On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  Davis understood that he was being asked to concoct a plan. “What if we get off the road and take the high ground?” he said. “What if we sneak up from behind?” He was already anticipating a scheme that had been taking shape in Litzenberg’s mind all morning: The colonel wanted to commit Davis’s First Battalion, as many as five hundred men, to save Fox Company. He wanted Davis to lead them off the road and march them, at night, through trackless mountains to relieve the Fox defenders.

  The idea stirred Davis’s blood. It was the kind of assignment that would rally any Marine: a stealth mission in enemy territory to rescue comrades in trouble. Davis studied the map a little more closely. A straight off-road journey from Yudam-ni to the back door of Toktong Pass looked to be only five miles as the crow flies. But this wasn’t going to be a direct shot. It appeared the trek would involve trudging over at least three steep ridges. With the detouring that such variegated terrain would require, Davis thought it would likely be a march of ten miles—maybe more. Who knew if a column of men already so frostbitten and fatigued could make such a march? Who knew if this sketchy map bore the scantest resemblance to the country? Who knew how many thousands of Chinese troops were encamped on those intervening ridges? This could be a mad mission, Davis thought. In trying to save a company, a battalion could be wiped out.

  Litzenberg understood the risks but demanded that they see the idea through. Idly presiding over the slaughter of Fox Company was not an option; it would weigh on his conscience for the rest of his life.

  Another factor further cried out for an overland march: Litzenberg understood that Fox Company was no longer in full control of Toktong Pass. The next day, when the nearly eight thousand Marines made their break from Yudam-ni to Hagaru, with all their wounded and their vehicles, they would have to slip through this narrow place. It was impossible to bypass. The Chinese, holding the high ground on both sides of the MSR, could inflict terrible damage on these road-bound Marines. The CCF might even succeed in halting the column—which, within the confines of this highland choke point, could result in a bloodbath. But if Davis could make a cross-country march for Fox Hill and swiftly seize the pass, much carnage could be avoided. Davis’s First Battalion would, in effect, unlock the back gate—and keep it open for the main body of withdrawing Marines.

  Litzenberg wanted Davis to work up a plan and bring it back as soon as he could. Davis was determined to try. His reasoning carried a powerful simplicity. “Some fellow Marines were in trouble,” he later wrote. “We were going to rescue them and nothing was going to stand in our way.”

  * * *

  It didn’t take Davis long. Within a half hour, he reported back to Litzenberg, who gave his brusque assent. Davis gathered his company commanders to discuss the details. It would be a “bold dash” under the stars, Davis said, and they would have to “streamline the battalion.” Surprise, he said, “will be our essential weapon. Marines don’t ordinarily attack at night, so the Chinese won’t be expecting us.” Davis wanted them to veer off the road just south of Yudam-ni and climb into the highlands, moving out in single file, heading southeast under cover of darkness. Utter silence was imperative. There could be no rattling of weapons along the route—everything would need to be muffled in cloth and tied tight. No cook fires would be allowed on breaks; the men were to bring only quick-energy food, ready to eat.

  They’d travel as lean as possible, carrying mostly light arms, with only two 81-millimeter mortars and six heavy machine guns in the whole column. They would jettison nonessential equipment in favor of extra ammo. Each Marine would tote an 81-millimeter mortar shell in his sleeping bag. More ammunition could be hauled on stretchers. Most Marines were expected to lug an additional bandolier of machine gun bullets.

  Communication would have to be kept to a minimum. The marchers would whisper orders down the column of men—no yelling, and no radios unless absolutely necessary. Davis predicted casualties, and he’d decided to bring along an excellent regimental surgeon, Navy lieutenant Peter Arioli, to treat them. The dead were to be buried in the snow where they fell, with the wounded placed on stretchers as the ammo originally hauled in them was expended.

