War: Retreat of the 20,000

"Retreat, hell!" snapped Major General Oliver Prince Smith, commander of the 1st Marine Division, with which he had fought on Guadalcanal, New Britain, Peleliu, Okinawa (TIME, Sept. 25). "We're not retreating, we're just advancing in a different direction."*

"We're gonna get out of here," said Lieut. Colonel Raymond L. Murray, commander of the 5th Marine Regiment. "Any officer who doesn't think so will kindly go lame and be evacuated, but I don't expect any bites for that offer." There were no bites.

Said Colonel Lewis ("Chesty") Puller, famed battle-scarred commander of the 1st Marine Regiment: "We'll suffer heavy losses. The enemy greatly outnumbers us.

They've blown the bridges and blocked the roads . . . but we'll make it somehow."

The running fight of the marines and two battalions of the Army's 7th Infantry Division from Hagaru to Hamhung—40 miles by air but 60 miles over the icy, twisting, mountainous road—was a battle unparalleled in U.S. military history. It had some aspects of Bataan, some of Anzio, some of Dunkirk, some of Valley Forge, some of the "Retreat of the 10,000" (401-400 B.C.) as described in Xenophon's Anabasis. The retreat of the 20,000 in Korea would not have been possible without General Tunner's ultramodern airlift, which supplied them with all the ammunition and food they could use, and even with bridging equipment (see below).

Bulldozers for the dead. Assembled in Hagaru, south of the frozen, blood-stained beaches of the Changjin Reservoir, the 1st Marine Division and the 7th had already suffered heavy casualties in battles with the encircling Communists. They had heard the screams of their comrades when the Reds lobbed phosphorous grenades into truckloads of U.S. wounded. When the order came to start south, the enemy was already closing in on Hagaru's makeshift airstrip, whence thousands of wounded and frostbite victims had been flown out. The last plane waited an extra hour for one desperately wounded man.

The marines abandoned none of their disabled men, but bulldozers pushed the dead into mass graves by hundreds.

The fight to Koto, six miles down the road, was the worst. The crawling vehicles ran into murderous mortar, machine-gun and small-arms fire from Communists in log and sandbag bunkers. The U.S. answering fire and air attacks killed thousands of the enemy and held the road open. When the lead vehicles reached Koto, the rearguard was still fighting near Hagaru to keep the enemy from chewing up the column from behind.

Beyond Koto there was a bad stretch of road winding through steep gorges. Moving at 3 m.p.h., the column halted several times while engineers filled shell craters in the road. At one point there was a four-hour stop while the engineers built abutments on both sides of a chasm so that a bridge span would reach across. The airplanes silenced much of the enemy fire, except on one agonizing day when the air cover was grounded by a driving snowstorm.