On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  Still, the Yalu detour had accomplished nothing except to harden MacArthur’s belief in the rightness of a course that was madly wrong. This was his moment of no return. By now, said one prominent Army general, MacArthur had come to resemble “a Greek hero of old, marching to an unkind and inexorable fate.”

  The supreme commander puffed his pipe and bantered with his aides while still staring out the window. Upon reaching the eastern edge of the Korean Peninsula, the Bataan banked south over the sea and headed for Japan.

  BOOK

  THREE

  THE RESERVOIR

  The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.

  —MAO ZEDONG

  18

  EASY FOR US, TOUGH FOR OTHERS

  Yudam-ni

  Yudam-ni was a mountain hamlet near the shores of the Chosin Reservoir, a speck of a place, a crossroads. Just to the east, in swirls of mist, a cove of lake ice gleamed the color of nickel. Five steep ridges, splotched with stunted pines, hemmed in the town and inspired among the Marines a nagging feeling that they were being watched. In the waning light, on the valley floor, a dozen mud-and-thatch huts, mostly vacant, threw shadows over the stubbly fields. A few villagers cowered in doorways and smiled awkwardly. They feared the American strangers and their machines—and nursed a thinning hope that the war would quickly move on.

  Something momentous was happening in the mountains around Yudam-ni, and the villagers knew it. Plays of shadows. Human voices murmuring through the hollows. Deer bolting down from the ridges in large numbers, as though spooked. Everyone knew the Chinese were gathering somewhere to the north. It was only a question of how numerous their forces had become, and what their true intentions might be.

  By the afternoon of November 27, more than eight thousand Marines had arrived in Yudam-ni, and the place was an industrial hive. The Marines had quickly transformed the valley into a sprawl of equipment depots, mess tents, trash heaps, munitions dumps. A layer of exhaust hung over the town like a grimy halo, and grids of canvas shelters billowed in the bracing wind. Men hunched around barrels, warming their hands over sparky fires. Occasionally a plane would appear and a mystery package, attached to a parachute, would drop from the sky.

  The Marines were using Yudam-ni as a temporary staging area from which to launch the drive across the Taebaek Mountains. From here, they were supposed to march fifty miles toward the west to shore up the flank of General Walker’s Eighth Army, then turn north for the final push to the Yalu River. Korea would be unified. The war would be over in a week or two—that was the word coming out of Tokyo.

  But the optimism radiating from MacArthur’s headquarters seemed sharply at odds with the mood around Yudam-ni. Here, worry lined the faces of the men. High along the ridges, Marine units were digging in for the night, using their entrenching tools, and sometimes explosives, to gouge shallow foxholes from the frozen earth. Individual platoons tightened their perimeters, while wiremen scurried up the hills, unspooling wheels of communications coil.

  The regiments at Yudam-ni—Litzenberg’s Seventh and Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Murray’s Fifth, along with elements from the Eleventh, a heavy artillery regiment—understood that they were the tip of the division spear. They had advanced the farthest north, the farthest west, higher and deeper into the mountains than any of Smith’s forces. As the sun sank toward the ridgeline, the men knew how far removed they were from help. Exposed as they were out here, they felt they’d become, said one account, “the plaything of the old men who directed them, the old men who were always fighting the last war.”

  * * *

  One of the outfits digging in for the night was the Seventh Marines’ Company E, also known as “Easy.” The 170 men of this scrappy rifle company—“Easy for us, tough for others” was their slogan—had taken up a position on North Ridge, an imposing escarpment that overlooked Yudam-ni. Specifically, Easy was supposed to defend a spur along the ridge called Hill 1282. (The number signified its height in meters, as noted on the old Japanese topographical maps the Marines were using.) Three platoons of Easy Company had begun to arrange themselves in a semicircle near the summit of the hill. At their backs, some seven hundred feet downslope, was Yudam-ni and their fellow Marines; in front of them was another steep slope, spreading out below. Easy’s job was to keep a close watch on that slope, to make sure the CCF didn’t come marching up it in the dead of night. The fear was that the Chinese might try to pour over North Ridge and overrun the Marine command posts and medical tents in the village itself.

