* * *
Upon his return to Hagaru, Partridge did a little research and sketched out some numbers, then met again with Smith in the general’s headquarters, beneath the portrait of Stalin. Partridge had to inform Smith that the situation looked bleak at Funchilin Pass, that the topography was unfavorable, and that clearing the Chinese was going to be tough. Smith understood how thorny the problems would be. It was “the most difficult defile through which the division had to pass,” he wrote. Smith had to give the Chinese credit. They “could not have picked a better spot to give us trouble.”
The good news was, Partridge thought he could repair the bridge. He informed Smith that he would be constructing a modified version of what was known as a treadway span. This was a pontoon-style contraption—normally designed to float on the surface of a river or canal—that relied on portable sections of heavy steel girders bolted together at the site.
“A treadway?” Smith said, puzzled. He knew they didn’t have any treadway pieces up here.
Partridge said he had already located some in Japan and could have them flown over straightaway.
“How will you get them up here?” Smith wondered.
“Air-drop them.”
Smith was skeptical. Has this ever been tried before? he wondered.
“Never heard of it, General.”
It was a bold solution—deus ex machina. The problem was that each treadway section weighed 2,900 pounds. No one seemed sure what would happen to a modest-size airplane, especially in thin mountain air, when that much heft was released at once. It might create such a dramatic shift in weight distribution that the aircraft would dangerously lurch and possibly spin out of control. Not many pilots were skilled enough or crazy enough to want to try it. Furthermore, no one was sure whether the treadway structures would survive the descent. Would they buckle and smash to pieces upon striking the ground? Partridge didn’t know whether the military made parachutes large enough to sufficiently slow the fall of something so heavy.
Still, he believed the plan could work, and he was impatient to get started. His idea was to drop the treadway pieces inside a protected perimeter surrounding Koto-ri, where they could be retrieved and loaded onto large Brockway trucks—the Army happened to have two of these behemoth utility vehicles already in Koto-ri. The Brockways, which weighed six tons apiece and were designed for erecting bridges, would deliver the treadway sections to the site once Smith’s forces had cleared the pass of most of its enemy defenders.
Employing multiple teams of laborers, Partridge would try to assemble the bridge as quickly as possible. He knew the task wouldn’t be easy for his crews—constructing a bridge while simultaneously taking enemy fire—but they had worked under similar conditions while building the Hagaru airstrip. If Smith could keep the Chinese more or less at bay, Partridge thought his men could have it bolted together in a few hours. Once the long convoy had passed over the repaired bridge, a demolition team would then promptly destroy Partridge’s handiwork, to deny the Chinese its use.
Smith listened intently to this. The plan had merit, he thought. But when he began to second-guess it, envisioning the things that might go wrong, Partridge, normally a tactful and even-tempered man, grew annoyed. “Dammit sir!” he snapped. “I got you across the Han River. I got you an airfield at Hagaru. And I’ll get you a goddamn bridge at Koto-ri!”
Smith chuckled at the outburst. If he was startled to hear a lieutenant colonel cursing at a general, he didn’t let on. He liked Partridge’s improvisational spirit, liked the novelty and ambition of the idea. There was something classical about it, Smith thought. Partridge’s solution may have been a long shot, but it was the only one Smith had. As one Marine account noted: “On such slender threads as bridges dropped by air do men and armies live or perish.”
Smith ordered the engineer to get started immediately.
* * *
Later that day, an Air Force C-119 Flying Boxcar growled off from Yonpo Airfield, near Hamhung, its belly loaded with a single treadway piece. The pilot had been ordered to rise over the rice fields, circle around, and then release the ponderous cargo within the confines of a drop zone marked with bright-orange panels. It was a hastily arranged rehearsal, under relatively controlled conditions, to learn what would happen. The crew successfully discharged the treadway piece, but the twenty-four-foot parachute attached to it—the largest one they could find in Hamhung—proved inadequate. The bridge section plummeted, crumpled upon impact, and was driven into the ground, sending up a cloud of dust.
