Back to the Korean War Chronology

After 1st Marine Division recaptured Seoul, instead of allowing X Corps to link up with Walker’s 8th Army, MacArthur had the Marines reboard the ships and sail around the peninsula to land at Wonsan in North Korea. X Corps was to remain separate from the 8th Army. Naturally, MacArthur was criticized for ignoring the chain of command and giving one of his favorites an independent command, but other observers felt that Walker, despite being viewed as the savior of Pusan, was not fit for high command.

The Marines landed without incident at Wonsan and prepared to move North, blissfully unaware that 120,000 Chinese soldiers had crossed the Yalu River. Tensions already existed between Almond and General O.P. Smith, CO of the 1 st Marine Division, one of X Corps’ two Marine divisions. First of all, the idea of an Army officer commanding the amphibious landing at Inchon had been hard to swallow, which had been exacerbated by Almond’s dismissal of amphibious landings as nothing more than a mechanical option. Smith and Almond clashed again over Almond’s tendency to spread the Marines over too much territory so that they could not support each other.

By the end of October, ROK troops had already told the Marines that they had captured Chinese soldiers, but MacArthur’s intelligence chief believed that these troops were simply diplomatic volunteers, sent as a face-saving gesture to Kim Il-sung. The Marines easily drove off the Chinese during their first encounter on November 2 near Sudong because the Chinese had horrible small unit leadership. For a former guerrilla army, they did not know how to use the land, so their well-ordered formations made good targets. After five days of fighting, the Marines had lost 50 men and found about 1,500 Chinese dead, but MacArthur’s intelligence staff still claimed that there were only 16,500 to 34,000 Chinese volunteers in Korea when the real number was closer to 300,000.

Ignoring Smith’s protests, Almond insisted on sending the Marines to Hagaru, at the foot of the Chosin Reservoir. Smith had no patience with Almond’s desire for glory and he felt that his left flank was exposed, so he deliberately stalled in order to properly organize and build up supply dumps along the road. He also began issuing the men with cold-weather gear, including sleeping bags, parkas, etc.

Smith personally inspected Funchilin Pass on November 13 and saw that it was an icy, tiny track hacked out of the mountain filled with hairpin turns and steep drops. He later commented that “The country around Chosin was never intended for military operations. Even Genghis Khan wouldn’t tackle it.”

On November 15, President Truman publicly reassured Peking that America did not plan to invade China. That same day, MacArthur sent orders to Almond that would place the three Marine regiments on opposite sides of the reservoir where they would be isolated. Almond was bursting with urgency but Smith thought that it was insane to have the regiments separated by 80 miles of mountainous terrain when it was so cold that the Thanksgiving dinner froze as it was being served. Smith basically refused to advance until his engineers had carved out an airfield from the frozen ground at Hagaru.

On November 24, MacArthur announced that Task Force X and the Eighth Army would be the eastern and western pincers that would crush the Communists between them. The next day, the 7 th Marine Regiment reached Yudam-ni, which was on the exact opposite side of the reservoir. That day and night captured Chinese prisoners and Korean civilians all told the Marines that a major Chinese attack would soon be launched.

By November 26, Smith had succeeded in placing one of 1 st Regiment’s three battalions at Hagaru, and one each at Koto-ri and Chinhun-ni, the two ends of Funchilin Pass, in order to guard his supply route. While the division was more concentrated than it had been for quite a while and much more concentrated than if Smith had listened to Almond, they were still very spread out. Although a jeep could cover the entire line in an hour, it was still 65 to 75 miles of mountainous terrain and the two most northern regiments were still separated by the reservoir. Army units were starting to arrive at the eastern part of the reservoir but they were from the 7 th Infantry Division, which was so weak that 8,000 Korean civilians had been press ganged into the division to bring it up to strength, at least on paper.

That same day, Task Force X learned that the western pincer, namely the 8 th Army, was in full retreat from a massive Chinese attack. For some unknown reason, neither Almond nor his staff felt that it was necessary to inform Smith.

