Read The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat Online
Authors: Bob Drury,Tom Clavin
As the enemy swarmed over the hilltop the thirty-five men who constituted the two forward squads of the Third Platoon were hard hit. Corporals Harvey Friend and Norman Johnson and privates first class Peter Tilhoff, Paul Troxell, Richard Stein, Dan Stiller, and Charles Stillwell were killed almost immediately. Private First Class James Umpleby, the only surviving member of his fire team, was wounded in four places but continued to fire his weapon until he ran out of ammunition. He then collapsed, unconscious.
Behind and slightly down the hill from Cafferata and Benson, corporals Oma Peek and James Iverson of the Second Platoon were also in trouble. Several squads of Chinese, caught in the crossfire between the two light machine guns, were funneled directly toward their foxhole. Iverson and Peek were inundated by hand grenades and automatic weapons fire; their position was overrun. Iverson was mortally wounded and Peek was knocked unconscious.
Holes were opening all over the American perimeter. Hundreds of Chinese poured through the gash in the broken flank between the Second and Third platoons, and Cafferata and Benson were surrounded. Two enemy riflemen reached the lip of their hole; Cafferata clubbed them with his shovel. One of them dropped a Thompson submachine gun. Cafferata picked it up and emptied it into another approaching squad. Benson, reloading, elbowed him. "Time to go, Hec."
Go? Go where? It had been so dark by the time Fox Company reached the hill that the two Marines had no idea where the rest of their platoon's foxholes were. Then, at the same time, they both remembered a slit trench they had passed on their sortie to cut tree branches for their "nest." It was about twenty-five yards behind and above them, closer to the top of the hill. They grabbed their weapons and ammo, rolled out of the hole, and fought their way back, Cafferata still in his stocking feet. They fell into a trench occupied by privates first class Harrison Pomers and Gerald Smith.
Pourers, a regular Marine, was one of the Third Platoon's fire team leaders. He was a tough kid who had once been a linebacker for the Corps' amateur football team. He was also a former scout swimmer with a seagoing squadron based in the Caribbean. Right about now, he was wondering how the hell he had wound up here, surrounded by Chinese and about as far away from that warm blue water as a man could get. Pomers had met Smith, a raw reservist, just a few hours earlier as he was scoping out the abandoned trench, four feet deep and eight feet long. He'd been so overjoyed at not having to dig out a foxhole that he'd promptly forgotten the new guy's name. He remembered it now, although he had no idea who these two Second Platoon Marines falling into his trench were.
Pomers had removed eight clips from his cartridge belt and lined them up on the lip of the trench. He was already through half of them. After he was joined by Cafferata and Benson, the four stood shoulder to shoulder, firing into the enemy flanks-particularly those now closing in on Corporal Ladner's machine-gun emplacement. It was no use. Ladner and his three-man crew disappeared in a sea of smoky white figures. Ladner and privates first class Benjamin Hymel and Jack Horn were killed. Private First Class Bill Boudousquie was wounded and left for dead. Two Chinese infantrymen trampled over his prone body as they dragged Ladner's light machine gun down into the ravine that ran up the valley between Fox Hill and the West Hill.
A concussion grenade exploded in the slit trench and kicked Pourers into the wall. Another bounced off his helmet and exploded just outside the trench, nearly knocking him out. He could move nothing but his left arm. He wiped his head, saw the blood on his left hand, and frantically reached for his helmet. Miraculously, he found it and slapped it back on. A voice was calling his name. A face came into focus. He recognized a Navy corpsman. "You'll be OK," the corpsman said.
After watching Ladner's machine-gun nest fall, Cafferata, Benson, and Smith let loose a torrent of covering fire as the Chinese surrounded another Third Platoon fire team. The hill itself seemed to tremble. But privates first class John Stritch, William Fry, John Bryan, and Arnold Vey died in the holes where they stood and fought.
The Chinese continued to concentrate their attacks on the machine guns. On the hilltop Sergeant Keirn's nest was finally overrun. Four Marines in Keirn's crew died around him as he knocked six enemy soldiers down with his forty-five-caliber sidearm. He threw his empty pistol at another charging soldier just before his left arm was blown off by a fragmentation grenade.
