The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Effective communication between the force on the ground and its eyes and ears in the sky was now gone. Up in the spotter aircraft, Major Millard Engen, the battalion executive officer, had spotted a sizeable force of enemy soldiers moving rapidly toward the Americans from the slope of Hill 453, which dominated the southern approach to the Twin Tunnels area. He immediately tried to radio Lieutenant Mitchell to get out of the valley as quickly as possible, but of course, he could not get through. Soon there was no need to warn them that the Chinese might attack—they were already being hit hard. The spotter plane then turned back to refuel, but not before Engen radioed regimental headquarters that the patrol was in danger of being wiped out.

  In fact, even as they entered the open valley, they had been trapped by a considerably larger Chinese force. Private Richard Fockler, who was caught along with the other men in the patrol when the Chinese struck, later remembered that they were just about to have lunch when the first mortar round landed near them. Almost immediately other weapons joined in. The drivers were ordered to turn their vehicles around immediately. But the road was so narrow that it was hard for the jeeps, let alone the trucks, to maneuver. They had just gotten most of the vehicles facing the right way when the lead jeep was hit. The driver, Fockler remembered, panicked and stalled it out, blocking the rest of the convoy. Then a Chinese machine gun began hammering away at them, the tattoo of an automatic weapon on a metal target, followed by the worst noise imaginable, Fockler believed, a kind of terminal sound, that of coolant draining from a radiator. When the Chinese began to fire, there apparently was a brief disagreement between Mitchell and Mueller. In Mueller’s view their only chance to avoid total annihilation was to head for the high ground—a hill just off to the east—and dig in. For a brief moment, Mitchell still hoped they might be able to fight their way out by road. Then Mueller yelled to Mitchell: “We’re going to have to get to the top of that hill. The Chinese are coming up from the other side. This is our only chance!” The Chinese understood that as well, so both sides started racing for the hill and the high ground. But if they were in a race for the hill, and if time was suddenly the critical factor, then the Americans were going to have to travel light, leaving most of their heavy weapons behind. In the end, they took only a rocket launcher, a light machine gun, and some of the BARs.

  The day the patrol was hit happened to be the twenty-first birthday of a young man named Laron Wilson, a driver for Headquarters Company of the Third Battalion of the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment, who had been loaned to Charley Company. The patrol was going to be an easy one, he had been assured, because the recon the previous day had made only the most minimal contact with the enemy. Wilson was just a little uneasy: for all of the assurances, going on a mission always had an element of uncertainty and danger, and he was going to be doing it without knowing anyone else in the unit. When he connected with the men he was to drive from the Twenty-fourth Division—four soldiers, all of them strangers, with a light machine gun—he felt very much alone. He did not even know the other jeep drivers from the Twenty-third, and that added to the loneliness—you were always supposed to know the men you went to war with, because in the end you fought for them as much as for yourself. It was never a lark, anyway, he believed, not up where they were operating, where they might well be completely surrounded by Chinese and not even know it until it was too late. One thing he noticed—rather enviously—was that the men from the Twenty-fourth Division all had the new reversible parkas that were just arriving in country. They were warmer, and one side was white, which offered that much more camouflage in snowy Korea.

  Wilson had joined the Army in 1948 right after finishing high school in Salt Lake City. He had always intended to be a soldier. When he was a boy and American troops had marched down Salt Lake City’s main drag during World War II, he had unfailingly rushed into the streets to watch. He loved the sight of those mighty convoys heading for a nearby Army base. In high school, he had taken ROTC because he was so sure that the Army would be his career. He had been in the Twenty-third for more than a year. The last night that his unit had spent in the States before shipping out in late July had been his first wedding anniversary. He had been given permission to spend the night with his wife at a nearby hotel. This had greatly irritated his first sergeant who, not married himself, did not believe that any serious soldier should have a wife or anything else not issued by the Army. As he headed into Twin Tunnels, Wilson was still dealing with the idea that he had just become a parent—his first child, Susan, had been born only three weeks earlier. The reality of that was hard to come to terms with because he was so far away, but it had immediately made him feel he had a lot to live for.