  To help with navigation over the confusing array of ridges, Davis devised an ingenious solution: Every so often, a howitzer in Yudam-ni would lob a star shell toward the southeast, along a predetermined azimuth, a line leading straight to Fox Hill. In theory, all Davis’s Marines had to do was follow the intermittent bursts of white phosphorus as they arced across the sky. The marchers would be guided to their destination like wise men to Bethlehem.

  One hitch presented itself: Davis’s men would likely have to fight a battle even before they could leave the road. By the look of the map, the best spot to jump off into the mountains was a place called Turkey Hill. The Chinese were known to be dug in there, and it would require blunt force to bust through their position and “destroy” them, as Davis phrased it. But he was confident that it could be accomplished by dusk. Then they’d be on their way, threading through the mountains toward Fox.

  But Davis had one more important decision to make. Who would lead the march? Which platoon? Davis had decided he would place himself near the middle of the column, making sure it held shape, sometimes floating forward, sometimes floating back toward the rear to exhort the stragglers. The line of marchers would stretch over a half mile. In the darkness, with the view ahead obscured by so many knobs and ridges, which themselves might be obscured by patches of ice fog or slanting snow, each Marine would have no choice but to follow the dim form immediately in front of him. The march’s success would crucially depend on who was in the vanguard, choosing the path forward.

  Davis didn’t have to think very hard about who it would be. He would pick the most irascible and most determined officer in the whole battalion, the twenty-four-year-old leader of Baker Company’s Second Platoon—a man who, coincidentally, spoke Chinese. His name was Lieutenant Lee.

  * * *

  As a boy growing up in Sacramento, the firstborn son of Cantonese immigrants, Chew-Een Lee had loved his father’s collection of ancient Chinese history books. He was especially fond of the turbulent period known as the Three Kingdoms. He feasted on the epics from that era, which recounted fabled generals, misty battles, and miraculous feats of military strategy. Lee was equally impressed by the tattoo that his father wore on his arm—DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR, it said. As a kid, he didn’t know exactly what it meant, but the words imprinted a stark ethos upon Lee’s imagination that followed him through life. He knew to the point of certainty that he would die a heroic death for his country on a battlefield far from home. It was the central assumption that propelled him.

  Lee was said to be the first Chinese American officer in the history of the United States Marine Corps. People didn’t appreciate his toughness at first glance. He was a slight man, five foot six, fine-boned, angular of features. He had a birdlike quality: a scowling face; a sharp beak of a nose; long, bony fingers; and a certain jerky precision in his motions. His disapproving eyes, tight and assessing, seemed to catch everything. His sense of humor, said one historian, “was not well developed.” “He was hardly a congenial companion,” said a mortarman who served under Lee. “But on duty he had our full respect as an unequivocal professional.”

  Lee had joined the Marine Corps in the waning days of World War II, but instead of being sent off to fight, he was dispatched to language school to become a translator. It chafed him to no end that the Marines refused to place him in a battlefield role—he viewed it as a blot on his honor. From then on, Lee had a chip on his shoulder. As he rose through the Marine ranks after the war, he only grew in his resolve to prove that he was the best, the most scrupulous, the most aggressive, the most eager to take action. “Some say I was by the book,” he said, “but I tell you, it works. Fire and maneuver! Discipline! Esprit!”

  What Lee wanted most—what he demanded—was respect. He was not
some interpreter, not some coolie with an unctuous smile curling across his face. He was determined to lead a unit of American men into combat, to have a group of Marines “willingly follow me into hell,” as he later put it. Sinophobia, dating back to the days of the “Yellow Peril” and the Chinese Exclusion Act, ran deep within the United States, the country to which Lee’s merchant father had moved as a young man from Guangdong Province in the 1920s. Lee himself had grown up in Depression-era California as a hybridized citizen, steeped in the old ways but also those of his native land. Whatever barriers Lee had broken in the Marine Corps he hadn’t broken bashfully. He was a defiant man, and very much old-school—as old-school as those martial epics from the Three Kingdoms.

