On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  The other two planes swooped down and dropped their treadway segments as well—both successfully. Then five more Flying Boxcars arrived, bearing five more bridge sections. One of the pieces drifted outside the perimeter and, as predicted, the Chinese fell upon it and hauled it away. This was doubly worrisome to Partridge: The enemy, upon inspecting the fallen bridge section, would fully apprehend, if he hadn’t already, the American intention to rebuild the span at Funchilin Pass. The Chinese would only redouble their defenses at the bridge site.

  Then one of the treadway sections dropped too quickly—one of its chutes didn’t open properly. It was damaged beyond repair when it smashed to the frozen ground. But three more sections landed safely. By afternoon’s end, the Brockway crews were able to recover six intact pieces, and that was enough. Meanwhile, another plane arrived to drop a substantial supply of precut plywood to serve as flooring for the bridge. Partridge was relieved: No planes had crashed, and no one had been hurt. He had everything he needed to carry out his plan. His engineers could get started.

  * * *

  At midmorning the next day, the two huge Brockway trucks, loaded with equipment and bridge parts, clanked away from Koto-ri in a blizzard. Partridge and his Marine engineers were accompanied by members of the Army’s Fifty-eighth Treadway Bridge Company. Platoons from Homer Litzenberg’s Seventh Marines worked out ahead of the two big trucks, clearing the country of the enemy as they went. The fighting was fierce, all the more so because the Marines had no air cover—Corsairs couldn’t fly in the whiteout conditions of this snowstorm. Each Brockway groaned down the road like a queen bee, fat and pampered, zealously protected by her own hive of soldiers.

  The convoy made only halting progress toward the blown bridge. The Chinese kept dropping shell fire on the road, trying to destroy the two big trucks and their precious cargo. With darkness descending, Litzenberg ordered the Brockways to the rear of the column. The mortar barrages were too intense, and he couldn’t risk damage to the trucks. Not only were the Brockways carrying the vital bridge parts, but they were also rigged with the hoists, cranks, winches, and cranes necessary for the span’s construction. Said Partridge: “The trucks, with their hydraulic operating systems, were vulnerable items of essential equipment; we had to get them out of there.”

  So the Brockways were turned around and driven to a protected place, tucked back from the road. The first truck nosed onto what appeared to be a good, flat parking space. But then its driver heard a frightful cracking sound and realized, too late, what was happening. This spot was not solid ground; it was a frozen-over pond. Pockets of spring water burbled beneath the ice, and then it collapsed. The Brockway, wallowing at first, sank up to its radiator in frigid water. Its engine wheezed and died. The driver couldn’t get it restarted—the motor was drowned. He was truly stuck.

  The other Brockway was brought over to the pond’s edge to yank her sister out. For a half hour, the engine revved and chuffed. Spinning wheels sang hot on the snow, flinging clods of dirt. Finally, the disabled truck emerged from the pond, rimed in ice, her engine apparently ruined. Partridge and his men fell into despair. “They were sick,” one Marine account put it, and they stood hunched in disbelief, “watching through slitted eyes.” As night fell, Partridge tried to reckon with the situation. “For me,” he said, “this was the most harrowing hour of the campaign.”

  43

  THE CROSSING

  Funchilin Pass

  The blizzard that had blown all day continued well into the night. But sometime in the early morning of December 9, the Marines at Koto-ri caught a hint of hope: They observed a single star winking through gauzy openings in the clouds. Many, taking it as an auspicious sign, came to call it the “Star of Koto-ri.” Said Staff Sergeant Manert Kennedy: “Seeing that star was like being given another shot at life. We had no idea if we were going to make it out of there. The star was a godsend, it was real—it meant the world to us.”

  Sure enough, by first light the snowstorm had cleared, and this happy turn in the weather changed everything. Now the Corsairs could return to the skies to menace and scatter the Chinese along the road. The engineers, with their one functioning and now grossly overloaded Brockway truck, could expect to reach the bridge site unmolested. The thousands of Americans trapped above the blown span could sense their salvation now.

