On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  “You rotten bastard!” Cafferata shouted. Something about what this enemy soldier had done, the brazenness and duplicity of it, had activated in Cafferata the most intense rage he had felt the entire night. Bic Hec was storming mad. He returned to the offending soldier and nicked his cheek with the tip of his bayonet. Curiously, this produced no reaction, so he fired a round into his shoulder. This jerked the man out of a most convincing performance. He bolted upright, to a sitting position, grimacing in pain. His eyes, now wide open, smoldered with spite and defiance. Some part of Cafferata had to admire him—he was proud and he was tough. This was one soldier who would never surrender.

  Cafferata shot him twice in the head.

  * * *

  At Fox Company’s command post, Captain Barber found some warm batteries that got the radio working, and he was finally able to reach his regimental commander, Homer Litzenberg, up at Yudam-ni. Litzenberg explained the larger situation as best he knew it: The Chinese were everywhere—in the hills, on the ice, along the road. Maybe more than 100,000 of them. Yudam-ni was surrounded. So was Hagaru, and Koto-ri, too. The entire First Marine Division was in peril. Litzenberg said he couldn’t get Barber any reinforcements. He wondered if Barber could quit Fox Hill and make a dash north to the relative safety of Yudam-ni. It would be a difficult and dangerous march of seven miles. What did he think?

  Barber said he didn’t believe he could make it. He was worried about his wounded. The Marines had an ethos about this—you never, ever left them behind, no matter what. Barber didn’t explain the problem to Litzenberg, not exactly. He feared the Chinese might be listening in on this radio frequency and might find his casualty report encouraging. But Barber did obliquely suggest that various “tactical necessities” dictated that he stay put.

  “Colonel,” he said, “I can’t move, but I think I can hold the hill for another night. Any reinforcements you can get me, I’d be much obliged.” Litzenberg said he’d do what he could but explained that things looked bad in all directions.

  During the night’s fighting, Fox Company had taken some prisoners, and through an interpreter Barber had begun to learn something about his foe: These soldiers were from a regiment of the CCF’s Fifty-ninth Division. Many of them hailed from Shanghai and its surrounding provinces. They had been training for an amphibious attack on Taiwan when the orders were abruptly changed and they found themselves traveling north on a train bound for Manchuria. They were horribly ill-equipped for winter weather. Many of them lacked overcoats, and almost none had gloves. During the frozen nights of November, they had marched down through the North Korean countryside, each soldier keeping warm during rests only by pairing off with another soldier; these “hugging buddies,” as they were called, slept entwined in each other’s arms. The prisoners seemed willing to divulge hard information and were not chary with the details. Some of them volunteered that they were pro-American—that they loved the United States, in fact. Several of them had been Nationalists, they said, fighting for Chiang Kai-shek during the civil war.

  Barber started to worry about the Chinese prisoners. By morning he had accumulated more than two dozen, and he didn’t know what to do with them. He didn’t have enough food to feed them. He didn’t have wire with which to detain them, or extra manpower with which to guard them. There wasn’t enough room in the warming tent, but if he left them outside to stand in the cold, they would freeze. On the other hand, if he sent them back to the Chinese lines, they would only return later that night with guns in their hands.

  This was one of several major problems Barber had to stew over. Another one was ammunition: He was running out of it. Some of the Marines in the Second Platoon were down to a few rounds per man. He ordered work details to go out among the Chinese dead and scrounge for ammo. He told them to pick up any usable Chinese weapons, too—his best ballistics guys would clean and test-fire them so that at least some of them could be put to use. He got on the radio and requested resupplies by air.

  Barber had barely recovered from the fighting, yet already he was preparing for the next night. He only had the daylight hours to organize his men. Once the skies darkened, the Chinese would be back.

