The Marines of Autumn: A Novel of the Korean War Read online

  In sixteen hours of tough fighting the regiment had gained only fifteen hundred yards and suffered heavy casualties. And they were still within the town limits of Yudam-ni, where they had started.

  Not even Smith realized it, but they were fortunate not to have advanced farther. That night the CCF attacked in overwhelming force on both shores of the reservoir, against the Fifth and Seventh Marines in the west and MacLean’s regimental task force on the other bank in the east.

  The night attack surprised Smith, surprised them all. He expected the Chinese to break off and take a breath after fighting all day. They didn’t.

  Verity had not fired a shot in anger at another man in five years. Okinawa, the summer of ’45. Despite what he told Elizabeth, he had shot plenty then and always in anger. Then a few times, less angry, up in North China, sometimes to frighten off or impress and not always to kill. That was the winter of ’45-’46. So for almost five years no shooting, nothing. Not unless you counted that one time a man he knew on the Eastern Shore had several of them come up for the goose shooting on Chesapeake Bay. Verity could handle a shotgun, but he lacked bird-shooting experience and kept missing the goose, shooting fore or aft of the bird as it flew in and then over them as they shot from the blind. He didn’t know how fast a goose really flew so could not lead properly with the shotgun.

  But he knew how to lead a man. He knew how fast a man moved and precisely how far out front of him to aim.

  Nor had he been shot at in anger (is there any other way?) for five years. Be fair about it: everything was a trade-off. Yet you never forgot the sound, the whine of the ricochet, the delayed, distant crack of a weapon, the sound that reaches you after the bullet is past, the extremely odd realization that someone you don’t know and have never met just attempted to end your life, and the blissful knowledge that you have, and literally, dodged the bullet.

  Now, in late November of 1950, he again was exchanging shots.

  There were ranging shots first, from the 61mm mortars, and overhead fire by machine guns, long-range and ineffective. Then there were rifle shots, scattered and then steadier, more intense. The sound came mostly from the east, from the shores of the big lake. Was that it? Were the Chinese coming across the lake? Trouble was, it was snowing, hard, dry, wind-driven snow, cutting visibility almost to nothing.

  “Let’s get ready, Gunny!” Verity shouted. “We could be in the middle of this!”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  How do you fight as an infantryman in snow so heavy you can’t see fifty yards ahead? They didn’t teach you that at the Marine Corps Schools, Quantico, Virginia, where all Marine officers are trained before they are sent out to command.

  Verity wished there had been such lessons.

  In snow this heavy the attacking Chinese could be among you before you knew it. That’s when their burp guns worked to good effect, in close. The Marines, with their superior rifles, had the advantage at a distance, two or three hundred yards, even more.

  In the snow of the Chosin in November, you might not be able to see thirty yards.

  Not now when during a blizzard the Chinese army launched its attack on the village of Yudam-ni. Now, having fought all day, without backing off for food or rest or rearming, they were counterattacking, challenging the Marines on their own ground.

  These are good troops, Gunny Tate thought. This is not the minor leagues we are playing in.

  In Washington, as elsewhere, the Christmas decorations had gone up at commercial enterprises at Thanksgiving. Kate, seeing the coverage on television, asked to be taken downtown to observe the wonders.

  Madame was unsure. What would Mr. Verity have done? The mother, as she understood it, was a Jew. Just how was the child being raised?

  In the end, acting in loco parentis (and wanting to see the stores herself), she took Kate to Garfinckel’s and to Woodward & Lothrop and to any number of lesser stores and shops where they enjoyed the holiday windows and the Christmas displays and encountered, dizzyingly, any number of Santa Clauses, even a few who actually looked the part.

  Kate wondered if they also decorated stores in Koree, using the French pronunciation.

  “Korea,” Madame corrected her, giving the pronunciation in English. She assumed they did.

  “And are there many Santas there as well?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why were there so many Santas?” Kate wondered, and wished Poppy were here so she could ask him.

  “Cowboys and Indians, Gunny! Cowboys and Indians!”

  Tate knew that for once, Izzo wasn’t just shooting off his mouth.

