Davis didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t leave the young man out here to die. Dr. Arioli declared him non compos mentis and had him physically restrained. They improvised a straitjacket and strapped him to a stretcher. Carriers took turns hauling the troubled kid across the mountain toward Fox Hill.
* * *
Through the feeble light of dawn, the battalion fought its way up what Davis believed was the last spur of the last ridge: By his reckoning, as soon as they reached the top, they would see Fox Hill spread out before them. But Davis was wary of this final approach. He knew that it would be perilous to draw any closer to Fox without first making radio contact with Captain Barber. If Davis and his men were mistaken for the enemy, Fox Company’s mortars would tear them to pieces. (After five days of besiegement, Barber would concede that his mortar and heavy machine gun teams were, as he put it, “getting pretty trigger-happy.”)
Davis’s radioman had trouble raising Fox on his hand-crank set, but after a few frantic minutes, he finally got a staticky signal. “Colonel, I have Fox Company,” he shouted, nearly quivering with emotion.
Moments later, Barber’s voice crackled over the waves. “This is Fox Six—over.” The captain’s businesslike tone brought tears to Davis’s eyes. Barber wasn’t surprised to be hearing from Davis; Litzenberg, in Yudam-ni, had already radioed Fox to say that a whole battalion would be tromping overland through the night. Still, Barber couldn’t have guessed Davis’s precise angle of approach, nor did he have, until now, any idea whether the Chinese had stymied his progress—or halted it altogether—through the long march. Davis could hear relief in Barber’s voice.
“Fox Six,” Davis said, “we are approaching the ridge preparatory to entering your sector. We will show ourselves on the skyline in five minutes. Will you alert your people to that effect?”
This was a roundabout way of saying Hold fire. Barber confirmed that he’d received the message loud and clear.
A few minutes later, when Davis had gained the top of the ridge, his radioman reached Barber again. “Fox Six, can you see us?”
“Yes, we can see you,” Barber affirmed. Across the hill, the men of Fox Company crawled from their pits and hideouts to salute the figures assembling high on the ridge. Many of Barber’s men produced scraps of parachute cloth, and the snowfields were aflutter with streamers of blue, yellow, and red.
Then Barber broke in: “Stay right where you are—I’m going to send up a patrol to guide you in.”
Davis could only smile as he considered the bold incongruity of what Barber had suggested. Who was rescuing whom? Davis’s Ridgerunners were an entire battalion; they didn’t need a few bedraggled men from Fox to escort them the last few hundred yards. Davis was well equipped to fight his way in. But he appreciated the gung-ho sentiment behind Barber’s gesture. It was as though the beleaguered captain were saying, We’re too proud to be saved.
“Negative on that, Fox Six,” Davis replied. “Keep your men in position.”
* * *
As Davis and his men marched onto Fox Hill, Corsairs appeared in the skies to cover one flank while Barber’s mortars covered the other. In this way, a safe path was established for the Ridgerunners finally to funnel onto the field and unite with their embattled comrades. Davis’s men would never forget the scene, simultaneously macabre and heroic, that unfolded before them. There was nothing beautiful about it—the hill was covered in blood and shit and trash and piss and guts and casings and chemicals. But it was as though they had entered a kind of Valhalla, a hallowed place in which every inch of ground spoke of some profound strife and sacrifice. Lieutenant Joe Owen described it eloquently. “We stood in wonder,” he wrote. “Men bowed their heads in prayer. Some fell to their knees. Others breathed quiet oaths of disbelief.” Tears welled in their eyes as they contemplated the savage ordeal that had transpired in “this place of suffering and courage.”
What had happened here was remarkable to contemplate. A single company of surrounded men, outnumbered ten to one, had held on in arctic weather for five days and five nights. And not only held on: They had slaughtered their foe. The magnitude of the carnage filled the Ridgerunners with awe as they marched down through it. The field was littered with hundreds and hundreds of Chinese corpses. “I swear to God,” said Owen, “you could have walked without touching the ground, using those bodies as a carpet.” The faces on many of the Chinese dead, he said, “were frozen in spasms of pain.”
