* * *
The completion of the airstrip also brought in the outside world. On some of the transport planes were stowaway journalists searching for a story. Perhaps the most famous among them was Marguerite Higgins, of the New York Herald Tribune. She arrived from Tokyo shortly after the airstrip opened and, as one of the first independent eyewitnesses to the events at Chosin, succeeded in getting some of the first dispatches out to the world. Higgins was as beautiful as she was resourceful, and the men, who had not seen an American woman in many months, remarked on how wonderfully incongruous it was to see her in this godforsaken place—though most were too tired and shell-shocked to summon prurient thoughts. Higgins described the Marines at Hagaru as men who’d been granted clemency. “They had the dazed air of men who have accepted death and then found themselves alive after all,” she wrote. “They talked in unfinished phrases. They would start something and then stop, as if meaning was beyond any words at their command.” Higgins wondered if they could possibly muster the strength to make the final punch to the sea. “They were drunk with fatigue,” she said, “and yet they were unable to shrug off the tension that had kept them going without sleep and often without food.”
Time-Life’s David Douglas Duncan, armed with two Leica cameras, dropped into Hagaru on one of the flights. Some of the photographers had found that their cameras wouldn’t work in the extreme cold, but luckily Duncan’s equipment had been thoroughly winterized back in New York—all the oily lubricants removed so that nothing could freeze up. He immediately went to work, snapping what would become some of the most iconic images of the Chosin Reservoir campaign. But he was able to shoot only a handful of rolls; often the film would break when he tried to load his cameras. “I had to be extremely careful in that cold,” Duncan said. “The film was so brittle, it would snap like a pretzel.”
From the arriving journalists, General Smith began to learn how the battle was being portrayed in publications in America and around the world. Some newspapers had reported that Smith’s division had already been destroyed, or at least that it appeared unlikely that he could ever spring his men from the “Red Trap.” Headlines screamed that the Marines were a “lost legion,” “surrounded,” “doomed.” Peking Radio announced that the “annihilation of the United States 1st Marine Division is only a matter of time.” Hawkish politicians back home were urging Truman to drop atomic bombs on Chinese cities. The chief of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith, worried that the Marines at Chosin could be wiped out unless the president began immediate high-level negotiations with Mao. Radio commentator Walter Winchell had called on the nation to hold a prayer vigil for the Marines at Chosin. “If you have a father, brother, or son in the 1st Marine Division,” Winchell said, “pray for him now.”
Some of the newly arrived reporters managed to persuade the usually reticent General Smith to say a few words. When Smith described how they would be driving to the sea, a British journalist interrupted him: “So you’ll be retreating, is that it?” As the story goes, the general sternly contradicted him, saying, “Retreat, hell! We’re just attacking in a different direction.” Smith later denied that he’d said it quite this way, but the quote caught on as reported and would live on as Smith’s most famous utterance. The more nuanced point that Smith sought to make was that he anticipated that their march to the coast would be a battle the entire way. When you are surrounded by overwhelming numbers of enemy soldiers who are trying to kill you, movement in any direction becomes, by definition, an attack.
In any case, Smith said, they were going to save themselves. They were going to come out with their units intact, with most of their equipment, and with all of their casualties accounted for. And when it was over, the First Marine Division would still exist as a formidable force, ready to fight another day.
* * *
All this time, as the airstrip reached completion and the planes began to arrive, Hagaru remained engrossed in a full-scale battle. The Chinese had never given up on seizing the town. Night after night, their assaults on the perimeter were unrelenting. They were keen on taking the airstrip, which they viewed as a tremendous insult and a threat. During the day, Chinese snipers took potshots at nearly every incoming and outgoing flight. Though they never succeeded in downing any aircraft at Hagaru, they riddled the underside of many a plane. Patients aboard the rescue transports took the occasional enemy bullet while soaring over the Chosin battlefields. One evacuee reportedly was killed in this way, and a number of crewmen were shot. One of them was Robert Himmerich y Valencia, a seventeen-year-old Marine radio operator, whose feet were seriously injured when Chinese antiaircraft rounds burst through the bottom of the DC-3 transport on which he served. “Luckily, no control cables or hydraulics were hit,” he later recalled, “but the plane was nicely peppered, which ventilated things a bit.” Himmerich y Valencia lost the use of seven of his toes, but he survived.
