The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (28 page)

"Did the Yanks really sweep Philadelphia?" said Hutchinson.

"Beats me," said Gaines.

By 7:30 a.m. the pale yellow sun vanished into a Rembrandt gloom. Storm clouds shrouded the surrounding peaks. It was the coldest morning since Fox Company had climbed Toktong Pass. Somebody said that somebody else knew somebody else with a thermometerthis was how news usually circulated at the front-and the mercury had quit falling at twenty-five below. Probably broken, the Marines figured. It felt colder than that.

Except for the warming stoves in the med tents, no fires had been lit yet, and men who were not out collecting weapons stood in their holes blowing into their gloves and stamping their feet. Gaines and Hutchinson were doing just that when slugs skittered across their parapet, upturning their neat rows of weapons and ammo yet again. They hit the dirt, and the curses were barely out of Gaines's mouth when he felt something, like a bee sting, pinching his leg. He reached down and pulled out a spent round that had penetrated his three layers of clothing but had barely broken the skin on his calf. He popped the bullet into his backpack as a souvenir.

The commotion at their hole attracted the attention of Gunnery Master Sergeant William Bunch, a tough veteran of World War II. He approached their position, ignoring their cries to stay low. As he placed his shoepac on the lip another burst swept the area and he was hit in the hand. Bunch let out a howl. He dived into the foxhole and the three Marines spent the next fifteen minutes scanning the south hill, three hundred yards away, for the sniper's position. But they could not spot him, and Bunch finally hopped out and headed back toward the med tents.

At 8 a.m., Marines along the hilltop saw two long columns of Chinese soldiers marching single file down the crown of Toktong-san's rocky ridge, toward the rear of the rocky knoll. Jesus, another battalion. When the enemy file moved to within five hundred yards of Fox Hill it disappeared from the skyline over the north side of the rocky ridge. Captain Barber ordered his two bazooka units to assemble on the middle of the hill, near the mortar emplacements just above the tree line.

When they arrived Barber stood on his crutch-the tree limband pointed to the rocky ridge. "Can you reach it?" he said.

Harry Burke was barely listening as Corporal Donald Thornton, the second gunner on the bazooka team, answered with an enthusiastic "Yes, sir." At twenty-one Burke was a seasoned bazooka handler, having been assigned to a rocket team shortly after he had enlisted in the reserves in 1948. He was from the tiny town of Clarkfield, Minnesota, and figured there had to be more to the world than crossing the South Dakota state line on Friday nights to drink beer and sing moony songs in cowboy bars. He wanted to travel, although North Korea was not exactly what he'd had in mind.

He had been driving home from a reservist camp in Virginia when news that the war had broken out came over the radio in his Studebaker convertible. Burke was elated. Given his experience, he had assumed he'd be ordered somewhere, most likely sunny California, as a bazooka instructor. Instead, almost three months to the day later, he landed at Inchon.

At weekend training camps in Minnesota, Burke had fired his bazooka in some frigid temperatures. But they had been nothing like this, and now he had his doubts. So far the fighting had been so close that there was no need-or time-for Burke to even load his tube. Now, as Thornton was assuring Captain Barber that their shaped-charge bazooka warheads could reach the ridges, Burke was reading the written warning etched on his tube: "Do Not Fire Below -20 Degrees Fahrenheit."

Barber said, "Let's send them a couple of rockets to let them know we're still fat and happy."

Burke and Thornton angled their tubes nearly vertical for maximum range. The assistant bazooka men loaded the rockets. "Fire," Barber said.

For some reason-Burke guessed it was the extreme cold-the propellant gases in the rockets not only ignited in the tubes but stayed lit as the rockets exited. They shot up spraying trails of flames and fell far short of the ridge. Thornton and Burke were knocked back flat on their asses. Thornton's eyebrows and whiskers were singed. Burke's thick eyebrows were actually aflame. A corpsman jumped to him, piled snow over his face to put out the stinging "brushfires," then slathered his brow with clots of semi-frozen Vaseline.

So much for that bright idea, Harry Burke thought as he lugged his tube back to his foxhole. At least he could use the worthless thing as a club the next time the Chinese attacked.

