On the hillside, the Chinese bodies were hurled like matchsticks. Hundreds of them were sprawled in the snow, frozen solid in weird contortions. But the Chinese replacements kept stepping forward, as though churned from an assembly line.
Yancey knew he was running out of men. He kept tightening his perimeter, concentrating his fire. He had lost more than fifty dead and wounded, and he had no idea if help was on the way. He was incommunicado: The Chinese had severed his phone lines, and his radio had been smashed beyond repair.
Alarmed by a new breach in the line, he pulled together a group of nine guys for a counterattack, barking, “Marines—follow me!” Robinson was at his side, but no one else followed. They were too scared or too addled by shelling to budge. Yancey flew into a rage. “Gung-ho, you cowardly bastards! I said ‘Follow me!’ ” Finally he got them moving, and they plugged the hole in the line.
In the midst of this action, a Chinese attacker, armed with a Thompson submachine gun, moved in close and squeezed a burst into Yancey’s face. One of the bullets entered Yancey’s cheek just below his eye and angled down through his sinus cavities, coming to rest in the back of his neck, near the base of his skull. Luckily, it had missed his spine, but along the way the projectile had fractured his cheekbone, jarred loose numerous teeth, and dislocated his jaw. Worst of all, the bullet pried Yancey’s right eye from its socket. The ball, dangling by a cord of nerves and fibers, rested high on his cheekbone.
Yet, somehow, Yancey was still functioning. He picked himself up from the snow and, with his good eye, spied his assailant reloading his Thompson. Reflexively, Yancey snatched his .45 pistol from its holster (a weapon he had taken off a dead Japanese officer eight years before at Guadalcanal) and fired two rounds into the enemy soldier’s abdomen, killing him. Then Yancey, horrified but not knowing what else to do, cradled his eyeball and gently mashed it back into its ragged hole.
Yancey was preparing to resume the fight when along came a godsend: A relief force from Charlie Company, Fifth Marines, led by Captain Jack Jones, had marched up from Yudam-ni to drive the Chinese off the hill. It would take hours of combat before North Ridge would be fully retaken, but Yancey’s trial was over. He relinquished command of the platoon, turned over Hill 1282 to Jones—and collapsed. His unit had suffered 90 percent casualties.
With the appearance of the sun, a Corsair from the First Marine Air Wing, based on the coast, came roaring overhead. The pilot flapped his wings, then joined the battle, scattering the Chinese attackers below. As this first morning would show, Marine aviators, as well as Navy pilots flying fighter planes from carriers, would play a significant—and deadly—role in the daylight hours of the Chosin Reservoir battle, often dropping preposterously low in “close support” of Marine actions on the ground.
The last survivors of Yancey’s platoon went onto the field to identify the dead. A cry came from the hill: “Corpsman! Corpsman!” Within the tangle of bodies, a Marine was moving: It was Sergeant Robert Kennemore. His platoon mates had assumed there was no way he could have survived the blast of two simultaneous grenade explosions—but he had. At some point during the night, he had awakened. He’d felt for his legs and found they were useless, a shred of sinew and exposed bone. He’d stabbed himself with a syrette of morphine and then summoned the strength to drag himself a hundred painful yards across the hill, to a place where he would be more easily spotted. No one could believe it. “Christ, it’s Kennemore!” They put him on a stretcher and carried him to Yudam-ni.
But Lieutenant Yancey, weak and ashen-faced from loss of blood, insisted on walking. His right eye wandered in its socket, and his broken jaw hung loose and floppy, like an unhinged gate. His teeth were shot into fragments that rattled around in his mouth. His parka was sieved with bullet holes and frayed from flying shrapnel. A topographical map in his coat pocket was later found to be perforated with burp gun fire. Yancey tore off a strip of blanket and wrapped it around his face, cinching the jaw into place. When he’d heard for certain that the hill had held, he gave his assent. A kind sergeant in front of him proffered a long stick and guided Yancey down the mountain.
The war was over for John Yancey. From Yudam-ni, he would be evacuated to Hamhung, and then Japan.