  * * *

  Hector Cafferata’s frozen feet never did connect with his abandoned boots. As he made his way toward them, shots rang out. His right arm was injured, and a bullet drilled into his chest, puncturing his right lung. He collapsed in the snow. He could scarcely breathe. His arm was in terrific pain—the radial nerve had been severed. Everything from his shoulder to his fingertips throbbed with a kind of hot electrical zing; it felt as though he’d taken hold of a high-voltage wire.

  He screamed oaths at the sniper, whoever, wherever he was. Cafferata couldn’t see anyone out there, couldn’t even guess the general direction from which the round had been fired. He couldn’t tell if it was from long range or from some shooter right next to him.

  He figured he had it coming, that someone must have been paying attention and had taken account of the death spree for which this one burly American had been responsible. You didn’t kill as many as a hundred men in a single night without karma catching up. Presumably the Chinese sniper had more to say—he wouldn’t be content with merely winging his target. Cafferata felt completely exposed on the hill and dreaded what he knew was coming.

  And several more rounds did come, whining overhead, flecking the snow around him. Luckily, they missed, and other Marines swooped in and poured fire into the area where the sniper seemed to be hiding.

  “You okay, Hec?” one of them said between shots. “How bad is it?”

  Other Marines started to crawl toward him, but Cafferata waved them away with his good arm. “I can make it!” he said. He didn’t want them to expose themselves, too. He didn’t think the wound was too serious. He only knew he had been hit in the arm; he wasn’t aware that a bullet had entered his chest.

  When Cafferata tried to stand, he couldn’t catch his breath. He tried again, and this time he got to his feet, but his injured arm screamed with pain. It hurt so much he nearly fainted. He had to jury-rig a sling to carry the full weight of his ruined arm. He rummaged through his belongings, then got an idea. Using his teeth and the half-numb fingers of his left hand, he removed his ammunition bandolier, fastened it around his neck, and angled his arm through it. Leaving a trail of his blood as he went, he stumbled in his icy socks across the slope toward safety.

  24

  A HOT RECEPTION

  Hagaru

  At around ten thirty that same morning, November 28, General Smith climbed into the cockpit of a small Marine helicopter in Hamhung and took off for Hagaru—the place that would be his new headquarters. His mood was grave. That morning, he had been trolling the radio and gathering reports from his three regiments. The attacks at Yudam-ni and Toktong Pass were the most brutal, to be sure, but firefights had flared throughout the reservoir country. A large scattering of Army units encamped on the east side of the lake had been hit especially hard—reportedly suffering more than four hundred casualties.

  As Smith’s helicopter flew along the path of the MSR, it passed over nine separate Chinese roadblocks. The situation, he had to admit, looked “grim.” On the way, his helicopter took some small-arms fire—nothing serious, but enough to make an impression. “These people were here to stay, and they were feeling cocky about it,” said Smith’s operations officer, Alpha Bowser. “Because they were so sure they could take us, they were no longer as concerned about staying out of sight. It was apparent—though no one had officially said so—that the Marines at Hagaru were in the process of being surrounded.”

  Smith was heading to Hagaru to take up residence in his newly prepared command post. Now that he had a true battle on his hands, he had little interest in leading it from the rear. He needed to be at the fulcrum of the fighting—and Hagaru was proving to be that spot, just as he had envisioned it might. At around eleven o’clock, Smith
’s helicopter hovered over Hagaru and crunched down in a frozen bean field. He jumped out into the bracing cold and tromped into a town that had become a maelstrom of activity. Hagaru had been spared the previous night, but recon patrols sent out into the surrounding hills had gathered intelligence that the Chinese were going to attack here in force on this night. Smith vowed, as one account put it, to give them “a hot reception.”

  The general set up his quarters in a two-room Japanese-built bungalow not far from the northern defense perimeter. The dank structure had a drafty stove and a lousy cot but little else to recommend it. It was a “pesthouse,” said one account. “The air was close and foul, reeking with the musty odor of human bodies.” Beside what would become Smith’s desk, a large propaganda poster of Stalin sniggered from a grimy wall. When one of the staff members started to remove it, Smith, employing a bit of reverse psychology, decided it should stay. “Leave it be,” he insisted. “Maybe it’ll inspire us.”