  Anchoring the center of Hill 1282, facing toward the northeast, was Easy’s Second Platoon, led by a legendary Marine from Arkansas named John Yancey. First Lieutenant Yancey, thirty-two years old, was a World War II veteran who had won a Navy Cross at Guadalcanal and had also fought at Saipan. His ruddy face was roped with scars. On Guadalcanal, he had lived behind enemy lines for a month, subsisting on nothing but rice. As was then the grim custom among Marines fighting a fanatical enemy, he had collected a number of souvenirs from his bouts of hand-to-hand combat—including two Japanese pistols, a bayonet, and a gold tooth that, in his youthful battle ardor, he was said to have extracted from the corpse of one of his most hated foes after a horrific fight. Yancey, according to one account, had “learned his own lessons in a hard school, the hardest there was.” In a single action, he had killed thirty-six Japanese soldiers—“before breakfast,” his citation noted. Among those casualties was an officer who had, as Yancey put it, “attempted with great vigor to decapitate me with a sword.”

  After the war, Yancey had been a lineman for the Razorbacks of the University of Arkansas. Now he owned a spirits shop in Little Rock and also a nightclub, called the Gung-Ho. He had recently become a father: The very day he came ashore at Inchon, his wife, JoAnn, gave birth to a baby girl. Yancey’s punctilious posture, suave smile, and prim black mustache gave him the air of a maître d’—all that was missing was the white jacket. He was a perfectionist, that was certain, and he could be hard on “the kids,” as he called his platoon members. He cursed in torrents and constantly issued commands in strident barks.

  Still, the men of Second Platoon adored Yancey. He was a bona fide war hero, someone who came alive in combat and had a special talent for it. People said he was indestructible. The strut in his step was infectious. “Yancey was the kind of person I’d read about but never thought I would meet in real life,” said Private James Gallagher, a machine gunner from Philadelphia. “He let us know early on that he would give the orders and we would follow him.” Although he was from the South, he was quick to criticize any of his men who showed even a hint of discrimination toward black Marines in the newly desegregated Corps. Yancey was, said Easy Company’s Ray Walker, “one of those natural born troop leaders, possessing both the charisma and the steel nerve.”

  “When Yancey was with us,” said another member of the platoon, the men “had a kind of Valhalla complex.” Speaking in his grumbly baritone, Yancey loved to quote—from memory—long verses of Kipling, his favorite poet, or certain lines from O. Henry, his favorite short-story writer. Uncannily calm in battle, he would utter swashbuckling exhortations that seemed straight out of a John Wayne movie. “Here they come, boys!” his men heard him yell during one firefight at Sudong. “Stand fast and die like Marines!” War, he said, quoting John Stuart Mill, was “an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things….A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free.”

  But Lieutenant Yancey’s personality had a whimsical aspect, too. When the work was done, when the danger had passed, he could be a mischief maker—and a master of the fine southern art of bullshitting. He was a “country fella” who’d spent time in the Ozarks, noted one Navy corpsman who served under him. “His banter was alwa
ys upbeat. He made those youngsters forget they needed a hot meal, that they were cold and scared and homesick.”

  The stories that surrounded Yancey were almost criminally colorful, and many of them were true. On an abandoned block of Uijeongbu, one of Seoul’s suburbs, he had used composition C explosives to blast open the vault of what appeared to be an abandoned bank. When the dust settled, he found a great quantity of North Korean occupation notes stacked in bundles. The war scrip was apparently valueless—but no matter. He had some of his men load the currency into a Russian jeep they’d captured and later distributed it throughout the company. Per his orders, everyone was given at least one bundle of cash. Several days later, Yancey returned from a beer-foraging trip to his unit’s bivouac site. To his dismay, things had changed drastically during his brief absence. A succulent pig was roasting, booze had been procured, Korean girls frolicked everywhere about the place, and a brothel had been established in a back room, “from which came squeals of delight.”

  Yancey, fuming mad, summoned his platoon sergeant and lit into him for letting things go to hell. Prostitutes? “But the men are paying them with the money you stole from the bank at Uijeongbu,” the sergeant replied. “These people think we’re just a bunch of rich, crazy Americans.”

