The Marines Attack To The West And Get Stuffed
First Night In Hell — UN Positions
First Night In Hell — The Chinese Attack
Chinese Attack At Yudam-ni
The Marines Attack To The West And Get Stuffed
At dawn on November 27, General Smith and his division were preparing to mount their attack to the west, in accordance with MacArthur’s “Home-by-Christmas Offensive” orders. It was 20 degrees below zero, colder still in exposed places where there was a stiff north wind. The companies of RCT-7 would be moving through the hills on either side of the road into the west. The battalions of RCT-5 were still arriving at Yudam-ni during that icy morning. They would move to the western road as soon as they arrived and commence their own advance to the west. Mupyong-ni was fifty miles away.
Lieutenant Owen describes that frigid dawn...
The men were cold and aching even before we mounted out, and a day-long, company-sized patrol lay ahead. [...] A wireman, stringing a telephone line from battalion, said that at least three Chinese divisions were coming at us. Thirty thousand troops. As it turned out, there were many more than that.
We went along the high ground to cover the 5th Marines left flank as they made the main attack to the west. We had already patrolled the rough terrain that the 5th had to cover, and we knew they had a difficult time ahead.
We climbed through heavy snow. The cold was forgotten as we struggled upward in our awkward gear. The skipper had placed Woody Taylor’s platoon up front. Headquarters people and the tactical air [control] team followed Taylor, the 2nd Platoon, the mortars, and Kiser’s platoon. Lee’s arm was festering badly, and he was back at the aid station on Captain Wilcox’s orders. Sergeant O’Brien had the [machine gun] platoon for the day.
The road was an hour behind us, and we had encountered no enemy. Kelly, though, insisted they were there. “[Chinese] all around us. I can feel them up there. Lots of ‘em.”
I saw no sign of them until we took a chow break.
On the break the men sprawled on either side of the trail that the forward squads stomped through the snow. They fumbled with their ration cans. Body heat, trapped inside several layers of clothing, had kept them warm.
“Up there! Look!” Kelly nudged me. A ridgeline at five hundred yards southwest was lined with Chinese soldiers peering down at us.
We all saw them at the same time. The men scrambled to the ready. Before the mortars began to thump, we heard heavy fire from the front of the column. Captain Wilcox passed the word on the walkie-talkies. Form a perimeter and prepare to repel the boarders!
Woody Taylor rammed his platoon forward. He formed skirmishers and went up the slope at the far end of the column, a move that, for the moment, took the pressure off the remainder of the column.
The Chinese moved down from the ridgelines all around us. They ran across the snow in squad columns, then formed firing lines among the boulders or prone in the snow.
Hugo Johnson spotted a moving column at three hundred yards. Holding the bipod, he led the target with the tube, and, on command, dropped a round of HE [high explosive]. We watched the shell arc, then saw it fall precisely in the middle of the Chinese squad.
There was no explosion, the direct hit was another dud. The Chinese squad, unharmed, continued its move through the snow. We cursed in disgust. Johnson spit a gob of brown tobacco juice in the direction of the Chinese.
When the Chinese first hit us, Captain Wilcox was up forward, with the tactical air control party with him. Sgt Joe Hedrick, who was leading the air liaison that day, was not able to bring the Corsairs to our immediate assistance. They were working full-time in support of the main effort, the 5th Marines attack two thousand yards north of us.
The captain came back from the forward line to set up a CP [command post] in the middle of the perimeter. Taylor hadn’t been able to reach the high ground ahead of us and was working his way back, holding off the Chinese from that end. O’Brien’s platoon had set up along our left flank, and Kiser made a semicircle around our rear. I took the mortar men who weren’t on the guns, along with all the company headquarters people I could find and strung them in a line to cover the right flank, a tie between Taylor and Kiser.