23
WHEN THE LEAD IS FLYING
Toktong Pass
At dawn, the fighting on Fox Hill began to subside, as it had at Yudam-ni. Hector Cafferata and the blinded Ken Benson had managed to hold on for nearly six hours, plugging what appeared to be a gaping hole between the Second and Third Platoons. The slope seethed with fog and smoke and the acrid smells of assorted propellants and explosives. The company had held, but just barely. Cafferata was willing to admit that Barber had been right: If the captain hadn’t taken the precautions he did, if he hadn’t carefully arranged the men out on the hill, Fox Company would have been wiped out. As it was, twenty-four Marines had been killed, more than fifty had been wounded, and three others were missing. Nearly a third of the company had become casualties in a single night.
The Chinese casualties, on the other hand, were more difficult to ascertain, but they were impressive. Along the perimeter, Cafferata could see snarls of bodies. Nowhere was the carnage heavier than right in front of his own position. There must have been a hundred corpses, he guessed. The worst of the attack appeared to have transpired where he and Benson had made their stand. The snow was dribbled and splotched with blood. In places, it looked like a Pollock painting.
Cafferata’s squad leader, assessing the damage along the perimeter, came trudging by. He stood in awe of what Cafferata and Benson had done—he estimated that two enemy platoons had been destroyed. He had fought in the Pacific during World War II and had seen his share of gore.
“Sarge,” Cafferata said. “Was it this bad on Okinawa?”
“Doesn’t matter where you are,” the sergeant replied. “When the lead is flying, that’s the worst place you’ve ever been.”
With a lull in the fighting, Cafferata was finally able to steal a good glance at Benson. The whole night, he hadn’t had a spare moment to consider his friend or to apply any first aid. What an alarming sight Benson was. He looked like Oedipus—his eyes were sealed shut with scabby globules of grit, ice, and dried blood. His face was lacerated, bruised, and speckled, as though he’d crashed through a plate-glass window. Needles of bamboo were embedded in his skin.
“Jesus Christ, Bense,” Cafferata said. “You look like shit.”
Benson knew he had to get to the first aid tent. With the morning light seeping through gaps in his crusted eyelids, he thought he could see well enough to crawl toward headquarters. Cafferata agreed that Benson should get some help. In parting, he realized that, in addition to being his best buddy in Korea, Benson was the most profound friend he probably would ever have. You didn’t go through an experience like that without feeling a connection. Cafferata’s life was indelibly changed, and Benson was indelibly part of it.
Cafferata helped Benson on his way—he was worried about snipers—but he quickly returned to his post. The battle may have been ebbing, but it wasn’t over yet. Across the slope, Cafferata could hear gunfire. In a few pockets, stubborn groups of Red soldiers continued attacking, charging at the Marines in the morning pallor. For now, Cafferata had to stay put, crouched in the same wash where he’d fought through the night.
* * *
Around 6:30 a.m., three Chinese soldiers approached Cafferata with their arms in the air. They were shaking, either from fear or from the cold, or both. Cafferata thought they looked like street urchins. They were short and scrawny, and couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. They had adolescent faces; some of their features seemed almost feminine. They cringed on the slope, smiling awkwardly, uttering something in Chinese, in obsequious tones.
Cafferata peeked from behind the lip of the wash. He waved his rifle at the three young men, signaling them to halt where they
were so he could appraise them. They wore white quilted uniforms, floppy hats, and flimsy tennis shoes that appeared to be made of canvas, with soles of crepe. They were shoes that might make sense in a tropical campaign, but not here. The three Red soldiers kept darting glances at the sky. Maybe they were praying, but more likely they were watching for planes. The Chinese respected American airpower and feared that dawn could bring the prospect of terror from above.
These kids seemed pitiful. Cafferata recognized that, to them, he must have looked like a giant. Probably they were half-starved. Certainly they were freezing.