  The Chinese had broken into the town itself after smashing through the perimeter from the east.

  “They must of come across the lake on the frigging ice!” Izzo shouted.

  He and Verity and Tate sheltered behind the jeep outside their hut, firing at the bulky padded Chinese coming at them in the squalls of snow. Then, abruptly, the snow thinned and the shooting was pretty good. There were already five or six Chinese down within a few yards of the jeep lying there on the snow-covered street. One of them was still crawling around and screaming and Verity thought about firing at him to finish him off, but he had only the .38 Smith & Wesson and not that many cartridges he could afford to be charitable. The Chinese broke off then, and the small-arms fire fell off and stilled.

  I should have drawn a rifle, he thought. That was stupid. Anyway, in a firefight there were always plenty of rifles lying around later that you could pick up.

  A few yards off, one of the big Pershing tanks was firing its cannon at distant targets in the hills, and Verity could feel the concussion and recoil of the big gun through his groin and belly and chest where he lay prone on the hard snow. Funny, though, he wasn’t cold. Once a firefight began, you forgot the cold. All of Litzenberg’s rifle companies were up in the hills, defending in depth as the Marines always tried to do if they had the manpower. That left the actual defense of the town itself, once the Chinese got through the hills or breached the road, to “casuals” like Verity and what he had come to think of as his “merry little band,” and to clerk/typists, truck drivers, engineers, radiomen, staff officers, corpsmen, the handful of tankers, artillerymen, and other assorted and unlikely front-line troops. Everyone but the Catholic chaplain.

  “They even got a squad of South Korean policemen,” Izzo had reported before the breakthrough.

  The police, and God knows what they were doing a hundred miles up in North Korea in their blue uniforms (one even had a pair of handcuffs in his belt) and smart, peaked caps, defended what was apparently the village hall, a building about as impressive as a one-car garage.

  Yudam-ni sat surrounded by hills on all sides except to the east where it met the shoreline of the Chosin Reservoir, and the fighting in the hills began late in the afternoon, as the western hills and the town and its little valley slipped into gloom and then full night. You could hear the firing in the village of course, and then the artillery joined in, firing at the Chinese positions in the hills as called in to the fire control center by forward observers up there with the rifle companies. If you are anywhere near a 155 howitzer when it goes off, you know the sound, and the ache and ringing you carry for hours after in your ears and head. This wasn’t really tank country and the tanks were there just to punch through on the road north or, if the regiment was pulled back, on the road south, but Litzenberg was using the tanks as mobile artillery and they, too, fired into the hills. The flash lighted up the sky, and Verity instinctively looked away whenever one fired, to retain night vision. It was the rods and cones in your eye that adjusted to darkness and enabled you to see. He remembered that from Hotchkiss and freshman biology. But could not recall which were the rods and which were the cones. He thought of asking Tate, who seemed to possess an enormous valise of trivial knowledge, but did not.

  The snow no longer fell.

  “Captain!” Izzo cried. “Here they frigging come again!”

  Verity blinked his ey
es clear, checked to see the .38 was loaded, and knelt next to Izzo behind the engine of their jeep, still marginally warm from being run one hour on, one off, to keep from freezing. He could see the Chinese, coming at them across the lake and up a gentle slope. Then a burst of burp gun slugs whipped past and he ducked. Behind and around them mortars were crashing in, small ones, 61s probably, the kind a single infantryman could backpack in. That was just about the biggest artillery the Chinese had, not much more than a supercharged hand grenade, and thank God for it. A hundred yards away was regimental headquarters, set up in a big pyramidal tent. A squad of Chinese was headed for the tent.

  “Jesus,” Verity said, half-aloud. There was no evident Marine presence around the tent, no screen of infantry, no sentries. Litzenberg and his staff couldn’t be asleep. Not with all this racket. They . . .

  Just then a lone figure broke from the tent, sprinting across the snow, and then another. Litzenberg’s staff was coming out. There were shots, fired by both sides, and the first Marine, a staff major, fell, twisting. The other sprinted past him and the firing picked up. One of the Chinese knelt by the fallen officer, and Verity wondered, What the hell? . . .

