21
Holding the Line
AMBLING UP the side of East Hill, Fred Hems frantically searched for his twin brother E.C. “Has anybody seen my brother?” he called out to the haggard remains of First Platoon. E.C.’s machine gun position lay in the direct path of the main Chinese assault. Hems feared the worst but hoped his brother had somehow survived the night. As he moved toward the first machine gun position, his fears subsided when his eyes locked with his brother’s. “I was really lucky,” responded E.C., as he showed his brother his battle-scarred helmet: a Chinese bullet had drilled a hole clear through the crown. The Hems brothers’ reunion was short lived. Under constant sniper fire from the Chinese, who still held strong, the men went back to consolidating their positions on the hill, cleaning weapons, and preparing for another assault.
The division hospital nestled within Hagaru-ri consisted of nothing more than a bunch of tents and old broken-down houses. The crude facilities were overwhelmed with casualties. More than six hundred Marines lay dying or wounded inside the makeshift hospital. Over a thousand more patients were expected to overwhelm the facility from Marine units fighting to the north and army units filtering in from east. Something had to give.
Barely alive but stabilized and one of the six hundred, Rocco Zullo clung to life in a cot. Zullo already had had several emergency surgeries to patch up the machine gun wounds piercing the side of his abdomen. Something had to be done with Zullo and the other wounded Americans who flooded Hagaru-ri’s field hospitals.
After twelve days of around-the-clock back-breaking work, Lieutenant Colonel John Partridge’s First Engineer Battalion had hacked out a semblance of an airfield. Although few people knew it at the time, December 1, 1950, would be a turning point in the fight for the Chosin Reservoir.
For days, the engineers had toiled against the elements and the enemy, often jumping off their equipment to take up arms to fend off the Chinese. George Company’s stand on East Hill had played a key role and ultimately a crucial link in Hagaru’s defenses, helping allow Partridge’s engineers to build the field.
The crude airstrip was wedged at a diagonal inside the Hagaru-ri perimeter. By December 1, it was only 40 percent complete and a mere 50 feet wide and 2,900 feet long. It was considered far too short to meet the official airstrip landing specification for transport aircraft of the time. Nevertheless, General Smith took a gamble and ordered the airfield operational. Casualties like Zullo had to go out, and replacements had to come in.
At 2:30 p.m., the men of George Company looked down East Hill and gave a brief cheer along with the other Marines from the base as they saw the first plane—an olive drab, weather-beaten C-47—touch down on the frozen runway. It took about a half-hour to upload twenty casualties. The C-47 bumped and lurched over the rough strip. The next two planes removed another sixty casualties, while the fourth plane, heavily laden with ammunition, touched down, only to collapse its landing gear on the runway. Fortunately, the cargo was salvaged, but the plane had to be destroyed to keep the airstrip operational.
Zullo was eventually evacuated. After spending years in military hospitals and undergoing countless operations, Zullo lost track of George Company. Nearly every Marine thought he was dead.
While wounded and dying in Task Force Drysdale, Zullo had called out for one of his men. The man, PFC Philip Loughlin, had been wounded and paralyzed from the hip down while attempting to find bandages to dress Zullo’s wounds. In honor of that man’s sacrifice, Zullo retired from the Marine Corps and dedicated his life to the education of children. He later became a high school principal. While he had been recovering on an operating room table, Zullo had met the love of his life and his future wife, a nurse-officer whom he married during his recovery.
As Zullo was flown out, hundreds of reinforcements flew in. Along with the fresh troops came a gaggle of reporters. Stateside, the press had predicted the demise of the First Marine Division, claiming they could potentially face massacre. The CIA chief, Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith thought the division would survive the Chinese onslaught only through negotiations. A British reporter called the withdrawal from the Chosin a “retreat.” Smith quickly corrected him, pointing out that they were merely attacking in a new direction.The press quickly improved on Smith’s initial remark, turning it into “Retreat, hell, we’re just attacking in a new direction.”
