states. In one corner was a jumble of used dressings, crusted with blood and pus. Behind a screen at the end of the tent was the operating theatre. The fuggy heat triggered re-function of iced-up nasal passages, accessing a sickly, rotten stench: gas gangrene. Above all hummed a strange sound: The low keening of scores of agonised men moaning quietly.

Orderlies arrived. Payne’s boots were cut away, then socks; the wool had frozen to the flesh of his feet. The rest of his party was undergoing the same treatment. ‘We all had frostbite to some degree,’ Payne said: his own toes had turned dark blue. But he was not the worst: ‘One had all black toes, and the front parts of his feet [were] also black,’ Payne recalled. ‘He lost all his toes and parts of his feet.’ Payne was placed near the stove. In the heat, circulation gradually returned. And with sensation, agony – for in one of nature’s cruel ironies, frost burns like fire. ‘It was terrible, absolutely painful,’ he recalled. ‘There was no anaesthetic, they had nothing to give us for pain, just coffee laced with medical alcohol to thin the blood and get circulation going.’ Payne’s time at the stove did not last. Urgent wounded were carried in from the perimeter. Payne was moved outside, where, on straw among mounds of wounded, he drifted to sleep under an ice-stiff tarpaulin.

Another man outside was Marine Geoff King. Waking up in the dressing station, his memory was a blank, but he had a pad and brace on his stomach; sharp, cramping pain brought back the memory of the Chinese bayonet. Seeing amputations underway, he asked to be taken outside. Bullets cracked in from infiltrators; King, lying wounded, got hold of an M1.

Corporal Raymond Todd, with a round through his right arm and another in his left chest, was helped to a different medical station, in the village schoolhouse. The medics were swamped. For the first time, Todd saw triage in action. ‘One man was assessing the wounded,’ he said. ‘Dead or dying were left outside and eventually moved to a small tent.’ Scanning bodies, recognition hit Todd, ‘like a kick in the stomach.’ One of his best friends, Petty Officer Tate, lay among them. Todd was motioned inside, but only after reluctantly giving up his hand grenades and pistol: ‘I thought they were crazy, Chinese were 400 yards away,’ he said. He was lifted onto a trestle where, ‘they patched me up, enough to keep me alive’. Then he was handed a mug of steaming coffee.

Looking around, Todd winced at the condition of some ROK troops, horribly frostbitten: Their hands were bloated lumps of great black blisters. Nursing his coffee, Todd felt ‘quite restful’, despite the occasional bullet hitting the outside walls. Friends were at hand. A commando officer shot through both lungs was propped against one wall: he seemed ‘quite cheerful’. Later, a Commando SBA arrived and offered to remove the bullet in Todd’s chest; the round was visible under a black bruise near a rib. ‘I managed to dissuade him,’ Todd said. ‘I don’t think he had the right equipment even though he was keen to have a go.’

One commando ended up on the wrong end of triage. Fred Hayhurst, shot through the leg, had been deposited in a hut by marines, who then departed. Inside was dark and silent. There were no lanterns, no stove. As his eyes accustomed to the gloom, Hayhurst could make out other wounded stacked around him. He started asking questions. Nobody replied. Nobody seemed to be moving. Nor did any orderly arrive. Some time later, the door opened and a head poked in. Hayhurst begged for a drink. The head disappeared as the man took off running. Hayhurst was mystified, until the runner returned, reinforced with two more marines. A torch was thrust into the commando’s face. ‘You’re not supposed to be in here,’ a voice drawled. ‘This is the morgue!’ Every man stacked around him, Hayhurst realised, was dead.

He was taken to a dressing station in a village cottage; mercifully, it was equipped with a cosy Korean underfloor heating system. By now, his leg had completely seized up. A field dressing was clagged on and he was given a tetanus shot but no other treatment was available. ‘I just had to sit there and listen to this firing, mortar fire, and everything else going on,’ he said.

* * *

Other commandos were discovering what close shaves they had had. Jack Edmonds, the SBS man, had slept in a hut with his pack still on. When he awoke, someone drew his attention to it: It had been shredded by a burst of fire but the rations stashed inside had saved him: The frozen tins were embedded with bullets. In the combat chaos, Edmonds had not even felt the impact.

41’s morale reasserted itself. ‘We felt that whenever things were going well, the Americans were probably better than we were, they had tremendous dash,’ said Marine Teddy Allen, the sharpshooter who had made his first kill the previous morning. ‘But when things were not going very well, we were better than they were. We didn’t lose morale the way they did.’

How many men had cleared Hellfire Valley? This was not yet known. Corporal Ron Moyse found his commanding officer and the RSM sitting on 44-gallon drums in the peasant hut serving as Commando HQ. ‘Drysdale asked me, “Where have you come from?” I told him. He said, “How many men were with you?”’ Just 125 members of the Commando who had started out from Koto-ri the previous morning – a lifetime away for so many members of the unit – had made it to Hagaru; the unit had suffered sixty-one killed, wounded or missing.² Moyse told Drysdale of the losses. For a moment, it looked as if the iron commander’s resolution would crack. ‘He was nearly in tears,’ Moyse said. ‘But being the kind of guy he was he pulled himself up; he had to come to terms with it. He was a very strong man.’

Taskforce Drysdale had lost 321 men and 75 vehicles, but its mission had been accomplished: it had reinforced the lynchpin of 1st MARDIV’s survival. ‘By its partial success, the taskforce made a significant contribution to the holding of Hagaru,’ Major General OP Smith would later state. ‘To the slender garrison … were added a tank company and some 300 seasoned infantry.’³ The tanks, and the US marines of George Company – the first elements to punch into the base – had been inserted into the perimeter immediately upon arrival.

The decimated commando, reformed into two amalgamated fighting troops, was tasked as garrison mobile reserve, to be used to plug any gaps in the perimeter if the Chinese broke through, as well as for offensive jobs. In a siege, reserve is the critical role. ‘A situation like Hagaru required that you had your best in reserve,’ said the base’s infantry commander, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Ridge of the 3rd Battalion, First Marines.⁴ ‘OP Smith knew the strength of Drysdale,’ added Lieutenant ‘John’ Lee Jong-yun, the Korean student assigned to the marines in the summer and now division liaison with local civilians. ‘He wanted them in the pivotal section.’

Lee was astounded by the strange new arrivals. ‘Usually any unit – regardless of whether they were marines or soldiers – after they engage in severe fighting, they are full of concern, but these were joking with each other,’ he said. ‘They were real professionals. I thought they’d be half-dead, but they were upright, full of fighting spirit: green berets!’

The commandos’ numbers were paltry, yet US marines seemed delighted to see another UNC contingent joining the battle. ‘We were welcomed out of all proportion to the benefit they were getting,’ said Walter. ‘It was just the feeling of someone on their side.’ And one American was formally welcomed to 41 Commando. When Drysdale noticed that US Corporal Don Saunchegrow, who had driven so brilliantly the previous night, was short of kit, he ordered him to outfit himself from the pack of one of the commandos who had not made it; the CO then made him a gift of his own beret.⁵

41 Commando’s first day at Hagaru passed. Daylight faded; early winter darkness descended. With it came the murderous cold. Base thermometers dropped to minus 25 degrees. And out of the darkness, came the enemy.

The first indication of impending assault was an unnerving sound beyond the perimeter: clashing cymbals. Then, at 20:15 a bugle blared, and a green flare burst in the sky. Action commenced on the low ground. Rounds from marine tanks ignited a pair of huts; their blaze illuminated charging crowds of attackers. Massed machine gun fire tore across their ranks, leaving lines of dead and wounded on the snow. On the high ground, on an outcrop of East Hill, was positioned Captain Carl Sitter’s George Company, the commandos’ comrades from Hellfire Valley. The attacking force, visible due to flares sputtering above and seventy drums of blazing aviation fuel ignited by a mortar bomb below, appeared like a ‘great shadow’ moving over the snow. Marine mortars and artillery blew terrible holes in their ranks.⁶ ‘There were machine guns and everything firing that night, a mass of light,’ said the young Marine Michael O’Brien. ‘You don’t see a perimeter, you just see pockets of people firing out.’ This was now a general attack; Hagaru was being assaulted by elements of two enemy divisions.⁷

In his CP – a peasant cottage with a portrait of Stalin adorning the wall – a pipe-smoking figure stood in the doorway, silently watching the fighting. General OP Smith had moved his base from the lowlands and set up here on 28 November, at the centre of the beleaguered division. The quiet general did not interfere with battle management at the tactical level; Smith let his subordinate commanders carry out their tasks. As the dark hours ticked by, the danger on the East Hill foothold mounted; Sitter’s men were being overrun. The garrison reserve was called upon for its first task. 41 Commando’s Baker Troop was ordered to counterattack on George’s flank and secure Sitter’s marines.

* * *

B Troop was considered 41’s best sub-unit, an elite within an elite.⁸ Lieutenant Gerald Roberts briefed his commandos. ‘We were told the Chinese had broken through, they had overrun the position on the hill that overlooked the village,’ said Edmonds. ‘We were sent up.’ Given his numbers – B Troop numbered only thirty-seven men⁹ – Roberts opted not to assault in the American style: ‘We’ll do it the Royal Marines way!’ he told his men.¹⁰ Roberts would generate battlefield shock by stealth and surprise; this operation would be stiletto rather than sledgehammer.

The troop spread out into assault lines and advanced silently across the open ground between the village and the objective. It loomed, a great black mass, topped by violent flashes of light where George Company was battling. Approaching, Allen watched green and red tracers crisscrossing overhead in the blackness. ‘One was not conscious of being under fire, but you could see it incoming,’ he said. ‘It was rather beautiful.’ As the range closed, Allen’s concern mounted: ‘I was sort of ridiculously trying to walk closely behind the chap in front, lining him up so he’d be hit first!’

On the hill, Sitter remained in charge, but wounded and anxious: he had no reserves left and the enemy was poised to overrun the remnants of his men. It was now approximately 04:00, 1 December.¹¹

Roberts led his men up the steepest spur of the hill, using rock gullies as his avenues of advance. Iced up, these were tricky to climb and the angle of the rock was so abrupt that the commandos approaching the crest were crawling. Tanks below shot cover over the commandos’ heads, their fire was so close that the crawling line halted, hugging frosted rock. ‘There were tanks firing, we did not know if they were theirs or ours,’ said Allen. ‘One was just lying there, one froze up completely.’ By now the commandos were just below the skyline. O’Brien could hear wounded marines screaming for corpsmen. Leopard-crawling past casualties, he whispered, ‘You’ll be alright in a minute.’¹² The tank fire lifted. For the commandos on the rock face, the tension wound up to its maximum – then was released. Roberts ordered the assault.

The silent attack went noisy. Sliding and struggling to their feet, the commandos stormed forward, hurling hand grenades and firing on the run. Edmonds watched a fellow commando, Jim Stanley get shot. Stanley spun down with a bullet through the arm – his shooter turned to run – he was gunned down. Few other enemy reacted so effectively. The majority were completely shocked by these attackers who had materialised out of nowhere that they scattered, fleeing before the assault wave.

