East of Chosin

by Roy Edgar Appleman

  Sweatman's statement is important for it shows clearly that some Chinese entered the inlet perimeter over the bridge and causeway, indeed a logical approach. But I have seen no other evidence to indicate that the Chinese used that approach. Such an approach would place the Chinese well behind the infantry line on the spur ridge over Soo yards east and bring them directly into the area of the trucks, the 3rd Battalion CP, and the battalion communication center and near the howitzers of A Battery. A dirt road down the valley of the Pungynuri-gang ran directly to the bridge from the east, hugging the mountainside on the north.

  Captain Kitz had to hurry to get his K Company CP out of the path of the Chinese onslaught. He led it hurriedly west about i,ooo yards to the rear, to the A Battery howitzer position. Some of his frontline troops followed him, closely pursued by Chinese. When this happened, Lieutenant Colonel Reilly's 3rd Battalion CP was fully exposed. Indeed, it may have been exposed to enemy attack even earlier, if many enemy soldiers crossing the bridge and causeway reached it. We do not know which enemy forces, those that crossed the bridge or those that broke through K Company, reached the battalion CP first. Little is known about what part, if any, the battalion command staff played in the developing battle. It appears that they were surprised in their hut and overrun before they had a chance to take part in the battle.

  Also, it is not clear just what happened in I Company, up the slope on the spur ridge above K Company. The Chinese broke through there, overran one of the company's platoons, and then penetrated to the 8i-mm mortars in the dry wash between the ridge and M Company's CP. Private First Class Lewis D. Shannon, ist Platoon messenger for I Company, stated that "as soon as enemy contact was learned I was told to tell our platoon leader to hold at all costs. Our company did not give any ground that I know of." Captain Marr may have been able to hold part of the original I Company line at its upper end.

  The artillerymen were not spared long. Everyone in front of them except M Company had folded within an hour of the first enemy attack. First Lieutenant Thomas J. Patton, of A Battery, 57th Field Artillery Battalion, has left a good firsthand account of how the night battle erupted in the artillery positions:

  The night was quiet and blackout restrictions were followed. At approximately 0230 hours 28 November ig5o, I was awakened by personnel of the Firing Battery Headquarters who said that we were attacked by Chinese Communists. About 0245 hours, Lt. Sickafoose, forward observer, K Company, 31st Infantry Regiment, came running into the CP and said the infantry was withdrawing to our rear. Capt. Harold L. Hodge, Battery Commander "A" Battery, made a round of all the gun sections and perimeter defense telling them to fight as long as they possibly could.

  Within 3 to 5 minutes, our CP received several bursts of machine gun fire forcing us out of the CP on the right side near the BC jeep and the radio 3/4 ton truck. There was a great deal of confusion in the area with a lot of yelling in foreign tongue which was impossible to tell from our Koreans who were with A Battery. A mortar or hand grenade exploded near two five gallon cans of gasoline setting the CP on fire. The CP group withdrew some 20 yards to the rear where foxholes had been dug by some of the A Battery ROKs. It was still impossible to tell our men from the CCFs until several CCFs ran up to where the CP was burning and started warming themselves by the fire. Capt. Hodge killed one and the others were shot by some of the members of the gun sections. Part of the battery started withdrawing past us toward Battery B. We then fell back entering Battery B's perimeter about 0325 hours where our men joined into the B Battery perimeter. There was heavy firing for a period of 30 to 45 minutes which then died down to intermittent firing the rest of the night.

  When daylight came we found sections of L and K Companies were mixed in with Battery A and B personnel. Captain Kitz organized a force to retake Battery As guns with Captain Hodge leading the remainder of A Battery.... When the battery was retaken our howitzers were turned upon the fleeing CCFs. We then discovered that approximately 30 men from Battery A had remained in their foxholes and continued fighting even though they were completely overrun.24

  After the Chinese were driven out of the A Battery position after dawn, the battery mess was used for a temporary aid station, and the kitchen was moved outside the building. About one-third of the men of A Battery were casualties. Four cooks who had remained inside the mess hall during the fight saw Chinese march off one American and 15 ROK prisoners. Private First Class Shannon, of I Company, said that Captain Marr helped drive the Chinese away from the overrun battery position in the counterattack there in the morning. He said that enemy dead lay all about the guns and that a few artillerymen were still fighting from their foxholes. He said that .n this counterattack "to my knowledge there were thirty or so prisoners taken."

