8
On the drive north of the 38th Parallel, MacArthur had deliberately separated the Eighth Army, under Walker, from the operations of X Corps, under his own Chief of Staff, General Edward Almond. The two divisions of X Corps—7th and 1st Marine—landed on the east coast and moved north, miles out of ground contact with the Eighth Army. Thus it was that, when disaster struck, Almond’s and Walker’s formations endured entirely separate nightmares, divided by the central spine of North Korean mountains. All that they possessed in common were the horrors of weather, isolation, Chinese attack—and the threat of absolute disaster overtaking American arms.
Relations between General Almond and O. P. Smith of the 1st Marine Division had been frigid since they came ashore at Inchon. Smith was thoroughly unhappy about the dispersal of X Corps strength on the advance north: “I told Almond we couldn’t make two big efforts. I said, ‘Either we go to the Yalu by Chosin, or by the northwest route, but not both.’ ” Almond, whatever his shortcomings, an undisputed driver of men, was exasperated by the sluggishness—even obstructionism—that he perceived in the Marines. Smith, in his turn, profoundly suspicious of Almond’s lust for glory, feared that sooner or later the Corps commander’s impatience would inflict a disaster upon his men: “What I was trying to do was to slow down the advance and stall until I could pull up the 1st Marines behind us, and get our outfit together.”1 The Marines’ advance to the Chosin Reservoir, and up its western arm, had indeed been slow because Smith insisted that at every stage reserves of ammunition and supplies should be brought forward and stockpiled. Meanwhile, Almond urged haste to prevent the Chinese from encompassing the destruction of the vast dams at the reservoir, which intelligence believed to be the Communist intention.
By November 25 two of Smith’s three regiments—the 5th and 7th—had reached Yudam-ni, at the eastern extremity of the reservoir, and were scheduled to jump off on the twenty-seventh toward a link-up with the Eighth Army’s northern movement at Mupyong. Thereafter, they would strike for Kanggye and Manpojin on the Chinese border. The 1st Marines were deployed along the main supply route between Hagaru and Koto-ri, alongside some army elements. The Corps’ rear coastal area was the responsibility of the 3rd Division. On the Marines’ right, three battalions of the 7th Division were moving up the east side of the reservoir. The bulk of the 7th Division was more than sixty miles northward, the most advanced American formation, behind the very banks of the Yalu.
Residual Communist strength in North Korea was reported by GHQ to be around 100,000 men—about the same as the UN’s front-line numbers—while some 40,000 Communist guerrillas and stragglers were believed to remain behind the front. In reality, over 100,000 Chinese troops were already deployed on X Corps front alone. Whatever delusions persisted in the rear, the Marines who visited North Korean villages raiding for food, who talked to villagers about the masses of men that had passed through, were in little doubt about the scale of enemy activity. When Lieutenant Colonel Robert Taplett, commanding the 3/5th Marines, flew forward in a helicopter, he could see a maze of tracks and foxholes in the mountain snow. “Those damn holes are just crawling with people,” said his pilot wonderingly.
The 1st Marine Division began to move forward on the morning of November 27. That night the Chinese launched violent assaults, not merely upon its leading elements, but for thirty miles down its main—indeed, only—supply route to the coast, seventy-eight miles to the south. To Marine officers in command posts among the positions at Yudam-ni, it seemed that every unit in the two regiments was reporting itself under attack that night. A Chinese grenade knocked out the switchboard of the 3/5th Battalion CP. One of its company commanders “froze” in his position, and his men could not be moved until another officer was hastily dispatched to take his place. All through the hours of darkness the Chinese hurled themselves again and again upon the company positions of the two Marine regiments. It is a remarkable tribute to the quality of units reconstituted only three months earlier, heavily manned by reservists, that they mounted so dogged a defense under the most appalling conditions. Almost every man who returned from the hills above the Chosin Reservoir brought with him an epic story of close-quarter combat amid the flares, mortaring, grenade and small-arms duels. Although the Chinese broke into a succession of positions and inflicted severe casualties, nowhere did they succeed in breaking the Marine companies.
By morning the Marines were holding three isolated perimeters: at Yudam-ni, farthest north; at Hagaru, on the base of the reservoir, and at Koto-ri, another ten miles south. There was brief discussion among the Americans about continuing their own offensive. “But I told Ray Murray, ‘Stop,’ ” said General Smith. “It was manifest we were up against a massive force out there.”2 It was apparent to the Marines that their predicament was precarious. They were facing very large Chinese forces: some ten enemy divisions, it later emerged, were deployed in X Corps’ area of operations. Hagaru, with its airstrip and supply dumps, at the junction of the only escape route south, was defended only by one Marine battalion and such local army elements as could be scraped together to man a perimeter on the surrounding hills. The formations of X Corps were dispersed among hundreds of square miles of barren mountains. Many of the American positions were accessible only by a single track or road, appallingly vulnerable to isolation by an enemy who moved at will among the mountains. As soon as the scale of the Chinese offensive became apparent, there was only one prudent option open to Almond’s forces: withdrawal to the coast. Yet for this to be possible, it was necessary for the main supply route, the MSR, to be held open. And in those last days of November, the lonely track through the passes from Hungnam to Yudam-ni was a snowbound thread liable to snap at any moment. The X Corps commander was always ready to find reason to attack O. P. Smith. Almond believed that he had ample cause for anger with the Marine general in the weakness of the Hungnam garrison. X Corps had correctly perceived that the junction at the base of the Chosin Reservoir was a vital position which must be held in strength. Now, Almond raged, why had Smith left so few men to defend it? The Marine answered that he could never have pursued Almond’s cherished advance from Yudam-ni with less than two regiments. Smith was furious that, even now, Almond was unwilling to recognize the urgency of their plight and call off his offensive. It was two days before the Marines at Yudam-ni received orders—or rather, consent—to withdraw. Meanwhile, Smith labored by any means to strengthen the garrison at Hagaru.