Not long afterward, Colonel Litzenberg managed to make radio contact with Barber from Yudam-ni. Although this was only seven miles north of the Toktong Pass, the peaks surrounding the Chosin Reservoir were playing havoc with radio waves, and the Marines up north were having the same problems as Barber's communications crew with the batteries. It occurred to Litzenberg that, if not for the roadblocks the Chinese had thrown up across the MSR between Yudam-ni and Fox Hill, it would have been easier to keep in touch with Fox Company by runners.

But now that he'd finally gotten through to Fox, Litzenberg informed Barber that Hagaru-ri had been lightly reinforced by units from Koto-ri farther south. About three hundred men-a combined force of U.S. and British Royal Marines, as well as seventeen American tanks-had fought through to the Hagaru-ri perimeter, but the village was also nearly encircled by the Chinese. Though Colonel Alpha Bowser in Hagaru-ri now commanded perhaps three thousand fighters, he was in no position to reinforce Fox.

Bowser had also asked the CO of How Company, Captain Benjamin Read, to redeploy his howitzer unit back into the village, Litzenberg said. But Read argued that moving his big guns any farther south would take them beyond the range of Fox Hill. Read asked to remain outside the perimeter in an exposed position. Bowser reluctantly concurred. This brought a smile to Barber's face. Good man, that Read.

Now, still on the radio, Litzenberg hesitated for a moment. Barber sensed that he was pondering a hard decision. After an uncomfortable silence he came out with it. He offered Barber the option of leading Fox Company off the hill and fighting his way back down to Hagaru-ri. "Your call," he said.

Barber had discussed this alternative with his XO, Clark Wright, only moments before. Moving his wounded was a major consideration, but so was tactical strategy. "Well, hell, we're already here," he had finally told Wright. "If we're ever going to get the Seventh together in one piece anywhere, north or south, it's going to involve fighting for this damned hill anyway. It's probably better to keep it while we've got it."

Now he reiterated these thoughts to Litzenberg, who wondered if holding Fox Hill and keeping Toktong Pass open were becoming a suicide mission. The colonel asked one more time if Fox Company would-if it could-fulfill its mission. The answer would become seared in the legacy of the U.S. Marine Corps: "We will hold, sir," Barber vowed. For both men, there was nothing more to say.

Barber put down the receiver and called his officers together to give them, as he laconically put it, "the latest dope from Division." The Chinese had invaded in force, he said. And not only were the Fifth, Seventh, and Eleventh taking heavy casualties at Yudam-ni, but Marines in Hagaru-ri and farther south in Koto-ri were also cut off. Scout planes had spotted eight enemy roadblocks between Koto-ri and Hagaru-ri. There was no need to reiterate their circumstances on Fox Hill. "Because of all this there's no possibility of relief for us," he said.

He leaned heavily on his crutch and took the measure of each man in the small circle around him, knowing that he had just told them their chances of surviving the next twenty-four hours were greatly reduced. They had a pass to keep open, and the lives of thousands of Marines depended on them. "We can expect heavy attacks tonight," Barber stated. But we have nothing to worry about as long as we fight like Marines."

2

At Yudam-ni, Colonel Litzenberg spent the morning sussing out contingency plans for an evacuation. The eight thousand or so Marines ringing the reservoir had been hit hard the previous night by as many as fifty thousand Reds, and the men were bone-tired and battle-weary. The First Division's supply officers calculated that the Chosin garrison had roughly three days worth of food, fuel, and ammunition remaining-less if you factored in the Eleventh Regiment's dwindling artillery shells.

The safety of these Marines was topmost in Litzenberg's mind, but he could not keep the fate of Fox Company from creeping into his thoughts. Sooner than later (he hoped) General MacArthur and General Almond would have to admit that their grand push to the Yalu River had been effectively crushed by the Chinese offensive, and Litzenberg was certain that the order to abandon Yudam-ni would arrive at any moment. He was just as certain that the enemy knew the key to the entire division's survival was Fox Hill.

Litzenberg suspected that the events of the last two days had provoked the Chinese military leaders to revise their strategy. Now, they didn't want merely to drive the Americans out of North Korea. They wanted to annihilate them, so they would never come back.

It had been hours since Litzenberg had gotten through to Captain Barber, but he was confident that nothing had dramatically altered the picture Barber had painted for him earlier. With the Marine Corsairs and Aussie Mustangs patrolling the skies, the Chinese would not dare attack in daylight. Tonight, however, was a different story. They would throw everything they had at Fox to sweep it off that pass.