After the long, dicey approach, the attack had taken mere minutes to clear the position. Roberts’ surprise tactic was vindicated: B Troop suffered just three men wounded. Stanley, the gunshot commando – his arm almost torn off by an explosive bullet – was laid on a groundsheet and slid down one of the hillside gullies, ‘like a sledge,’ recalled Edmonds. The commandos dug in to secure the height. ‘All you were doing was scraping in,’ said Allen. ‘There were trees in front of us, and I am sure I saw someone climbing up, but in the morning it looked completely different, it did not look anything like it had hours earlier.’

With daylight, the commandos and marines saw the gruesome cost of the attacks that had swarmed over George’s position throughout the hours of darkness: More than 500 enemy lay dead. ‘We pushed them out of foxholes, we just heaved them out,’ said O’Brien. ‘Within minutes of being killed, they froze solid, so if you had to move a dead Chink, you tipped him over like a piece of wood.’¹³ Edmonds found the man who had shot Stanley: ‘We’d shot him in the back of the skull, and his brain spilled out of his head,’ he said. ‘I searched him and found a picture of his wife and kids in front of his house …’

But the callousness of combat was taking affect. Edmonds rolled a dead Chinese out of a mountain sleeping bag the man had obviously taken from a dead American. The SBS man had no superstitious compunction that his new possession had been occupied by at least two deceased combatants in the previous night: ‘We did not have sleeping bags,’ he said simply. ‘So we took them.’ The enemy fallen were so numerous that the commandos began stacking them into a pile 7 feet high. US marines later erected a lean-to in its lee, huddling in shelter with the frosted faces of dead Chinese peering over their shoulders. So prominent was the stack that it was visible from below; the grisly new feature became a landmark.¹⁴

The counterattack had been successful, but commandos later learned that disaster had been narrowly averted: No message had been sent signalling the gaining of the objective, so a daylight assault on the hilltop was in the works; airstrikes were just called off when word got down.¹⁵ With the position secure, the base reserve were relieved; the commandos headed back down to the village.

On the way, O’Brien was amazed at the ability of the Americans to dish up what was, by British standards, quality fare while under siege. He was walking past a field kitchen ‘like a hot dog stand in a lay-by’, when one of the Americans manning it called out, ‘Hey Brit!’ – the commandos berets made them recognisable – ‘You want something to eat?’ O’Brien had not eaten a proper meal since Hamhung three days ago, so wandered over. ‘What can I have?’ he asked. ‘We got flapjacks!’ the American replied. O’Brien had never heard of them; he was delighted when the cook dished fourteen pancakes onto his makeshift platter of ration pack cardboard, drizzled treacle over the top and shoved a hot coffee into his hand. ‘In the middle of everything, they were so organised: A mortar could have blown them asunder, but they were there, talking casually as if they were in Central Park,’ O’Brien said. ‘The marines were fantastic fighters, there were youngsters there the same age as me; we just smiled, talked and moved on.’

However precarious things seemed for the defenders, Hagaru was proving a furnace for the attackers. In the fight to overcome massed marine firepower on the previous night, the Chinese 58th Division had been burned out.

* * *

It is an odd facet of human behaviour that even those facing the most extreme circumstances acclimatise themselves to their lot. So it was at Hagaru. Commandos slipped into the routine of a besieged base.

The Chinese did not attack during daylight hours, but snipers were active. ‘It was potluck whether you got hit or not,’ said SBS Corporal Harry Langton. Extreme danger bred a disregard for risk and death. O’Brien, queuing in the open with American marines at a field kitchen, noticed that a nearby latrine, a rickety, wooden shack, was riddled with bullets – a sniper had it zeroed – yet marines were still using it. O’Brien was ruminating on this when a shot rang out. A marine in the queue crumpled, the sniper’s latest victim. But a stationary tank had spotted the shooter. Its engine roared and the tank jerked into motion, clanked over to a pile of rubble and began rolling back and forth over it, pivoting on its axis. Facing being crushed, the sniper’s nerve broke. He broke cover and fled awkwardly through the snow. The metal beast pursued, accelerated and caught him; churning the man under its tracks. ‘There was an imprint of him in the snow, like the jokey thing of a steamroller going over him,’ said O’Brien, who, with others in the chow line, had watched the fatal drama with mild interest. ‘You just carried on eating, “Oh, that’s got rid of one.”’

The 4-mile perimeter was a line of unconnected holes in the snow. ‘When your mate was on sentry, you dropped off to sleep and your feet froze and when you wakened you had to spend 15 minutes getting your feet moving,’ said Edmonds. It was critical to regularly get into warming tents or cottages inside the perimeter, but the contrast between external frigidity and interior warmth held its own risks. ‘In the huts, there [were] these barrels which were keeping the huts warm, on bricks, glowing red hot,’ said Lance Corporal Gersham Maindonald. ‘One American came in and said, “Goddamn, it’s cold out there!” took his shoepacs and socks off and lay down with his feet toward the barrel. Within a few minutes one smelt burning; the soles of his feet were burning and he did not know it, his feet were so numb.’

There were some tremendous characters among the US marines. Lieutenant Peter Thomas’ Heavy Weapons Troop had been taken in by a transport unit commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Olin Beall. ‘He was an old fashioned marine with a Springfield rifle,’ said Thomas. ‘He used to go out, come back and cut another notch in his butt and say, “I got me another Gook today!”’ Moyse’s section was sent to reinforce a dugout, a large hole with overhead cover – though so widely spaced, a mortar bomb could easily have landed inside; offense-focused US marines were not great builders of defences. The resident was a grizzled marine sergeant. ‘He had been there for several days, he had a fire in a tin can, and I thought it was amazing that instead of wearing boots, he had several pairs of thick, white socks on,’ Moyse said. The two got talking; the marine was a Guadalcanal veteran. ‘He was so calm and collected, we asked about his feet and he said, “I ain’t goin’ nowhere!”’ In front of the dugout, a pair of frozen enemy dead dangled on a thicket of barbed wire, ‘almost within reaching distance’. The men settled in for the night. A runner arrived and warned them to prepare to repel cavalry. ‘We all said, “What!?”’ recalled Moyse. The cavalry – probably supply mules – never appeared but the sergeant was momentarily enthused, telling the commandos he would capture one and ride it out. It was a weak joke but like many men in combat, they found it funnier than it was.

Not all attacks were assaults. ‘At one stage an enemy officer – rather smartly dressed in a dark uniform – just walked through,’ said Allen. ‘He was as bold as brass! Only afterwards did people think he might have been a North Korean.’ Probes – some men surmised the Chinese were raiding for supplies – could bypass strong points. ‘They’d come in from behind, or from another part of the perimeter; whether they were trying to get out or heading for us, I did not dwell on this,’ said Langton, recalling replacing one of his men on sentry. ‘One of the lads said to me, “A machine gun followed you all the way here.” Tracers had been hitting behind me – I hadn’t realised.’

Lee, in charge of Korean porters, shared a tent with General Smith’s bodyguard detachment – yet even this, in the centre of the base, was perforated by bullets. ‘We were the last unit to guard the HQ, so our personnel were good fighters,’ Lee said. ‘A couple of Chinese made it to our tent then surrendered: They’d penetrated our perimeter, but knew that they would be killed instantly if they carried on.’ Smith kept a pistol belted on at all times. It was no affectation. In a siege in which the perimeter was threatened nightly, even the division commander might have to defend himself.

* * *

The catastrophe overwhelming both Walker’s 8th Army and Almond’s 10th Corps was by now staring even MacArthur in the face. High Command in Tokyo had conferenced late into the night on 28 November; Almond was ordered to pull back and consolidate, albeit still with a view to somehow assisting Walkers’ embattled men in the west.¹⁶ On 29 November, Almond placed all forces in the reservoir area of operations – including 31st RCT – under Smith’s command. On 30 November, he ordered the 5th and 7th Marine Regiments at Yudam, and the soldiers of 31st RCT east of the reservoir, to fall back on Hagaru.¹⁷ Once concentrated, the marines and soldiers would fight their way to Koto, down Funchilin Pass into the lowlands, thence to the sea.

News of the disaster in Korea was reaching all branches of the US Armed Forces. The commander of the US Naval Forces in the Far East, Admiral CharlesTurner Joy, ordered naval units from across the Pacific to steam for the peninsula with all possible speed.¹⁸Ploughing through the grey swells of the northern Pacific, a vast American armada converged to support 1st MARDIV’s upcoming break for freedom.

Off northeast Korea, prowled Taskforce 77, a swarm of mine-sweepers, destroyers and cruisers, screening the fast US aircraft carriers Philippine Sea and Leyte and the light carrier Badoeng Strait; the fast carrier Princeton would arrive on 5 December; the light carrier Sicily on 7 December. Even though MIG 15s were now duelling the US Air Force high above the Manchurian–Korean frontier, some 350 aircraft were committed to the Chosin area. The land- and carrier-based squadrons tasked to assist the marines totalled fifteen on 1 December; by 10 December, these had increased to twenty.¹⁹

With besieged troops demanding ammunition and medical supplies, a massive air bridge was under construction. Every USAF C-119 ‘Flying Boxcar’ in theatre was assigned to operations at Chosin on 1 December. In the skies above the reservoir, the planes orbited. Inside the vibrating cargo bays sat lines of plywood pallets, with parachutes attached, on skaterollers. Given that the perimeters were so restricted, the aircraft’s rear, clamshell doors had been removed, granting the USAF quartermasters – ‘kickers’ – in the back of each plane an awesome view of snow-covered, embattled mountains unfolding below them. Once each aircraft neared the Drop Zone it slowed to 110 knots; when the pilot, in radio communication with ACTs on the ground, sounded the alarm, the kickers sliced through a sling restraining the pallets, and the bundle tumbled out of the aircraft belly in six seconds, parachutes billowing. Between 1 and 6 December, 238 C-119 sorties dropped 970.6 tons of cargo.²⁰

The eyes of the world were now focused on the bleak little mountain settlement, but previously Hagaru had been an overlooked backwater in the communist republic. This isolation had made it a sanctuary for a certain group. ‘Some Christians had escaped to Changjin from the Japanese,’ said Lee; the community had practised their forbidden religion despite Hirohito’s, and later Kim Il-sung’s, strictures against it. After the marines arrived, they had begun openly holding services. Their salvation was being cut short. With the marines preparing to depart, the population of Hagaru decided to abandon their homes, taking their chances on the perilous retreat to the sea. Lee was dismayed at the suffering this would entail. ‘God is too harsh,’ he said.

* * *

The first stage of the withdrawal – the pullback of the 5th and 7th Marines and the 31st Regimental Combat Team to Hagaru – got underway on 1 December.