  Smith first made sure he had ample quantities of his favorite tobacco—Sir Walter Raleigh—and then, filling and lighting his pipe, he wasted no time in getting to work. Incredibly, he hadn’t yet received a single communication from X Corps in reaction to the previous night’s withering attacks. “Apparently they were stunned,” Smith said. “They just couldn’t make up their minds that the Chinese had attacked in force. They just had to re-orient their thinking.” But Smith knew instinctively that the march to the Yalu was over. His far-flung regiments couldn’t defend themselves, let alone keep advancing. The enemy numbers were overwhelming.

  For now, he ordered Litzenberg and Murray to stay put in Yudam-ni and await further instructions. “Until present situation clarifies, remain present position,” read his terse message. “I halted the attack,” he later explained, “because it was manifest that we were up against a massive force out there…We couldn’t do anything but defend, as I couldn’t withdraw without permission from higher authorities.”

  * * *

  Acting independently, Smith had begun to conceive the broad outlines of a new battle plan. His goal was to consolidate his regiments in Hagaru and form what he hoped would be an impregnable legion there. As soon as possible, he would pull Litzenberg and Murray back from Yudam-ni to Hagaru and let them regroup there. The action would be something like a hen collecting her chicks under a protective wing. This ingathering of units, Smith knew, had to happen before anything else could seriously be entertained. Once pulled together, his Marines could then organize themselves for whatever was to come next.

  And Smith already thought he knew what that was: a breakout, a fighting march back to Koto-ri—where his First Marine Regiment was now dug in—then down the many winding miles to the coastal plain around Hamhung. Here Smith imagined his division would spend the winter in bivouac, tending to its wounds and girding for a spring offensive. With its excellent harbor and airport and its favorably flat terrain, Hamhung seemed eminently defensible, Smith thought. It could be turned into a U.N. bulwark and held indefinitely—or at least until the powers that be, in Washington and in Tokyo, had formulated a new master plan.

  But a fighting march from Hagaru down to Hamhung was not going to be easy. In military parlance, what Smith had in mind was a “retrograde maneuver”—also known as an “advance to the rear.” Another word for it might be “retreat,” although Smith assiduously avoided both the term and its connotations. Whatever euphemism one wanted to use, all the martial textbooks agreed on this point: Even under more favorable circumstances, a disciplined, well-choreographed fighting withdrawal was one of the trickiest maneuvers in military science (if anything having to do with the military could be said to be scientific). It was hard enough for an army to defend itself when it was dug in; to do so while on the move, with a numerically superior enemy attacking every inch of a rearward march, was next to impossible. Yet some battlefield situations offered only one solution beyond surrender or destruction—and that solution was a swift exit. The mark of a great general, Wellington once said, was “to know when to retreat, and have the courage to do it.” Smith recognized that this was one of those times.

  The secret to Smith’s success, he knew, was going to be the airstrip. If Hagaru was the heart of the battle, then, to extend the metaphor, the airstrip would serve as both vena cava and aorta, bringing in and taking out everything Smith needed to keep his division alive and beating. Each day, on the wings of large airplanes, the vital supplies would come in, and the wounded would go out. The Hagaru perimeter would shrink; the division would distill to maximum efficiency. Finally, when the time was right, the Marines would break from this mountain citadel and bash their way to the sea.

  Everything, then, was tied to the airfield. But Smith was miffed to learn how slowly the project was progressing. Though Lieutenant Colonel John Partridge’s engineers had been slaving around the clock—working through the nights under the floodlights—they were only about 40 percent done. Partridge estimated that they had three days to go, maybe more. The dirt was frozen to a depth of eighteen inches. Even with sappers using explosives to soften the topsoil, it seemed to take forever for the dozers to scrape into this unforgiving earth. Smith would have to be patient.