  All morning, the Marines waged a mean battle at the site of the bridge. The mountains shuddered with artillery, and the Corsairs reddened the hillsides with their rockets and canisters of napalm. The artillerymen often employed “proximity fuze” shells—special munitions equipped with sensors that bounced radio waves off the ground as they hurtled through the sky; the shells were set to detonate at a predetermined height above their target, blasting thousands of metal shards down upon entire hillsides of the Chinese. By midday the enemy fortifications had crumbled. More than a hundred Chinese soldiers had surrendered. The word was conveyed by radio, and the engineers, guarded by a weapons company, hastened the three miles from Koto-ri down the MSR, reaching the site without incident. Partridge’s men, along with those on Lieutenant Ward’s bridge-building team, went to work.

  But within a few minutes, Partridge and Ward made an awful discovery: Over the past few days, the Chinese had managed to destroy the bridge further. The gap was now twenty-nine feet across, some nine feet wider than Partridge had estimated. This posed a problem, for the treadway sections, bolted together, reached only twenty-two feet. The engineers scratched their heads, did some more measuring, and admitted that they were stumped.

  Luckily, one of the enlisted engineers had spotted a pile of railroad timbers nearby and proposed that carpenters could build up a “crib” of interlacing lumber on a ledge that still clung to the bridge’s undergirding, about eight feet below the road level. This shelf was just wide enough to make up the difference between the treadway span and the actual gap.

  Partridge gave the idea his approval. More than a hundred men were thrown into the project—including all the able-bodied Chinese prisoners the Marines could commandeer. Shuffling on frostbitten feet, they fetched railroad ties, they assembled a foundation of sandbags, they hammered and sawed, they laid piece upon piece. Slowly, a scaffolding of wood rose from the depths until it reached the level of the road. But this hollow abutment of rough-cut lumber was dangerously wobbly; Partridge needed ballast to stabilize it. The engineers, having run out of sandbags, tried to gather sufficient quantities of dirt, yet the frozen earth proved impossible to excavate. Then a solution, grotesque but perhaps inevitable, took shape: They would fill in the gaps with human bodies.

  The battle for the bridge site had produced hundreds, possibly thousands, of Chinese corpses. They were strewn on the bloody hills, lying in ditches and draws, wedged into foxholes. They seemed to leer down at the pass they had given their lives to defend. If using them as a structural material seemed a ghastly expedient, it was perhaps no worse than leaving them where they were, out in the snow squalls, frozen in twisted shapes, their blanched faces bearing expressions of anguish and pain. At least some of them would be given a kind of burial, within the substructure of the bridge.

  A work detail began the grim task of collecting bodies and dropping them into the span’s interstices. It seemed strange but not so terrible at the time. It was another horror to add to those they’d seen and done, and had done to them—another bruise to the soul. The lattice crib was filled with human ballast, and the engineers declared the structure stable enough to accept the full weight of the bridge pieces. The lone Brockway truck was brought forward, and its hydraulic crane swung the steel segments into place. Workmen crawled out to bolt together the spacers and fasteners—performing “high-wire acrobatics,” according to one Marine account, “while from the near hills Chinese snipers added to the entertainment, trying to pick off individual engineers swinging out over the void.” As the construction proceeded, Marines patrolled the hills, dislodging the
last nests of the Chinese.

  The engineers worked for several hours. Finally, crews laid a course of thick plywood sheets between the metal treadways, and the span was complete. Partridge ordered a test run. A jeep eased out over the chasm. The bridge settled and creaked, but it held.

  Partridge couldn’t contain his glee as he drove to the top of the pass to alert the waiting train of division vehicles that the span was repaired and the breakout could begin at last. Stretching to Koto-ri and back toward Hagaru, a convoy numbering more than a thousand vehicles had been waiting for this moment, fighting off the Chinese all the while. It was a snake of rolling machinery, bumper to bumper, ten miles long: ambulances, transport trucks, half-tracks, artillery pieces, tractors, bulldozers, snowplows, tanks. Some fourteen thousand Marines and Army soldiers, as well as Royal Marines, would be marching or motoring down the mountain. They had come to the reservoir as a fighting force, and they would come out the same way, with their guns and equipment intact.

