23
The Living Walked. The Dead Rode
THE LIVING MARCHED down the MSR, while George Company’s dead rode on the trucks. The cadavers’ feet and legs dangled over the sides of the olive-drab 6x6s, their faces frozen stiff and etched in time. By the morning of December 9, George Company and the rest of the First Marines were heading south toward the port of Hungnam. In order to get there, the miles-long convoy would have to blast its way through several Chinese divisions.
Suddenly, a figure snapping pictures startled the long haggard line of George Company Marines. In unison, First and Second Platoons barked, “Don’t take our pictures! Don’t take our pictures!”
The Third Platoon, not so camera shy, said, “Take ours!”
David Douglas Duncan was a Marine officer in WWII and is an American photojournalist among the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. Douglas is renowned for his dramatic combat photos during WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and for his famous photos of Pablo Picasso. Duncan’s still pictures captured an iconic shot of machine gunners Red Nash, Tom Powers, Fred Hems, and Sergeant Fred Garcia. The photographer later approached a haggard George Company Marine near him: a “quiet Marine who never said anything, but did his duty.”
In Duncan’s words:
Dawn was just over the horizon.A Marine . . . kept prodding with his spoon, trying to break loose a single, frost-coated bean from the others in his can. He could neither move it nor long continue holding the spoon between his gloved but almost rigid fingers. He found one, and slowly raised it to his mouth. He stood un-moving, waiting for it to thaw.
“What would you want if you could have any wish?” Duncan asked.
The Marine “continued to stand motionless, with empty eyes. Then his lips began to open . . . [and] his eyes went up into the graying sky.
After the brief, but historic encounter, Duncan’s photo, one of the war’s most famous, captured the feelings and grit of combat in the reservoir. Duncan summed up the picture this way: “That photo represents all of us who were there.”
Late on the afternoon of December 9, George Company marched down the MSR and pushed up a hill labeled Objective A. The hill, roughly a thousand meters high and white with a fresh coat of snow, lay astride the MSR and had to be held at all costs. Once atop the rocky mount, George Company quickly occupied frozen foxholes that had been scraped and dug out by the Chinese weeks earlier and more recently occupied by the Seventh Marines.
That night, the temperature plummeted to its lowest levels of the entire campaign. According to the meteorological officer assigned to the First Marine Division, the mercury dropped to -60 with a sixty-five knot wind. The combination created a windchill factor of -125.
“It was the one time Captain Sitter actually gave us orders to stand up in our sleeping bags,” recalled Bruce Farr. “I remember standing up in my bag with my M1 Garand in my hand. We needed the bags just to stay alive.”
The Siberian wind howled as the icy snowflakes blew sideways, pelting the men’s faces. Clark Henry’s most vivid memory of the experience involved squeezing into a tiny one-man foxhole with Carlos Banks. Banks’s shoes were “threadbare,” and he looked sickly.
“I’ll never forget the expression on Carlos’s face as we tried in vain to stay warm,” recalled Henry. In desperation, Henry placed a poncho over the hole and lit a cardboard ration box on fire to gain a few fleeting minutes of warmth.
Earlier in the day, Fred Hems and Red Nash had cleared out a foxhole and set up their machine gun. Sleep-deprived for days, the two were as exhausted as the rest of George Company. In the driving snowstorm, Nash turned to Hems and said, “Fred, I just can’t stay awake.”
Meekly, Hems responded, “Nash, I know. I will try to keep my eyes open. But we’re in the forward-most position. If they come, they will kill us in our bags.”
Despite Hems’s dire warning, both men fell asleep. Nash slept like a log.
At about 0400, a startled Hems heard voices and the tramping of hundreds of marching feet.
“I immediately woke up. We were surrounded by hundreds of Chinese,” remembered Hems.
He quickly woke up Nash, yelling, “Wake the fuck up! We’re about to be overrun.”
Exhausted and practically in a semi-coma, Nash eventually came to, as Hems frantically depressed the trigger of his .30 caliber machine gun, firing into the mass of assaulting Chinese. Within minutes, fifty or so dead Chinese lay within the first five to fifteen yards in front of their position.
“Where are the grenades?” Nash screamed.
“I’ve got two,” Hems said.
Nash threw both into the horde.
“Give me your carbine!” Nash snapped.
It would be the last time the friends spoke.
An illumination flare lit up the area and revealed scores of dead Chinese, as well as twenty or more Chinese who were attempting to take any cover they could from Hems’s deadly crossfire.
“How far can you fire to your right?” Hems barked to Nash.
Nash was bent over. Damn it, falling asleep again, thought Hems.
From the corner of his eye, Hems spotted a shadowy figure. He quickly fired at the apparition and then turned to give Nash hell for falling asleep: “As soon as I touched him, I knew he was dead.” Nash fought till he fired the last rounds in Hems’s carbine. Only two bullets remained in the 30-round clip.
As a flare went up, Hems glanced at his watch. It was 4:20 a.m. Shouts went up that the enemy was attempting to overrun Third Platoon’s position. Hems’s machine gun lay at the eye of the storm. He cried out to Sergeant Garcia, “Nash is dead! Send me another assistant!”
PFC Harry Hobbs arrived several minutes later with no gloves. Hems looked at Hobbs’s icy, frostbitten hands. Incredulous, Hems asked, “Where the hell are your gloves?”
Over the din of battle, Hobbs stammered, “I took them off and can’t find them.”
Quickly, Hems pried the frozen gloves off of Nash’s hands.They resisted, but finally broke free. Hems tossed them to Hobbs.