Behind the public bluster and bravado, the First Marine Division was in serious trouble. While the Chinese casualties were staggering, they still had over 40,000 troops between Hagaru-ri and Chinhung-ni. The press reports in the States were all doom and gloom. Time described the Eighth Army’s rout as “the worst defeat the United States ever suffered.” Newsweek was worse: “Perhaps it might become the worst military disaster in American history . . .”
At least the Eighth Army had a line of retreat.The Marines were surrounded, and front-page newspapers stated the division was “entrapped.” Using the same fundamental tactics as Xenophon in 401 B.C.—the Ten Thousand cut their way through Persian and Asiatic hordes to the Black Sea—First Marine Division would have to do the same.
For the Marines of the First Marine Division, December 1 turned out to be a momentous day. Not only was the airfield operational, but the Fifth and Seventh Marines planned their breakout to the south, placing their best battalions in the front. The Seventh Marines CO, Colonel Homer Litzenberg—known as “Litz the blitz” for his command of certain forms of the English language, rather than his command style—issued a simple order: “In our order for the march south, there are no intermediate objectives:The attack will start at 0800 on December 1. Objective Hagaru.”
Lieutenant Colonel Ray Murray, CO of the Fifth, reflected: “Haguru [is] fourteen miles down the road, and there is a hell of a lot of Chinese between us and them.” Inwardly, Murray doubted they would make it. Making matters worse, the Chinese brought up two fresh regiments from Manchuria. The hills swarmed with tens of thousands of Chinese. A breakthrough seemed against all odds.
That morning, the two Marine regiments fought their way down the MSR toward Haguru-ri. The Fifth moved along the axis of the MSR, while the Seventh fought through the Chinese over land, taking the hills overlooking the MSR. Audaciously, Litzenberg covertly pushed one of his battalions over winding mountain paths, through Chinese lines. They intended to link up with the Marines of Fox Company, 2/7, who continued to hold Toktong Pass open against all odds. Fighting all day, the regiments pushed south linking up with Fox Company at the pass.
The nights of December 1 and 2 on East Hill remained much quieter than the previous night for George Company. A blinding snowstorm blanketed the men and coated their positions with a fresh layer of freezing snow. Combined with the storm, the Chinese hit George Company’s position with a grenade attack. In the snow, the grenades’ explosions looked spectacular as they mixed with the icy crystals. Fortunately, the grenades largely fell short of their target and did not have the intended effect.
The standard Chinese grenade was a typical “potato masher” about eight inches long. It had an iron cylinder and fixed explosives on one end. The other end was a bamboo shaft attached to the iron cylinder. To use the grenade, the Chinese removed a small metal cap at the end of the wooden handle and pulled it.The string then fastened to a match fuse that burned for roughly four seconds. Sparks from the burning fuse trailed the grenades as they were hurled through the air. In a typical Chinese attack, the soldiers took four or five grenades and latched them together with twine, hurling the group through the air. Fortunately for the Leathernecks, many of the grenades didn’t detonate. Sergeant Ronald Wyman, a replacement Marine who came in with the second draft
38 recalled: “Only half of them would land anywhere near a target and the other half failed to go off—duds. We all respected the grenades because every once in a while they would do what was intended, but if they were successful, the charge was so intense that it would vaporize the metal fragmentation sleeve instead of sending fragments over the target area.”
Tom Enos recalled the ensuing grenade battle: on the slope perpendicular to the crest of the hill, “I would throw out an illumination grenade about twenty yards in front of us, whenever they would attack. The tanks below would use this as a sign of sorts. They would sweep the hill with .30 and .50 caliber machine gun fire, killing the attackers.”
That evening, Clark Henry also actively engaged the Chinese: “I heard voices in the gulch over to our left.” The aggressive Irishman then requested that he take a squad from Second Platoon and clean out the Chinese. “Can we go see what is going on?” Henry asked Sitter. Sitter replied, “We don’t have enough men.”
