Puller’s men loved him, and were deeply loyal. “The higher brass may not have appreciated him, but we sure did,” said Manert Kennedy, a staff sergeant from Detroit. “When we were under assault, he’d be out there with us, walking the line. We’d get a tap on the shoulder: ‘How ya doin’, Marine? Hope you get to kill a lot of Chinese tonight.’ ” One day at Koto-ri, Puller was on a field phone, trying to learn the disposition of the enemy. “How many Chinese’re up there on that ridge?” he yelled into the mouthpiece.
“A shitpot, sir,” a scratchy Marine voice replied.
“Well,” said Puller, “I’m sure as hell glad somebody up there can count!”
It could be said that Puller suffered from some of the same personality excesses that plagued Ned Almond. He was always aggressive, perhaps recklessly so, but that was a trait that seemed more appropriate for a regimental commander than for a general. As long as a superior officer kept a close eye on him, Puller could be a dynamic asset on any battlefield. He was as brave as he was optimistic. General Smith had a deep fondness for the man, although he viewed him a little skeptically, calling him a “picturesque” character.
Smith radioed Puller. What was the situation at Koto-ri? he asked him. How bad were things there? Koto-ri lay eleven miles away. Could he spare any men to come smashing up the road to reinforce Hagaru in its hour of need?
* * *
The answer came back in the resounding way it usually did with Puller: Hell, yes. His First Regiment was under strain at Koto-ri, but he thought he could slap together a motley team of fighters to barge up the road. He could muster a force of maybe a thousand men. It would consist of some Marines and some Army guys, too. But the main fighting force Puller had in mind was a peculiarly staunch unit, 235 strong, from Great Britain. They were a group of Royal Marines known as 41 Independent Commando.
To the American Marines, these cousins from across the pond were a curiosity and a delight. They had arrived in North Korea in mid-November and had immediately been assigned to Smith’s division. Trained for amphibious reconnaissance, they had an undeniable panache. They wore svelte green berets, a form of headgear that did nothing to dissuade bullets or guard against the cold. They actually said things like “Tally ho!” and “What’s next on tap?” They kept up a spit-and-polish appearance and shaved almost every morning, a discipline the hirsute Marines found amazing, particularly in this cold weather. Their leader was a tall, stylish World War II veteran named Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Drysdale.
That morning, when Chesty Puller assigned Drysdale to lead a breakthrough force to Hagaru, he was game. Drysdale’s Royal Marines were eager for a fight. The hodgepodge of Americans and Brits, dubbed Task Force Drysdale, jumped off from Koto-ri at 9:45 a.m. on November 29. Nine hundred men and a train of about 150 vehicles wound through the mountains, following the frozen Changjin River as it coursed along the valley floor. Drysdale called it “poisonous” country, perfect for ambush. He was right: Within the first mile, they ran into trouble. The Royal Marines and a company of American Marines—George Company, under the command of Captain Carl Sitter—took turns neutralizing Chinese positions in the heights while the rest of the column crept ahead. Drysdale, quickly ascertaining that he needed more firepower, radioed Puller, who sent some twenty tanks up the road. But even with the tanks in their midst, Drysdale found that his task force was barely inching forward—it was, said one Marine historian, “a joint-by-joint advance, like a caterpillar’s.”
The Chinese had cratered the road with bombs and had erected numerous barricades to make the way impassable. High along the hills, hidden behind Korean huts, the Chinese riddled the thin-skinned American vehicles. Their mortar shells walked up and down the convoy. In one tricky passage, a defile Drysdale had dubbed “Hellfire Valley,” the enemy assaults were especially withering. The men of 41 Commando absorbed the onslaught with regulation sangfroid, but by afternoon Drysdale had already taken dozens of casualties. With nightfall approaching, he assumed that the Chinese would only step up their attacks. He thought he should turn back—he sensed this was turning into a suicide mission—but he needed higher authority to do so. Drysdale radioed Hagaru to ask Smith if he wanted the endangered column to keep going or return to Koto-ri.