During the course of events, the Chinese threw a grenade into their position. Hobbs scrambled for it heroically to toss it back at the Chinese. It exploded in his hands, turning them into a dangling mass of crimson and flesh. A corpsman stopped the bleeding and brought Hobbs to the rear.
Hems cried out for another gunner.The six-foot Irishman who dove into the hole was Tom Powers. Hems turned to Powers, saying, “I killed Red Nash. You’re going to have to work the gun; I can’t do it.” In the confusing melee, Hems incorrectly took on the burden of guilt for Nash’s death. Based on the position of the gun it was impossible for Hems to have fired on Nash, Powers recalled fifty-nine years later.
The Chinese continued to swarm their position, coming close enough that the men could have reached out and touched them. As the horde charged forward, “Give me tomorrow,” looked seriously in doubt.
“I remember the whistles and yelling, and bugles,” recalled fire-team leader Joe Sagan. Drowned out by gunfire, the howling wind, and Chinese bugles, Sagan kept screaming, “Here they come!” to warn the rest of George Company.
Clack!
Sagan squeezed the trigger on his M1. Completely frozen, the useless gun refused to fire. Feverishly, Sagan took off a glove and pulled out the only weapon at his disposal, a lone Mark II Fragmentation Grenade. To get a better grip on the metal pineapple, he tore off his mittens and pulled the pin. As he hurled it, the skin came off his hands.
Thud!
The grenade hit one of the advancing Chinese squarely in the chest and then bounced down to the ground and detonated. “I’ll never forget thinking to myself, God, here I come. It was the longest seven seconds in my life,” mused Sagan.
The explosion took out several enemy fighters, but despite the detonation, the Chinese kept coming. One advanced until he stood directly over Sagan’s position. Unarmed, Sagan played dead as the Chinese soldier attempted to rip the prone Leatherneck’s M1 from his clenched hands.
Fortuitously, George Company’s 60 mm mortars then erupted in front of Sagan’s foxhole. Next began the slow chatter of a machine gun, manned by Jack Daniels, located behind Sagan. In almost slow motion, the .30 caliber bullets spun through the gun’s barrel.
Ping!
A Chinese round glanced off the tripod on Daniels’s M1919A4 light machine gun as he touched the gun’s trigger. Another pierced the olive-drab box of ammunition lying next to his heart on top of the foxhole. “I was sure I was hit,” he recalled. But three rounds of belted ammunition coiled in the ammo box stopped the Chinese projectile from hitting Daniels’s chest. His right index finger pulled back on the trigger of the machine gun, letting loose a another deadly volley of lead and cutting down dozens of Chinese soldiers, including the man in front of Sagan.
Suddenly, a Chinese soldier appeared directly in front of Daniels’s gun, poised to hurl a grenade. As the soldier raised up, Daniels looked down the barrel of the gun and “cut loose” another burst. Daniels’s bullets blew a hole “about the size of my fist” into the Communist trooper’s torso, “blowing out the Chinaman’s backbone.” In his last gasp for life, the Chinese soldier crumpled down on his knees and tried to pull the string on the potato-masher grenade clenched in his hand.
By dawn, the attack was over. Caught by surprise as they were moving from one position to another, the Chinese assault had focused on Third Platoon. Later, after-action reports estimated that George Company had beat off an attack of over 350.
The next day, the company was ordered off the hill. George Company then became part of the rear guard for the push south toward Hungnam. Their job was to protect several tanks that were part of the rear guard. The tanks rumbled forward, but their turrets and 90 mm guns spun around toward the rear. They faced north to blast any Chinese that menaced the column. Additionally, the tanks destroyed any equipment and vehicles that couldn’t make their way south, denying their use to the Chinese. Behind the miles-long convoy trailed a mob of Korean civilians.They were retreating from the Chinese Army with the forlorn hope of somehow evacuating with the Marines. “There were thousands of them,” recalled Powers.
Suddenly, the mob charged the tanks and George Company. “It was wild. People were shooting everywhere; refugees and Chinese soldiers were everywhere.”
“Don’t come near the tanks, or we’ll shoot!” some of the men in George Company shouted.
The Korean civilians then screamed, “The Chinese are amongst us!”
Powerfully and in a calculated fashion, the Chinese used their allies, the innocent North Korean civilians, as human shields to screen their movements as they positioned to attack the tanks.
43 The Chinese completely disregarded the laws of war. With no choice, the M26’s 90 mm fired into the crowd.
“It was like a fucking bowling alley. Bodies, limbs, and heads were flying everywhere!”
The Chinese in civilian clothes continued driving the civilian mob into George Company and the tanks.
“They were swarming all over us, and we were fighting them off hand to hand.”
One Chinese soldier jumped on a tank right in front of Powers. “I shot him in the face with my .45, and the bullet split apart his nose,” remembered Powers. Another Chinese soldier jumped on Powers’s back: “I wrestled him to the ground and had him by the throat. His eyeballs were popping out.”
Someone screamed at Powers, “We’re pulling out. Get on the tank!”
Powers jumped up, put his hands around the Pershing 90 mm gun and attempted to pull himself up onto the tank’s engine compartment.
Boom!
The tank’s 90 mm fired back into the gaggle of civilians and Chinese troops.The blast blew Powers off the gun and knocked him out. Luckily, someone from Third Platoon grabbed the burly Irishman and hurled him onto the engine compartment of the tank.
For several seconds, “everything turned white,” and Powers slipped into unconsciousness. When he came to inside the tank, he was temporarily blinded. Several hours later, his sight returned, but the memory is forever sealed in his mind’s eye as a phantasmal killer, a dream.
“For the rest of my days, I see that Chinese soldier I shot in the face. He has appeared in my dreams practically every night for over fifty years. Each time he tries to strangle me,” recalled Powers.