The ground froze eighteen inches down. To dig a hole with chapped, numb hands was prolonged agony; each night each man had to dig his shelter nonetheless, and lie shivering in its shallow length through thirteen hours of darkness.
Into this bitter land in November 1950 marched the Marines, and sundry Army troops. They called the road the MSR—the main supply route. To those who lived, there will never be any other.
They could not move together; on this MSR there was not room. The 5th and 7th Marine regiments pushed far ahead, reaching Yudam-ni, securing its ringing ridges. Behind them they left a battalion and its supporting troops in Hagaru, to build and defend an airstrip. Fox Company, 7th Marines, held high ground in Toktong Pass between the towns to protect the road. Far behind, Puller's 1st Marines held Kot'o-ri, and sections of the road below.
And up this MSR came the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry, Lieutenant Colonel Don G. Faith. At Hagaru on 25 November, Task Force Faith, numbering 1,053 officers and men with attached troops, turned right, marching east of the reservoir. Plans called for Faith to push to the Yalu on the right, while the Marine effort moved left, to sweep each side of the now-frozen stretch of water.
A few miles north of Hagaru, Faith detrucked his men, and allowed them to warm up in special tents. The troops of the 32nd Infantry were numb, but morale was high, because all knew the war was almost over. The next day, 26 November, Faith relieved Marine units in this area, and on the 27th he pushed north. The relieved Marines informed Faith they had heard that three Chinese divisions were in the area.
These regiments and battalions, Marines and Army, were spread over many miles of bleak terrain, joined only by a fragile thread, the road. There was no one on their flank to east, no one to west. Eighty miles beyond the horrendous peaks lay the Eighth Army. What lay in between no man knew.
On 25 November, men of the 1/7 Marines took a prisoner, a subdued, wounded Chinese, who said he was a private soldier. Under interrogation, this humble POW became a fount of information. Among other things. he described the CCF plan of battle:
In the mountains above the reservoir were two CCF armies, of three divisions each. When the Americans reached Yudam-ni, this was to trigger an attack. Three divisions would strike at Yudam-ni; one from the north and one from the west were to attack the two regiments there, while the third flowed around to the south and cut the road to Hagaru-ri. A full division would throw itself against Hagaru and its defenders, while a fifth broke the road between that city and Kot'o to its south, and also isolated Kot'o from Chinhung-ni.
Marine field grade officers hardly knew as much of their own battle plans, and the Chinese' information was greeted with suspicion or ironic amusement. It was never credited. Unfortunately, it was correct.
And while this sufferer from delusions of grandeur was being questioned in a hut at Yudam-ni, General Sung Shih-lun was briefing his senior officers in the shadow of Paemyangji Mountain, ten miles to the north. Sung Shih-lun was just forty years old this 1950, the Chinese Year of the Tiger, and he had led men in battle for most of those years.
One of the bravest men in the Chinese Communist Forces, Sung had tired of formal instruction in the Whampoa Military Academy at the age of seventeen. Since then he had had his training in the field, with the Communists. In November 1950 he commanded the CCF IX Army group, twelve divisions of 120,000 men, and beside the fingers of Changjin Reservoir he had poised six of these divisions.
Hardheaded and quick-tempered, Sung had driven his men across the terrible mountains from the Yalu in fourteen nights of marching. By any standards, it had been a prodigious feat for the Chinese hordes to clamber across the icy mountains unseen. Unable to bring across his heavy artillery, Sung gambled. He drove the men, with rifles, mortars, and machine guns, on ahead, leaving his big guns behind.
At Paemyangji-san, General Sung Shih-lun had perfect intelligence of each movement of his enemy. He knew where they were and what they would do. He knew that the massive blow against Eighth Army had already been launched in the west, and he himself was ready to move.
He described to his senior officers how the divisions would infiltrate across the mountains, to take Hagaru and Kot'o-ri from both flanks and rear. The road, the American MSR, was to be cut in a dozen places. Chinese troops then would dig in above the road beside the American supply and escape route. As for the two regiments near Yudam-ni, they would be flailed to pieces once isolated.