On the ground, meanwhile, the battle for Hagaru did not let up. East Hill continued to be the focal point. Its broad shoulders saw some of the most savage fighting of the whole Chosin campaign. Sitter’s George Company and Drysdale’s Royal Marines had valiantly plugged holes and repelled the worst attacks. It was frenzied, all-or-nothing combat, much of it hand to hand. The George Company Marines, who cut strips of red parachute silk to wear as identifying scarves, became known as “Bloody George.” Control of the hill changed by the hour, and the slopes became littered with so many Chinese corpses that the Marines employed them as windbreaks.
“Death was all around us,” said Bob Harbula, a George Company Marine from the Pennsylvania steel country. “It was like a shooting gallery up there. Killing all those people—I felt like a mass murderer. Often we didn’t have time to reload, so we wielded our rifles as clubs. Other times, we used our entrenching tools, even our helmets, as weapons.” Standing in the town with a pair of binoculars, one could look up and see stacks of bodies on East Hill; some of them had become such prominent features that mortar teams began to use them as orientation points. But the Chinese, some of their officers on horseback, kept leading new assaults and reclaiming various parts of the hill.
When the mortar teams ran low on ammo, a supply drop was called in, using the established code name for 60-millimeter mortar shells: “Tootsie Rolls.” A plane came and dropped the requested supplies by parachute, but when the boxes were cut open, the supply crews found no shells inside. Whoever had packed the order, apparently not familiar with the code name, had stuffed the boxes with actual Tootsie Rolls, enough candy for many thousands of men. The mortar teams were infuriated about the mix-up, but everyone else was thrilled. From then on, Tootsie Rolls became the signature treat of the Chosin campaign, and a form of currency. Many Marines would insist that Tootsie Rolls had sustained them through their darkest hours—and may have saved their lives. (The Chinese were crazy about them, too: When looting American positions, Tootsie Rolls, along with Marlboro cigarettes, were the first things they hunted for.) The Marines found that the confection not only provided quick fuel; it had a practical use, too. The rolls were the perfect size and consistency for plugging bullet-riddled gas tanks, fuel hoses, and radiators. The men would warm the candies in their mouths until they softened, then “precision-mold” them to whatever shape was required. Tootsie Rolls thus became a kind of all-purpose spackle that kept the Marines and their machines going through the battle.
Just when it seemed as if Smith might lose the battle for East Hill, the incoming planes paid off again: They began to bring in hundreds and hundreds of Marines from the coast. Some had been recovering from wounds sustained earlier in the campaign. Others were noncombat Marines—drivers, clerks, communications people, logistics people. But they knew their brother Marines were surrounded at Chosin and were eager to help. Their arrival was like an infusion of fresh blood. As they disembarked from the planes, Smith wasted no time in putting them on East Hill to stiffen the lines.
* * *
The ne
xt day, December 3, the tide of the battle unmistakably turned. It was then that the Marines from Yudam-ni began to trickle into town. They came rolling in like some army of Joads, shabby but spirited, beat but not beaten, their ice-barnacled vehicles shot to hell, windows shattered, windshields cracked. The wounded were crammed into those same trucks—hundreds and hundreds of them—while the dead were strapped to bumpers, tied to fenders and hoods, stacked like kindling on the roofs of cabs. And in truth, most of the living looked nearly dead themselves. “Our parkas were all stained with blood, food, gun oil, and dirt,” wrote Lieutenant Joe Owen. “Our filthy faces were matted with bristly beards that bore icicles of mucus and spittle.” Many discovered that they’d been sleepwalking the final few miles; once they arrived in Hagaru, said Owen, they collapsed in heaps and “slept dead to the world.”
