The Korean War (32 page)

Around fifty British and American soldiers and Marines, in all, surrendered at first light. Some others escaped back to Koto-ri. A few, like the British heavy weapon section, eventually got through to Hagaru in desperate straits from frostbite. Captain Pat Ovens also made good his escape on foot to the Marine lines. The leading elements of the survivors pressed on in their vehicles until, within sight of the American engineers working under floodlights to improve the runway inside the Hagaru perimeter, they were hit again. An abandoned tank blocked the road, and Chinese mortaring ignited a succession of vehicles. After another fierce firefight, the tank company and the surviving infantry struggled into Hagaru around midnight. The armour came first, smashing headlong through the defending American roadblock, crushing a jeep. The British, according to one of the Marines manning the road position, appeared looking more like a raiding party than a military unit: ‘Don’t shoot, Yank!’ Colonel Drysdale himself was slightly wounded by a grenade fragment in the arm, and less than a hundred of his Royal Marines were still behind him. ‘I never thought I should be so glad to see an American,’ said Lieutenant Peter Thomas wryly. Thomas brought in the last two vehicles of the convoy, both loaded with wounded. Sixty-one British Marines had been lost on the road from Koto-ri, out of Task Force Drysdale’s total of 321 casualties and seventy-one vehicles destroyed. 41 Commando became garrison reserve, under the command of Ray Murray of the 5th Marines.

The little town of Hagaru lay in a cleft in the mountains that otherwise appeared to the Marines to occupy the entire surface of North Korea. For those brief winter weeks of 1950 when it was held by the Americans, Hagaru resembled a nineteenth-century Arctic mining camp. Snow coated the peasant houses, the Marines’ tents, the tanks and trucks, the supply dumps and artillery pieces and command vehicles. The local sawmill was kept in perpetual motion by the engineers, cutting timber to strengthen positions and assist the vital labour of airfield construction. Thin plumes of smoke from a hundred fires and stoves curled upwards on rare days when the air was still. More often, they were whipped aside by the driving wind that stung every inch of exposed human flesh. At first, men marvelled at the depths to which the thermometer could sink: –10, –14, –20 at night. Then they became as numb to the misery of the cold as to everything else. Many said that it was not only their capacity for physical activity that diminished, but even their speed of thought. General Smith himself found it increasingly difficult even to move his jaw to speak. The simplest action loading a weapon, unbolting a steel section, rigging an aerial became a laborious, agonising marathon. The jeeps were kept running continually. In some cases, their headlights were run on cables into key positions such as the sickbay and operations tents, to supplement the feeble coleman lanterns. To start an engine required hours of work thawing its moving parts, persuading its frozen oil to liquefy. Blood plasma froze. Medical orderlies were obliged to carry morphia syrettes in their mouths, to maintain their fluidity. For the men, the miraculously effective space heaters in the tents became the very focus of life. All this, before the enemy had even begun to take a hand.

The battle for Hagaru was a strange affair, like so many of the actions of that first Korean winter. By day, there was little enemy activity, and the Americans could move with almost complete freedom, while their own air strikes hammered the communists’ presumed positions. Then, with the coming of night, the struggle began in earnest. All through the hours of darkness, the defenders
fought back the Chinese attacks, glimpsing their enemy briefly by the light of flares and gunflashes, perceiving him above all by the eerie sounds he brought with him – the bugles, the whistles, the banshee yells. For many men, the greatest fear was that when the moment came, when the communist wave broke upon their positions, the cold would have jammed their life-saving weapons. After the first November battles, rumours swept the UN armies that some men – allegedly of 1st Cavalry Division – had been surprised by the Chinese in their sleeping bags, and bayoneted where they lay, unable to extricate themselves in time. Thereafter, most men on the line were either themselves unwilling, or were forbidden by their officers, to zip up their bags to sleep.