By this time, the US Army unit east of the reservoir, was crumbling. With its CO, Lieutenant Colonel Allen MacLean lost, Lieutenant Colonel Don Faith assumed command. Leaving aside training and motivation, the RCT was already weaker than its marine equivalents. Approximately one third of its men were half-trained Koreans who spoke little or no English. When Faith gave the order to break out, artillery and vehicles were blown up; the RCT would keep only twenty-two runners to transport their 600 wounded. The column hit resistance as soon as they moved beyond their perimeter, and the covering aircraft drenched the front of their column with napalm. Faith personally led a charge on a roadblock; he was wounded, and soon died. He had hurled away a Silver Star in his fury at High Command’s indifference to his unit’s predicament; for his leadership, he was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honour. The column struggled on to the hamlet of Hudong-ri, half way to Hagaru, to find it occupied by enemy in strength. In despair, vehicles tried to crash through, but were raked and halted. The RCT disintegrated. It had occupied the attention, for three nights, of two Chinese divisions that could otherwise have joined the assault on Hagaru. The cost had been horrific. Originally 2,500-men strong, just over 1,000 men made it to Hagaru; of those, only 385 were found combat effective; they were formed into a provisional battalion.²¹ 31st RCT had been virtually wiped out.^*

The 5th and 7th Marine Regiments were a tougher proposition. Surrounded by three divisions, they had been fighting ferociously at Yudam since the night of 27 November. On 1 December, they began their 14-mile breakout toward Hagaru, down what Colonel Raymond Murray, the 5th Marines’ CO, called ‘a nightmare alley’.²² This would not replicate 2nd Infantry Division’s motorised race into disaster at Kunu-ri; this was a tactical move. The column was led by a lone tank, flanked by marine companies fighting along the ridgelines and shepherded overhead by US Marine Corsair squadrons and the Royal Australian Air Force’s Mustangs. Painstakingly, marines cleared high ground, jury-rigged blown bridges and smashed aside roadblocks. In a brilliant feat of soldiering, Lieutenant Colonel Ray Davis, led his 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, cross-country through knee-deep snow to relieve a lone company holding the key Toktong pass that overlooked the road. In an epic private battle, the 237 men of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, surrounded on a hilltop, had been under siege since the first night of battle; when Davies’ men arrived on 2 December, Fox was reduced to eighty-six effectives.²³ Their position was encircled by enemy dead. One survivor could not avoid walking over a 50-yard wide carpet of Chinese corpses as he abandoned the hill.²⁴

The 5th and 7th Marines were expected to make Hagaru on 3 December; their 14-mile breakout had taken nearly 48 hours. At 16:30, the garrison reserve was ordered to advance to Hagaru’s northern roadblock to link up with the column and cover it in.

The commandos and tanks took up defensive positions. Darkness fell. Nobody arrived. Then, emerging out of the gloom, the convoy’s point element appeared. ‘I had never seen anything so dreadful,’ said Walter. Jeeps and trucks, crammed with wounded and dead – the two regiments had 1,500 casualties – dripped bloody icicles. For want of space on vehicles, frozen dead were lashed across bonnets and dangled from artillery barrels. The living were wide-eyed, slack-jawed, gaunt, unshaven. ‘Talk about the retreat from Moscow!’ said Allen. ‘Some had straw round their feet, they looked totally defeated.’ Wounded were hanging ‘like grim death’ to trundling vehicles.

But their spirit was unbroken: The 5th and 7th Marines’ entrance to Hagaru would become a Korean War legend. ‘They’d been through it, they’d been hammered, but they came out carrying their wounded and their weapons,’ Moyse said. ‘Pretty good.’ Approaching the perimeter, some marched in singing The Marine Hymn. Thomas, deeply moved, wondered whether 41 Commando should transition from covering force to honour guard. ‘We should have presented arms,’ he said. ‘They were magnificent!’

The Americans were surprised at the identity of their greeters. ‘Thank God we’re not the only guys fighting this goddamned war!’ one told Thomas. ‘Their spirits were lifted when they saw us,’ said Moyse. ‘They thought we were mad to wear berets!’ Commandos were detailed to assist the wounded, a group of whom had been secured with cord. A commando cut loose one man and gave him a cigarette. ‘Harry, give me a hand, they got this fucking Yank tied up for Christmas!’ he remarked to a mate. ‘It sure felt good to know these people were on our side,’ was the wounded marine’s comment.²⁵ Inside the base, the unwounded new arrivals settled into positions alongside the commandos. ‘They bow to no man in the bloody business of the foxhole,’ one US marine wrote of the commandos.²⁶

Field kitchens fed the arrivals a hot meal; Hagaru marines who knew men in the 5th and 7th regiments approached them to ask about the fate of buddies. Many would receive bad news. The most relieved man to see his haggard regiments, though, was their divisional commander. Watching them arrive, Smith wrote, was ‘quite an emotional experience’.²⁷ Some members of the 5th and 7th had been stunned to see what looked like thousands of dead Chinese heaped outside Hagaru’s perimeter.²⁸ Having escaped Yudam, they had hoped Hagaru would be a haven. In fact, they had just escaped the first link in the trap.

On 4 December, 41 Commando went out again, accompanied by marine engineers. The commandos clambered onto snow-covered tanks – their armour was frozen but their engines pleasantly warm – which clattered past the northern roadblock, out of the perimeter. Mounted on one steel beast was Langton. The treads of the tank in front were churning up shards of ice from the road, which lashed him in the face, but he could not raise a hand; he was too busy hanging on. Chinese were visible in the distance, but did not attack. The commando rode into the wasteland to where, up the track, 5th and 7th Marines had abandoned eight 155mm howitzers when their prime movers ran out of fuel. Arriving at the guns, commandos spread out: ‘It was merely a question of being a protection party,’ Moyse recalled. The artillery, engineers discovered, was unrecoverable. The party remounted on the tanks as Chinese began appearing over ridges. As the little convoy churned back to Hagaru, an air strike roared in to destroy the guns.

* * *

At Hagaru, the engineers’ work was paying off. A trickle of wounded had been escaping the siege, flying down to the lowlands, in light observation planes. Among them were Payne and Todd. Payne was told, ‘You are getting out!’ He was taken to the landing strip where a one-seater scout plane crouched. The canopy swung open and Payne – armed with a carbine and a .45 pistol under his parka – was crammed into the space behind the pilot’s seat. The plane shook and bucked as it picked up speed, then lurched into the air and away over the hills. ‘I was fully expecting to stay there recovering then join what was left of the commando,’ Payne said. ‘The reaction was relief but also shock – of the suddenness in which it happened.’

Todd had a similar experience. While B Troop had been fighting up East Hill, the Chinese skirmished close to the aid post. The following morning the commando was asked if he wanted to be evacuated: Single-seaters could get in. Todd agreed, so was stretchered out to the airstrip, where a small plane was waiting. ‘The chap flying was a dentist from Tokyo, a major or a colonel and he told me he had a private pilot’s licence and they had brought in all these kinds of people, anyone who could fly, for this evacuation,’ he said. ‘He was quite a cheery chap.’ Todd crouched behind the pilot’s seat: ‘We had to wait as Chinese had infiltrated the airstrip.’ Marines counterattacked, then the plane climbed up, giving Todd a last chance to see 41. ‘Whilst he was banking he said, “Have a look at your boys down there”.’ ‘We could see lines of marines clearing the hills.’

King was awaiting air-evac’ with a friend when he felt ‘as if someone had hit me with a bat’. A mortar had burst, sending a piece of shrapnel into his un-helmeted scalp. Both he and his friend were covered in blood – head wounds bleed heavily – but the man helped him up onto the evacuation plane. When he came round, he was in a hospital in Japan, being offered an American purple heart.

But the massive numbers of wounded required bigger transports. With Hagaru lying 4,000 feet above sea level, manuals demanded a minimum runway of 7,600 feet to accommodate C-47s.²⁹ On 30 November, it still measured only 2,500 by 50 feet; moreover, it had a hump at one end and a 25-foot dyke at the other.³⁰ Yet – though the strip was unfinished; though its ‘control tower’ was a jeep with a radio – Smith decided, on 30 November, to chance large aircraft.³¹ Among those scheduled for one of the first flights was the leg-shot Hayhurst.

He was driven by vehicle to the airstrip, then lined up to board the next aircraft, a C47, the famous ‘Dakota’ transport. ‘When we started moving toward the aircraft, a group of us were stopped, and they said, “No, there are people on stretchers and they were going on,” and they were put on,’ he said. ‘We were not too happy.’ The stretcher cases were loaded, the aircraft’s rear door slammed. Its props hummed, then it turned, gathered speed down the icy runway, wobbled into the air – and flew directly into the hillside ahead.

Hayhurst was stunned. Marine squads raced to rescue survivors. But there was no time to lose. The next aircraft taxied up. Hayhurst and the wounded around him were loaded – with trepidation – into the C47’s belly. It raced down the strip, lifted, and cleared the wall of mountains. The besieged base receded. Relief. Twenty minutes later, Hayhurst landed at Hamhung.³²

The air bridge was in place. From 1 December, a full-scale lift got underway: It would carry 4,312 wounded and frostbitten men, including 25 commandos³³ to safety.³⁴ Remarkably, only two C-47s were lost. At Smith’s insistence, 138 marine dead were also flown out. X Corps ordered him to cease the funeral arrangements; Smith ‘didn’t pay them any attention’.³⁵

The chance to end the ordeal was too much for some: It became necessary to screen evacuees when some men were caught feigning wounds in order to escape.³⁶ There was no doubt of the state of many wounded, though; when the four-day evacuation was complete, the ground between the main aid post and the landing strip was a sheen of frozen blood.³⁷

And traffic was not one-way: 537 marine volunteers from echelons in the lowlands and Japan were flown in to reinforce the decimated ranks of the combat units ‘up at the reservoir’.³⁸ Necessary supplies were also flown in, including, for some reason known only to a quartermaster far in the rear, a shipment of condoms.³⁹

With the Hagaru strip operational, the USAF proposed flying out the entire garrison. Smith declined, but it was not pride on the part of the marine general.⁴⁰ Once the garrison’s manpower was reduced to a certain size, a tipping point would inevitably be reached, and the rearguard would be overrun. Smith was determined to get his entire command – heavy weapons and equipment intact – out.

The addition of the 5th and 7th Regiments, and the incoming reinforcements, boosted Smith’s decimated companies, but did not alter 1st MARDIV’s overall strategic position. Nobody needed a situation map – maps that were by now crisscrossed with red arrows – to understand that; the position was clear to anyone who gazed beyond the perimeter of the fortified airhead. ‘We were completely entrapped, an island in a sea of Chinese,’ said Lee. ‘In the mountains we could see people on top, and we could see the smoke from their cooking fires.’

On 5 December, Almond flew into Hagaru as Smith’s staff presented plans for the breakout from the mountain arena. The movement – 56 miles from Hagaru to Hungnam – would commence on 6 December. The Hagaru garrison would fight south in a moving pocket. Infantry would lead the way; other companies would clear the heights. Soft-skinned vehicles would drive loaded with gear, wounded and dead. Hellfire Valley’s lesson had been learned: tanks would be spread through the column for fire support, while bulldozers on point would smash aside roadblocks. Overhead, twenty-four fighter bombers would orbit.⁴¹ But air support could not trump ground fighting. When Almond told Smith that he had arranged for bombers to ‘clear a path for you all the way to the sea’, Smith responded: ‘I think there will be plenty of fighting for all of us.’⁴²

The 7th Marines would spearhead on 6 December; the 5th Marines would rearguard on the 7 December. 41 Commando was assigned to the 5th Marines. Smith himself would fly his CP to join Puller, and control operations from Koto. Once the 5th, 7th and 41 Commando joined Puller’s 1st Marines, the concentrated division would strike south.