  The Korean conflict, Lee felt, gave him a second chance to prove himself in war. If some Marines wondered whether he could be trusted fighting soldiers from the land of his heritage, those worries were quickly expunged on the battlefield. On November 2, during an engagement at Sudong Gorge, Lee had become the protagonist in a spectacularly heroic exploit. Attempting to trick the enemy into revealing his position high on a wooded hill, Lee launched a one-man assault in which he tried, in effect, to impersonate an entire platoon. He would fire a round from his carbine, then scurry to another position and hurl a grenade, then run to still another spot and shoot his pistol. It was a ruse. He was trying to produce a lot of racket over a broad area in order to make the Chinese think a large group of Marines was advancing.

  The stratagem worked: The enemy returned fire. Lee, now knowing where the Chinese bunker was hidden, crawled right to it. When he drew within a few yards and realized he’d been detected, he blurted out, in Mandarin, “Don’t shoot—I’m not the enemy!” The distraction bought him enough time to hurl his last two grenades. Then he opened up with his carbine, at full automatic, spraying the Chinese. In a few moments, it was over. Single-handedly, First Lieutenant Lee had captured the enemy outpost and secured the hill. He was a one-man army. For this action he would win the Navy Cross.

  * * *

  The next morning, November 3, while still fighting near Sudong Gorge, a Chinese sniper shot him. The bullet struck Lee’s right elbow and spun him around. He crumpled to the ground in agony. His arm had a gash four inches long, with the shattered bone exposed. A corpsman bandaged him and wrapped his crippled appendage in a sling, and he was sped, against his wishes, to an Army evacuation hospital, set up in a school gymnasium in Hamhung, to await transport to Japan. But after a few days languishing in this makeshift infirmary, Lee became restless and bored. His arm may have been wrecked, but he could still fight—he was sure of it.

  The day before he was to fly to Japan, Lee and another convalescing Marine hatched a plan to escape from the Hamhung hospital and return to the front lines. Finding a supply of weapons piled in a nearby compound, they armed themselves and took off in the first jeep they could scavenge from the motor pool. “Hey, that’s mine!” a soldier yelled as they pulled away. Lee waved his carbine in the man’s direction, and they disappeared into the backstreets of Hamhung, laughing like two fugitives as they careered toward the outskirts of town. They drove along a levy between dry rice paddies and aimed north, for the snow-dusted mountains.

  When the jeep coughed out of gas, they got out and walked the last miles to the front lines. Lee found his unit, Baker Company, and reported for duty, his slung arm encased in a heavy cast. He was worried he might be court-martialed, not only for violating doctor’s orders and going AWOL from the infirmary but also for commandeering—stealing?—an Army vehicle. But Baker Company welcomed him back and said the paperwork would be taken care of.

  Lee was thrilled. “I wasn’t yet convinced,” he said, “that I had earned any glory.” He wasn’t afraid to die in combat—he still believed it was his destiny, now more than ever. “I was prepared to meet my Maker,” he said. “I could care less about heaven or hell. If I were to die, it would be a pulling of the blinds, and then there would be darkness.”

  Lee had worn his sling and his cumbersome cast through the fighting at Yudam-ni. He had led numerous patrols, having to hold his weapon with his left arm, steadying it with his hip. He had never complained. Lee, said one noncom who served under him, “was hard as steel, tough as nails, cold as ice, and reliable as time itself—all the clichés apply.”

  When he learned that Colonel Davis had picked him to lead a night march through the mountains to rescue the men of Fox Company, Lee wasn’t surprised. On the contrary, he expected it. “This was almost a mission impossible, over unknown terrain, against unknown forces,” Lee later said. Davis’s choosing him, Lee thought, seemed “sort of logical.” Not because he was Chinese American, not because his language skills might come in handy, but because he was the best.

  32

  EVERY WEAPON THAT WE HAVE

  Washington, D.C.