• • •
The 235 men of 41 Independent Commando, Royal Marines, had arrived at Koto-ri on November 28 to operate under X Corps. When transport and equipment had been found for the British unit, it was intended that it should act as a reconnaissance group. But it now became a matter of urgency to reinforce the Hagaru perimeter with every available man. On the morning of November 29 the Royal Marines, together with a company of U.S. Marines and another of infantry, 922 men and 141 vehicles in all, were ordered north under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Drysdale. There was no time even to feed the men before they marched. The British had just time to remove a section of 81-mm mortars and .30-caliber Brownings from the crates in which they had been brought up from Hamnung before “Task Force Drysdale” moved north.
They met resistance almost immediately. The British and American Marines deployed from their vehicles and began painfully to clear the high ground overlooking the road. Yard by yard, under constant fire, they pushed forward, aided by a company of tanks which had arrived to support them. By 4:15 P.M., with darkness falling, they were only four miles north of Koto-ri. Drysdale radioed Hagaru to ask General Smith whether he was to keep coming. Smith answered that he needed every man he could get into the perimeter. After a delay while the tanks refueled, the column pressed on into the darkness. To Drysdale’s fury, the armored company commander—“an opinionated young man”—flatly rejected his request to distribute his seventeen tanks along the length of the convoy and insisted that they should punch through in a body at the front. As a result, when Task Force Drysdale was ambushed by the Chinese in a defile known as “Hellfire Valley,” above the Changjin River some five miles from their starting point, the soft-skinned vehicles were unprotected. When the Chinese hit trucks in the midst of the convoy around 10 P.M., those in the rear were cut off. Some of the U.S. Army company in the rear retired to Koto-ri without displaying much enthusiasm for a night battle against powerful enemy forces. Pockets of British and American Marines fought all night beside the road.
A mortar bomb hit the truck ahead of that carrying Marine Andrew Condron, a twenty-two-year-old radio operator from West Lothian. He and the others in his vehicle jumped down and lay in the monsoon ditch beside the road, watching the dim shapes of Chinese soldiers flitting to and fro in the darkness. His carbine jammed at his first attempt to fire it, and he picked up an M-1 rifle from a dead American lying nearby. They exchanged desultory fire with the enemy around them until, about 1 A.M., an officer ran up and urged them to join him in an effort to break out. They collected some ammunition and grenades and began to work their way across open ground. Condron was appalled to pass an American in agony by the roadside, on fire from burning phosphorus, screaming for someone to shoot him. The Marine lost track of his officer early on and found himself, with two other British rankers, wading an icy stream. There was a sudden shot, and the leading man fell. They heard American voices, at whom the outraged Marine with Condron shouted, “You’ve killed my mate!” When the emotional temperature had cooled, the little group of British and Americans lay together in silence, listening to the firing and explosions among the convoy, now some half mile distant. Condron hung his socks in a tree to dry, where they promptly froze. He put a beret on one foot, a camouflage net on the other under his boots. Condron was dressing the wound of a comatose Marine shot in the hip when he glanced up to see a South Korean standing above him, wearing a snow cape and carrying a Thompson gun. The man grunted aggressively. “Bugger off,” Condron grunted back. An American shouted hastily to the Scot, “Hey, buddy, you’d better drop that rifle fast—we’ve surrendered.” The “South Korean” was a Chinese soldier.
Condron’s brother had been a Japanese prisoner of war in World War II and he told the young Marine to ensure that he always carried the vital essentials of life, in case he himself was captured. Condron took heed, and had stowed in his pack an emergency kit of razor blades, waterproof matches, vitamin pills, and two books of poetry—Burns and Fitzgerald. But all these things still lay in the distant truck. Like most of those who suffered the same fate in Korea, Condron passed into captivity with only the clothes on his back.3
Around fifty British and American soldiers and Marines, in all, surrendered at first light. Some others escaped back to Koto-ri. A few, like the British heavy-weapon section, eventually got through to Hagaru in desperate straits from frostbite. Captain Pat Ovens also made good his escape on foot to the Marine lines. The leading elements of the survivors pressed on in their vehicles until, within sight of the American engineers working under floodlights to improve the runway inside the Hagaru perimeter, they were hit again. An abandoned tank blocked the road, and Chinese mortaring ignited a succession of vehicles. After another fierce firefight, the tank company and the surviving infantry struggled into Hagaru around midnight. The armor came first, smashing headlong through the defending American roadblock, crushing a jeep. The British, according to one of the Marines manning the road position, appeared looking more like a raiding party than a military unit: “Don’t shoot, Yank!” Colonel Drysdale himself was slightly wounded by a grenade fragment in the arm, and less than a hundred of his Royal Marines were still behind him. “I never thought I should be so glad to see an American,” said Lieutenant Peter Thomas wryly. Thomas brought in the last two vehicles of the convoy, both loaded with wounded. Sixty-one British Marines had been lost on the road from Koto-ri, out of Task Force Drysdale’s 321 casualties and 71 vehicles destroyed. 41 Commando became garrison reserve, under the command of Ray Murray of the 5th Marines.