Pat Burris’ gun [mortar] was behind Kiser’s line, and he and Jack Gallapo, Kiser’s runner, spotted targets for the mortar. Under heavy fire they both stood, acting as aiming stakes, and called range to Perkins and Bifulk on the tube. Gallapo nailed a machine gun at two hundred yards, relieving much of the enemy pressure on that sector.
We had no machine guns [large tripod-mounted machines guns] of our own on my stretch of the line, but the mortarmen and the headquarters people had taken BARs [Browning Automatic Rifles – a light shoulder-fired machine gun] from the early casualties, so we had some fire power to defend against a direct assault. Chinese mortars began to fall on us and on the CP, which was fifty yards behind us. A round exploded close by and lifted me off the ground. I was dazed for a while and when full awareness returned, Kelly had me by the arm, leading me toward the CP.
“Where are we going. Kelly?” I didn’t understand why we were heading away from the line.
“Get a corpsman to look at you. I thought you were a goner back there.” He pointed at my parka, flapping around my knees; it had shrapnel holes in it. “They don’t get any closer than that to tearing your balls off. It’s a good thing you got me around, Lieutenant.”
The corpsmen at the CP were far too busy with the seriously wounded to tend my mild concussion. The casualties lay in blanket-covered rows. Doktorsky, Davis, and Toppel went from one to another; they jabbed morphine, slowed bleeding, cleaned out holes blasted in flesh, patched them, and wrapped them up as best they could. The corpsmen had their mouths filled with syrettes of morphine [to keep them from freezing] and their bare hands were bloody. They worked with mortars exploding, bullets stabbing the air two feet above them, and weak, frightened voices called for their help.
Don Mickens from the 1st Platoon took some shrapnel, then later a .25 slug in the leg as he was patching WIAs on Woody Taylor’s line. The stretcher-bearers dragged Mickens to the CP and laid him in the line of casualties. Next to him, damning the Chinese in his Arkansas drawl, was Platoon Sergeant King, who had been blasted by grenades and hit by a burp gun. Paul Rendon, a machine gunner with the platoon, lay there too. The first platoon was rapidly being depleted, and it was having a hell of a fight holding its end of the perimeter.
Bob Fisher had taken charge of the stretcher bearers, a dozen men who were not on the firing line. They crawled up or scurried low to the ground, sliding wounded men on stretchers or dragging them by their parkas to the makeshift aid station the corpsmen had set up. It was hard work, and hazardous, running through enemy fire, hauling wounded men who screamed terribly at the rough handling.
“Keep it moving, you people! Keep it moving!” Fisher yelled at his detail. “Hey Grauman! Veeder! There’s a man down over in Bahr’s squad. Move out on the double!”
The afternoon light faded and we worried about whether the ammo would hold out. The Chinese had fully encircled us. Their volume of fire was just enough to keep us pinned down. They would wait for dark, then swarm over our lines. They had plenty of people to do the job.
Our bayonets were fixed and our grenades ready. Every man had a target sector and we kept fire discipline to conserve ammo. We began to settle in and wait for dark.
As bullets zinged, grenades exploded, and Marines cried for help, someone yelled out that Captain Wilcox had been hit. He had taken a bullet in the face and a piece of shrapnel had shattered his arm. Joe Kurcaba took over as our skipper.
When he got the word that Captain Wilcox was down, Joe and I were scouting the perimeter; the skipper had wanted a new estimate of the situation. My senses were revived and I wished Joe would get closer to the ground. No matter how much metal was in the air, Joe would repeat, “If I get down, I might never get back up again.”
As soon as we heard about the Captain, we ran to the CP. We found him there, his head wrapped in a big, white ball of bandage, unable to speak. His blood-soaked sleeve dangled beside him. He kept struggling to get to his feet while the docs put him down on his spread-out poncho. After a while the morphine kicked in and the skipper nodded off, groaning softly.
