The Korean War (31 page)

I remember one of my company headquarters, a quiet, reliable chap, who was sitting on the ground near me, about to open a tin of baked beans. He suddenly stood up and screamed. He ran wild-eyed into the middle of a paddy-field ignoring the sergeant-major’s shouted orders to come back. I walked after him and he stood there waiting for me, holding the tin of beans like a grenade, shouting, ‘don’t come any nearer!’ I did, and he flung the tin at me, but missed. When I came up to him, I just told him that I knew exactly how he felt, because I felt like that too, but we were all in this together and just had to stick it out or go under. At this he broke down and sobbed, then walked back with me to our position and resumed his place with the battalion.
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The men of Eighth Army, plodding south, were awed by the great pillars of flame and smoke from the supply dumps of Pyongyang, fired to keep them from the hands of the enemy. Private Waters met a tanker by his ditched monster, who told them sardonically: ‘This vehicle requires a new part that costs $5. We do not have one. Therefore we must blow up this vehicle.’ Pyongyang was abandoned on 5 December, leaving behind vast quantities of stores and equipment. Having lost 11,000 casualties dead, wounded, and missing in the first days of the Chinese offensive, Eighth Army was now in full retreat by land, sea, and air, its men fleeing from North Korea by every means available. It was fortunate for the reputation of United States arms that, while Walker’s army hastened southwards in disarray, almost incapable of organised resistance, further east other Americans were salvaging at least a portion of honour from one of the most inglorious moments in their nation’s military history.

8 » CHOSIN:
THE ROAD FROM THE RESERVOIR

On the drive north of the 38th Parallel, MacArthur had deliberately separated Eighth Army, under Walker, from the operations of X Corps, under his own Chief of Staff, General Edward Almond. The two divisions of X Corps – 7th and 1st Marine – landed on the east coast and moved north, miles out of ground contact with Eighth Army. Thus it was that, when the enemy struck, Almond and Walker’s formations endured entirely separate nightmares, divided by the central spine of the North Korean mountains. All that they possessed in common were the horrors of weather, isolation, Chinese attack – and the threat of absolute disaster overtaking American arms.

Relations between General Almond and O. P. Smith of 1st Marine Division had been frigid since they came ashore at Inchon. Smith was thoroughly unhappy about the dispersal of X Corps strength on the advance north: ‘I told Almond we couldn’t make two big efforts. I said: “Either we go to the Yalu by Chosin, or by the north-west route, but not both.” ’ Almond, whatever his other shortcomings an undisputed driver of men, was exasperated by the sluggishness – even obstructionism – that he perceived in the Marines. Smith in his turn, profoundly suspicious of Almond’s lust for glory, feared that sooner or later the corps commander’s impatience would inflict a disaster upon his men: ‘What I was trying to do was to slow down the advance and stall until I could pull up the 1st Marines behind us, and get our outfit together.’
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The Marines’ advance to the Chosin reservoir, and up its western
arm, had indeed been slow, because Smith insisted that at every stage reserves of ammunition and supplies should be brought forward and stockpiled: meanwhile, Almond urged haste to prevent the Chinese from destroying the vast dams at the reservoir, which intelligence believed to be the communist intention.

By 25 November, two of Smith’s three regiments – 5th and 7th – had reached Yudam-ni at the western extremity of the reservoir, and were scheduled to jump off on the 27th towards a link-up with Eighth Army’s northern movement at Mupyong. Thereafter, they would strike for Kanggye and Manpojin on the Chinese border. The 1st Marines were deployed along the main supply route between Hagaru and Koto-ri, alongside some army elements. The corps’s rear coastal area was the responsibility of 3rd Division. On the Marines’ right, three battalions of 7th Division were moving up the east side of the reservoir. The bulk of 7th Division was more than sixty miles northwards, the most advanced American formation, behind the very banks of the Yalu.

Residual communist strength in North Korea was reported by GHQ to be around 100,000 men – about the same as the UN’s front-line numbers – while some 40,000 communist guerrillas and stragglers were believed to remain behind the front. In reality, over 100,000 Chinese troops were already deployed on X Corps’s front alone. Whatever delusions persisted in the rear, the marines who visited North Korean villages to raid for food, who talked to villagers about the masses of men that had passed through, were in little doubt about the scale of enemy activity. When Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Taplett, commanding the 3/5th Marines, flew forward in a helicopter, he could see a maze of tracks and foxholes in the mountain snow. ‘Those damn holes are just crawling with people,’ said his pilot wonderingly.

1st Marine Division began to move forward on the morning of 27 November. That night, the Chinese launched violent assaults not merely upon their leading elements, but for thirty miles down their main – indeed, only – supply route to the coast, seventy-eight miles to the south. To Marine officers in command posts among the positions at Yudam-ni, it seemed that every unit in the two regiments was reporting itself under attack that night. A Chinese grenade knocked out the switchboard of the 3/5th Battalion CP. One of its company commanders ‘froze’ in his position, and his men could not be moved until another officer was hastily dispatched to take his place. All through the hours of darkness, the Chinese hurled themselves again and again upon the company positions of the two Marine regiments. It is a remarkable tribute to the quality of units reconstituted only three months earlier, heavily manned by reservists, that they mounted so dogged a defence under the most appalling conditions. Almost every man who returned from the hills above the Chosin reservoir brought with him a little epic story of close-quarter combat, amid the flares, mortaring and grenade and small-arms duels. Although the Chinese broke into a succession of positions and inflicted severe casualties, nowhere did they succeed in causing the Marine companies to collapse.

Retreat from the Chosin Reservoir

By morning, the Marines were holding three isolated perimeters: at Yudam-ni, furthest north; at Hagaru, on the base of the reservoir; and at Koto-ri, another ten miles south. There was brief discussion among the Americans about continuing their own offensive. ‘But I told Ray Murray: “Stop”,’ said General Smith. ‘It was manifest we were up against a massive force out there.’
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It was apparent to the Marines that their predicament was precarious. They were facing very large Chinese forces: some twelve Chinese divisions, it later emerged, were deployed in X Corps’s area of operations. Hagaru, with its airstrip and supply dumps at the junction of the only escape route south, was defended only by one Marine battalion and such local army elements as could be scraped together to man a perimeter on the surrounding hills. The formations of X Corps were dispersed among hundreds of square miles of barren mountains. Many of the American positions were accessible only by a single track or road, appallingly vulnerable to isolation by an enemy who moved at will among the mountains. As soon as the scale of the Chinese offensive became apparent, there was only one prudent option open to Almond’s forces: withdrawal to the coast. Yet for this to be possible, it was necessary for the Main Supply Route, the MSR, to be held open. And in those last days of November, the lonely track through the passes from Hungnam to Yudam-ni was a snowbound thread liable to snap at any moment. X Corps commander was always ready to find reason to attack O. P. Smith. Almond believed that he had ample cause for anger with the Marine general, in the weakness of the Hungnam garrison. X Corps had correctly perceived that the junction at the base of the Chosin reservoir was a vital position which must be held in strength. Now, Almond raged. Why had Smith left so few men to defend it? The Marine answered that he could never have pursued Almond’s cherished advance from Yudam-ni with less than two regiments. Smith was furious that, even now, Almond was unwilling to recognise the urgency of their plight, and call off his offensive. It was two days before the Marines at
Yudam-ni received orders – or rather, consent – to withdraw. Meanwhile, Smith laboured by every means to strengthen the garrison at Hagaru.

The 235 men of 41 Independent Commando, Royal Marines, arrived at Koto-ri on 28 November, with orders to operate under X Corps. When transport and equipment had been found for them, it was intended that they should act as a reconnaissance group. But it now became a matter of urgency to reinforce the Hagaru perimeter with every available man. On the morning of 29 November, the Royal Marines, together with a company of US Marines and another of infantry, 922 men and 141 vehicles in all, were ordered north under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Drysdale. There was no chance to feed the men before they marched. The British had just time to remove a section of 81mm mortars and .30 calibre Brownings from the crates in which they had been brought up from Hamhuing, before ‘Task Force Drysdale’ moved north.

They met resistance almost immediately. The British and American Marines deployed from their vehicles, and began painfully to clear the high ground overlooking the road. Yard by yard, under constant fire, they pushed forward, aided by a company of tanks which had arrived to support them. By 4.15 p.m., with darkness falling, they were only four miles north of Koto-ri. Drysdale radioed Hagaru to ask General Smith whether he was to keep coming. Smith answered that he needed every man he could get into the perimeter. After a delay while the tanks refuelled, the column pressed on into the darkness. To Drysdale’s fury, the armoured company commander – ‘an opinionated young man’ – flatly rejected his request to distribute his seventeen tanks along the length of the convoy, and insisted that they should punch through in a body, at the front. As a result, when ‘Task Force Drysdale’ was ambushed by the Chinese in a defile known as ‘Hellfire Valley’, above the Changjin river some five miles from
their starting point, the soft-skinned vehicles were unprotected. When the Chinese hit back in the midst of the convoy around 10 p.m., those in the rear were cut off. Some of the US Army company in the rear retired to Koto-ri without displaying much enthusiasm for a night battle against powerful enemy forces. Pockets of British and American Marines fought all night beside the road.

A mortar bomb hit the truck ahead of that carrying Marine Andrew Condron, a twenty-two-year-old radio operator from West Lothian. He and the others in his vehicle jumped down, and lay in the monsoon ditch beside the road, watching the dim shapes of Chinese soldiers flitting to and fro in the darkness. His carbine jammed at his first attempt to fire it, and he picked up an M1 rifle from a dead American lying nearby. They exchanged desultory fire with the enemy around them until, about 1 a.m., an officer ran up, and urged them to join him in an effort to break out. They collected some ammunition and grenades, and began to work their way across open ground. Condron was appalled to pass an American in agony by the roadside, on fire from burning phosphorus, screaming for someone to shoot him. The Marine lost track of his officer early on, and found himself with two other British rankers, wading an icy stream. There was a sudden shot, and the leading man fell. They heard American voices, at whom the outraged Marine with Condron shouted: ‘You’ve killed my mate!’ When the emotional temperature had cooled, the little group of British and Americans lay together in silence, listening to the firing and explosions among the convoy, now some half-mile distant. Condron hung his socks in a tree to dry, where they promptly froze. He put a beret on one foot, a camouflage net on the other under his boots. Condron was dressing the wound of a comatose Marine shot in the hip, when he glanced up to see a South Korean standing above him, wearing a snowcape and carrying a Thompson gun. The man grunted aggressively. ‘Bugger off,’ Condron grunted back. An American shouted hastily to the Scot: ‘Hey buddy, you’d better drop that rifle fast – we’ve surrendered.’ The ‘South Korean’ was a Chinese soldier.

Condron’s brother was a Japanese prisoner-of-war in World War II. He had told the young Marine to ensure that he always carried the vital essentials of life on the battlefield, in case he himself was captured. Condron took heed, and stowed in his pack an emergency kit of razor blades, waterproof matches, vitamin pills, and two books of poetry – Burns and Fitzgerald. But all these things still lay in the distant truck. Like most of those who suffered the same fate in Korea, Condron passed into captivity with only the clothes on his back.
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