On the forward positions, the cold was so appalling that an extraordinary improvisation, perhaps unique to this campaign, became necessary: the introduction of ‘warming tents’, a few hundred yards behind the front, where every two or three hours men retreated to thaw themselves a few degrees, to restore circulation to their deadened limbs, in order that they might be capable of resistance when the Chinese came again. How the Chinese themselves coped, lacking any such refinements yet presumably at the same extremities of human tolerance, men marvelled to speculate. When the garrison received an occasional night air strike in support, they marked the pilots’ aiming points by firing solid tracer. The optical effects of battle below zero were astonishing: mortar bombs flew through the sky like rockets, leaving fiery trails in the ice-cold air.

The garrison was a hotchpotch. There were two companies of the 1st Marines; some gunners conscripted as infantry; an army engineer company sent to build a command post for General Almond, but now pushed into the line; a ragtag of American and South Korean line of communication personnel, deployed on the hills as reluctant riflemen. It was a matter of pride to a platoon of army signallers that, during one Chinese attack, they successfully held their positions while the engineers broke. One night, East Hill was lost, overlooking the vital airstrip. A scratch force of two
hundred cooks, drivers, and stragglers was ruthlessly rounded up from all over the perimeter and herded forward to counter-attack at dawn, protected by an air strike. Only some seventy-five were still present when they mustered at the start-line – the remainder had simply drifted away into the darkness. But they regained part of the hill, and G Company of 3/1st Marines completed the job. One night, a company clerk standing in as a heavy machine-gunner was appalled to see a file of Chinese advancing upon his roadblock. Ignorant even of how to elevate the barrel of his gun, he could only lift the legs of the gun’s tripod to bring fire to bear upon them. Fortunately, the company runner then woke up and took over, to more effect.

The Americans seemed to enjoy the company of their little British party of 41 Commando. They found Colonel Drysdale himself somewhat reserved, although the effects of exhaustion and his wound undoubtedly influenced his demeanour. The two nations set about reconciling their military inconsistencies – the British habit of calling a mortar-round a bomb, while the Americans called it a shell; the instinctive British parsimony with ammunition, when the Americans believed in intensive bombardment if the rounds were there. A Marine rifle company commander sought to illustrate his approach to fire support to Drysdale: ‘Suppose we were going up that hill over there – we’d expect to put in two hundred rounds before we left the start-line.’ The British officer ruminated for a moment, then remarked drily: ‘We wouldn’t go up the hill at all. We’d go around it.’ The British insisted upon shaving each morning, in the interests of morale and discipline. Most Marines preferred to cultivate a stubble. The Commandos found the Americans’ carelessness about showing lights at night almost incomprehensible. Their formidable Regimental Sergeant-Major, Jim Baines, tore a ferocious strip off a dim figure whose cigarette he saw glowing in a nearby foxhole, and was embarrassed to find an American officer hastily stubbing out his butt. But if the Commandos and Marines found some of each other’s habits incomprehensible, they also formed a deep admiration for the tenacity
and determination common to both corps. ‘I felt entirely comfortable fighting alongside the Marines,’ said Colonel Drysdale.

Each day, as the men on the hills watched the C-47s taxi along the frozen airstrip to collect their loads of wounded, it was impossible not to feel a deep pang of envy for those who would be safe in warm beds, far out of range of enemy fire, within a few hours. It was too much to expect, in those circumstances, that they should count their blessings: while the Chinese deployed immense numbers of infantry, well supported by mortars, they possessed virtually no artillery. The centre of the perimeter was thus almost immune to direct fire. The predicament of X Corps would have been incomparably worse, had their enemies possessed the normal support weapons of a modern army.

Among a host of tragic spectacles that MacArthur’s forces were to behold that Korean winter, the arrival of the survivors of the 7th Division’s ‘Task Force Faith’ at Hagaru remained one of the most vivid. Across the great sweep of ice covering the reservoir, the Marines on the perimeter saw handfuls of men stumbling, limping, even crawling. Some were without weapons. Most had lost their equipment. Many were at the extremities of frostbite. ‘Some of these men were dragging themselves on the ice,’ wrote a Marine officer, ‘some had gone crazy and were walking in circles. It was pitiful.’
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The Marines hauled sledges out on to the reservoir, and brought in all the soldiers they could find. But only 385 of the thousand survivors from a force of 2,500 were considered sufficiently fit to take their place in the line at Hagaru.