  He had fought through the Naktong battles and made it out of Kunuri. He had great faith in Colonel Freeman and special confidence in Captain John Metts, commander of his Headquarters Company, as cool a customer as he had dealt with. In those final hours at Kunuri, when everything was falling apart, Wilson had been in the process of disassembling a cooking stove. Just then, with the Chinese getting ever closer and the tension becoming unbearable, Captain Metts appeared. Wilson put together a plate of food and some coffee for him, anything to fight off the numbing cold, and joined him with a coffee of his own. Suddenly, the Chinese started firing away. Two bullet holes promptly appeared on the stovepipe right next to him, and Wilson quickly hit the ground, spilling coffee all over himself. Metts never moved. “Well, that’s two more rounds we don’t have to worry about” was all he said. Somehow they had managed to slip away on the road west to Anju. Their jeep conked out on the road and they chained it to a tank. Not the most elegant way to leave town, he thought, but it had worked.

  The trip that day to Twin Tunnels from Iho-ri had been relatively uneventful until they entered the valley. Then Wilson heard the hateful sound of Chinese horns and bugles. Many years later, he still believed he had the sequence of events right: they had heard the Chinese instruments before they actually saw the enemy, although others disagreed. Suddenly they were caught in the terrible chaos of yet another battlefield where the enemy has seen you before you’ve seen the enemy—that worst of all possible moments. An American officer was yelling for them to hurry up, move the jeeps so they could get the hell out of there. He thought that was Lieutenant William Penrod, who had ridden at the front of the convoy. But then the same officer clearly realized that the Chinese had set up a blocking force exactly where the Americans had entered the valley, and suddenly he was shouting—it was like orders changing in midsentence—for them to get the hell up on the hill. Then he heard Mueller yelling the same thing. All of the officers grasped by now that they were badly outnumbered. Just how badly they were about to find out.

  They started up the north side of the hill, where the snow was heaviest and the ground more slippery, as the Chinese went up the south slope. Penrod had told Wilson to carry two cans of ammo, about twenty pounds extra in each arm, he thought. There were a couple of times when, weighed down as he was, he did not think he was going to make it. But Penrod was turning out to be a marvelous officer, pushing the others when the only thing they really wanted to do was quit (even if it meant Chinese captivity and probable death). Down at the bottom of the hill, Wilson noticed, was a small cluster of men, seven or eight of them—Fockler’s group, he learned later—all brand-new to the regiment and on their first combat patrol. Penrod was shouting at them, “Come on, goddamn it! Come on!” But they did not move, which surprised Wilson, whose instinct was always to believe that there was safety in numbers.

  For the men cut off at the bottom of the hill it was the worst of all possible scenarios: their first taste of combat, and nine of them, all apparently new to the regiment, including Fockler, found themselves separated from the rest of the unit, unsure of which way to go, absolutely terrified, and with no one in command. They headed for a cluster of huts, because it seemed to offer some kind of protection. Later, it was claimed that a small group of them had panicked and refused orders to
go up the hill. The much-maligned victims, Fockler would say. That was wrong, he believed. They did not refuse orders—they never heard them. “The truth is we fought like hell,” he said, and then many died because of the confusion of war. He did not know much about the others because they were so new—they were linked to one another in the annals of the regiment without knowing one another. There was a kid from North Carolina, just married, about whom Fockler recalled only one thing—he said he had not yet finished paying for the wedding ring. Allan Anderson from Massachusetts, as he remembered. Anderson dropped his weapon by mistake when the fighting began, went back to retrieve it, and was shot and killed. Richard Norman, he remembered because it was his seventeenth birthday. He was hit by a concussion grenade, his wound bandaged by his friend Rudolph Scateni of Chicago, and both of them were killed later in the day. Robert Walsh, from upstate New York, who briefly shared a defensive position with Fockler, was also killed that day. Thomas Miller from California, a BAR man who fought hard and swore he had killed fifteen of the enemy, died as well. The seven, “all killed on one/twenty-nine/fifty-one,” Fockler would say half a century later as if repeating a mantra for the worst day of his life. “All killed on one/twenty-nine/fifty-one…. All killed on one/twenty-nine/fifty-one….” Other than Fockler, only Miller’s partner on the BAR, Guillermo Untalan, who was from Guam and looked Asian—“the Chinese thought he was one of theirs and he slipped away from them”—made it out alive, though he was wounded.