The obstacles facing the breakout were daunting. The 5th and 7th Marines had had to fight, mile by mile, from Yudam, and 41 Commando had to run the Chinese gauntlet in Hellfire Valley – the same 11-mile route that led from Hagaru to Koto. Then, to exit the highlands, the escape hatch led through Funchilin Pass. The winding, narrow, 10-mile track carved into the cliffs was custom-made for ambush.

* * *

If the troops’ outlook was grim, the prospects for anti-communist civilians were equally frightening. Though official information sources were silent, word of the defeat of the UNC and the communist descent through the mountains was reaching the lowlands.

‘We knew, through the grapevine, that something terrible had happened,’ said Lim Geum-sook, the 19-year-old girl who had hidden in a bunker dug in a cemetery prior to the arrival of UNC troops. ‘Every day, people were passing through and they talked: news spread fast.’ The teenager was astonished that the UNC – ‘the most modern troops’ – were retreating. ‘We knew the Chinese were approaching,’ she said. ‘The fear, the impact, was so great.’

Most of Lim’s staunchly anti-communist family had departed for the south in previous weeks after her older brother had volunteered for the ROK Army. The only members remaining in Hamhung were Lim’s parents and her 13-year-old brother. The family decided to escape. Precious goods – fabrics and jewellery – and provisions – rice, red pepper paste and power – were boxed. The family bundled on all their winter clothes and left a home they would never see again. At Hamhung Station they hoped to catch a train for the coast, but chaos reigned, and soldiers prevented civilians from boarding. ‘They were saying, “Get away! Hamhung is safe!”’ Lim said. She did not believe them. Trains were reserved for military personnel, and, she guessed, for those with connections. The station doors were slammed.

Korean civilians were not the only ones growing aware of the situation around the reservoir; the high drama was not lost on editors around the world. On 4 December, Peking Radio announced: ‘The annihilation of the United States 1st Marine Division is only a matter of time.’⁴³ British and American newspapers did not demur. A Philadelphia columnist wrote that the marines were being ‘sliced to ribbons’.⁴⁴ Marines were unimpressed by press statements from High Command, which evidenced little faith in their survival.⁴⁵

On 5 December, that would change, for the airlift brought journalists to Smith’s CP, and it was one of those who provided Smith with the phrase that would not only re-animate the battered spirits of his own men, but would brand the breakout for posterity.

Smith was asked by a British correspondent if his division was retreating. The general explained patiently that this could not be a retreat: ‘Heck, all we’re doing is attacking in a different direction,’ he said. The quote somehow morphed into, ‘Retreat – hell!’ It was seized upon as bold defiance of overwhelming odds. Marines were electrified, and the phrase blazed across US headlines.⁴⁶ Eleven miles south, Puller also rose to the occasion. When doubts were raised by his staff, he leapt onto a table. ‘I don’t give a good goddam how many Chinese laundrymen there are between us and Hungnam!’ he roared. ‘There aren’t enough in the world to stop a marine regiment going where it wants to go!’⁴⁷

Fighting words may read like hyperbole, but in desperate situations, theatrics like Puller’s are motivational. And Smith was no drama queen; his statement was factual. ‘There was no word of withdrawal,’ said Smith of his breakout orders. ‘That was an attack order because we were attacking, and we gave them objectives to capture enroute.’⁴⁸

1st MARDIV would have to hack its way through everything the enemy could throw in its path. Two Chinese regiments, spearheading a fresh corps from Manchuria, were arriving to reinforce General Song at the reservoir.⁴⁹ Song himself was manoeuvring: He ordered the 76th and 77th Divisions to block the route between Hagaru and Koto, while his 60th and 89th Divisions massed around Koto and took up positions overlooking Funchilin.⁵⁰

It was amid the soaring cliffs of the pass that Song pulled off his masterpiece – a spectacle worthy of a Hollywood cliffhanger: Chinese infiltrators blew the bridge in front of the power station. Even if they fought through 11 miles of enemy-held hills from Hagaru to Koto, 1st MARDIV’s escape route to the lowlands led not to safety, but to an abyss 2,900 feet deep, over rock, ice and snow. The division’s rat run was now a rat trap.

The situation, 1st MARDIV’s operations officer thought, was ‘not promising’.⁵¹ yet intelligence about the blown bridge did not delay the breakout. On 5 December, flames flickered through snow flurries as Hagaru-ri was put to the torch. Among the stores being hurled onto bonfires were piles of marine dress uniforms; why they were at Hagaru was anyone’s guess.⁵² Vehicles were loaded. Remarkably, Corporal Don Saunchegrow’s truck – its bodywork shot to pieces – was still a runner. The vehicle, christened ‘Old Faithful’ would comprise, along with Drysdale’s jeep, 41 Commando’s sole load-carrying vehicles; the US marine corporal, posted as missing by his own unit, elected to remain with ‘the crazy Brits’.⁵³ On 6 December, the breakout began as 7th Marines attacked toward Koto. That afternoon, the radio relay station at Hagaru – the base’s link with the outside world – was closed. The air bridge shut down. Smith helicoptered for Koto.⁵⁴

* * *

Dusk, 6 December. General Song had smashed 31st RCT, but the 5th and 7th Marines had slipped through his grasp at Yudam. Now, the situation was being repeated at Hagaru. With the 7th Marines having jumped off south, the force at Hagaru was halved. A key military principal is: ‘Fix the enemy in position. Then destroy him.’ Song was determined to exterminate the marines before they could escape his clutches again.

Some time after 16:00, 41 Commando had joined the column and started toward Koto. Reports were negative: The 7th Marines vanguard was engaged in heavy combat. Soon after 19:00 sounds of fighting to their rear reached them; the commandos had barely advanced 400 yards. The situation was deteriorating. ‘About 21:00 hrs … a heavy attack on Hagaru developed,’ 41 Commando’s war diary noted. ‘By midnight … the position at Hagaru was looking a bit sticky … soon after this, 41 Commando were recalled and were committed to the perimeter.’ The commandos were deployed near the stone bridge under East Hill to help repel the last and greatest Chinese attack on the base. The events of the night of 6–7 December would be described by the US Marine history as ‘spectacular’.

For the marines and commandos manning the Hagaru perimeter, straining to see in the darkness, the first indication was bugles sounding as the invisible enemy manoeuvred. Bursts of firing crackled here or there on the perimeter: probes. Then – illuminated by flares and burning buildings – the ghostly, white-clad masses emerged from the darkness, rolling forward: a wall of men. ‘You could see hordes of them on the skyline – literally hordes! – like a Western when you see Indians suddenly appear on the hilltops,’ said Maindonald. ‘You just waited for the bugle as you knew then they were forcing their attack home.’

If the Chinese assault was cinematic, the American response was operatic. As the perimeter lacked obstacles – mines were invalidated by the permafrost; barbed wire was minimal; field fortifications poorly constructed – defence depended upon firepower. Positions lit up with laser-like streaks of machine gun tracers, their chatter a relentless popping crackle; mortars and artillery dropped DF tasks with flashing crumps; tanks rocked back on their suspensions as they fired out. Invisible in the darkness overhead, American night fighters droned, guided onto enemy concentrations by parachute flares fired by the artillery, or by solid lines of red tracer from heavy machine guns – their crossfire marking bomb aiming points – then adjusted by radio from ACTs. ‘They had a very slick system of fire control,’ said Thomas, awed by the god-like firestorm the Americans were summoning from the skies. ‘Imagine a hill with these figures all over it coming down with a background of white snow, lit up by flares, by tracers going up in the air,’ recalled Langton. ‘Fireworks night!’

Still – incredibly – the crowds surged in.

Those enemy who made it through the beaten zone of marine heavy weapons had a better chance, as the cold affected the propellants – and so the muzzle velocity and knockdown power – of small arms. Weapons work was intense: shooting, reloading, clearing stoppages, giving or responding to fire commands. ‘You got engulfed with Chinese attacks, literally masses in the dark,’ O’Brien said. ‘You are firing into hordes of them, they are falling down and another lot come on.’

The main attack hit the marines on East Hill, but the commandos caught the flank of the attack. Edmonds watched Chinese hit three or four times, yet – as if in a nightmare – continue advancing. This was not all-arms warfare, or even fire and manoeuvre: the Chinese approach was simply mass. Echeloned units charging over the bodies of their comrades to swamp the defenders. The enemy numbers necessitated the shelving of the commandos’ precision shooting, in favour of more profligate American drills. ‘It is not like on a rifle range where you took careful aim,’ said Langton. ‘The only thing that would beat the enemy was firepower, so you would not aim with one round, you would let two, three or four go at one target before you switched to the next: bang-bang-bang!’ Men armed with semiautomatic weapons found themselves suffering an unusual ache: trigger finger fatigue.⁵⁵

In winter darkness, it was impossible to see the foresights of weapons, so commandos loaded every third or fourth round with tracer to mark their fire. With the frozen Changjin in front of his position, Langton squeezed off bursts onto the surface of the river with his BAR: the ice was so hard, the bullets ricocheted up into the enemies’ lower bodies.⁵⁶ Moyse’s section was forced into cover behind a wall of what turned out to be frozen excrement. His night vision was useless; he could see no individual targets to pinpoint. All that was visible was a violent, flashing kaleidoscope.

The marines and commandos were fuelled by a potent blend of adrenalin and caffeine from black coffee, but the astonishing courage of their attackers – and their apparent ability to absorb several rounds before collapsing – led many defenders to conclude that they were doped. ‘It was said that a lot were fighting under influence of drugs,’ said Maindonald. ‘They certainly must have had something to spur them on.’ Benzedrine – a stimulant – and opium – probably a pain-killer – were, indeed, recovered from some corpses. But there was another motivation driving this incredible assault: the cruel cold and feeble Chinese logistics. The enemy knew the Americans had food, heating equipment and warm clothing and boots. If they could take Hagaru before the dumps were fired, that loot would be theirs.

They were generally poor shots, but were taking an inevitable toll. In lulls, commandos and marines whispered in low voices. ‘We were fighting to survive, you were laid shoulder to shoulder on the ground, a New Yorker speaking to a Cockney,’ recalled O’Brien.‘The conversation was not about the war, it was about anything but. In a quiet moment, you’d say, “Where you from?” and he’d say “Nebraska” and next thing he’s lying dead, his head blown off.’