Yet as late as 27 November, the day that the elements of the 7th Division east of the reservoir at Sihung-ni first met the Chinese, General Almond had flown in by helicopter personally to emphasise his determination that the American offensive should not be deflected. ‘We’re still attacking and we’re going all the way to the Yalu,’ he said. ‘Don’t let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop you.’ In the days that followed, X Corps only slowly began to understand
the disaster that was unfolding east of the reservoir. ‘We didn’t see it as a tragedy, because we had no idea at all how terrible their losses were, until they came out,’ said one of Almond’s staff. Yet from the night of 27 November until their withdrawal in ruins three days later, the men of ‘Task Force Faith’ – as 32nd RCT became when their original commander was killed – found themselves under constant attack from the Chinese, who drove them back down the east bank of the Chosin reservoir, bleeding terribly as they marched.

Private Don McAlister was the son of a Kansas farming family who had spent his teens trying any job that would earn a buck: dishwashing, sawmilling, farmwork. It was a grindingly hard life. After spending the winter of 1949 clearing a hedgerow, he and his cousin decided to join the army, and try to get a training in the engineers. McAlister was still in basic training in June 1950. He found himself abruptly shipped to the 1/32nd Infantry, 7th Division. He felt an instinctive sympathy for the South Korean farmers, whose poverty seemed only a degree or two worse than that from which he himself had come. He greatly admired his battalion commander, Don Faith, who walked every battlefield with a cane rather than a weapon. He had much less confidence in some of the other officers, and sometimes suspected that the battalion commander did, too. On the night of 27 November, McAlister was on an outpost position when the Chinese attacked, in overwhelming strength. The BAR team and Browning gunners fired for as long as they could, but at last the Chinese swept over the position. The American survivors ran back to their own company front as fast as they could go. They fought all night. McAlister at one point found himself physically wrestling with two Chinese soldiers for possession of his BAR. The company commander was killed, the hillside littered with the bodies of dead Chinese and Americans. At dawn, when the attacks stopped, he and his section were sent back to their outpost. To their astonishment, lying in the bottom of a
foxhole they found two of their own men, alive and unharmed. They had successfully played dead when the position was lost.

All that day, Marine and Navy aircraft flew strikes against enemy concentrations in front of the Americans. But that night, the Chinese came again. Their second assault pushed back McAlister’s A Company halfway down their hill line. They hung on only with urgent support from their neighbours of B Company. As they fought from foxhole to foxhole, American fortunes see-sawing through the night, McAlister lost his pack, his sleeping bag and extra rations. The bag had been important not merely for sleeping, but to stand in through the long hours in freezing holes. About 4 a.m., the battalion began to withdraw. Many of the machine-gunners covering their departure were lost, as the Chinese raced forward in pursuit. The 1st Battalion reached the positions of their own gunners and other infantry to find that they too had been attacked and surrounded. It was now that Colonel Faith assumed command of all the survivors.

That day, like its predecessor, the Americans spent stamping their feet in the desperate cold, trying to improve their positions for the night, and watching the air strikes. The Chinese harassed and sniped at them. That night, they lost their positions in one attack, and were compelled to counter-attack to retake them, all the time losing men. The following morning, 30 November, supplies and ammunition were air-dropped to the perimeter.

Retrieving them was difficult [wrote McAlister], because the Chinese wanted them as much as we did, and some were dropped far out of reach. Of what we got, we found that a lot of the belts and clips were damaged, and we had to work in the cold refilling the BAR magazines. That night my BAR assistant got hit by rifle fire in the eye and had blood all over his face. He was still alive and in a lot of pain. I called the medic and pushed him down in the hole, because I had to keep firing as the enemy was almost on top of us. After a while the medic came and took him to the rear, and I never saw him after that. Later I ran out of ammo, and reached for the rifle that my buddy had left. There was no ammo in it either. I was reaching for my .45 when a grenade was thrown into the hole. The next thing that I remember, I was back in the centre by the artillery, but all I could see around me was men that had been wounded or killed.