Isegoria

The Marines paused to consolidate after each move forward along the Main Supply Route, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War):

The terrain made it impossible for the division to remain intact, but at each successive plateau along the MSR, units were consolidated at regimental or battalion strength, with supporting artillery able to fire in any direction.

[...]

This consolidation, and the fact that most Marine officers had had experience with Oriental warfare, learning the importance of keeping tight, steelringed perimeters by night whatever happened in the rear, did much to save the division.

[...]

The moon came up, huge and swollen, rising clear and bright over the swirling ground mists. It came up behind Easy Company, silhouetting the company positions for the enemy, but not throwing enough light along the dark corridors to reveal the lurking Chinese. On the hill, the temperature had dropped to twenty below.

Easy’s men heard monstrous shuffling sounds through the dark, as of thousands of boots stamping in the snow. They heard sounds, but they could see only ghostly moon shadows.

Yancey asked Ball, on the mortars, to fire star shells.

Ball had little 81 ammo, but he tried. The flares wouldn’t work — lifted from crates stamped “1942,” they fizzled miserably.

[...]

The enemy mortars fell first, bursting with pinpoint precision among the foxholes on the forward slope of Hill 1282. Then, in the moonlit hills, bugles racketed; purple flares soared high, and popped. The shadows suddenly became men, running at Marine lines.

The Chinese did not scream or shout, like North Koreans. They did not come in one overwhelming mass. They came in squads, yards apart, firing, hurling grenades, flailing at the thin line across the hill, probing for a weak spot across which they could pour down into the valley beyond.

Again and again they were stopped; again and again Chinese bugles plaintively noised the recall. The icy slopes were now littered with sprawled figures in long white snow capes.

Again and again, while the Marines’ guns grew hot, they came back to flail at the hill. Looking down into the shadowy valley, John Yancey could see hundreds of orange pinpoints of light, as the enemy sprayed his hill with lead.

The night seemed endless. A grenade exploded close to Yancey, driving metal fragments through his face to lodge behind his nose. Many of his men were hit. Those who could stand continued fighting; those badly hurt were dragged some twenty yards behind the company position, where a hospital corpsman worked over them in the snow.

There was no shouting or crying. Now and then a man gasped, “Oh, Jesus, I’m hit!” or, “Mother of God!” and fell down.

The attacks whipped the hill. By the early hours of morning, most of Easy’s men had frozen noses or frozen feet in addition to their combat wounds. Yancey’s blood froze to his moustache, dried across his stubbled face. Snorting for breath through his damaged nose, he had trouble breathing.

[...]

The platoon, all Easy Company was in desperate straits. Captain Phillips, who had carried ammunition to Yancey’s platoon during the night, and who had said again and again, “You’re doing okay, men; you’re doing okay!” took a bayoneted rifle, and ran out to the front of Yancey’s line.

“This is Easy Company!” Walt Phillips said. “Easy Company holds here!” He thrust the bayonet deep into the snowy ground; the rifle butt swayed back and forth in the cold wind, a marker of defiance, a flag to stand by.

[...]

John Yancey realized that some sort of counteraction had to be taken to push them out. He ran back of the hill, found half a dozen able men coming up as replacements. “Come with me!”

With the new men, he charged the breach in Easy’s line. His own carbine would fire only one shot at a time; the weapons of two of the replacements froze. The other four dropped with bullets in their heads—the Chinese aimed high.

Beside the CP, Lieutenant Ball, the exec, sat cross-legged in the snow, firing a rifle. Several Chinese rushed him. Ball died.

Now Yancey could find only seven men in his platoon. Reeling from exhaustion and shock, he tried to form a countercharge. As he led the survivors against the broken line, a forty-five caliber Thompson machine-gun slug tore his mouth and lodged in the back of his skull. Metal sliced his right cheek, as a hand grenade knocked him down.

On his hands and knees, he found he was blind.

He heard Walt Phillips shouting, “Yancey! Yancey!”

Somebody he never saw helped Yancey off the hill, led him back down the rear slope. He collapsed, and woke up later in the sick bay at Yudam-ni, where his sight returned.