  Partridge returned to the bridge site and, in the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon, waved the first dozen vehicles across. The column seemed to be moving smartly along when a large bulldozer crossing the span snapped through one of the plywood floorboards. The piece of equipment was too heavy—the sheet of wood gave way with a crack, and the nose of the bulldozer tipped into the abyss. This was too much for the terrified driver, who slid off and slunk back to the north side of the bridge. The whole train of vehicles was stopped, and would remain so until this ponderous obstacle could be removed. Partridge mulled over a solution. Darkness had fallen, making the task before him even more daunting.

  Then a technical sergeant named Wilfred Prosser pressed forward and volunteered to rescue the stricken piece of machinery. By most accounts, Prosser was the best dozer operator in the whole division and was not wanting in courage. He sidestepped onto the bridge and climbed to the seat of the tipped bulldozer. By deftly working the blade, Prosser was able to right the vehicle. Then, guided by flashlights, he eased it backward, drawing applause as he safely returned to terra firma.

  Partridge’s engineers had to find a way to repair the cracked bridge. They decided they should yank out the plywood center boards and respace the steel treadways a few inches farther apart. In this new configuration, wider vehicles would ride along the outer lip of the span while narrower vehicles would ride the inside lip. This should work, Partridge reasoned, but it meant the drivers would have precious few inches to spare. With the precut plywood sheets removed, the gap between the parallel metal spans would be nothing but black air. The drivers would have to hold their tires in exactly the same position for the crossing or risk a drop into the void. Each vehicle would have to inch along, with teams of observers holding flashlights front and rear.

  Partridge’s men removed the plywood boards and began to respace the steel treadways. In another hour it was done, and the vehicles were moving again. Their drivers fought off vertigo as they crept across the gulf. They had to trust their pedestrian guides—and not look down. Partridge’s modified bridge was treacherous, but it seemed to be working.

  * * *

  Eight hundred yards down the mountain, however, another obstacle loomed: The blown railway trestle still lay across the road, like an unwanted toy tossed aside by a surly giant. To some of Partridge’s men, this seemed an even tougher impediment than the blown bridge. The sappers were going to have to blast apart the metal monstrosity, piece by piece. It could take hours—and Partridge didn’t have hours.

  One of his lieutenants, David Peppin, went to inspect the trestle with a small team and a bulldozer. Peppin observed that there was a stream issuing from the mountain nearby. It was mostly frozen, but it still seeped and trickled. Where it met the road, the water fanned out in frozen sheets beneath the railroad trestle.

  Peppin had an idea. “Just for the hell of it,” he recalled, “I told the bulldozer operator to butt his blade up against the trestle and see what would happen.” The driver figured it was a quixotic move, but he was willing to try. When he did, the result was almost comical: He smacked it once and the whole piece, many tons in weight, slid effortlessly along like a puck on a rink. Within a few seconds, the little dozer had pushed the trestle off the road.

  Nothing stood in Partridge’s way. The road to Hamhung and on to the sea was clear. Smith’s men, who had been steadily flooding into Koto-ri over the past several days, were finally free to break out. Now the long file of troops and vehicles began to spill from the mountains and cross over Partridge’s unlikely construction—a bridge delivered by parachutes, assembled by acrobats, and buttressed, in part, by the enemy’s frozen flesh. “I’ll get you a goddamn bridge,” Partridge had said—and he’d made good on his promise. In a few hours, once everyone had passed over it, his men would blow it up again.

