There was a hardness in the Marines. The 7th Marines’ Fox Company had been left atop a hill in a key pass to try to keep the road back to the southern end of the reservoir open. Resupplied by air, Fox Company fought for five days, finally operating from behind improvised barricades that included stacks of frozen Chinese corpses. “Word had been passed to kill all enemy wounded,” recalled Fox’s PFC Ernest Gonzalez. It was so icy in the cutting wind of the pass, recalled another member of the company, PFC Robert Ezell, that one morning, when warm milk was poured over his cereal, by the time he sat down on a stump to eat, the milk had frozen. Another Marine, Cpl. Robert Kelly, was so cold that he did not notice he’d been hit by rifle fire in the right foot, a fact he discovered only after the battle, when a medic noticed his limp and sat him down to examine his foot. The medic looked up at him and began laughing, saying, “You dumb asshole, you’re shot.”
The key to getting the two Marine regiments from their outposts on the west side of the reservoir down to the junction at Hagaru, where Smith and supplies were waiting, was to break through the Chinese roadblocks and get the road open. Two attempts were made to clear the road directly; both failed. The regimental commanders, Lt. Col. Raymond Murray of the 5th Marines and Col. Homer Litzenberg of the 7th Marines, recognized that a radically different approach was needed.
In what might have been the crucial tactical moment of the entire campaign, Murray and Litzenberg sent Lt. Col. Ray Davis to lead his 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines overland through enemy-held territory. The temperature was twenty-four degrees below zero, according to reports from artillery units in the valley. Few movements are as physically draining as going up and down hills covered with snow, but Davis’s battalion marched eight miles through waist-high drifts and over three frozen ridges. In steeper sections, Davis said, “we had to climb on our hands and knees, hold on to roots and twigs to keep from sliding back down.” At times the Marines were so near Chinese troops that “we could smell the garlic and hear them talking,” recalled Sgt. Charles McKellar.
The weather was a physical threat but also a tactical ally. The snapping wind covered the sounds of hundreds of heavily laden men moving and climbing in the snow, and encouraged enemy soldiers to keep their ears well covered. It was too cold, and the men were too fatigued, to allow any stops, so the column moved almost continuously for twenty-four hours, then collided with the rear of the enemy along the road, ambushing the would-be Chinese ambushers and relieving the beleaguered Fox Company. When Lt. Col. Davis’s battalion arrived, it saw some 450 Chinese corpses splayed out around the company’s perimeter. Over the course of six days, Fox had suffered 26 killed, 89 wounded, and 3 missing, out of about 220 Marines in the reinforced company. The dead were stacked outside Fox Company’s aid station, recalled McKellar, “probably twenty feet high,” topped by the pilot of a helicopter downed that morning, still in his leather flight jacket. “That sight is burned into my brain,” he said. All of Fox’s survivors had suffered either frostbite or dysentery. Davis and Fox’s commander, Capt. William Barber, would both receive the Medal of Honor. (A total of fourteen Marines in the Chosin campaign would receive that highest of American military honors.) Davis’s battalion then moved down and held open the pass until the Marine column could move southward through it.
Over four days and three nights, this epic march and attack enabled the 5th and 7th Marines to push the fourteen miles back down the left arm of the Y to Hagaru, fighting Chinese attackers most of the time and the cold always. There were seven Chinese roadblocks along the way that needed to be attacked and cleared. Moving slowly and carefully, the two regiments brought with them all fifteen hundred of their wounded—six hundred of them in stretcher cases—as well as their dead. “The dead were stacked in trucks like so many cords of wood,” recalled PFC Doug Michaud of the 5th Marines. “When they ran out of truck-bed space, they laid the dead on fenders, across hoods, tied on the barrels of artillery pieces. God, there were a lot of them.” Patrick Roe, an intelligence officer for the rearguard battalion, wrote later, “No one ever doubted the troops from Yudam-ni would make it, but there was always a question of how many would.”