And if they succeeded? What if Barber and his men were not even alive tomorrow morning? Litzenberg thought the odds were grim and grimmer, and he conferred with his counterpart, Colonel Murray of the Fifth Regiment, about precisely such a possibility. If the Chinese broke through and commanded Toktong Pass, they decided, their regiments would be surrounded and probably wiped out. Their only chance would be to destroy their own vehicles and artillery and fight their way south on foot, ridgeline to ridgeline, avoiding the road. Toktong was too strong a chokepoint for the transport of rolling stock. If it fell into enemy hands the Americans trying to blast past the roadblocks on the MSR would be cut to pieces from the overhanging ridges. The two colonels assumed that an overland retreat would result in at least 50 percent casualties. Neither cared to dwell on the likelihood of losing more than four thousand Marines.

i'here was one other hope. Litzenberg put it to Murray. What if they used the cover of night to dispatch a stripped-down rifle battalion overland toward the pass before the remaining Marines trapped at Yudam-ni left and set off down the meandering MSR for Hagaru-ri? This rump battalion could serve two purposes. First, if Barber was still holding out, he would certainly need the reinforcements. Second, if Fox had been wiped out, the flanking maneuver might result in a big enough surprise attack to recapture the heights from any occupying Chinese.

Murray liked this "backdoor" scheme, and Litzenberg sent a runner to find Lieutenant Colonel Ray Davis, the man he wanted to lead the march. Davis, the commanding officer of the Seventh Regiment's First Battalion, had already proved his mettle three days earlier by rescuing his own "Hard Luck Charlie" Company from Turkey Hill, and earlier in the war he had captured the Fusen Reservoir with only three Jeeploads of Marines and a dozen shotguns.

Litzenberg was relieved that Davis was still in the vicinity. Turkey Hill was two miles south of Yudam-ni, and when Davis had set off to save Charlie Company the colonel had left it to Davis's discretion whether to return to the reservoir with his survivors or continue the five miles south to link up with Barber on Fox Hill. Davis had taken too many casualties on Turkey Hill to continue a southern assault, however. Now Litzenberg was going to send him back again, in the same direction, and this time the route would be much harsher.

Bob Ezell woke up in the east med tent and tried to rub his legs. But his hands, which had turned pearly-white, were numb and swollen to the size and texture of small footballs.

"Here, gimme." It was Private Bernard "Goldy" Goldstein, lying next to him. Ezell extended the two things attached to his wrists. Goldstein's left hand had been shredded by a grenade, but with his good right hand he began massaging Ezell's hands to bring back some circulation. Gradually the blood returned, and though they remained grotesquely swollen, Ezell finally got some feeling back. He ran his hands over his legs, bandaged from hip to ankle. He thought of his baseball career. Over.

"Corpsman said the cold saved your life," Goldstein said. "Kept you from bleeding out."

Ezell didn't know what to think. Would he have been better off dying up by those rocks, better off to have gone down fighting? Was that better than being bayoneted, helpless in an aid station, when the Chinese finally overran the outfit? Was it better than never playing ball again?

His self-pity evaporated when the tent flap opened and he watched two corpsmen carrying in Private First Class Cecil Bendy, an assistant mortarman who had just been shot in the head by a sniper. No, no, Ezell wouldn't have been better off dying. It was good here. It was warm. He would walk again. He'd make it off this hill. He might even play baseball-just not the outfield.

The corpsmen lowered Bendy into an empty space where Private First Class Alvin Haney had recently died. Haney's body was the latest to be added to the growing pile of American dead just west of, and downhill from, the aid station. The frozen corpses, wrapped in ponchos and covered by half tents, were stacked three feet high by fifteen feet long.

When he watched them carry Haney out, Warren McClure remembered a conversation he'd had with Haney a week earlier, over chow in Hagaru-ri. Haney had told McClure that his goal in Korea was to win the Medal of Honor, "for the Corps."

Now a corpsman stepped carefully among the prone bodies in the tent handing out morphine syrettes. McClure, though still in excruciating pain, declined. He was afraid any more medication would put him under so deep that he would stop breathing. Next, boxes of Orations were passed around, but again McClure begged off. He knew his lung was punctured, but what else had the bullet torn up in there? He was afraid that a piece of food clogged in his innards might pose difficulties for the docs who would open him up when he got back to a real field hospital. When they got him back. Ha!