The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (30 page)

Just after Sudong a new boot had been assigned to the outfit, an overweight kid who obviously couldn't take the punishment. He'd just been transferred out of the rifle company and into the motor pool when they had taken incoming from a Russian T-34 tank. Davis watched the fat kid dive under a truck just as a shell hit the front end. He came out without a scratch, but when anyone tried to talk to him all he could do was mewl and blubber. They gave him a Section Eight. Yeah, he was crazy, Davis thought now, crazy like a goddamn fox.

As suddenly as it had come over him, Davis's pensive mood was broken by the arrival of Lieutenant Peterson, who was distributing Chinese-issue white blankets taken from the packs of the enemy dead. Peterson had multiple wounds to his shoulder and sternum, and his uniform was bloody and in tatters. The heavy Australian rifle he carried completed the bizarre picture.

"Where'd you get the cannon, El-Tee?" Johnson said.

"Dead gook," Peterson said. "Just wanted to let you know that we'll be kind of thin on this line tonight. Lotta wounded. Lotta empty holes."

Then Peterson produced a pint of whiskey from inside his field jacket, passed it to both men, and jerked his chin toward the Chinese on the West Hill. "What they doin' out there?"

Davis and Johnson exchanged brief glances. Hell you think they're doing?

"They're firing at us, sir, and I believe you better get down in the hole," Johnson said. He and Davis prided themselves on having the deepest foxhole on the west slope.

Peterson ignored their warning and gingerly assumed a sitting position on the lip of the foxhole, his legs dangling inside.

Davis said, "Lieutenant, what do you think happens if the tables are turned? You know, a couple, three Marine battalions attacking a company of Chinese holding this hill?"

Peterson smiled but did not deign to answer such a silly question. Instead he pulled out a pair of 6x30 Zeiss binoculars and scanned the surroundings left to right-over the West Hill, up the rocky knoll, and beyond to the rocky ridge.

"Machine gunner up there," he said, pointing to a position about four hundred yards away atop the rocky ridge. "Looks like he's sighting in on us."

Davis and Johnson threw the white blankets over their shoulders and scrunched farther down into the hole. Peterson didn't seem bothered. It was if he were eyeballing girls on the beach. "Yup, definitely sighting in on us."

Machine-gun bullets beat the ground and the scrub around the foxhole. They tore through the trees behind the three Marines, cracking branches large and small. The gunner must have emptied an entire canister.

"Over now," Peterson said, "he's done." He placed his binoculars back in their leather case and began the painful act of standing up. Davis and Johnson watched him limp a bit up the hill before he stopped. Over his shoulder Elmo Peterson said, "Your question? Tables turned? Over in half an hour."

He continued up the slope and sat down on the lip of the next foxhole.

At 3 p.m., two U.S. Air Force C-82 Flying Boxcars soared over the southern horizon. They flew much higher than the Marine cargo plane and made one run apiece, both missing the "X" of air panels near the crest with their drops. The supplies landed in a column that ran several hundred yards down the center of the west valley. Most of the parachutes failed to open, and the Marines watched cases of hand grenades smash apart and scatter in all directions. They cursed the Air Force pilots, who had neither the balls nor the aim of their Marine counterparts.

"They're supplying the enemy," Captain Barber said as he watched the Boxcars disappear. But he knew someone was going to have to go out and get that ammunition. Lieutenant Peterson stepped up.

Barber said he didn't expect Peterson's detail to recover every single crate. "Concentrate on blankets, stretchers, medical supplies, and C-rations," he said. "Ammo after that."

This recovery run would be much more hazardous than that of the previous day, when the Marines merely had to worry about a few snipers on the far South Hill. Peterson sent the men in his detail out one by one, unarmed except for knives. As each approached a multicolored parachute, mortar and machine-gun covering fire from all over Fox Hill blasted the enemy lines.

Despite the fusillade, the Chinese opened up from the ridgeline and folds of the West Hill, from the rocky knoll and the rocky ridge, and from a small patch of woods that wrapped around the base of the West Hill near the MSR. One of the men providing covering fire was Gray Davis, who had been assigned a light machine gun. Davis had protested that he hadn't fired a machine gun since boot camp. Good enough, Peterson said.