Henry decided to act on his own. Carrying a BAR, he and a commando slithered on their stomachs toward the gulch. They crept into position and began firing in the direction of the voices. “I’m not sure if we hit anything, but the talking stopped and they dispersed,” he recalled. Henry and the commando made their way back toward George Company’s lines.
On the morning of December 2, Enos and what was left of the First Machine Gun Section—six men—woke up. (They had started with seventeen men.) The machine gunners had somehow survived another night on the hill.There were no more whistles or bugles, just the occasional crack of gunfire from wounded Chinese sniping at them. The Marines took turns going down the hill to get additional ammunition and food.
As Enos made his way downhill, his legs and toes screamed with pain. He remembered that after grabbing several boxes of ammunition, “I started making my way up the hill, but kept falling down.” After each fall, he started again. Soon he began crawling up the hill on all fours. Finally as his feet and knees gave out, “I started breaking down. I was lying there in the snow and couldn’t get anywhere.”
The new NCO found the forlorn machine gunner outstretched in the snow, crying. He tried to help Enos up, but each time, they fell down.The NCO left to get a medic as Enos lay there with fresh flakes of snow hitting his face. Time seemed to fade away as he slipped in and out of consciousness. The medics arrived and placed him on a stretcher. Suddenly, he woke up in a medical tent and realized he was not on the hill. As the doctor cut off his sock, he found that all of Enos’s toes were black and green. His toes were pus-filled and eaten with gangrene. Revived from the heat in the tent and a little bit of rest, Enos insisted on receiving a fresh pair of boots and going back up the hill. With a stern look, the doctor said, “No, son, you’re in no condition.You’re going to be out of here in a few days.You’re more of a liability to us walking.You might as well be flown out.” Enos was later evacuated and flown to a hospital in Japan.
Over the next several days, George Company continued to be harassed by the Chinese, who probed George’s positions on East Hill. They never mounted an assault on the scale of the night of November 30. Reinforcements continued to filter onto the hill in the form of U.S. Army troops and even “buddies” or ROKs who were paired up with Army personnel.
Wyman recalled several ROKs assigned to his squad: “I put them further to the right because I didn’t trust them. I felt that if anything happened during the night, they wouldn’t be firing at my squad.When I went over to check on them that night just after dark, they were gone, bugged out.”
Staff Sergeant Harold “Speedy” Wilson, an NCO, had arrived as a replacement in November. Wilson’s leadership on the hill kept Third Platoon together.
39 He recalled that one Army officer asked, “Where’s the bug-out route if we get overrun?” Wilson calmly patted the back side of his foxhole as he shot the Army lieutenant a menacing look, saying, “This is as far as we go. I don’t get out of my hole at night because these guys [pointed at his Marines] shoot at anything that moves.”
Most of the Army troops came to the hill haggard and weapon-less. PFC Steve Olmstead
40 remembered one of the Army troops who filtered into his position. The replacement turned to Olmstead and said, “I survived the Battle of the Bulge, but this is worse.”
What would have made the GI say that? On December 2, the bedraggled survivors of three U.S. Army battalions were beginning to make their way into Hagaru-ri. It is highly probable that the doggie had been part of these doomed units, called Task Force Faith.
Five nights earlier, division-sized elements of the PLA had torn into Task Force Faith, which was holding separate perimeters on the eastern end of the Chosin Reservoir, about fifteen miles from Hagaru-ri. For twenty-four hours, the battalions held their Alamo-like position while being resupplied by air. After the commanding officer died, Lieutenant Colonel Don Carlos Faith, a former paratrooper officer who had fought in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division during World War II, took command of the three battalions’ fight for their lives.
One battered soldier under Faith’s command described their CO: “Here comes Colonel Faith in his shiny helmet and new parka and riding pants. He had a grenade attached to each side of his backpack harness and was holding a .45 in his hand. Really, I thought he looked too sharp, too West Point, compared to the rest of us.”
