The Korean War (34 page)

Although the first great danger to 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 goddam 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 6 December, 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.’
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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, 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 13 of the 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 bear-hugs 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 Cration 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 Hamhung 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 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 10 December, the first men of the great Marine column began to trickle into the port of Hamhung. 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 Hamhung could become a vast beleaguered fortress. Unit by unit, 100,000 men of the US 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 24 December, with the evacuation completed, the US Navy unleashed a huge bombardment on the abandoned port, blasting its facilities and remaining dumps into wreckage. It was more a gesture of frustration, of embittered anger and disappointment, than of military utility. The Marine 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’s battle was lost. The Marines alone had suffered 4,418 battle and 7,313 non-battle casualties, the latter mostly minor cases of frostbite. From subsequent PoW interrogations and captured documents, the Chinese were believed 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 Hamhung in the last days of 1950 could at least exult in the certainty of strategic achievement. They had driven the US X Corps headlong out of North Korea.

9 » THE WINTER OF CRISIS

1. The Big Bug-Out

As Walker’s Eighth Army reeled before the Chinese offensive in the first days of December, one morning Colonel Paul Freeman of the 23rd Infantry turned bitterly to his executive officer: ‘Look around here,’ he said. ‘This is a sight that hasn’t been seen for hundreds of years: the men of a whole United States Army fleeing from a battlefield, abandoning their wounded, running for their lives.’
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Freeman was among those few senior soldiers in Korea who never lost their grip, who remained bewildered to the end of their lives about the fashion in which their commanders and their comrades allowed the collapse of the American army in North Korea in the winter of 1950. Freeman watched with pride his own 1st Battalion, holding the Chinese on the Chongchon for thirty hours; his regiment undertaking thirteen successive redeployments without losing a man. Suddenly, he received an air-dropped message from 2nd Division ‘to extricate ourselves as best we could’, and retired under cover of a powerful artillery barrage. Only then did he begin to discover what was happening to the rest of the army: in 25th Division, only the 27th Infantry held together effectively. In 2nd Division, Freeman’s regiment remained the only combat-effective unit by the turn of the year.

Private Pete Schultz, a platoon runner in A Company of the 1/23rd, had been feeling somewhat dejected about the promise of MacArthur’s ‘home for Christmas’: ‘Here I was, full of life, eighteen years old, fresh out of basic training, and about as green
as they come. I wanted to see some action.’
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He spent the night of 25 November crouching in a foxhole listening to the intense firing all around him, without the remotest idea what was going on. A small-town boy from Kansas, Schultz found the action that he wanted in the next few days. The memories merged into a blur: picking among abandoned supply dumps as they retreated; manning a .30 calibre machine gun, watching the tracer arch towards a cluster of Chinese on the next ridgeline; running to clamber up on the hulls of their supporting tanks when they heard the engines rev up, a sure sign that they were about to move. They feared above all being left behind, finding themselves last out. ‘A lot of men convinced themselves that each was the last man left in Eighth Army,’ said Lieutenant Carl Bernard of 21st Infantry.
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Lieutenant Karl Morton of the 5th RCT found the first reports of the retreat incomprehensible, for his unit had scarcely been engaged. The first symptom of defeat was the absence of transport to carry them back. They began to walk. And as they walked, day after day their morale sunk. They did not fight, but they heard rumours. Faster, faster, they were constantly warned, lest you be cut off by the Chinese. Morton’s thighs became raw, agonising, with the constant slapping of wet fatigue cloth against them. One of his corporals walked with a toilet roll on his rifle barrel, in permanent misery from diarrhoea until they somewhere found him a packet of cornstarch to solve the problem. One day, they watched from a roadblock as men of the 2nd Division moved past, ‘in awful disarray’. Only one black battalion, led by a ramrod-straight, white-haired colonel, still appeared to possess all its equipment. As they marched on, and on, they discarded gear to lighten their burdens: rocket launchers went first; then spare clothing, ammunition, even sleeping bags. One evening at dusk, they saw a solitary soldier pedalling manically past them on a bicycle. They tried to stop him: ‘Hey, what’s going on up there?’ The cyclist did not check, but shouted back over his shoulder: ‘Hell of a lot of Chinamen!’ As the supply system cracked, men grew desperate in their hunger. Morton saw two soldiers discover an
abandoned, half-empty can of peas coated in days of dust. They simply scraped off the dust with a bayonet and wolfed the remains. The young lieutenant found this spectacle, of thousands of men on the margins of panic, very frightening.
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