On Desperate Ground
Page 28
Some men fighting nearby hauled him into a farmhouse and set him on the dirt floor beside a dozen other injured comrades. There he lay for three days, unable to move. Through a crack in the doorway, he watched the fighting outside and could see the Chinese growing closer. He had probably been concussed in the blast, and every explosion outside made his head throb. His legs hurt terribly as well, but he could not find a medic to administer morphine. He plugged the worst of his wounds with wads of torn cloth—and suffered in silence.
For those three days, all he had to eat or drink was a little tea steeped in melted snow and a breakfast package of bran cereal. He savored the dry flakes, one by one, and let them slowly dissolve on the back of his tongue like a delicacy. His only other diversion was a pocket Bible he sometimes thumbed through. A devout Christian, Reeves would read aloud from the Psalms during the heat of battle. “And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee.” There are no atheists in foxholes, it is said; whatever their background, none of the other casualties cooped up in the farmhouse seemed to mind Reeves’s recitations.
Outside, along the east side of the reservoir, the Army units were unraveling. Their original commander, Colonel Allan MacLean, was gone. A few days earlier, marching across an icy inlet toward a company of men who he thought were American reinforcements but turned out to be enemy soldiers, MacLean had been riddled with bullets and taken prisoner. (He would soon die of his wounds while in captivity.) MacLean’s successor, Colonel Don Carlos Faith, was left to make sense of the situation. Faith was the man General Almond had awarded a Silver Star on the morning of the twenty-eighth, the man Almond had told to buck up and not let a bunch of “laundrymen” stop him.
Finally, on the evening of November 30, the word came that Colonel Faith would be attempting a breakout to the south. No succor was coming from the Marines at Hagaru, they heard, so Faith had determined that the only hope for the nearly three thousand soldiers trapped here on the east side of the Chosin was to smash their way out. If Smith couldn’t break through to Faith, Faith would break through to Smith. It was the Army’s last chance to save itself from certain destruction. Shortly after dawn on December 1, Ed Reeves and the other critically wounded who could not walk—more than six hundred men—were loaded onto trucks while demolition crews burned equipment and dismantled weapons to prevent anything of strategic value from falling into Chinese hands.
Later that morning, at Colonel Faith’s order, the exodus had begun.
* * *
By midafternoon the breakout had descended into havoc. The vanguard, inching along in the face of roadblocks, blown bridges, and booby traps, had covered only a few hard-won miles. Machine gunners had expended their ammunition. Grenades had become scarce. Many of the trucks ran out of fuel. As the cold sapped the radio batteries, various sections of the convoy lost communication with one another and with Colonel Faith. It was a long, deadly traffic jam, as far as the eye could see. The unwounded were wounded, and the wounded were re-wounded. Men cowered under trucks, some unable to fight, some refusing to fight, others already thinking the fight was as good as over. Company integrity began to crumble: Men from different units became confusingly intermingled on the road. No one seemed to know who to take orders from, or who to give orders to. Throughout the wrecked cavalcade, military order was collapsing. The column had become, as one historian put it, “a struggling organism without its central nervous system.”
The enemy, sensing vulnerability, grew bolder. They rivered down from the ridges. When the sun began to set behind the hills, dousing the road in a dreary blue light, the Chinese grew bolder still, for they knew that with darkness the Corsairs would have to return to their bases. The Red soldiers lunged closer, sallying right into the column of trucks, sometimes shooting at point-blank range or bayoneting men and dragging them off the tailgates.
The Americans were powerless to stop them: The Chinese were cutting the convoy to pieces.
Sam Folsom, a Marine pilot, happened to be flying overhead in a Corsair and witnessed it all. “It was heartrending, like a bad dream,” Folsom said. “I watched the Chinese coming down from the ridgelines. I could see the Army guys, all strung out, cut off, overwhelmed.” Folsom, a highly experienced pilot from World War II, became so desperate to help the soldiers that he did something uncharacteristically impulsive and reckless: He swooped down over the trees, dropping lower than he had ever tried to fly a plane. He picked out a cluster of Chinese soldiers and, aiming directly for their heads, tried to chop them up with his propeller. “I knew it was crazy, but that’s how close I got, I was so full of rage.” Folsom came within just a few feet of succeeding in his maniacal undertaking, but then, coming to his senses, he pulled higher into the sky. He realized there was nothing he could do. His Corsair wasn’t armed—that day, he was serving only as an observer. “I could see what was going to happen down there,” he said, “and I was helpless to stop it. It was feet against wheels down on that road—and the feet were going to win.”
Ahead of Ed Reeves’s truck, Colonel Faith tried to rally the troops, marching up the line of vehicles with a Colt .45 automatic pistol in his hand. When a few men started to head for the safety of the woods, he threatened to shoot all deserters. Then he discovered two South Korean soldiers who’d lashed themselves to the undercarriage of a truck. Evidently, they had hoped to ride to safety, said one account, “like Odysseus escaping from Polyphemus.” Faith ordered the two young Koreans to rejoin the fight. When they refused, he shot them both.