• • •
The little town of Hagaru lay in a cleft in the mountains that otherwise appeared to the Marines to occupy the entire surface of North Korea. For those brief winter weeks of 1950, when it was occupied by the Americans, Hagaru resembled a nineteenth-century Arctic mining camp. Snow coated the peasant houses, the Marines’ tents, the tanks and trucks, the supply dumps and artillery pieces and command vehicles. The local sawmill was kept in perpetual motion by the engineers, cutting timber to strengthen positions and assist in the vital labor of airfield construction. Thin plumes of smoke from a hundred fires and stoves curled into the air on the rare days when the air was still. More often, they were whipped aside by the driving wind that stung every inch of exposed human flesh. At first, men marveled at the depths to which the thermometer could sink: –10, –14, –20 at night. Then they became as numb to the misery of the cold as to everything else. Many said that it was not only their capacity for physical activity that diminished, but even their speed of thought. General Smith himself found it increasingly difficult even to move his jaw to speak. The simplest action—loading a weapon, unbolting a steel section, rigging an aerial—became a laborious, agonizing marathon. The jeeps were kept running continually. In some cases their headlights were run on cables into key positions such as the sick-bay and operations tents to supplement the feeble Coleman lanterns. To start an engine required hours of work—thawing its moving parts, persuading its frozen oil to liquefy. Blood plasma froze. Medical orderlies were obliged to carry morphine Syrettes in their mouths to maintain their fluidity. For the men, the miraculously effective space heaters in the tents became the very focus of life. All this, before the enemy had even begun to take a hand.
The battle for Hagaru was a strange affair, like so many of the actions of that first Korean winter. By day there was little enemy activity, and the Americans could move with almost complete freedom, while their own air strikes hammered the Communists’ presumed positions. Then, with the coming of night, the struggle began in earnest. All through the hours of darkness the defenders fought back the Chinese attacks, glimpsing their enemy briefly by the light of flares and gun flashes, perceiving him above all by the eerie sounds he brought with him—the bugles, the whistles, the banshee yells. For many men the greatest fear was that when the moment came, when the Communist wave broke upon their positions, the cold would have jammed their life-saving weapons. After the first November battles, rumors swept the UN armies that some men—allegedly of 1st Cavalry Division—had been surprised by the Chinese in their sleeping bags and bayoneted where they lay, unable to extricate themselves in time. Thereafter, most men on the line were either themselves unwilling, or were forbidden by their officers, to zip up their bags to sleep.
On the forward positions the cold was so appalling that an extraordinary improvisation, perhaps unique to this campaign, became necessary: the introduction of “warming tents,” a few hundred yards behind the front, where every two or three hours men retreated to thaw themselves a few degrees, to restore circulation to their deadened limbs, in order that they might be capable of resistance when the Chinese came again. How the Chinese themselves coped, lacking any such refinements yet presumably at the same extremities of human tolerance, men marveled to speculate. When the garrison received an occasional night air strike in support, they marked the pilots’ aiming points by firing solid tracer. The optical effects of battle below zero were astonishing: mortar bombs flew through the sky like rockets, leaving fiery trails in the ice-cold air.
The garrison was a hotchpotch. There were two companies of the 1st Marines; some gunners conscripted as infantry; an army engineer company sent to build a command post for General Almond, but now pushed into the line; a ragtag of American and South Korean line-of-communication personnel, deployed on the hills as reluctant riflemen. It was a matter of pride to a platoon of army signalers that, during one Chinese attack, they successfully held their positions while the engineers broke. One night East Hill was lost, overlooking the vital airstrip. A scratch force of 200 cooks, drivers, and stragglers was ruthlessly rounded up from all over the perimeter and herded forward to counterattack at dawn, protected by an air strike. Only some seventy-five were still present when they mustered at the start line—the remainder had simply drifted away into the darkness. But they regained part of the hill, and G Company of the 3/1st Marines completed the job. One night a company clerk standing in as a heavy machine gunner was appalled to see a file of Chinese advancing upon his roadblock. Ignorant even of how to elevate the barrel of his gun, he could only lift the legs of the gun’s tripod to bring fire to bear upon them. Fortunately, the company runner then woke up and took over, to more effect.
The Americans seemed to enjoy the company of their little British party from 41 Commando. They found Colonel Drysdale himself somewhat reserved, although the effects of exhaustion and his wound undoubtedly influenced his demeanor. The two nations set about reconciling their military inconsistencies—the British habit of calling a mortar round a bomb, while the Americans called it a shell; the instinctive British parsimony with ammunition, when the Americans believed in intensive bombardment if the rounds were there. A Marine rifle company commander sought to illustrate his approach to fire support to Drysdale: “Suppose we were going up that hill over there—we’d expect to put in 200 rounds before we left the start line.” The British officer ruminated for a moment, then remarked dryly, “We wouldn’t go up the hill at all. We’d go around it.” The British insisted upon shaving each morning, in the interests of morale and discipline. Most Marines preferred to cultivate a stubble. The Commandos found the Americans’ carelessness about showing lights at night almost incomprehensible. Their formidable regimental sergeant major, Jim Baines, tore a ferocious strip off a dim figure whose cigarette he saw glowing in a nearby foxhole and was embarrassed to find an American officer hastily stubbing out his butt. But if the Commandos and Marines found some of each other’s habits incomprehensible, they also formed a deep admiration for the tenacity and determination common to both corps. “I felt entirely comfortable fighting alongside the Marines,” said Colonel Drysdale.