During the night, the temperature dropped to 25 below zero, so both the men and their weapons functioned much slower than before. When the Marines began to move out from Yudami-ni, they encountered such heavy Chinese resistance that they had to abandon the attempt after only moving a mile.

The Chinese had gone to great lengths to conceal their movements so the Marines had no idea that they were outnumbered and surrounded. The 5 th and 7 th Marine Regiments did not have enough troops to form a continuous perimeter around the reservoir, so the men were strung out all along the reservoir with companies isolated on hilltops. On the night of November 27-28 3,000 GIs from the 31 st Regiment were on the east side of the reservoir and the 5 th and 7 th Marines (8,200 men) held the hills around Yudam-ni. Toktong Pass, between Yudam-ni and Hagaru, was guarded by 218 Marines, Hagaru had 3,000 Marines and 600 GIs, Koto-ri had 1,500 Marines and 1,000 GIs, and Chinhung-ni had 1,600 Marines. A total of 13,500 Marines and 4,500 GIs faced 60,000 Chinese soldiers.

On the night of November 27 the Chinese launched an overwhelming attack against the two Marine regiments but they held together despite heavy casualties. The Chinese attacked in ranks and died in ranks but they still managed to overrun several hills. The preferred Chinese tactic was to isolate a unit and pummel it with massive troops, sometimes it worked, sometimes the Chinese were cut to pieces by Marine firepower. One Marine battalion lost seven dead and 25 wounded against 300-400 dead Chinese but they were still surrounded.

It was so cold that Marine corpsmen had to hold the morphine syrettes in their mouths to warm them up enough to inject them into the wounded and the plasma was useless because it was frozen. The aid stations received so many casualties that many of the wounded had to be left outside. Whenever the corpsmen had time they would brush the snow off the faces of the wounded but they left the snow on the dead men’s faces. Smith arrived at Hagaru on the 28 th to take command.

Three battalions of 7 th Infantry Division had reached the reservoir but they had not dug in because they only expected to remain there for a night. When the Chinese attacked at 11PM, Nov. 27, the Korean conscripts naturally panicked and the Chinese were soon mixed in with the Koreans. The GIs were not that well trained either but they managed to drive off the Chinese and hang on until daylight brought air support.

General Almond believed that the Chinese numbers were completely exaggerated so he visited Smith at Hagaru on Nov. 28 before going up to the 31 st Regiment’s command post. Failing to grasp the seriousness of the situation, instead of ordering a retreat to Hagaru, Almond told the 31 st Regiment’s CO, Col. MacLean, to continue to advance. Almond refused to accept that the GIs had been attacked by two Chinese divisions because he knew that there were not two Chinese divisions in all of Korea. MacLean did not protest Almond’s order to advance even though it should have been obvious that he did not have enough troops.

Smith refused to send reinforcements to Task Force MacLean because he knew that he had barely enough men to defend Hagaru. Five Caterpillar tractors were working around the clock to finish the airfield but progress was slow. Foxholes were prepared by blowing holes in the icy ground with C4 and putting the loose earth into sandbags. The Chinese attacked during the evening of the 28, and men were rotated to warming tents to thaw out between waves of attacks. By morning there were 1,000 Chinese and 61 Marine casualties but Hagaru’s survival owed less to the Marines’ training and more to the Chinese habit of repeated frontal attacks on the same location which were always signaled by lots of noise. The battle for Haguru was fought at night since the American planes hammered the Chinese positions during the day so it took on a nightmarish quality where the enemy was often heard but not seen.