The Chinese mounted another attack, and Faith was mortally wounded—a piece of shrapnel from a fragmentation grenade had cut into his chest, just above his heart. Aides propped him up in the cab of a truck, like a mannequin, perhaps to make it appear as though he were still in command. The dead Faith looked, said one historian, “rather like El Cid riding out to his last battle.” But when this deception was discovered, the men stopped fighting. Shorn of leadership, with no one else rising up to take charge and with ammunition virtually spent, the units began to dissolve.
By this point, farther back in the column, Ed Reeves’s truck was stitched with bullet holes. Its gas tank had been pierced multiple times, draining the last dregs of fuel. The truck wouldn’t budge. The men sat in the late-afternoon gloaming, waiting for the worst to happen.
A small reconnaissance plane came over the ridge. It wagged its wings, then dropped a series of containers along the road. Someone near Reeves’s truck retrieved one of them. Inside was a leaflet that read: ENEMY ON ALL SIDES. DON’T STAY ON TRUCKS. CROSS ICE TO OUR TROOPS SOUTH END OF RESERVOIR. A sergeant, marching through the column, came along to reinforce what the leaflet said. He stopped at Reeves’s truck, climbed into the bed with the wounded, and told it straight: “Column ain’t moving again. Everybody who can, better move out.”
The men were confused. Move out where?
The sergeant pointed toward the reservoir, a ghostly sheen off to the north, a mile or two away. “Get out on the ice. And head left.”
And if we can’t move at all?
The sergeant was blunt. “Prepare to become prisoners of war,” he said.
And so began the final unraveling. In ones and twos, then in clusters, then in throngs, the able-bodied men quit the road and started running, with the not too badly wounded plodding behind. They abandoned their trucks, they abandoned their dead; many even abandoned their weapons. What good was a rifle without ammunition? It would only slow them down. They ran in serpentine fashion as they made for the reservoir, dodging Chinese bullets. Officers tried in vain to instill some semblance of discipline. What had once been an army had devolved into a rabble.
* * *
Ed Reeves unzipped his bag and tried to stand, but the pain in his legs was so severe that he started to faint. It was futile: He couldn’t move an inch, let alone walk to the reservoir. The truck had been his only hope of deliverance. Now it had become his prison.
When night fell, Reeves fished out his pocket Bible and read by moonlight from the Book of Psalms until he fell off into a fitful sleep. Shortly after dawn, a figure approached the truck. It was a solitary man, his boots crunching on the snow. He walked around to the back of the truck and stood at attention. The man appeared to be a Chinese officer. He wore a gray greatcoat and a fur-lined cap. “Good morning, men,” he said in nearly perfect English. He seemed educated and poised, and he spoke softly, with a British accent.
One of the wounded sitting on the tailgate implored the officer. “Sir,” he said. “You can see we’re dyin’ here. If we don’t get shelter and medical help soon, we’ll all be dead. Can we move to a place where we won’t freeze?”
The officer stepped forward and raised his mittened hands in a gesture of impotence. “I am sorry,” he said. “I can give you none of the things you ask for. If I were to be heard speaking to you like this…” He stood, looking sympathetically at the wounded men for a moment. “I have only stopped to say, ‘Bless you all, may God be with you.’ ”
Then he spun around and marched up the road.
* * *
Reeves, having dozed through the middle of the day, woke with a start. He thought he heard gunshots somewhere ahead. “What’s that?” he demanded. “What’s going on up there?”
People in the forward part of the truck craned their necks to see. “Gooks are burning the trucks,” someone yelled. The man’s tone was strangely neutral, disembodied, as though the scene he watched and narrated were taking place on another plane, in another world—as though it didn’t apply to them. “Looks like they’re shooting anyone who tries to escape.”
Finally it dawned on Reeves what was going on: The Red soldiers must have been given an order to clear the road, to dispose of the American wounded and dead. They were incinerating the trucks with the wounded still inside. Reeves could hear the screams of the Americans. He smelled gasoline and roasting flesh. The Chinese were being systematic about it, working their way back through the convoy. They would soak a truck with fuel, then toss in a few phosphorus grenades, then shoot anyone who found the strength to flee the flames. Then they would move on to another truck.
“Looks like we’re next,” someone said, adopting the same disembodied tone. “Here they come.”
Reeves lay in a stupor, searching for some way to accept what was happening. When he joined the Army, he had imagined dying in any number of ways—heroically, in battle, performing some gallant deed. He never envisioned anything like this: being burned in a pyre with a few dozen of his helpless countrymen. As the Chinese approached the truck, he prayed: God, give me the courage to die like a man.
The Reds walked around to the rear of the truck. One of the Americans perched near the tailgate offered his cigarettes, attempting to make friends with his executioner. He was promptly shot.
Reeves could hear other Chinese soldiers rattling around the gas tank, apparently trying to siphon fuel with which to start the fire. But when they discerned that the bullet-riddled tank was empty, the officer in charge issued new orders: A soldier, armed with a rifle, climbed onto the bed of the truck. He came to the first man, leveled the barrel between his eyes, and fired. He moved on to the next. Then the next.
