“I got another one for you here,” Beall yelled over the roar of the engines.
“Colonel, we’re already overloaded,” the pilot said. “We can’t take any more.”
But Beall was adamant. “Captain, I said I got another one for you here.” They loaded Reeves onto the plane and strapped him into a stretcher. The C-47 revved its engines and took off. As it pulled up over East Hill, Reeves heard an insistent metallic noise: It was Chinese small-arms fire, pecking the belly of the aircraft as it rose from the battlefield.
Reeves was one of the last soldiers to be pulled off the ice. When the final tallies came in, they were devastating: About a third of the nearly three thousand soldiers who were trapped on the east side of the lake had been killed or captured. Task Force Faith had been obliterated as a fighting force. In a way, Reeves was one of the lucky ones.
When the plane leveled off, a flight nurse leaned over Reeves. “Hurting much?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“When did you have your last shot for pain?”
“Haven’t.”
“When were you hit?”
“I don’t know. Days ago.”
She worked up a dose of morphine and administered it to Reeves. Feeling flushed and warm all over, he drifted into semiconsciousness. The plane buzzed toward the coast. It landed at Yonpo Airfield, near Hamhung, and Reeves was spirited inside a medical tent next to the runway. When they snipped his clothes away and beheld his wounds, the doctors didn’t know where to start. His legs? His head? The doctors didn’t say anything to Reeves, but they could see that he would have to lose his feet, and probably his hands as well. But Ed Reeves was defiant. “They give me another shot of morphine,” he said. “By then I thought I could whip the whole Chinese army.”
39
TAKING DEPARTURE
The Sea of Japan
On the afternoon of December 4, the aircraft carrier USS Leyte heaved in the seas off Hamhung-Hungnam. On its wooden flight deck, a pilot, Ensign Jesse Brown, revved the engine of his Navy fighter, Corsair 211, and prepared to take off. Crewmen removed the chocks, and the dark-blue plane pulled forward in a crowd of other Corsairs from Fighter Squadron 32. It was forty degrees on the carrier deck—brisk and gusting, but a world away from the mountains around the reservoir, where the squadron would be heading today. As the prop wash streamed over his plane’s Plexiglas canopy, Brown cinched his helmet, adjusted his goggles, and began a final check of his instruments. He wore fire-retardant gloves, a khaki flight suit, a parachute, and a life jacket. Brown eased the fighter ahead. Like all Navy Corsairs, his plane bristled with weapons—including six .50 caliber machine guns, eight salvo rockets, and an egg-shaped bomb that contained napalm jelly.
Deckhands summoned Brown and nine other Corsairs into place. The whole aircraft carrier pulsed with the roar of the engines and the whine of the yellow-tipped propellers. In the Leyte’s tower, hundreds of well-wishers could be seen leaning against the rails, cheering. Many aboard this Essex-class carrier seemed to know that the squadron of Corsairs would be heading over the reservoir, in what promised to be a dangerous assortment of missions.
Brown gave a thumbs-up in recognition, then throttled his Corsair forward again. Behind him, serving as his wingman for the day’s mission, was Lieutenant Thomas Hudner, piloting Corsair 205. Brown and Hudner had trained together at a naval air station in Rhode Island and had recently completed a lengthy tour of duty, cruising the Mediterranean from Crete to Monaco to Lebanon. Today they would stay in close radio contact and do their best to keep each other out of harm’s way.
The pilots had run through their checklists, and the squadron was ready. At the signal, Brown raced down the long planked runway, gaining speed, slowly lifting the nose. At eighty miles an hour, he climbed off the deck and banked over the sea. Soon Hudner and the others were also launched into the sky, and the Corsairs fell into formation. Turning west, they sped over the shoreline and, two by two, vectored for the snowy mountains beyond.
* * *
Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner hailed from dramatically different worlds, but they were the truest of friends.
