Combat- Parallel Lines

by William Peter Grasso

  The artilleryman knew it wasn’t really a question.

  Chapter Eight

  On the east side of the Chosin Reservoir, there was no doubt the Army’s 31st Regiment would collapse soon. It was just a question of how soon.

  In five nights of intense Chinese attacks, scores of panicked GIs had fled across the frozen reservoir and stumbled into the Marines fighting for their own lives—and stubbornly holding their ground—around Hagaru-ri. By the GIs’ frantic accounts, many more of their number on the east side had been killed or were missing, probably captured.

  Yet General Almond, commander of X Corps, wasn’t interested in talk of withdrawing. He didn’t even want to consider the prospect of defending in place. He seemed hell-bent on continuing this fool’s errand to reach the Yalu and seize all of North Korea…

  Even though six CCF divisions now stood in his way, grinding his greatly outnumbered forces steadily to dust.

  On this frigid morning, Almond’s helicopter brought him to the command post of 31st Regiment. The pilot didn’t dare shut her engine down; it might never start again in the brutal cold, and it wasn’t very likely the general planned to stay long at the tip of the spear.

  Lieutenant Colonel Don Faith was now commanding the regiment. He’d been thrust into the position just the day before, when the previous regimental commander was wounded and presumed captured by the Chinese. Faith had only one question for the general: “When do we begin our withdrawal, sir? If we wait much longer, there won’t be any of us left.”

  Almond replied, “The Chinese you’re facing are nothing but disorganized remnants of a shattered division. You’re not telling me that a bunch of laundrymen are going to stop you from pushing north, are you, Colonel?”

  There could be no answer to a question as ungrounded in reality as the one the general had just asked. Even if the Chinese forces were, in fact, remnants, Faith knew all too well that there were many thousands of them against his dwindling hundreds.

  Reaching into the pocket of his parka, Almond produced a Silver Star and proceeded to pin it on the dumbstruck Colonel Faith.

  Then the general began walking toward the aid station a short distance away. Seemingly oblivious to the scores of wounded—and the stacks of dead GIs wrapped in ground sheets piled behind the station’s tent—he approached two exhausted soldiers who’d taken a moment to rest on some crates. Seeing the man with the stars on his winter cap striding in their direction, the soldiers dragged themselves to their feet. They couldn’t quite manage to remain at rigid attention, though. After spending an entire day and night carrying the dead and wounded down from Hill 1221, their aching limbs simply wouldn’t allow it. The best they could do was sway like frail saplings in the icy wind.

  “You men are doing a fine job,” Almond told the two as he pinned a Bronze Star on each of them. His voice brimmed with the bravado of one fortunate enough to be well-rested, well-fed, and not under fire.

  The bizarreness of it all stunned one of the GIs to silence, just as it had Colonel Faith. The other soldier, however, coolly appraised the medal on his chest. Then he pointed to the stacks of dead men and told Almond, “With all due respect, General, those are the guys you should be pinning medals on.”

  Without saying another word, Almond marched like an automaton to his helicopter and flew away, back to a world where the delusions of his commander in Tokyo—delusions he’d parroted so proudly on that frozen helipad—didn’t have to compete with harsh realities.

  From his airborne perch, he couldn’t see Faith and the two GIs hurl the medals he’d just bestowed on them into a snowdrift.

  *****

  Later that night, the question of how soon until 31st Regiment collapsed received its unequivocal answer. With over two-thirds of its manpower lost, including many of its officers and NCOs, the 31st was finished as an effective fighting force. They’d managed to hold off the enemy for five days—and protect the right flank of the Marines on the other side of the reservoir—but they could do no more. To prevent what was left of his shattered unit being engulfed and destroyed by the swarming Chinese, Colonel Faith led hundreds of survivors in a fighting withdrawal across the frozen reservoir to the Marines’ base at Hagaru-ri.

  Even in retreat, they suffered heavy casualties and lost all their vehicles and heavy weapons. By survivors’ accounts, however, Colonel Faith’s judgment, heroic actions, and strong leadership—even after being grievously wounded—saved their lives. For those qualities, he’d receive one more medal, but it wouldn’t be pinned to his chest by a foolish sycophant wearing stars on his collar.

  This medal—the Medal of Honor—would be awarded posthumously to his family by the President of the United States, for Don Faith never made it to Hagaru-ri. He died of his wounds that very night.

  *****

  The Marines on the west side of the reservoir were suffering mightily from Chinese assaults, as well. Most companies were down to half or one-third of their fighting strength.

  Yet, with the help of Marine Corps and Navy air support during daylight hours and prodigious amounts of artillery fire around the clock, they were holding on to the terrain they’d claimed while inflicting catastrophic casualties on the attacking CCF divisions.

  Gunnery Sergeant Jim Ramsay saw it this way: It all boils down to the air support… not only the fighters shooting rockets and dropping napalm but all those transport planes bringing in supplies and ammunition: the C-47s that can land here at Hagaru, the Air Force’s big C-119s that can’t land on this short runway but drop their big loads on parachutes. Without those drops from the Air Force guys, the Marines up at Yudam-ni would’ve been overrun days ago.

  But let’s not kid ourselves…if we try to hold on much longer here, we’ll get decimated just like the GIs on the other side of the reservoir.

  It’s simple arithmetic. There are just too many chinks.

  We’ll never kill them all.

  *****

  General O.P. Smith, the Marine division commander, could do the math, too:

  If we don’t get out of here real soon, our only escape route—the MSR—will be overrun with Chinese. We’ll be completely cut off.

  His attempt to keep the MSR clear had been a dismal failure. A mixed convoy of Marine Corps, Army, and British Royal Marine companies—with sixteen US tanks—was hastily assembled from units around Koto-ri, a town ten miles to the south. Known as Task Force Drysdale after the group’s British commander, Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Drysdale, they rolled north from Koto-ri toward Hagaru, intent on sweeping away the CCF roadblocks.

  They were ambushed and mauled in the process. Only a few hundred of the 1,100-strong task force made it to Hagaru. The rest were dead, captured, or trapped in enclaves surrounded by Chinese. As Smith put it, The ones who made it here are no more a fighting force than the GIs who fled the east side of the reservoir.

  We’re going to have to fight our way out of here. It’ll be twenty miles of murderous hell in those mountains before we hit the more favorable terrain of the coastal plain.

  Smith stared at the message in his hand from X Corps Headquarters. When he first read it, he was surprised it wasn’t another of Almond’s exhortations to push on to the Yalu. Instead, it instructed his 1st Marine Division—with the survivors of those ravaged units from other services now under its wing—to conduct an orderly withdrawal to the port of Hungnam. The message went on to say that all available air support would be at Smith’s disposal.

  Yeah, all available air support…in daylight only.

  At night, we’re screwed.

  *****

  In the briefing room at Itazuke Air Base, Kyushu, the operations officer began by saying, “You’re not going to believe this, gentlemen, but the United States Marine Corps is actually asking for help from the Air Force.”

  He let the assembled B-26 pilots and crew smirk for a few moments. Then he said, “That might sound amusing to us, since those guys run their own show without bothering to tell us what they’r
e doing most of the time. But the request actually comes from MacArthur himself. It seems the chinks are about to destroy First Marine Division, which is a real big chunk of his boy Almond’s Tenth Corps, and that would make the man in Tokyo look worse than the Chinese have already managed to do.”

  There was another round of snickering as they imagined the great man himself wandering the halls of his headquarters in the Dai-ichi Building, down in the dumps and muttering to himself for being so dead wrong about the Chinese not daring to intervene in Korea. According to reliable sources, there had been actual sightings of him doing just that.

  One of the pilots sounded disgusted as he asked, “We’re not going to be flying missions with gyrene and squid pilots, are we? You know what a disaster that’d be.”

  He was right; the Air Force rarely worked with Marine and Navy squadrons for a very good reason: the various services shared very few standard operating procedures—SOPs—which were necessary for coordinated actions in combat. Without those SOPs, the pilots faced the potential for confusion, redundancy of missions, and the likelihood of accidentally killing each other in the air or friendly troops on the ground.

  “We’re all aware of that potential for disaster, Captain,” the ops officer replied as he aimed his pointer at the big situation map on the wall. “So here’s the deal: First Marine Division’s got itself between a rock and a hard place at this place called the Chosin Reservoir. They’re going to try to pull out of there and head to the coast for evacuation by ship. The trouble is, there’s only one way out—one stinking road called the MSR—”

  One of the pilots interrupted, asking, “What does MSR stand for? Marines Swiftly Retreating?”

  Nobody laughed this time. The seriousness of it all was making its impression.

  “As I was saying,” the ops officer continued, “MSR stands for main supply route, and the first twenty miles or so of that road will be ambush city, with high ground towering over it on both sides. It’s a gauntlet they just might not survive without a whole lot of help.”

  The pilots listened intently, but they were still wary. Their point of view: they’d all had to deal with time slots for attacks when coordinating with other USAF units, and those fragile schedules usually disintegrated promptly, leading to off-the-cuff improvisations that had a good chance of causing mid-air collisions and fuel exhaustion while diminishing the chances of an effective strike on target.

  “Now here’s the good news,” the ops officer continued. “We won’t actually be sharing airspace with those guys at all. They’ll handle all day missions…”

  The pilots groaned en masse. They knew what the rest of the sentence would be.

  “And we’ll employ those night tactics we’ve been developing so diligently, working with the Firefly ships.”

  That didn’t stop the groaning. If anything, it got louder. There wasn’t much enthusiasm for flying around mountains in the dark, with or without the illumination from the flare-dropping ships.

  Then he announced that the squadron would fly its first Firefly mission that very night. Takeoff time was less than four hours away.

  *****

  The setting sun was dropping into the sea west of Itazuke as Tommy began the preflight inspection of his B-26. He was taking his time; it was still a new ship to him, with quirks yet to be learned. He’d amassed a grand total of five hours at the controls since joining the squadron just two days before. The last three hours he’d been solo, just boring holes in the sky over Japan to sharpen his feel for the powerful twin-engined machine.

  The squadron commander hadn’t balked when Pete Newsome signed him off after he’d executed the engine-out landing on his first—and only—check ride. As the C.O. put it, “If you can do that on your first time in the seat and not so much as blow a tire, I’d say you’re good to go. Welcome to Fifty-Third Bomb Squadron, Major Moon.”

  Having multiple engines wasn’t the only new thing Tommy needed to get used to; this ship had two other men in her crew, as well. Staff Sergeant Bob Allen was his gunner, a veteran of B-25 bombers in the last war. Lieutenant Hank Roth, a rookie on his first squadron assignment, was the navigator.

  Tommy took one last look at the front of the ship before climbing the boarding ladder. She was a hard-nosed model: eight .50-caliber machine guns protruded from the nose in a tight group stacked four to a side. Smiling as he thought about the last eight-gun ship he flew—the P-47; the jug, they called her—he told himself, Man, you won’t have gun convergence issues with these babies like you had with those wing-mounted guns on the jug. With this ship, it’s just point and shoot. I like this type a hell of a lot better than the glass-nosed “B” models, with the bombardier’s position up front…and no nose guns.

  The ship’s name—Moon’s Menace VI—had been painted on each side of the nose earlier that day by his crew chief. Hopping on top of a servicing cart so his outstretched hand would just reach the characters, he touched a finger to the paint and was relieved to find it dry.

  That’s all we’d need…to come back from the mission with her name obliterated and paint streaked down the side of the fuselage. If I’d known we’d be flying tonight, I would’ve put the artwork off a day or two.

  When Tommy slipped into his seat in the cockpit, Bob Allen was already tucked into the gunner’s compartment in the rear of the fuselage. He wouldn’t be able to get to the cockpit until the napalm canisters had been dropped from the bomb bay, clearing the passageway forward.

  But he’d need a good reason to leave his position. “Better I stay on the guns, sir,” he told Tommy. “Never can tell when some clever bastard’s gonna try to jump us.”

  Seated to Tommy’s right was Hank Roth, the navigator. He looked wonderfully organized, with his marked-up charts, whiz wheels, sextant, and frequency cards neatly arranged around his station—the picture of preparedness. But Tommy could tell the young man was nervous.

  He’s got every right to be. He doesn’t have a whole lot of combat time, and this is his first night combat mission.

  Hell…this is technically my first night combat mission, too.

  “I’ve got to be honest with you, Hank…I find it a little strange flying with a navigator. Never had one before.”

  He decided not to mention all those times he wished he did have one.

  “We’ve got an updated takeoff time, sir,” Roth said. “Nineteen-oh-seven hours.”

  “Great, they’re throwing changes at us already. What’s the reason?”

  “The Firefly ship is going to be a little late getting airborne out of Kimpo. They didn’t say why.”

  “Let’s just hope he lights up the right place,” Tommy said. “We’re still number four in the conga line?”

  “Affirmative, sir.”

  Tommy had one more ritual to perform before beginning the pre-start checklist. Reaching into his flight bag, he pulled out a photo of Sylvie Bergerac and affixed it to a corner of the instrument panel.

  “Your wife, sir?” Roth asked.

  “Nope. Close as we can get to that, though, considering she isn’t the marrying kind. I guess you could say I’m not the marrying kind, either.”

  Roth had no idea what that meant. But he didn’t think it was his place to ask for an explanation.

  “Known her ever since Forty-Four, back in France,” Tommy added. “In fact, she’s the one who thought up the name that adorns our ship.”

  “She sure is pretty, sir.”

  “Pretty isn’t the half of it, Hank. Now start reading me that checklist.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Marines gave up trying to measure the progress of their withdrawal down the MSR in terms of miles. In the two hours since the lead element rolled out of Hagaru, it had traveled roughly seven hundred yards—less than half a mile—through the gauntlet of Chinese in the hills to either side of that narrow road.

  They’d come up with a name for that stretch of the MSR, too: Hellfire Valley.

  Gunnery Sergeant Jim Ramsay and his
tankers were spending more time acting as bulldozers than fire support, shoving the burning and disabled vehicles off the road. The valley was so narrow in most places that a disabled truck or tank blocked the path completely, bringing every vehicle behind it to a standstill…

  And making everybody better targets, dammit. Once the column is stopped, Chinese come out of the hills and try to swarm all over the vehicles. Tanks, trucks...it don’t matter to the chinks. A lot of them die trying…but plenty are getting through.

  I’m seeing too many Marines die because their weapons won’t work right in this godawful cold. The carbines, especially. They won’t fire more than one shot on auto or semi-auto, like some damn bolt-action hunting rifle. You’re not going to hold off a wave of chinks one shot at a time, that’s for damn sure.

  Without the Marine and Navy Corsairs dumping load after load of napalm onto those hills, we’d all probably be dead already.

  But once the sun goes down and they go home, we’re on our own.

  The other day, before we set out, some reporters were stupid enough to show up at Hagaru, wanting to know all about our coming retreat. General Smith had it right when he told them, “We are not retreating. We are merely advancing in another direction.”

  Those reporters laughed, like it was all just some bullshit fantasy.

  But it ain’t a retreat when you’re surrounded. You’ve got to attack to break out.

  And that’s what we’re trying to do.

  *****

  Moon’s Menace VI was tail-end Charlie of Switchblade Green Flight, the last ship of four B-26s in trail stretched out over several miles. Behind them was Switchblade Blue Flight, another four-ship formation some five miles behind. The night mission would last nearly five hours. If all went well, they’d return to Itazuke around 2300 hours.