  It appears that nearly all the survivors at the inlet except M Company retreated to the B Battery artillery perimeter and found there a good defensive position in which they all joined to fight off the Chinese in the hours before dawn. There were infantrymen from all three rifle companies, L, K, and I, as well as the A Battery artillerymen. There is some indication that, strange as it may seem, the I Company CP was adjacent to B Battery and that one platoon was there when men from all points of the perimeter came running to it as a place of last refuge. Throughout the night battle, however, many men were cut off in different places and continued their resistance isolated from the main center that developed around B Battery.zf

  In the fighting around A Battery, Sgt. Stanford 0. Corners, a member of the medical detachment with the battery, performed valiantly. Under small-arms and mortar fire, he succeeded in getting wounded to an aid station set up in a house and subsequently loading them into a truck when A Battery position was being overrun, then moving them to a position of safety in the rear, where he continued to help with the wounded.26

  In the rapid onslaught of the Chinese that carried them to B Battery position, the last defensive perimeter in their path in the main inlet bivouac area, the Chinese overran the 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry CP. What happened there was not known to the rest of the battalion until after dawn. The enemy held it from about 3:00 A.M. until just after daybreak. It was generally assumed that Lieutenant Colonel Reilly and most of his battalion staff had been killed or captured.

  Shortly after daybreak ist Lt. Henry (Hank) Traywick, the 3rd Battalion motor officer, organized a counterattack party to drive enemy soldiers away from the 3rd Battalion CP and communication section. Under heavy machinegun and small-arms covering fire Traywick reached the two houses, drove away the last of the Chinese soldiers, and entered the CP. To their surprise Traywick and his men found Reilly unconscious but alive when they entered the battered, bullet-riddled, and grenaded shack. Apparently the Chinese had thought Reilly dead. They had stripped him and others there of all weapons and anything else they considered of value. The bodies of several of his staff were strewn around inside the small structure. Traywick and his group took Reilly to the battalion aid station, where he recovered consciousness.27

  Mrs. Reilly learned of the Chinese attack on the 3rd Battalion's CP in a letter from her husband. He told her that when the CCF suddenly arrived at the CP he and several of his staff were inside. Reilly said that he sat facing a window with gun in hand. Chinese soldiers tried to climb through the window, and he shot several as they made the attempt. While the fight at the CP was going on, Captain Adams, the battalion S-4, who was inside the house, received a chest wound through the lungs. He died during the day. Reilly noticed that Lieutenant Anderson, the battalion assistant S-3, appeared frustrated that he could not get his pistol out of its holster. Reilly went over to him in the semidarkness to see what was wrong. He found that Anderson's right arm had been blown off by a grenade and that Anderson seemed not to know that his arm was missing. Reilly took the pistol from its holster and placed it in Anderson's remaining hand. Anderson died during the night. Reilly himself was knocked unconscious by a grenade burst near his head. Altogether he had four wounds-a .So-caliber bullet wound thro
ugh the right leg, a bullet through the toes of one foot, a splattering of mortar fragments on his upper legs and hands, and the hand-grenade concussion over the right eye that had knocked him unconscious.28

  During the CCF attack on the 3rd Battalion CP and the artillery batteries, First Lieutenant Johnson, the Fifth Air Force forward air controller attached to the battalion, was killed and his equipment damaged.29 This was a serious loss because now the battalion had no means of directing air strikes against the enemy. The Corsairs would be left to their own devices in trying to help the beleaguered troops. Another serious loss during the night was the regimental surgeon, who was killed while working on a critically wounded man in a blackout tent.

