On December 3, Major Lynch made a count of the American soldiers from the 31st RCT at Hagaru-ri and reported it by radio telephone to Maj. Gen. Clark L. Ruffner, X Corps chief of staff. This report shows Lieutenant Colonel Anderson, commanding; Maj. Carl G. Witte, executive officer; and Captain Dovell, S-3 of the group, which numbered 40 officers and 844 enlisted men, a total of 884 men. In this total Lynch had a count of 21 officers and 304 enlisted men, a total of 325 men, from the Hudong-ni schoolhouse perimeter area. Of these 325, 6 officers and 170 enlisted men had been in Drake's 31st Tank Company.
From the ist Battalion, 32nd Infantry, there were 5 officers and 228 men; from the 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry, 7 officers and 165 men; and from the 57th Field Artillery Battalion, including D Battery (- ), 15th AAA AW Battalion, i1 officers and 197 men. Of the rifle companies in the two infantry battalions K and M companies had the fewest men, and the same count, 1 officer and 30 men each. Of the three rifle companies and the Heavy Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry, A Company had 1 officer, and the others none. Many of the men in the count of December 3 were airevacuated on December 4-5.5 When Hodes left Hagaru-ri, he ordered Lynch and Sergeants Cox and Hammer to remain behind, Lynch to act as a 7th Division liaison officer with the 1st Marine Division.6
Some members of the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry; the 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry; and the 31st Infantry regimental staff and Headquarters Company in Lieutenant Colonel Anderson's provisional battalion were killed or wounded in the fighting during the withdrawal from Hagaru-ri to Koto ri and on top of Funchilin Pass. Thereafter in the continued withdrawal to the coast the 31st RCT provisional battalion was in reserve and was not engaged in combat.
Many officers and men air-evacuated from Hagaru-ri from December 2 to 5 returned to their regiments after recovering from their wounds and frostbite, most of them in January and February, 1951. By then the 7th Infantry Division, still a part of X Corps, had entered the Eighth Army line in central Korea. Among the officers who returned were Major Curtis, Captain Bigger, Captain Vaudreaux, and Lieutenants May, Campbell, and Mortrude. Capt. Earle H. Jordan, promoted to major, returned to duty as the S-3, operations officer, 2nd Battalion, 31st Infantry. Major Lynch, promoted to lieutenant colonel, was assigned to command the 2nd Battalion, 31st Infantry. When he learned that Jordan's wounds had healed and he was returning to the regiment, he requested and was granted Jordan's assignment to his battalion.
Little is known of the CCF strength and losses east of Chosin. If the Both Division was of average Chinese strength of those engaged in the Chosin Reservoir Campaign, it had 7,000 to 8,ooo men at the beginning. The number of casualties it sustained during the actions against the 31st RCT east of Chosin is unknown, but it was a very large number, totaling in the thousands. It is known that the 8oth and 79th Chinese divisions were so decimated that they were not combat-effective when they went into bivouac near Hamhung after X Corps evacuated northeast Korea. These Chinese divisions did not reenter combat until March-April, 1951, when they took frontline sectors on the central Korean front.?
he fate that overtook Task Force Faith was one of the worst disasters for American soldiers in the Korean War. Could it have been avoided? I think that the answer is a speculative yes. If certain things had been done that were in the realm of the possible, then the story could have had a different ending. Few disasters occur spontaneously. Most are due to a chain of significant circumstances that build to a cumulative finale. Often a backward glance over the course of events seems to indicate that the result was foreordained. But a critical analysis will ordinarily reveal factors that might have been avoided or corrected to bring about a different outcome. Part of the answer is framed in Kipling's words:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on."
That, however, does not say it all. In military affairs a big part of the answer lies in the wisdom of command.