It was a very good plan, trading on the strengths of Sung’s Chinese hordes and on the supposed weaknessed of the American enemy.
"Kill these Marines as you would snakes in your homes," Sung instructed his officers.
As the moon, swollen and gibbous, rose over the harsh, frozen peaks on the night of 27 November, the hills beside the Changjin Reservoir swarmed with dark figures. Long, antlike columns of men, their gloveless hands huddled in the sleeves of their mustard-green quilted jackets, marched down the corridors toward Yudam-ni. At first they chanted and sang in wailing minor keys, the music of all Chinese on the march. Then they fell silent, waiting for the horns and bugles to summon them to the kill.
On the eastern fingers of the frozen reservoir, Lieutenant Colonel Don C. Faith had dug in his rifle companies in a perimeter facing north. The road ran through them, and on all sides there were reasonably good fields of fire. Dark came early here on the roof of the world in winter; and with it came intense cold. Huddling in their miserable, icy holes, the men of 1/32 Infantry shivered, waiting.
Shortly after nine, the first Chinese reconnaissance patrols touched the fringes of their perimeters.
Chinese advanced until they drew fire, then retired. One officer, realizing that the enemy was trying to smell out American positions, ran up and down shouting, "Don't fire—don't fire!" But he was too late. Nervous, the men had fired at the slightest sound, and the Chinese learned what they wanted to know.
By midnight, the enemy was in position. Suddenly, Faith's company's perimeters erupted in orange-purple streaks of fire, resounded with the clatter of machine guns. Striking head on into the American lines, the Chinese also kept trying to probe a soft place between units, and to slip men past into the rear areas.
Some platoons held; others were forced out of position. Meanwhile, the supporting 57th Field Artillery came under small-arms fire; the wire to the front-line companies went out. With its own worries, the 57th was unable to continue its support mission with any authority.
At dawn Task Force Faith was still in place, but it was grievously hurt. There were gaps in the line, and the men were badly shaken. The night had been stingingly cold, and everyone now realized that something new was in the wind.
The attacks had not been those of a defeated, fleeing enemy.
The sun came up, but it did not warm. Men pulled their sleeping bags around their feet, and kept hands on guns, shivering in their holes. Later, on Colonel Faith's order, some of the higher ground lost to the Chinese during the night was retaken—only to be lost again. Through the day, more than sixty casualties were gathered at the battalion aid station.
In the afternoon, a helicopter whirled down out of the skies, settling beside the hut that was Faith's command post. General Almond stepped out. Faith reported to him, and the two men talked to one side for several minutes.
Then Almond mentioned that he had three Silver Stars with him. One was for Faith himself—and Almond wanted Faith to select two others for the award.
What Faith did next indicated something of his frame of mind. He snapped to a wounded young officer, Lieutenant Smalley, sitting on a five-gallon water can and waiting evacuation, "Smalley, come over here and stand at attention!"
Bewildered, Smalley obeyed.
The next man to pass by was Sergeant Stanley, a mess steward. Faith called, "Stanley, come here and stand at attention next to Lieutenant Smalley."
A dozen men, clerks, wounded, and the like, were assembled to watch, while General Almond pinned Silver Stars on Faith's and the other two men's park
as. Almond then shook each man by the hand. He said:
"The enemy who is delaying you is nothing more than some remnants of Chinese divisions fleeing north. We're still attacking—and we're going all the way to the Yalu. Don't let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop you!"
Then Ned Almond got into his waiting copter and whirled away over the snow-covered hills. Almond was neither a fool nor an ass—he had orders from Tokyo to move to the Yalu—and he intended to comply, whatever his own doubts.
Lieutenant Smalley went back to his seat, muttering, "I got a Silver Star, but I don't know what the hell for."
As soon as Almond's copter disappeared, Faith ripped his own decoration from his parka and hurled it into a snowbank. His S-3, Major Curtis, approached him and asked obliquely, "What did the general have to say?"
Faith looked at him. "You heard him—remnants fleeing north!"