These soldiers had died honorable deaths; their bravery was beyond question—nearly every one of them had fallen facing toward, not away from, the Marine positions. The far reaches of the slope had been cratered by shells. Chinese bodies had been stacked four and five high around the Marine foxholes.
Another Ridgerunner, radioman Joseph DeMonaco, thought Fox Hill resembled “a Hollywood battle set.” As they got closer to the Fox lines, DeMonaco started to see dead Marines. “One I’ll never forget,” he said, “was this Navy Corpsman, lying there with his scissors in one hand and a roll of bandages in the other. He must have been hit just as he was going to treat some wounded Marine.”
As the Ridgerunners approached the perimeter, someone gave a raucous cheer, and they ran to join their comrades from Fox. According to one Marine account, “They sprinted through the snow with a speed that seemed to mock the awful night that had passed, and burst into Fox Company’s lines with shouts and grins.” The raccoon-eyed defenders emerged from their gruesome barricades of dead bodies to greet Davis’s men. They wore raggedy slings and blood-drenched compresses, their heads wrapped in gauze. “Men hobbled about with makeshift leg splints,” Owen wrote. “We exchanged profane greetings that did not conceal the love that we Marines felt for each other.”
You look like shit! they yelled to one another—which, of course, was an insult of endearment. As one Marine put it, “The saviors would gaze upon the saved, and both would conclude that the other was pretty beat.”
One of the first of the “saviors” to stumble into the perimeter was Lieutenant Chew-Een Lee, still in his unmissable costume of fluorescent panels. Lee had never been so exhausted in his life, and never so ecstatic. “It was exhilarating,” he later said. “I was so proud of my men.” He hesitated to say that he and the rest of Davis’s men were “rescuing” Fox Company—although, practically speaking, that may have been true. “We never claimed that we saved Fox,” he said. “Some of them may have resented us for this notion. But we relieved them from further attack—and we secured the pass.”
Colonel Davis made his way to Barber’s command post. Davis still wore his bullet-dented helmet, his forehead splotched with blood. The captain lay on a stretcher but was determined to greet Davis standing up. Wincing, Barber staggered to his feet, propping himself with his cane fashioned from a tree limb.
Ignoring each other’s battle stench, the two officers smiled and warmly shook hands. At first they were too overwhelmed with emotion to speak. With the First Battalion’s 450 men flooding onto the hill, there was no question that Fox would hold. What was more, they now stood an immeasurably better chance of breaking out of Toktong Pass and reaching Hagaru—and then the safety of the coast. Though Davis and Barber had much to be proud of, they were in no position to celebrate. Between the aid tents lay a pile of two dozen dead Marines, and more corpses were being brought in from the morning’s fighting. Those bodies, stacked in the open air for all to see, chastened any impulse for rejoicing.
Barber went over the dour numbers with Davis. The men of Fox Company had sustained 118 casualties: twenty-six dead, eighty-nine wounded, and three missing. Of the company’s seven officers, six had been hit—a few of them several times. Nearly everyone suffered from some degree of frostbite. With fewer than a hundred “effectives” left in its ranks, Fox could only with exaggeration call itself a company any longer.
* * *
Davis’s arrival may have drastically improved the strate
gic picture on Fox Hill, but it did not mean an end to the casualties. Although the Chinese had stopped their mass attacks out of deference to the American planes hectoring overhead, all through the morning, while Barber and Davis conferred, sniper fire kept angling through the camp. Every few minutes, another bullet came whanging through the air, splitting tent fabric, glancing off metal, spurting in the snow. Sometimes the Chinese bullets hit flesh.
Immediately upon arriving on Fox Hill, Dr. Peter Arioli, the surgeon, had found himself nearly overwhelmed by the task of taking care of casualties. Fox had some very brave and talented medical corpsmen, but to have a real doctor in the company’s midst was a glorious amenity. One of the patients Dr. Arioli had to attend to was the eighteen-year-old Texan who said he’d had it and wasn’t going to take another step. The straitjacketed kid was carried into one of the aid tents on a stretcher. His condition had deteriorated throughout the early morning. Arioli examined him but still could find no visible injuries. Then, a few hours later, to the incredulity of everyone, the young Marine passed away. The cause of death was never determined. He just stopped living.