Smith understood Drysdale’s dilemma, and he fully appreciated the difficulty of the relief mission he’d been assigned. But the general had been visiting Hagaru’s hospital tents, had seen the rows upon rows of casualties from the previous evening’s fighting. He believed Hagaru was in danger of falling that night. Now was the time for a bitter command decision that only he could make. He knew from his experiences on Peleliu and Okinawa that, at critical times, sacrifices were required of one group in order to save the whole. Later, when discussing how he’d weighed this decision, Smith said, “War leaves no soft options.”
And so Smith’s reply was radioed back to Drysdale: “Press on at all costs.”
The British officer, though sobered by the command, didn’t flinch. “Very well then,” Drysdale said, “we’ll give them a show.”
And a show it was, a vicious fight every step of the way. “There were a lot of Chinese bastards shooting at us from every conceivable angle,” said one Royal Marine. “The firing was coming in, thick and fast,” said another. “Our lorries were totally exposed. The chap right next to me was killed, and there was a lot of messing about. When the going got tough, we just bashed on.” The tanks in the front bulled through without much problem, with George Company and the leading edge of Drysdale’s commandos following. Finally, sometime after midnight, they arrived at the margins of Hagaru, which was bathed in the glow of the floodlights the engineers were relying upon to build their airstrip. The town was engrossed in a major battle, but Drysdale, stumbling through the mayhem, managed to locate Smith’s headquarters. At around one in the morning, he sauntered in. Blood dribbled from two shrapnel wounds in his arm. His green beret was fixed to his head at a rakish angle. Drysdale had no idea how many of the nine hundred men in his task force had survived, no idea how the rear of the long vehicular train might be faring. But he wanted Smith to know he was here. In the faltering light of a tent lantern, Drysdale gave a crisp salute and proudly announced, “41 Commando, present for duty.”
By then, several hundred men had stumbled into Hagaru, and they’d arrived at a critical juncture. Almost immediately, Smith put the Royal Marines and Sitter’s George Company to work. Smith pointed to the landmass that rose over the village, which now flashed with combat: East Hill. They were to do everything in their power to take it.
* * *
The story of Task Force Drysdale would turn out to be a story of thirds. The front of the column, about four hundred men in all, would reach its destination—mauled, but still ready to fight. The rear third, encountering sharp resistance early on, had scrambled back to the safety of Chesty Puller’s stronghold at Koto-ri. But the middle third of the column, trapped in the deepest folds of Hellfire Valley, encountered an altogether different situation. These men, some 320 in all, were doomed.
Somewhere in the thick of that middle section, a seventeen-year-old ammo carrier from Oklahoma named Jack Chapman was riding along in the late afternoon when a Chinese grenade plopped into his truck bed. It clunked on the floorboards, right between his legs. He stared at it wide-eyed. Lucky for everyone, Private Chapman was young and had quick reflexes. He grabbed the grenade without thinking and flung it over the side of the truck. It landed in a ditch and immediately detonated; no one was hurt. Everyone thanked the Okie for saving their lives. But this proved to be only the beginning of a long night of horrors.
Chapman was a scrappy kid, with a bony face and a sweet, snaggletoothed grin. Part Cherokee Indian, he’d grown up in poverty. When he started butting heads with his stepfather, he was passed around to various relatives. He dropped out of high school and became more or less a vagrant, taking odd jobs around the country: gathering walnuts
and pecans, picking cotton, working his uncle’s onion fields in Michigan, setting pins at a bowling alley in Tulsa. He hated this work, hated moving around all the time. He knew his life needed direction. So he lied about his age—he was sixteen at that point—and joined the U.S. Army. He trained at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, then at Camp Carson, Colorado. His outfit spent a couple of months in Alaska before transferring to Wisconsin.
Chapman got orders to report for duty in Japan, then was sent to Korea with the Seventh Infantry Division’s Thirty-first Regiment. The Army had first sent him north, and his unit briefly lingered at the banks of the Yalu, but then he was sent back to Hamhung. Through convoluted routings, Chapman and his comrades happened to be in Koto-ri the day Task Force Drysdale was mustered. It was a perfectly random circumstance that he’d fallen in with a group of British commandos and American Marines.