Fortunately, 300 men of 41 Royal Commando under Lt. Col. Drysdale had reached Koto-ri, so they were sent to Hagaru, along with an additional 600 troops from units not part of the perimeter defence and a tank unit. Unfortunately, the tank commander ignored Drysdale’s advice and kept his tanks remained bunched up so they blocked the column whenever they stopped to fire at the Chinese. Chinese counter fire did not hurt the tanks but the nearby unarmored jeeps and trucks were sitting ducks. Despite the heavy toll of casualties, Smith ordered Drysdale to press on. Hagaru had to hold on because the airfield meant that the wounded could be evacuated and the other troops could be resupplied. Drysdale and the lead elements made it to Hagaru but in the confusion they had not noticed that roughly 380 men had fallen behind, most of whom were either killed or captured. Nevertheless, the men at Hagaru were happy to receive any reinforcements.

X Corps HQ sent no orders to the Marine division for two days which managed to further lower the Marines’ opinion of Almond. On Nov. 29, Smith was ordered to send troops from Hagaru to pull the army troops east of the reservoir into Hagaru but he ignored it since the garrison at Hagaru was barely beating off the Chinese attacks as it was. General David Barr, the CO of 7 th Infantry Division, was at Hagaru and he supported Smith.

On November 29, Smith instructed the two Marine regiments at Yudam-ni to commence their retreat, with 5 th Regiment holding off the Chinese and 7 th Regiment clearing the road to Hagaru. The next day, a Marine officer finally managed to explain the situation to Almond, who immediately flew to Hagaru. Almond had been too aggressive moving forward and once the Chinese invasion began, he was too aggressive retreating. He wanted the 1 st Division to retreat quickly and abandon all of its equipment, promising to supply the troops by air, but Smith insisted on an orderly retreat. By November 30, everyone, including newspapers in the US, believed that the Marines were doomed. Everyone except for the Marines of 1 st Division.

The Chinese tactic of wave attacks was not that effective against men who were dug in. A major Chinese assault against Hagaru during the night of November 30 was beaten off with minor Marine casualties but the Chinese lost 500-750 dead. Another Chinese attack that same night had so many men that there seemed to be a shadow crossing the hill but in the end most of them were slaughtered. The British commandos disliked the disorderliness of Chinese corpses strewn everywhere so they stacked the corpses seven feet high at the top of the hill, and men often used it as shelter from the wind. Smith now had 600 seriously wounded men and he knew that the 5 th and 7 th Regiments would bring at least 500 more, so he had no choice but to try to use the half-finished airstrip. Fortunately, planes proved able to land on the airstrip and they began flying out the wounded while bringing in Marine volunteers, so Smith soon had an additional 500 men.

Lt. Col Faith had assumed command of the 31 st Regiment when Col. MacLean was captured and was planning to retreat to Hudong on the morning of December 1, but unknown to him but Hudong had already been evacuated the day before, thus trapping Task Force Faith. No one knows who issued the evacuation order, but it is believed that General Barr had written off Faith. The 3,000 men, 600 of them wounded, began moving after they received air support. Unfortunately, the first air strike was too close to the front of the column, so the napalm incinerated a dozen men and threw the column into chaos before it started. Most of the men were too exhausted to fight back and the Chinese kept shooting the drivers of the trucks. As dusk approached the head of the column was 4.5 miles away from Hagaru so the men knew that they were not going to make it and huddled beside the trucks, ignoring Faith’s repeated attempts to motivate them to fight. Once it was dark, the Chinese came out in the open and began shooting the soldiers in the trucks at the rear, not even bothering to take prisoners. Only 1,000 of the 2,500 men made it to Hagaru, many had serious frostbite, and only 385 were fit to fight. When it became clear that Task Force Faith was surrounded, Almond blamed Smith for not preparing a strong enough garrison at Hagaru to relieve them. General Barr broke down when he heard the news and had to be relieved of his command.