  A little later that morning, Smith was approached by Brigadier General Hank Hodes, the assistant commander of the Army’s Seventh Division. Hodes was worried: He wanted to share with Smith the alarming reports he’d received from his Army units scattered along the east side of the reservoir. The GIs over there, under the command of Colonel Allan MacLean, had taken a serious hit the night before, with many hundreds dead and wounded. They were trapped, and Hodes didn’t think they could fight their way out. General Hodes was too proud (personally and perhaps also institutionally) to say it out loud, but he hoped that Smith could help MacLean’s men. He wanted the Marines to mount an expedition to go save the beleaguered Army troops. As Smith described it in his log, “The inference was that they should be rescued by a larger force.” Alpha Bowser sensed that Hodes was “quite embarrassed about asking us for help in extricating the Army troops.”

  But the cruel fact—which Hodes must have understood—was that such a mission was impossible now. Smith didn’t have enough men to defend Hagaru, let alone go marching up the road to rescue Army outfits stranded high along the reservoir. In truth, the unit that had been hardest-hit, the Thirty-first Regimental Combat Team, likely had twice as many troops in its ranks as Smith did in Hagaru. Until he could gather his regiments from Yudam-ni, Smith had precious little to work with here: a hodgepodge of three thousand Marines, along with a few hundred Army troops who happened to get caught here en route to the Yalu. Many of these potential defenders weren’t fighters, at least not by formal job description. They were a medley of “casuals” and “service troops”—stenographers and clerks, signalmen and radio operators, cooks and MPs, carpenters and truck drivers. Whether generalists or specialists, they weren’t exactly warriors. Many of them hadn’t fired a weapon in years.

  But so acute was Smith’s need for warm bodies to plug the holes that every one of these service troops, Marine and Army alike, would be given rifles and sent out to the perimeter to fight with everyone else. They were “pretty much a bastard organization,” one Marine colonel admitted—not a bunch “that would seem to inspire cockiness in any battalion commander facing a division of the enemy.” But Smith’s stronghold could not be allowed to fall; it would be defended to the last man, even if the last man was a baker or a mechanic.

  In any case, Smith could not help the embattled Army units on the lake’s east side (other than by offering close air support from the First Marine Air Wing). Said Alpha Bowser: “Any Marine force from Hagaru strong enough to blast its way through to the GIs would have left our perimeter dangerously vulnerable.” Smith told Hodes, with some regret, that the Army battalions would have to fend for themselves. His recommendation was that they do everything they could to bull their way down the road to Hagaru
.

  * * *

  At midday, General Smith had an unexpected visitor. A small plane popped out of the leaden skies, circled overhead, and landed at Hagaru’s old runway. It was an L-17 light aircraft, the Blue Goose. The plane’s door sprung open, and out hopped General Ned Almond, crisply dressed in a warm parka, its collar lined with fur. Almond had a bounce in his step, and he carried himself with a cocksureness that didn’t seem to align with the sober mood on the ground. It was as though he were trying to change the circumstances through force of body language, as though he thought that if he could telegraph sufficient confidence now, the present predicament might go away.

  “General Almond preferred to believe that the reports of vast numbers of Chinese were grossly exaggerated, and that the distress signals from the reservoir represented little more than a loss of nerve,” wrote historian Martin Russ. Almond had “decided to fly north and personally stiffen the collective backbone.”

  No account of their private meeting has been passed down, but the essence of it was apparent to Smith’s staff: Almond had come to assure Smith, in the most emphatic terms, that X Corps was forging ahead, still bound for the Yalu. The previous night’s attacks were unfortunate, but they wouldn’t stop the campaign. Smith’s division was to keep moving, as though nothing had happened.

  Near the end of the conversation, Smith’s aides watched the two generals standing off by themselves, Almond holding forth, gesticulating with bravado. Smith listened with a look of disbelief. He made a dismissive gesture, then spun around and stormed off. As he passed by one of his aides, Smith muttered through gritted teeth, “That man must be crazy.”