Chosin Reservoir, 27 November – 13 December 1950

The battle, stage by stage

1. 27 November 1950, afternoon

   Spread along the road

   X Corps' 1st Marine Division is strung out for some 78 miles along a single mountain road climbing from Hamhung to the Chosin Reservoir. Two regiments — Murray's 5th and Litzenberg's 7th Marines — are at Yudam-ni, west of the reservoir, where 2/5 attacks west that morning and is stopped within about a kilometre. Fox Company, 7th Marines, holds a hill over Toktong Pass, the summit of the 14-mile road back to Hagaru-ri; at Hagaru-ri a single Marine battalion guards the division command post and the half-built airstrip; Puller's 1st Marines hold Koto-ri and Chinhung-ni. East of the reservoir the Army's RCT-31 (Col. Allan MacLean) is split between an inlet perimeter about eight road miles north of Hagaru-ri and Lt. Col. Don Faith's 1/32 Infantry a few miles further on. In the hills around them, Song Shilun's 9th Army Group — eight divisions of the 20th and 27th Armies — has moved in unseen. Temperatures fall toward -30 F.

2. Night of 27–28 November

   The hills come alive

   After dark the Chinese strike almost everywhere at once. At Yudam-ni the 79th Division hits North Ridge (Hills 1282 and 1240), held by two companies of the 7th Marines, and the 89th the ridges to the west and south-west; some positions are overrun and retaken by counterattack before dawn. The 59th Division cuts the road south, falling on Charlie Company 1/7 and on Barber's Fox Company at Toktong Pass. East of the reservoir the 80th Division, reinforced by a regiment of the 81st, assaults Faith's battalion and the inlet perimeter, where the 3/31 and 57th Field Artillery positions are partly overrun. By morning every UN position north of Koto-ri is cut off.

3. 28–30 November

   Hagaru-ri and Hell Fire Valley

   The 58th Division, arriving late, attacks the thinly held Hagaru-ri perimeter on the night of 28–29 November; engineers and clerks fight beside 3/1 Marines, and the Chinese take part of East Hill, which is never fully cleared. On 29 November Task Force Drysdale — 41 Commando Royal Marines, G Company 1st Marines and B Company 31st Infantry, 921 men — pushes north from Koto-ri; the 60th Division cuts it in two in 'Hell Fire Valley'. About 300 infantry reach Hagaru-ri; the task force loses 162 dead or missing and 159 wounded. East of the reservoir Faith's battalion falls back to the inlet; MacLean, walking toward troops he took for his own, is shot and captured and dies days later. Faith takes command. At Yudam-ni the two Marine regiments pull into a tighter ring; Fox Company, supplied by air drops, holds on.

4. 1 December

   Task Force Faith

   With no relief coming, Faith breaks out south on 1 December, with some 2,500 men and the wounded in trucks. A misdirected napalm strike falls on the lead platoons; at a blown bridge and then under Hill 1221 the column is stopped by roadblocks. Faith, leading an assault on the block, is mortally wounded by a grenade, and after dark the column breaks apart near Hudong-ni. Survivors — by one count about 1,050 men, only 385 of them fit to fight — walk across the reservoir ice to Hagaru-ri. The same day the first C-47 lands on the new Hagaru-ri airstrip. At Yudam-ni the 5th and 7th Marines begin the breakout south, while Lt. Col. Raymond Davis's 1/7 leaves the road to march through the night across the mountains toward Fox Hill.

5. 2–4 December

   Fox Hill and the road to Hagaru-ri

   Davis's battalion reaches Fox Hill on the morning of 2 December after a night march over snow-covered ridges. Fox Company has held for about five days and nights; reportedly only some 80 of its roughly 240 men can still fight (26 killed, 89 wounded, 3 missing, by one count). Barber, wounded, later receives the Medal of Honor, as does Davis. The 5th and 7th Marines fight down the road behind them with their wounded and many of their dead in trucks, the head of the column entering Hagaru-ri on 3 December and the rear on 4 December. From the Hagaru-ri airstrip transports fly out some 4,300 wounded and frostbitten men.

6. 6–7 December

   Attacking in another direction

   'Retreat, hell! We're just attacking in another direction,' Smith is famously, if loosely, quoted. On 6 December the division — now with Army and Royal Marine survivors — sets out for Koto-ri, 11 miles south, the 7th Marines leading and the 5th Marines holding Hagaru-ri and East Hill behind them. Fresh divisions of the Chinese 26th Army attack the column and the rear guard; East Hill sees some of the heaviest fighting of the campaign. With Corsairs overhead by day, the column covers the distance in about 38 hours, the last units reaching Koto-ri on 7 December, and Hagaru-ri is destroyed behind them.

7. 7–8 December

   A bridge from the sky

   South of Koto-ri the road clings to the side of Funchilin Pass. Where it crossed the penstocks of a hydroelectric plant, the Chinese have blown the bridge, leaving a gap — given as anything from 16 to 29 feet in different accounts — that no vehicle can cross. On 7 December Air Force C-119s parachute eight sections of steel Treadway bridge into Koto-ri (one is damaged and one falls to the Chinese, by most accounts). On 8 December, in a snowstorm, 1/1 Marines climbs north from Chinhung-ni to attack Hill 1081, which dominates the bridge site, while the division masses at Koto-ri.

8. 9–11 December

   Down Funchilin Pass

   1/1 takes Hill 1081 on 9 December, and that afternoon engineers lay the Treadway sections, eked out with timber, across the gap; by one account the bridge was finished with only inches to spare on each side of the tank tracks. The column — vehicles, wounded, refugees following — files down the pass through the night and the next day. Tanks bringing up the rear are lost when one breaks down above the bridge. The last Marines are clear of the pass by 11 December, and the bridge is blown behind them. From Hamhung and Hungnam X Corps and about 100,000 Korean civilians are taken off by sea, the last ships sailing on 24 December. US losses in the campaign are most often given as about 1,029 killed, 4,894 missing and 4,582 wounded, with thousands more cold casualties; Chinese official figures give some 21,000 combat and 30,000 non-combat casualties.