The senior officers of the 5 th and 7 th Regiments had 8,000 men and knew that once they commenced their breakout, they had to keep moving or they would become surrounded again. The Marine column was spread out along the road and although the Chinese were targeting the drivers the column still made it to Toktong Pass. Of the original 237 Marines at Toktong Pass, only 86 were still effective when they were relieved. The column received steady air support and they made it to the northern part of Hagaru shortly before 7pm, December 3. The two Marine regiments had 1,800 casualties between them, one third of which were frostbite. Actually, the Chinese soldiers suffered even more frostbite cases since many of them only had tennis shoes.

Over 4,000 wounded were flown out of Hagaru in four days, as well as 137 corpses. The Air Force had offered to evacuate all of the Marines but Smith refused because the rearguard would have to be sacrificed and the heavy weapons abandoned.

The Marines left Hagaru on Dec. 6 and the men were so tired that if officers were not nearby, they would pass out by the roadside, which would mean death or capture. It was so cold that the men wanted to feel pain in their feet, no pain meant frostbite. Back at Hagaru, a rearguard of two Marine battalions fought off the Chinese during a three hour firefight where endless waves of Chinese soldiers threw themselves at the Marines with a mixture of fatalism and ferocity that shocked even the veterans of Yudam-ni. One Marine officer, Lt. Col. Murray, had fought in the Marines’ island hopping campaign, including Guadalcanal and Saipan, and even he had never seen so many dead.

Although there were now 14,000 troops in one place, the last stretch of the retreat would still be dangerous since the column would have to go through the ten miles of Funchilin Pass. That snaking, twisting track would be an excellent killing ground for the entrenched Chinese troops and the temperature actually fell even lower that night. The remnants of the division continued to struggle forward despite having taken huge casualties. Third battalion, 7 th Marines had shrunk from 1,000 to 120 Marines.

The last missing Marine battalion and the only fresh one in the division was First battalion, 1 st Regiment and it had been guarding the railroad and supply dumps at Chinhung-ni, on the other side of Funchilin Pass. It was relieved by GIs on December 7 and it set out to provide support for the retreating column. After a hard fight, the battalion captured Hill 1081, which dominated the road, before the column arrived. The last bridge was blown up at 0230 December 11 after the last Marines made it across and it was smooth sailing as they marched down to Hungnam.

The 1 st Marine Division boarded the troopships on December 12. The Marine senior staff believed that they could have held the port through the winter but MacArthur’s staff decided to play it safe and pull them out, thus abandoning a beachhead in North Korea.

While the media and the government competed to see who could make the defeat sound worse, only one division in 8 th Army and X Corps was praised for its successful retreat, the 1 st Marine Division. It is believed that the division fought six Chinese divisions. The Marines took 4,418 battle casualties and 7,313 non-battle casualties (mainly frostbite), while the Chinese are believed to have taken 37,500 casualties.

Smith’s statement “Gentlemen, we are not retreating. We are merely advancing in another direction” became a symbol, and his feud with Almond deepened. In the end, Smith’s tough, steady leadership kept the 1 st Division intact while Almond’s lust for glory almost caused a catastrophe.

Back to the Korean War Chronology

Related Movies:



Further Reading:

Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950. Martin Russ, Penguin Books, New York, 2000.

He does not edit the men’s comments, sentences like “They arrived in the middle of the counterattack and met them fuckin’ shambos head-on.” The term “gook” is used frequently. Skillfully combines first-person testimony from veterans with general overview to show both the viewpoint on the ground and the big picture. The author is a former marine, who admits that the Marines had contempt for the US Army, and frequently gives examples of when the GIs were unable to provide Marines with effective support or could not even defend themselves properly.

The Korean War-Max Hastings, Touchstone, New York, 1988.

Based on interviews with more than 200 Americans, Canadians, British and Koreans, and even Chinese, although their stories still followed the party line. It is a very perceptive book that explains the Korean War and shows how the American mistakes in Korea were perpetuated in Vietnam. It is an excellent introduction to the Korean War, although he covers the British side of the war a bit too much, but then he is British. It is an excellent introduction to the Korean War but it is hard to avoid feeling a sense of futility when reading it.

Share this page with others: