National Affairs 1950: U.S. Army In Retreat in Korea

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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 Valley Forge.

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. 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 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. The airplanes silenced much of the enemy fire, except on one agonizing day when the air cover was grounded by a driving snowstorm.

At week's end some 8,000 marines broke through the last thin crust of enemy resistance and poured into Hamhung. More kept coming in every hour as tanks brought up the rear. Frantic photographers called to the bedraggled men, asked them to "wave and look happy." They obliged. The triumph was marred by more than 30% casualties, but the bulk of the marine division's and the 7th's survivors reached safety.

THE CONGRESS Horrendous Swing

The Senate, which likes to go home to dinner, got stuck with some nightwork. Wisconsin's rash-talking Joseph R. McCarthy rose and swung the tails of not one, but 81 Communists and party-liners (or so he said) in a wild attempt to decapitate both Harry Truman and Dean Acheson in one horrendous swing.

In a 5½-hour speech he read case histories of all his exhibits, cried that 80 of them were employed in the State Department, that one card-carrying comrade was a presidential speechwriter. He refused to name one name. And his story was also weakened by the fact that he had been using all kinds of differing figures for weeks: first he had said there were 205 disloyal employees in State, then 57, before settling on 80. By demanding a quorum to listen to him, he forced a night session for the first time in five years.

Two days later the Senate voted unanimously to investigate McCarthy's charges. Republicans hoped they might turn up another Alger Hiss case; Democrats felt that they didn't dare stifle an inquiry—and besides, they said confidently, they weren't worried.

TRIALS The Reckoning