  On the morning of November 30, the Indian Treaty Room inside the Old Executive Office Building was crowded with more than two hundred journalists. President Truman marched into the great room and, in a blaze of flashbulbs, assumed his place at the dais. Then, in a crisp, straight-ahead manner, he proceeded to read a prepared statement. “Recent developments in Korea” he said, “confront the world with a serious crisis.” China, he noted, had mounted a strong and well-organized attack against the United Nations forces, “despite prolonged and earnest efforts to bring home to the Communist leaders of China the plain fact that neither the United Nations nor the United States has any aggressive intentions toward China.” The “historic friendship” between the United States and China made it all the more shocking to Truman that Mao had sent his armies to fight against American troops. The prospect for negotiations did not seem promising, Truman said—the representatives of Communist China had given no indications that they were willing to talk. Given this, the United States had no choice but to prepare for full-scale war. “It is more necessary than ever before for us to increase at a very rapid rate the combined military strength of the free nations,” Truman insisted. He would call for dramatically expanded funding for all branches of the armed forces and would request a substantial increase in the budget for the Atomic Energy Commission. Truman concluded his statement, saying, “This country is the keystone of the hopes of mankind for peace and justice. We must show that we are guided by a common purpose and a common faith.”

  Then the president opened the floor to questions.

  Q. Mr. President, in what detail were you informed about these [latest developments]?

  THE PRESIDENT. Every detail. On November 23 General MacArthur had launched an assault on the Communist forces in Korea in an attempt to end the war. On November 28 he issued a special communiqué stating that the United Nations forces faced an “entirely new war” with an enemy force of 200,000 men.

  Q. Mr. President, there has been some criticism of General MacArthur in the European press—

  THE PRESIDENT. Some in the American press, too, if I’m not mistaken. They are always for a man when he is winning, but when he is in a little trouble, they all jump on him…He has done a good job, and he is continuing to do a good job. Go ahead with your question.

  Q. The particular criticism is that he exceeded his authority and went beyond the point he was supposed to go.

  THE PRESIDENT. He did nothing of the kind.

  Q. Mr. President, since the Chinese delegation has shown no inclination to resolve the difficulties, what can be done then?

  THE PRESIDENT. We are still working on the thing from every angle. The best thing that can be done is to increase our defenses to a point where we can talk—as we should always talk—with authority.

  Q. Mr. President, will the United Nations troops be allowed to bomb across the Manchurian border?

  THE PRESIDENT. I can’t answer that question this morning.

  Q. Mr. President, will attacks in Manchuria depend on action in the United Nations?

 
THE PRESIDENT. Yes, entirely….We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have.

  Q. Will that include the atomic bomb?

  THE PRESIDENT. That includes every weapon that we have.

  Q. Does that mean that there is active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?

  THE PRESIDENT. There has always been active consideration of its use. I don’t want to see it used. It is a terrible weapon, and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression. That happens when it is used.

  Q. Mr. President, I wonder if we could retrace that reference to the atom bomb? Did we understand you clearly that the use of the atomic bomb is under active consideration?

  THE PRESIDENT. Always has been. It is one of our weapons….We have exerted every effort possible to prevent a third world war….We are still trying to prevent that war from happening.

  33

  THE RIDGERUNNERS

  In the Mountains South of Yudam-ni

  Slightly before nine o’clock on the evening of December 1, Lieutenant Colonel Ray Davis moved among his men, reminding them of the significance of the mission upon which they were about to embark. “Fox Company is just over those ridges,” he said, pointing toward the south. “They’re surrounded and need our help.”

  Davis pivoted and gave a nod to Lieutenant Chew-Een Lee. Lee raised his good arm into the frozen air so everyone could see and cried out into the squalling night. Then he started marching, and the men of the First Battalion followed him into the hyperborean bush—450 Marines, in single file, groaning under their burdens like so many mountain yaks as they stomped through virgin snow. First came Baker Company, then Davis’s command group, then Able Company, then Charlie, then How.