Read Online The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat by Bob Drury, Tom Clavin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Bob Drury, Tom Clavin
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graduation from Central High Duluth in 1946 he enlisted, and after boot camp he was assigned to the Corps' Sea School. He traveled to China aboard the heavy cruiser USS St. Paul as a seagoing Marine before taking an early discharge in 1948, when the Corps' manpower was reduced dramatically from its wartime height. Pickett remained in the active reserves while taking courses at Duluth Business College, and ten weeks after North Korea's invasion of South Korea he found himself on a crowded troopship bound for Kobe, Japan. He'd been fighting with Fox from Inchon to Seoul and had taken part in the voyage around the peninsula for the landing at Wonsan.
The names of the places where he'd fought, the places where he'd watched buddies die, were all a blur. Hungnam. Sudong. Hagaru-ri. And now here he was on a frigid hill above a place named Toktong Pass trying to crack the frozen crust of the earth with his spade. Finally, he and Williford gave up. There was a giant boulder, a nearly vertical slab of granite, a few paces from their position.
"See that rock?" Pickett said.
Williford nodded.
"That's our foxhole."
The two men gathered their kit, slid in behind the rock, and anchored one end of their pup tent to its base. They spoke of being home for Christmas.
One month earlier, on October 25, 1950-exactly four months after the North Korean armies had poured south across the 38th Parallel -advance elements of several South Korean ROK units reached the Yalu River. They had American air support, including napalm, a recent invention, which produced some of the most fearsome firebombing in history. At that point it seemed as if the North Koreans' plans to dominate northeast Asia-plans backed by the Soviet Union-were finished. A bottle of water from the Yalu was even sent to Syngman Rhee, the president of South Korea. Legend has it that after the bottle had been filled, ROK soldiers lined up on the banks of the river and urinated into it as an act of defiance toward the Chinese on the other side.
General Paek Sun Yap, possibly the ablest ROK commander, was not, however, in a mood to celebrate. A few Chinese soldiers had been captured on the Korean side of the border, and he insisted on interrogating them personally. "Are there many of you here?" he asked. They nodded and replied, "Many, many." But when he reported this to his American allies, the intelligence was dismissed as fantasy-and not merely by MacArthur.
In Washington, D.C., the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Truman's other military advisers continued to believe that the Chinese had sent only a small number of troops into North Korea, purely as a gesture to save political face, and that Mao was unwilling and unprepared to take on the United Nations on behalf of such an ally as weak as North Korea. Still, the American brass seriously considered a suggestion forwarded from MacArthur's Tokyo war room: to bomb the Yalu River bridges and keep even the face-saving forces in China. The proposal was rejected by the Joint Chiefs when they decided that such an attack could have the effect of goading the Chinese leadership into action to save face yet again.
The Americans also believed that the CCF armies would never enter the Korean peninsula because the Soviet Union did not want to see the war extended. American intelligence, however, did not yet see that political and ideological cracks were opening between Stalin in Moscow and Mao in Peking. The Truman administration had no idea that China was bristling at being a "puppet state" of the Soviet Union. The administration also chose to overlook the fact that, in October, Chou En-lai had summoned the Indian ambassador to his ministry and told him that if MacArthur's United Nations forces crossed the 38th Parallel, China would intervene.
In the last week of November, no American official-military or civilian-had any idea that some 300,000 Chinese troops were already inside Korea, and an equal number were on alert in Manchuria.
The names of the places where he'd fought, the places where he'd watched buddies die, were all a blur. Hungnam. Sudong. Hagaru-ri. And now here he was on a frigid hill above a place named Toktong Pass trying to crack the frozen crust of the earth with his spade. Finally, he and Williford gave up. There was a giant boulder, a nearly vertical slab of granite, a few paces from their position.
"See that rock?" Pickett said.
Williford nodded.
"That's our foxhole."
The two men gathered their kit, slid in behind the rock, and anchored one end of their pup tent to its base. They spoke of being home for Christmas.
One month earlier, on October 25, 1950-exactly four months after the North Korean armies had poured south across the 38th Parallel -advance elements of several South Korean ROK units reached the Yalu River. They had American air support, including napalm, a recent invention, which produced some of the most fearsome firebombing in history. At that point it seemed as if the North Koreans' plans to dominate northeast Asia-plans backed by the Soviet Union-were finished. A bottle of water from the Yalu was even sent to Syngman Rhee, the president of South Korea. Legend has it that after the bottle had been filled, ROK soldiers lined up on the banks of the river and urinated into it as an act of defiance toward the Chinese on the other side.
General Paek Sun Yap, possibly the ablest ROK commander, was not, however, in a mood to celebrate. A few Chinese soldiers had been captured on the Korean side of the border, and he insisted on interrogating them personally. "Are there many of you here?" he asked. They nodded and replied, "Many, many." But when he reported this to his American allies, the intelligence was dismissed as fantasy-and not merely by MacArthur.
In Washington, D.C., the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Truman's other military advisers continued to believe that the Chinese had sent only a small number of troops into North Korea, purely as a gesture to save political face, and that Mao was unwilling and unprepared to take on the United Nations on behalf of such an ally as weak as North Korea. Still, the American brass seriously considered a suggestion forwarded from MacArthur's Tokyo war room: to bomb the Yalu River bridges and keep even the face-saving forces in China. The proposal was rejected by the Joint Chiefs when they decided that such an attack could have the effect of goading the Chinese leadership into action to save face yet again.
The Americans also believed that the CCF armies would never enter the Korean peninsula because the Soviet Union did not want to see the war extended. American intelligence, however, did not yet see that political and ideological cracks were opening between Stalin in Moscow and Mao in Peking. The Truman administration had no idea that China was bristling at being a "puppet state" of the Soviet Union. The administration also chose to overlook the fact that, in October, Chou En-lai had summoned the Indian ambassador to his ministry and told him that if MacArthur's United Nations forces crossed the 38th Parallel, China would intervene.
In the last week of November, no American official-military or civilian-had any idea that some 300,000 Chinese troops were already inside Korea, and an equal number were on alert in Manchuria.
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