  Two more people emerged, firing, from the tent, and the kneeling Chinese fell across the major’s body. He’d been trying to strip his boots and had died for it.

  Izzo, who was proud of his marksmanship, had an M-l and was stolidly squeezing off single shots, focused and methodical, only becoming excited when he hit.

  “You seen me drop that one, Gunny? Oh, man, it was glorioso! Took him right through the chest.”

  Even with a damnfool pistol it wasn’t difficult shooting, Verity knew. The only problem: running out of cartridges.

  This wave of Chinese coming off the lake finally broke and ran, leaving their dead. But you still had plenty of fighting other places in the village. It was behind and to their left and right, and Tate, with the big BAR, kept swiveling to see, not wanting someone to come up on them sudden, not the way the headquarters tent seemed to have been surprised. A light colonel came by, checking them for info and if they were set for ammo. He was the one that told them it was a staff major who’d been shot coming out of the tent, the one who almost lost his boots.

  “Funny,” the colonel remarked. “I threw a quick look at the Chink that was taking his boots and they wouldn’t have fit at all. The major had big feet.”

  Well now, Verity thought, isn’t that interesting?

  It was how men talked right after a firefight, saying silly, banal things, telling corny, pointless yarns, just out of nerves. It was still being alive and perhaps surprised by the fact that got men nattering on as the light colonel had.

  Tate sent Izzo to scout around a bit for a rifle for the captain, and in a few minutes Izzo came back with two.

  “This looks like a nice clean weapon, Captain. The action works just fine. I got some clips for you, too.”

  He’d taken one rifle off a dead Marine; the other was just out there in the snow with blood all around, as if a wounded had been carried off and his weapon left.

  “Personally,” Izzo said thoughtfully, “I like to keep a weapon private, you know, what with so many guys thaw out the action in the morning pissin’ on ’em. But that weapon I gave you looks pretty clean. Leastways, I didn’t smell no piss on there.”

  Verity thanked him for his concern.

  The Chinese came back twice more that night and there was a lot of shooting and some people hit, but it wasn’t all that bad. Verity hated to think what it would have been if the snowstorm kept up. Then the Chinese could have gotten right up all over them in the village, and who knew what the hell would have happened then?

  He didn’t like to imagine.

  In the hills around Yudam-ni where Litzenberg and Murray had their rifle companies, the fighting was bad, nothing like these little skirmishes in the town. Really bad. On Hill 1240, Dog Company of the Second Battalion Seventh Marines began the night with almost two hundred men and six officers, under command of Capt. Milton Hull. By dawn there was only Captain Hull and sixteen men, barely a squad left out of a company, and them just hanging on. In daylight a relief platoon from the Fifth Marines, commanded by Lt. Harold Dawe, came up to the remnants of Dog Company, and between what was left of Dawe’s men and Hull’s squad they took back Hill 1240, sweeping the last Chinese in front of them. But by eleven in the morning the Chinese counterattacked with two battalions supported by heavy mortar fire.

  That did it for Dog Company; it just ceased to exist as a unit.

  A couple of dozen Dog Company Marines drifted in eventually, most of them walking wounded. The rest were still up there, they said, on 1240, dead or taken.

  “Chinks came through firing and bayoneting and we ran out of ammo. They took some of us, tied their hands behind, and pushed ’em along with bayonets.”

  In this cold a man with tied hands wouldn’t have hands very long.

  Other men, Dog Company reported, had been stripped of their boondocker field shoes and their shoepacs and gloves and barefoot in the snow, driven north by their captors. Other men were just missing from Dog Company and would never be found.

  Colonel Litzenberg had been a Marine nearly twenty years and couldn’t ever remember a regimental commander’s losing an entire rifle company in one fight. Not the whole damned company, officers and men both. And this was the first night of fighting at Yudam-ni, not the last.

  Not by a damn sight.

  At Hagaru, fourteen miles south of Yudam-ni, cut off by fighting at the Toktong Pass, and isolated from Puller in the south at Kotori, where the road had been, at least for the moment, severed, Gen. Oliver Smith raged.