“We were stunned,” said one of his squad mates. “We carried him over to where the dead were, and put him at the end of the row. I think the poor son of a bitch was literally frightened to death.”
Dr. Arioli was also supposed to be tending to Hector Cafferata, who had never received anything more than palliative treatment for his horrible wounds from five days earlier. The New Jersey private was hanging on, but he could barely breathe—his punctured lung was filled with blood. According to the clipboard, Cafferata was supposed to be next in line, but Arioli was detained on more urgent errands of triage. He had poked his head out of the tent to speak to someone, his gloved hands red with gore, when a sniper’s round struck him. As described in one account, “A single bullet pierced the thin canvas and snapped Arioli’s spinal column. The doctor was dead before he fell into the arms of the stunned staff officer.”
“He didn’t suffer,” recalled a lieutenant who was standing nearby. “He was gone in seconds. One of the corpsmen examined him, and pronounced him dead.” Dr. Arioli’s body was added to the stack of corpses between the aid tents, next to the young Texan.
Another patient Dr. Arioli was supposed to have treated that morning was Chew-Een Lee. But because the lieutenant’s arm wound was not deemed life-threatening, he was far down the list. Lee was resting in a warming tent when one of Davis’s officers asked him to come interrogate a couple of Chinese POWs. Lee cut a sour look. He was not some egghead translator from intelligence. He’d spent the night leading a body of men through a mountain wasteland; he wasn’t going to demean himself by serving as somebody’s interpreter.
But Davis’s officer prevailed upon him—these two Chinese POWs were kids, he said. They were, said one Marine account, “docile little fellows, sitting patiently in a grove of trees, hugging their knees in the wind.” What they must have felt, as forlorn captives on a hillside that had become a public abattoir for more than a thousand of their frozen countrymen, no one could guess. But Lieutenant Lee went over and hunkered with them. They spoke with him freely, and Lee became engaged in their story.
“These people were former Nationalist soldiers who had fought under Chiang Kai-shek,” Lee later said. “They did not parrot the usual boring Communist propaganda.” What really motivated them, he learned—and, according to them, what motivated their most devoutly Communist comrades, too—was the sense that they were “defending the border, the frontier, from the aggression of foreign imperialists,” Lee said. “You heard hardly a word about Communism, or Stalin, or Lenin, or even Mao. They considered our coming to the border a genuine threat to the motherland.”
Lee asked them if they had any motivation beyond that. They did not hate Americans—as former Nationalists, they knew that the United States had long supported their cause. Why were they fighting Americans now? Why had their own leaders sent them here to die on this icy hillside, in the barrens of North Korea?
“Mei yu fatzu,” one of them replied. It was an idiomatic expression used throughout China. It meant, basically, “We don’t know. It can’t be known. It’s out of our control.”
BOOK
FIVE
TO THE SEA
“The enemy you see before us is all that stands between us and the sea we have marched so far and fought so hard to reach.”
—XENOPHON, Anabasis
35
ATTACKING IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION
Hagaru
The time had come for Oliver Smith to collect his regiments and start the process of chipping his way out of the icebox. All illusions of forward movement had been cast aside. They would be heading on, heading down, heading back, heading out. Quitting the field, if you wanted to call it that, but in a grand way, a planned way, engaging the enemy with every step. By radio, Smith had been following the movements across the battlefield, and today was the day when all the components of his master plan would begin to click into place.
First, Fox Company. He had heard about Davis’s overland rescue mission, and he was immensely pleased to learn that it had been a success, that Barber had been relieved and Toktong Pass was again in American hands.