Each day, as the men on the hills watched the C-47s taxi along the frozen airstrip to collect their loads of wounded, it was impossible not to feel a deep pang of envy for those who would be safe in warm beds, far out of range of enemy fire, within a few hours. It was too much to expect, in those circumstances, that they should count their blessings. While the Chinese deployed immense numbers of infantry, well supported by mortars, they possessed virtually no artillery. The center of the perimeter was thus almost immune to direct fire. The predicament of the X Corps would have been incomparably worse had their enemies possessed the normal support weapons of a modern army.
• • •
Among a host of tragic spectacles that MacArthur’s forces were to behold that Korean winter, the arrival of the survivors of the 7th Division’s “Task Force Faith” at Hagaru remained one of the most vivid. Across the great sweep of ice covering the reservoir, the Marines on the perimeter saw handfuls of men stumbling, limping, even crawling. Some were without weapons. Most had lost their equipment. Many were at the extremities of frostbite. “Some of these men were dragging themselves on the ice,” wrote a Marine officer, “some had gone crazy and were walking in circles. It was pitiful.”4 The Marines hauled sledges out onto the reservoir, and brought in all the soldiers they could find. But only 385 of the thousand survivors from a force of 2,500 were considered sufficiently fit to take their place in the line at Hagaru.
Yet as late as November 27, the day that the elements of the 7th Division east of the reservoir at Sihung-ni first met the Chinese, General Almond had flown in by helicopter personally to emphasize his determination that the American offensive should not be deflected. “We’re still attacking and we’re going all the way to the Yalu,” he said. “Don’t let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop you.” In the days that followed, X Corps only slowly began to understand the disaster that was unfolding east of the reservoir. “We didn’t see it as a tragedy, because we had no idea at all how terrible their losses were, until they came out,” said one of Almond’s staff. Yet from the night of November 27 until their withdrawal in ruins three days later, the men of Task Force Faith—as 32nd RCT became when their original commander was killed—found themselves under constant attack from the Chinese, who drove them back down the east bank of the Chosin Reservoir, bleeding terribly as they marched.
• • •
Private Don McAlister was the son of a Kansas farming family who had spent his teens trying any job that would earn a buck: dishwashing, sawmilling, farmwork. It was a grindingly hard life. After spending the winter of 1949 clearing a hedgerow, he and his cousin decided to join the Army and try to get training in the engineers. McAlister was still in basic training in June 1950. He found himself abruptly shipped to the 1/32nd Infantry, 7th Division. He felt an instinctive sympathy for the South Korean farmers, whose poverty seemed only a degree or two worse than that from which he had come. He greatly admired his battalion commander, Don Faith, who walked every battlefield with a cane rather than a weapon. He had much less confidence in some of the other officers, and sometimes suspected that the battalion commander did too. On the night of November 27, McAlister was on an outpost position when the Chinese attacked in overwhelming strength. The BAR team and Browning gunners fired for as long as they could, but at last the Chinese swept over the position. The American survivors ran back to their own company front as fast as they could go. They fought all night. McAlister at one point found himself physically wrestling with two Chinese soldiers for possession of his BAR. His company commander was killed, the hillside littered with the bodies of dead Chinese and Americans. At dawn, when the attacks stopped, he and his section were sent back to their outpost. To their astonishment, lying in the bottom of a foxhole they found two of their own men, alive and unharmed. They had successfully played dead when the position was lost.
All that day Marine and Navy aircraft flew strikes against enemy concentrations in front of the Americans. But that night the Chinese came again. Their second assault pushed back McAlister’s A company halfway down their hill line. They hung on only with urgent support from their neighbors of B Company. As they fought from foxhole to foxhole, American fortunes seesawing through the night, McAlister lost his pack, his sleeping bag, and extra rations. The bag had been important not merely for sleeping, but to stand in through the long hours in freezing holes. About 4 A.M. the battalion began to withdraw. Many of the machine gunners covering their departure were lost as the Chinese raced forward in pursuit. The 1st Battalion reached the positions of their own gunners and other infantry to find that they too had been attacked and surrounded. It was now that Colonel Faith assumed command of all the survivors.
That day, like its predecessor, the Americans spent stamping their feet in the desperate cold, trying to improve their positions for the night and watching the air strikes. The Chinese harassed and sniped at them. That night they lost their positions in one attack, and were compelled to counterattack to retake them, all the time losing men. The following morning, November 30, supplies and ammunition were air-dropped to the perimeter.
“Retrieving them was difficult [wrote McAlister], because the Chinese wanted them as much as we did, and some were dropped far out of reach. Of what we got, we found that a lot of the belts and clips were damaged, and we had to work in the cold refilling the BAR magazines. That night my BAR assistant got hit by rifle fire in the eye and had blood all over his face. He was still alive and in a lot of pain. I called the medic and pushed him down in the hole, because I had to keep firing as the enemy was almost on top of us. After a while the medic came and took him to the rear, and I never saw him after that. Later I ran out of ammo, and reached for the rifle that my buddy had left. There was no ammo in it either. I was reaching for my .45 when a grenade was thrown into the hole. The next thing that I remember, I was back in the center by the artillery, but all I could see around me was men that had been wounded or killed.
