Defense of Hagaru-ri

If the Chosin campaign had a single point upon which everything else turned, it was Hagaru-ri. The tiny village sat at the southern tip of the reservoir, at the junction of every road that mattered—the road north to Yudam-ni, the road south to Koto-ri and the coast, and the road east to the Army's positions. And on its edge lay a partially finished airstrip, a bare scar of graded earth that was the only means of flying the wounded out to hospitals in Japan. Without that strip, the thousands of wounded Marines and soldiers who would otherwise have to be carried out on litters through enemy fire would never have survived the march. When the Chinese attacks began on the night of November 28, the garrison at Hagaru-ri was a hodgepodge—a perimeter held together from whatever was at hand: division headquarters personnel, engineers still racing to finish the runway, cooks, clerks, and a handful of infantry and artillerymen. They were surrounded and badly outnumbered, holding a perimeter that at its thinnest point was barely a few hundred yards deep, and under almost continuous assault for a week. The airstrip was the heart of the defense, and finishing it became a race against the cold and the enemy. Army engineers and Navy Seabees worked around the clock in the killing cold to extend the strip to 3,200 feet—just long enough for the C-47 Skytrains to get in and out. Graders froze to the ground; men dug with pickaxes to break the frozen earth. On December 1 the first transport touched down under fire, kicking up snow from the rough runway, and the evacuation began. Over the following days more than 4,500 wounded were flown out to hospitals in Japan, a steady relay of transports that turned the impossible into the routine. The strip also allowed the delivery of 527 replacement Marines, of medical supplies, ammunition, and—critically—of the Treadway bridge components that would later be parachuted to the engineers at Koto-ri. T-6 "Mosquito" forward air controllers used the strip to direct the close air support that kept the perimeter alive when the infantry could not. When the battered columns from Yudam-ni finally fought their way into Hagaru-ri on December 4, trailing their dead and wounded, they found a garrison still holding the runway—but only just. The perimeter had been nearly overrun more than once; men who had never expected to fire a rifle had fought from their foxholes with whatever came to hand. Without Hagaru-ri, the entire 1st Marine Division and the attached Army units would have been lost in the mountains. With it, they had a chance.