As dawn broke over East Hill’s crags on 7 December, the attack dwindled away. Charging into the teeth of the defences, the attackers had been slaughtered. ‘It was amazing and frightening to find Chinese dead within 3, 4 or 5 yards. You’d seen a silhouette and fired,’ said Maindonald. ‘If we had not stopped them, they would have been right in amongst us.’ Langton’s ricochet fire had proven effective. ‘[The Chinese] had died in all sorts of positions – the severe cold must have frozen them as they dropped,’ he said. The 5th Marines’ CO, Colonel Raymond Murray, walked along the lines that morning. Though he had fought the Japanese on Guam and Saipan, he had never seen so many enemy dead.⁵⁷

It was time to move out. Once again, Drysdale paraded his men, checking weapons, appearance, clothing. Once again, watching American marines were astounded. Orders were delivered. The only persons to be allowed on vehicles were the wounded, the dead and the drivers. Everyone else – including those wounded in the arms – had to walk.⁵⁸ The parade broke up. For the first – and almost certainly the last – time in the village’s history, Hagaru was serenaded with, ‘We’re a Shower o’ Bastards.’ Then the commandos separated into their sections for the breakout.

Nothing was being left for the Chinese, neither equipment, nor shelter. Yudam had been obliterated by artillery as soon as the 5th and 7th had withdrawn.⁵⁹ Even the wreckage of 31st RCT’s truck column – complete with dead aboard – had been incinerated by napalm on Almond’s orders.⁶⁰ Now, as the rearguard headed for Koto, Hagaru and its supply dumps blew up: the firework-like explosions reminded some marines of 4 July.⁶¹ As well as the supply dumps, wrecked aircraft were destroyed, the timber village torched. Through billows of snow, the shadowy figures of marines were silhouetted against yellow flames dancing across the dark wood of buildings. Hagaru-ri was scorched off the map.

The commandos were among the last of the 5th Marines to leave. Chinese had infiltrated a small hill inside the perimeter, and at daybreak they tried to escape. Corporal Jerry Maill, Heavy Weapons Troop’s ace machine gunner, opened up with long bursts, tumbling them down in the snow, Thomas recalled. By the time Maill was finished, he had burned out the barrel of his weapon, firing cover while vehicles pulled out.⁶²

By now, some commandos, samurai-like, had accepted the inevitability of death. ‘I think I became resigned that I’d had it: I’d be killed,’ Langton, the SBS corporal, said. ‘I can’t say I welcomed it, but I was not frightened, you just felt: “We are not going to get out of here.” I was not ready to surrender. The end to me would be the end.’

* * *

On either side of the grey ribbon of road, loomed the snow-covered hills, stubbled here and there with scraggy forest. Beyond, rose the glittering bulk of the mountains. Having cleared the blazing pyre of Hagaru, the column began passing a long tangle of wrecked trucks and jeeps, shoved off the road by the 7th Marines the previous day. Among this blackened monument to Taskforce Drysdale were wrecked men, too. The marines and commandos were now entering a nightmare wonderland, for battle in Siberian temperatures had transformed Hellfire Valley into a surreal gallery of cartoonish monstrosities, of hideous grotesqueries.

In normal circumstances – even allowing for the rigidity of rigor mortis – tensile integrity deserts corpses, gives them their rag-doll appearance as they lie sprawled or flat. Not so at Chosin Reservoir. Here, the bodies – like victims of an icy Pompeii – had frozen into rigid postures, limbs sticking out at peculiar angles: ‘stiffs’ in every sense of the word. Even though the corpses had been lying in the valley for six days and nights, they looked freshly killed, Moyse thought. Some tableaux were reminiscent of an abattoir: spilled blood had not coagulated to its usual brownish scab, but frozen into streams and puddles of crimson. The feelings and emotions that the men had been undergoing at their moment of death – shock, terror, agony – remained frozen in their faces. O’Brien recognised some. They were ‘terrible to see’, lying, trouserless, with their feet up in the air where the Chinese had stripped them to clothe themselves; their legs had frozen in the extended position. Edmonds spotted a commando he had once served with on HMSSheffield; his corpse was frozen ‘absolutely solid’. There were greater indignities. The Korean interpreter, Lieutenant Lee, could not help noticing how many corpses displayed signs of having soiled themselves. And Allen passed a marine who had been sniped while defecating. Dead, trousers round his ankles, he squatted at the side of the track, a frozen sentinel.

Scattered among the wreckage and the dead were letters and brightly wrapped Christmas gifts from the blown-up mail truck; Thomas found the sight pathetic. The necessity to break south as fast as possible meant there was no time to properly police up the slaughter. Dead marines were heaved onto trucks for later burial. Bodies were impossible to stack in any order. ‘There were people twisted and in agonised positions, it was grotesque,’ said Moyse. ‘Some had bullet holes in their bodies and faces, but others, you would not know they had been shot.’ With crooked arms and legs jutting over their tailgates, the trundling hearses appeared to be conveying a cargo of butchered waxworks. Still, at least the marines took pains to carry their own out. In an unusually callous example of inter-service rivalry, a number of army corpses were left in situ by the marines.⁶³

Chinese dead fared worse of all. Enemy bodies, rolled over again and again by tanks and trucks, were flattened; straw stuffed into their uniforms for insulation made them look like dead scarecrows. Oddly, on these one-dimensional corpses, Walter noted that individual facial features on ‘foot-and-a-half wide heads’ were recognisable. Enemy carrion not steamrollered flat into the surface of the track was booted into the parallel ditches, though some offered an opportunity for marine humour. Moyse passed a roasted Chinese corpse that, like many victims of extreme heat, had contorted, due to the shortening of the tendons, into a ‘pugilist pose’, body bowed, hands pulled up, fingers clawed inward.⁶⁴ In this posture, the blackened and shrivelled body appeared to be kneeling beside the track hands extended. A passing comedian had carefully dropped a boiled sweet onto the outstretched palm. Other enemy dead had had cigarettes placed in their mouths; passing marines amused themselves by shooting the cigarettes out as they passed.⁶⁵Yet along this charnel house of a road, the terrible cold proved an effective mortician. By refrigerating the fallen, the weather obviated the rotten stench that permeates battlefields in more gentle climes.

There were other incongruities. The columns were continually stopping, starting and concertinaing, making it near impossible to light fires to thaw out frozen cans. Trail rations were called for, and at Chosin, it had been discovered that not only did candy not freeze solid, but Hagaru held a massive supply of the stuff, for before the Chinese struck, the basis of a PX – the American NAAFI – had been established.⁶⁶ General Smith had ordered the sweets be doled out to the troops, with the result that the dull-eyed fighting men forged south chewing on caramel Tootsie Rolls and sucking on Lifesavers sweets – rations more suitable for a kindergarten picnic than a fighting withdrawal through a screaming wasteland.⁶⁷

While the cold preserved the dead, it gnawed at the living. Trifling injuries were the white patches of frozen skin that appeared on the face, the strips of flesh that peeled off around the fingernails, the cracks that cut through lips. Ears and earlobes, fingers and the tip of the nose were equally at risk, but as these areas were visible, men warned each other when danger signs appeared. More seriously, a design fault of the shoepacs was becoming painfully apparent. The impermeable rubber boots did not ‘breathe’ so sweat could not evaporate; moisture froze into a film of ice around the feet. Frostbite comes in stages, and for those marines and commandos who did not have the chance to remove their boots – often for days at a time – they could not know how serious their condition would be. In the first stage, the feet feel icy cold; the flesh turns white. This is treatable. In the second stage, blisters develop, accompanied by a burn-like pain. At this stage, toenails may come off with socks. In the third and most severe stage, blisters and affected flesh turn greenish-black as gangrene sets in. This is when toes and chunks of feet fall off, an effect that may require amputation. Of frostbite casualties, ninety-five per cent would be to the feet.⁶⁸

Water bottles were carried inside clothing, to prevent freezing. Commandos constantly kept one pair of socks slung under their armpits, drying out from body heat. A sergeant ordered O’Brien to kick empty ration cans along the road. O’Brien concurred with the order – it took him a while to realise that the move was designed to keep circulation in his feet. ‘My insteps were numb, but I did not get frostbite,’ he said. With so many men losing toes, he was grateful for the advice.

At the rear of the column came the exodus from Hagaru. Some civilians piled their belongings in ox carts, but many just walked with what they had carried on A-frames on their backs or in bound bags on their heads. Edmonds was to experience one of those odd coincidences that would be a feature of the campaign: He halted near a group of Korean refugees, carrying both their own belongings and gear salvaged from the battlefield. On one A-frame Edmonds spotted his kitbag, lost in Hellfire Valley, recognisable by the stencil. He did not have the heart to reclaim it.

Amid the horrors, one angelic-looking refugee stood out. ‘I remember this girl – she was beautiful, skin like alabaster, she must have been sixteen or seventeen, and everyone remarked on her, even in that situation,’ said Moyse. ‘It was so sad to see people displaced like that.’ The spectacle of their suffering tore at witnesses. Lee’s Christian faith was wracked. ‘I don’t see that kind of suffering as God’s grace,’ he said.

But the exiles were kept at a distance. ‘The refugees tried to follow us,’ said Thomas. ‘The US marines got jittery about infiltration and fired on them.’^*

Firefights continued to break out all along the column, for the Chinese lay in ambush in the hills; bullets hitting the iron-hard road sounded like stones hitting a tin roof. One of these brief combats spelt tragedy for the approximately 300 Chinese prisoners taken at Hagaru. ‘The Chinese on the hills thought we were Chinese and flashed a signal with a mirror or something, then shouted to the POWs from the hills,’ said Lee. ‘About half the POWs ran off, then immediately afterwards, the Chinese opened fire and we returned fire.’ Taking cover in the ditch, bullets bounced off Lee’s helmet; for the first time in the battle, he prayed, ‘really sincerely’. The prisoners were mown down in the crossfire.

41 Commando’s C Troop was tasked to clear a hill. A US tank halted to fire support. The cover offered, however, was not as accurate as the commandos liked; one dashed back and told the astonished tank commander, ‘Excuse me, this is our show!’⁶⁹

More formidable support circled overhead, where the ground attack squadrons circled like birds of prey. Outnumbered in infantry terms, the marines had dubbed the Corsairs ‘The Equalizers’. Captain Lyle Bradley of the ‘Black Sheep’ squadron – who had been so stunned to see the footprints in the mountains – was among them.

Bradley’s squadron was staging from Yonpo Airfield near Hamhung where the subzero temperatures, though milder than in the highlands, made aircraft maintenance – a precise mechanical job – agonizing for ground crews. The aircrews shared some discomforts of the infantry, sleeping in sleeping bags in a windowless concrete building with North Korean artwork on the walls. Bradley was prepared to survive on the ground if he went down. He dressed in fatigues instead of a flight suit, stuffed his pockets with emergency rations, and packed a .38 revolver and a knife. He also carried a suicide kit: ‘I was determined not to be captured,’ he said. ‘Aviators were very unpopular.’ For good reason: If their quilted uniforms were splashed by napalm, Chinese soldiers flared up like human torches.