Now, hunched over in the emplacement, spraying the West Hill and the little woods for all he was worth, Davis felt as if he were back in the stands at a Florida State game. Marines ran through the broken field like tailbacks. Directly in front of him Lieutenant Joseph Brady-the mortar unit commander, who still had grenade fragments in his back and hands and who indeed had been a star halfback at Dartmouth-dashed toward a box of 81-mm rounds, cradled a shell under each arm like two footballs, and scatted back across the valley as if the bullets pocking the packed snow at his feet were tacklers.

Several men got back safely, dropped off their haul, and went looking for Davis. They were not happy. They felt that his covering fire had strayed a bit too close to their scalps. "Then cover your own ass next time," he told them.

Up at the command post, tabulating the haul, Captain Barber was incredulous and then enraged. Peterson reported that his detail had managed to bring in stretchers and blankets as well as ammunition: belted slugs for the thirty-caliber machine guns, several mortar shells, and boxes of forty-five-caliber bullets that could be used in the captured Thompson submachine guns. There were also a few C-rations, although not nearly enough.

But when his men-under fire, Peterson emphasized-had crowbarred open crates searching for medical supplies or, most important, more food, they had found helmet liners, unusable fifty-caliber rounds and howitzer shells, barbed wire, and forty-seven-year-old Springfield rifles and their stripper-clipped, World War I-era ammo. Inexplicably, they had also discovered five-gallon cans of fresh water that had frozen to ice.

Ice. Just what we need up here.

When Barber regained his composure he decided it was too dangerous to send another detail out to the supply drop while it was still daylight. He had been lucky. Despite the Chinese barrage, none of his men had been hit. He couldn't afford to press that good fortune. Plus, there was more urgent business to tend to.

He called together the officers and platoon leaders who were still standing and told them he'd managed to get through to Division headquarters. Up on the east side of the Chosin, he said, the Army battalions were getting their heads handed to them, and the Fifth, Seventh, and Eleventh Marine regiments at Yudam-ni had been surrounded for almost twenty-four hours. Interrogations of Chinese prisoners revealed that three enemy divisions-more than 30,000 soldiers-to the north, northwest, and southwest had closed on the shrinking American perimeters along the fourteen-mile stretch from Hagaru-ri to the reservoir, with more on the way. For all intents and purposes, he said, the American push toward the Yalu was over.

Barber told his men that he was proud of them, that Fox had held out longer than the Chinese had expected. He added that though he didn't have it officially, he was certain that a combined "pullback" of what was left of the eight thousand Marines up near the Chosin was imminent, and that holding Toktong Pass would make the difference between a successful breakout and a massacre of Americans.

The men around Barber fell silent. Each knew what this meantfor himself, for Fox Company, for their friends and comrades up north, for General MacArthur, and for the United States. It was all on them now.

Barber broke the silence. "Pass the word. Tell every man to conserve whatever C-rations he has left. It's all the food we're likely to have for a while. And I want booby traps and trip flares placed all around the perimeter."

Although the Chinese high command was perplexed that its strategy of isolating individual American units and chewing them up with superior firepower was proceeding more slowly than expected-both Charlie Company and Fox Company, after all, should have been eliminated by now-General Sung Shih-lun assured the leaders in Peking that the final outcome was certain. And, at almost the same time that Barber was meeting with his officers on Fox Hill, General MacArthur was following up his report to the United Nations with a communique to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington.

He began with the same wording he had sent to the UN-"We face an entirely new war"-but added a separate coda. "It is quite evident that our present state of forces is not sufficient to meet the undeclared war by the Chinese," he wrote. "This command ... is now faced with conditions beyond its control and its strength."

It was not a coincidence that, during a press conference the next day, President Truman refused to rule out the use of atomic weapons in North Korea. In fact, hours earlier the U.S. Air Force's Strategic Air Command (SAC) had been ordered to prepare to dispatch several bomber groups to Asia carrying "atomic capabilities."