  The only forward unit of the 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry, to hold its CP during the night battle was Capt. Earle Jordan's M Company. During the evening the weapons company had been ordered, over Jordan's protest, to send its 75-mm recoilless rifle and machine-gun platoons to K and I companies on the line. Each of these companies, therefore, had a section of 75-mm recoilless rifles and a section of machine guns from the weapons company at the time of the enemy attack. All these weapons were temporarily lost to the enemy in the night battle. Jordan had with him only his headquarters personnel. His mortar platoon with its 81-mm mortars was just in front of his CP in a broad, shallow wash, about 200 yards south of Reilly's 3rd Battalion CP in a thatched mud house standing in a courtyard. Darkness had fallen before he completed emplacement of his mortars and established local security.

  Jordan's first knowledge of trouble came between 1:3o and 2:00 A.M., when he awakened to the sound of small-arms fire in his mortar position. He hurriedly arose and alerted all personnel at the CP. He then went outside and saw that enemy soldiers were overrunning his mortar position and that smallarms fire, coming from the east and south, was hitting around his CP. Chinese soldiers were already in the draw around the mortars. Jordan shouted to his mortarmen to fall back to the CP hut and courtyard. There he organized his defense, which held all night against repeated close-in Chinese attacks. Most of the men in Jordan's group were either killed or wounded during the night, but the less critically wounded continued to fight in the desperate battle. Jordan said, "When it was light enough to see I went around to check the damage, and counted over 6o dead enemy soldiers within yards of our position, nearly all armed with American sub-machine guns, 45 cal. [Thompson submachine guns] and American ammunition."30

  Jordan was wounded during the night battle but did not relax his control of the defense. An enemy hand grenade exploded a few feet from him, and fragments cut several flesh wounds on both legs, and the blast of the explosion severely wrenched his back. In addition, he had frostbite in both feet. 3, Jordan described how the first night's fight seemed to him at his position; no doubt it was much the same elsewhere. He wrote: "The first night it seemed to me to be just a continuing battle at very close range, sometimes hand to hand, grenades used in large numbers by the Chinese, until dawn, when the remaining enemy withdrew. There was little room where one might assemble a group for counterattack as such. It would seem to me to be more clearly stated as a close range fight for individual positions."32 When daylight came, Jordan walked over to the communications hut, where he encountered Lieutenant Traywick. The latter told him he had just driven off the last of the Chinese soldiers. The battle was over for a while.

  It is interesting to note that Jordan's M Company, which had an outstanding record in the Chosin Reservoir fighting, had its full complement of KATUSA. Moreover, at Camp Crawford in Japan during the previous summer, when stringent measures had been taken to bring the 7th Infantry Division up to strength for the Inchon Landing, Jordan had received an unusual group of replacements. About 70 percent of the American troops sent to Jordan at that time came on "early release from the 8th Army Stockade"bad actors all, from the Army standpoint. Under Jordan's leadership these men became good soldiers, and they were better fighting men at Chosin than the average-they killed their share of Chinese. Jordan's record speaks for itself, and those who knew him spoke words of praise that fully reinforce his record as a soldier. He was a large man, a native of Auburn, Maine, born in 1917. He was a veteran of World War II: he had been commissioned a second lieutenant in infantry upon graduating from the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1942. Most of his service was in the 143rd Infantry Regiment, 36th Division, which engaged in some of the hardest battles of the Italian campaign.

  It is clear that the Chinese almost overran the 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry, and the two batteries of the 57th Artillery Battalion in their initial attack at the inlet on the night of November 27-28. No count of American and ROK casualties at the inlet perimeter during the night's battle was ever recorded. Nor was there ever any knowledge of the number of enemy casualties, but they were heavy. So far as can be determined, the enemy attack came entirely from the east, down the valley of the Pungnyuri-gang and the hill mass just south of it at the head of the inlet. Chinese troops apparently had not had time to deploy on the slopes of Hill 1456, south of the American bivouac area, or west of it. If they had been there, as they were on subsequent nights, the 3rd Battalion and the artillerymen at the inlet would have been effectively surrounded and might have been destroyed.

  The CCF 8oth Division's plans for the night of November 27-28 did not include action against the Hudong-ni perimeter, possibly because of the presence there of the 31st Tank Company. In any event, all was quiet there during the night. But there was action only a mile or two north although those at Hudong-ni were unaware of it at the time.