Next, his regiments at Yudam-ni, the Fifth and the Seventh. Both of them—some eight thousand Marines in all—would be breaking out that morning and marching toward him. They would be taking their wounded, their equipment, and some of their dead. Disengaging from their defensive posture would be a perilous thing, like letting go of a tiger’s tail, but Litzenberg and Murray had it choreographed. They would advance as a “rolling perimeter,” with companies of flankers thrown onto the ridges to clear the highlands while the main column of trucks, packed with casualties, eased along the valley floor. Weather permitting, squadrons of Corsairs would bomb and strafe the route ahead to keep the enemy scattered. The dash, all fourteen miles of it, was going to be bloody. No doubt the Chinese would hurl everything they had at the withdrawing Americans, but Smith thought Litzenberg and Murray had enough firepower to blast through. When they reached Toktong Pass, they would pick up the battered remnants of Fox Company, as well as Davis’s Ridgerunners, folding them into their advance for the final miles to Hagaru. All in all, it seemed to Smith like a sound plan.
Finally, there was the Hagaru airstrip. After twelve days of nonstop effort, the engineers were reporting that the runway was 2,900 feet long—impressive, but still a thousand feet less than the length recommended for the big transport planes General Smith hoped to bring in. But Smith declared that it was time to stage the first test flight. The Navy surgeon at Hagaru had told him that the casualties had mounted to more than eight hundred, and he expected hundreds more when Litzenberg and Murray came in. Smith had to start evacuating the wounded now. He couldn’t wait for the airstrip to reach regulation length. So he radioed a request for a plane.
At two thirty that afternoon, an Air Force C-47, piloted by a brave airman, dropped over the ridgeline and barreled in for a landing. The big twin-propeller plane hopped a few times on the bumpy airstrip, then jerked to a stop. Crewmen loaded the plane with a few dozen of the most seriously wounded. Now came the real test: On this short strip, in these cold temperatures, at this high altitude, would the C-47 make it off the runway and climb fast enough to clear the tight hem of mountains?
Colonel Partridge’s engineers stood along the edge of the runway, beside their bulldozers, and anxiously watched. The plane jittered down the strip. It strained a bit, but the C-47 vaulted over the ridge with a little room to spare. Snarling into the sky, it banked for Hamhung as the engineers cheered.
Five more transports came in that afternoon, each one egesting more supplies and carrying off more of the reservoir’s critically injured. The next morning, at first light, the process began again. Smith said the airstrip was starting to look “like La Guardia.” Every ten or fifteen minutes, another plane
would rumble in from the coast. The operation was taking on something of the quality of the Berlin Airlift. The crates of ammo, the barrels of fuel, the pallets of C rations were starting to pile up at the edge of the runway. Smith’s foresight was paying huge dividends. Hagaru was coming to life again.
And the aid tents were emptying. “What casualties?” Almond had asked a few weeks earlier. By the time the rescue flights drew to a close several days later, more than four thousand injured men would be spirited to safety. Smith couldn’t be more pleased. The big birds kept coming, and the tent hospitals at Hamhung kept receiving the injured. With each flight, the forces at Hagaru grew leaner, the perimeter tightened, the enclave sharpened.
The surgeons in Hagaru’s hospital were relieved now to have the option of diverting their worst cases to the evacuation planes. The doctors had been working around the clock in unbelievably trying conditions. Hagaru’s hospital, set up in an old school building, had a gaping bomb hole in its roof that let in blasts of icy wind and snow. It was so cold in there that the doctors had trouble getting their plasma and IV drips to flow—the fluids had turned to slush. At times, the line between active surgery and active combat appeared dangerously thin. Bullets often came ricocheting through the operating room, pinging off medical equipment.
On one occasion, a half-crazed Marine rushed in, straight from the battlefield, holding a live grenade. It turned out the Marine had accidentally pulled the grenade’s pin, and he was now nervously clutching its “spoon”—the only thing preventing it from exploding. The Marine had come into the busy operating room thinking that a bit of well-placed medical tape would finally enable him to loosen his grip on the deadly thing. A coolheaded orderly steered the Marine outside and convinced him to toss the grenade into a barren field, where it safely detonated. “You constantly felt the presence of the battle just outside our doors,” said Dr. James Stewart, a recent Tulane Medical School graduate who was serving as one of the only surgeons on duty. “We were stretched to the maximum, but the airstrip considerably eased the pressure.”
On Desperate Ground Page 26