Perils started at takeoff: Wintering geese were common over Yonpo’s runway, and were disastrous if sucked into the 13-feet props of the Corsairs, heavily laden with explosive and fuel. The combat zone was only a twenty-minute ‘hop’ away, granting pilots two hours overflight above the column. On days when the cloud ceiling was just 300 feet, the pilots reached the marines by flying over the road snaking up into the mountain plateau. The heavy overcast – ‘soup’ in pilot parlance – and frequent snow flurries made low flying high risk. ‘We lost several pilots who ploughed into the sides of valleys,’ Bradley said. ‘You are not going to hurt a mountain, but you tear hell out of an airplane!’

Once over the column, pilots contacted the ACTs on the ground, whose radios were manned by marine pilots with the infantry. ‘We never did any type of action unless we were under positive control with the air controller,’ Bradley said. One of the best ACTs Bradley dealt with had an appropriate call sign: Dunkirk 14. Attack precision was critical, for Corsairs bristled with a fearsome array of killing instruments: 500lb bombs or rocket clusters dangled under the wings; a napalm tank hung in the centre of the fuselage; and there were the four 20mm cannon in the wings. The control stick of the Corsair held the trigger for the cannons and the rockets; the bombs and napalm tanks were released by switches.

Once a pilot had visual ID, it was easy to tell the combatants apart, even when skimming over the battle at 350 knots: ‘The Chinese were dressed in white uniforms but not quite white – I don’t know if they realised it, but the snow was much whiter – and some of their uniforms were dirty,’ Bradley said. ‘The marines were all in dark uniforms.’

Prior to an attack run, Bradley – despite the screaming, subzero wind chill – wrenched open his cockpit canopy. ‘When bombing low, you don’t know exactly what the blast will do – it could cut the engine or send up a piece of rock,’ he said; his open canopy enabled a split-second bale-out. Bomb drops necessitated a steep Stuka-style plunge on top of the enemy, releasing the 500lb bomb at the same angle as the diving plane and pulling up and out of the blast zone before the explosion overtook the Corsair. Hurtling down like a rollercoaster – hitting the bomb release – jerking violently up – Bradley could feel the shockwave through his airframe.

Rockets were fired as much as a mile ahead of the aircraft, though their explosive force was not as great as the bombs. Napalm runs – used to mark the drop zone for bombs as well as to incinerate troops – were made with shallow dives as low as 20 feet. On a napalm run, Bradley made one near-fatal error: ‘When I got low to drop napalm, I accidentally hit the rocket trigger,’ he said. Flying into the explosions, his aircraft shook as objects clattered against it; rock fragments had blown nineteen holes in his airframe.

After expending their explosives, the Corsairs had their 20mm wing cannon – effectively giant machine guns. These had no tracer ammunition, but tracer proved unnecessary: Loaded alternatively with incendiary and explosive rounds, the cannons’ fall of shot was marked by the churning lines of fountains in the snow. ‘You could see the Chinese diving for cover, running,’ Bradley said. ‘Some hugged tree trunks for cover.’ Some fighting was incredibly close, safety margins razor thin: Flying up the road as marines and Chinese shot into each other across the width of it, Bradley was only able to fire the cannon in one wing. Keeping his Corsair flying straight was a struggle as recoil almost threw him into a corkscrew.

When the aircraft swooped on enemy roadblocks on the track or fireblocks in the hills, marines and commandos halted to watch the effect. Sweeping down, the dark blue, crooked-wing hellions were awesome apparitions, their menace compounded by the roar of their engines, and the siren-like shriek a diving Corsair emitted as wind whistled through its wing-mounted air intakes – an effect that had caused World War II Japanese to dub the aircraft ‘Whistling Death’.

‘People on the hills tried it on but nothing very seriously because the air control kept it to a minimum,’ said Moyse. Allen was reminded of nature films of flocks of birds wheeling across the sky in formation as a unit of Chinese zigzagged through a snowfield, taking desperate evasive action to shake a strafing Corsair.

Still, after exploding, the napalm offered the enemy one advantage. ‘We could see Chinese coming out and warming themselves over where the napalm had been dropped,’ Allen said. Thomas was fascinated to see the effect of Chinese camouflage reversed, for the jellied petroleum transformed long streaks of snow into black sludge. ‘The Chinese were wearing white quilted jackets,’ he recalled. ‘You could see them when they ran across the blackened bits quite prominently.’

After an air strike, the column had about fifteen minutes before the Chinese recovered and resumed shooting. The convoy inched down the road at less than one mile per hour, constantly halting to dismantle or shove over the timber-and-earth road blocks the Chinese had thrown across the track, load wounded or dead onto vehicles, take cover and return fire, or watch more air strikes pounding the flanks. By 17:00, all members of 41 Commando were inside the Koto perimeter; by midnight, the last of the 5th Marines had made it to the village.

For the first time in the Chosin Reservoir campaign, 1st MARDIV was concentrated.

* * *

Inside Koto, the commandos reunited with twenty-five men, including Ovens’ party, who had escaped Hellfire Valley after that first night; 41 Commando was now 150 strong.⁷⁰ The meeting was not entirely joyful: The many silences as names were called forced men to confront the losses suffered: ‘Lots of familiar faces were missing,’ Brady realised⁷¹

One commando, Corporal Williams, had a remarkable tale. In the confused fighting he had been wounded and captured, but had managed to convince Chinese that he was a British war correspondent, not a combatant. The enemy had put him on a shot-up, tyreless, jeep with a pair of US soldiers, and helped them charge the battery. The jeep trundled south, stopping on the night of 30 November under a bridge. When Williams awoke the following morning, the jeep, and the two US soldiers, had gone. Williams was furious. The Chinese took him into a roadside hut with another American prisoner. For days, the pair slowly froze until, on 6 December, they heard tanks clanking past. It was the 7th Marines. The two yelled out, were spotted, stretchered onto a truck and carried to Koto.⁷²

Bivouacs had been prepared inside the perimeter, but Allen first went looking for his kit and had an almost supernatural experience. On the march from Hagaru, he had got fed up with the weight of his pack, and slung it into a passing jeep. At Koto there was an enormous park of 1,400 vehicles – trucks, weapons carriers, jeeps. ‘I emptied my mind and headed off, I allowed myself to be guided to my pack,’ he said. ‘I went to the right corner of the park and there was the vehicle on which I had put my pack – I just found it. Very strange!’

There were other odd events underway – events that would later convince some exhausted survivors of divine intervention. Snow had fallen through much of 7 December and on the evening of 8 December, storm clouds were settling heavily over the plateau. Yet intermittently, through breaks in the air cover shrouding the mountains, sentries made out a lone, white star glittering over the combat base. Word spread. Cheers rang up from warming tents and perimeter positions, then songs. As a symbol of hope, ‘The White Star of Koto-ri’ would enter marine legend.^*73 But when daylight came on 8 December, it brought with it a mix of fog and snow flurries; the skies were unflyable. ‘The familiar drone of planes was strangely absent, and a glacial, primeval silence settled over the hundreds of tents,’ wrote the war’s most famous correspondent, Margueritte Higgins, who had arrived at Koto’s tiny airstrip.⁷⁴ On 9 December, the skies cleared.

The dead were consigned to the frozen ground they had fought over. Three mass graves were blown in the rock-hard earth and on 8 December, 113 men were laid to rest. Among the waxy corpses of US marines and soldiers, the commandos were identifiable by their green berets. ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ was recited by an American chaplain but the shrieking wind carried away his words. A graves registration officer paced the spot and sketched a map – just in case UN forces should return.⁷⁵ ‘It was “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” then the bulldozer covered them,’ said Thomas.^*

One attendee at the funeral would not join the fight through Funchilin. Puller had been indignant at her presence and Smith, suffering ‘an attack of chivalry’ insisted Higgins be flown out.⁷⁶ No proponents of womens’ lib, the commandos had been among those unimpressed with her presence. ‘Ridiculous!’ sniffed Thomas. Koto’s short runway could not accommodate larger aircraft, so torpedo bombers were being used to fly wounded out. Higgins flew out in one – under fire from ridges above. Her co-passenger was General Lemuel Shephard, commander of all marines across the Pacific: He had flown into Koto to join his men on the battleground; Smith persuaded him to depart.⁷⁷

For the descent through Funchilin Pass, the 7th Marines would break trail, followed by the 5th Marines and 41 Commando. Puller’s 1st Marines, together with tanks and the divisional reconnaissance platoon, would be rearguard. There was one advantage at this stage of the operation, a fellow commando told Brady: ‘At least it’s all downhill, mate!’⁷⁸ But there a critical obstacle remained: the felled bridge.

The Chinese had blown a 30-foot gap; below it, yawned a chasm 2,900 feet deep.⁷⁹ While infantry could scramble around the slope behind the power station, there was no space to build a by-pass; 1st MARDIV’s 1,400 vehicles, many loaded with wounded, were lost unless the gap could be bridged. Four sections of treadway bridge would be needed for MARDIV to cross – but it had no treadway.

In a brilliant feat of improvisation, salvation fell from the sky. The USAF loaded bridge sections – each weighing 2 tons – and attached parachutes to their ends, an operation never previously undertaken anywhere. Mindful that the equipment might not survive the fall, marine engineers ordered eight sections. The drop took place on 7 December from C-119s. One piece fell into Chinese hands and one was damaged, but the rest landed inside the Koto perimeter. The next challenge was moving them down through the pass to the chasm. By a fortunate coincidence, Almond had, in the heady days of the advance to the Yalu ordered a section of treadway-carrying trucks to Hagaru. These trucks had survived the journey from Hagaru and were deployed to move the bridge sections.⁸⁰

At minus 30 degrees, 8 December was the coldest day of the campaign: On that day, the final stage of 1st MARDIV’s epic breakout – the withdrawal through the eleven winding miles of the towering pass – began. As the 7th Marines and the engineers with the bridge rolled out of Koto, 41 Commando was ordered to hold high ground covering one of the hairpin ‘switchbacks’ on the road.

The commandos laboured up the face of the hill, buffeted by the frigid blast of the 30-knot wind. Upon reaching a trench cut in the ridge, Edmonds was shocked to find it piled with scores – perhaps hundreds – of frozen Chinese. Below, visible through breaks in the blizzard, the divisional column passed. As light faded, the commandos settled in for the coldest night of their lives. The attack they had been sent up to repel never came, but even Drysdale thought, ‘daylight would never come’.⁸¹ The next morning, 41 was ordered back to Koto.

Upon arrival at the chasm on 9 December with the bridge loaded, the engineers discovered that their sections were too short – by seven feet. However, there was a ledge, about 8 feet below the level of the road, at the southern end, and railway timber had been left by the roadside. The timber could be used to create a lattice to bridge that final gap, but it needed filler, and this would require another – much grimmer – feat of improvisation than parachuting bridge sections. Though the ground was too hard to dig for soil, there was one construction material which was plentiful.

