17

“At All Costs”

CRANING THEIR NECKS to the whirl and crack of the tank’s radio, Lieutenant Colonel Drysdale and Captain Sitter heard General Smith’s determined voice: “Press on at all costs.”

Facing potential defeat and a wall of Chinese resistance, Drysdale had radioed Smith minutes earlier and asked if the convoy should continue north or retreat to Koto-ri. When Smith received Drysdale’s message and request for a quick decision, he was visiting casualties at “E Med,” one of the two Navy tent hospitals established within the perimeter of Hagaru-ri. Smith quickly weighed the costs. He knew that without reinforcements, Hagaru-ri would fall. Holding this town was key to the entire campaign and reuniting the division.

In the din of battle, amid the crackle of Chinese machine gun fire and the whiz of stray bullets, Sitter soberly nodded to Drysdale. Drysdale responded to Smith in his proper British accent, “Very well, then. We’ll give them a show.”

Task Force Drysdale resumed the perilous trek north. As they reached the halfway point between Koto-ri and Hagaru-ri, the tanks began running low on fuel. The column halted in a valley that was about a mile long and covered with snow, with sparsely wooded hills rising sharply to the right of the road. Here, a dry stream bed ran parallel to the Changjin River, which was a couple of hundred yards away. A thin crust of snow covered the hills that reminded the men of those around Camp Pendleton. The task force pulled alongside the stream bed and began to refuel. The men dismounted, provided security for the tanks, and returned fire against the Chinese.

After topping off the tanks, Drysdale again ordered the column forward. Less than a half-hour later, the convoy experienced what would prove to be one of the most critical events of the mission. As had happened countless times before, a mortar round turned one of the trucks into a flaming pile of burning rubber, flesh, and metal.This time, however, the results of the blast were far-reaching. Drysdale and Sitter didn’t know it at the time, but the column had been split into two parts.

Using the flaming truck as a roadblock, the Chinese poured small arms and mortar fire onto the convoy. Since the tanks weren’t staggered and only the front portion of the column had radio contact, Drysdale did not realize that the middle and rear portions of the convoy were not moving forward. They were cut off and surrounded by the Chinese. Unit integrity became nonexistent as “infantry elements mixed with headquarters troops.”

Despite the chaos, the tanks, followed by George Company and three-quarters of the commandos, pushed forward. Sixty-one commandos, most of Company B,Thirty-First Infantry, and nearly all the division headquarters and service troops were left behind fighting for their survival. The Chinese cut the middle and rear elements into one large and three smaller groups that they could deal with piecemeal. In remembrance of the ensuing carnage, the entire area was later dubbed “Hell Fire Valley” by Drysdale himself.

While the Chinese mauled the middle and rear elements of the convoy, Sitter, Drysdale, and the tanks pushed forward with the armored First Dog Company tanks in the vanguard. George Company followed with the commandos. Without communications, they were unaware of the tragedy befalling the rest of the column. However, as dusk fell, George Company faced its own personal hell. The Chinese attacked, blowing whistles and bugles. Flares lit up the early evening sky.

“I was so mad. I was so goddamn mad. I could not stand seeing my Marines being shot. As the First Sergeant, I was supposed to be the first soldier. I needed to do something about it!” Zullo later reflected.

He soon got his chance. After a machine gunner on a .50 caliber machine gun went down, Zullo took over. He pulled back the belt and cleared the jam. Then Zullo barked to Frank Bove, “Get your guinea ass up here, and go find me some ammo!” Christ, Chinese are all around, he thought as his eyes scanned the ten or fifteen yards to his left and right.

After receiving several boxes of ammo, the burly Italian pulled back the bolt on the machine gun and threaded the copper and steel belt into the chamber. He adjusted the head space on the weapon and began cutting Chinese down like a scythe.

“It seemed like we hit the entire Chinese army. There was a lot of them,” recalled Bob Camarillo. “Zullo was throwing a lot of lead into the masses.” The rounds sprayed from the gun at a cyclic rate of over five hundred rounds per minute. The projectiles tore some men in half; body parts flew into the air. For nearly an hour, Zullo administered a steady drumbeat of death as the convoy drove through the Chinese assault.

“Bullets were flying everywhere,” remembered Zullo.

Bove heroically continued running up and down the convoy yelling, “Gimme ammo for the .50!”

He was still searching for ammo to feed Zullo’s hungry .50 when he went down. “He was a brave man, all over the place looking for ammo,” reflected Zullo.

