Nearly all survivors of Task Force Faith agree that with the napalm drop a demoralization set in among the troops that was never wholly overcome. It grew worse as the afternoon wore on. Major Miller, however, said: "I do not believe that the napalm drop itself had the long term effect. I believe that for most of us it was just another terrible part of an already unbelievable situation which progressively worsened. Everyone knew without question the value of the air support."45
Smith kept his promise to Barr. Task Force Faith did get air priority on December i; Smith allotted 20 planes to it. They came in flights usually of 4 or 6, and in relays. Beginning with the initial strike, the Corsairs and a few other types of planes were over the task-force convoy all afternoon until darkness prevented further support at Hill I22I. They swept the road ahead of the task force and strafed, rocketed, and bombed the high ground on the left of the road column, while one or more planes covered the rear. The survivors generally agreed that without this close air support the task force might never have been able to clear the perimeter. Had the task force been willing to leave its wounded and abandon all vehicles, its men could have walked out over the hills and the ice, and most of them would have escaped. But its mission was to escort the truck convoy with its wounded.
The fight down the road was particularly intense for the first half mile outside the perimeter. There the black-painted Corsairs must have looked to the Chinese like so many huge birds of prey, but to the Americans they were birds of hope. Perhaps it would not be Black Friday after all.
We return to Mortrude to learn what happened to him and members of his point platoon after he rolled off the Mig and dropped over the western embankment of the road. Once defiladed from enemy fire, Mortrude stopped to gather his wits. A battalion staff officer ran up to him and said that the entire task-force column had stopped and that he must get moving. Mortrude replied that he would try to flank below the road along the ice and get behind the enemy's front line. He and several of his platoon started west below and parallel with the road. In a few moments he saw an enemy immediately above him. Mortrude threw one of his salvaged enemy grenades at him. The grenade fell short and started to roll back toward him. Mortrude ducked behind a rock as the grenade exploded. When he looked up, he saw the Chinese running away down the road. In this flurry of activity Mortrude's white-camouflaged helmet and fur cap fell off and rolled toward the inlet. He ignored them and led his men back up to the road. There he saw a Chinese soldier on the elevated shoulder of the road trying to put some kind of ground-mounted weapon into operation. Mortrude said:
I attempted to fire at him at close range, my carbine misfired, he abandoned his position but returned immediately and then ran again. At which point I manually chambered a round, fired, and hastened him on his way. Thus encouraged and enthused, our little group of five or six people including two BAR men ran screaming and cursing down the road shooting at everything. This included one Chinese who crawled out from under a disabled US vehicle and a communications lineman up a telephone pole. As our targets and endurance exhausted, we stopped to regroup and rest.... One of my platoon members came up with my helmet and cap which he had salvaged from the ice. As more members of the platoon rejoined us and other battalion troops appeared to be closing on us we resumed our march. This time we proceeded without incident to the mouth of a large valley where a collapsed concrete span crossed a gulley and the road was intercepted by another trail or road leading up the valley.... There were only four or five of us advancing abreast on the road to the blown bridge at any one time with some occasionally falling out and others filling in. I suspect that we had avoided the main enemy strength at the first roadblock by leaving the road and working along the shore of the reservoir ice. Those few enemy we encountered when we first came back up on the road were, very likely, only in supporting positions backing up the main road block and were surprised by our accidental initiative in leaving the road in a flanking maneuver. After these people broke and ran, no other established positions or determined return fires were encountered.46
After the temporary chaos and confusion following the napalm drop, Captain Seever led C Company down the road, despite his four-day-old leg wound. The Corsairs were now engaged in a furious assault on the fleeing Chinese and their position on the left side of the road. Their fire slaughtered most of the enemy ahead of C Company as they broke and ran. Many Chinese ran to the south and southwest on the road and in the railroad bed just east of the road. If the Corsairs did not get them, American small-arms fire accounted for most of them. C Company was soon ahead of the rest of the task force. It was commonly believed by survivors of the company that Captain Seever was killed in this phase of the fight, but Lieutenant May said that he saw him hobbling with a cane in the approach to the first blown bridge. If the latter is correct, he did not live long afterward.