The relentless cold that was corroding the commandos and marines was killing their enemy. The marines’ scorched earth tactics meant that the Chinese were unable to secure either shelter or food. Having outrun their own supply lines, many were now subsisting on ‘a handful of parched flour and a handful of snow’.⁸² While their cotton quilted uniforms were reasonably effective, most had no gloves, and their canvas boots, designed for an invasion of the subtropical island of Taiwan, proved gruesomely inadequate for the subzero rigours of Chosin Reservoir.⁸³ The weather was proving as murderous as bullets and napalm, and nowhere was this more true than in front of the valve station. A Chinese battalion had been ordered to establish an ambush there on the freezing night of 8 December. They had jogged there, but once they arrived and set up positions in the snow, most froze to death in the ice of their own sweat; a few dozen pathetic survivors surrendered to the marines.⁸⁴

As the wooden lattice was constructed, frozen corpses were slung onto the ledge by Chinese POWs.⁸⁵ Engineers were the first to cross, then one by one, divisional traffic began rolling. 1st MARDIV was exiting the high country via a bridge built over the bodies of their enemies: human cement.

The only 1st MARDIV battalion not thus far engaged was joining the fight. 1st Battalion, 1st Marines had held Chinhung-ni, the town that was the entrance to and exit from, the highlands. On 8 December, they had been ordered to fight up through enemy roadblocks below Funchilin, seize a key ridge – Hill 1801 – and link up with the marines fighting south. They had impressive fire support: An army armoured artillery battalion and an anti-aircraft battalion, armed with double 40mm cannon and the fearsome quad .50 calibre machine guns, mounted on eighteen half tracks. Behind the 1st Marines, an army unit from the 3rd Infantry Division in the lowlands – Taskforce Dog – occupied Chinhung to cover the marines’ exit.

Following a second sleepless night holding a section of Koto’s perimeter, 41 Commando started moving down the pass at 09:00 on 9 December with the 5th Marines. A blizzard whipped stinging snow into the faces of the marching men. Drysdale had earlier ordered that nobody would ride in vehicles; despite his wounded arm, 41’s CO marched among his commandos.

Fighting continued. While the wheeling Corsairs obviated much ground combat, Maindonald’s troop, Charlie, was tasked to eliminate a machine gun sweeping the road from the head of a gully. One commando, Jimmy Pepper was hit in the shoulder. Maindonald’s section deployed into line for a frontal assault – the machine gun opened fire – commandos dived for cover. Maindonald could see bullets churning the 18-inch deep snow with a ‘fluttering’ effect. He hid behind a tree, but it was only a sapling, the trunk just inches wide; he crawled into a fold in the ground. An officer yelled orders for a flanking manoeuvre, but when they moved right, the valley dropped away, sheer. The machine gun was well emplaced; there was no avenue of attack, but by now, the column had passed. The commandos were recalled, abandoning their attempt on the gun. 41 tramped over the jury-rigged bridge. ‘It was a great job, marvellous,’ Moyse said. ‘There are two things I really admired about the Americans: engineers and fliers.’

To one side of the road, where it dropped away sheer for thousands of feet, were dramatic vistas of snow and mist filled valley bottoms. On the other side. towered granite cliffs. Commanding hilltops – notably Hill 1801, taken by the fresh 1st Marines after a torrid assault – were black with napalm. From positions up-slope, squads of refrigerated Chinese dead sightlessly watched their enemies escaping.

Thomas’ gaze was drawn to an eviscerated Chinese: The man’s frozen intestines were spread across the entire width of the track. More enemy lay crushed, flattened into the ice-glazed road surface. ‘We were walking on human beings,’ thought Brady the desire to survive overcoming revulsion. While he habitually marched head down, he could no longer bear to look at the road surface. His thoughts turned to other legendary retreats; Brady wondered if conditions had been as bad for Napoleon in Russia. Mulling this amid the almost ghostly spectacle of lines of marines and commandos marching through the mist along the twisting mountain road Brady sensed, for the first time, history in the making.⁸⁶

Brady’s reverie was interrupted when someone started to hesitatingly sing: ‘She’s a big fat bastard, twice the size of me …’ Above the wind, Brady bellowed back, ‘With hairs on her belly like the branches of a tree!’⁸⁷ The song was taken up, echoing off the cliffs.

In the late afternoon, a barrage of heavy artillery thundered down into the surrounding hills. ‘We thought we were home and dry when the Puerto Ricans brought down fire on us,’ said Thomas. The Puerto Rican 65th Infantry was establishing blocking positions in the lowlands; fortunately, nobody was hit. ‘I suspect the fire was friendly, but it was nonetheless unpleasant,’ Drysdale commented.⁸⁸

Daylight died. In the darkness, Chinese began firing light mortars. Each time they fired, they flashed. The commandos, who had lost their own mortars in Hellfire Valley, put small arms fire down on the flashes. It was unclear if they were hitting anything, but the flashes were moving all the time, meaning the Chinese were being forced to move and redeploy their weapons.⁸⁹ But there was now a feeling that the enemy’s back had been broken: their frozen dead were visible all around, they were not attacking with their previous élan. ‘From that point on, you felt safe,’ said O’Brien. ‘You still had odd attacks causing a bit of disruption, but not mass attacks: They’d come up on a hillside and fire down.’

The last unit casualty would come in darkness, as Saunchegrow conned his shot-up truck down through the pass at walking pace. A commando was striding ahead, guiding him by verbal commands, but at a turn, the track crumbled. The truck tipped over and disappeared down the slope, scattering commandos and equipment. Drysdale and Aldridge dashed over to supervise the rescue, but none was needed; remarkably, the vehicle had come to rest on a ledge 20 feet down; equally remarkably, nobody was wounded. Saunchegrow, hanging upside down at the steering wheel, crawled out. The US marine corporal was ‘mighty sad’ at the demise of ‘Old Faithful’.⁹⁰ The vehicle had been carrying the last of the unit’s kit: Now, all the commandos had left was on their backs or hanging from their belts.

The slow, cold miles passed. When the column halted yet again, the commandos belted out, ‘Why are we waiting?’ Morton Silver, a US Navy corpsman accompanying 41, was as astonished by the singing as much as by the fact that the commandos were ‘disdaining any and all forms of motorised transport’.⁹¹

Rumours spread: There were trucks waiting around the next bend. Yet around each bend, the promised vehicles proved illusory. By now, abandoned personal equipment – packs, shovels, bed rolls – littered the track, dropped by exhausted men ahead. Still 41 Commando trudged on. Brady, almost hallucinating with exhaustion, registered something: the road he was on no longer sloped, it was flat. Then there came a ragged cheer: A long line of empty trucks was waiting on the road ahead.⁹²

Thomas was near the front of the column with Drysdale, ordering that every commando would march out, but when he looked back it was too late: his men were swarming over the vehicles. The commandos had marched 23 miles; none had slept for 72 hours.⁹³Thomas happened to glance across at Drysdale as he gazed back up the grim pass they had fought out of. A look of utter desolation passed momentarily across his face as, Thomas guessed, Drysdale remembered the men left behind.

1st MARDIV’s spearhead had reached Chinhung at 02:30 on 10 December. 41 Commando were in at 21:30 hours.⁹⁴ Behind 41, the 1st Marines pulled back. The last elements were a column of tanks, a reconnaissance platoon, and a group of engineers. The bridge was blown; the treadway sections tumbled 2,900 feet into the abyss. Refugees were left stranded on the northern side, though many scrambled around the slope behind the valve station and down to the lowlands. Six heavy tanks of the rearguard, trapped by a tank that stalled on the road ahead, were abandoned. They were blasted by air strike. By 11 December, the last marines had cleared the highlands.

* * *

Sprawled over one another in the backs of the trucks, shattered commandos dozed. ‘The vibration of the truck as it moved off was the psychological equivalent of manna from heaven,’ thought Brady. ‘I have never since felt the release of tension so vehemently.’⁹⁵

The survivors disembarked at a tented camp in Hungnam. While cold, the camp was not nearly as frigid as the highlands: the mud was liquid, not frozen, the snow merely patchy. A field kitchen was dishing up hot stew and coffee. Men wolfed it down. No member of the commando had removed his clothing since 27 November. ‘It will be an interesting moment when the time comes!’ Drysdale reckoned.⁹⁶

41 Commando was a shadow of its former self. RSM Baines called the roll. The murderous combat in Hellfire Valley, the subsequent fighting at Hagaru and during the breakout the insidious frost had bled the unit white. Of 217 men who had entered the mountains twelve days earlier, ninety-eight were casualties: thirteen killed; twenty-seven missing or captured; thirty-nine wounded; and nineteen suffering from frostbite, exposure or pneumonia.⁹⁷ Having been ‘pretty badly cut about’, the Commando was reduced to, in its CO’s words, ‘virtually three independent platoons’.⁹⁸

The US marines suffered terrible losses. Between 11 October and 11 December 1950, 1st MARDIV lost 704 killed; 187 missing, 3,489 wounded and 6,000 non-battle casualties, largely frostbite cases. Overall, X Corps suffered 11,500 casualties.⁹⁹

On 12 December, 41 Commando, together with the 5th Marines, loaded onto LSTs at Hungnam’s Green Beach and chugged out to the troopship USS General Randall. The next day, she set sail. Silver, the US Navy medical officer, was approached by an SBA with a request to examine the commandos. ‘The Britishers removed their shoes and hosiery to reveal frozen, gangrenous, blackened toes and feet,’ Silver wrote. ‘They had marched, crippled and in pain, fought, singing and swearing, down the road from Chosin to the sea. The US Marines were proud to have the Royal Marines fight alongside us in that hellish place.’¹⁰⁰

Bound for Pusan, General Randall was carrying 5,000 men aboard a ship designed for 2,000.¹⁰¹ Administration was impressive. ‘They gave us a ticket: Four people to share every bunk,’ said Edmonds. ‘The pipe would come: “Red tickets! Crash now!”’ Galley queues jammed companionways. ‘As soon as you got to the end of the queue, it was time for the next meal!’ Edmonds recalled. ‘The showers were knee-deep in underwear where people had thrown stuff off,’ said Moyse – yet new, clean underwear was on hand for every man. In the showers, Maindonald noted how odd some looked: ‘The combination of C-ration diet and temperatures which had dissuaded men from defecating for days on end, had left many bloated.’¹⁰²

The gangways, mess halls and bunkroom were animated by a delirious atmosphere of explosive emotional decompression. Crowds of marines were squatting in any spare space, gambling away hundreds of dollars. ‘Money was nothing to them,’ said O’Brien. ‘They had come out of hell, and being typical Americans, the dice was going. Every one of them was laughing.’¹⁰³

Drysdale was not sharing the joy. Determined that Whitehall grasped the ordeal his men had endured, he wrote to the Admiralty on 12 December. ‘I should like Commandant General Royal Marines to know that the chaps have been absolutely magnificent under quite the bloodiest conditions that I have ever experienced,’ he wrote. ‘I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m proud of them.’ His letter – a single page, but containing several typos – reveals that the carnage in the mountains had affected the commando leader. ‘What I am desperately in need of is future guidance, 41 Commando is no longer an operation (sic) unit,’ Drysdale continued. It would need to be ‘either very considerably reinforced … or be disbanded’. For the CO even to suggest that the unit of which he was so proud might lack a future indicates his desolation. ‘I’m sorry this is so short, but conditions are not ideal,’ Drysdale concluded, ‘and I’m a spot weary.’¹⁰⁴

He was not the only one. Looking at himself in a washroom mirror, O’Brien noticed grey hairs. He was nineteen.