Behind him, on 1282, Captain Walt Phillips stood beside his standard until he died. Late in the afternoon, a new company relieved Easy; of its 180 men only twenty-three came off.

But they held the hill.

[...]

Reality had caught up with the Marines, as with all men, but they had faced it well. Everywhere, the Marines had held.

On 25 November T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), men of the 1/7 Marines took a prisoner, a subdued, wounded Chinese, who said he was a private soldier:

Under interrogation, this humble POW became a fount of information. Among other things. he described the CCF plan of battle.

[...]

Marine field grade officers hardly knew as much of their own battle plans, and the Chinese information was greeted with suspicion or ironic amusement. It was never credited. Unfortunately, it was correct.

[...]

Hardheaded and quick-tempered, Sung had driven his men across the terrible mountains from the Yalu in fourteen nights of marching. By any standards, it had been a prodigious feat for the Chinese hordes to clamber across the icy mountains unseen. Unable to bring across his heavy artillery, Sung gambled. He drove the men, with rifles, mortars, and machine guns, on ahead, leaving his big guns behind.

[...]

Chinese advanced until they drew fire, then retired. One officer, realizing that the enemy was trying to smell out American positions, ran up and down shouting, “Don’t fire — don’t fire!” But he was too late. Nervous, the men had fired at the slightest sound, and the Chinese learned what they wanted to know.

[...]

When darkness fell across the bleak, icy landscape, Task Force Faith began another night of battle. Alone, exposed to the full weight of the Chinese assault pouring against its front, flanks, and rear, after more than one hundred hours of incessant combat Task Force Faith dissolved. Colonel Faith was killed by a hand grenade.

Beyond Chinhung-ni the road rose 2,500 feet into cold, thin mountain air, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), and from Kot-o-ri the road crept through mile-high hills to the city of Hagaru, near the southern tip of the thirty-mile-long Changjin Reservoir:

And here, in November 1950, winter came early, howling off the roof of the world, screaming across the frozen Yalu, the worst winter the world had seen for a decade.

[...]

Korea is not sheltered by the surrounding seas from the cold that sweeps the northern land mass of Asia. On a parallel with climes that are moderate in Europe or America, Korea is arctic when winter comes.

[...]

The mercury dropped to ten below. At the first shock, men became dazed and incoherent. Some grew numb, others cried with pain. No amount of clothing, even good GI issue, could entirely keep the cold out.

Many Americans were used to much worse weather — but not to fight in, without fires, shelter, or warm food. Water froze solid in canteens; rations froze in their cans. Plasma froze; medical supplies could not be stored more than eight feet away from a roaring stove at any time. Vehicles, once stopped, would hardly run again. Guns froze solid — all oil had to be removed from them; and many automatic weapons would fire but one shot at a time.

[...]

The ground froze eighteen inches down. To dig a hole with chapped, numb hands was prolonged agony; each night each man had to dig his shelter nonetheless, and lie shivering in its shallow length through thirteen hours of darkness.

One of the persistent myths of American arms in the middle of this century, T. R. Fehrenbach argues (in This Kind of War), is that technicians somehow are not and should not be soldiers, before telling the grim tale of the 9th Infantry’s medics, bringing up the rear as their convoy stopped:

When the regiment debarked at Pusan, the medics were issued rifles. As Schlichter put it later, this caused a certain amount of consternation in the ranks. For here they were told that the North Korean enemy considered any man in uniform fair game, whether he wore medic’s armband or the chaplain’s silver cross, and they should govern themselves accordingly.

[...]

Then an officer — for there were young men wearing bars among this convoy who were never soldiers, either — ran along the stalled line of trucks, shouting: “It’s every man for himself! We’re trapped! Get out any way you can!”

Men got down from the trucks and began to run for the circling hills — and the officers and sergeants followed. Here, thought Sergeant Schlichter later, we committed a grievous error. Here we broke faith with our fellow soldiers, and fellow men.

There were 180 wounded men in the trucks, and no one said anything to these men as they were abandoned.

[...]