All day and night, the vehicles kept streaming in—troop trucks, tractors, ambulances, bulldozers, rolling artillery. The quick and the dead were mixed together in one long procession. More than eight thousand men in all. Hector Cafferata was in that procession, stuffed in a truck, holding his Mauser, one of his lungs clogged with blood. Bill Barber was in it, too, and Ken Benson, and so many of the casualties from Fox Hill. The worst cases were taken straight to the airstrip, where the triage doctors affixed them with evacuation tags. The less seriously wounded would have to wait their turn. The still less seriously wounded were handed weapons and sent out to fortify the perimeter.
General Smith greeted his regiments with a fatherly mixture of pride and relief. With their arrival, he knew that nothing could stop his division now. Alpha Bowser was sitting with Smith in a hospital tent when this happy realization started to sink in. “Our troubles are over,” Bowser said to Smith. “We’ve got it made. The Chinese don’t stand a chance.”
“Bowser,” Smith replied, “those Chinese never did stand a chance.”
When Lieutenant Colonel Ray Davis, Lieutenant Chew-Een Lee, and the Ridgerunners marched into Hagaru, they straightened their shoulders and fell into parade formation, their boots keeping cadence on the snow. Then they began to hum a familiar tune. Soon they were singing “The Marines’ Hymn” at the top of their lungs:
Here’s health to you and to our Corps
Which we are proud to serve;
In many a strife we’ve fought for life
And never lost our nerve;
If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven’s scenes,
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines.
A Navy surgeon, standing on the road and watching the spectacle, could only shake his head in admiration. A reporter heard him say, “Look at those bastards, those magnificent bastards.”
Litzenberg’s and Murray’s men were fed hot pancakes and given a good rest, but Smith soon began to organize them for the coming breakout. Vacating Hagaru was going to be a complicated endeavor: Over the next few days, they would have to shrink their perimeter, close down the airstrip, strike the hospital tents, and destroy everything of value they couldn’t take out with them—using thermite grenades to melt and disable equipment made of metal. They would have to assemble the vehicles and arrange the forward units in a great flying wedge. All of this while continuing to fight a nightly battle.
But one more urgent problem was brought to Smith’s attention: The Army units east of the reservoir, originally under the command of Colonel Allan MacLean, had met a disastrous fate. Several days earlier, Smith had refused to help them in their hour of need—he simply couldn’t spare the men. But now that Hagaru had been reinforced, he had to do what he could to save the last Army remnants stranded on the ice. Some survivors from the battles on the east side of the lake had begun to straggle into Hagaru. The stories they had to tell were beyond horrifying.
36
IN THE DAY OF TROUBLE
East of the Reservoir
The wounded men jounced on the back of the transport truck as it rolled south in the long, fitful convoy. Twenty-five casualties of war, lying on pallets of parachute silk, were crowded on the open bed of this rolling medical ward. Some had been maimed by shrapnel or riddled with bullets. Some had sucking chest wounds. Some were dumbstruck from battlefield concussions, their eardrums perforated. Whenever the truck stopped, the soldiers winced. Each jolt seemed to pull at their wounds.
It was early on the morning of December 1, and the sun’s rays slanted through the naked trees that fringed the ridgelines, giving light, if little promise of warmth. Ed Reeves sat somewhere in the middle of the truck bed, in this cargo of Army invalids. He was zipped to his neck in his sleeping bag, trying in vain to keep warm. A private first class, attached to Company K, in the Thirty-first Infantry, Reeves was a gangly kid, nineteen years old, with a clownish smile and furry eyebrows that quivered like caterpillars on his forehead. He had grown up on a farm in Illinois and had worked in a succession of Chicago factories before enlisting in the Army in 1949, looking for discipline and adventure. In Korea, he’d found both.