  An hour or two after Captain Drake returned to Hudong-ni from his trip up the road searching for Colonel MacLean, the 31st Medical Company arrived at Hudong-ni. It was a unit of the 31st Infantry that was to join MacLean's Headquarters group at the reservoir. Drake talked with the medical company's captain, informing him how the men of the 31st Infantry that had already arrived had been dispersed and what he had seen on his recent trip up the road. The medical company's commander was eager to continue on at least as far as the inlet and join the 3rd Battalion there for the night. Drake tried to persuade the officer not to continue but to remain at Hudong-ni that night and go forward with the tank company the next morning. The commander decided, however, to continue on, and after midnight he and his company pulled out and disappeared up the road.33

  Sometime later in the night, the exact time unknown, the first sergeant of the medical company reappeared at Drake's CP. He was in an excited and disheveled condition. He said that a Chinese force had ambushed the company a mile or two up the road and that he had escaped by crawling back in the road ditches. He did not know much about what had happened. He was the only member of the medical company whom Drake saw after the ambush, but three or four others got back to Hudong-ni, according to Maj. Carl G. Witte, the regimental S-2. None of them knew how many might have broken through the ambush and reached the 3rd Battalion at the inlet. It appeared that the Chinese had killed an unknown number and had destroyed several vehicles on Hill 1221, the first hill north of Hudong-ni.

  It was there, indeed, that the ambush had taken place, as was verified after daylight. American dead and several destroyed medical-company vehicles cluttered the road about 400 to Soo yards south of the hairpin turn in the saddle, where the road bent sharply toward the reservoir to the west in continuing generally northward toward the inlet.

  The ambush and roadblock on Hill 1221 were typical Chinese tactics. In attack the Chinese usually made one or more frontal assaults and sent a sizable force around a flank to cut the main exit road behind those they were attacking frontally. They were adept at picking ridgelines or hills close to the road, overlooking the point where they put in their fire and roadblocks. The latter were nearly always defended. So, while the CCF Both Division was attacking the forward perimeter and the inlet frontally it was also putting in its roadblock behind them, cutting off their escape. Later events showed that the Chinese had at least a battalion of troops at the site and held the
roadblock throughout the entire period of action east of Chosin. This Chinese-defended roadblock was a dominant factor in the ultimate fate of the 31st RCT

  By the early hours of November 28 the Hudong-ni CP was receiving garbled messages reporting enemy action at both the forward perimeter and the inlet. But there was never any clear understanding there of what was taking place. Communications soon deteriorated to the point of being virtually nonexistent.

  Soon after the first messages of enemy action at the 31st RCT perimeters north of Hudong-ni came in, Major Lynch tried by the regimental SCR 193 radio to reach Colonel Paddock, the 7th Infantry Division G-3 at Pungsan Headquarters, 6o air miles northeast. To Lynch's surprise General Barr, the division commander, answered the call. Barr told Lynch that he wanted to talk with General Hodes, who proceeded to outline the situation as he knew it and asked Barr to arrange for air support the next day. He also said that the 2nd Battalion, 31st Infantry, had not arrived and was badly needed. Radio communication was broken off before the end of the conversation and could not be reestablished. This was the only time the 31st RCT, on the east side of Chosin Reservoir, had direct communication with its division CP.34

  Lynch's importance at Chosin came from his association with General Hodes as the latter's G-3 aide. He never got farther north than Hudong-ni, but there and later at Hagaru-ri he was the one person who knew most about Hodes's efforts to obtain help to extricate the 31st RCT from enemy entrapment.35 Major Lynch had long experience in the Army. Born in Madisonville, Texas, in 1917, he enlisted at age sixteen in the 143rd Infantry, 36th Division, Texas National Guard, at Huntsville, Texas. By 1939 he had earned a second lieutenant's commission. When the 36th Division was mobilized in November, 1940, he commanded one of its rifle companies. He served with the 143rd Regiment throughout the war, participating in some of the hardest-fought battles in Italy, southern France, and the Vosges Mountains of northern France: Salerno, San Pietro, Rapido River, Cassino, Anzio, and the Colmar Pocket. In August, 1g5o, Lynch, now a major in the Regular Army, was one of 35 "extra" majors sent to Japan for duty with the 7th Infantry Division. He was assigned to the Division G-3 section.