When darkness fell across the bleak, icy landscape, Task Force Faith began another night of battle. Alone, exposed to the full weight of the Chinese assault pouring against its front, flanks, and rear, after more than one hundred hours of incessant combat Task Force Faith dissolved. Colonel Faith was killed by a hand grenade.
The Chinese tide had risen everywhere; X Corps could not help; the Marines at Hagaru were undergoing their own nights of fire. But the bitter-ness of the men who fought east of the reservoir, hoping for rescue, would never be erased.
Survivors stumbled back over the frozen road to Hagaru. Others were seen by Marines wandering across the ice of the reservoir; they had fled across the lake itself. Of the original thousand officers and men, less than two hundred returned. The others, killed, captured, or frozen, had been swallowed up in the frigid wastes.
Late on the evening of 28 November, General Almond flew to Tokyo at General MacArthur's request. Almond reported to the Dai Ichi one hour prior to midnight, and at this time he was told to break off the corps offensive, to withdraw, and to consolidate his forces.
For Task Faith, already isolated, the order came too late.
The Marines, admittedly advancing reluctantly into the unchartered wastes, had paused to consolidate after each move forward. The terrain made it impossible for the division to remain intact, but at each successive plateau along the MSR, units were consolidated at regimental or battalion strength, with supporting artillery able to fire in any direction.
While the road link connecting the units was tenuous, the broad valleys at Yudam-ni, Hagaru, and Kot'o-ri allowed the Marines space to form solid perimeters. The ground, while higher than that in the west, was not characterized by the endless washboard of hills that had broken the United States 2nd Division into a hundred separate fragments.
This consolidation, and the fact that most Marine officers had had experience with Oriental warfare, learning the importance of keeping tight, steelringed perimeters by night whatever happened in the rear, did much to save the division.
On 27 November, as the 7th Marines attacked westward from Yudam-ni, the 5th Marines moved west of the reservoir and joined them. It had first been planned to move only two battalions through Toktong Pass, following with the third on 28 November, but at the earnest suggestion of the motor transport officer, the entire regiment moved together. Thus, at nightfall on 27 November, two full regiments of Marines, less one company holding high ground above the pass, and a weapons company left at Hajam, were able to operate in conjunction at Yudam-ni.
Before the night passed, both regiments were deep in crisis.
Again, the story of one company, one platoon, tells the story of all.
At dark, the seventy men of First Lieutenant John Yancey's platoon of Easy Company, 7th Marines, was dug in frozen earth facing north along the brushy, rocky slopes of Hill 1282. Each foxhole, painfully scrabbled out of the frozen shale, held two men, and machine guns protected the flanks. Yancey's platoon was in the middle of the hill, with Bye's to his left, Clements' to his right. Behind Yancey's position the company skipper, Captain Walter Phillips, was positioned with his exec, Lieutenant Ball, to fight the company.
The moon came up, huge and swollen, rising clear and bright over the swirling ground mists. It came up behind Easy Company, silhouetting the company positions for the enemy, but not throwing enough light along the dark corridors to reveal the lurking Chinese. On the hill, the temperature had dropped to twenty below.
Easy's men heard monstrous shuffling sounds through the dark, as of thousands of boots stamping in the snow. They heard sounds, but they could see only ghostly moon shadows.
Yancey asked Ball, on the mortars, to fire star shells.
Ball had little 81 ammo, but he tried. The flares wouldn't work—lifted from crates stamped "1942," they fizzled miserably.
"Oh, goddam," Yancey said. Yancey, a reservist, had been a liquor-store operator in Little Rock when the war broke. He had a baby, born on the day For Task Force Faith, already isolated, the order came too late. he went ashore at Inch'on, whom he had never seen. He had a Navy Cross from Guadalcanal, and he had washed off the mud of Okinawa. He did not consider himself a fighting man. But he had learned his own lessons in a hard school, the hardest there was.
The ranks of the Marines were now diluted with reservists, at least 50 percent. Few of them were mentally prepared to fight, or physically hardened to war. Inch'on, luckily, had been easy.
