panel, and as an American plane flew over, searching the ridges for Chinese in the dawn, he waved this up and down, trying to attract the pilot's eye.
The pilot saw, and radioed for help—but the Chinese also saw Hill as he exposed himself. A rifle bullet struck him in the belly, passed through, and tore a hole in his lower back.
Hill fell down and said softly, 'Oh, my God!'
Schlichter ran to him, tore open his bulky winter clothing. Hill said, 'My God, boy, get down—they'll kill you!'
'Hell, the SOBs can hit me,' Schlichter muttered. He put a bandage across Hill's wounds, gave him morphine. There was nothing else he could do.
As he treated the officer, the Air Force roared in, slamming the ridges and valleys with rockets and machine guns. They drove the circling Chinese cavalry away.
Now, in the strengthening light, Schlichter could see he was on a ridge only a little way from the abandoned vehicles on the road—during the night his party had circled about like a running hare, ending up almost where they had begun. And here, suddenly, Charles Schlichter decided that those wounded men down below belonged to him. With the men about him, he held a short powwow.
There were Chinese moving on ridges to the far side of the road; but the senior soldiers with Schlichter's party—but not all of those senior in rank—agreed that their wounded had to go out with them.
They started back down the slope toward the vehicles standing forlornly beside the debris-littered road. But the decision of what to do for those hurt men was taken from them.
Undamaged, the vehicles stood starkly by the road, in column, easily visible from the air. Before Schlichter's party reached them, Air Force planes screamed out of the south, shooting, bombing. It was standard practice for the Air Force to destroy abandoned equipment before the enemy could profit from it. The pilots could not know what cargo those deserted trucks still held.
Schlichter was too far away to do anything, but close enough to hear the wounded men aboard the vehicles scream. Then the Air Force dropped napalm, the drums bouncing from the frozen ground and engulfing the dusty trucks in flame.
In the zero weather, Charles Schlichter's face was suddenly wet with sweat. Some of the men with him closed their eyes.
And then they all ran back into the hills. They went in small groups. There was no unity. The C.O. was unable or unwilling to do anything. Some of the men were now wounded from Chinese fire, and many had thrown their weapons away.
Yet there were many who still walked as men. One, Captain Struthers, M.C.—to whom a general had offered a job in Japan, and been refused—died in a machine-gun burst, trying to aid a wounded soldier.
Within a short time, a North Korean patrol had pinned them on a hill, holding them down with submachine- gun fire. Major Coers and a second officer talked. Coers said, 'It's futile to resist.' He stood up, and surrendered himself and his men. There were fifteen in the little group, including Schlichter.
The North Koreans marched the captives over a ridge, then halted them before a long, narrow slit trench that had been dug in the hill. They turned the muzzles of their Russian-made submachine guns on the group, and in a blinding moment of fear Schlichter realized the Koreans were going to shoot them.
In that moment, the men holding those guns cut his line to home. The power and the glory of the United States were suddenly far away, impotent, as he stood facing death on a frozen, windswept hill ten thousand miles from home.
He had carried a small Bible in his jacket because his people had been religious, and they had brought him up in the same way. But until now he had hardly glanced at it. In the seconds he had left, Schlichter drew the book from his jacket, and it fell open at the Twenty-third Psalm.
He did not have to read it, he knew it from childhood.
The North Koreans did not fire. An officer, apparently Chinese, ran toward them, shouting orders in a high voice; sullenly, the troops lowered their weapons. The Chinese officer barked again, and with motions of their gun barrels the soldiers herded the captive Americans into motion. They headed north.
They staggered north, numbed, silent, cold, and exhausted by their ordeal. But in the little group, Charles Schlichter suddenly felt he would never again be so afraid of tomorrow. And of these men, only he would live to see again his native land.
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22
Changjin Reservoir
— Captain Walter Phillips, commanding E Company, 7th Marines, on a hill above Yudam-ni.
THREE DAYS after Walton Walker's Eighth Army found the hostiles along the Ch'ongch'on, X Corps met a Chinese buzzsaw in the east. Here again occurred some of the most savage actions in the long history of land warfare. In many respects, the fighting in the east resembled that in the west—U.N. forces were flanked, some brought to battle while others remained unscathed, and the whole position rendered untenable.
But there were differences, too.
While Eighth Army attacked on a broad front, Almond's X Corps advanced north in four main columns. On the eastern side of Korea there were no relatively flat valleys, only deep and tortuous corridors fingering their way through bare and brutal mountains. The roads—such as there were—were dirt. In many places the arteries of communication were only cliff-hanging trails leading along the mountainsides.
Because of the terrain, contact even between the various units of X Corps was fragile. On the left, trying to close the gap with Eighth Army, advanced the American 3rd Division. Above them, the 1st Marine Division marched northwest, toward the Changjin Reservoir. The U.S. 7th Division, east of the reservoir, went straight north for the Yalu. On the far right, the ROK I Corps of two divisions moved along the coast.
It was not a steady line advancing across the savage reaches, but rather four separate fingers thrusting upward into the narrow mountain corridors. The progress made during November by each column varied greatly.
Attacking against crumbling remnants of the NKPA, the ROK Corps galloped freely toward the maritime province of Siberia. In the ROK zone no Chinese ever appeared.
The 7th Division, on the ROK's left, met scattered opposition. By 21 November Powell's 17th RCT of that division reached Hyesanjin on the Yalu. The village's connecting bridges with Manchuria had been shattered by U.N. Air, and it was a ghost town. The wattle huts were deserted, and cold cattle, abandoned, lowed in misery in the frozen fields.
The Marines, marching northwest from Hungnam toward the Changjin Reservoir, met Chinese in force first week of November. But these Chinese, part of Lin Piao's First Phase Offensive, were defeated in sharp fighting, and pushed back. By 8 November they too had melted into the looming mountains to the north. But General Oliver Smith, of the Marine Division, and his regimental commanders, Litzenberg, Murray, and Puller, were now highly dubious of what might lie ahead of them in the mysterious north.
Deliberately, the Marines slowed their advance, even though Ned Almond fretted at their lack of progress. The Marines felt that, strung out as they must be in such terrain, a pellmell rush to the Yalu was highly dangerous. The whole Corps plan of maneuver was ill advised, if more than broken, remnants of the NKPA faced it.
But, like Walker, Almond had his orders from Tokyo: push on, and end the campaign. Under Almond's prodding X Corps, including the reluctant, exposed Marines, pushed on.
North from the Korean port of Hungnam on the cold, gray waters of the Sea of Japan, a narrow, dirt and gravel road snaked into the hills. For some forty-three miles—the distance from Hungnam to Chinhung-ni—the road contained two lanes and moved across reasonably rolling ground.