All night the medics, none of whom possessed any infantry training, wandered aimlessly through the hills fringing the road.

[...]

Undamaged, the vehicles stood starkly by the road, in column, easily visible from the air. Before Schlichter’s party reached them, Air Force planes screamed out of the south, shooting, bombing. It was standard practice for the Air Force to destroy abandoned equipment before the enemy could profit from it. The pilots could not know what cargo those deserted trucks still held.

Schlichter was too far away to do anything, but close enough to hear the wounded men aboard the vehicles scream. Then the Air Force dropped napalm, the drums bouncing from the frozen ground and engulfing the dusty trucks in flame.

The road west was unfit to move howitzers by night on a fighting withdrawal, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), so the cooks, clerks, and drivers of the 15th Field Artillery formed daisy chains from the ammunition dumps to the guns:

Only a few thousand yards beyond, Chinese were pressing down from the hills in column. With every man in the artillery bearing a hand to bring up the ammunition, the gunners opened fire.

In twenty minutes, the battalion sent 3,206 rounds through the tubes; the earth before the advancing Chinese trembled and exploded in fire and death. Paint burned and peeled from the guns; breechblocks went dark from heat. Then, the ammunition gone, Keith’s gunners’ removed the firing locks and sights and thermited the tubes, and made for their trucks.

But the hail of explosives had saved the regiment. Running into such unprecedented fire, the Chinese stopped — and believing they were about to be counterattacked, they dug in.

T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War) Lieutenant Tom Turner’s incredible afternoon:

Earlier, while directing fire against attacking Chinese, a rocket blast from friendly air knocked him unconscious in the ditch, where he lay for more than an hour as the motorcade ground past.

Coming to, bruised and shaken, he had walked more than a mile south, moving along stopped vehicles whose drivers and riders were down in the ditches, fighting. At the head of this mile-long column he found a small truck standing idle, clear road opening before it, while its crew engaged in rifle duels with the Chinese in the hills.

Turner got this truck on its way — then, under heavy fire, he moved back along the road, getting men into their trucks and moving again. It took tremendous effort, and great courage. Finally, with the trucks moving, he leaped on the running board of a two-and-a-half ton, only to fall into the ditch again as the bit of metal to which he clung was carried away by a machine-gun slug.

Again Turner blacked out.

When he crawled from the ditch once more, he saw the column had braked again approximately a thousand yards to the south. But as he stood erect, he felt a Chinese rifle in his back.

He was in the midst of a Chinese squad, some of whom were rendering first aid to American wounded lying along the road. Limping from a badly sprained ankle, Turner was told by the Chinese leader, in good English, to sit down.

Then, after a few minutes, the Chinese asked him if his ankle was good enough for him to walk back to his own lines. Surprised,Tom Turner answered, “I think so.”

The Chinese then searched him — but politely, asking if he objected. They took two letters from him, leaving his money intact. More important, they missed the bottle of I. W. Harper that Turner stowed in his jacket.

Then the Chinese leader ordered him to move down the road, collecting American walking wounded as he went. Limping, his ankle afire with pain, Turner walked away, fully expecting to be shot in the back. Instead, the Chinese faded into the hills.

Turner began to collect American wounded men who could walk, and he passed his bottle around. With three other men, all hurt, he approached the north end of the pass. Here a machine gun opened fire on the little group, and they hit the ditches. Resting, Turner passed the bottle once more.

There were wounded men all around, crawling, groaning, trying to move south into the pass. Tom Turner took another swig from his bottle, then got up. Hardly feeling his ankle, he trotted forward, under the embankment. And here American soldiers shouted to him to get down; a Chinese gun was dug in only twenty-five yards above him, spraying the road.

Turner asked for a grenade, but none of the men near him had any. Shaking his head to clear it, he then asked, “Who’ll join me in rushing that gun?”

The suggestion went over like a lead balloon. One soldier told him, “You want it, you go take it, Lieutenant.”

Somebody else said, “Take it, and shove it up your ass.”