  Eventually, Fockler saw where the main body of the unit had gone, and he and a buddy, Private Clement Pietrasiewicz, tried to cross from the tiny village back to the hill. But Fockler was hit in the right leg, and a few minutes later the Chinese captured them both. “It seemed to me like a regiment that surrounded us but it was most likely a squad,” he said. Fockler tried to rise up to surrender, and when he did, Pietrasiewicz surrendered too. “I was waiting to see what you did,” he told Fockler. Because of his wound, Fockler could not walk on his own, so Pietrasiewicz served as his crutch. As they neared the village, they saw a group of Chinese soldiers and Fockler said, “Hey, Pete, look at all those litter bearers.”

  “Not for you, Fockler, not for you,” Pietrasiewicz answered. It was the last thing his buddy ever said to him. They were separated at the village and Fockler never saw him again. He was sure Pietrasiewicz had been taken to a POW camp, and after the war, when they started publishing lists of repatriated soldiers, he searched them carefully. Eventually he was told by Division record keepers that Pietrasiewicz had never been seen again.

  Fockler, now a POW, lay down on the ground. Chinese soldiers wandered by to see if he had a watch they could take, never going for his wallet—a watch had value, he thought, a wallet did not. Then he watched as the Chinese set about destroying the vehicles the Americans had abandoned. They pried the thatched roofing off the local huts, spread it on top of the jeeps and trucks, poured gas on it, and set everything on fire. Then they simply left. No one seemed very interested in Fockler, so he crawled into one of the huts, slipped under a straw mat, and waited either to be killed or rescued.

  The next day, he crawled what seemed like miles back to the road—fifty-two years later, as a tourist in South Korea, he checked out the actual distance and discovered it was only a mile and a half. As he was crawling toward what he hoped might be help, an American fighter dove in and strafed him, so he rolled into a ditch and waited there, spending one more night on his own. The next day he began to crawl again, until, finally, an American captain in a jeep spotted him.

  WHILE THE MEN who had been separated were being torn apart, the rest of the task force was scrambling up the hill under constant machine gun fire from an adjoining hill where the Communists had already set up positions. Laron Wilson was tiring quickly as he climbed, needing to rest more frequently—and the enemy fire was getting heavier. About two-thirds of the way up, he stopped, sure that he was incapable of taking even one more step. That was when Lieutenant Penrod came down for him, telling him he had to make it, and they had to get to the high ground. Not knowing where the energy was coming from, but knowing that if his mind gave in to his body, he was surely dead, he pressed on. When Wilson reached the makeshift perimeter, he was exhausted, his clothes soaked with sweat in that freezing cold, and he was certain of one thing—if the Chinese didn’t get him, the sheer cold would, that he was probably going to freeze to death on that hill. But he had made it, a triumph of adrenaline-driven fear over normal physical limitations. Better yet, he had managed to bring the ammo with him, even though at certain moments as he had climbed, he wanted more than anything else to leave it behind. Later he was glad he had brought it up, because that night they ran perilously short early on, and if not for those two extra cans he had carried, they all would have been dead.