The machine gunners tried to keep their units together. Ammo carriers frantically stayed close to the gunners, feeding them ammo as they maintained a steady hail of bullets. The gunners fired at muzzle flashes, and the men directed the tracers (the fifth round in every ammunition belt), which made a brilliant scene. Tragically, in all the melee and excitement, a Marine fell to his death under the treads of a Dog Company tank.

Suddenly, PFC William Baugh screamed, “Grenade!”

The grenade landed in the back of a truck as the men were dismounting. A bazooka man who was attached to George Company, Baugh faced a split-second decision: either hurl the grenade back out of the truck or dive on it to protect the men in the cab with his own body. Baugh heroically dove on the grenade and cradled it with his hands and chest, absorbing the entire blast. Moments later, the mortally wounded twenty-year-old private from Kentucky died in his comrade’s arms. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his courage and self-sacrifice.³¹

Shortly after Baugh sacrificed himself on the grenade, the Chinese shot Captain Sitter’s Jeep out from under him and turned it into Swiss cheese. “I really miss that Jeep. It had my green overcoat and a brand new box of cigars. I lost them both. I think I miss the cigars more than the coat,” quipped Sitter.

He continued, “As the trucks were going by, my first sergeant, Rocco Zullo, slowed down, and I jumped on the driver’s running board. Then we’d go up and get stopped by fire. Up and stop; up and stop.” The same monotonous maneuver of stop, dismount, fire, conquer, mount up, and push forward continued.

During one of the many stops,Tom Powers recalled bailing out of the truck and rolling into a ravine next to the road. He remembered looking to his right and telling the men to “mount up.” In the corner of his eye, he saw a shadowy figure, not in an American uniform. Comrades up the road yelled, “It’s a Chinaman! It’s a Chinaman.” A hail of bullets cut down the lone Chinese straggler.

“The Chinese were all around us. It was a complete mess as we switched trucks several times,” remembered Dick Hock.

As the convoy passed a railroad embankment, “all hell broke loose.” Dale McKenna recalled the torrent of fire:

There was a wall of machine gun fire on either side of us. It was an ambush! It was so heavy, rounds were flying everywhere. The only protection we had was to lie completely prone on the bed of the truck. I was lying down; I could not see where we were going, I could only see where we’d been.

Unflappable, Captain Sitter directed his men during the ambush.³²

“Get off the trucks!”

“Everyone face out!” Sitter yelled.

Deploying what seemed like an invisible shield, as bullets passed within a hair of his body, Sitter made his way up to the front of the convoy and found Drysdale. Drysdale, his arm bloodied crimson, looked over to Sitter and said, “I’m hit.You now have command.”

Sitter responded, “All right. I’m going to get the tanks and we’re going to start moving.”

Sitter then ordered everybody back on the trucks. “Dead and wounded too. We weren’t going to leave anybody behind,” recalled the pear-shaped leader.

Powers remembered a machine gun that was firing directly onto the convoy: “A truck loaded with men got hit with something. It burst into flames. I could see guys standing in the fire. It was horrifying as the truck slid off the road into a ravine.”

Orace Edwards bailed out of the tailgate of the burning truck as it slid over the side of the mountain. In almost suspended animation, the fiery, two-and-a-half-ton truck and Edwards tumbled down the cliff together. “I was afraid the truck would roll over on me while it tumbled down the mountainside,” said Edwards.

The burning hulk careened into an icy stream. Edwards burst through the ice with the truck. “I had on four layers of clothes, plus a parka. I guess that helped me survive all the tumbling.” Waterlogged and freezing, the rifleman fought his way out of the stream. “The ice froze on my clothes and all over me. I tried to stand up, but my leg wouldn’t hold me up,” he said.

Edwards crawled out of the stream and looked around for his rifle, finding it with its stock broken off in two pieces. Tracers arced across the skyline, and the firefight continued on the road above. His boots were filled with water and froze along with his clothes. As Edwards attempted to crawl back to the mountain road alone, “It was pitch dark except for the occasional light from tracers.” The burning truck provided illumination, as two silhouettes crunched in the snow toward him.