  Yancey had no choice but to let it go.

  * * *

  At dusk, Yancey patrolled the perimeter and inspected the two-man foxholes he’d had his platoon digging all afternoon along Hill 1282. The men were sweaty and sore and exhausted from the toil. This ground was impossible, like chipping at solid concrete. Their entrenching tools merely skipped off the flinty ground with a hollow clang. But Yancey reminded them that their lives depended on depth: Every inch counted. “A little more, kids!” he kept growling at them. “A little deeper now!”

  Yancey had them reinforce their foxholes with barricades of brush and rocks. He set up two men with .30 caliber machine guns at opposite ends, to protect Second Platoon’s flanks. He surveyed the amphitheater of hills below him and tried to read the angles, tried to see it from the Chinese vantage point. Where were the weak points? Where would his men be most vulnerable to mortar concentrations? He sent some Marines out to arrange a circuit of trip flares, while others filled ration tins with pebbles and strung up these crude rattles to long runs of communications wire.

  About forty yards behind Yancey’s position, set in a declivity behind some boulders, was the Easy Company command post, where Yancey’s superior, Captain Walter Phillips, was also getting set up for the night. Yancey went down to confer with Phillips and his company executive, First Lieutenant Raymond Ball. Behind the CP, mortar specialists were digging into the snow, and Company E’s radioman was testing his frequencies. Yancey and Phillips talked awhile in the warming tent that had been set up. They wished each other good luck, and Yancey returned to the top for the night.

  Back with his men, Yancey gave one of his little spiels on the importance of foot care. He was obsessed with the topic and was constantly reminding his charges to change their socks, rub their feet, wiggle their toes, and slather on generous daubs of boric-acid ointment. In the Pacific, he had seen the horrors of “jungle rot” and other podiatric ailments, but this was far worse. Frostbite was a silent and insidious enemy, he said, and every bit as lethal as the Chinese. But if you got religion and followed Yancey’s regimen, you at least had a chance, he said, to come out of these mountains with feet instead of stumps.

  Throughout the day, Yancey had been noticing that Private Stanley Robinson had been limping around like a cripple, wincing in pain. Robinson was a tall, scrawny, obstreperous kid who seemed to have a nose for trouble. Yancey liked him but considered him the “platoon delinquent.” He instructed Robinson to remove his boots. The sight was sickening. The early signs of frostbite—swelling, blood-filled blisters, white scales on red skin—were obvious. The skin had sloughed off of both anklebones. A medical corpsman took one look at Robinson’s feet and declared them beyond his resources to treat.

  Yancey ordered Robinson to turn in his rifle and report to the infirmary in Yudam-ni. “You’re going down the hill.”

  “Hell I am,” Robinson protested. Defiant though he was, he looked up to Yancey like a father, and felt most at home in the field, under his watch.

  But Yancey would have none of it. “Don’t fuck with me, Robbie.”

  And so Robinson handed over his Browning Automatic Rifle. Still sulking, he shambled down the slick hill.

  When the sun disappeared behind Sakkat Mountain, to the west, Hill 1282 was almost immediately plunged into darkness. Yancey kept bundles of kindling strapped to his pack, and soon he had a fire going in a protected place near the top. In the flickering shadows, he issued an order that gave the platoon pause. Down the line, the word spread: “Mr. Yancey wants to see bayonets on the ends of those rifles.”

  From their foxholes, the men of Easy Company’s Second Platoon murmured uncomfortably. What’s Yancey know that we don’t?

  * * *

  A little after 6:00 p.m., a bright gibbous moon, four days past full, peeked over the southeastern horizon to light up the slopes of North Ridge. It was a beautiful, sharp night. The ground fog was clearing. Yancey could see the reservoir: a white expanse with black bald spots where the wind had swept the snow off the ice. The valley was calm. The temperature had dropped to twenty below zero.

