The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat (32 page)

As usual, Jack Page's heavy machine gun was the first to let loose. He slapped the hatch shut, double-primed the gun, and squeezed off two long bursts followed by a shorter burst. He toppled the first row of Chinese, who were just stepping onto the road. Jim Holt on the other heavy gun followed Page's cue, as did the two light machine gunners on either slope of the hill. Then every Marine rifle and BAR in between opened up.

It was a slaughter.

The bodies of the first two rows of attackers lay fanned out across the MSR in the same formations in which they had charged. As the third, fourth, and fifth files became entangled in the corpses, many Chinese turned and ran. But the 60-mm mortarmen lifted a brace of illumination rounds-220,000 candlepower of light turning night into day-while the 81-mm mortars tore into the rear of the Chinese ranks.

Those who had fled turned to charge again. They were mowed down. The few Chinese left alive tried to take shelter beneath the wall of the cut. They were showered with rolling hand grenades. Finally, at Lieutenant Campbell's radioed request, the 105-mm howitzer unit in Hagaru-ri provided the death stroke. Salvo after salvo of proximity-fused rounds burst over the South Hill behind the devastated companies, cutting off any route of escape.

Abruptly the field fell nearly silent-the only sound the intermittent pop of a dead Chinese soldier's ammunition exploding, the result of a small fire started in the padded cotton of his uniform by a scalding American bullet. The smell of sulfur (like rotten eggs) and ozone hung heavy in the air. The Marines at the top of the hill, bracing for an attack across the saddle, turned to watch as the last tear-shaped star shell arced 250 feet before fluttering quietly beneath its parachute to the bloody snowfield. To some the landscape was eerily reminiscent of the final scene of a movie from a decade earlier starring Errol Flynn-Custer and his 202 dead troopers strewn across the Montana grasslands of the Little Bighorn. Now, there were four hundred bodies, and they were not blue-clad American cavalrymen but white-clad Communist Chinese regulars.

It was 2:41 a.m. The battle had lasted ten minutes. One Marine, Private First Class John Senzig, had been killed. Another, grazed by a bullet, refused medical attention. The attack across the saddle never came. It was a fitting birthday present for Captain Barber, who had not mentioned to anyone that he had turned thirty-one at midnight.

6

At daybreak there was a palpable sense of relief across the hill. Small groups of men huddled over fires-joshing, laughing, teasing one another. Some brewed coffee and shared their last C-rations. On each corner of Fox Hill the Americans had similar thoughts. Why didn't they come across the saddle last night? Have they had enough?

The men were disabused of the latter notion an hour later, when Captain Barber visited the two med tents with a stark request: any wounded man with the strength to walk and squeeze off a round should return to his position on the line. If you could squeeze, you fought. Barber instructed his platoon leaders to pair wounded Marines with uninjured men-or at least men as uninjured as they could find.

Sensing the unease in the med tents, he softened the harsh dictum with a pledge. "Here it is, men. Things are pretty bad. But I've seen them worse. One more thing-we're not pulling off this hill unless we all go together. Nobody stays unless we all stay. I led you onto this hill and I'm leading you off. That's it."

Among the gaunt Marines who tried to answer the captain's call was Private First Class Harrison Pourers. The entire right side of his body burned with pain, but Pomers rolled to his left and attempted to stand. A corpsman rushed to his side.

"Think you're goin'?"

"To fight," Pomers said. "I can still use my left hand."

Now that he had parachute silk to re-bandage him, the corpsman took a chance and slit open Pomer's shirt and long johns. "You've got a hole as big as a fist in your back," he said. "Your spinal column is exposed."

Pomers rolled back over. "I could use some more morphine. My right hand is killing me."

The medic was already applying pressure to Pomers's right hand. "We're out," he said.

"Squeeze it harder," Pomers said.

"If I squeeze any harder I'll break your fingers."

"It's useless anyway, doc. Go ahead and break them."