  “Idiots! Blind, stubborn idiots!” Was it stupidity or pride or just what?

  In the west, Eighth Army, hammered savagely by the Chinese, was falling back across an eighty-mile front with huge gaps where ROK units and some army units had been overwhelmed or just bugged out, and Johnny Walker was screaming for help. Here in the east two of Smith’s three Marine rifle regiments were surrounded and under heavy attack at Yudam-ni, while his third regiment, Puller’s, had no way of reaching them. The MSR on which all three regiments desperately depended had been cut in half a dozen places. Verity and the pilots reported new Chinese units arriving at the Chosin by the hour.

  And Smith was still under orders from Almond and Tokyo to attack? To send the Fifth and Seventh Marines into the mountains west of the reservoir, on foot, in a blizzard, to march forty miles to relieve Eighth Army?

  There was a possibility they could not even hang on to Yudam-ni under this pressure, never mind go over to the offense. What the hell was Almond thinking and where was MacArthur? Did they know or care what was happening up ahead at Yudam-ni to the Fifth and Seventh Marines?

  As dawn broke in the eastern sky, turning black into gray and then something brighter, the Chinese again disappeared.

  “They just sink into the ground,” a Marine complained, exasperated.

  “They carry bed sheets. We brung in bodies and seen ’em. In daytime they lie down in the snow and pull the bedsheets over them.”

  “Just like their momma was tuckin’ ’em in.”

  Whatever, they were gone.

  That next night, November 27-28, it was as if God and the Chinese had entered into conspiracy.

  With the Seventh Marine’s surviving rifle companies strung like beads on the necklace of hills girdling Yudam-ni, the temperature fell to twenty below zero Fahrenheit. The Marines on watch in the hills had no foxholes, no trenches. There were eight inches of hard frost in the earth no entrenching tool could penetrate. It was like digging into a big-city sidewalk. Later, at Hagaru, Item Company of the First Marines would demonstrate ingenuity by fashioning shaped charges of C-3 explosive inside empty ration cans and blowing down through the frostline so that holes could be shoveled out and the excess earth used to fill sandbags.

  The Seventh Marines fought all that night without foxholes, without sandbags.

/>   It was full light by seven, and the Marines came down the slopes slowly, like ghosts, through the gray morning and a light snow. There was no wind and you could hear them come, leather creaking, metal on metal, shoepacs and boots slipping and gripping, a few words, the odd shout. There were almost no curses. Men were too tired to curse. What was also strange, most of them had bayonets fixed to their rifles.

  But no one ever actually uses a bayonet, Verity thought. Bayonets were a joke out of John Wayne movies, useless things fit for opening cans and making noise. If they had bayonets fixed there must have been some fighting up there; when you fix bayonets you are damned near finished, or so the wisdom went.

  The first Marines off the hill had a couple of Chinese prisoners, small, glum-looking men bulky in their padded cotton suits. One of them had no left arm, and the side of his uniform was rusty with dried blood. “Sumbitch won’t die,” one of the Marines accompanying him said in wonder. “Must of been the cold stopped the bleeding.”

  They had brought him in as a curiosity, for their fellows to see. The other Chinese, well, they might get some intelligence out of them.

  Also coming along now, with a couple of Marines leading them, two Marines trussed up in makeshift straitjackets, their parkas reversed with the sleeves tied snug behind. They weren’t prisoners, just men who’d broken up there, who’d cracked during the fight.

  “They’re shook,” someone said, “just shook.”

  That was the new word, shook. Once it had been shellshock. Then battle fatigue. Now it was shook. Each war brings its own vocabulary.

  Some Marines didn’t buy: “Gutless bastards.”

  The trussed-up Marines vanished into the maw of the camp and were not spoken of again.

  Verity and Tate got to question the prisoners, including the man without an arm, who proved unaccountably cheerful and willing to chat while a corpsman cauterized the stump. Assisting them, or perhaps just getting in the way, was a smart-as-shellac young intelligence major sent up by G-2 at Division, an Annapolis trade-school man who kept showing his class ring.