Reeves sat up, half out of his sleeping bag, and watched as though it were a movie. He didn’t know any of these Americans especially well—he’d just shared the bed of a truck with them for a day and a half—but he was in awe of them. They didn’t beg or cry; they didn’t utter so much as a whimper. They looked their executioner in the eye and died with dignity.
When the barrel slid over to Reeves, he felt strangely at peace. His eyes followed the smooth metal until they found the eyes of the soldier. Reeves did not see malice in them. He was a kid, following horrible orders. Possibly, from his point of view, it was a mission of mercy—get it over with in an instant, rather than let them slowly freeze to death. The soldier was standing no more than three feet away when he squeezed the trigger. The muzzle blast knocked Reeves to the floor. Then the barrel swung over to the next man.
37
I’LL GET YOU A GODDAMN BRIDGE
Funchilin Pass, South of Koto-ri
As General Smith planned his breakout from Hagaru toward Koto-ri, a new problem presented itself further along his escape path to the sea. Aviators were reporting that the Chinese had blown the concrete bridge at Funchilin Pass, just below Koto-ri, making the road impassable. It was the same bridge Smith had been so apprehensive about when he’d first laid eyes on it, a few weeks earlier, on his way into the mountains—the precarious structure that spanned the penstocks carrying reservoir water toward the valley below. If the air reconnaissance reports were true, Smith knew, his exit plan was imperiled.
Smith had more than one thousand vehicles. They would form a convoy several miles long. These vehicles would transport the wounded and the dead and all the food and supplies his forces would need for their fighting exodus to the coast. As a matter of principle, Smith was determined not to abandon his equipment, nor to leave behind anything valuable for the Chinese. But now, apparently, his escape hatch had been sealed shut. The mood in Smith’s headquarters was morose. His chief of operations, Colonel Alpha Bowser, viewed the situation this way: “My personal, private reaction when I heard the news was something akin to despair.”
Smith again summoned his head engineer, Lieutenant Colonel John Partridge, to discuss the reconstruction project. Only a week earlier, Partridge had put the finishing touches on the Hagaru airstrip, a feat many people said couldn’t be accomplished, and since then his teams had kept themselves busy repairing the road and clearing impediments along the MSR. Smith was starting to recognize that, to a peculiar extent, the battle of the reservoir was proving to be an engineering story. Now here was an even more nettlesome problem for Partridge’s gifted mind to solve.
The two men talked for a while, then Partridge said he needed to see the destroyed bridge site firsthand. He crawled into a small observation plane and took off from the Hagaru airstrip, turning south over the snowy mountains. The spotter plane flew past Koto-ri and then bumped its way through the freezing air a few more miles until it came to Funchilin Pass. After he circled the site, the full import of what the Chinese had done began to register with him. This, said Partridge, “was a damned serious situation.”
The Chinese sappers had turned the bridge into a mess of rubble and twisted rebar. It had a yawning hole, about twenty feet across. With the explosive force the Chinese had obviously employed, it was a wonder they hadn’t ruptured the penstocks, causing a cataract that might have swept away the entire installation. Partridge could see that the mountainside to which the narrow road clung was too steep for him to construct a bypass around the ruined bridge—nor could he build an impromptu ledge on its downhill side.
Worse, Partridge discovered that the enemy had deposited another lovely gift a few hundred yards down the MSR, at a place where a trestle had once carried a set of railroad tracks up and over the road. Here, the Chinese had blown the trestle from its concrete pylons, neatly dropping the structure athwart the MSR. Partridge couldn’t guess how many tons this huge mesh of metal might weigh, but he was worried it could be an even more significant obstacle than the blown bridge.
Partridge kept passing over the site in the little plane, ex
amining it from every angle. He instructed the pilot to drop lower so he could get a better look. Only then did he see that thousands of Chinese were dug into the surrounding hillsides. Song’s armies were preparing for a big fight here around the blown bridge. Every now and then, soldiers aimed their rifles in the air and took potshots at the plane. If Partridge flew any lower, he might be shot out of the sky.
Clearly the Chinese had recognized the vulnerability of this spot and had already taken efforts to exploit it. These were elements of the Chinese Sixtieth Division, and they had been given the order to do everything in their power to block the Marines’ march south from Koto-ri. General Song, an avid reader of Sun Tzu, was doubtless familiar with one of the ancient philosopher’s more widely quoted precepts: “When a cat is at the rat hole, 10,000 rats dare not come out; when a tiger guards a ford, 10,000 deer cannot cross.” Funchilin Pass was the rat hole, and Song’s Sixtieth Division was the cat. Here the Chinese would put up a determined fight. It was their last chance to prevent the Americans from escaping the mountains and slipping away to the coast.
Partridge shivered in the plane’s freezing cockpit and tried to force his numb fingers to take notes. He knew there was neither time nor available materials to build a bridge of hewn timbers. Nor did he think the site would accommodate a Bailey bridge—a span that his engineers often used, constructed of prefabricated trusses. Partridge had to devise something different. It had to be foolproof and strong enough to withstand the weight of a Sherman tank, but also something that he could lay down in a hurry. After a few more passes over the site, he finally struck upon an idea.