The Korean War: The Untold Truth

Chapter 72
battle break
To the relief of the beleaguered Marines, the Chinese had no intention of attacking their refuge in Jieyu-ri, even when the Marines at Liudam-ri arrived.The Marine Corps believed there were several reasons: Hagaru-ri's defensive positions were well-built and visible, making the Chinese attack vulnerable to U.S. air support.The Marines had no choice but to retreat south.By the time they retreated along the narrow road, they were still 67 miles from the Sea of ​​Japan, where the Chinese army could wipe out the "war dogs of capitalism" with little effort.The Marine Corps should take advantage of this intermission; the Chinese should also take this opportunity to move their troops south and build fortifications along the main supply lines. The battle of "Ice and Snow Changjin" is far from over.

Nevertheless, General Smith's Marine Division fully enjoyed the brief lull after the protracted battle.Marines need time to rest, replenish, and deal with some of the fallout from combat.

Smith's first order was to evacuate casualties using the airstrip he had insisted on building despite General Almond's objections. On December 12, the first casualties of the Army's 2nd Infantry Division began to pour in.Smith looked down on the U.S. Army even more because of this, saying that many soldiers who were not injured pretended to be seriously injured in order to board the retreating plane. "They went to the runway, wrapped them in a blanket, and groaned on a stretcher. The guards came and carried them onto the plane." Captain Eugene Herring, a military doctor of the 2st Marine Division, reminded Smith to pay attention to the large number of equipment in the 1nd US Division. A sick deserter. On the morning of December 2, there were 12 people in his hospital, 2 were evacuated by air that day, but there were 450 bedridden wounded when it got dark.Herring believes that "a significant number of uninjured soldiers" were able to board the plane.The Marine Corps stepped up boarding checks.Smith was disgusted by these units of the 914nd Army Division, who dropped their arms and behaved ridiculously in Hagaru. Yes, pitch them a tent. We dissuaded them from thinking that way."

As the Liutan-ri Marines staggered into Hagaru-ri, Dr. Herring established a new standard for evacuating the wounded.According to Smith: "Some doctors tend to be sympathetic and others are ruthless. Dr. Herring ended up arbitrating questionable cases himself. He used the 5th Marines (Major Leisendon) as his standard. Although the doctor's feet were frostbitten, he could still stagger. The wounded who were not seriously injured (Lesenden) were not retreated." By December 12, 5 wounded were evacuated from Hagaru by air inside.

Smith displeased Ten Corps by ordering the evacuation of dead bodies first.Major General Clark Laffner called Smith's chief of staff, Colonel Gregan Williams, and demanded that the dead be kept in Hagaru and the planes be reserved for the wounded.Smith interrupted him to say that the Marines had "extreme reverence for their comrades who have fallen in battle" and even sacrificed their own lives to bring out the corpses.He's not going to leave them "in a lonely, deserted village in northeastern North Korea that we're about to evacuate. We drag the bodies on to the plane, it's easy -- they're frozen hard, they don't rot or anything. We put The corpses were shipped out, a total of 10."

MacArthur's commanding command also made Smith very angry.When frostbitten patients arrived at Japanese hospitals, Far Eastern Command dismissed the frostbite phenomenon as a "lack of leadership."

"It drives me crazy," Smith said angrily.He wrote a furious letter to General Clifton Cates, Commander of the Marine Corps:

I just awarded a silver star here to a sergeant who took off his gloves to throw a grenade and got frostbitten fingers.Can you court martial this soldier for failing to take effective measures to prevent frostbite?Can you send his battalion commander, regimental commander, and division commander to a court-martial for this?
The question was absurd, and ended up being left alone.

However, Xiajieyuli is still a temporary shelter.Air Force C-119 transport planes dropped large quantities of supplies—372 tons of ammunition, shells, gasoline and diesel, and field food, which Smith considered “just enough” to keep the division operational.

Smith knew very well that the five days of silence were nothing but false calm.According to the intelligence report, a large number of Chinese Communist troops have assembled in the area from the main supply line to Gutuli. There are 7 confirmed divisions, and there may be 2 more divisions. This means that the Chinese have a 9:1 advantage.The plan of this march is almost the same as the plan of the Marine Corps to evacuate Liutanli: the vanguard will seize the high ground on both sides of the road, followed by a mixed formation of wounded, infantry and more than 1200 vehicles who can walk, and then the rearguard; Concentrate the most powerful tactical air force in the Korean War, which is a fleet of more than 100 land-based fighters and ship-based fighters.

Margaret Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune hitchhiked into Hagaru-ri on December 12, where she was briefed by Lieutenant Colonel Ray Murray to officers.They had trekked from the willow pool and were exhausted. "They are people who are at a loss, who think they are going to die and then come back to life. When they speak, they don't make sentences, and they hesitate to speak, as if they have an unspeakable feeling."

