Battle of Yudam-ni

The night of November 27, 1950, began in a silence so deep the Marines could hear the wind scouring the ridgelines above Yudam-ni. The 5th and 7th Marine Regiments, barely 15,000 men, were spread across the frozen high ground at the northwestern corner of the Chosin Reservoir, occupying a patchwork of company strongpoints that marched along the ridges for miles. They had advanced there expecting only scattered resistance. Instead, eight divisions of the Chinese People's Volunteer Army—roughly 40,000 soldiers—had moved through the mountains in complete secrecy, arriving undetected on the heights above the Marine positions. When the assault came it came all at once. Bugles and whistles sounded out of the darkness, and then the hillsides seemed to move. Waves of Chinese infantry, firing from the hip and shouting, poured down the slopes in close assault, sometimes in human-wave formations that the Marines cut down only to see replaced by the next. Outposts were overrun in the first hour. Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, isolated on a lonely ridge east of the reservoir, was surrounded and cut off completely; for five days its men held their foxholes against repeated battalion-sized attacks, supplied only by airdrops of ammunition and rations that drifted down to them through the enemy ring. The cold was a second enemy, and in some places the more deadly one. Temperatures on the exposed heights fell to -35°F, colder still with the wind. Rifle bolts froze open or shut, machine guns jammed, vehicles would not start, plasma bottles burst, and morphine syrettes solidified into useless glass. Frostbite claimed nearly as many men as enemy fire. Medics warmed IV fluids against their own bodies before they could be used; wounded men who survived their wounds sometimes lost feet, hands, and ears to the cold in the hours before they could be reached. For four days the regiments held. Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Murray's 5th Marines and Colonel Homer Litzenberg's 7th Marines repelled continuous assaults by day and by night, counterattacking again and again to recover lost ground and to keep the road south to Hagaru-ri nominally open. Artillery of the 11th Marines, fired at point-blank range from the frozen gun pits, broke up concentrations forming for assault. Close air support from Marine squadrons off the escort carriers offshore, and later from the airstrip at Hagaru-ri, was the only thing that kept the perimeter intact when the infantry was stretched past breaking. By the morning of December 1, the situation was no longer tenable. The order came down to withdraw—but to withdraw the way Marines withdraw, fighting every step. The column would have to fight its way fourteen miles south to Hagaru-ri through territory now held by the Chinese, and it would bring its wounded, its dead, and its heavy equipment with it. Nothing that could move would be left behind. It was the beginning of the legendary fighting withdrawal—an attack, as Major General Oliver P. Smith would insist to a reporter who used the word "retreat," in a different direction.