Sgt Gene O’Brien, of the 2nd Platoon, was hit while setting up a machine gun, and Fisher’s people dragged him to the aid station. Bill Davis, the corpsman, took a piece of shrapnel through the mouth; two of the wounded he had been tending were killed by the same blast. Doktorsky and Toppel were the only two corpsmen we had left. They shot Davis with morphine, wrapped him up, and laid him on his poncho, next to Mickens.
Before they stabilized their line around us, the Chinese had pushed the first platoon almost back to the CP. Just as Joe Kurcaba came to take over command of the Company, Woody Taylor stormed in, demanding that we get the hell out of there.
“The (Chinese) have all the high ground. They’ve got us surrounded,” he boomed. “They’re going to pick us to pieces tonight.”
Joe Kurcaba answered him quietly. “We need air support to run interference for us. Then we might be able to make a break for the road.”
“They better get to work mighty fast,” said Woody. “We only have a few minutes of daylight left.”
All afternoon, Joe Hedrick, the air controller had attempted to get a piece of the air support [which had been] dedicated to the 5th Marines. Now, in the remaining minutes of daylight he caught a flight of four Corsairs in search of action. The 5th Marines attack had run into far greater resistance than expected and had been called back. The Corsairs wanted to use up their ordnance before dark, so they were looking for targets of opportunity.
Joe Hedrick gave them their first opportunity.
The Corsairs first strike went along the ridgelines where the Chinese were looking down our throats and taking potshots at us. Hedrick aligned the next run over Kiser’s platoon and down the valley that led back to the road, a mile away. Kiser had the air marker panels in the snow, and he was ready to break out as soon as the planes flew over to shoot up the Chinese who were facing him. I took all my mortarmen, except one man to carry each gun, and we moved up to add more BARs and rifles to Hank Kiser’s push.
The four Corsairs streaked low above us, pointing at the Chinese positions less than a hundred yards away. They dropped their earth-shaking big bombs and then they scathed the long, deep valley with rockets and heavy caliber slugs. The Chinese took cover and we moved out.
Kiser’s platoon, with my mortarmen bolstering their center, charged forward. The sharp thrust, quickly following the air strike, gave us momentum. Kurcaba formed the rest of the company in two parallel columns, with the wounded and dead carried in the center. For the remaining few minutes of light, the Corsairs continued their covering passes in front of the column.
As darkness descended our progress slowed. We slid and stumbled down the deep valley. Stretcher-bearers strove, vainly, to protect the wounded from rough falls. We put flankers out on the slopes on each side, and the forward element took little Chinese fire. Woody Taylor’s platoon fought off a few trailing attacks, but these were not serious attempts to stop us. The enemy seemed to be letting us slip from his grasp.
-—
It took hours more for Baker-One-Seven to make its way the mile down the road. Colonel Davis brought elements of Charlie Company out to meet us. We loaded our dead and wounded on waiting trucks and sent them back to Yudam-ni. The Chinese had cut off the MSR between Yudam-ni and Hagaru-ri, the colonel informed us.
On the march back into the Yudam-ni perimeter, past midnight, the men were silent, spent from this cold and brutal day. Captain Wilcox had been a good skipper. [Captain Wilcox later recovered from his wounds and returned to duty. He retired from the Marine Corps after 20 years of service with the rank of Major.]
All that effort and fighting and death and injury had yielded an advance of perhaps three quarters of a mile. The division, attacking as a division with the 5th Marines attacking up the road, the 7th Marines attacking along the ridgelines overlooking the road, and the big guns of the 11th Marines bombarding the enemy troops ahead of them, had been stuffed, to use football parlance. They did not know it – no one knew it yet – but this one battle marked the end of the “Home-by-Christmas” offensive. That night ten of the twelve divisions of General Song’s Ninth Army attacked General Smith’s 1st Marine Division and Lt Col MacLean’s RCT-31 – about 100,000 men against about 28,000.