The main adverse factors for Task Force Faith were: (t) lack of communications; (2) lack of effective ammunition and gasoline resupply; (3) lack of air-reconnaissance intelligence on physical obstacles on the withdrawal route; (4) short daylight period; (5) a breakout plan hastily decided upon and providing no options as it progressed; (6) depleted officer and noncommissioned officer leadership for troop control; (7) surviving troops exhausted by four days and five nights of battle in frigid weather; (8) and a higher-command decision to withdraw the 31st Tank Company and the 31st Infantry Rear from Hudong-ni the day before the breakout effort.
Without adequate communications in a military organization, both upward and downward in command echelon, in action a given unit becomes a struggling organism without its central nervous system. It flounders. The most powerful radio the 31st RCT had east of Chosin was the SCR 193 that Colonel MacLean had on the 3/4-ton vehicle that he left at the 31st Rear at Hudong-ni. It failed about midnight on November 27 in the course of a brief radio conversation between General Hodes and General Barr.
The 31st Rear radios were not netted to the ist Marine Division, and those Cps therefore had no radio communication with each other though they were only five miles apart. Only when General Hodes took one of the 31st Tank Company tanks to Hagaru-ri on the afternoon of November 28 was there any radio communication between Hagaru-ri and Hudong-ni, and it was limited to messages between the one tank Hodes had at Hagaruri and the 31st Tank Company tanks at Hudong-ni. Major Lynch wrote: "General Hodes had one of Drake's tanks and this was the sole means of communication with the School House [at Hudong-ni] from Hagaru-ri."'
The mountainous country and the extremely cold weather, which weakened batteries, rendered the infantry battalion and company radios all but useless. The radios were mostly World War II instruments rebuilt in Japan. Their life-span in Korea proved to be short.
Major Lynch remarked about the serious communications problem:
There was no command and control setup established either at regiment with MacLean or with General Hodes which would enable either to get information and influence counter action. It was a case of the blind leading the blind so far as command control was concerned. Bits of unclear information came to us over a multitude of radios. Usually source was uncertain other than we got the picture that the units up forward were eyeball to eyeball with the Chinese. This communication garble lasted through midday on the 28th. After that information dwindled progressively to zero. Communications were never established with the 1st Mar Div CP.1
After late afternoon of November 28 neither of the forward infantry battalion commanders nor the field artillery commander could reach the 31st Infantry Rear at Hudong ni, and they had never been able to reach the Marines at Hagaru-ri. The Fifth Air Force TACP attached to the 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry, never had a chance to function during the battles with the Chinese. It was overrun at the communications headquarters the first night of the battle. Lieutenant Johnson, the TACP leader, was killed, and his radio equipment was damaged. The TACP thus had no opportunity to call in any air strikes at the inlet perimeter. Only from November 29, when Captain Stamford and his TACP with the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry, arrived at the inlet, did the 3rd Battalion and the 57th Field Artillery Battalion receive the benefit of a TACP. According to Stamford, the 31st RCT need not have been isolated without communication to the outside world. He said: "My AN/GRC-i was capable of tuning any High Frequency used by U.S. Forces air or land. Had we been given a frequency used by a pilot or had Gen. Barr brought one with him, or someone air dropped one, we could have been in business. The ist Mar Div Air Section knew what kind of equipment I had."3
The lack of communication applied also to a very large extent within the task force, especially when any of its elements were in movement. Curtis, the ist Battalion operations officer, commented on the lack of reliable communications within the 31st RCT itself, which compounded its problems. "Wire communications within the perimeter were
good," he said, "but during movement, radio communication from Bn to Co. to platoon was practically non-existent. This contributed greatly to the loss of control. Example: the movement from the forward perimeter to the Inlet. I was on the east flank-but out of communications with the command group and the company commanders. The Command Group was out of communication with Miller and the rear guard. Runners could not run in the snow in shoe pacs!"4 The lack of communication by runners within the task force was disastrous during the breakout attempt from the inlet perimeter on December i and was one of the factors leading to loss of control of the troops early in the afternoon.
There is considerable evidence that coordination within the task force was not good. The lack of coordination is partly chargeable to Lieutenant Colonel Faith. Major Curtis, for instance, was never informed of Faith's action in placing Major Miller in charge of the ist Battalion on December 1 with a staff of his own. Nor did Curtis know that Faith had designated Major Robbins, of the 31st Infantry, the S-4 of the task force. Some units of the 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry, seem not to have been well informed on the breakout plan.
Colonel Embree has stated that "during the action on the east side of the Chosin Reservoir (in either the initial position area of the HQ and HQ Btry, or in the subsequent position area with the two howitzer batteries) I had no contact, verbal or written with LTC Faith nor with LTC Reilly."5 This is almost incredible when one reflects that Faith, Reilly, and Embree were within the same small inlet perimeter after the morning of November 29.
Major McClymont has said that he received orders or instructions only once from anyone within the inlet perimeter. That was on the morning of December i when Lieutenant Colonel Faith told him to place an Miq full-track dual-4o at the point of the breakout column, as requested by Major Miller. The lack of communication with Major McClymont in the form of orders and instructions seems strange, considering the vital role his antiaircraft weapons played in the defense of the perimeter.
In discussing with survivors the questions of coordination and communication in the task force and its several units at the inlet perimeter, I found almost all in agreement that they were poor. Hugh May has written of the situation: "In general terms there was very little of the who, what, why, when, and where forthcoming.... These five points of information failed to be issued from the inlet CP and in my opinion was partially responsible for the disintegration later. Some of the points were issued in the orders rec but not all and surely not adequately covered (in my opinion). Majors Miller and Curtis did their best to correct that mistake."6
After Colonel MacLean and General Hodes arrived at the reservoir and until the morning of November 30, the 7th Infantry Division had responsibility for the 31st RCT on the east side of the reservoir. It had to be apparent that the 31st RCT was isolated and had no communication with higher command. It should have been mandatory for higher headquarters to send a liaison officer, using a liaison-type plane from Hamhung to Hagaru-ri and a helicopter from there to Task Force Faith at the inlet daily from November 29 on to ensure that needs in ammunition, gasoline, batteries, spare parts, and food were known and delivered by airdrop. Such regular liaison would have provided a means of communicating information and orders for needed cooperative action. But such liaison was not established. Only once from November 27 through December i did an officer from a higher headquarters visit the inlet perimeter.
Regular liaison visits should have eliminated one of the causes of the ultimate disaster-the failure of ammunition resupply, especially certain ammunition for particular weapons that were vital for a successful defense of the perimeter and for a successful breakout. There were airdrops on several days, but some of them went to the enemy when high winds drifted the parachutes away from the intended drop zone and into Chinese-held territory.
The resupply of .50-caliber ammunition fell far short of meeting the needs of the M16 quad-Sos with their tremendous automatic firepower, and not a single 40-mm shell was delivered to the perimeter for the M19 dual-40s, the most destructive weapon of all against close enemy attack and enemy close-in assembly areas. The one large airdrop of 40-mm ammunition on the 28th or 29th of November came down at the wrong place. The pilot carrying the 40-mm shells dropped them at Hudong-ni, where the 31st Tank Company and the 31st Rear had no use for them. The men stacked the 4o-mm ammunition, and when the units left Hudong-ni on the afternoon of November 30, Captain Drake ordered it destroyed. That ammunition would have been invaluable for the M19s and Task Force Faith at the inlet and in the breakout attempt.
McClymont has commented: "I have always regretted that the re-supply of ammunition and gasoline [was] not received by us when we so desperately needed them.... perhaps with a little better planning we could have easily extracted ourselves, and there would have been no Chosin Reservoir incident for us to remember, to relive, and to write about." 7 Captain Bigger echoed that thought, saying: "The Quad So and the Dual-4o are magnificent ground support weapons. If a few more of these weapons with their tracked ability had been available with ammunition we could have made it."8
The troops at the inlet did not know about the drop of 40-mm shells at Hudong-ni, only three air miles south of them. When I first mentioned it to Major Stamford in 1979, he exploded with "Those d knuckleheads!" In correspondence with me Drake told about the airdrop of 40-mm shells at Hudong-ni and the failure to deliver to him the 76-mm and 105mm shells he needed for his tank guns.