Then again, he thought, this could be a trick. Maybe their brothers-in-arms were hiding in the brush downslope, waiting to ambush him. He agonized over what to do. This was not a decision he was equipped to handle. He was just a private, twenty-one years old—low as they come, he liked to say, “lower than whale shit.” After the night’s fighting, he didn’t trust his nerves. He feared that if he came out in the open to search the three Chinese, he might do something stupid, maybe get himself killed. He didn’t know what protocol the Marines were supposed to follow in this situation. Captain Barber had never talked about what to do with prisoners.
Cafferata looked around at the bodies littering the slope. If he watched carefully, he could see that some of them were still writhing and twitching. Maybe they were in their death throes, or maybe they were just doing a so-so job of playing possum. He began to suspect that some of the Chinese were feigning death in order to lure the Americans near enough that they could open fire on them. A few of them did seem pretty good at impersonating cadavers: Sometimes the only telltale sign was a faint puff of vapor rhythmically rising from someone’s mouth. Periodically, Cafferata could see an unarmed corpse spring to life and make for the brush. The nearest Marine would fire a few rounds. Some of the fleeing soldiers were hit; the lucky ones reached the safety of Chinese lines.
Cafferata considered the three prisoners again. Should he shoot them? Should he turn them loose? He didn’t know.
He had to wonder: Why had these three men surrendered in the first place? They didn’t seem injured. They hadn’t been cornered or caught. They’d appeared out of nowhere and voluntarily turned themselves in to a lone American. It was as though, in a single night, they’d gotten their fill of fighting. Maybe they thought that if they laid down their arms, they might find some hot food.
Cafferata beckoned the three young soldiers to come forward. He gave them a cursory frisking and motioned for them to get on the snow beside him. He had them lie on top of one another, figuring that would limit their ability to make a sudden move, and that the heat of their commingled bodies would keep them warm. He gestured with his rifle and barked: “You screw around and I’ll shoot.”
* * *
Captain Bill Barber had spent the night fighting for his life and the life of his company. His apprehensions had come horribly true. The Chinese had understood the strategic importance of this place, just as he had. They had struck hard from above, from the ridges and saddles, and they had struck hard from below, from the road itself. Barber was not one to say “I told you so,” and he did not gloat over his prescience, but he recognized that if he hadn’t ordered his men to dig in, everyone in the company would have been captured or killed.
In fact, Barber had nearly been overwhelmed in the first moments of the fighting. He had originally established his command post near the road, but the Chinese had hit with such a concentration of firepower that he and his staff were almost immediately forced to abandon the headquarters and establish a new one, far up the slope.
Since then, Barber had been constantly on the move, patrolling the lines, shouting commands, firing his carbine, rallying his men. He hadn’t made it over to where Cafferata and Benson had fought their fight, but it seemed he’d been everywhere else. He appeared to be indifferent to the dangers around him. Two of his runners had been wounded trying to keep up with him. At one point during a particularly blistering firefight, a sergeant had suggested to Barber that it might be prudent for him to take cover. Barber ignored him, saying, “They haven’t made the bullet yet that can kill me.”
“Barber was cool as they come that night,” said Richard Bonelli, a private who served with Barber on Fox Hill. “He was quiet, no nonsense, firm. Thank God he was there. Without him, the Chinese would have run us over. Them sons of bitches—there was no end to them. They just wore us down.”
Barber was impressed by the bravery and resolve of the Chinese soldiers, but he didn’t think much of their tactics. He noted how they seemed to charge over and over again in the same place. He noted also how their battle cries forfeited the element of surprise: All those bugles and whistles and horns and cymbals sounded eerie, but by announcing themselves like that, they gave the Marines time to brace for every attack.
What shocked and even saddened Barber was how little the Chinese superiors appeared to value the lives of their own men. Many of them were sent into their charges unarmed—presumably they were supposed to scoop up the weapons of their fallen comrades. On Iwo Jima, Barber had seen plenty of crazy banzai charges, but an aspect of strategy usually revealed itself, a method in the madness. Here, he thought, the Chinese officers were just throwing souls away. From the initial counts, at least 450 of the enemy had died in the night’s fighting on Fox Hill. Across the larger Chosin battlefield, the casualty totals for General Song’s troops would be even more astonishing: His Ninth Army Group had lost ten thousand men during the first night of battle, a rate of more than one thousand casualties an hour.