“I left the area on a truck with the rest of the wounded. We were being fired on constantly by enemy machine guns. Our planes were trying to help by dropping napalm between our troops and theirs. As a result some of our men got burned pretty bad and were put aboard the trucks with us wounded. I will never forget the smell of human flesh after that. A lot of them died before too long.”
McAlister himself was hit shortly afterward by a stray bullet which rendered his right arm useless. Then the trucks were halted by a Chinese roadblock. Their captors ordered the occupants out. When those who could walk had climbed down, to their sick horror they watched North Korean soldiers run along the line setting fire to the vehicles, together with those who remained aboard them. For several days that followed, McAlister and his comrades were held captive close to the road. Then, numb and at the limits of exhaustion, they were gathered together to be marched north. McAlister sat down on the running board of a burned-out American truck. He could not bring himself to move when a Korean guard ordered him to his feet. He was hit twice, hard, on the head, and passed out.
“When I came to, I was alone. I guess they figured I was dead. I stumbled around for what seemed to be hours, and finally got back to the lake. I could only walk for a few minutes before falling down. My feet were frozen and I couldn’t use my hands much. Somehow I got started towards Hagaru-ri. At last I met a ‘big ole Marine colonel’ who carried me to a truck, and onto an aid station from which I was flown to Japan. I had frostbite in both feet and hands, shrapnel in the head, and my right wrist was almost severed. I was in hospital until May 31, 1952.”5
• • •
When the predicament of Task Force Faith became apparent, General Almond blamed O. P. Smith for the Marines’ failure to leave a force at Hagaru strong enough to be able now to send a relief force to 7th Division’s aid. At Almond’s insistence, an attempt was made to cut a path up the east side of the reservoir to link up with the retreating units. But this rapidly encountered heavy opposition. It was abandoned. Colonel Faith spoke to Hagaru for the last time through a Marine air liaison officer’s radio link: “Unless someone can help us, I don’t have much hope that anybody’s going to get out of this.” He was told, “We are bringing in an awful lot of air support, but that’s all we can give you. We just don’t have enough people here to risk losing our hold on the foot of the reservoir.”
“I understand,” said Faith.
This was his last contact with Hagaru. Air support could do nothing by night, when the fate of Task Force Faith was sealed and its courageous commanding officer killed. “Whenever I hear the words ‘task force,’ I shudder,” said a distinguished Marine veteran later.6 In Korea, all too often, the phrase became an apology for a makeshift collection of vehicles and men committed to disaster.
A staff officer who entered the general officers’ mess at Hungnam the evening of the arrival of the news of the destruction of Task Force Faith found inside it, alone by the stove, General David Barr, the 7th Division’s commander. He was sobbing quietly. “Barr was a nice man,” said the officer later, “but he had no personal magnetism, and should never have been permitted to command a division at war. He was too old, and too soft. The Chosin campaign finished him.” Barr was relieved of his command and sent home.
If General Almond’s chief preoccupation in mid-November had been to seize North Korean real estate, at whatever cost to the dispersal of his corps, by the end of that month he had become as hasty in his anxiety to get his command back to the coast. As the weight of Chinese forces confronting the X Corps and threatening its main supply route became apparent, those privy to the intelligence reports felt a growing, gnawing fear that they were close to the brink of a great disaster for American arms. “I really thought we’d had it,” said Colonel Al Bowser, G-3 of 1st Marine Division. “We did not know the details of what was happening to Eighth Army, but we knew that there was only eighty miles of open flank on our left. We knew the size of the Chinese forces against us—and we didn’t at that time understand their shortcomings. I would not have given a nickel for our chances of making it. Fortunately, a lot of people down the line could not see the overall position as I could see it, and continued to conduct themselves as if they were going to get out.”7
Fresh argument now broke out between the Army and the Marines, precipitated by the newly acute sense of crisis: the soldiers favored abandoning all heavy equipment and artillery and pulling back south as fast as 1st Marine Division could march and ride. O. P. Smith, however, was determined to conduct what he termed “an orderly and honorable withdrawal.” He would bring out all his vehicles and guns. “Don’t worry about your equipment,” Almond told Smith impatiently one morning at Hagaru. “Once you get back, we’ll replace it all.” Smith said, “I’m not going to do that. This is the equipment we fight with.”
“Okay,” said Almond wearily. “I just wanted you to know that we would replace it.” When the two men parted Smith turned to Colonel Bowser: “This guy is a maniac. He’s nuts. I can’t believe he’s saying these things.”8
On this occasion it was Smith’s will which prevailed, that formed the basis for the legend of the retreat from Chosin, perhaps the only really creditable American military performance of that winter campaign of 1950. On December 1 the 10,000 men of the 5th and 7th Marines began their epic fourteen-mile fighting retreat from Yudam-ni to Hagaru, battalions leapfrogging each other southward, pressed at each pass by the Chinese, machine-gunning and mortaring every point upon the road upon which their weapons would bear. The Marines could move forward only by clearing the ground commanding the road in front of them, yard by bitterly contested yard. The 3/7th, leading the assault, became bogged down, and Taplett’s 3/5th was ordered to pass through them and take up the lead. When night came, with the men utterly exhausted by wading in snow up to their hips on the hillside, Taplett asked if his battalion might halt, at least for long enough to establish its own precise location. Permission was refused. “Attack, keep attacking,” he was told. Item Company of Taplett’s battalion was almost wiped out on the first day. Taplett himself lost four runners attempting to pass messages to its commander. A single tank led the column, followed by Taplett’s command jeep, directing the infantry on the shoulders above the road. Ray Murray appeared at Taplett’s jeep and demanded to know why the attack was stalled.