The Chinese attacks took an enormous toll, hundreds of wounded men flooded makeshift field hospitals inside the perimeter, and dead GIs lay stacked in rows four feet high. Hope of holding the pocket faded when a company-sized relief force was mauled. Thousands of Chinese attacked and nearly overwhelmed Faith’s fragile position.
Fearing annihilation, Faith ordered his men to destroy their artillery, form up into a convoy, and attempt to break through west to Hagaru-ri.As the convoy formed up, the Chinese riddled it with small arms fire and descended from the hills, taking up ambush positions along the road west. Under constant attack from Chinese on each side of the narrow road back to Hagaru-ri, the battered convoy pushed on. Drivers became the Chinese target of choice.Wounded men were piled into the trucks alongside dead bodies. As the pounding continued, the wounded were often hit a second and third time, or killed outright.
In an attempt to relieve the relentless PLA attacks, Marine air support strafed and bombed them with napalm, often with deadly effect, yet sometimes tragically killing GIs caught in the crossfire. PFC James Ransone recalled:
[GIs] were burned to a crisp, their skin peeling back like big potato chips. Still others just blazed away like torches. There I was practically in the middle of them and couldn’t do anything to help. Someone hollered, “Keep going. The medics will take care of them.” There was nothing the medics could do. The worst thing was when a couple of them begged me to shoot them.
Trucks were blown away. The cries and screams of the wounded overwhelmed even the shrieking of the arctic wind. A massacre had begun. At one point, Faith personally manned a .50 caliber machine gun and fired into the Chinese hordes.
As the convoy rolled forward, control broke down, and men refused to fight. Brandishing his .45, Faith pushed into the mass, attempting to maintain unit cohesion. It was hopeless. Slowly the task force disintegrated before his eyes as companies and platoons morphed into a tattered mob of individuals.
At one point during the doomed death ride, Faith confronted two South Korean soldiers who were attempting to hide under a truck and lash themselves to the vehicle’s undercarriage. Faith ordered the men into the open. “Faith extended his right arm toward the cowering man and pulled the trigger, then shifted his aim and shot the other as well.”
“Shoot anyone who tries to run away,” Faith barked.
As the purple tinge of dusk cascaded over the convoy, a Chinese grenade detonated near Faith, mortally wounding him. With Faith down, nothing remained to hold the convoy together. Scattered and leaderless, small bands pushed west. Wounded and frostbitten, they made their way across the ice of the frozen Chosin Reservoir. All wounded and able-bodied men who remained with the convoy were massacred. Miraculously, hundreds of men found their way through the minefields, wire, and Chinese lines into Hagaru-ri.
Despite the bloodbath taking place on the convoy, some of the Chinese helped the wounded get back to American lines.The official history states: “Far from hindering the escape of the Army wounded, the Chinese actually assisted in some instances, thus adding to the difficulty of understanding the Oriental mentality.”
Unlike their Army brethren, the Fifth and Seventh Marines marched into Hagaru-ri in perfect battle order. Like a well-oiled machine, the Commandos seized a nearby hill along the MSR. About five hundred yards from the perimeter of Hagaru-ri, trucks and tanks in the convoy halted. Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Davis barked to his Marines: “You people will shape up and look sharp.We are going in like United States Marines.”
With drill instructor cadence harking back to boot camp, the weary Marines of the Fifth and Seventh straightened their backs, and their steps became surer and smarter. To men in Hagaru-ri, the Fifth and Seventh, tattered and dirty, “looked like zombies” as they proudly marched in perfect unison.
From atop East Hill, George Company saw the proud, iconic moment unfold: “It’s the Fifth and Seventh coming in,” the men heard Marines shout.
“I heard the Marine hymn in the distance,” recalled Tom Powers, “and we all started singing it on the hill.”
From the Halls of Montezuma,
To the shores of Tripoli;
We fight our country’s battles
In the air, on land, and sea;
First to fight for right and freedom
And to keep our honor clean;
We are proud to claim the title
Of United States Marine.