Quiet, steady, cautious, Jesse Brown had a bashful smile offset by a sharp gaze that projected an air of purposefulness. Though he was only twenty-four years old, he had already flown twenty combat missions over Korea, and he was one of the most experienced pilots—and most reliable shots—on the Leyte. Devoutly religious, he often prayed in the cockpit before takeoff. He usually kept to himself while aboard ship. He neither smoked nor drank (“Make mine a gin and tonic—but hold the gin,” he’d say when he found himself in a bar). He was smitten with his wife, Daisy, and their baby girl, Pam. He often spent his nights on the Leyte writing Daisy love letters or designing the dream house they hoped to start building back home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, once the war was over. He had only a few more months of active duty left and then he could go home. The previous night, he’d stayed up late working on a letter to Daisy. He’d slipped it into the Leyte’s maildrop that morning.
Reserved and unassuming though he was, Brown was a celebrity in the world of aviation. He was the first black fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy, and the first African American to fly off an aircraft carrier. He’d been photographed by Life, and he’d been the subject of newspaper articles all across the country. The other black men aboard the Leyte—stewards, petty officers, mechanics, deckhands—so revered Brown for breaking the color barrier that they’d recently pooled their money and surprised him with an expensive Rolex watch. Brown wore it with pride.
He’d come from humble beginnings. The son of black Mississippi sharecroppers, with Choctaw and Chickasaw blood also mingled in his veins, Jesse had grown up in a tin-roofed wooden shack without plumbing or electricity, in a little place called Lux, not far from Hattiesburg. The cabin was set beside some railroad tracks at the edge of the piney woods. “The whole structure sat on blocks, a pile under each corner,” wrote Brown’s biographer, Adam Makos. “When trains raced by at night, the cabin shook.” Brown grew up in a world of mules and molasses, overalls and overtime. (During harvest season, the family liked to say they worked from “cain’t see to cain’t see.”) Brown’s parents, stalwart Baptists, grew their own vegetables and raised their own chickens, but they were forever in debt to the company store run by the landowner whose fields they worked. Mired in the monotony of their circumstances, the Browns urged their children to pursue an education.
Jesse took the lesson to heart. When he wasn’t chopping cane or cotton, he usually had his nose in a book. A star athlete, he graduated as the salutatorian of his high school in Hattiesburg and won a scholarship to study architectural engineering at Ohio State University (which he chose because his hero, Jesse Owens, had gone there).
Brown’s real passion, though, was aviation. When Jesse was six, his dad had taken him to a local air show that featured biplanes doing acrobatic stunts and wing walkers defying death, only to float safely to earth by parachute. Jesse was hooked: Ever since that day, he had wanted to fly planes. By lamplight, he read Popular Aviation magazine until the copies became tattered. People often scorned the naïveté of his ambition: “If Negroes can’t ride in aeroplanes, they sure ain’t gonna be flying one,” a family friend had once assured him. But when President Truman, in 1947, began the process of fully integrating the United States armed forces, Jesse decided to enlist in the Navy to become a pilot. He trained for three hard years, in Illinois and Iowa, then in Pensacola, Florida, learning to fly Grumman Bearcats and Hellcats, then the Vought-designed F4U Corsair. He earned his commission as an ensign in 1949 and was assigned to Quonset Point Naval Air Station, in Rhode Island, where he met Tom Hudner.
Hudner was a winsome man with bright blue eyes and a lantern jaw. Twenty-six years old and a bachelor, “Hud,” as he was known, liked to drink Scotch and smoke a pipe. He grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts, in a stately shingle
d Victorian house. His father had gone to Harvard and owned a successful chain of grocery stores. Even in the depths of the Great Depression, his family hardly suffered. Two of Hudner’s brothers attended Harvard, and another went to Princeton. The family had a full-time maid, and young Tom often whiled away his afternoons playing lacrosse and running track. He was “movie star handsome,” wrote naval historian and novelist Theodore Taylor, and spent his summers at the family’s home on the coast, where he “did a lot of sailing and loved to read nautical books, especially about four-masters and Captain Horatio Hornblower.” Hudner attended Phillips Andover, then the Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland, where he graduated in 1947. For all the privileges of his upbringing, he had cultivated from his parents a commitment to duty and an unspoken sense of noblesse oblige. Hud liked the good life, but he wasn’t a snob.