Hector Cafferata turned to Pomers from a nearby stretcher and tried to lighten the mood. "Boy," he said, "is my mother gonna be pissed off if I get myself killed here."

"Ha," someone else said, "more like is your mother gonna be pissed if I get myself killed here."

From across the room Howard Koone yelled, "Don't nobody worry about that. We're all going to be home for Christmas, remember?"

Around 7 a.m., the Marines stationed on the lower east slopes were flabbergasted to see two enemy officers sauntering dreamily up the MSR. They were dressed more appropriately for a Gilbert and Sullivan performance than for a war zone, in flowing parade-ground capes lined with scarlet silk, bright red fedoras, and black kneelength boots polished so brilliantly they reflected the sun. The two Chinese stepped over and around the frozen corpses of their countrymen as if they were so many piles of debris. When they ambled to within twenty-five yards of the larger hut, Corporal Page yelled, "Halt." At the sound of an American voice they swiveled and instinctively reached for their sidearms. Page's heavy machine gun cut them in half.

The blast of Page's Browning invigorated the enemy sharpshooters; suddenly the Americans were awash in incoming fire from the West Hill, the rocky knoll, and the rocky ridge. It was as if the Chinese on the heights were trying to atone for their failure to attack during the previous night's massacre. A bullet knocked a mug of hot cocoa right out of John Henry's hand, and when Harry Burke, his face still singed and smudged with dirt and Vaseline ointment, raised his head to see if Henry was all right he nearly had it blown off. The hell with this.

He ducked back into his foxhole and removed his gloves in order to light a cigarette. He placed them on top of a log on the lip of the depression. Both gloves were immediately blasted back into the hole, one landing in his lap, the other on his helmet.

Reports of snipers streamed into Captain Barber's command post. On the crest a slug spun Private First Class Gleason's helmet 180 degrees as he hunched behind Corporal Dytkiewicz's old light machine gun. The bullet left an entry hole and an exit hole in the side of his steel pot without giving him a scratch. Farther down the west slope a bullet blew the cigarette from between the platoon sergeant Richard Danford's fingers. Danford was humbled, if uninjured. Not far away, automatic weapons fire felled a small tree in front of the foxhole occupied by privates first class Childs and Jackson. They both ducked as it crashed across their pit.

The tree, snapping at its base, sounded quite a bit like the report of an M1, and before Childs and Jackson knew it an NCO whom they did not recognize was standing over them chewing their asses for wasting ammunition. Childs cursed under his breath as the sergeant stalked off, turned back toward the enemy lines, and came face-to-face with a Chinese soldier not twenty yards away sighting down the barrel of a Thompson submachine gun. Childs ducked at the same moment the man fired. A bullet creased his helmet at dead center, knocking him unconscious. Jackson tended to Childs while the wounded Lieutenant Brady rushed from his foxhole and heaved a grenade at the Chinese soldier, who was slithering back into the ravine that cut through the west valley. He could not tell if he got the man.

This was enough for Captain Barber. He instructed Lieutenant Campbell to request another howitzer strike, again with antipersonnel rounds, on the West Hill, the rocky knoll, and the rocky ridge.

Men along the west slope heard the priceless shells before seeing them. They whistled overhead and culminated in a string of large black puffs of smoke detonating about fifty feet above each target. One Marine likened the Chinese across the valley and the saddle to "ants scrambling away from an ant hill that's been kicked over." The Americans could hear clearly the cries of the dying and wounded and watched as those still able ran for cover on the reverse side of the West Hill or clawed their way over and in back of the knoll and the ridge.

When How Company ceased firing eight minutes later, only a few diehard snipers remained. Even this annoyance was too much for Barber. His men were wounded, tired, cold, and hungry. He lifted the radio receiver and prayed to get through to the air base. Connection. He requested an air strike on the same three positions.