Now he was in Hellfire Valley, a quick-witted teenager wiser than his years. Shortly after the sun went down and the road was cloaked in darkness, the column slammed to an abrupt and eerie halt. Then Chapman’s truck came under fierce attack—apparently the whole convoy did. Leaning out, he could see the main problem: A truck up ahead had been hit by a mortar and was engulfed in flames. The wreck wasn’t budging, and because this was a single-lane road, an immovable logjam had been created. The Chinese knew what they were doing; they were trying to fractionalize the column, to snip it into pieces so that they could then attack each isolated fragment with impunity.
Everyone in Chapman’s truck jumped out and dropped into a ditch. They grabbed their rifles, and a battle began. Chapman could see hundreds of Chinese pressing in. Bullets stuttered across the snow. Chapman had a carbine, but the little rifle wasn’t reliable in the cold. He might as well have been plinking away with a BB gun.
In his immediate vicinity, only one instrument of any significant firepower seemed to be operating. It was an M20 75-millimeter “recoilless rifle” mounted on the back of a truck. To call this weapon a rifle seemed a bit of a misnomer: It was a formidable piece of tube artillery that could accurately project a twenty-pound shell a distance of more than two miles. Upon detonation, the long, slender, rocket-shaped missile broke up into innumerable hot fragments, visiting extreme punishment on anyone within its range. Rather than having a recoil mechanism, like most artillery pieces, the M20 relied upon explosive gases to propel the shell forward, so the weapon had almost no “kick” when it was fired. Instead, a miasma of noxious gas shot out of the back of the gun, a plume long and hot enough to scorch anyone who stood in the way. It was a wicked weapon, and one that Chapman happened to know how to use.
As the fighting intensified, the Army sergeant manning the M20 began to lose his nerve. He was a perfect target up there, blasting away with this bright, powerful weapon, splattering shrapnel over the hillsides. Wielding that gun was an advertisement to be shot; surely the Chinese would take their vengeance soon enough. Finally the sergeant could take the pressure no more. He jumped down from the truck and knelt in the snow, then started to pray out loud, intoning in a strange voice, “Protect us, O Lord. Protect us, O Lord.”
Captain Peckham, the commanding officer of Baker Company, scolded the sergeant, cursed him, shamed him. “Get back up there, you coward!” he yelled. But the sergeant wouldn’t budge from the ground, even when threatened with court-martial. So Captain Peckham stomped among the men, looking for a volunteer. “Anyone know how to work this gun?” he demanded.
Haltingly, Jack Chapman raised his hand. Back in Colorado, he had trained on the M20. He thought he could remember how to use it. He was the only one brave enough, or dumb enough, to give it a try.
* * *
Chapman crawled up on the truck bed, leaving himself exposed in the moonlight. He swiveled the big gun and aimed at the distant muzzle flashes. The first shell shot through the frigid air and smashed into a ridge several hundred yards off, spitting its destruction in a wide arc, well behind enemy positions. He realized he would have to use the weapon close-in—much closer than it was intended for. Chapman aimed at a group of enemy soldiers who came bursting across the slopes, thirty or forty yards away. He fired, and the projectile cut them all down.
Manning a weapon as lethal as this, he knew it would be only a matter of time before the Chinese found him. First they shot him in the left arm, then the right leg, then the other arm. Another bullet, he later learned, had lodged in a pack of Philip Morris C-ration cigarettes stuffed in the breast pocket of his field jacket. A British medic quickly treated his wounds, and Chapman climbed back on the truck. He was shot again, in the left hip, and then he took several slivers of shrapnel. He was bleeding profusely—he wondered how much blood a person could lose before he died. But his adrenaline was pumping, and somehow it blunted the pain. He kept at his gun, blasting into the night.
He had finished reloading the recoilless rifle when he sustained his seventh—and final—wound. As he prepared to fire, a bullet from a burp gun struck his forehead. It knocked him off the truck and rendered him unconscious. He lay sprawled in the snow. The bullet had embedded itself in his cranium, but, amazingly, it hadn’t entered his brain.