Smith and his chief of operations, Col. Alpha Bowser, were in a tent at Hagaru one night, working on the issue of how to replace a blown bridge on their line of retreat, when they heard an unfamiliar noise, one of human voices gradually growing louder. Bowser went outside to look and found hundreds of Marines marching into camp from the northwestern side of the reservoir, “singing in the midst of this falling snow,” he said. “The place was a fairyland to look at if you could just detach yourself for a split second and look at the scenery. It was like a fairyland. . . . Beautiful, really beautiful to look at.” The voices were those of the lead element of the two regiments coming into camp, singing the Marine Corps Hymn and other familiar tunes. Bowser looked at Gen. Smith and said, “Our troubles are over. We’ve got it made.” The mood was less cheerful inside the medical tents, where arriving casualties were packed. “We had so many patients lying, sitting, and standing that we could hardly see the floor,” recalled Charles Holloway Jr., a Navy surgeon attached to the 1st Marine Division. “I stacked patients in like sardines in the commandeered pyramidal tents, 25 casualties in a circle around the center stove. Their own body heat and warmth from the heater kept them from freezing until we could load them on planes.”
Hagaru itself was under assault by yet another Chinese division. Smith took two days to allow the two arriving regiments to recuperate and refit, and also to fly out all the wounded and then some of the dead. (The aerial supply and evacuation effort was overseen by Air Force Maj. Gen. William Tunner, who just two years earlier had been in charge of the Berlin Airlift.) With the additional infantrymen, plus ammunition brought in by air, Smith calculated that he now had sufficient combat power to hold Hagaru indefinitely, despite being greatly outnumbered by Chinese attackers. “I considered that the critical part of the operation had been completed,” he wrote not long after the battle. “Even with two depleted RCTs [regimental combat teams] I felt confident we could fight our way to Koto-ri where we would gain additional strength.” But the newly arrived regiments were hardly put on a regime of rest for their two days at Hagaru. PFC Fred Allen of the 5th Marines remembered being put into the Hagaru line upon arrival and told to “dig in and be prepared.” At midnight, an illumination flare launched high overhead revealed a memorable sight: “It looked like half of China was coming down that valley.”
Elements of six Chinese divisions stood along the sole road leading from the junction of the Y south to the sea. On December 6, Smith began the march of his ten thousand Marines to the coast. It was planned even more carefully than an attack, with Marines moving along the flanking ridgelines to protect the column. There were a thousand trucks, tanks, and other vehicles in the column, but by Smith’s order, only drivers, radiomen, medics, and the wounded were allowed to ride. Everyone else would walk, the better to stay warm and to ward off enemy attacks. “This was a very powerful force,” Smith later wrote. “It was well-supplied with ammunition, fuel, and rations; was powerfully supported by Marine and carrier-based air; possessed organically artillery, tanks and the whole gamut of infantry weapons; and had dedicated officers and men to carry the fight to the enemy.” Even so, it took thirty-nine hours and cost six hundred more casualties to fight southward eleven miles through nine more roadblocks to the next of Smith’s prepared strongpoints, at Koto-ri. Gen. Almond flew over the convoy and was outraged to see it stopped at points, so he had his aircraft land at Koto-ri, where he lectured Gen. Smith on the need to move rapidly.
When the Marines marched into Koto-ri, the last of Smith’s strongpoints, PFC Paul Martin, a member of the 1st Marine Division’s reconnaissance company, went looking among them for friends in the 5th and 7th Marines. “Found most of them had been killed,” he said.
On the final leg, south from Koto-ri down to the coastal plain, one of
Lt. Col. Davis’s officers, Joseph Owen, encountered combat in a whiteout blizzard. “The tracers were weird streaks of orange that flew at us out of blinding snow clouds,” he wrote. Chinese soldiers, ill-clad and at the far end of their supply lines, were found frozen to death in their foxholes. Chinese mortars were zeroed in on a point in the road where it was crossed by railroad tracks. The Navy Reserve surgeon Charles Holloway, who had been pulled from civilian life just months earlier, was frightened out of his wits but still conscious enough to observe that the fragments of exploding mortar rounds hit the icy canyon walls with a sound “like gravel being thrown against glass.”
The final obstacle, where the road ran along the top of a fifteen-hundred-foot cliff face, was a deep notch in the cliff whose bridge had been almost completely destroyed by the Chinese. Without it, troops could walk out, but Smith’s fourteen hundred vehicles (he had picked up four hundred more at Koto-ri) were stuck—and on them lay the truck-bound wounded. “To leave them was unthinkable,” said Lt. William Davis of the 7th Marines. The division engineer, Lt. Col. John Partridge, came up with a novel way to address the problem: Drop bridge sections by air.