First Night in Hell — UN Positions
It was fully dark by the time the Marines returned to their positions in Yudam-ni. By midnight – just an hour or so before the PVA attack was to begin – the UN forces at the Chosin Reservoir were located in six distinct, geographically-separated perimeters.
The bulk of the 1st MarDiv — the 5th, 7th, and most of the 11th Marines — was all located in Yudam-ni.
(The dashed red line slightly to the west of Yudam-ni represents the Chinese defensive line that the 1st MarDiv encountered that afternoon.)
RCT-31 was located at the inlet at the northeastern corner of the reservoir. RCT-31's situation was problematic. It was not at full strength. It had just arrived at the inlet earlier that day. The forces which were there were in three small areas, each separated from the other by several miles. Its defensive positions were incomplete and were spread out. Overall, it was not prepared for the impending PVA attack.
Two companies from the 7th Marines were posted along the MSR, at Toktong Pass. Charlie/1/7 was located on a spur of Hill 1419 (“Turkey Hill”), right next to the MSR. Fox/2/7 had established a perimeter on top of a small hill about 100 yards immediately east of the MSR, at the crest of the pass, looking down into it.
The 3/1 Battalion was at Hagaru-ri, guarding the MSR, a supply depot, and an airfield. General Smith’s division CP was located here too with its support units.
The 2/1 Battalion and RCT-1’s regimental CP was at Koto-ri. It was being held in reserve. It was also guarding the MSR, a supply depot, and an airfield under construction.
The 1/1 Battalion was at Chinhung-ni, also in reserve, and also guarding the MSR and a supply depot.
First Night In Hell — The Chinese Attack
During the early morning hours of November 28, ten divisions of the PVA Ninth Army launched multiple attacks and ambushes throughout the area. (The remaining two divisions were being held in reserve, but they would be brought forward and used in next few days.)
Two divisions (79th and 89th ) surrounded and attacked the Marine position at Yudam-ni. (PVA 20,000 infantry vs. US 10,000 infantry.)
Three divisions (80th, 81st, and 94th) surrounded and attacked RCT-31 in their areas on the eastern side of the Reservoir. (PVA 30,000 infantry vs. US 3,300 infantry.)
One division (59th) attacked Charlie and Fox Companies guarding Toktong Pass and cut the road between Yudam-ni and Hagaru-ri. Charlie Company was saved by artillery fire from Yudam-ni that night and rescued by the rest of the 1/7 battalion with air support the next day. The 1/7 couldn’t get Fox Company out, though. Fox/2/7 tightened its perimeter on top of the hill, but they were trapped there. It would be five days before they got relief. (PVA 10,000 infantry vs. US 450 infantry.)
One division (58th) attacked the 3/1 Battalion and the 1st MarDiv command headquarters, the supply depot, and the airfield at Hagaru-ri. (PVA 10,000 infantry vs. US < 2,000 infantry.)
Two divisions (76th and 77th) attacked along the MSR between Hagaru-ri and Koto-ri and cut it. (PVA 20,000 infantry unopposed.)
One division (60th) surrounded and attacked the 2/1 Battalion and RCT-1 CP units Koto-ri. (PVA 10,000 infantry vs. US 2,000 infantry.)
The Marine position at Chinhung-ni was not attacked.
These battles were not quite as one-sided as they seem. The US forces established perimeters of varying defensibility at all locations. The Chinese swarmed the US positions — they attacked en masse — which contributed to large casualty counts for them, and they were lightly armed. General Song clearly underestimated the Marine troop strength at Yudam-ni and overestimated RCT-31's defenses at the inlet. He probably was not aware that RCT-5 had left the inlet and moved to Yudam-ni and had been replaced at the inlet by the much smaller RCT-31.
