became more clogged with broken and burning vehicles, and Chinese fire increased at the final defile, the movement became more and more sluggish. Finally, about midafternoon, the pass itself was blocked and closed.
The major trouble, all that bloody afternoon, was that a strung-out motor convoy could have no unity of command. Tankers, who could move freely up and down the road, had no orders. Some stopped to fight; others blared through to the south. Senior officers filled their own vehicles with wounded and walked out. Some fought off encircling Chinese with rifles. No one had command; no one had control.
Colonel Peploe, his own jeep filled with wounded men, roared into the last defile before the road closed. In the pass a great heap of debris is from exploded trucks lay across the road; Peploe, holding on with all his strength, felt the jeep would never clear it.
But his driver, a young lieutenant, poured on the gas like a madman, careening and sluing across the road. The jeep bounced through. Whining down the last ridge, Peploe's quarter-ton raced around a curve and up over a wooded hill, and suddenly there were men about the truck. A friendly British voice yelled, 'You can slow down now—you're safe!'
Behind Peploe, the pass closed in a fury of fire and death. Still to the north of it was the greater part of the 2nd Division.
The British, fighting their way north, were in contact with a Chinese division, stalled. A force might have been put together from the men who had first cleared the pass, and such force might have gone back and swept its sides of enemy guns—but the men who reached British lines had been fighting their own separate Little Big Horns for five days and nights. As an observer remarked, these survivors were men, not gods. No relieving force was ever organized from the south.
Within the gauntlet, each vehicle, each man, lived through an individual Hades. There were acts of immense courage, and of heartbreaking solicitude, as well as of stupidity and cowardice. As in all battles, all that reflected good or bad for the race of man took place within the pass.
These tales have been well told, elsewhere.
On the northern lip of the gauntlet, after the column started through, Colonel Sloane's 9th Infantry had run into new trouble. As the Turks, cut to pieces, reeled back from the surrounding slopes, mortar fire crashed down on the men holding the shoulders of the road.
Barberis was hit, a litter ease. The 2nd Battalion S-3 was hit. Captain Frank Munoz, senior surviving officer, took temporary command.
The 2nd Battalion, like all the units of 9th Infantry, had been told to come out any way it could. And most of the men of the 9th secured places in the convoy as individuals as the trucks came by, so losing their lives or coming through, as their fortunes read.
Munoz tried to keep his own men together. On the road he found some stalled vehicles, abandoned when they were stopped. Their tires had been shot away, their radiators perforated by bullets. Using the native mechanical genius of his men, Munoz put an artillery ammunition truck in running order. Then, throwing out the heavy stuff, he loaded aboard all the small-arms ammunition he could find.
He told George Company: 'We're going to fight our way through. We're going to evacuate our wounded on this truck. Anyone who can't walk, rides—'
His men were worried and shaken, but they listened to him.
A .50-caliber machine gun was in a ring mount on the repaired truck, and with his firing at the enfilading hills, Munoz and his company started south, picking up stragglers, fighting their way through.
Some time after three o'clock, they arrived at the pass. Coming below the high slate cliffs, they walked into a swarm of Chinese bullets. The pass itself was blocked with wrecked vehicles, and from the high ground to either side of it enemy machine guns blazed incessantly at the vehicles piling up to the north.
Men had to leave their vehicles and make for the rocks and ditches, while gunfire cut them down. In the ten- degree weather, soldiers were becoming exhausted and apathetic. Americans, ROK's, and Turks lay on the ground, shocked, uncaring, while Chinese fire beat the earth about them. Their faces were dust-grimed, their eyes watering, their jaws slack.
Munoz saw a scene of incredible confusion. The dead lay about in droves. Now and again a hurt man croaked aloud for water. Only a few men were trying to fight back at the enemy holding the hills.
On the other side of the road, meanwhile, across from Munoz, General Keiser arrived in his jeep. He left the truck and walked up to the edge of the fatal log jam in the defile. Here he tried to bring some soft of order to the dazed men on the ground.
'Who's in command? Who are you? Can any of you do anything?'
The ROK's and Turks couldn't understand; the Americans kept silent.
Then Major General Keiser, division commander, walked on into the pass, to see what he could do. He found a few men fighting, and he saw men helping the seriously wounded. But he found no officers, and he went back to the northern edge, while bullets chipped the rock behind him.
On the way out, he accidentally stepped on the body of an American lying in his path. The man suddenly moved and said, 'You damn son of a bitch!'
Surprised, General Keiser could only say, 'My friend, I'm very sorry.' Feeling very old and tired, he went on.
He knew that infantry parties had to be formed to attack and clear the ridges lipping the defile. Until this was done, there was no hope of clearing the obstacles in the road.
Over the pass now, Air Force jets were strumming in full fury, rocketing, napalming, stinging the rocks with machine-gun fire. They did a great deal to ease the burdens of those below, but they could not do the job alone. Still, they tried.
A plane whined in so low that the spent .50 caliber cartridges from its wing guns tinkled off Frank Munoz's helmet. The flame from a napalm blast seared his face.
Munoz, pinpointing a machine gun on the right side of the pass, got five men together. Frozen, exhausted to the point of hardly caring whether they lived or died, men moved as in molasses. It was almost impossible for anyone, officer or man, to do the slightest task—but Munoz moved up the slope, and the Chinese pulled the gun away.
Meanwhile, the man who could get the job done had arrived.
Lieutenant Tom Turner, exec of the 38th's Regimental Tank Company, had had an incredible afternoon. Earlier, while directing fire against attacking Chinese, a rocket blast from friendly air knocked him unconscious in the ditch, where he lay for more than an hour as the motorcade ground past.
Coming to, bruised and shaken, he had walked more than a mile south, moving along stopped vehicles whose drivers and riders were down in the ditches, fighting. At the head of this mile-long column he found a small truck standing idle, clear road opening before it, while its crew engaged in rifle duels with the Chinese in the hills.
Turner got this truck on its way—then, under heavy fire, he moved back along the road, getting men into their trucks and moving again. It took tremendous effort, and great courage. Finally, with the trucks moving, he leaped on the running board of a two-and-a-half ton, only to fall into the ditch again as the bit of metal to which he clung was carried away by a machine-gun slug.
Again Turner blacked out.
When he crawled from the ditch once more, he saw the column had braked again approximately a thousand yards to the south. But as he stood erect, he felt a Chinese rifle in his back.
He was in the midst of a Chinese squad, some of whom were rendering first aid to American wounded lying along the road. Limping from a badly sprained ankle, Turner was told by the Chinese leader, in good English, to sit down.
Then, after a few minutes, the Chinese asked him if his ankle was good enough for him to walk back to his own lines. Surprised, Tom Turner answered, 'I think so.'
The Chinese then searched him—but politely, asking if he objected. They took two letters from him, leaving his money intact. More important, they missed the bottle of I. W. Harper that Turner had stowed in his jacket.
Then the Chinese leader ordered him to move down the road, collecting American walking wounded as he went. Limping, his ankle afire with pain, Turner walked away, fully expecting to be shot in the back. Instead, the