Unlike Brown, he’d never wanted to fly planes. His first sojourn in the skies was decidedly inauspicious—he was prone to airsickness, he found, and couldn’t hold down his lunch. But as an Academy graduate, Hudner had to choose a path and put in his time for the Navy. His rationale for deciding to fly planes was superficial at best: Pilots were cool, he’d heard, and girls seemed to like them. All the same, Hudner grew to love flying, and he turned out to be good at it. He experienced a deep sense of calm in the air, and he seemed to have the right reflexes and instincts. He planned to make a career in the Navy. Everyone seemed to agree: Hud was a natural.
* * *
The squadron of Corsairs arrowed over the white gloom. Heading northwest, climbing from the coast, they loosely followed the road as it twined through the mountains, a road choked with scorched barricades and ruined vehicles. From up here in the relative warmth of their cockpits, moving at more than 250 miles an hour, the pilots couldn’t imagine the travails that had taken place in this wintry outback. Brown and Hudner flew in silence, bouncing through the turbulence, occasionally snatching glimpses of each other as they flew side by side.
Forty-five minutes later, the planes came to a place where the country opened up to a valley that was studded with tents, girded with entrenchments, ringed with artillery, and marked by a fresh gash that proved to be an airstrip. It was a military tent city lofted in the mountains, a tabernacle of war: Hagaru. Smoke twisted from a dozen fires, and vehicles idled in white veils of exhaust. For Hudner, the frozen village brought to mind a painting he’d seen in his youth, depicting the winter encampment of a Roman legion dug in at the edge of Gaul.
Dozens of Corsairs and Skyraiders circled over Hagaru, awaiting orders from the dispatcher below. Brown and Hudner fell in with the flow of traffic and tried to follow the radio cross-chatter in their headphones. From their high perch, the circling pilots could see the transport planes parked on the rubbly runway, some disgorging reinforcements, others taking on casualties from the battlefield.
Finally, the pilots in the circling Corsairs got their orders: Head north toward Yudam-ni, then fly over the trackless barrens along the western shores of the lake. That morning, a large contingent of Chinese replacements, as many as ten thousand, had reportedly been seen marching south, aiming for Hagaru. The squadron’s mission was to confirm the size and whereabouts of this enemy force—and, if possible, attack it.
Flipping on their gunsights, arming their salvo rockets, Brown and Hudner peeled off and headed north with the rest of the Corsairs. They dropped down low, almost to the level of the treetops, and followed a dirt road that skirted the reservoir. When Brown first flew over the Chosin country, a month earlier, he had found it a land of unsurpassed beauty—the luminescent blue lake surrounded by fall foliage and mountain meadows matted in the season’s last wildflowers. He had written to Daisy about it. He’d never seen such a tranquil spot. But now it was covered with snow and scrims of fog, a gray and forbidding place.
The Corsairs searched for a half hour, covering a broad grid of terrain, but the recon mission was a bust: no sign of the Chinese. Wherever they were, they remained cleverly hidden. At three o’clock, about seventeen miles north of Hagaru, near a village called Somong-ni, an unseen Chinese gunman raised his weapon and fired into the sky. A bullet struck the thin aluminum skin of Corsair 211, Jesse Brown’s plane, and pierced the oil line. It was a one-in-a-million shot. Brown didn’t hear it over the vibrations of his engine.
The concerned voice of another Corsair pilot broke over the radio. “Jesse, something’s wrong—looks like you’re bleeding fuel!”
Brown, swiveling his neck, couldn’t see anything. But Hudner was able to confirm it: “You’ve got a streamer, all right.”
Brown checked his instrument panel and saw the needle on his oil pressure gauge dropping fast. The engine grew hotter and hotter as oil seeped from the line. Brown couldn’t do anything to stop it. The gnashing was terrible. The friction was grinding away the innards of the plane. His engine was burning up.
He knew he couldn’t make it back to Hagaru, and he was already too low to bail out and land by parachute. He had no alternative but to crash his plane—and do it in a hurry.
“I have to put it down,” Brown radioed.