It is necessary to dwell a moment on what the lack of 40-mm shells for the M19s and belted .So-caliber ammunition for the M16s meant when the breakout started. Captain McClymont said, "The lead M19 twin 40 mm had precious little ammunition, perhaps enough for some targets of opportunity." By the time the M19 and the point of the motor column reached the first blown bridge two miles down the road it was out of ammunition. The M19 proved its tremendous value there in another way, however, for its full-track locomotion enabled it to pull the vehicles in the column around the blown bridge over an unimproved bypass. But just beyond, on the road climbing obliquely to the saddle of Hill 1221, the motor column and the foot soldiers were stopped by an enemy fire block.
In my view, if the Miq and the M16s had been well supplied with ammunition after reaching the blown bridge and the road beyond, they could have suppressed the terribly costly enemy fire from the valley and the ridges north of the road at Hill 1221 and very likely would also have quickly suppressed the fire from the enemy fire block at the saddle of Hill 1221 at the hairpin turn. They could have swept away many of the enemy positions on Hill 1221. The motor convoy could then have passed around Hill 1221 before dark. If the Mig and M16s had been supplied with ammunition and had been accompanying the motor column when it ran into the final enemy fire block at Hudong-ni, the Mig probably could have reduced that enemy fire position as well. But the M16s had long since run out of ammunition and the Mig, also out of ammunition, ran out of gasoline shortly after it had pulled the last truck around the blown bridge bypass.
The failure of the rear guard, the 31st Infantry and the 57th Field Artillery, to protect the rear of the motor column at the first blown bridge was an important factor in the chaos and destruction that overtook the road column below the CCF fire block at the hairpin turn on Hill 1221. That situation reminds one of Xenophon's conversation with Cyrus on the subject of tactics in war, when the latter said: `Behind all the rest I shall station the so-called rear guard of veteran reserves.... a phalanx is good for nothing, unless both front and rear are composed of valiant men."9
A breakout effort from the inlet perimeter had been a probability for at least 24 hours before it was launched, and in that period thought should have been given to its eventuality. When the decision came, however, it was apparently entirely ad hoc, prompted by what seemed necessity. We know that Faith decided on the breakout about 10:00 A.M. on the morning of December i and that Majors Miller and Curtis urged it on him. They thought that the remaining force would be overrun in another night of Chinese attacks on the perimeter. Whe
n the Corsair appeared over the inlet that morning, gave Stamford a weather report indicating clearing weather about midday, and promised to lead a flight of planes in at that time, Faith made the decision to break out. The effort was projected to be one headlong dash for Hagaru-ri, covered by aircraft. It offered no options in execution to meet delays and unfavorable developments.
Not all the unit commanders, especially in the 31st Infantry, were informed of subsequent decisions. Captain Jordan, commander of M Com pany, for instance, did not receive notice of the breakout hour or that the breakout had started, though he had learned earlier that there would be a breakout attempt. He said that he knew that the breakout was under way only by watching the 3rd Battalion Headquarters area (he was a few hundred feet from it) and that, when he saw them going, he put his company in motion to follow.
There was a period of only two hours to get word passed around to everyone to unload trucks and vehicles of whatever they contained and load the wounded into them; cannibalize destroyed or immobilized vehicles for tires, batteries, and gasoline; form the convoy on the road-and find every possible cartridge of ammunition. There was also the task of preparing for destruction the supplies and weapons that could not be taken along. The troops had to be assigned their special roles in the breakout attempt. When the CCF saw these preparations and saw trucks pull onto the road within the perimeter, they increased their rate of fire, especially mortar fire, and a new group of wounded was added to the hundreds already present.
East of Chosin Page 35