“Hold at All Costs”
Reno Block, at least, had been retaken. But the cost had been high. For example, just in the 3rd Platoon of Charlie Company alone, only ten men had escaped being killed or wounded. That was where the two corpsmen Lieutenant Ruthazer had brought with him proved valuable—more valuable than anyone would have asked for. One was Hospitalman Third Class Paul Polley, and the other was Hospitalman Francis Hammond.
“As our casualties mounted, our corpsmen performed heroically,” Janzen said. “Polley was wounded twice. Hit badly in the shoulder, he was also blinded, but he refused to leave. He continued to treat wounded Marines by having them place his hands on their wounds, and then he’d patch them up.”
Polley, from Kentucky, was twenty-three years old. Though he couldn’t see, he kept refusing to be carried or at least led back down to the MLR. Finally, though, the time came when weakness from loss of blood combined with exhaustion to persuade him to leave. On his way, however, he encountered a group of wounded Marines. Once more he was led to one man after another, blindly treating them by touch. Polley did this until he collapsed and was carried to a treatment tent behind the MLR. He would receive the Navy Cross for his actions.
Hammond, who hailed from Virginia, was twenty-one years old. He had been hit earlier in the evening but, like Polley, refused evacuation and kept ministering to other Marines who had been wounded. Even when some of Ruthazer’s platoon was ordered to pull out, Hammond remained to help evacuate the men he had just treated. It was a mortar shell that killed him. Hammond was awarded the Medal of Honor and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to where he grew up, in Alexandria.
The job of holding Reno Block would have been difficult enough for Captain Walz and his composite company, but the overriding mission was to rescue whoever was left on Outpost Reno. They tried. But every time the Marines prepared to head for higher ground, the Chinese attacked first. Time after time, wave after wave of enemy troops rushed Reno Block, and the defenders barely clung to it. The Marines refused to be forced backward, but they couldn’t go forward either. Even when there were lulls between assaults, the Chinese artillery shells gouged the ground between Reno Block and the outpost.
• • •
When the Chinese troops came at Carson a little after 7 p.m., it wasn’t just the ferocity of the attack that set the Marines back on their heels, it was the sheer number of enemy soldiers. It was estimated that the leathernecks were outnumbered by as much as twenty to one. Being in a strongly fortified position with reinforcements nearby counted for a lot, but the rest was up to the defenders standing their ground.
For more than half an hour the screaming and bugle-blowing Chinese came on, wave after wave of them. As with Reno, they were able to take the outer trenches, but that was as far as they got. The Marines, led by Lieutenant Jack Ingalls of Charlie 1/5, the outpost CO that night, fired carbines and pistols, eventually at point-blank range, and still the enemy kept coming.
An hour after the onset of the attack, at 8 p.m., the Marines were throwing back Chinese forces with bayonets, knives, rifles, and bare fists in the close, heavy fighting at Carson. The hilltop was piled with enemy bodies.
Telephone communication with Lieutenant Ingalls’s company commander was gone, but the Outpost Carson radio worked for the first hour. Ingalls could hear the radio operator on Reno calling for help. When that man’s voice was replaced by Chinese voices, the lieutenant feared the worst. The Chinese assaults on his position continued, and he radioed for instructions, hoping what he would hear was that reinforcements were on the way. Instead, the message back was: “Hold at all costs.”
The Chinese broke off the assault at 8:10—an intercepted Chinese message said that the charge “has completely collapsed”—and they melted off the side of the hill. This gave the Outpost Carson defenders an opportunity to separate the dead from the wounded and move the latter into the protection of the cave where they could be treated by the two Navy corpsmen. The Marines in the fighting holes along the main trench kept busy by firing down at the retreating Chinese. Meanwhile, squads from Charlie and Dog Companies of the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 5th Regiment arrived to reinforce the outpost. Enemy gunners greeted them with a steady rain of artillery and mortar shells.
• • •
The attack on Outpost Vegas had also been launched at 7 p.m. Private James Larkin, a native of New York City, would have been a casualty if it had commenced a little earlier.
He was an artillery forward observer with Able Battery, 1st Battalion of the 11th Regiment. Born in the Bronx, he was only seventeen when he joined the Marines in 1950.
On the 26th, he had spent much of the day on Vegas. Like many other Marines that day, Larkin had a feeling something was about to happen. Who knew how big, but something. He figured it would be when night fell. That was the Chinese way of doing things. Maybe he would be off Vegas by then.
He was. Shortly before 6 that evening, Steve Drummond arrived atop the hill and told Larkin he was there to relieve him. The two men shook hands, then Larkin began to half run, half crawl down past the outpost to the bottom of the hill and across the mud-slick rice paddies to the MLR. It turned out he was in more danger leaving Vegas than being on it because once the Chinese mortar gunners caught sight of him, they began launching shells. The enemy’s long-range artillery was getting warmed up too, so Larkin was in double jeopardy. He was quick and fast, though—and lucky—so he arrived safely at a listening post about fifty yards in front of the first Marine trench. There he joined the others at the post who were trying to burrow into the ground because, Larkin recalled, the artillery shells “were lighting up the landscape and sending up huge spouts of water and mud.”
The artillery fire seemed to be intensifying. Still, when there was a slight lull, Larkin dashed the rest of the way to make a report to his commanding officer attached to the 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment. It was then that the Chinese attack began in full force. Larkin said sixty years later, “I had the blessings of the man upstairs to walk away alive.” However, he was far from finished with Vegas.
• • •
As with the men defending Outpost Reno, the Marines of How Company were in trouble quickly. Most if not all of them had never experienced an artillery barrage like the one the Chinese threw at Vegas during the middle of that dark and noisy night, and it seemed like whatever square foot one of those shells didn’t land in, a mortar round did.
As the hordes of Communist troops rushed the outpost, the Marines could tell immediately that they were grossly outnumbered. As the enemy overran the front trench, it was impossible to mount any credible defense. The Marines pulled back from the outer positions. They would make a stand where they could.
Thanks to Chinese infiltrators as well as artillery and mortar shells, most of the communication wire that Reckless and other Marines had painstakingly strung was cut. From the time the attack began, staying in touch with First Lieutenant Kenneth Taft Jr., the outpost commander, and his men on Vegas was difficult. Requests by Colonel Walt for updates usually ended in frustration, especially as the attacks intensified, and even radio transmissions were spotty.
Vegas was being overwhelmed. A desperate Lieutenant Taft requested a “VT”—variable time fuse—artillery bombardment on his own position. “VT fuses could be set to explode shells fifteen to twenty feet above the Chinese troops,” recalled Colonel Anthony Caputo, whose 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment was waiting for orders from his CO. “The Marines on Vegas were magnificent in holding the Chinese off as long as they could, but with such overwhelming numbers, there was no choice to put artillery right on top of them.”
The Marines moved into a cave on their side of the hill and prayed while the 11th Marines launched the VT bombardment.
Colonel Walt wasn’t giving up on Outpost Vegas yet. At 10:05, a platoon from Dog 2/5 was sent out to reinforce the men on it. They got as close as they could, which was about four hundred yards from the bottom of the hill, where mortar shells rained down on them. There was nothing for the men to do but flatten out and cling to the ground and hope not to be instantly turned into a crater. When they did lift their heads, they saw only Chinese troops on the hill.
A platoon from Easy 2/5 was ordered to reinforce the reinforcements. When the two units linked up they pushed forward, covering about half the distance to Vegas. But once again the Marines were pinned down, with incessant small-arms fire joining the mortar barrage.
On the hill, Outpost Vegas was being overrun, and its loss was inevitable. “We started out with maybe forty guys, and it seemed like there were a thousand Chinese coming up from three sides,” recalled Bernard Hollinger, a twenty-three-year-old private with How Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. “We were firing like mad out of the trenches but they kept coming. Too many of them got close enough that they could toss grenades right into the trenches.”
One of those grenades hit Hollinger, and the subsequent explosion ripped the rifle out of his hands and he lost consciousness. After what was probably only a few seconds he came to a bit. His first thought was that he was dead, he said, but “I felt a little ping, and realized here was one of them jabbing me with a bayonet to see if I was still alive.”
Fortunately, he was, with the only apparent injury being a sharp pain in one of his ears. Unfortunately, he was taken prisoner by the Chinese, who now controlled the outpost.
Communication with the Marines on Vegas came to a complete halt just before midnight. That and what appeared to be much less firing at the outpost told Colonel Walt that the Marines there were dead or taken prisoner. The combined reinforcements were told to return to the MLR.
• • •
Not all the Americans at Outpost Vegas were dead, though. One who was still alive was Billy Rivers Penn. A corpsman from McComb, Mississippi, he was twenty years old and had been in Korea only six weeks, having arrived, inauspiciously, on Friday the 13th. Soon after the Battle of the Nevada Cities began on the evening of March 26, Penn, while attached to How Company of the 5th Marines, heard that corpsmen were needed on Vegas. He arrived just as the Chinese were beginning to penetrate the defensive perimeter.