When he came to, the fighting was nearly over. The Chinese had overrun his unit’s position, and now they were looting the trucks, rummaging for food and ammunition. Chapman looked up at one point and saw several enemy soldiers studying the recoilless rifle. They fussed with it, aiming it this way and that; they were trying to figure out how the thing worked. Several of them were standing behind the gun when it accidentally went off. The backblast of propellant gas scorched them horribly.
It was a grisly sight, and yet Chapman, dazed and bleeding on the snow, had to stifle the urge to smirk. But the battle of Hellfire Valley was over. What was left of Task Force Drysdale had been severed into various surrendering groups trapped on the road, each one having lost contact with the others. “Press on at all costs,” Smith had said, and the costs had been steep. More than a hundred American and British troops had been killed, with 150 wounded. Seventy-five vehicles had been wrecked—many of them were crackling in flames across the valley. More than a hundred men were laying down their arms.
The highest-ranking American in the contingent, Marine major John McLaughlin, was negotiating terms for surrender. He stood on the roadside with three Chinese officers, one of whom spoke fluent English. Trying to stall for time, McLaughlin, rather ludicrously, told the Chinese man that he was now willing to accept their surrender.
The Chinese were not amused. “You have five minutes,” the English speaker said, holding out his hand and counting off his fingers. “If you do not surrender, we will kill you all.”
By this point Jack Chapman had passed out, and the next thing he knew, he and ten other prisoners were hunched on the dirt floor of a tiny Korean farmhouse somewhere on a hillside. Their bodies reeked in the close heat, and Chapman’s numerous wounds, having thawed, began to flow again. He wasn’t sure how long he remained in the farmhouse. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he lost track of time. But at some point, the Chinese prodded him and the other men to their feet and herded them out of the structure. They joined a larger group of captives, both British and American, and marched for nineteen days, following obscure mountain trails until they reached a barbed-wire enclosure at a place called Kanggye, not far from the Manchurian border. Chapman would be a prisoner of war for nearly three years.
31
ONE-MAN ARMY
Yudam-ni
The eight thousand Marines at Yudam-ni had held on handsomely since the first attacks on the night of the twenty-seventh, and now they were planning their breakout for Hagaru. Colonel Homer Litzenberg, the Seventh Regiment commander, and Lieutenant Colonel Ray Murray, the Fifth Regiment commander, had been working closely on the plans, and they were just about ready. They aimed to break out the following day, December 2, and bash their way toward General Smith.
But Litzenberg had a more imme
diate concern to consider. He was deeply worried about Fox Company. After four days of attacks at Toktong Pass, Fox was on the verge of annihilation, and the colonel knew it. He had been on the radio with Barber that morning, with a scratchy signal, and although the wounded captain had put his best face on things, Litzenberg sensed that Fox could not hold on for another twenty-four hours. Three-quarters of Barber’s company had become casualties. His men were shell-shocked. His perimeter had shrunk, and shrunk again, like a hardening tumor. What Barber faced was a concentrated version of the same situation that was playing out all across the Chosin battlefield. The Chinese bodies continued to pile up on the slope, yet the enemy, sensing victory, pressed with renewed vigor. Fox Hill, Litzenberg feared, was about to become the site of a massacre.
He knew something drastic had to be done to save these surrounded men. Around midday on December 1, Litzenberg summoned one of his most experienced and resourceful battalion commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Davis, to discuss the predicament. Ray Davis hailed from Georgia and was a taciturn man, cool under pressure, with “eyes that bored into you,” according to one subordinate. He was a war hero from the Pacific who had fought admirably at Guadalcanal, New Britain, and finally Peleliu, where he won the Navy Cross. He had seen harrowing situations, but none so bad as the one Fox Company faced. Sitting on a rickety cot in the glow of a ticking stove, Davis and Litzenberg squinted at a topographical map. “The Chinese think we’re roadbound,” Litzenberg said. “They think we’ll stick with our vehicles.”
On Desperate Ground Page 23