When C Company charged into the Chinese following the napalm burst, Major Miller ran forward on the road with them. He climbed the bank on the left to reach the railroad bed to see what the situation was there and looked down into the cut. He said:
Not ten yards away were three Chinese manning a heavy machine gun and firing into B Company on the left flank which now was moving forward on my orders to help clear out the enemy positions. I fired one round from my carbine and it jammed. However, a BAR man sprayed them and put the MG out of action. The fight was over in a matter of seconds and C and B Companies moved out down the road and on the right side of the road. At the first slight turn of the road was a log barricade of three or four eight inch logs. I signalled up the SP [the Mig dual-4o] which moved the logs diagonally and nudged them far enough to one side to allow the trucks to clear.47
When the trucks started moving after the road had been cleared ahead of them, they moved in "jerks and halts," with some frightened ROK soldiers trying to climb aboard. Americans moving alongside the trucks pulled them off. Most of the wounded in the trucks lay quietly and "stared into nothing." Major Robbins lay at the side in one of the trucks where he could look out between the side slats. He wrote of this part of the breakout:
From my peephole I could see dead Chinese and American soldiers alike lying in little sprawled heaps on the side of the road and in the ditches, their blood forming pools from which steam rose into the freezing air. I remember staring at this in complete realization of the fight those GI's were making. Soldiers passing our truck called out encouragement to us and grinning as they went on forward to blast more Chinese or fall themselves. The enemy was giving way now and our guys sensed it, following them more closely and with greater courage.48
But it was not clear sailing by any means for the truck column. Chinese were on every nose of ground east of the road, their small-arms and automatic fire killing and wounding despite the ferocious air attacks. The task force was under heavy fire as it moved slowly south. But with effective air support there seemed a chance that the column would make it to Hagaru-ri. This prospect depended primarily on two factors: (I) that the column would not be stopped for any great length of time by enemy roadblocks and could reach Hagaru-ri before dark, when vital close air support would end, and (2) that enough officers and noncommissioned officers would survive to exercise control over the men to keep them protecting the vehicular column of wounded, without degenerating into a mob seeking their own survival.
The tendency of the men on foot to rush ahead of the trucks was apparent early after the breakout. It was partly exhilaration in reaction to the initial breakout, and partly the men on the higher ground east of the road wanting to drift down to the road for cover from enemy fire from the east. The officers and noncommissioned officers did not have much success keeping the infantry on the high ground where they could protect the roadbound column. Most wanted to get to the head of the column on the road and stay ahead, thinking thereby to improve their own chances of reaching safety.
A view looking north along the narrow-gauge railroad track. Hill 1250 is on the right, and Hill 1324 is on the south side
of the Pungnyuri-gang Inlet in the distance (left). The photograph was taken in the early afternoon of December 1, 1950, during Task Force Faith's breakout from the inlet. The men shown are probably members of the 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry, the designated rear guard. The vehicular road is immediately left of the railbed under the embankment. Both railbed and road are at the edge of Chosin Reservoir to the left. The photographer is unknown. Photograph courtesy of Col. Crosby P. Miller.
Sergeant Luna of B Company was on the road with the trucks. Two or three days later at Hagaru-ri he wrote a statement of what he saw on the road in the breakout. He said that Soo to 6oo yards outside the perimeter, beyond the site of the napalm drop and the dead of both sides in the initial clash, there were many enemy dead in the road, so many, he said, that one had to step over them, and that in some places they had to be removed so that the trucks could pass. As the trucks moved forward, he and others put many newly wounded Americans on the trucks. He wrote: "We got what wounded we could out. I mean just kept loading them on and on the trucks. It was impossible to get all of them on. I do not recall now just how many were left behind. You couldn't possibly back up and take them with you.... They [the trucks] just kept moving forward."49 Luna added that the ROK soldiers were a continuing difficulty. They kept crowding down on the road and would not stay on the high ground east of the road. He said that Faith was on the road constantly ordering them back to higher ground.
After Major Miller had called up the Mig and cleared the small roadblock of logs from the road half a mile west of the perimeter, he noticed that the infantry were leaving the trucks behind. By this time his two radiomen were missing, and he could not communicate with the forward platoons. He wanted to slow them-they were getting beyond his control. He sent runners ahead to B and C companies with orders to keep the troops on the left of the road. He saw that
the troops were giving way to the right of the road and the shelter of its embankment. I do not believe the runners were able to accomplish their mission as no change in troop disposition became evident either then or later. In retrospect, I believe that at this point (the Chinese encirclement had been broken and troops and trucks were on the move) for the first time, loss of control began to creep into the picture. The leading troops were moving very rapidly and elements of B and C Companies were becoming mixed together. It was here that a brief reorganization or slowing of the leading elements would have helped to retain the control which was slipping away. I started trotting forward to catch the leading company.S°
Major Curtis saw it much the same. He said that after the initial success of the breakout the troops "flooded down the road like a great mob and tactical control broke down almost immediately. Officers tried frantically to re-establish control and to order men up on the high ground where they could protect the truck column.... Enemy small arms fire was encountered all the way, but men attacked and overran enemy positions fron tally with seeming disregard for basic tactical principles and their own safety. The aircraft were having a hey-day strafing and bombing in front of the troops." 5'
Lieutenant Thomas J. Patton, of A Battery, said that he had a group of 15 men of Headquarters Battery who helped cover the left flank of the column where enemy had concentrated to stop the breakout. It was a rough place to be. Patton gives a sampling of what happened to units there in the first part of the breakout. He wrote: `By the time we had reached the old Headquarters Battery area [about one road mile] there were only 3 men left along with myself. The others were wounded and placed on trucks. 2 of them dead."SZ Captain Hodge, of A Battery, played an active and courageous role in getting his battery ready for the movement and leading it thereafter. The commanders of both A and B batteries were apparently killed in the breakout.