Chinese Attack At Yudam-ni
The PVA 79th Division attacked RCT-7 positions on North and Northwest Ridges, while the PVA 89th Division attacked Southwest Ridge where RCT-5 had their positions. Throughout the night it was attack and counterattack, with heavy casualties on both sides. Some enemy advances took advantage of gaps in the line and came down to the valley floor, dangerously close to command posts
Lieutenant Owen describes that first night. Baker/1/7 was on a hilltop in the southeast side of the valley, near the MSR to the south. Had Chinese forces come from the south, they would have been at ground zero, but no Chinese attacked on their front. The nearest fighting to Baker/1/7 to them were more than a mile away.
Lieutenant Owen describes the Chinese attack that first night…
[...] The Chinese threw everything they had at Yudam-ni. Their all-out attack started with a heavy barrage of mortar fire. Then came the red and green rockets, and the flares and bugles, more than we had ever seen or heard before, and thousands of their soldiers poured through the mountains. They hit with simultaneous force on all the Marine positions west and north of the village. Baker-One-Seven was not directly involved, but we had a clear view of the fight from our hill across the valley.
Every one of the big guns that the 11th Marines had emplaced on the low meadows of Yudam-ni opened up to protect the ridgelines. The sky filled with the arcing red streaks of the artillery shells, and the hills blossomed with their fiery explosions. Star shells popped high in the air, their stark blue light casting unearthly shadows across the snowy ground. There were tracers from both sides, brilliant lines of red and orange, flashes of grenades, the flaming bursts of machine guns, and burp guns and rifles winking like swarms of fireflies.
The Chinese attacked in massive numbers, an overwhelming weight, but they also endured terrible casualties. Several times they pushed the Marines off their ridges. Each time the Marines reformed and counterattacked. They had artillery support behind them [The Chinese really had no artillery aside from mortars. They had a great many of these – about twice as many per capita compared to Marines.] Their counterattacks sent the Chinese reeling back. The battle went back and forth all night. When the Chinese bugles sounded at daybreak and the fighting broke off, there was little ground lost. The Marines still controlled the high ground around Yudam-ni, but they had paid the price of hundreds of dead and wounded men.
Across the reservoir that night, east of Yudam-ni, there was another display of pyrotechnics. We had heard that our Army was over there, units of the 7th Division. Miles away, from our hill, we saw the sky light up above their position. The Army was under Chinese attack, too. We did not know how desperate their battle was.
The 1st MarDiv had been caught somewhat by surprise. General Smith had always strongly suspected that his division was surrounded by Chinese ever since it left Sudong-ni, but he never had any solid information. His intelligence people had hints about it, primarily from civilians they encountered or from captured Chinese solders. These people knew where the PVA had been, but not where it was now. The soldiers knew which units they belonged to and how large those units were, but they also had no idea where those units currently were. They also had no idea when or where their units might attack.
General Smith had prepared for the impending attack the best he could, but when it came it was very strong. I don’t think that even he thought that the Chinese would hurl ten divisions at his one, or that there would be so many different simultaneous attacks. By dawn, the five 1st MarDiv positions and RCT-31's position were all cut off from one another. The MSR was occupied by the Chinese in many places. The Battle of the Chosin Reservoir had begun.
The Marines would incur their heaviest casualties at Yudam-ni during the first two nights of the Chinese attack. During these first two nights there were 172 Marines killed, 935 wounded, and 60 missing – more than 10% of the two regiments’ infantrymen. On the other side, General Song’s two divisions were mauled. Their losses were considerable higher for during these two nights of battle.
In the daytime, Marine and Navy air power was brought to bear on any Chinese positions that could be located. During the third night, November 29-30, Song attacked elsewhere, as we will see. On November 30, the 1st MarDiv began it breakout from Yudam-ni, back over Toktong Pass, back to Hagaru-ri, “attacking in another direction.” This would be a serious fight the entire way.
Next Part
Previous Parts
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Korean War Begins
Part 3: MacArthur's War
Part 4: First Encounter With The Chinese
Part 5: Where Have All The Chinese Gone?
Part 6: Into The Trap -- Koto-ri to Toktong Pass
Part 7: Changes Of Plans