Task Force Drysdale

By November 29, Hagaru-ri was straining under continuous Chinese assault, its thin perimeter held by headquarters clerks, engineers, and a handful of infantry. It needed men. At Koto-ri, a relief column was assembled to break through and reinforce the garrison. Task Force Drysdale, named for its commander Lieutenant Colonel Douglas B. Drysdale of the 41 Independent Commando, Royal Marines, was thrown together in a matter of hours from whatever units were at hand: about 900 men drawn from 41 Commando, from G Company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, from a platoon of tanks, and from elements of the 31st Infantry Regiment and the Army's 92nd Amphibian Truck Company. The convoy set out in mid-morning down the single, narrow road that wound toward the reservoir. Almost immediately it came under heavy, plunging fire from Chinese forces holding the high ground above the route. The defile would be known forever after as "Hell Fire Valley." The lead tank was disabled by a mine and blocked the road; the column was cut into three pieces; and the men trapped in the middle were forced to fight for their lives from the ditches and from behind burning vehicles, sometimes for hours, while the Chinese fired down into the defile from the heights on both sides. Drysdale himself was wounded in the arm early in the fight but refused to be evacuated and continued to lead. When the road could not be forced by vehicles, the men went forward on foot, fighting from rock to rock along the frozen roadside. After hours of close combat, roughly 300 of the task force fought their way through to Hagaru-ri—arriving battered, frostbitten, and many of them out of ammunition—but providing the reinforcements the garrison desperately needed. 41 Commando and the Marine company had suffered the heaviest losses in the breakthrough. The cost of the day was severe: 162 killed, 159 wounded, and more than 300 captured or missing. Those taken prisoner were marched away into the mountains and endured a brutal prisoner-of-war march that many did not survive. But the men who broke through to Hagaru-ri helped hold the perimeter long enough for the airstrip to keep flying out the wounded, and the name "Hell Fire Valley" entered the legend of the Chosin Few.