The test had demonstrated that for the real drop at Koto-ri, Partridge would need much bigger parachutes. A special detail of Army rigging experts flew in from Japan and worked through the night, making calculations, coiling ropes, and packing chutes. At Yonpo Airfield, crews numbering more than a hundred men would labor until dawn, loading and readying the planes. Nothing quite like this had ever been tried before, and they were excited by the challenge. The rigging experts decided that each steel section should be dropped from eight hundred feet above the ground and would require two forty-eight-foot parachutes, one attached at each end. The riggers felt confident that this would be sufficient to break each piece’s fall, but they were only guessing.
The next morning, a squadron of Flying Boxcars would be heading up to Koto-ri, each one bearing a precious piece of steel. Partridge knew he didn’t have the luxury of staging any more tests. This time it would be the real thing.
38
BLOOD ON THE ICE
East of the Reservoir
Ed Reeves didn’t understand how he could still be alive. His head pounded, and he felt hot blood oozing from his temple. He lay on the floor of the truck bed and tried not to move as he heard the rifle blasting his fellow Americans, one by one by one, into eternity. Another minute, and the shooting was over. The Chinese soldier hopped from the bed, and the officer in charge humphed his approval. The crew moved on to the next truck.
For hours, Reeves shivered in his bag. With Chinese soldiers all around, he dared not budge. Later in the day, though, when movements on the road quieted, he sat up long enough to steal a good look at the two dozen Americans around him. No one stirred. Their rigid limbs were twisted into awkward shapes, their faces frozen in odd expressions. He was sure he was the only one alive. He removed a glove and felt his face. Though it was tacky with blood, he could not find a bullet hole. The round had ripped a large flap of skin from his scalp and left a groove along his skull. But the gunman, in his haste to finish an unpleasant job, had fired a glancing shot.
Reeves didn’t have a plan for what to do next, but he knew he had to get off the truck. The dead bodies gave him the creeps. When darkness came, he unzipped his bag and tried to stand, but it was just like the last time he had tried it: He felt so lightheaded, he thought he would faint. He realized that if he lost consciousness for any period of time outside the warmth of his sleeping bag, he would quickly freeze. So that was it: He had no options. He would have to stay the night here in this ghoulish place.
* * *
The next day, Reeves was roused from his stupor by a crew of Chinese soldiers. They climbed onto the truck bed and started rifling through the clothes of the American corpses in search of anything valuable—watches, rings, cigarettes, lighters, boots. Once they were satisfied with their pickings from one corpse, they would toss the loot onto a cloth they had spread on the ground. They would hurl the corpse over the side, and other soldiers would drag it over to a fast-growing stack of bodies beside the road. Reeves understood what was happening: This was a graves detail. The Chinese were clearing the road of vehicles and bodies, foraging for useful relics, and trying to tidy up a hideous scene.
Reeves, peeking from his sleeping bag, tried to will his body not to tremble or make a sound. The crew worked down the line of corpses until they came to him. They unzipped his bag, unfastened his clothes, and started fumbling through his
pockets. Reeves breathed shallowly and kept his body rigid, trying his best to assume the attributes of a frozen cadaver. But one of the Chinese soldiers, sensing human warmth, recoiled in horror. Reeves heard a gasp, then shouts. The next thing he knew, they had hurled him from the truck bed. He struck the frozen ground with a thud. Three soldiers picked him off the snow and leaned him against the tailgate.
Reeves opened his eyes wide—he was no longer playing possum. He sensed that they wanted him to stand up and bow in respect. When Reeves failed to do so, they started beating him, kicking him, slapping him in the face.
They dragged him over to the side of the road and hurled him onto the pile of corpses. Then Reeves saw them pick up their rifles. He was expecting a bullet. Instead the soldiers started pounding him in the head with their rifle butts. He tried to buffer the impact with his hands, but the blows kept coming. Several times he felt the bones in his hands and fingers cracking.