With the capture of the two light machine guns the Chinese had effectively taken the northwest crest of Fox Hill. They now divided and attacked down the west slope and across the top of the hill. Private First Class Bob Kirchner, out of ammunition near the top of the west grade, bayoneted one man charging his hole, and then another. Still more came. A bugle blared from behind a large rock not ten feet away. Kirchner wheeled and a stray shot took off the tip of the little finger on his left hand. He stared blankly at the bloody stump; the hand seemed to belong to someone else. The squad leader Sergeant Joe Komorowski came flying by his hole hollering for a grenade. Kirchner tossed him one as if lateraling a football. Without stopping the big sergeant pulled the pin, climbed halfway up the rock, and dropped it on the bugler's head.
In the hole next to Kirchner, Private First Class Fidel Gomez and Private Harold Hancock raked a solid wall of charging infantrymen. Neither had been to boot camp, but both had qualified in advance combat training, including marksmanship, at Pendleton. There the targets had been far more distant. The enemy was now no farther than thirty feet away. The Chinese fell like bowling pins. His adrena line churning, Gomez at one point turned to Hancock to ask for more clips. His foxhole buddy was frozen into his firing position. Gomez pushed him. He fell backward, dead, a bullet hole through his left eye. Gomez, a devout Catholic, said a quick prayer for his soul.
Over on the Third Platoon's right flank, at the northeast corner of the peak, Howard Koone saw what looked like red fireworks off to his left. He kicked Dick Bonelli's sleeping bag. "They're coming," he said. Bonelli sprang up, grabbed his M 1, and glanced over his right shoulder. "Ski" Golembieski and "Goldy" Goldstein were already in firing positions. The Chinese crashed through in waves.
"Jesus Christ, it's a New Year's Eve party!" Bonelli hollered as volleys of potato mashers trailing their glowing cloth fuses filled the air. All four Marines in Koone's fire team stood to meet themand all four of their weapons misfired, including Koone's BAR. The firing pins had frozen solid.
"Fix bayonets and throw hand grenades," hollered Koone. He was the first to toss one. Three Chinese soldiers sailed through the air. Bonelli pulled grenade pins and threw as fast as he could, tossing short while Koone threw long. Bonelli bit off one pin and part of his lip stuck to the frozen metal. Koone jumped from the hole and stood on the edge raging like a madman, waving his shovel over his head. "C'mon motherfuckers?"
A Chinese soldier emerged from the dark and Koone plunged the point of the entrenching tool deep into his throat. Jesus! Bonelli thought. Fuckin' Cochise we got here.
All around him Bonelli could hear the gurgling death cries and anguished yelps of the shredded enemy. He did not speak their language, but even in this horrific clamor he was instinctively able to distinguish between those who were yelling for help and those who were offering their final prayers. He turned around. Golembieski and Goldstein were gone, vanished. He swore and pulled another pin. As he let the grenade fly Koone tumbled back into him, hard, knocking him over. The corporal had been hit in the ankle by a burst from a burp gun.
Koone screamed. He felt as if someone had chopped at his leg with an ax. He saw stars, and a hot taste of aluminum seared the back of his throat. He felt like vomiting, but he couldn't get the bile to rise. He tried to get to his feet, but the sudden rush of blood to his brain sent him into a dizzying spiral. He screamed again and again. He wailed so loudly that he scared Bonelli. "Jesus, you tryin' to bring every Chinaman in Manchuria down on us!" Bonelli said.
Alone and desperate, fearful that Koone's shrieks would attract half the Chinese army, Bonelli half-carried and half-dragged Koone out of the hole and down the hill. After a few paces he stumbled across Golembieski and Goldstein, frantically working their rifle bolts. He started to curse them. They cut him off.
"New perimeter," Golembieski said. He was panting. "Lieutenant says all Third Platoon re-form thirty yards down the slope."
Bonelli had no way of knowing that Bob McCarthy had burst from his dugout at the first rifle reports and rallied his reserve fire teams to plug the gaps in the line while ordering the hilltop perimeter pulled back. As Bonelli passed through this new line he thought that it seemed to be holding.
"Back up in a minute!" he yelled to no one in particular and continued dragging Corporal Koone down the hill. Koone felt as if his leg were made of lead and thought his foot was about to tear off. Bonelli was oblivious. He continued to holler: "Back up in a minute!"
Private First Class Ernest Gonzalez did not hear Dick Bonelli's cries, although he was less than twenty yards away. The whizzing, subsonic boomlets snapping over his head reminded him of "pulling butts"-marking targets on the rifle range at Pendleton. But there was one difference: the enemy's gunpowder had a peculiar stench. Gonzalez had been told that the Chinese lubricated their guns with whale oil to keep them from freezing up. It smelled more like whale shit to him.