“We can’t even get artillery support,” said Taplett.
“We’ve got trouble behind us, too,” explained Murray.
“If you want to get out of here,” said Taplett flatly, “you’ll give the guys at the front the support.”9
In a sea of mountains reaching to the horizon, it was impossible for the infantry to reach and command the higher ground. They could seek only to hold the shoulders and suppress the Chinese small-arms fire while the great regimental train crawled along the road below. It was fortunate for the Americans that the Chinese now appeared to have outrun the artillery they had brought down on the Marines at Yudam-ni. The Marines could see Communist troops swarming on the hills around them. Without the dedicated support of the Marine Air Wings, few men believed they would ever have made it. Even Marine pilots who were tasked to fly interdiction missions against targets farther north kept a bomb, a rack of rockets, or a few seconds of cannon ammunition to expend in close support of their own people on the way home. Men marveled at the great gushers of snow, the black impact on the hillside, as a Skyraider unloaded its ordnance. It reminded Major Ed Simmonds “of a giant bird taking a crap.”10
On the one day when blustering snow and low clouds made air support impossible, the column scarcely moved. Every few hours a group of Chinese would succeed in breaking through to the road, disabling a vehicle, blocking the route. Then the Americans were compelled to counterattack, to shift the wreckage, before they could get movement started again. Even without the intervention of the enemy, mechanical failure or a moment’s carelessness by a driver would block the road with a stranded or ditched vehicle. There were difficult decisions: whether to keep the artillery moving or suffer the delays of causing guns to unlimber on the road to provide urgent support for the infantry. It was an agonizingly slow business, by day and by night, for men crippled by exhaustion and the weather, the inescapable elements. The cold seemed to gnaw into their bodies, sapping reserves of strength, making every movement painfully slow and clumsy.
• • •
The first units of 1st Marine Division entered the perimeter at Hagaru on the afternoon of the third, the last men on the evening of the following day. Taplett’s battalion was reduced to 326 effectives out of some 2,000 whom he had commanded at Yudam-ni. Many of the casualties were suffering only from frostbite, but the serious cases still required evacuation from the overworked airstrip. It was also found necessary to introduce rigorous security on the runway to prevent stragglers from sneaking aboard one of the C-47 casevac aircraft, which could offer them a priceless passage to safety. The aircraft that flew out wounded brought in supplies and some replacements, many of them men wounded on the Naktong or in Seoul. “The feeling now was—‘Let’s get the hell out of this,’ ” said Taplett. “ ‘This is too much for us with our resources.’ It was hard to take, for men who had been told that the war was won, who were looking forward to that big parade we had been promised in San Francisco.”
• • •
The performance of the 1st Marine Division in desperate circumstances had begun to command the attention of America, so hungry for heroic news at a moment when there was so little to be had. O. P. Smith captured headlines all over the country when he told correspondents who flew into Hagaru on December 4, “Gentlemen, we are not retreating. We are merely advancing in another direction.” His remark was interpreted as a magnificent defiance of reality. Yet, as he said afterward, it was also tactically accurate, as the great military historian S. L. A. Marshall perceived: “Slam was the only one who understood that what we were doing really was attacking in another direction, because you couldn’t withdraw when you were completely surrounded,” said Smith.
The feud—for it was nothing less—between Smith and Almond became a focal point of controversy both during the campaign and in the recriminations after it ended. At times the Marines almost seemed to relish the X Corps commander’s misjudgments. During the desperate struggle to hold the Hagaru Perimeter, Smith took bleak pleasure in the discovery of a group of big treadway trucks with winches, which Almond had dispatched to prepare his Corps command post when he believed that he was presiding over an administrative advance to the Chinese border. Officers who flew down to Hamnung returned with scornful tales of the china, napkins, fresh fruit, and meat flown in from Japan for Almond’s table.