  Through the night, the men and the machines kept coming, easing down the steeps toward Hamhung. The procession was quiet, save for the distant rumbling of artillery. People hardly spoke. They sensed that their ordeal might be over, and with that realization came flood tides of emotion. On the road that night, Partridge found the mood hopeful, but also spooky. “There seemed to be a glow over everything,” he recalled. “There was no illumination and yet you seemed to see quite well; there was the crunching of many feet and many vehicles on the crisp snow. There were many North Korean refugees on one side of the column and Marines walking on the other side. Every once in a while, there would be a baby wailing. There were cattle on the road. Everything added to the general sensation of relief, or expected relief, and was about as eerie as anything I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

  Manert Kennedy thought the cries of the refugees had a distinct ebb and flow, like the paroxysms of a wounded creature. “Those poor folks out there,” he said. “A collective moan came out of them, it had a rhythm to it. It was an ungodly sound of hopelessness, of helplessness. It chilled me right down to the bone. I can still hear it.”

  44

  WE WILL SEE YOU AGAIN IN THE SOUTH

  Hamhung

  Lee Bae-suk found it surreal to be standing all day with a rifle slung over his arm at the Bridge of Long Life, a mere handful of blocks from the place of his birth. He felt like an interloper, a ghost in his own home. His job was to interrogate people crossing over the bridge, to check their passes and keep an eye out for suspicious activity. He scanned the crowds, looking for faces he knew but dreading what would happen if a face he knew spotted him. Lee couldn’t tell his American comrades who he really was, and he hated the dissembling this entailed. The Americans, he’d heard, believed that all North Koreans were Communists. He tried to feign disinterest in his surroundings, as though this were just any assignment, in any place. He had a job to do, and he had to work hard to assume a stern and businesslike demeanor.

  Several days went by. The work at the bridge was unceasing. Lee never got a break. He had hoped that he might find a lull, a free hour or two to peel away from the checkpoint and disappear into the city to hunt down his family. He tried to work up the nerve to ask his American superiors for an afternoon off. But he dared not—not yet, anyway. Such a request might rankle them, he feared, and it might raise suspicions.

  Then, one morning, General Almond and the American command issued a new order: At noon that day, Hamhung was to be locked down. No one would be allowed to cross the bridge and enter the city. Except for American or South Korean soldiers holding the appropriate pass, all traffic must cease—indefinitely.

  The purpose of the order was to relieve congestion in the overcrowded city so that the Americans could organize themselves and get smoothly on their way to Hungnam. It was designed primarily to keep out the flood of civilian refugees from the mountains, and any North Korean guerrillas or Chinese infiltrators who might be hiding, in various disguises, in their midst.

  But the ban applied equally to locals: Any Hamhung citizens who, in their random comings and goings
, happened to be outside the city when the order was issued could not pass back inside to resume their lives and reunite with their families. At the stroke of noon, the gates would shut. These hapless people, many thousands of them, would be trapped outside the city until the Americans left and the moratorium was lifted. Almond’s order was unequivocal—no exceptions.

  A loudspeaker was mounted on a jeep beside the checkpoint. At noon, Lee was told to announce the order. He hated to do it, but he had no choice. When his words issued from the squawky speaker, a wail of panic and outrage arose from across the river. Crowds began to teem on the other side of the bridge. Lee could hear their wild pleas. People were stunned. They cursed at the authorities and shook their fists in the air. Some dove into the freezing cold river and tried to swim across. Rumors circulated that the Americans had placed explosives in the undergirding of the bridge and were going to blow it to prevent any more crossings.

  Lee had never seen such a heartbreaking sight: starving refugees from the mountains, wizened grandparents, infants crying at their mothers’ breasts. Farmers with pots tied around them, clanging miscellanies of vessels stuffed with their last belongings. These people had come down from the Chosin battlefields in a great hegira, had braved the snows, had risked their lives—only to arrive at this implausible terminus at the moment the gate had snapped shut.

  And Lee was there to stop them, to dash their hopes and turn them around. What an awful assignment it was. His orders were to halt them at the west side of the bridge and, through the tinny amplifier, command them in the boldest possible language to walk no further. If they kept coming, Lee was told to point his rifle in the air and fire a warning shot. And if they still kept coming, he was to shoot directly into the crowds.