The soldiers kept smiting away until they thought he was dead. One of them grasped him by a hank of bloody hair and studied his face. Reeves stared vacantly down the road. He didn’t blink. He didn’t move. He didn’t even breathe, fearing that his breath would freeze into fog as it rose through the air. The soldier let go of his head and grunted. He wiped the blood from his hands on Reeves’s jacket. The crew seemed sure he was gone.
They crouched beside their loot. Through a blood-red veil, Reeves watched them haggle over some of their spoils. They folded up the fabric and spun it into a bundle. Then they vanished into the whirling snow.
* * *
After an hour or so, Reeves slid down from the pile of the dead. He tried to fasten his clothing back together where the Chinese had undone it, but his hands were so smashed up, he couldn’t work the zippers and buttons and snaps. He sat in the snow and saw that the enemy was camped on the ridges above him. He was still in mortal danger—he had to get away from the road.
So he attempted to crawl, but his broken hands hurt so badly that he couldn’t put any weight on them. He tried using his elbows instead of his hands. That seemed to work, and he was able to creep off the road and into a field. As he did, a patrol of a half-dozen Chinese soldiers came marching down the road. Reeves stopped crawling and looked back in dread. They couldn’t possibly miss the trail of fresh blood that led from the corpse pile to where he was now. But if they did notice it, they didn’t pay it any mind.
He resumed his pitiful crawl. He was in excruciating pain, and each bout of exertion would result in progress of only a few feet. He looked up at the ridge and saw hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chinese. He wondered, Why don’t they shoot me? He would see them pop their heads out of their foxholes. It would have been so easy for them to snipe at him, but they held their fire. Reeves thought maybe they were taking bets on how far he could go before collapsing.
He came to a steep embankment leading to a set of railroad tracks that gleamed in the late-afternoon light. Painfully, he slid down and crawled across the tracks. He thought he heard the sound of marching feet reverberating through the cold metal of the rails. He climbed the other side of the ravine and hid in the scrub. A minute later, a column of Chinese tromped past him. They didn’t see the splotches of new blood along the tracks; they didn’t spot the freshly disturbed snow.
Hours passed, and finally Reeves reached the ice of the reservoir. He knew because he could feel its implacable hardness beneath him. Lying on his belly, he brushed away the snow and saw the blue glint in the moonlight. It was a beautiful sight, he thought, and for the first time he felt a glimmer of a chance that he might live.
He kept crawling farther out onto the reservoir, putting distance between himself and the Chinese. He found that his balky limbs responded to thought commands—individual parts would move only when he consciously willed them to. Right foot, slide forward. Left knee, push off. His elbows, no longer sturdy, would often slip out from under him and he’d bang his chin on the ice. At least it would jar him awake for a while. With redoubled determination, he would continue on through the night, scratching a jagged path across the long, smooth surface of the lake. To establish some kind of rhythm in his crawl, he recited the old marching chants he’d learned back in training:
Sound off!—one, two,
Sound off!—three, four,
The captain rides in a jeep,
The sergeant rides in a truck,
Gen’ral rides in a limousine,
But you’re just shit outta luck!
One, two, three, four, one, two,
THREE-FOUR!
Counting cadence in this way worked for only so long. Reeves knew he needed to conserve his energy or else he was going to pass out from exhaustion—and freeze. So he angled his back to the wind and curled up in a fetal position, tucking his knees under him, mashing his hands into his armpits to keep them warm. He vowed not to doze off—he would simply rest for a short while. But a few minutes later, he heard boots squeaking over the snow. Reeves threw a glance over his shoulder and saw a Chinese soldier, holding a burp gun, sauntering up to him. The soldier appeared to be alone. Reeves couldn’t figure out where he’d come from. The Chinese man prodded Reeves in the back with the barrel of his gun.
Reeves, who by this point was feeling nothing so much as a deep sense of disgust at the remorseless ways in which fate seemed to be toying with him, rose and cried out in a primal scream of spite and frustration. He figured that this time, surely, the end had come. But when he turned around, he was surprised to see the Red soldier running away. It was as though the man had seen a ghost. Reeves watched him kicking up snow as he sprinted toward the shore.