Almond seemed to lack any instinct for identifying himself with the men of his command in their brutal predicament. One morning he flew into Hagaru from his headquarters and sought to make himself agreeable to some of the Marines on the perimeter. “Well, men, and how are you today? Pretty cold, isn’t it?” The bearded, mufflered scarecrows peered out at him from the inch or two of exposed flesh around their eyes. “Do you know I wear a plate?” persisted Almond conversationally. “When I got up this morning, there was a film of ice on the glass by my bed.” “That’s too f**king bad, General,” said one of these men who could not dare to dream of ever seeing a bed again. Almond strolled on, still oblivious of the impression he had made. It was a soldier, a member of Almond’s staff, and not a Marine, who recounted witnessing that incident.11
Yet some able officers retained great respect for the X Corps commander’s abilities: “I consider Almond was an excellent Corps commander,” said General Lemuel Shepherd, commanding the Fleet Marines. “He was energetic, forceful, brave, and in many ways did a good job under most difficult conditions. He and O.P. just didn’t get along.”12 Ed Rowney and Al Haig, both officers who served on Almond’s staff in Korea and rose to high rank in the U.S. Army, retained a lifelong respect for their old commander. Lieutenant Colonel Ellis Williamson, Almond’s G-3, took an ambivalent view: “O. P. Smith wasn’t a team player at all. He just wanted to do what he wanted. Ned Almond was one of the most energetic, dedicated officers I have ever known. He was so energetic, that at times he was tactically careless. He could not visualize himself being wrong. He was almost as bad as MacArthur in this. Once he had made up his mind that something was so, he was just not listening anymore.”13 The evidence is overwhelming that O. P. Smith was indeed a slow and cautious commander. Likewise, his habit of lapsing into sturdy silence when confronted with Almond’s tantrums precluded any possibility of understanding between the two men. Smith was disgusted by Almond’s undoubted obsession with achieving a personal triumph on the battlefield. If fortune had fallen otherwise, if Almond had been granted his opportunity to lead a Patton-like pursuit, a dash for victory, he might indeed have earned his place in military history, while Smith would have been remembered as a plodding encumbrance. Instead, however, on the road back from Chosin, Smith’s dogged, imperturbable leadership not only saved the honor of the 1st Marine Division but the reputation of American arms in Korea. Almond, on the other hand, was branded by many as the commander whose impatience and overweening personal ambition came within a hairbreadth of creating a catastrophe.
• • •
Although the first great danger to the 1st Marine Division had been overcome by the successful withdrawal to Hagaru, there were no delusions about the difficulties of the next stage. At Koto-ri, when officers of the 1st Marines were briefed about the plan for the movement of the 5th and 7th, there was obvious concern about its feasibility. But “Chesty” Puller, whose capacity for histrionics had markedly not been diminished by circumstances, climbed on a ration box beside the space heater in the briefing tent and harangued his team, “I don’t give a good goddamn how many Chinese laundrymen there are between us and Hungnam. There aren’t enough in the world to stop a Marine regiment going where it wants to go! Christ in His mercy will see us through.”
On December 6, the 1st Marine Division set out on the eleven-mile journey from Hagaru to Koto-ri. It was intended that the entire formation should be clear of the base of the reservoir by nightfall, but the slow progress of the vanguard caused the rear elements to linger at Hagaru into the darkness, fighting off the Chinese, who began to descend from the hills and bring down fierce fire on the road. Finally, sluggishly, the last Americans pulled out. They left behind vast dumps of stores, burned or destroyed to keep them from the Chinese. Yet one cargo the Marines insisted upon taking with them, to the renewed exasperation of X Corps staff: their own dead. Some British Marines found it macabre to advance alongside trucks from which the frozen limbs of the corpses protruded, uncovered. Smith’s men were merely determined that dead or alive, the entire division should make it back. “We were grateful for what the cold had done to those bodies,” said Robert Tyack, a British Marine. “You were looking at a chunk of frozen meat, rather than a messy, stinking corpse.”14 The march took thirty-eight hours through the snow, under constant harassment from the Chinese. Not every Marine was a hero. When the Chinese broke through close to the road, it proved essential for American officers to stay close to their men, to drive them to respond. Lacking immediate leadership, some exhausted men were prone to lapse into a ditch and lie huddled together, too numb to trouble to fire back. Robert Tyack remembered vividly a moment when his mate fell asleep on a hillside as they scraped a position with their bayonets and furiously shook off every attempt to rouse him: “Leave me! If I don’t wake, what the hell?” Stragglers had to be kicked, pushed, cajoled. Those who stopped never started again.
When they were not under direct fire, men plodded wearily beneath the ice-laden telegraph poles, their helmets and weapons and clothing decked in crusts of snow. It was better to feel the pain in their feet. The thousands of men who no longer possessed any sensation in their boots were suffering from various extremes of frostbite. Once again, as on the withdrawal from Yudam-ni, while the thousand-vehicle convoy crawled along the road, leapfrogging battalions cleared the high ground above. When they passed the dozens of burned-out vehicles from Task Force Drysdale’s battleground, they gathered up the frozen dead, and to their utter astonishment, found one wounded man in a hut by the road still alive.
Clearing the road from Hagaru to Koto-ri cost the Marines another 103 killed and 506 wounded; also, the loss of all but thirteen of 160 Chinese POWs they were marching south. When the POW contingent came under fire from the hills, they broke and ran from the road, causing the Marines to shoot them down. Their arrival at Koto-ri, the reunion with the garrison on its perimeter, was another emotional landmark, celebrated with bearhugs between men clumsy in their layers of clothing, rejoicing to have survived another desperate stage of their journey. Men who had been fighting at Koto-ri searched the ranks of those from Hagaru for friends and even relations. Corporal Selwyn Handler of the 2/1st looked for his brother Irwin among the men of B Company, 5th Marines. For hours he stood hunched by the road as the gaunt files marched in, peering between raised collars and lowered helmets for the familiar face he had last seen at Wonsan. Irwin was eighteen and planned to be an optometrist. He was one of those who never made it down the road from Yudam-ni.