  About forty of them had made it up the hill, along with one light machine gun, eight BARs, and a bazooka. The semiautomatic, crew-served BAR was one of an infantryman’s best friends, much prized by the men who fought in Korea, because it could be used single-shot or as an automatic weapon. Two men handled it, one firing, the other feeding it a clip of twenty rounds; Wilson became a feeder. The BAR man that Wilson worked with was from another unit, and later he could not remember his name (it was Private William Stratton). Wilson wondered, years later, if he had ever known it during those long hours when their lives were so closely bound together. Could they really have fought there, literally body to body, without exchanging names? Had Wilson ever mentioned that this day, possibly the last in his life, was his birthday? The only thing he knew about the BAR man, other than that he had a coveted white parka, which meant he was from the Twenty-first Regiment, was that he had been a hell of a soldier. The Chinese launched assault after assault, their heads popping up as they tried to break into the perimeter, and Stratton just sat there, and waited and waited, and then fired, almost, it seemed, at the last millisecond. They had eight clips to spend, just 160 rounds of ammo to last what might well be their lifetime, and he had wasted nothing. Bless him for that, Wilson thought.

  The Chinese kept pouring fire in their direction and finally hit the BAR man’s right hand with a round, knocking off a couple of his fingers. But even that did not stop him. Wilson helped him bandage the hand, and he kept on firing. In all the wildness and the desperation of that fight the gunner still managed to boast, in the age-old sardonic language of soldiers, that he now had his million-dollar wound, his war was over, and he wanted the names and phone numbers of everyone else so that he could call their loved ones when he got back to the States. Especially their girlfriends. Later, when the Chinese firing got even worse, he kept going around to the others, a number of them wounded by then, telling them that they were going to make it out, that they had to keep the faith and not give in mentally.

  Nothing stopped Stratton. When he could no longer use his right hand, he switched to his left. When more Chinese assaulted their position, he stood and emptied the BAR at them, and was hit a second time—in the chest. Another soldier crawled out and pulled him back to the center of the perimeter. Then a Chinese grenade landed between his legs. He screamed in pain.

  “For God’s sake shut up!” Lieutenant Mitchell said.

  “My legs have just been shot off,” the BAR man yelled.

  “I know it, but shut up anyway,” Mitchell replied. A little while later Stratton was hit for the fourth time and died.

  Almost everyone up on their tiny perimeter was hit that night. Penrod and Mueller had gone around telling the men not to cry out when they were wounded and not to moan from their wounds because they did not want to give away the vulnerability of their position and encourage the Chinese. At dusk the men on the hill had gotten a boost when an Army spotter plane marked some of the Chinese positions for American jets that raked the area with rockets, napalm, and machine gun fire. Then the little plane returned and dropped some ammo and medical supplies. Most of it missed the perimeter, but one case of ammo got through. The pilot made pass after pass
trying to drop ammo off, coming in so low they could see his face. Wilson added him to his pantheon of heroes, someone who risked his life again and again on behalf of men he had never met, pushed by an exceptional internal code of honor.

  Finally the pilot came in low and dropped a yellow streamer that said, “Friendly column approaching from the south. Will be with you shortly.” But how shortly was shortly? If it was a long shortly, they would not live to see it. The men knew that when darkness fell, the Chinese would be coming again and then maybe again and that there were always too many of them. That evening, as predicted, they did, with machine guns, grenades, and burp guns. Mitchell eventually moved his men back from the edge of the knob, in part because they had so little ammo that he did not want any wasted on mere sounds—they were only to fire when they actually saw a Chinese head.

  Back at headquarters for the Twenty-third, when Colonel Freeman heard that the patrol had been hit by a major Chinese force, he immediately ordered up an air strike. He was told by the spotter plane that at least two battalions of Chinese, perhaps even a regiment, had struck this small patrol. That made it a fight of quite possibly two to three thousand against sixty. Freeman immediately ordered Lieutenant Colonel Jim Edwards, commander of the Second Battalion, positioned about ten miles nearer Twin Tunnels than the rest of the regiment, to put together a relief force. Edwards chose Captain Stanley Tyrrell, commander of Fox Company, one of his best young officers. It took about two hours to mobilize the men and the requisite gear, especially the heavy weapons—a section of 81mm mortars and a section of heavy machine guns. Edwards ordered Tyrrell to play it tough but smart, to try and rescue them that night, but to make sure his own troops were in a solid defensive position first. If need be, he was to button up for the night and attack in the morning. Tyrrell took off with a total of 167 officers and men.