The truck engine spluttered and coughed, then died in a frozen creek bed. Reeves and the two dozen other men scoured the hills for Chinese while mechanics coaxed the engine back to life. “Think we’ll ever get out of this mess?” someone asked. Reeves said he thought they would. Whatever his faults, a lack of optimism wasn’t among them.
The truck, trying to catch up with the rest of the convoy, came around a turn and ran straight into the enemy. The Chinese swept down from the hills and fired into the vehicles. Bullets winged through the air, sometimes drilling into the sideboards of the truck, sometimes clinking off metal, sometimes striking flesh. A man to the left of Reeves was hit in the arm. Another, to his right, was hit in the face. Reeves cringed lower in his bag, but there was nowhere to hide.
The truck began to slip off the road, trailing sluggishly toward a ravine. It took a while, with all the shouting and shooting and screaming, to figure out what the trouble was: The driver had been shot and was slumped, dead, over the steering wheel. The windshield was spattered with his blood.
A soldier walking on the road nearby took the initiative. He pulled the dead driver from the cab and assumed the wheel, guiding the truck back onto the road. But not two hundred yards farther on, he, too, was shot, and a third driver had to be found. It was obvious whom the Chinese snipers were targeting. Anyone who climbed into the cab of a truck knew it was a death sentence. Yet, throughout the train of vehicles, men kept volunteering to drive.
Luckily, the day was sunny and clear, which meant that Corsairs from the First Marine Air Wing could be unleashed on the enemy. When a firefight broke out somewhere ahead of Reeves’s truck, a Corsair was called to the scene. A plane swooped down from the treetops, scattering the Chinese. The pilot dropped his canister, but the releasing mechanism got hung up for a second too long. The drum of jellied gasoline tumbled through the air. It exploded, its contents splattering in the vicinity of one truck and a group of American soldiers who happened to be walking alongside.
A nightmare unfolded in front of everyone. The napalm clung to the victims’ skin and clothing—they couldn’t get it off. The burning petroleum gel kept boring into their flesh. They flung themselves on the ground, writhing in terror and agony, some begging their comrades to shoot them, some marching straight for the hills, hoping the Chinese would put them out of their misery. Soldiers rushed over and rolled the victims in the snow but found they were helpless to save their dying countrymen. “It was so hot out there, we couldn’t breathe,” one witness, Private Robert Ayala, said. “Them guys, their skin just fell right off. They was all charcoal, like a cigarette.”
“The smell was awful,” said another witness to the incident, Harrison Ager, an Army truck driver. “They were miserable. The quicker they died, the better off they were.” Nineteen men, having spent the week nearly freezing to death, were sizzled alive. The charr
ed bodies continued to smolder long after they had stopped twitching.
The convoy resumed its forward progress, but a grisly disaster like this, so early in their slow trundle to the south, hung heavily on the men and shook their morale. Would they ever make it to Hagaru? Even Ed Reeves’s optimism was shaken. He lay in his truck, feeling for the good men he saw dying around him, astounded by their bravery. He yearned to join the fight, but that was impossible. He couldn’t hold a weapon. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t even stand.
* * *
During the first night of the fighting, back on the night of November 27, Reeves had seen plenty of action. He had fought well, he thought, and by the morning of the twenty-eighth he felt a certain cockiness, a sense that fate was smiling on him. He had burns on his jacket from grenade shards, he had scratches from the underbrush, he had bullet holes in his jacket. But he was unscathed. A little later that morning, though, as he was standing beside a dilapidated farmhouse that functioned as his company’s command post, a round from an antitank gun landed beside Reeves. The blast hurled him twenty feet through the air. His legs and arms were sliced with hot shrapnel. The explosion knocked the breath out of him and rendered him unconscious. When he came to, he realized that his legs were wrecked and bleeding profusely. He couldn’t get up.
On Desperate Ground Page 27