running the ridges, knocking the Chinese back, enough of the pressure was removed for the Marines of Yudam-ni to break through.
When Davis had joined Barber on his lonely hill, word came from Litzenberg: 'Assume the point and lead the way to Hagaru.'
At Yudam-ni only the wounded and those who could not walk were placed aboard vehicles; many men who were hurt had to walk. Then, the infantry battalions leading the way, the regiments came out through Toktong Pass.
They came out intact, with their jeeps, guns, tractors, and trucks. Strapped to the fenders and hoods of vehicles lay bloody, half-frozen Marines. Others lay across gun barrels, or were carried in ox-drawn sleds taken from Koreans.
It was not a motor march. It was a tactical battle most of the way, against Chinese who held the hills in depth. But the Marines came out, for three reasons:
One, Davis' and Taplett's men were able to climb the encircling mountains, knock the enemy off the ridges, drive them across the high timber. Moving by night, attacking cross-country in savage terrain and savage weather, these Marines took the Chinese in the flank, and by surprise. In the face of incredible hardship, the Marines were able to mount offensive action—and Barber's Fox Company, 7th Marines, had been able to hold off two enemy regiments for six days, preventing the Chinese from closing their ring. If Barber had not held, the way would have been much more difficult.
Two, Marine air from the 1st Air Wing near Hamhung, carrier pilots from
Hour after hour, the sky above the American troops was black with friendly aircraft, and without them, in spite of their courage, in spite of all else, the ground troops would never have come out.
Third, General Sung Shih-lun had gambled. In the horrendous terrain, he had never been able to bring his full manpower to bear on the embattled Marines, outnumbered though they were. By pushing his men across the mountains from the Yalu in fourteen days, he had had to leave most of his supply and artillery behind—and as the battle continued day after day, stinging night after night, even Sung Shih-lun's sturdy peasants neared collapse.
The Chinese had come into Korea well fed and well clothed, but they were without supply, depending on the countryside for future livelihood. Near-starvation and dysentery hit them, too. The hardy Chinese peasant, while brought up to hardship, was no superman. As the Marines neared Hagaru, weary CCF units deserted their peaks under air attack. The Marines found some who had thrown away their arms and who lay huddled together in the snow, freezing and apathetic, trying only to stay alive.
But others fought to the end, and it was not until the morning of 3 December, a morning obscured with a stinging curtain of snow, that the advance guard fought in sight of the Hagaru plateau. By late afternoon, the main column reached the summit of the mountain ridge separating Yudam-ni from Hagaru, and suddenly men could see the friendly perimeter, and the airstrip, eleven miles away.
Now it was downhill all the way. Brushing aside roadblocks, snipers, and attempted ambushes, the two regiments crashed down toward Hagaru. Coming toward the friendly lines, some of the Marines tried to sing. Others marched in, erect, in column, picking up a cadence without order. Men so tired they could hardly stand, who had fouled themselves repeatedly from raging dysentery, who had frostbitten faces and fingers, and who were weak from hunger, made one final effort—and marched in like Marines.
More than one grown man broke down and cried as the Marines of Yudam-ni came together with those of Hagaru.
From their encirclement at Yudam-ni, Litzenberg and Murray had brought out all their wounded—six hundred of them stretcher cases. They brought out all their equipment, with the exception of one quarter-ton truck and four medium howitzers that had slid from the icy road into a chasm.
But an airstrip had been completed at Hagaru, and the thousands of ounded could be flown out. Ammunition and supply could be flown in. Without this, the retreat would have become a debacle, for 5,400 men were flown from Hagaru, all of them too hurt to march.
Relieved of his wounded, issuing all his stocks of candy and food to the troops, Marine General Smith ordered the march south to Kot'o-ri on 6 December.
Nine heavily defended roadblocks barred the road; bridges were gone, the road mined. But Marines and Army troops—the survivors from east of the reservoir—swept out from the road, clearing a frontage of seven hundred yards right and left, from which distance even Chinese machine guns could not fire accurately. The Marines would not repeat the tragedy of Kunu-ri.
It cost the column twenty-two hours of agony to cover the nine and one-half miles from Hagaru to Kot'o-ri. On arrival, there were six hundred more wounded.
At Kot'o, these wounded were flown out, and the dead were buried in shallow graves torn out of the frozen ground by bulldozers.
On 8 December, the column moved south again. The air cover droned over them by day, scouring the hills, but even the hospital units were sometimes attacked by sporadic Chinese assaults, marching out.
But air, ground action, and hunger had taken their toll from the attackers, and now many Americans saw isolated units of Chinese, often merely wandering along the American flanks, making no determined effort to stop the column.
On 9 December the advance guards of the men from the reservoir and the forces trying to move north to relieve them linked up on a windswept ridge north of Chinhung-ni.
Now no power on earth could prevent the Marines and Army from coming out. Marching down the frozen road, men picked up a song, roaring, as one observer put it, until the North Korean hills rang like bells of ice. It was a parody of the old British Indian Army song 'Bless 'Em All':
Down into the level ground beside the Sea of Japan came the Marines; from the north the 7th Division left the Yalu and hurried south, and the ROK I Corps scurried back from the fringes of Siberia. With the enemy massed in force on the left flank, any other course would have been madness.
Before the ports of the gray-blue Sea of Japan, X Corps massed, under the cover of its air and far-reaching naval guns. The Chinese, starving in the hills, made no attempt to push them into the sea. Such an attempt would have failed, and Sung Shih-lun and his generals knew it.
But X Corps was now isolated in North Korea. To its west, the Eighth Army was in full retreat; it had already abandoned P'yongyang and was moving south toward the parallel. While General Almond and the Navy said they