Higgins thinks she senses a stern tone in Murray's voice: "This is not a retreat, this is an attack in the other direction. There are more Chinese swarming on the road to the sea than we have in front of us." Blocking, but we still have to get out of here."

"Any officer who disagreed could be treated like a cripple and jettisoned. I don't think anyone would do that." No one did.

On the evening of December 12th, the artillery in Xiajieyu carried out violent saturation fire on both sides of the road going south, and the 5mm artillery shells roared and landed on the Chinese assembly area. (These bursts also consumed excess 155mm shells that the Marines couldn't take away.)
At dawn on December 12, the marching column began to march south through the permeating white fog.The artillery battalion had to advance about 6 miles to a little more than halfway from Gutuli, and then established a firing position to ensure the safety of the marching column.General Smith remained in Hagaru-ri until 5 p.m. when he was sure the troops were on the right track before boarding a helicopter and flying south to his new command post in Gutu-li.The flight took 4 minutes, but the march of the division's troops was not so easy.

The march started off well.About 1 yards south of Hagaru-ri, the Marines found some Chinese sleeping in a small village and killed more than 500 of them.Thereafter, the Chinese stepped up their resistance.Chinese mortar fire stopped the marching columns several times.Roadblocks are everywhere, often using wrecked US military vehicles.The tanks that opened the way in front of the US army pushed all the roadblocks away.

Several captured Chinese showed that the condition of the Chinese army was much worse than that of the marines.They were hungry and cold, and demoralized by the U.S. firepower superiority.Lizenberg ordered that all thatched huts along the route be burned down. "We will never leave any place for the enemy to warm up."

The Marines fought all night, and Lizenberg believed that the dangers of night fighting (the favorite time of the Chinese) were not as great as the danger of the enemy moving to attack American positions.The Marine Corps has produced many heroes.A Marine tank was held back by heavy machine gun fire, blocking follow-up troops.Both the terrain and the angle of fire favored the Chinese.Sergeant Leland Ehrlich organized his squad and shouted, "I'll kill them." He charged across the road, up steep slopes, and scrambled across slippery snow and ice.Startled, the Chinese turned their machine guns and fired at him.They killed him, but before the Chinese machine gun crew could regroup, the Marines' bullets killed them.Two trucks transporting the wounded were hit by Chinese fire and caught fire, completely exposing the cars to the Chinese.Sergeant Major William McLane ran to the truck and dragged down several wounded.An enemy bullet killed him, but the road reopened.

At 12:7 am on December 5, the lead company made contact with Colonel Chesty Puller's troops at Gutuli Base.It took them 30 hours to cover the nine miles. Ninety minutes later, the first troops staggered into Gutuli, but were immediately told to return to the main supply line to ensure unimpeded passage for follow-up troops.As soon as an artillery battery entered the position, an observer found 22 Chinese gathering for an attack.The artillery roared at a distance of 9 to 90 yards, and all but a few dozen Chinese were killed.

Meanwhile, the rear guard at Hagaru-ri was in peril under the ferocious attack of the Chinese.On the first morning of the retreat, the Marines managed to capture a key high ground that the Chinese had held to their advantage since 11 November.The Marines needed a salient to cover the retreat, so they went to capture the high ground.The Chinese resisted for only a few hours.To reach the summit, the Marines used iron bolts to fasten ropes to the snow-covered summit, then dragged machine guns, mortars, and even personnel up the mountain.But this was only the prelude to a 29-hour battle in which large numbers of Chinese returned.At 22 p.m., Corsairs won the battle for the Marines by bombing a large Chinese force that was forcing its way across a saddle ridge leading to the summit.Chinese soldiers surrendered in large numbers, and a marine platoon actually took more than 4 prisoners. (But the Marines only detained them for a few hours, then disarmed them and gave them a day's worth of food to fend for themselves.)
The Chinese did not stop there.They launched an attack in the early morning of December 12, which survivors at Liutan-ri called "the most spectacular, if not the most contested battle" of the entire Changjin Lake campaign.Marine Corps historian Lynn Montrose writes:
They (the Marines) had never seen so many Chinese swarming, or attacking so tenaciously.Sometimes the night sky was intertwined with tracer bombs into a net of fire, and sometimes a flare bomb gave out a terrible light, exposing the trot forward row after row of Chinese troops, and they immediately fell to the ground one by one according to the deployment.Marines' tanks, artillery, mortars, bazookas and machine guns were used to great effect.But the enemy army still kept coming, and their tenacious and unyielding spirit of facing death made the Marine Corps awe-inspiring.Groups of Chinese in thick cotton uniforms, looking like round dwarfs, occasionally rushed within grenade-throwing distance and were knocked down again.