But the Chinese had succeeded in at least one of their objectives: They had largely seized control of the road, and now they were erecting substantial barriers on both sides of Toktong Pass. They hauled down tree trunks, they rolled boulders into place, they blew up sections of the road. Barber understood that he was truly cut off. Except by way of air support, it was doubtful he could get any relief from either Hagaru or Yudam-ni. His men would have to hold here, indefinitely.
* * *
Through the early morning, Hector Cafferata stayed with his three captives in the wash, scanning the slope for an attack. He spoke to his charges several times, making halting conversation, trying to soothe them—it was obvious they were scared to death. Then, at around seven thirty, a Marine from Captain Barber’s command post came along. Word had reached Barber of the incredible firefight that had transpired here in the gap between the Second and Third Platoons. Stories had already begun to spread about Big Hec and his heroics: that he’d taken out a legion of Chinese, that he’d saved the lives of Benson and a half-dozen other trapped and wounded Marines, that he’d batted away grenades like Ted Williams. Cafferata, of all people—no one saw it coming. The biggest fuckup in Fox Company was already becoming a legend.
Cafferata ignored such talk. A hero, he’d once heard, was a person caught in the right place at the wrong time. It was more a matter of luck than anything else. He and Benson did what they did because they had no choice.
The Marine from headquarters asked Cafferata if he needed any help. “Yeah, take these guys,” Cafferata said, pointing to the prisoners quivering on the ground. He felt a proprietary responsibility for them—they were his prisoners. He felt sorry for them and wished them well. The Marine prodded the three captives with his gun, ordered them to stand, and pointed them across the hill, toward Barber’s tent, where, presumably, they would be interrogated. The Marine turned for a moment and said with a smirk, “Hey, Moose, what’s with the socks?”
Cafferata looked down and saw, with some consternation, that he wasn’t wearing his boots. They were still in his sleeping bag, where he’d left them the moment the shooting had started, more than six hours earlier. Without his knowing it, he’d spent the night fighting in his stocking feet.
He started to head over to his original position, by the windbreak he and Benson had constructed. Now that he knew his boots were missing, he decided
he desperately wanted them—his feet were blocks of ice. But the way down to the windbreak was a gauntlet of horrors. He had to step through piles of entwined corpses. The Chinese casualties looked like wax dummies, their eyes frozen in terror. At one point, he passed by a soldier who seemed to be alive—Cafferata thought he saw his hand move. He knelt and, with a thumb, peeled back one of the man’s eyelids. But the eyeball didn’t flutter, and the pupil was rolled far up into his skull. The guy was dead after all; Cafferata figured he must have been imagining things. With a shrug, he shuffled on toward his sleeping bag.
He was astonished by the international miscellany of weapons to be found on the Chinese dead: There were Enfields from Britain. Shpagin burp guns from Russia. Arisaka bolt-action rifles from Japan. A few German Mausers. There were antique implements whose provenance Cafferata, who was obsessive about guns, could not guess. The most common weapons of all were Thompson submachine guns, the “Chicago typewriters” made infamous by Al Capone’s gangsters. The United States had supplied Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces with Thompsons for decades. After Mao prevailed in the Chinese Civil War, his Red armies had appropriated much of Chiang’s arsenal—and, in many cases, had commandeered Nationalist troops themselves, put them in PLA uniforms, and sent them off to die in Korea. The irony wasn’t lost on Cafferata: American weapons, carried by once pro-American troops, were being used to kill Americans.
Cafferata continued down the slope when he was startled by the sound of a grenade clunking on the frozen ground nearby. He hurled himself into the snow, trying to take cover, only to find to his relief that the grenade was a dud. Then he realized that it had come from the vicinity of the supposedly dead man he’d just examined.
On Desperate Ground Page 18