I’m captured, thought Edwards. Chinese were all around. “Then one of them said, ‘Bring a stretcher. Here’s another one.’ Boy, you can’t believe how really relieved I was. They gave me a shot of morphine, then strapped me on a stretcher and took me back up the hill feet first.When we got to the road, the stretcher was fastened onto the hood of a truck. I remember looking up, seeing tracers going over me, and saying to myself, There is no way I’m going to make it out of this.”³³

Without Edwards, George Company progressed in the now-familiar stop-and-start fashion, the column had reached a point several hundred yards from Hagaru-ri when two or three vehicles were blown to pieces. The Chinese hurled a satchel charge under a tank, disabling it. The crew abandoned the vehicle. The snow stopped falling, and an odd downpour hit them. In a lame attempt to stop the armor, the Chinese threw bales of burning hay from rocky outcroppings onto the Pershings. Men riding the tanks brushed off the burning straw with a mere kick of a foot.

By now, it was becoming dark, and the convoy could not utilize its headlights.The slightest wrong turn would send a truck careening over the side. Powers sat on the front fender of the truck and guided the driver: “Let’s go, let’s go!”

George Company pushed through the roadblock and formed up at the head of the column with the tanks.

“After the last roadblock, I saw a tent, and lights for the airfield,” recalled Zullo, who still manned the ring-mounted .50.

Harbula added, “The lights for the airfield—they were working. It was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in the world.”

Several individuals came out of the tents in Marine uniforms and approached the convoy. Zullo asked Sitter, “Captain, what’s our next move?”

At that moment, small arms fire erupted from the tents. A bullet tore through his side, leaving a hole the size of a grapefruit. Blood gushed from his guts like a geyser. “You could put your goddamn fist in here,” Zullo recalled almost sixty years later. “How could I have been so goddamn stupid?” Shrapnel had perforated his shoulder and lacerated his wrist; this was his third wound of the day.

After cutting down the Marine impersonators, Zullo’s men carefully placed him in the back of a truck headed for Hagaru-ri. To protect the first sergeant from additional small arms fire and mortar rounds, three of the men cradled his badly broken body.As they rolled through the gates of Hagaru-ri, they could not feel Zullo’s pulse. He was slipping away.

While George Company, most of the commandos, and the tanks broke through to Hagaru-ri, the rest of Task Force Drysdale faced almost certain destruction. Major John McLaughlin commanded the largest group of the cut-off convoy.³⁴ Using weapons no larger than 75 mm recoilless rifles, the men fought on bravely in Alamo fashion, with hope that the tanks and reinforcements from Koto-ri would break through.

Slowly, the Chinese overran portions of McLaughlin’s group. Rather than going for the kill, the Chinese first busied themselves looting the trucks and probing McLaughlin’s border with small groups armed with grenades.

To no avail, McLaughlin sent small teams of runners south to link up with the other perimeters. One of the men assigned as a liaison between McLaughlin’s group and George Company was PFC Jimmy Harrison, the young marine who loved to play Dixie. Henry emotionally recalled Harrison’s death on the exact day and time almost sixty years later: “He was no more than eighteen years old. I didn’t know the lieutenant assigned him as a liaison. Had I known of his assignment, I would have found a way to stop it. He was shot between the eyes by the Chinese with a .45. He was the first man I lost in Korea.”

Courageously, McLaughlin stood and fought, hoping the Marine Air would come on station in the morning to strafe and bomb the Chinese. As the night wore on, the situation along the road became more and more desperate.

McLaughlin’s group successfully repelled several large Chinese attacks, each time losing their man on the 75 mm. Army crews returned fire on numerous enemy mortar positions, driving them backward twice, and cutting off several probing attacks. By 0200, the 75 mm was destroyed.

About an hour before dawn, the Chinese sent captured American prisoners into the pocket and demanded that McLaughlin surrender. Accompanied by a stalwart commando, the American officer attempted to buy time. “Initially, I demanded the CCF [Communist Chinese Forces] surrender,” McLaughlin haughtily recalled.

The Chinese weren’t amused. They gave McLaughlin ten minutes before launching an all-out assault on his fragile perimeter. The major checked his men; many were unarmed or down to their last eight rounds of ammunition.They had no grenades, no projectiles for the 75 mm, and many were wounded.

Buying time for some of his able-bodied men to slip away from the perimeter, McLaughlin continued negotiations. He finally agreed to surrender with the condition that the Chinese allow them to evacuate the wounded.The Chinese accepted his surrender with those terms.³⁵

After McLaughlin’s group laid down their arms, the smaller perimeters followed suit or were overwhelmed. Only a few pockets of daring men slipped back to Koto-ri and lived to tell the tale of the doomed convoy.