The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat Read Online Free PDF

brooding storm clouds. It was not lost on either Marine that mountain warfare was alien territory for an amphibious force trained and accustomed to fighting on beaches. Both men had received sketchy reports of enemy contact earlier that day at the Chosin, probably involving Chinese units that had forded the Yalu, and this gave their seven-mile drive an uneasy tone.
    In fact, as they snaked farther away from Hagaru-ri and up the steep slopes toward Toktong-san, two things struck them with foreboding. The first was their topographical maps. These were outdated, adapted from old Japanese documents, and nothing on the charts seemed to match the contours of the terrain. Peaks loomed high on the wrong side of the road, valleys opened where there should have been hills, and snow-covered foot trails meandered next to streams-frozen solid and marbled with blue ice-that should not have existed. More ominous was the absence of refugees. Since the landings at Wonsan the Americans had encountered emaciated North Korean civilians on nearly every road and donkey path. But this morning the MSR was deserted even by the small groups of bedraggled boys who usually begged for candy and chewing gum.
    Barber had done his homework, which included reading a translated copy of Military Lessons, the propaganda tract the communist high command had disseminated among its troops. This pamphlet had been found in the pocket of a dead Chinese NCO at Sudong. After grudgingly noting the tactical superiority of U.S. tanks, planes, and artillery, it declared, "Their infantry is weak. These men are afraid to die, and will neither press home a bold attack nor defend to the death. If their source of supply is cut, their fighting suffers, and if you interdict their rear, they will withdraw."
    Barber had also scanned intelligence files prepared by the South Korean army interpreters at HQ in Hagaru-ri. Several local farmers had been interviewed, and they reported that the area's abundant game had lately been spooked out of the narrow mountain vales around the Toktong Pass. It was as if something was moving around in there. He suspected it was a shitload of Reds.
    Upon reaching the switchback where the MSR looped east to west at the apex of the pass, Barber and Lockwood dismounted before a steep, broad eminence on the north side of the road and began climbing in the shadow of Toktong-san. They were at 4,850 feet when they reached the eighty-yard-wide crest of the promontory, a shoulder of the big mountain. The effect of being cut off from the sea by mountains to the west, east, and southeast had extraordinary consequences. The raw, wet wind screaming out of the Arctic and across the Manchurian plain, and then funneling through the pass, was the fiercest either man had ever encountered. The area around the Chosin Reservoir was said to be the coldest place in Korea, and the fallow terrain was the only ground in the country where rice could not be grown. The local peasants knew to expect an average of sixteen to twenty weeks each winter when the average temperature never rose above zero degrees Fahrenheit, and Barber could not help wondering how drastically this cold would reduce his company's combat efficiency.
    The hill they stood on loomed above two narrow valleys and occupied an area about the size of three football fields. At the top of the hill, on the northwest quadrant, the ground extended to form a narrow saddle-seventy-five yards wide and humped like a whale's back. This land bridge, which ran three hundred yards, fell away sharply on both sides and ended at a large rocky knoll. Above and beyond the rocky knoll a string of higher, serrated rocky ridges ran another one-third mile like a gleaming white staircase up the looming bulk of Toktong-san.
    Except for the narrow saddle, the hill was well separated from the other heights in all directions by slender, snow-covered valleys. The basins to the east and west stretched a bit over two hundred yards across, with