Among the few scrubby trees and the forest of tents in the overcrowded perimeter at Koto-ri, the dead were at last buried in a grave blasted from the iron-frozen earth. There was an old-fashioned little squabble when General Smith insisted that the indomitable Herald Tribune correspondent Marguerite Higgins should be evacuated by air, despite her enraged protests of sexual discrimination: “There are a lot of good Marines who are getting frostbite,” said O.P., “and if you march down with these Marines, you will probably get frostbite, and then somebody is going to have to take care of you. I am sure these Marines will see that you are taken care of, and we haven’t got men for that kind of business.” Smith’s chivalrous concern almost misfired when the aircraft carrying Higgins and General Lem Shepherd came under heavy Chinese fire as it took off. “My God, Maggie,” said Shepherd as they sat hunched together watching the tracer pass beneath them, “won’t it be an awful scandal if the two of us are found crashed together?”
With 15,000 men and almost 1,500 vehicles crowded into the perimeter at Koto-ri, there was precious little room for movement. The new arrivals blasted themselves foxholes with C-3 demolition sticks and stripped every house in the little town to provide roofing and firewood. There was a moment of raw comedy when the “recreation packs” air-dropped to the division were discovered to include contraceptives: “What the _______ do they think we are doing with those Chinese?” If the pressure of enemy attack had diminished, that of the cold never did so. Men carried C-ration tins under their armpits, wore one of their two canteens under their clothing, to keep it usable.
A new and serious difficulty developed when it was learned that the bridge over the gorge in the Funchilin Pass, a few miles south of Koto-ri, had been destroyed by the Chinese for the third time in the battle, this time irreparably. The only conceivable means of getting Smith’s marines through was to air-drop and lay a new treadway bridge. Could it be done? Lieutenant Colonel John Partridge, the divisional engineer officer, overflew the gap, making notes about the equipment that would be needed to bridge the thirty-foot culvert: “I got you across the Han River,” he told Smith reassuringly. “I got you the airfield here. I’ll get you a bridge.” In the South a young engineer captain experimented with parachuting a bridge section, which smashed on impact. “It’s okay—we’ll use bigger parachutes and the next rehearsal will go fine,” he reassured the Marine headquarters. “We don’t have time for a ‘next rehearsal.’ Next time is for real,” he was told bleakly. Eight bridge sections were parachuted into the perimeter at Koto-ri. Six were recovered intact. The culvert was bridged.
The routine—if such a word does not diminish the nature of the ordeal—for the march from Koto-ri to Hamnung was identical with that from Hagaru. Some men trudged along the road, among the vehicles, while others took their turn “ridge-running,” sweeping the shoulders of the high ground above the column. When the snow squalls came, it was sometimes impossible even to see the man a few yards in front. And still, every few hours, parties of Chinese managed to work close enough to put in fire somewhere on the column. “Aw, quit horsing around,” said Corporal Handler of the 2/1st in some exasperation when his buddy, “a kid named Freudenberg,” began to pull wounded men out of a truck that suddenly came under fire, only to topple over sideways into the snow. But Freudenberg was suddenly dead.
Not all the memories of that march were heroic. Colonel Taplett of the 3/5th had a ferocious argument on the road with an army officer who suddenly sought to get his men into the column in front of Taplett’s battalion. The Marine was disgusted, since he knew that the army officer had been instructed to bring up the rear, behind the 5th. At the rear of the great snake of Marines and their 1,400 vehicles, some 3,000 refugees struggled with their carts and pitiful possessions. It was critical for the American rearguard to maintain a clear field of fire between themselves and the Koreans. Desperate measures became necessary in order to achieve this. Finally, the divisional engineers blew a bridge behind the Marines. The Koreans were left on the other side, gazing hopelessly into the chasm.
• • •
On December 10 the first men of the great Marine column began to trickle into the port of Hamnung. The first ships of a vast amphibious armada awaited them. Many Marines, including their most senior officers, believed that they could easily have held a perimeter around the port through the winter, a formidable enclave deep in North Korean territory. But by now the Dai Ichi had no stomach for such dangerous gestures. Rather than a stronghold, a perimeter at Hamnung could become a vast beleaguered fortress. Unit by unit, 100,000 men of the U.S. Army, the Marines, the ROKs boarded the ships and sailed away for Pusan. Behind them an orgy of looting and destruction was taking place, as one of the greatest supply dumps in Korea was stripped by civilians or blown up by engineers. Pillars of black smoke plumed along the horizon behind the waterfront. As the last Marines departed, thousands of civilian refugees boarded the ships behind them, taking a last chance to escape the return of Kim Il Sung. On December 24, with the evacuation completed, the U.S. Navy unleashed a huge bombardment on the abandoned port, blasting its facilities and remaining dumps into wreckage. It was much more a gesture of frustration, of embittered anger and disappointment, than of military utility. The Marines’ performance had been heroic. They had retired from the Chosin Reservoir in column of units, with virtually all their heavy equipment and transport intact, maintaining the cohesion of the division to the end. But X Corps’ battle was lost. The Marines alone had suffered 4,418 battle and 7,313 nonbattle casualties, the latter mostly minor cases of frostbite. From subsequent POW interrogations and captured documents, the Chinese were estimated to have suffered some 37,500 losses in the Chosin campaign, many of these from the cold.
The Communist army endured privations more dreadful than those of the Americans. In the last stages of the American march to the coast, and through the evacuation, X Corps suffered scarcely at all from Chinese intervention. The enemy, too, was spent. He had outrun such supply lines as he possessed, and his men were at the extremities of misery from hunger and cold. But the formations of the People’s Liberation Army who inherited the wreckage of Hamnung in the last days of 1950 could at least exult in the certainty of strategic achievement. They had driven the U.S. X Corps headlong out of North Korea.