  In the moonlight, Yancey could make out the jumbled ridges where pockets of other Marines were also settling in for the night. At nearly every point on the compass, another group of defenders occupied some godforsaken scrap of high ground: Hill 1203, Hill 1426, Hill 1294, Hill 1276, Hill 1240. Each unit, on each promontory, would have to tend to its own safety. But the men of Easy Company could at least take comfort in knowing they weren’t entirely alone, that the travails of their shivering vigil were shared by some poor Marine bastards across the way.

  Yancey realized that the moon was rising behind his position, an infelicitous angle that was throwing his men into silhouette and thus providing clearer targets for any enemy approaching from below. He put the platoon on 50 percent alert—that is, in each foxhole, one man would try to sleep while his buddy kept his eyes peeled, rifle at the ready. A few quiet hours passed, but then, at 9:45, the Easy Company radioman picked up some bad news from Dog Company, which was situated about a thousand yards away on an adjoining hill. “Heads up over there!” came the warning from Dog. “One of our guys just got bayoneted in his bag.”

  A few minutes after that, Yancey could faintly discern white shadows flitting over the ground, moving toward the crown of 1282. Then he saw the livid flashes of the Chinese burp guns as bullets peppered the hillside. This wasn’t much of an attack, Yancey thought—quite tepid, in fact. He surmised that it was intended merely as a probing action, and he instructed his machine gunners to hold fire at first, so as not to reveal their positions. The Chinese were only testing, trying to locate the salient points and weak links in Yancey’s line. Still, a vigorous firefight broke out for a few minutes. Yancey stalked the periphery, exhorting his men.

  Gallagher opened up with his .30 caliber machine gun and mowed down a file of Chinese who were making straight for his position. They wore white quilted coats, fur-lined hats, and canvas shoes that looked like sneakers. Many of them sported white capes. Gallagher dropped one enemy soldier at point-blank range; the attacker fell with an elbow touching one of the tripod legs of his machine gun.

  After a few intense moments, the shooting waned, then stopped. It was so strange, the way the Chinese fought. They were ethereal. As quickly as they appeared, they slipped into the shadows.

  “Don’t worry,” yelled Yancey. “They’ll be back.”

  Yancey had his men inspect the Chinese bodies. On one of them they found a tape measure, a plotting board, and a surveying tool called an alidade. “Probably a scout,” Yancey said, figuring the man had come to diagram Marine positions for
Chinese mortarmen downslope. Papers on his person identified him as an officer in the Seventieth Division.

  At that moment, a sniper fired a round from long range. A spent bullet grazed Yancey’s left cheek and drove deep into the soft tissue of his nose. Cursing, he hocked and spluttered as blood coursed down his face and into his mouth. The gash smarted terribly, but Yancey was okay. Refusing medical attention, he methodically took off a glove and snatched the sliver of metal from his snout. The blood instantly crusted over and froze to his bearded skin.

  Yancey looked like a wild chieftain, smeared in war paint. He scanned the slope and fumed. He told his men to dig their holes a little deeper. “They’ll be back,” he said. “But we’re ready for them, understand? Just do what I tell you.”

  19

  BOON COMPANIONS

  Toktong Pass

  The company captain rocked on his haunches as he surveyed the hill, trying to foresee how he and his 245 men could possibly defend it. Manchurian winds keened through the mountain pass, and snow crystals glittered on the air. The captain’s men had not arrived yet. They would be coming later in the afternoon, hauled up in a convoy of nine trucks from Hagaru. For now, he was alone in this wilderness, swallowed by it. He had been dropped off in a jeep an hour ago and had insisted on staying here by himself so he could have some time to think. He squatted on the brow of the hill, taking in the shadows as they shifted in the afternoon light. He had spent the past hour selecting this place, staking this ground. It was just a foothill, stippled with brush that scratched in the wind. Yet he knew instinctively that, should a battle take place around the Chosin Reservoir, this spot could be the most important swatch of terrain. That was why on this day—November 27—Captain William Earl Barber, commander of Company F (Fox) of the Second Battalion of the Seventh Regiment, had been sent from Hagaru to this isolated spot beside a hairpin crimp in the road. It was his job to map where his men might dig in for the night, to memorize the angles and sight lines, the advantages and vulnerabilities, the possible fields of fire.