* * *

On 11 December – the day the marines exited the highlands – X Corps issued orders for a total withdrawal from northeast Korea. The battleworn 1st MARDIV was just the first unit to depart. In all 105,000 military personnel and 17,500 tanks and vehicles would be carried away into the northern Pacific.¹⁰⁵

To cover this exodus, four fast aircraft carriers, one light carrier and two escort carriers were on station. To this was added, the naval gunfire of two heavy cruisers, six destroyers and three rocket ships. Off the coast, some 200 ships were undertaking the biggest seaborne evacuation since Dunkirk.¹⁰⁶

While the Chinese were gunning for 1st MARDIV, X Corps’ other units – 7th Infantry Division and ROK 1st Corps – had withdrawn, largely without interference from the enemy.^* Corps rearguard was the US 3rd Infantry Division. After their savaging at the hands of the marines, the Chinese did not pursue closely. 3ID withdrew through a series of concentric phase lines, methodically blowing everything behind them. The Puerto Rican troops of the division commandeered ox carts to carry kit as explosions rigged by demolition engineers brought factory chimneys crashing down behind them.¹⁰⁷

Hungnam’s rail yards provided another canvas for the engineers’ art. On 15 December, fifteen locomotives and 275 cars were set on a viaduct, a span of which was blown. The engines and carriages were then rolled, one by one, into the chasm. The last pieces of rolling stock were a locomotive and several tankers of petrol, sitting on a wooden section of the viaduct. The wood was ignited. The flames climbed. The engine’s whistle blew forlornly; it turned pink, then scarlet, before the wooden supports collapsed and it plunged to destruction.¹⁰⁸

For tens of thousands of Koreans, the sky was falling. With the thunder in the mountains descending to destroy them, the UNC defeat triggered a desperate race for survival.

Four of them, turned away at Hamhung train station, knew their lives rested on reaching the coast. After nightfall the Lims crept into the station, and hid inside a single cargo car. ‘There was no engine, we just hid there,’ Lim said. Her hands nearly froze in the night. The next day, there came clangs from outside; they were being connected to a locomotive. The car started rolling. ‘We did not know our destination,’ she said. ‘We just hoped and hoped.’ The train stopped at the end of the line: Hungnam.

Bundled up in thick layers of clothing, their few possessions bound up, carted or carried on heads or backs, refugees swarmed over the frost-glazed quays of the port and the freezing black mud of the evacuation beaches, hoping to be ferried out into the Pacific.

The Lims had reached the port, but not safety; they hid in the house of a cousin. ‘Hungnam was a port and industrial city, so was full of communists,’ Lim said. ‘Every day, we waited to hear if we could get on a boat.’ They did not dare go out; instead, every day, their cousin left to see if there was space. Every day she returned with the same litany: ‘Not today.’ ‘We were terrified, we could not sleep,’ said Lim. ‘If we could not escape, it meant death.’ Then her cousin roused them: ‘There’s a ship!’ she said. Fearful of marauding troops, her mother bundled the teenaged Geum-sook up in a muffler to hide her gender. ‘We were afraid of soldiers,’ she said. ‘Russian, communist or UN – soldiers are soldiers.’ The family hurried down to the port and joined one of several long queues thronging the icy docks.

The atmosphere was one of fearful anticipation. Lights were winking out to sea and the air over the refugees’ heads was rent with express train shrieks as the US Navy bombardment group rained destruction far inland. ‘I knew my hometown was being destroyed,’ Lim said. ‘How can I explain my feelings? My heart felt like it was being squeezed, I could barely breathe with terror.’

The ship Lim’s cousin had spoken of was a freighter, the SS Meredith Victory; the last civilian ship to leave Hungnam. Her master, Captain Leonard La Rue, had not been ordered inshore, but scanning the scene through binoculars and seeing thousands of refugees still hoping, somehow, to get away, he volunteered. On 22 December, he docked. ‘There were families with eight and ten children,’ La Rue, remembered. ‘There was a man with a violin, a woman with a sewing machine, a young girl with triplets. There were seventeen wounded, some stretcher cases, many aged, hundreds of babies.’¹⁰⁹ While the ship was only designed to carry twelve passengers, Koreans were herded aboard throughout the night. Among those piling up the gangways were the Lims. The family was ushered into the hold, well below the waterline. It was heaving with people. ‘There was no room even to sit, but it was a horrible situation, life or death,’ she said. ‘I did not think of discomfort.’ For the first time in weeks, the 19-year-old was safe.

Enemy forces were reportedly only 4,000 yards away. ‘My main memory was the anxiety of getting all those people aboard as communist forces closed in,’ said Robert Lunney, a US naval ensign. ‘We had men on shore with axes ready to cut our lines, our boilers were up and running.’ Cables were cast off on 23 December and the ship’s bows turned seaward, but risk had not receded: In the northern Pacific chill, some refugees lit fires near barrels of fuel. Yet not only did everyone aboard the ship survive, theMeredith Victory^* docked on Boxing Day near Pusan with five more passengers than she had departed with: babies born in transit.¹¹⁰ Of 91,000 Koreans civilians evacuated from Hungnam; 14,000 sailed aboard the ‘Ship of Miracles’.¹¹¹ ‘That Christmastide, in the bleak and bitter waters off the shores of Korea,’ La Rue, who later entered the church, stated, ‘God’s own hand was at the helm of my ship.’¹¹²

The background overture to the tragedy now reached its crescendo. The great battleship USS Missouri – the vessel on whose deck the Japanese surrender ending the Second World War had been signed – had been summoned. On 23 December, the three 16-inch turrets of the floating fortress joined the cruisers and rocket ships as they fired a rolling barrage a mile and a half inland.¹¹³ The 16-inch shells each cost the price of a Cadillac; when fired, they caused a displacement of water; when they detonated, they blew a crater 30 feet across in the frozen soil. The avalanche of explosives was part tactical necessity, part impotent fury. Viewed from an observation aircraft, even the greatest of America’s fighting ships appeared like a toy against Hamgyong’s snow-capped mountains.

On 24 December, the last unit ashore, demolition experts of the US Navy’s Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) Detachment Bravo, were working feverishly. Their orders from Admiral James Doyle, the commander of the evacuation, were simple: Hungnam’s port was to be turned into ‘a wasteland’. The UDT men found it strange to be preparing demolitions with a naval barrage howling over their heads; they had to ‘work fast and be damn cautious’, recalled a team member, Royal Vanatta, who was praying silently. Hundreds of yards of explosive hose were connected; charges were lowered off quays into the water. The UDT rigged the docks with tons of explosives, as well as wiring a nearby train loaded with aerial bombs. Enemy closed. A flare was fired to summon the scattered detachment to the end of the breakwater, their extraction point. Setting a last charge in the lighthouse, the frogmen boarded the APD USS Begor, which swiftly departed out to sea.¹¹⁴

Christmas Eve, 1950 was one of those crystalline winter days – an appropriate backdrop for the most spectacular, most terrible manifestation of the UNC’s scorched earth policy. Admiral Doyle and General Almond watched through binoculars from the USSMount McKinley; closer inshore, the UDT men on the Begor had a grandstand view of their handiwork. First, an ammunition dump blew, crackling like a firework display. Then, a long line of synchronised explosions detonated, rippling along the shoreline. Thunder boomed across the water. The eruptions tore apart the docks, blasting their facilities – quays, cranes, warehouses, lighthouse – into obliteration. Seconds later, tons of debris began splashing down into the Pacific. Colossal clouds of white, grey and black smoke and dust billowed up into a merciless blue sky.

The UNC’s foray into North Korea was over. It was an apocalyptic finale.^*

* * *

For overseeing the successful evacuation of northeast Korea with minimal losses of men or materiel, General Almond, X Corps’ commander, received his third general’s star.¹¹⁵ Such platitudes did nothing to sweeten the overall outlook. For the UNC, that believed it stood on the brink of victory at the end of November, the situation at the end of December was catastrophic.

In the west, the 8th Army had been routed. In the east, X Corps had retreated. North Korea was lost to the UN. UNC troops regrouped in the South. In the winter winds, the red banner fluttered once more over Kim Il-sung’s land, now a blasted wilderness.

Within that wilderness, a strange new feature had appeared. In the high country around Chosin Reservoir – in and around the ashen ruins of Chinhung-ni; up through the winding Funchilin Pass to Koto, Hagaru and Yudam; along the roads linking them; and in the mountains overlooking them – countless oval hummocks lay in irregular patterns across the terrain.

The Chinese had planned to annihilate the marines. Instead – against an enemy who could not be panicked, and who deployed grit, tactical skill and firepower – the Chinese, themselves, had been decimated. On 8 December, in a cable to Mao, Peng estimated that 9th Army needed 60,000 replacements.¹¹⁶

Hamgyong Province had become the Army Group’s graveyard: Each hummock marked one of General Song’s fallen soldiers.¹¹⁷ The countless frost-blackened corpses would not be revealed until their snow shrouds melted in the spring thaw.

* The ill-fated 31st RCT has become known to posterity as ‘Taskforce Faith’. The latter designation, however, was not in use at the time.

* Thomas told the author how haunted he was by the sight of the refugees; he wondered if any made it out. In fact – remarkably – many did. Over twenty years later, John Lee, by then retired from the military and a successful lawyer, met a group of Hagaru exiles in Seoul. They were keen to tell him how successful they were in South Korea; Lee was moved to tears.

* The ‘Star of Koto-ri’ became the official logo of the veterans’ group ‘The Chosin Few’. Today, it shines on in the stained glass of the US Marine chapel in Kaneoe, Hawaii.

* As part of the 1953 Korean War truce terms, the 113 men buried at Koto were exhumed and turned over to the UNC. ‘I’ve got to hand it to the North Koreans,’ said General Smith. ‘They did an excellent job of digging up those bodies and put them in bags and sent them to Panmunjom,’ he said. (See his interview with Roe atwww.chosinreservoir.com)

* While some in the US Army contend that 31st RCT’s sacrifice saved the marines, it is worth noting that by holding down the Chinese mass of manoeuvre, it was 1st MARDIV that permitted ROK and US Army units further north to escape to the coast unscathed.

* The Meredith Victory, the ‘Ship of Miracles’, earned a mention in the Guinness Book of Records for carrying out the world’s largest ever seaborne rescue, as well as a special citation from President Dwight Eisenhower. In 1993, she was sold for scrap – without apparent irony – to China.

* A popular South Korean song of the post war years, ‘Be Strong, Keumsun’ tells of a couple separated at Hungnam: Amid a raging blizzard at Hungnam Port, I shouted your name and searched desperately/Where are you Keumsun?/Keep alive behind the iron curtain/The day will come when we will reunite/The day will come when we will dance hand in hand. Sixty years later, that day has yet to arrive.