But now, on the frozen hills above Yudam-ni, the Marines, regular and reservist alike, faced reality.
Because their officers were tough-minded, because their discipline was tight, and because their esprit—that indefinable emotion of a fighting man for his standard, his regiment, and the men around him, was unbroken—weak and strong alike, they would face it well.
The enemy mortars fell first, bursting with pinpoint precision among the foxholes on the forward slope of Hill 1282. Then, in the moonlit hills, bugles racketed; purple flares soared high, and popped. The shadows suddenly became men, running at Marine lines.
The Chinese did not scream or shout, like North Koreans. They did not come in one overwhelming mass. They came in squads, yards apart, firing, hurling grenades, flailing at the thin line across the hill, probing for a weak spot across which they could pour down into the valley beyond.
Again and again they were stopped; again and again Chinese bugles plaintively noised the recall. The icy slopes were now littered with sprawled figures in long white snow capes.
Again and again, while the Marines' guns grew hot, they came back to flail at the hill. Looking down into the shadowy valley, John Yancey could see hundreds of orange pinpoints of light, as the enemy sprayed his hill with lead.
The night seemed endless. A grenade exploded close to Yancey, driving metal fragments through his face to lodge behind his nose. Many of his men were hit. Those who could stand continued fighting; those badly hurt were dragged some twenty yards behind the company position, where a hospital corpsman worked over them in the snow.
There was no shouting or crying. Now and then a man gasped, "Oh, Jesus, I'm hit!" or, "Mother of God!" and fell down.
The attacks whipped the hill. By the early hours of morning, most of Easy's men had frozen noses or frozen feet in addition to their combat wounds. Yancey's blood froze to his moustache, dried across his stubbled face. Snorting for breath through his damaged nose, he had trouble breathing.
Slowly, painfully, day began to spread over the bleak hills. Now, Yancey thought, surely it must get better, with daylight.
Instead, things grew worse.
A fresh wave of Chinese, in company strength, charged the hill. Yancey's men fired everything they had—rifles, carbines, machine guns. The Chinese fell in rows, but some came on. At his line of holes, John Yancey met them with as many of his men as he could muster, including many of his wounded. Somehow, he threw them back.
The platoon, all Easy Company was in desperate straits. Captain Phillips, who had carried ammunition to Yancey's platoon during the night, and who had said again and again, "You're doing okay, men; you're doing
okay!" took a bayoneted rifle, and ran out to the front of Yancey's line.
"This is Easy Company!" Walt Phillips said. "Easy Company holds here!" He thrust the bayonet deep into the snowy ground; the rifle butt swayed back and forth in the cold wind, a marker of defiance, a flag to stand by.
The wounded lay helplessly behind Easy Company; there was no way to get them out. And Easy Company was not going to leave its own.
The Chinese came again. Now they stumbled over their own dead, scattered like cordwood a hundred yards down the slope. And on the hill, Americans also fell over their own dead, moving to plug the leaks in the line. Small leathery-skinned men in quilted jackets leaped into the perimeter, and over-ran the command post.
For over an hour, close-in fighting raged all over the hill. The Chinese wave was smashed, but Chinese dropped behind rocks, in holes, and fired at the Marines surrounding them.
John Yancey realized that some sort of counteraction had to be taken to push them out. He ran back of the hill, found half a dozen able men coming up as replacements. "Come with me!"
With the new men, he charged the breach in Easy's line. His own carbine would fire only one shot at a time; the weapons of two of the replacements froze. The other four dropped with bullets in their heads—the Chinese aimed high.
Beside the CP, Lieutenant Ball, the exec, sat cross-legged in the snow, firing a rifle. Several Chinese rushed him. Ball died.
Now Yancey could find only seven men in his platoon. Reeling from exhaustion and shock, he tried to form a countercharge. As he led the survivors against the broken line, a forty-five caliber Thompson machine-gun slug tore his mouth and lodged in the back of his skull. Metal sliced his right cheek, as a hand grenade knocked him down.
This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History Page 36