He went straight to the command bunker. The artillery barrage was intensifying, but above the roar and thunder he heard a voice calling for a corpsman. He was taking care of the wounded Marine in a trench when two Chinese soldiers jumped him. One stuck a bayonet through his left leg above the ankle, and Penn couldn’t move. The soldier couldn’t get the bayonet back out, and Penn watched as the soldier’s finger tightened on the trigger, knowing he was about to fire the rifle. He could only hope the recoil would help dislodge the bayonet, though it would probably take what was left of the corpsman’s foot with it. The gun clicked. The enemy soldier began to cock his rifle with the bolt action when Penn produced his .45 and shot him in the head. The impact lifted the soldier three feet down the trench.
“The Chinese were so small, they just looked like ants with a ten-inch waist,” Penn recalled. “They were more of them on us. They had run up the hill with their own artillery still firing.”
He was able to remove the bayonet and rifle from his leg and started pulling the wounded Marine into the command bunker with Chinese troops all around him. He was hit in the left knee by shrapnel, then took a shot from a burp gun in the right shoulder, a through-and-through wound. A bayonet in the right lower back glanced off his flak jacket. As Penn turned, his elbow caught an enemy soldier in the throat. The man fell, and Penn jumped on him, adrenaline and anger combining into fury. Penn pounded him so often that when he finally stood up, the soldier was not moving at all.
According to the beleaguered corpsman, “There were more of them on us. I picked up an entrenchment tool and started swinging. I hit one in the neck, and the way his body was shaking on the ground I thought I had decapitated him. I had a flashback of wringing a chicken’s neck back home. Dead Chinese were all over. Everyone was in hand-to-hand combat. I saw my friend Woody standing outside his machine-gun bunker, swinging his gun like a baseball bat. Trying to get another Marine back to the command bunker, I was jumped again by a Chinese and I beat him unconscious with a rock.”
As he stooped to get out of the command bunker again—the door was only four feet tall—Penn was hit by a rifle butt in the helmet. Reflexively, he raised his .45 and it went off on the tip of the enemy soldier’s nose. “I’ll never forget the expression on his face as the .45 went off, or the feeling I had seeing what power the .45 had at point-blank range.”
Penn backed into the command bunker, seeing what looked like a thousand Chinese all over Vegas. Just as he squatted behind a twelve-by-twelve support, a satchel charge came in the door. All he saw after that was a big flash of white light. When he regained consciousness, he could see only blurs of light. He was mostly buried under dirt and the support beam. Chinese soldiers were digging him out. He thought he was the only one left alive: “I could feel arms and legs all around but no one was moving or crying out.”
Penn was dragged away and hauled up into the back of a truck with four or five wounded Marines. They were all now prisoners of war.
• • •
By midnight on the 26th, after five blistering hours of battle, the early efforts of the enemy had been partly successful. Two of the Nevada Hill outposts had fallen, and Marine attempts to strengthen them were initially being thwarted by Chinese troops who had overflowed past Reno Block and southward toward the MLR. Outpost Carson was holding. But the Chinese were in control of Reno and Vegas and were using the Reno position to mass troops and firepower to bolster the continuing assault on Vegas.
By then, it was clear to Colonel Walt that his regiment had suffered staggering losses. Reno and its defenders were gone. The same, most likely, for Vegas. Of the three essential outposts, only Carson remained under the control of the 5th Regiment, and the Marines there were barely clinging to it. The men under Captain Walz at Reno Block had been whittled down to the equivalent of a single reinforced platoon.
In his classic book This Kind of War, T. R. Fehrenbach wrote: “Compared to Gettysburg, Bastogne, or Verdun, the outpost battles that erupted across Korea from time to time were skirmishes, pinpricks next to the wounds of the world’s great battles. But on the bodies of troops actually engaged the casualties were exceedingly high. When companies are reduced to forty men, and platoons to six or seven, to the men in them it is hardly limited war.”
Soon after the sun set on March 26, the Communists had unleashed unlimited war, hurling men and bombs and everything else they had on three outposts whose capture could guarantee a sweeping victory. They had reduced companies to platoons and platoons to squads and left them bruised and bloodied.
There was really only one thing left for the most decorated Marine Corps regiment to do: Attack.