Reeves, wide awake now, continued his crawl across the ice.
* * *
At the first suggestion of morning, Reeves looked out and spotted another figure on the reservoir. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he appeared to be an American GI. He had emerged from the brush of a peninsular shoreline and was stumbling along, hugging himself in a way that indicated he’d been injured in the gut. “Hey, you!” Reeves yelled. “C’mere and help me!” The man did come, and when he approached, the two invalids surveyed each other. Reeves thought the GI looked ashen, on death’s door. God only knows what the man thought of Reeves—this sad creature, crawling along on his elbows like a praying mantis, his head a tangle of blood and ice. They stood there for a moment, looking at each other.
Then, out of nowhere, three Corsairs came zooming overhead, flying their first morning sorties. Reeves told the other soldier, “Write something in the snow—SOS or whatever.” In a frantic fury, the man scraped his foot across the snow, etching out an H, then an E. He was on the long leg of the L when one of the pilots spotted the letters taking form below him. The plane came down low over the ice, so close that Reeves could see the aviator’s goggles and the outlines of his helmet. The pilot gave them an “OK” signal as he flew by.
He must have radioed to dispatchers on the ground, for soon Reeves and the other man could make out a jeep speeding across the reservoir. Reeves worked himself to a sitting position as the vehicle grew bigger and bigger on the ice. It pulled right up to him. A Marine colonel, whose jacket said BEALL, climbed out of the jeep. He squatted beside Reeves on the ice. “Soldier,” he said softly. “Where you hurt? I don’t want to hurt you more.”
“The legs hurt a lot, sir.”
Lieutenant Colonel Olin Beall, commander of the Marine First Motor Transport Battalion, gently gathered him and tucked him into the jeep. He removed his own fur parka and bundled Reeves up. As a second vehicle arrived to retrieve the other frozen GI, Beall climbed into his jeep and rapped on the side. “Ralph!” he barked. “Let’s go!”
Private First Class Ralph Milton, a nineteen-year-old farm boy from Wyoming, was Beall’s driver. For the past three days, at General Smith’s instruction, they’d been pulling men off the reservoir. Beall’s crews of rescuers, who had become known as
the “Ice Marines,” had saved more than three hundred men. Countless times, Beall and his drivers had risked their lives out here on the reservoir. Sometimes they’d heard an ominous creaking sound and realized that their jeeps were in danger of breaking through. Often they had drawn enemy fire as they pulled wounded GIs from the shore brush. The Chinese bullets would ricochet off the ice, sometimes kicking up spurts of water around Beall’s crews as they sped back toward the Marine perimeter, using the frozen sheet as a superhighway.
Beall’s team of rescuers, pulling alongside so many prostrate bodies on the ice, had to make dreadful, on-the-spot assessments about who was dead or alive. “We developed a technique,” said Linus Chism, another of Beall’s drivers. “We got to where we could tell by looking closely at the guy’s mustache. If the hairs right under his nostrils was all icy and frozen, he was a goner. But if those hairs had even a little bit of moisture on them, just a little spot that wasn’t frozen, that meant he was still breathing, and we’d pick him up.”
Over the past three days, Beall and his drivers had seen many terrible cases. Men with compound fractures. Men walking in circles, muttering to themselves. Men hiding inside wooden dinghies that were locked into the shoreline ice. But he didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone in such bad shape as Reeves. Private Milton drove as fast as he could, the jeep fishtailing over the ice. When they reached the Hagaru perimeter, the sentries waved them on through. “Head for the runway, Ralph!” Beall said. The jeep got out on the runway and made straight for a C-47 transport plane that was preparing to take off, its propellers turning. Milton flashed his headlights at the plane as he pulled around to its wing. Beall climbed out and pounded on the fuselage. The hatch opened, and the pilot emerged.
On Desperate Ground Page 29