Scanning the topography, Brown couldn’t find anything promising. It was the usual Chosin country—a confusion of steep ridges and ravines, much of it covered in runt pine trees. His engine’s eighteen cylinders were misfiring, his propeller stammering and spitting smoke. Corsair 211 dropped into a steep descent. Hudner followed him, and they both hunted for a swath of level country. At ten o’clock ahead, a half mile toward the north, Brown spotted a relatively flat place, a bowl-shaped clearing framed by spines of rock. It seemed to be a mountain pasture where villagers took livestock to graze in the summer months. A boarded-up shack stood on the verge of the field. If he could glide his way over there, he might be able to lay his aircraft down.
“Taking departure,” Brown transmitted as he zeroed in on the clearing. His voice was calm.
Hudner swooped beside him and talked him through the procedures for a crash landing. In short order, Brown jettisoned his belly tank, released his napalm, and fired his rockets into the hills—measures designed to lighten the aircraft and minimize the likelihood of an explosive fire.
As he neared his target, Brown saw that the pasture left much to be desired. Hardly level, it was crosshatched with small trees. Large rocks lurked beneath a veneer of snow. But it would have to do. Following protocol, Brown cranked his canopy backward until it clicked into place. The freezing air rushed over his face as the plane glided downward. Hudner was still at his wing, issuing encouragement over the radio.
Brown held the nose up as long as he could, but he was losing control: The plane had stopped flying. As Brown prepared to crash, Hudner pulled back on the stick of his Corsair and climbed to safety.
With a terrific shudder, Brown’s six-ton aircraft struck the earth and sent up a cloud of snow and debris. The impact demolished the propeller blades, hurling fragments across the field. For a few seconds, Corsair 211 furrowed through the snow, groaning and buckling as it went. Finally it ground to a stop in a thin hiss of smoke.
My own dear sweet Angel, I’m so lonesome. But I try to restrain myself and think of the fun we’re going to have when we do get together, so only a few tears escape now and then. The last few days we’ve been doing quite a bit of flying, trying to slow down the Chinese communists and give support to some Marines who were surrounded. Helping those poor guys on the ground, I think every pilot here would fly until he dropped in his tracks.
Don’t be discouraged, Angel, believe in God and believe in Him with all your might and I know that things will work out all right. We need Him now like never before. Have faith with me, darling, and He’ll see us thru and we’ll be together again before too long. I want you to keep that pretty little chin up, Angel, come on now way up. Your husband loves his wife with all his heart and soul—no man ever loved a woman more.
40
THE BRIDGE OF L
ONG LIFE
Hamhung
That same week, Lee Bae-suk touched down in his native province after four long years away. His assignment had finally come through: He was going to serve as a translator, as well as a military policeman, for the X Corps forces in Hamhung. His plane, a four-engine C-54, rolled to a stop at Yonpo Airfield, and Lee, churning with emotions, pressed his face against the window. Were his parents alive? His brothers and sisters, his cousins and friends? Would his neighborhood still be standing? What would happen to Hamhung when the Americans left? Lee could scarcely work through the welter of feelings that coursed through him. He yearned to see his home but feared he wouldn’t recognize it. He was worried that he had arrived too late.
Lee and other two translators stepped off the plane into a blustery day, sunny but bitterly cold. Enormous piles of crated supplies sat on the Yonpo runway. A squadron of Corsairs stood idling, preparing to take off for the highlands around Chosin. An officer from X Corps greeted the three translators and ushered them into the base. They were driven to Hamhung’s city hall, which had been taken over by the American military. Lee was told to report to the Criminal Investigations Division, down the hall, to undergo questioning. Lee’s gut clenched at this: He still had not told anyone about his past—that he had grown up in North Korea, in this very city. He feared that if he did, he would be arrested as an infiltrator and a spy. He was certain that the investigators would see him as the enemy and send him to jail.
An American officer led off with a few questions. Lee fibbed, saying he had been born and raised in Seoul. His northern dialect might have given him away, but luckily, the Korean officer on duty had been pulled aside on another matter. Lee sailed through the questioning, and it was official: He would serve in a unit of the X Corps military police, attached to the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division. He was given a uniform and a rifle, offered C rations to eat, and told to report back in the morning for duty. They told him he would be working at the most important checkpoint in the city, guarding a large bridge that spanned the Songchon River. It was called Mansekyo—the Bridge of Long Life.
On Desperate Ground Page 30