Giving up on the Americans, Turner went back the way he had come, shouting for any ROK or Turk who could talk English to come forward. He found one ROK who could. The man brought more than thirty other ROK’s with him. Turner explained what he wanted — and the ROK’s agreed.

He set some of them up as a base of fire to pin down the enemy gun, while he explained to the others that they would attack it behind him. Then he moved out. Looking back, he was shocked to see the whole group coming with him — they had not understood his orders.

Operating on his own genuine courage and the stimulus of the liquor, Turner figured what the hell. He yelled, “Banzai—Banzai!” and ran up over the covering embankment toward the enemy gun.

Turner’s group swamped the gun crew before they could swivel it to meet the charge. Eager to go on, Turner’s ROK’s wanted to rush another gun, but he held them back, trying to get them into some kind of fighting order first.

At this moment an aircraft whistled low over the ridges, firing into them. A rocket exploded, and once again Tom Turner, bruised and concussed, lost consciousness.

But while he lay on the cold dust, other men were beginning to take charge.

After the Turkish Brigade routed the enemy, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), it became clear that they’d routed already-fleeing South Korean allies. Then things got worse:

Then, still at Wawon, the main strength of the Chinese burst over them. The detail of what happened will probably never be reported; the essence has been: The Turkish Brigade was destroyed.

Tall, pale-eyed men with dark faces, in heavy greatcoats, wielding long bayonets, the Turks refused to fall back. There were observers who said some officers threw their hats to the ground, marking a spot beyond which they would not retreat, and, surrounded by the enemy, died “upon their fur.” There were others, all else failing, who threw cold steel at the enemy in bayonet charges. Rarely has a small action, dimly seen, sketchily reported, sent such intimations of glory flashing across the world.

But the Turks died. On 28 November, when the Turkish Brigade at last fell back southwest and linked with the 38th Infantry, only a few of its companies were combat-fit.

It was deeply ironic later, when the American Government, badly concerned with Turkish public opinion concerning their losses, sent quiet apologies to Turkish authorities. The Turks hardly knew what the Americans were talking about. The Turks, however badly used, had come to fight, and above all else Turks were proud of what their men had done.

Americans had forgotten that only a generation before one of their own generals, Pershing, could stand on the soil of France and say to Clemenceau: “We are here to fight and be killed. Do with us as you will, without counting.”

There was massive American weapon power, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War), in the hills of Korea:

There were regiments, battalions, a whole division. But only companies fought, and each company fought alone, out of sight, often out of knowledge of any other American unit. The battle boiled down into how long individual companies, singled out and enveloped on all sides by overwhelming numbers, could hold out.

It was weird fighting, such as the United States Army had not seen since the days of Fort Phil Kearney, the Washita, the Little Big Horn. And what the Army had learned on those fields had long since been discarded on the battlefields of Europe. Unable to maneuver where its wheels could not go, unable to emplace and effectively use its big guns, unable to see or communicate in these hills, the United States Army was being bitten to death rather than smashed down by numbers.

Captured up on a hill near the Ch’ongch’on, Private Smalley was ordered into his sleeping bag, T. R. Fehrenbach explains (in This Kind of War):

At dawn, a slender Chinese officer shook him awake. Speaking perfect English, the officer began to question Smalley and the two ROK soldiers who had been taken with him.

Smalley refused to open his mouth. Seeing his example, the two KATUSA’s were silent, also. At last the Chinese officer snapped his fingers. While Smalley watched, horrified, the Koreans were marched a few paces away and shot down.

Then the officer said to Smalley, “We know all about you.” And he did — down to Smalley’s unit, and who commanded it. “Now go back and tell your commander not to use fire bombs — napalm — against us. Your outfit is over there” — he pointed to the river — “take off!”

Fully expecting a bullet in the back, Smalley ran for the river. Though he was forced to hide twice to avoid Chinese patrols, he reached the Ch’ongch’on and splashed across.

During this time the Chinese released many such prisoners as Smalley, undoubtedly for propaganda reasons. In Private Smalley’s case the propaganda backfired. Finding Captain Muñoz, he said bitterly: “I saw what they did to those ROK’s. Gimme a machine gun!”