At the rear of the column the situation was also deteriorating. Faith had instructed May to stay near the rear to make sure that all vehicles got in line. May said that as the column moved down the road after the breakout it took a great deal of rifle fire from the high ground on the left. He was in a good position to know the amount of damage to the vehicles between the perimeter and the first blown bridge, where the convoy had a prolonged stop. He said, "I saw no vehicles knocked out from the Inlet south to Hill 1221.... But many of our drivers were badly hit and had to be replaced." Private Edward E. Bilyou, L Company, 31st Infantry, was in the rear guard, behind the trucks, but he was called on to replace a driver who had become a casualty, and he drove a truck until well after dark. He said that one of his wounded in the truck was hit three more times by enemy fire. The drivers, on the left side of the trucks, were exposed to enemy fire, which came almost entirely from that side, until the convoy reached Hill 1221. It was hard to find replacements for killed or wounded truck drivers in the convoy, for nearly all the soldiers on foot considered the job a form of suicide.53
Lieutenant Smalley was one of those killed by enemy small-arms fire as he lay, already wounded, in a truck. Concerning him, May wrote: "I was with Lt. Smalley when he was killed. He was in the rear of a 21/2-ton truck, a casualty from wounds in the legs. Lt. Smalley was shot through the head by rifle fire coming from the CCF on high ground to our east. This shortly after the breakout from the Inlet."54 Enemy fire hitting wounded in the trucks a second and a third time, killing many of them, was a dismal occurrence that became more pronounced later in the afternoon.
In the running fight from the breakout to the first blown bridge, enemy opposition was intense. It was in this part of the breakout that the M16s were able to counter the enemy. May said of them: "The Quad 5o's played a very important role in the Inlet area prior to the breakout. During the breakout they placed withering fire on CCF troops trying to overrun our column. Until they ran out of ammo they were our most deadly defensive weapons." Unfortunately, they were out of ammunition before the column reached Hill 1221.
Captain Jordan's M Company, 31st Infantry, was near the end of the column. About a mile down the road Jordan found that the foot troops had stopped and were bunching up because an enemy machine gun was firing from the east down a draw and across the road to the ice of the reservoir. This draw was the shallow valley east of the road where the 57th Field Artillery Headquarters and Headquarters Battery, together with McClymont's AAA AW weapons, had bivouacked the night of November 27- 28. For the enemy it was an ideal site for a strongpoint along the withdrawal route. Earlier Stamford had had to call in an air strike on this area to help the men in front get past it. Now there was considerable pressure from rear elements crowding forward, which only made the bunching worse. Jordan sent his Sergeant Pruitt with a squad of men to take out the enemy machine gun while he worked to get the column moving again. Jordan wrote: "At this point there were few officers to be found and not much leadership. So many had become casualties and fatigue was taking its toll." SS Once past this point, Jordan said, the rear of the column closed up and moved ahead at a reasonably good pace until it reached the valley north of Hill 1221. For the Chinese this last mile to the valley was difficult terrain; they could find few strongpoints from which to harass the column. The slope of Hill 1456 was steep and came down abruptly to the road and the reservoir.
Captain McClymont, who had been near the point during the breakout, stayed there until the column had covered the first mile to the cove where he and his antiaircraft battery had bivouacked and fought the first night. There he decided to walk back along the column and check the condition of his remaining weapons. He found that the first quad-So in line was in good condition. He continued on, looking for the Miq that was supposed to bring up the rear. Instead, he came on his sergeant with the other crew members walking along with the foot soldiers. He was shocked and dismayed when he learned what had happened and that the Mi9 was standing back in the perimeter with half the priceless 40-mm shells they had remaining at the beginning of the breakout.56 He told the Mig crew members to stay with the convoy. As he walked back toward the front of the column, he found that he could walk faster than it was moving.
The 3rd Battali
on, 31st Infantry, was the convoy rear guard. The three rifle companies of the battalion, I, K, and L, were now so reduced in strength that their able-bodied men, those who could walk and carry a weapon, had been combined into one company. It was called K Company, with Captain Kitz, of the original K Company, commanding. It left the perimeter at the rear of the column but must soon have moved to the right side of the road, where it would be defiladed from most enemy fire. Kitz, in a statement made a few days later at Hagaru-ri, said that K Company moved mostly on ice. This meant that his company moved far enough to the right to get onto the ice of the reservoir where the going would be easier, but it is hard to see how moving there would serve his mission of acting as rear guard for the column.
While K Company was on the ice, presumably close to the edge of the reservoir, the ice broke in one or two places, and some men, including Kitz, fell into the water. Some of them, Kitz among them, got out, but others drowned-Kitz did not say how many.51 After regaining the road, Kitz led his company south on it and the railroad bed, following the trucks.ss
According to Major Curtis, about 3:00 P.m., after the column had traveled approximately two miles from the perimeter and was nearing the valley north of Hill 1221, a "jeep mounted radio picked up the following message in the clear, `To Colonel Faith: Secure your own exit to Hagaru-ri. Unable to assist you. Signed Smith, CG 1st Marine Division."'59 This message was received over the artillery observer's jeep radio. It had been prepared that morning by General Hodes at Hagaru-ri and signed by Smith.60 The taskforce withdrawal had now been in progress for two hours. Curtis learned of this message firsthand, at the time it was received, from the operator of the jeep radio.
East of Chosin Page 24