Partridge is one of the unacknowledged heroes of Chosin, having already overseen the emergency construction of the northern airstrip that permitted the evacuation of more than four thousand casualties. The end of that runway was only three hundred yards from the base perimeter, and the engineers occasionally had to put down their construction tools and pick up weapons to help repel attackers. But Smith was skeptical of the unprecedented plan for the bridge and questioned Partridge closely about it. “He was kind of a grouchy guy,” Smith recalled of his engineer. “He admitted that the Air Force had never dropped Treadway bridge sections.” Smith pressed him, asking how he knew it would work, whether test drops had been conducted, what would happen if some sections were damaged while being parachuted in, and whether there was a backup plan. Finally Partridge tired of the questions and exclaimed, “I got you across the Han River. I got you the airfield. And I’ll get you a bridge.” Smith laughed and told him to proceed. The bridge project worked, and the Marines were able to move out of the mountains. Surprisingly, despite his heroic efforts and Smith’s support, Partridge would not be promoted beyond lieutenant colonel.
Evenness under extreme strain is a vital leadership skill, one that both George Marshall and O. P. Smith appreciated, and that Lt. Col. Ray Davis demonstrated for weeks during the Chosin campaign. An officer in his 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines recalled Davis raising his voice just once during the campaign, when he was informed that one of his companies had been pushed off a hill. Near the end of the retreat, Cpl. Ray Pearl heard a voice in the frozen darkness. It was Davis. “Is that you, Pearl?” he asked.
“How you been, Colonel?” Pearl responded.
“No complaints. How’s things with you?” said Davis.
“Fine, sir. Just fine.”
“That’s good. . . . Take care, Pearl.”
It was the most ordinary of exchanges, made memorable because it occurred in the most stressful of circumstances. When Davis reached the sea at the conclusion of the retreat, he was surprised at how hungry he was, eating first “five or six of these great large Tootsie Rolls” and then “something like 17 or 18 pancakes in two hours.” One of Davis’s Marines, Charles McKellar, reported that when he landed at Inchon he had weighed 170 pounds, but when he left Chosin he was down to 120.
Gen. Smith, vastly outnumbered, had mauled the Chinese divisions—at least nine of them, and perhaps even twelve—arrayed against his one division. Afterward, he wrote to the commandant of the Marines that his men “came down off the mountain bearded, footsore, and physically exhausted, but their spirits were high. They were still a fighting division.”
Smith’s pride was justified. According to Russell Spurr’s groundbreaking history of Chinese involvement in the war, Enter the Dragon, after the Chosin battles, the Chinese commander in Korea, Marshal Peng Dehuai, a coal miner turned guerrilla from Hunan Province and a veteran of the Long March of 1934–35, flew to Beijing. There he confronted Chairman Mao Zedong, telling him bluntly that the forces given him were unequipped, untrained, and undersupplied. As a result, he said, the attack on the Marines had been a disaster. (Twenty-three years later, during the last phases of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Peng would be repeatedly beaten by Red Guards in a series of more than 130 interrogations and also paraded with a humiliating placard hung around his neck, before he succumbed to cancer.) The Chinese divisions that attacked the Marines at Chosin suffered twenty-five thousand dead, twelve thousand more wounded, and tens of thousands of frostbite cases. These divisions were withdrawn from fighting until March of the following year.
Nonetheless, the campaign was a strategic victory for the Chinese. They had taken on the Americans, the world’s leading military power, and, fielding an illiterate, unmechanized peasant army, had pushed them out of northern Korea. And they had done it against one of America’s most prominent generals, Douglas MacArthur, the conqueror of Japan. “Communist China—until then considered to be a rogue regime of doubtful legitimacy—had become a power with which to be reckoned,” concluded Patrick Roe, a Marine intelligence officer at Chosin.