Our flag’s unfurled to every breeze
From dawn to setting sun;
We have fought in every clime and place
Where we could take a gun;
In the snow of far-off Northern lands
And in sunny tropic scenes;
You will find us always on the job
The United States Marines.
Here’s health to you and to our Corps
Which we are proud to serve;
In many a strife we’ve fought for life
And never lost our nerve;
If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven’s scenes;
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines.
Inside Hagaru-ri, Lieutenant Colonel Murray wiped tears from his eyes with the filthy sleeve of his parka. In an interview with Chicago Tribune reporter Keys Beach, he said, “I didn’t think we could do it.”
For the first time in weeks, most of the First Marine Division was reunited at Hagaru-ri. During the afternoon of December 5, elements of the Second Battalion Fifth Marines relieved the haggard remains of George Company. Bruce Farr looked at the three remaining men of the First Machine Gun Section; the other fourteen were either dead or wounded. The men shuffled off to their new position in fighting holes on the western end of the newly completed airstrip. George Company relieved another unit and occupied their fighting holes.
“We were in absolutely terrible shape,” recalled Farr. “I grew the first and only mustache in my life.” Due to the constant combat, the men had not had a chance to shave. Beads of mucus and sweat froze to their faces. Sickness seemed ubiquitous throughout the unit; many of the men had diarrhea. As Farr vividly related:
I had about four layers of clothes on and I had to constantly defecate. You know how hard it is to do that? I remember pulling my trousers down and seeing the snow explode around me from Chinese machine gun fire. I raced into a makeshift shelter made of parachute silk, four other guys dove on top of me trying to avoid the fire also.
One Marine remembers trying to urinate and it seemed like his “kidneys froze.” Another recalled, “I cried, I’ve never cried so hard in my life just trying to relieve myself.”
First Marine Division and George Company were starved for replacements; they combed the rear areas and even hospitals for fresh men. As Farr recalled, “We received a replacement who had recently come from Japan and still had pneumonia. He was in bad shape, but on the line with us.”
“That night a rumor went around the company that we were going to be hit by Mongolian cavalry. What the hell is Mongolian Cavalry?” recalled Powers. Apparently, the company had found a few horses, and rumors abounded that George Company would face a mysterious Chinese cavalry unit. Powers remembered asking, “Do you take out the horse or the rider first?” A few captured horses used as pack mules by the Chinese fueled the initial speculation, but there were reports of mounted Chinese east of East Hill.
As the purple dawn streaked across the airfield, hundreds of Chinese emerged from the shadows and stormed George Company’s lines. The previous night, they had silently crept through a gully where there was a low sloping hill and formed up in a ditch about a hundred yards in front of the airfield and George’s lines.
“They came charging toward us at dawn, a daytime attack,” recalled Farr.
First Machine Gun Section was down to one gun instead of two; the firing mechanism seemed to have frozen solid. Frantically, Farr reached for his carbine and attempted to fire. Clack! The firing pin had frozen. Pulling back the bolt of the machine gun, Farr squeezed off one round at a time at the oncoming Chinese. Another Marine, whose hands were crimson with blood from a shrapnel wound, frantically assisted Farr as he attempted to fire his single-shot machine gun.
Further down the line, Powers brought ammo to Fred Hems and Red Nash’s machine gun as they blazed away at the oncoming Chinese. Taking heavy casualties, the Chinese attack halted and retreated toward the ditch. Olmstead recalled an unusual situation: “There was firing from the Chinese toward their own men who were fleeing through the gully.We weren’t firing on them.”
The Marines also took twenty or thirty prisoners. “Several of them had feet that were elephantine and deformed since they had been exposed to the frost. They looked like they were blocks of ice,” recalled Olmstead. “We were poorly equipped, but they were a hell of a lot worse.”
Mao had a policy of using his former adversaries as cannon fodder and eliminating them. In keeping with that policy, many of the officers captured claimed to have fought in Chiang Kai-shek’s army. They considered themselves allies of America during WWII. The officers were willing to fight with the Marines again, if they were given food and weapons.