He wiggled out of his sleeping bag in the slit trench on the centerright flank of the Third Platoon's perimeter. For some reason he checked his watch. It was 2:22 a.m. He squirmed into the foxhole to his right, raised his head above the lip, and saw scores of whiteclad "phantoms" running across the ridgeline.
Gonzalez was an assistant BAR man, Third Squad, Third Platoon, Third Fire Team, and he had been cold and angry from the moment he ascended to the top of Fox Hill. Now he was cold, angry, and frightened. A few hours earlier his squad had huddled at the base of the hill, halfheartedly digging in for well over an hour before finally being assigned positions all the way up at the eastern edge of the crest. Gonzalez was only seventeen and weighed barely more than 100 pounds; he was so thin that, people joked, he was nearly invisible when he turned sideways. When he turned up to face the hilltop and judged the wind he realized that the gale would cut him in half. His nose and cheeks were already affected by mild frostbite, which he had picked up at Hagaru-ri, and a deep gash on his left index finger, the result of a woodcutting accident a week earlier, was refusing to heal. Now they wanted him to act as a human wind sock?
"Fuck it," he'd said to his BAR man at the bottom of the hill. "I'm staying here."
"Get your skinny ass up there," the BAR man said.
Gonzalez muttered a curse, but he moved. It was the murals that got him going.
A year earlier Gonzalez and three friends from East Los Angeles had ventured down to the Marine Armory in Chavez Ravine, where the Los Angeles Dodgers would one day play. They had lied about their age and tried to enlist in the reserves. All four boys had failed the written entrance test, and they then talked about visiting the local Army recruiting office. But Gonzalez was determined-his extended family included veterans from both world wars-and the next day he persuaded his best friend, Charlie Rivera, to join him in giving the Corps one more try. The same recruiting officer who had administered the previous test was again passing out the entrance exam, but he didn't appear to recognize the two boys from the barrio. They passed, and they were assigned to Able Battery of the Second Howitzer Battalion.
Before leaving the recruiting center Gonzalez had studied the murals at the armory-dramatic, heroic depictions of the islandhopping Marines of World War II. The seriousness of the commitment he had just made became etched in his mind.
Gonzalez's unit had been called up on July 18, when President Truman activated the reserves, and on reaching Pendleton he was transferred from the Howitzer Battalion to Fox Rifle Company. He was shipped to Yokahama, Japan, where he trained for nearly a month before arriving in Wonsan on November 7. (That was his saint's day, commemorating Saint Ernest, a medieval German Benedictine abbot who joined the Crusades, preached in Persia and Arabia, and was tortured to death in Mecca.)
"Should have known right then that this wasn't going to turn out well," he said to his buddy Private First Class Freddy Gonzales, another Marine in Fox Company. Freddy Gonzales was not a relative, although he told Ernest that their aunts knew each other. In fact, when Ernest Gonzalez had caught up to Fox just south of Sudong he discovered that there were many Hispanics in the outfit, including three more Gonzaleses in addition to Freddy. Ernest was the only one whose name ended in "z." Something of a rivalry emerged between the southern California branch and the Texas branch, and as a show of independence Ernest and each of the Gonzaleses began responding in a more individual way during morning roll call. "Here," one would say. Another would answer, "Present." A third might merely say, "Yes." Ernest decided his response would be "Hoo," a variation of the Marines' "Hoo-yah."
Near the top of the hill Ernest Gonzalez's fire team had found two abandoned foxholes connected by a slit trench about eight feet long. Gonzalez scooched down into one hole, barely a stone's throw from the southwest corner of the same gnarled thicket Dick Bonelli had eyed with suspicion. His BAR man took the other hole. Their team leader jumped into a third, ten feet to Gonzalez's right. Only then did Gonzalez realize that their fire team was one short. He would have to serve as both assistant BAR man and rifleman.
Now, with the Chinese seemingly surrounding their position, Gonzalez thought, fleetingly, of that man their fire team was lacking. Could use that extra gun now. He knelt in a firing position. His BAR man was already emptying clips into the enemy columns from his hole on the left side of the trench. His fire team leader was doing the same with an M 1 from a hole to the right. Gonzalez lifted his own MI. He had butterflies in his stomach. He had never been in combat before. He was about to squeeze off his first round when he was knocked to the bottom of the hole by a retreating Marine. The American, whom Gonzalez did not recognize, tossed him his rifle. He shouted that it had jammed. He picked up Gonzalez's gun and started firing. Then he jumped the back lip of the hole and took off down the hill.