The bullet that clipped off three fingers of Miller's left hand (he was left-handed) took with them his Virginia Military Institute class ring and his wedding band. The little finger was hanging by a shred of flesh, which Miller had a soldier cut off.,
Lieutenant Marshburn, who must have been the first officer of the task force to reach the road slanting up the north face of Hill 1221, was mortally wounded by an enemy bullet between his eyes during the heavy fire on the stalled truck column. Private First Class Wendell P. Shaffer, one of Stamford's TACP, was slightly wounded by the same burst of fire that hit Marshburn. It was his third wound at Chosin. For a brief time he cradled Marshburn's head between his knees as the lieutenant seemed to be dying. He then took cover in the ditch. After a time he recuperated enough to join a party that attacked up the hill. He survived to reach Hagaru-ri. He and Cpl. Gerald R. Thomas, the TACP leader, were the only members of Stamford's TACP other than Stamford to escape with their lives. TACP members Cpl. Myron J. Smith and Pfc. Billy E. Johnson were missing in action the next day, December 2, but Major Miller told Stamford that he had seen them dead.8
At the foot of Hill 1221, Stamford noted that the late afternoon was turning to dusk and that his air cover was thinning. He said that the aircraft stayed on station as long as possible but that no more arrived. In the gathering dusk his radioman, Cpl. Myron J. Smith, who had been carrying the AN/TRC-7 radio on a packboard, was wounded by enemy fire. Stamford took the radio packboard from him and put it on his own back and lifted Smith into the TACP jeep. Stamford decided that in the deepening gloom it was time for him to join the other vehicles. As the jeep moved forward up the hill, Stamford walked alongside it. By this time he had lost track of Lt. Colonel Faith. On the way up the hill Stamford came upon Major Miller in the ditch. Miller later wrote, "Fortunately for me, Captain Stamford came by walking beside his jeep, spotted me and had me loaded across the hood."9 The hood was a good place to ride. The engine kept the hood warm and helped keep Miller from freezing. The time was now about 5:00 P.M., and it was getting dark.
Stamford continued on up the road with some infantry, expecting, he said,
to find our troops on the hill [the slope of Hill 1221] moving toward the road block. About halfway up I noticed it was too dark to run any more air strikes so I threw away my binoculars, removed the packboard and destroyed the radio because I knew if we did not get out that night we would be captured. I continued up the hill [not on the road but on the hillside to the west of it] and tried to organize the troops and keep them moving toward the road block. They continually tried to drift down to the road south of the road block.10
Before Stamford went up the hill, and before dark, Faith went to the stalled truck column and again tried to get soldiers out of the ditch and away from the shelter of the trucks and the embankment. He attempted to organize assault parties to attack the slope and crest of the hill to clear it of enemy so that the truck column could move forward. He found dogged resistance to his efforts. He was especially infuriated by the ROKs, who, prodded to join parties starting up the slope, immediately came back down to the road.
The situation was truly desperate, and if attack parties could not be made to clear the enemy from their firing positions on Hill 1221, the truck convoy could not move. The fire block and roadblock had to be removed from the flank and rear; frontal effort had failed. Faith came on ROK soldiers tying themselves to the undercarriages of trucks so that if the trucks got through so would they. Faith ordered two ROKs to come out from under the trucks and rejoin the fight. They refused. He shot both of them with his .45 automatic."
Finally Faith, with the help of officers, some of whom were wounded but still able to move, did get various groups of men started up the hill to clear it sufficiently to permit an attack on the roadblock. But it was an uncoordinated, disjointed effort. It was a case of each officer working with those men who were close to him and whom he could motivate. The groups were of varying size, ranging from only 3 or 4 to a squad to a platoon or more. One or two attack groups at first consisted of loo or more men.
These individual attacks were made from various points along the road below the roadblock up the north face of Hill 1221 to the crest or high points on the long finger ridge that ran down eastward to the saddle and the road at the hairpin curve. The great majority of the men who reached the crest of the finger ridge continued on over it down the other side to reach the road on the southeastern slope south of (below) the roadblock. Most of them crossed the finger ridge along a line that brought them to the road near the point where the Chinese had earlier knocked out two of Drake's tanks and ambushed the medical company. When they gained the crest of this ridge, they did not try to turn down it and attack toward the enemy fire block and roadblock at the hairpin curve. Only one group, led by Capt. Earle Jordan, did that.
Lieutenant Campbell had a good view of the effort that Faith and other officers made to rally the men along the road. He had been dazed when he was placed in a truck at the perimeter after being wounded that morning. His memory of events remained fuzzy for hours from shock, fatigue, and a Syrette of morphine. After the convoy reached the bridge and moved around it, his head began to clear. He was relatively alert by the time the trucks stopped on the side of Hill 1221. He realized that small-arms fire was hitting wounded in the trucks. The thud of impacting rounds and the moans of the wounded were unforgettable, he said. He rolled out of the truck and into the ditch alongside. From there he had a good view up the road.
He saw Faith striding up and down the road near the front of the column exhorting everyone in the ditch to get up and attack the hill. Every time Faith passed his own jeep, he stopped long enough to fire a burst from the .3o-caliber machine gun mounted on its side. Campbell realized how hard a time Faith and other mobile officers were having mounting an attack. If the hill could be cleared, it would be possible for foot troops to pass over it and attack the fire block from its flank and rear.
A major problem facing Faith was the shortage of ammunition for the troops. One of Stamford's requests to the pilots making the strikes at Hill 1221 and in the valley in the late afternoon was to bring in a drop of rifle and carbine ammunition. In a subsequent flight relay a Corsair pilot came on station and reported that he had the ammunition. Stamford said: "I requested the pilot to drop the ammunition on the road at the side of Hill 1221. The pilot brought the Corsair in from the direction of the reservoir. I asked the pilot to make the drop on the outer side of the road where the trucks were lined up. The drop was nearly perfect. It landed on the northern edge of the road opposite the trucks. The troops in the vicinity rushed to grab the ammunition. Some men divided with others, but there was no effort at a systematic distribution to all."12
Lieutenant Cecil G. Smith, commander of A Company, ist Battalion, 32nd Infantry, was one of the first to lead a sizable group up the slope of Hill 1221. Smith said that the men bunched badly along the road and many were hit there. He organized as many near him as he could and led them up the slope. Their immediate objective was an enemy machine gun that had been firing on the road, but they did not attack it. In going up the hill, they bypassed the machine gun and thus did not help the rest of the troops on the road. When they reached the top, his point men went on over it and headed south. Smith with some 15 men followed and continued south toward the road on the south side of the fire block. They made no effort to turn back and attack the enemy roadblock from the rear but simply continued down the road toward Hagaru-ri. For a mile not a hostile shot was fired at them. This kind of action at Hill 1221 unfortunately became the common pattern thereafter, with no benefit to the stalled truck convoy.
After Smith's groups reached the bottom of the hill on the south side and passed Twiggae, it turned toward the reservoir. A force of about 25 Chinese soldiers came from east of the road and chased them but stopped at the edge of the reservoir. A wounded man fell behind the others, who moved out on the ice about Soo yards. A Chinese soldier followed and caught up with
the wounded man and bayoneted him. 13 Smith's group may have joined with Patton's artillerymen, mentioned earlier. Neither Patton nor Smith mentions the other, but both tell the story of one man at the end of their column who was bayoneted by a Chinese soldier and was identified by Patton as a wounded ROK.
Captain Bigger led one of the more successful attacks on Hill 1221, but success was brief. Bigger had been severely wounded in the leg by a mortar burst at midmorning at the inlet. When the breakout came, he was riding in a jeep. But he soon gave up his place to other wounded along the road and hobbled along using the two canes his mortar section had used as aiming stakes. Near the bridge he met Faith, who told him about the roadblock ahead at the hairpin turn that was holding up the column. Bigger said that he would go up to see if he could help:
As I drew near the column, I observed that the trucks with the wounded were stopped; that the soldiers on foot were trying to take cover between the trucks and the embankment where the road had been cut out around Hill 1221. But the road was exposed to a murderous fire from the Chinese from the high ground to the East. I began shouting to the dead tired soldiers, "If you are going to die, do it while in the attack. I et's get moving and secure this hill." I began flailing at them with my canes. Captain Vaudreaux came up and joined in. Another group that I later learned belonged to Captain Earle Jordan and under his leadership also moved out. We mounted a pretty good attack and seized Hill 1221. We were trying to get organized and set up a defensive perimeter on the hill when the Marine fighter-bombers mistook us for Chinese and began strafing us. I stood up to wave them off (I came within ten seconds or less of being killed by this mishap, for someone called to me and as I turned to see who it was, trajectories began hitting my former position). At this point we lost control of those who had responded so valorously moments before. They began streaming down the west side of Hill 1221 away from the Chinese and toward the reservoir. I went with them.... It was my intent to hold this hill until we could get the trucks moving.... this inadvertent strafing of our positions by the Corsairs threw the men into a panic.... the harm had been done, the men took off toward the reservoir. It was a case of leading where they were headed. We walked south [on the ice] and shortly darkness fell. The Marine Air had spotted us, notified the 1st Marine Division who sent line crossers (Blue Boys) out to lead us in through the anti-personnel mine fields. 14
One can appreciate what this effort cost Bigger, considering the many wounds he had received earlier in the day, including a wound in one eye, over which he wore a patch. In a letter to Captain Stamford less than a year later, Vincent J. Navarre, the 1st Battalion surgeon who had treated Bigger when he received the mortar wounds, asked, "How in the world did Bigger make it? His leg was a bloody mess the last time I saw it."15
There was a big surprise for Bigger and the others in his party as they approached Hagaru-ri: "As we moved down the ice toward the south end of the reservoir, we could hear the sound of revving airplane motors. At first we couldn't believe it for there had been no completed airstrip as we passed Hagaru-ri several days prior."16 This unexpected accomplishment, completed just that day, was to save hundreds of lives among both Army and Marine wounded.
It was probably Bigger's group whom Lieutenant Mortrude joined in the assault on Hill 1221. After Mortrude hobbled across the valley to join the mass of troops assembling in the road and the ditch alongside Hill 1221, he took part in an attack up the hill:
Someone initiated movement up the hill which quickly became a spontaneous attack under the rallying cry of "come on GI." Somewhat recovered by this time, I salvaged an M-i rifle from a wounded Korean auxiliary and followed the movements up the hillside which was now dotted with our casualties. This attack carried to the crest of the hill into the very midst of the Chinese occupied positions which had been originally prepared by the US Marines and temporarily occupied by us on Day One. The Chinese broke under the pressure of our assault and ran down toward the saddle where the road crossed the high ground. Those that did not run were quickly killed in their holes and I have heard that at least one was choked to death by an enraged American. During this melee on the hill, we were again struck by the US Marine air support, this time by rocket fire. Fortunately we had the abandoned positions as refuge and I saw no casualties. It does, however, give our platoon the dubious distinction of being hit by friendly napalm, machine gun, and rocket fire, all in one day, in the course of one operation. Obviously, these experiences were the function [result?] of our close engagement with the enemy rather than any ineptness on the part of the Marine fliers. Even if I had a choice I would certainly have chanced a few stray rounds for the benefit of the remarkably close support.
With the line of trucks now moving across the valley and up the road to our rear, the movement of our troops (I doubt that any one was really in command) continued south off the high ground to intersect the road as it now curved back to the west. Once down on the road again, I observed at least one disabled US tank and several friendly KIA as I followed the line of march down to the reservoir.
Although my memory is now vague, and very likely my observations were at best hazy then, it seems to me that we converged into a sizable group of perhaps so or more people as we moved out on the ice of the reservoir. In recall, it seems we were led by a wounded officer who was familiar to me and that it was Capt. Bigger.... I do recall, that as we moved across the ice, groups of Chinese would attempt to intercept us but we would drive them back to shore with much shouting and shooting. Also, we came across one wounded US soldier and one wounded and one dead Chinese, all literally frozen to the ice of a watering hole location. The US soldier said the Chinese had shot him after initially indicating friendship as they hosted him to a drink from the water hole. Subsequently, the wounded US soldier had retaliated by shooting both of them.
Just prior to darkness we observed a friendly air drop of supplies in what we assumed to be the Hagaru-ri area and I was heartened by the assurance of our direction of our march.
Sometime after darkness, it seemed to me that we were moving through a built-up area and in my state of exhaustion I wanted to fall out and rest in one of the houses. Fortunately, someone of more presence of mind convinced me my "buildings" were merely rocks and that I must keep moving.
Upon reaching Hagaru-ri, we were individually passed through the friendly forward US Marine positions in a most professional manner. My impromptu camouflage and again my expropriated Chinese great coat occasioned some concern and curiosity among the Marines. I was, however, able to identify myself. Since there were infiltrators in the area and their troops were nervous, they insisted on divesting me of my coat and remaining "potato masher" grenades before escorting me to the aid station.'?
First Sergeant Luna, of B Company, in his statement, made at Hagaru-ri on or about December 3, 1950, does not mention taking part in any attack on Hill 1221, but he did lead a party of about 25 men, IS from B Company and io ROKs, to Hagaru-ri from the roadblock area.18
The ist Battalion assistant surgeon, Korean doctor Lee Yong Kak, joined a group attacking up Hill 1221, but he could not make it and had to drop back to the bottom. He said that some ROK soldiers were with the group that made it to the top. There one of the ROKs pushed his carbine into a gunport in a Chinese bunker and on automatic fire sprayed a 3o-round clip into it and secured it. It had contained 16 Chinese soldiers.t9
When Major Robbins crawled out of the truck in which he had been riding, Lieutenant Curtis, of Jordan's M Company, called to him from the roadside ditch. In a quick conference they decided that there was only one thing to do-go up and over the hill as others had been doing. The two officers rounded up about 20 other men to go with them and began scrambling up the slope, firing as they went. Robbins's carbine fired twice and then jammed. He threw it down and picked up another from a dead American soldier. Most of the group reached the top and started down the southern side toward the Hagaru-ri road. While he was still on the hill, Robbins came upon Captain Jordan and a grou
p who were preparing to attack down the spur ridge toward the enemy roadblock. Robbins came out on the road where Drake's knocked-out tanks stood. They paused there and joined about 30 more men, who were sitting around or milling about trying to decide what to do next. Major Robbins wrote:
There was no organization left. Men of all units were mixed up at this stage. Again [Lieutenant] Curtis [not to be confused with Major Wesley Curtis] and I came to our decision as to what to do; we were going on to Hagaru-ri where the Marines were holding, or where we thought they were holding. What lay between we could only guess. Major Jones of the 32nd Infantry and Capt. Goss from the 57th FA Battalion came up about this time and joined up with a few men [more than a few were with Major Jones when he left Hill 12211 they had led out. We formed two long lines of soldiers on each side of the road and moved out quietly down the road to the south. As we moved along the group swelled in size until there must have been a hundred or more GI's moving along the road.20
East of Chosin Page 27