out American positions, ran up and down shouting, 'Don't fire—don't fire!' But he was too late. Nervous, the men had fired at the slightest sound, and the Chinese learned what they wanted to know.
By midnight, the enemy was in position. Suddenly, Faith's company's perimeters erupted in orange-purple streaks of fire, resounded with the clatter of machine guns. Striking head on into the American lines, the Chinese also kept trying to probe a soft place between units, and to slip men past into the rear areas.
Some platoons held; others were forced out of position. Meanwhile, the supporting 57th Field Artillery came under small-arms fire; the wire to the front-line companies went out. With its own worries, the 57th was unable to continue its support mission with any authority.
At dawn Task Force Faith was still in place, but it was grievously hurt. There were gaps in the line, and the men were badly shaken. The night had been stingingly cold, and everyone now realized that something new was in the wind.
The attacks had not been those of a defeated, fleeing enemy.
The sun came up, but it did not warm. Men pulled their sleeping bags around their feet, and kept hands on guns, shivering in their holes. Later, on Colonel Faith's order, some of the higher ground lost to the Chinese during the night was retaken—only to be lost again. Through the day, more than sixty casualties were gathered at the battalion aid station.
In the afternoon, a helicopter whirled down out of the skies, settling beside the hut that was Faith's command post. General Almond stepped out. Faith reported to him, and the two men talked to one side for several minutes.
Then Almond mentioned that he had three Silver Stars with him. One was for Faith himself—and Almond wanted Faith to select two others for the award.
What Faith did next indicated something of his frame of mind. He snapped to a wounded young officer, Lieutenant Smalley, sitting on a five-gallon water can and waiting evacuation, 'Smalley, come over here and stand at attention!'
Bewildered, Smalley obeyed.
The next man to pass by was Sergeant Stanley, a mess steward. Faith called, 'Stanley, come here and stand at attention next to Lieutenant Smalley.'
A dozen men, clerks, wounded, and the like, were assembled to watch, while General Almond pinned Silver Stars on Faith's and the other two men's parkas. Almond then shook each man by the hand. He said:
'The enemy who is delaying you is nothing more than some remnants of Chinese divisions fleeing north. We're still attacking—and we're going all the way to the Yalu. Don't let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop you!'
Then Ned Almond got into his waiting copter and whirled away over the snow-covered hills. Almond was neither a fool nor an ass—he had orders from Tokyo to move to the Yalu—and he intended to comply, whatever his own doubts.
Lieutenant Smalley went back to his seat, muttering, 'I got a Silver Star, but I don't know what the hell for.'
As soon as Almond's copter disappeared, Faith ripped his own decoration from his parka and hurled it into a snowbank. His S-3, Major Curtis, approached him and asked obliquely, 'What did the general have to say?'
Faith looked at him. 'You heard him—remnants fleeing north!'
When darkness fell across the bleak, icy landscape, Task Force Faith began another night of battle. Alone, exposed to the full weight of the Chinese assault pouring against its front, flanks, and rear, after more than one hundred hours of incessant combat Task Force Faith dissolved. Colonel Faith was killed by a hand grenade.
The Chinese tide had risen everywhere; X Corps could not help; the Marines at Hagaru were undergoing their own nights of fire. But the bitter-ness of the men who fought east of the reservoir, hoping for rescue, would never be erased.
Survivors stumbled back over the frozen road to Hagaru. Others were seen by Marines wandering across the ice of the reservoir; they had fled across the lake itself. Of the original thousand officers and men, less than two hundred returned. The others, killed, captured, or frozen, had been swallowed up in the frigid wastes.
Late on the evening of 28 November, General Almond flew to Tokyo at General MacArthur's request. Almond reported to the
For Task Faith, already isolated, the order came too late.
The Marines, admittedly advancing reluctantly into the unchartered wastes, had paused to consolidate after each move forward. The terrain made it impossible for the division to remain intact, but at each successive plateau along the MSR, units were consolidated at regimental or battalion strength, with supporting artillery able to fire in any direction.
While the road link connecting the units was tenuous, the broad valleys at Yudam-ni, Hagaru, and Kot'o-ri allowed the Marines space to form solid perimeters. The ground, while higher than that in the west, was not characterized by the endless washboard of hills that had broken the United States 2nd Division into a hundred separate fragments.
This consolidation, and the fact that most Marine officers had had experience with Oriental warfare, learning the importance of keeping tight, steelringed perimeters by night whatever happened in the rear, did much to save the division.
On 27 November, as the 7th Marines attacked westward from Yudam-ni, the 5th Marines moved west of the reservoir and joined them. It had first been planned to move only two battalions through Toktong Pass, following with the third on 28 November, but at the earnest suggestion of the motor transport officer, the entire regiment moved together. Thus, at nightfall on 27 November, two full regiments of Marines, less one company holding high ground above the pass, and a weapons company left at Hajam, were able to operate in conjunction at Yudam- ni.
Before the night passed, both regiments were deep in crisis.
Again, the story of one company, one platoon, tells the story of all.
At dark, the seventy men of First Lieutenant John Yancey's platoon of Easy Company, 7th Marines, was dug in frozen earth facing north along the brushy, rocky slopes of Hill 1282. Each foxhole, painfully scrabbled out of the frozen shale, held two men, and machine guns protected the flanks. Yancey's platoon was in the middle of the hill, with Bye's to his left, Clements' to his right. Behind Yancey's position the company skipper, Captain Walter Phillips, was positioned with his exec, Lieutenant Ball, to fight the company.
The moon came up, huge and swollen, rising clear and bright over the swirling ground mists. It came up behind Easy Company, silhouetting the company positions for the enemy, but not throwing enough light along the dark corridors to reveal the lurking Chinese. On the hill, the temperature had dropped to twenty below.
Easy's men heard monstrous shuffling sounds through the dark, as of thousands of boots stamping in the snow. They heard sounds, but they could see only ghostly moon shadows.
Yancey asked Ball, on the mortars, to fire star shells.
Ball had little 81 ammo, but he tried. The flares wouldn't work—lifted from crates stamped '1942,' they fizzled miserably.
'Oh, goddam,' Yancey said. Yancey, a reservist, had been a liquor-store operator in Little Rock when the war broke. He had a baby, born on the day For Task Force Faith, already isolated, the order came too late. he went ashore at Inch'on, whom he had never seen. He had a Navy Cross from Guadalcanal, and he had washed off the mud of Okinawa. He did not consider himself a fighting man. But he had learned his own lessons in a hard school, the hardest there was.
The ranks of the Marines were now diluted with reservists, at least 50 percent. Few of them were mentally prepared to fight, or physically hardened to war. Inch'on, luckily, had been easy.
But now, on the frozen hills above Yudam-ni, the Marines, regular and reservist alike, faced reality.
Because their officers were tough-minded, because their discipline was tight, and because their
The enemy mortars fell first, bursting with pinpoint precision among the foxholes on the forward slope of Hill 1282. Then, in the moonlit hills, bugles racketed; purple flares soared high, and popped. The shadows suddenly