Gen. Ridgway admired O. P. Smith’s performance at Chosin. “If it wasn’t for his tremendous leadership, we would have lost the bulk of that division up north. His leadership was the principal reason it came out the way it did. He was a great division commander.” When Smith retired, S. L. A. Marshall, the Army historian, went even further, calling his Chosin performance “perhaps the most brilliant divisional feat of arms in the national history.” It is difficult to overstate what he achieved. Had he simply followed orders and charged toward the Yalu, he might well have lost more than ten thousand Marines, which would have been perhaps the greatest military disaster in the nation’s history. If the 1st Marine Division had been wiped out, it would have been a triumph for Communism, with consequences for the Korean War and the larger Cold War that are incalculable. The United States might have withdrawn from the peninsula and into isolationism, or it might have escalated and used nuclear weapons in Korea. Neither prospect is appealing.
Surprisingly, Smith is not much remembered or honored in today’s Corps. Ask a Marine who commanded at Chosin, and he is likely to say Chesty Puller or perhaps, even more mistakenly, Gen. H. M. Smith, the “Howlin’ Mad” officer of World War II fame. A major reason for the relative obscurity of Gen. O. P. Smith likely is the friction between him and Gen. Shepherd, his immediate superior in the Marine Corps during the Chosin campaign, which probably is why he was never invited to the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, to teach fellow officers about the campaign. “Regimental commanders spoke, company commanders spoke—everyone spoke but O. P. Smith,” wrote his granddaughter, with evident bitterness.
This neglect continues even now. The exhibit on the Chosin campaign at the big new Marine Corps museum near the Quantico base is magnificent. Especially chilling is the room-size re-creation of Fox Company’s hilltop stand, with its depiction of tracer fire arcing across the night as mortarmen run low on shells and the dead are covered by snow. “Chosin remains a touchstone of Marine Corps history,” a nearby sign states. Yet the exhibit treats O. P. Smith as an afterthought, sharing a small display case in a corner with Chesty Puller. The only Marine general from the Korean War honored with a prominent yellow-on-red biographical plaque, oddly enough, is Gerald Thomas, who succeeded O. P. Smith as commander of the 1st Marine Division in Korea.
Upon retiring, Smith and his wife, having never owned a house, at first found it difficult to obtain a mortgage, but eventually they were able to buy a small rambler not far from Stanford University, in Los Altos, California. There he gardened in the combat boots he had worn at Chosin. He died on Christmas Day of 1977.
Why the difference in leadership?
Years later, Faris Kirkland, an Army veteran of Korea
turned academic historian, wrote a careful analysis of the Chosin campaign that is heartbreaking in its conclusions. Sifting the historical records and mulling the different outcomes of the Marine and Army units, he found little difference between the 13,500 Marines and the 4,500 Army troops in the performance of their enlisted men and junior officers. But in their more senior officers—majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, and generals—he detected crucial distinctions. “Marine commanders at Chosin demonstrated knowledge of tasks, obstacles and the means to overcome them,” Kirkland wrote. “Army commanders showed dash, bravery and hope; but little understanding of such matters as communications, reconnaissance, fire support and logistics.”
The key factor, he concluded, was the combat experience of those in command. As Kirkland noted, the officer officially designated as the Army’s hero of the battle, Lt. Col. Faith, who took over after the regimental commander was killed, had no combat experience, nor even much formal schooling in his profession. Rather, Faith, the son of an Army general, had been plucked directly from Officer Candidate School during World War II to become an aide to Matthew Ridgway. He never attended the Infantry Advanced Course for officers or the Command and General Staff College. Eight years after OCS, leading a beleaguered regimental combat team in Korea, he knew how to look like a commander. “On the battlefield, Faith was a clone of Ridgway: intense, fearless, relentlessly aggressive, and unforgiving of error or caution,” wrote the historian Clay Blair. Yet for all that, Kirkland noted, Faith did not really know how to command:
[He] had not mastered the fundamentals of military operations in the field. He ordered all the mortars and howitzers destroyed. He made no arrangements for communications within or between the infantry forces or the truck column. He did not ask Marine aviators, who had provided close support throughout the period 27 November–1 December, for information about the condition of the route he was to traverse or the dispositions of the enemy; neither did he send out patrols. He assigned no intermediate objectives and made no plan for spending one or more nights on the road. At least one company of 3-31 Infantry did not know there was going to be a breakout until leaders saw a line of trucks driving out of the perimeter. The commander of the artillery battalion asserted that he never had oral, telephonic or radio contact with Faith from the time he assumed command until the 31st RCT was annihilated.
The Generals Page 16