An estimated 2 Chinese were killed in front of the 800nd Battalion's position on the high ground.

The rearguard of the march met the last resistance of the Chinese at close range.Division company administrators mounted machine guns on the piles of trucks, and band members became machine gunners, keeping the enemy at bay until the burning trucks were pushed off the road.But the Chinese kept coming.At dawn, Lieutenant Charles Sullivan—he was 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 240 pounds—fired the last few rounds in his carbine on the charging Chinese, then jumped to his feet, roared, and held the gun in his hand. The gun was thrown like a javelin.The bayonet on the gun penetrated the chest of a Chinese soldier 15 feet away, and the other Chinese turned and fled.Sullivan drew the bayonet from the body, wiped away the blood, found the bullets and resumed shooting.

When night fell on December 12, the end of the marching team also left Xiagaru-ri. What was left behind the demolition team was soaring flames, thick smoke and explosions-this was excess ammunition and fuel that could not be taken away.Marine Corps engineers bulldozed the boxes of food and surplus clothing and doused them with fuel.

However, Chinese soldiers couldn't resist finding food, and they rushed into the flames and scoured the rubble.The Marines stopped and fired their farewell cannons.

Trailing the Marines was a hideous army of war refugees: hundreds of thousands of women, children, and the elderly, taking all they could with them.Xiajieyuli no longer exists.For the same reason, other villages affected by the battle of Changjin Lake were also destroyed.The engineers and soldiers kept warning the civilians that bridges and roads were filled with explosives, and walking on them might cause them to fall to the sky.But the warnings did not stop the North Korean refugees, who swarmed past the bridge seconds before the engineers blew it up.They lived under Kim Il Sung for five years and apparently felt that the Chinese would not improve their lives either.

The evacuation of the Gutuli stage finally ended 38 hours after it started, and 1 sergeants and more than 1 vehicles were safe and sound.The Marines had 000 killed, 103 wounded, and 506 missing, for a total of 7.The 616st Marine Division survived, in the final analysis, because General Oliver Smith refused to submit to Generals MacArthur and General Almond, and this stubbornness saved the lives of 1 Marines.

repair broken bridge
The retreat of the Changjin Reservoir was carried out in stages, which was very bad psychologically.The marines walked from Liutanli to Xiajieyuli, and then marched to Gutuli after a short rest.They must now recharge their batteries for the final mile to sea and safety.43 miles to Xingnan.

The physical endurance of the Marine Corps has reached its limit.Most of the uninjured people suffered from severe diarrhea.In the extreme fatigue of crossing mountains and ridges, their clothes and pants were dirty with feces, but there was nothing they could do.During the march from Xiajieyuli to Gutuli, no one dared to stop to light a fire, so the marines had to eat half-frozen food or starve.For more than a week, people stayed in warm tents for a while at most in the temperature of minus [-] to [-] degrees Fahrenheit.Those who could walk walked heavily; some wounded lay on stretchers for three days, unable to move.

In Koto-ri, the bitter cold of the North Korean winter delivered its final blow to the exhausted Marines.A snowstorm made the snow on the ground more than half a foot thick, and the snow got into the gaps between the coats and sleeping bags, making the marines numb and miserable when they marched.

General Smith's greatest concern was the evacuation of the wounded, but this time he did not have an airstrip like the one at Hagaru-ri, the only small airfield that could not accommodate the R-4D transport aircraft (the Marine Corps and Navy version of the Skytrain C -47, or DC-3).So, Marine Corps pilots used outdated torpedo bombers (TBMs), which were able to take off and land in tight areas and evacuate six to nine wounded per sortie.None of the three pilots—Lieutenants Truman Clark, Lieutenant John Murphy, and Lieutenant Alfred "Mike Jr." McCaleb—had ever flown a torpedo bomber of this type before.It doesn't matter, a landing commander guided with a flag, and they flew to Gutuli many times on December 6, transporting more than 9 wounded.Marine Private Leland Gordon was lying on a stretcher beside the runway, his right thigh was injured, and the anesthesia could not completely relieve the pain. "I remember hearing the plane and it was snowing so hard I could only see my nose. All of a sudden there was a yell and the plane landed. People put my stretcher into the cabin and the plane took off."

Smith's plan was still a replica of the Ryudam-ri and Hagaru-ri retreat battles.The Marines would seize the high ground on either side of the main supply line, and the main marching column would move south down the road under cover of the artillery units arriving earlier.Colonel Lewis Puller, who had been watching the battle of Changjin and was restless, would hold Goto-ri until all the marching columns had left the small village, and then act as rear guard.Lt. Col. Donald Schmuck's 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, in order to catch the Chinese off guard and delay their movement towards Gutuli, would feint north along the main supply line and establish blocking positions.

(End of this chapter)