As it became more and more evident that the United States' forces in North Korea were facing a rout, Marine battle command ers were anxious to recast this national humiliation as similar to the British "spirit" exhibited at Dunkirk in the early days of World War II. It worked. After covering news conferences in Washington, D.C., American journalists echoed the Marines' "gung ho" proclamations in their copy-missing the irony that gung ho was actually a Chinese phrase (loosely translated as "to work together"). In one case, sympathetic war correspondents, visiting the rear areas, asked the commander of the First Division, General Oliver P. Smith, about the Chosin withdrawal. They subsequently converted his rambling response into a stirring battle cry. "Retreat, hell," he was quoted as saying. "We're just attacking in another direction."

Smith's brio was not lost on Litzenberg, who now issued the following directive at Yudam-ni: "In our order for the march south there will be no intermediate objectives. The attack will start at 0800 on 1 December. Objective: Hagaru-ri."

4

As their third night on the hill approached, the weary Marines of Fox Company began placing bets on what time the Chinese would come. They also wondered how the enemy, clad in their thin canvas sneakers, managed to keep their feet from falling off in the subfreezing temperatures-no campfires were visible on the surrounding hills-and whether frostbite would slow them down as the hours passed. Though the sun had intermittently broken through the clouds, the day had been the coldest so far on Toktong Pass. Evening shadows were settling over the hill at 5:30 p.m. when Kenny Benson moved up behind Bob Kirchner's position. He had recovered his BAR and was also carrying an old Japanese Nambu automatic rifle (the version with a banana clip extending from the top). "Lieutenant Peterson says to fill an empty hole," he said.

Kirchner nodded to a gun pit about ten feet away. There was a dead Chinese soldier lying in it.

"I ain't touching that," Benson said.

"Oh fer Christ's sake." Kirchner crab-walked to the hole, lugged the corpse out, and laid it along the rim facing the West Hill. "The next one's yours," he said. "Make your own cover."

Farther down the slope Gray Davis and Luke Johnson had been joined in their foxhole by Private First Class Clifford Gamble. The three Second Platoon Marines chewed the fat for a while-there was not much else to chew-until a glint of reflected sunlight far to the northwest caught Gamble's eye. He rapped on his friends' helmets and pointed in the direction of a mountain pass about six hundred yards away, on the far side of the West Hill. Three companies of Chinese troops-each company five men across and twenty-five rows deep-were parade-marching down the MSR.

Jesus, it's like watching a movie, Davis thought. The three Marines followed the columns until they disappeared into the piney woods that wrapped around the southwest base of the West Hill. There seemed to be an endless supply of Red reinforcements.

At the same moment Lieutenant Peterson was making his first evening rounds. He too saw the enemy columns disappear into the fir trees. When Peterson reached Davis and Johnson's foxhole they all watched a fourth column, and then a fifth, follow the first three into the trees. That made a battalion. Peterson took out his field phone, unfolded his topographic map, and relayed the information and the coordinates of the woods to Lieutenant Campbell up at Barber's command post. Campbell in turn radioed How Company's howitzer battery at Hagaru-ri.

Within five minutes a registering round burst over the woods. Peterson cradled his field phone. "On target," he told Campbell. "Fire for effect."

A minute later multiple salvos of proximity-fused antipersonnel rounds exploded over the small forest. Marines on the west slope watched in wonder as rounds burst fifty feet above the trees. Thousands of pieces of shrapnel rained iron on the Chinese. The variably timed airbursts exploded in groups of six, at thirty-second intervals. The artillerymen walked the entire grid pattern from one coordinate square to the next. The shelling lasted twenty minutes. When it was over the Marines could see no movement in the trees.

Fish bait, Gray Davis thought. He was still a Florida boy, after all. A few moments later, just to satisfy his curiosity, he loaded a tracer into the barrel of his M I and fired it toward the trees. The muzzle blast gave him spots before his eyes, and he had no idea in which direction the bullet went. Luke Johnson, who had repeatedly warned his foxhole buddy that firing a tracer from a rifle was a stupid idea, looked on with a satisfied smirk.

As night fell, Colonel Homer Litzenberg sat on the cot in his small tent command post at the southern end of Yudam-ni. He and Colonel Murray had just adjourned a meeting with all of their battalion commanders, at which assignments were handed out for what was unofficially being called the "breakout" from the Chosin Reservoir. As the officers filed out Litzenberg asked Lieutenant Colonel Ray Davis to remain behind.