At 9:30 a.m., three F4U Marine Corsair fighter-bombers appeared high above Fox Hill. The Marines recognized them as the "Checkerboard" squadron by the black-and-white squares painted on their engine cowlings. The lead fighter broke off and flew an observation run over the rocky knoll and rocky ridge. All sniper fire ceased-the Chinese had learned a lesson from the Australian Mustangs-while across the valley Americans stood up in their holes.

Barber carried no radio that allowed him to talk to the pilots directly on their frequency, but he managed to communicate the targets to them through a cumbersome series of relayed messages to the air base. Within seconds the Checkerboards broke their vector. The first plane strafed and rocketed the rocky ridge just north of the rocky knoll. The second loosed a five-hundred-pound bomb. The third dropped a canister of napalm behind the knoll.

The Corsairs pulled up, turned, and swooped down for a second run, and then a third. The knoll and the entire ridgeline were aflame. To the Marines the scene resembled an exaggerated version of the bonfire the Chinese had lit during their second night on the hill.

After the third bombing run several Marines noticed a highwinged Navy trainer observation plane circling a valley about six hundred yards beyond the West Hill. The depression between the mountains was the terminus of the same lower pass through which Private First Class Gamble had spotted the Chinese battalion marching the previous evening. The Corsairs broke off their attack on the knoll and the ridgeline and screamed west. The men of Fox Company could not see what-or who-was in that valley, but they could certainly make an educated guess as the planes fired their last rockets and strafed the area with their "death rattlers." When the Corsairs turned for home they overflew Fox Hill and waggled their wings. A roar rose up to meet them.

Meanwhile, down by the road, John Henry decided to use the Corsair runs as cover to take out two or three persistent snipers who had been pouring bullets into Jack Page's heavy machine-gun emplacement for the last hour. They were the same sharpshooters who had spilled his cocoa, and he was angry.

Henry didn't anger easily. Even when his father had taken him out behind their home in Chattanooga eight years earlier and whupped his ass with a strap for making his mother cry, he had taken the beating stoically. He figured he probably deserved it. Henry had been a seventeen-year-old freshman at Michigan State at the time, 1942, and his father expected him to graduate, follow in his footsteps, and become an electrical engineer. Instead Henry had left Michigan, had come home to Tennessee, and had signed up for the Corps. When he brought the enlistment papers home for his mother to sign, however, she wept so hard, right there in the driveway, that his father had to "rectify" the situation. Or so he thought. A week later, back up at school, Henry passed the test for Army aviation cadets and was enrolled in the Army Air Corps' pilot training program. This time his parents didn't try to stop him. Despite the fact that he had piloted or copiloted five flight tests in the States, he was shipped out to the Pacific as a turret gunner. He joked to friends that the average life span in his line of work was approximately minus-three seconds. He had managed, however, to make it through the war unscathed.

The Marines remained in Henry's blood, and he and his brother had both enlisted when war broke out in Korea. Given his experience and sagacity, he rose fast through the enlisted ranks, and when his heavy weapons unit reached Hagaru-ri he expected to be assigned to an outfit up on the Chosin. Instead he was attached to Captain Barber's Fox Company, and he'd be lying if he said he wasn't disappointed by having to babysit at some backwater bottleneck.

But John Henry was a big enough man to admit when he was wrong, and he had certainly been wrong about Toktong Pass. Among the peaks rising on all sides of him, one in particular, far off to the west-a high, wide plateau surrounded by perpendicular cliffs-reminded him a little of Lookout Mountain back home. He wondered what his mother would think if she could see him scrounging up volunteers to go kill snipers in the frozen mountains of North Korea.

Now, with the Corsairs still circling, Henry and two of his ammunition carriers crawled across the MSR as the fighter-bombers kept the enemy at bay. The three Marines set up a classic V ambush and waited. Sure enough, when the Corsairs disappeared over the horizon Henry and his men saw three heads pop up from behind a snowbank midway to the South Hill. They cut loose with BARs and killed all three.