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See terms and conditions. 18 plus. And we continue with our American stories. In the fall of 1850, it looked as though the Korean War would be over. Shortly after General Douglas MacArthur pushed his forces deep into North Korea, his 10,000 1st Division Marines found themselves surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by 100,000 Chinese soldiers. Their only chance for survival was to fight their way south through a narrow gorge that needed to be held open at all costs. The mission was handed to Captain William Barber and the 234 Marines of Fox Company. Here to tell the story is Tom Clavin, author of The Last Stand of Fox Company.
Let's take a listen. And aside from a vague awareness that Thanksgiving had just passed and Christmas was coming, many had no idea what date it was, much less what day of the week. Moreover, because canteen water had to be thawed over campfires, stateside notions of hygiene had been abandoned from almost the moment they had set foot on Korean soil.
A twig often had to do for a toothbrush, and they could barely lay their heads down for the night in an abandoned hooch without waking up with a scalp full of lice. Most had given up trying to wipe their runny noses with anything other than the sleeves of their filthy uniforms, and anyone who grew a mustache soon had a revolting mass of frozen mucus laid across his upper lip. They bitched and groused, but they never shirked a command, remaining true to the Latin motto above the eagle on the Marine emblem, Semper Fidelis, always faithful. And so, just past noon, while Fox Company mustered in the village of Hagaru-ri, Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Lockwood, commanding officer of the 7th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, summoned his subordinate, Captain William Edward Barber, Fox Company's new CO, for a trip in the company jeep to scout Taktong Pass. Now, this is the condition they were in before the Battle of Fox Hill on Taktong Pass. So these are not Marines who had been well fed and well cared for and rested when the time came to fight what would be an almost unimaginable odds against the Chinese. In June of 1950, as many of us know, the North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea and almost pushed the American forces there and South Korean Army into the sea.
Reinforcements were sent as quickly as possible by President Truman, and MacArthur and the UN forces started to push back and push back the North Korean troops, and they even pushed them back beyond the 38th parallel and kept pushing. And they started to, up by the Chosin Reservoir, they were getting closer and closer to the Yalu River, which was the border with China, and the Chinese were getting a little bit nervous. Mao Tse Tung and Chuan Lai were giving out warnings, Don't come any closer. Don't try to initiate a war with us.
If you make us more nervous, we'll enter the war. And I guess it was kind of hard for MacArthur, who was on a string of victory after victory going through the fall of 1950, to say stop. They also didn't believe the Chinese would enter the war. They thought that the Chinese were maybe in a vulnerable position then because it had only been the year before that they defeated Chiang Kai-shek and assumed the control of the country. So they must be tired and depleted, the Chinese armies, and maybe couldn't really put up much of a fight.
They were wrong. What happened was the Chinese sent something like 300,000 troops across the Yalu River to engage the UN forces, most of whom were American soldiers, Army and Marines. And the 1st Marine Division, some of its forces were down in a place called Hagaru-ri, which was south of the Chosin Reservoir and where the UN forces were setting up a perimeter that presumably would stop the Chinese from getting any further. But the rest of the 1st Marine Division was up in a place called Yu Dam-ni, and they had at most maybe 8,000 Marines up there. They were being approached by 100,000 Chinese soldiers.
Those are not good odds. And there was a place called Taktong Pass, which was the only escape route for those remaining members of the 1st Marine Division, and the Chinese realized that. So they decided they were going to try and close down that pass, which would block off the escape route. And a couple of the American officers, Colonel Litzenberg, head of the 7th Regiment, realized we've got to keep that pass open. Unfortunately, there weren't a surplus of American troops to go around. What they had was Fox Company, 246 men. And orders were given for Captain William Barber and his men to go either by truck and by walking and hiking seven miles up into the mountains to reach Taktong Pass. And when they did, they were supposed to hold it for at least one night.
Maybe if you hold it one night, we can get enough people out that everything's okay. So that was basically their mission. And so Fox Company went up there. It was the night of November 27, 1950. The temperature when they reached the top of Taktong Pass, and this is seven miles, uphill is not fun for any of us. The temperature when they reached the top of Taktong Pass was 30 below zero. This is not wind chill. There was a temperature, 30 below zero.
I've just referred to here the Siberian Express, that wind that came off Siberia right across Korea. And they got up there, and they tried to dig in. And so as night is falling, they're trying to dig a trench or dig a foxhole or dig something, and their spades are clanging off the ground and hitting themselves in the head. They're knocking themselves out trying to dig in, so they just did the best they can. And they settled in for the night hoping that maybe the Chinese would decide not to come their way. What they had no idea of knowing, these 246 men, that was only discovered later on, is that the Chinese assigned 10,000 troops to take that pass.
Again, let's do the math. Not good. Actually, it's very fortunate they did not know what they were facing.
So this is where it all began. The Chinese attacked. The Fox Men of Fox Company withheld as best they could off during the night until dawn. Captain Barber had set up a perimeter as best he could that our understanding is, is still being taught in some classes at Quantico because it was extremely effective at not leaving much of any gaps for the Chinese to get through and covering fire from different positions. And they made it through the first night, which was supposed to be their only night.
If they could hold it for one night, they made it through the first night. When dawn came, the Chinese retreated. The attacks stopped. And the reason for that was that the Chinese were very afraid of the American and Australian pilots, the Air Force. They had a certain kind of swagger to them, and they could inflict a lot of damage. And the Chinese, who did not have an Air Force really, were kind of exposed in the daytime, so they would only attack at night.
As Fox Company learned, if you can make it till dawn, you've survived because the Chinese will retreat. So this first night of battle, they made it to dawn, and they survived. And then they had to count who was left and how many were left.
And out of the original 246, after the first night, Captain Barber was able to ascertain that he had about 175 what he called effectives. These were men who hadn't been killed and who were not seriously wounded. Some of them may have been wounded, but not as seriously that they couldn't maintain their position. So during the daytime, they still had the problem with snipers. The Chinese would be up in the hills and sniping on them. There would be airdrops made of supplies, but it turned out that what Fox Company received was ammunition but no food. And it might not have mattered anyway because they couldn't eat the food. The rations that they were given were frozen.
And you've been listening to Tom Clavin, author of The Last Stand of Fox Company, go to Amazon or the usual suspects and pick up a copy. North Korea is a war that's sort of forgotten. There's a lot written about World War II, a whole lot written about Vietnam. But we lost 50,000 men in Korea, and we lost it for a reason. I mean, look on a map today, and there's North Korea, and there's South Korea. When they say our wars had no purpose in the Far East after World War II, we have only one shining example to point to.
The freedom enjoyed in South Korea and the nightmare that is living in North Korea. When we come back, we'll find out what happened to Fox Company under the able leadership of Captain William Barber here on Our American Stories. Sound is personal, intimate, and emotive. Just like this podcast. We are audio stack.ai. We combine AI writing. The best synthetic voices like ours.
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Here's Clavin. They couldn't light fires. I mean, they could maybe during the day sneak in a few fires to try and heat something up, but certainly not at night to give away their positions. So what was happening is as time was going on, these men were not able to eat any food.
Maybe they would be able to melt a Tootsie Roll. A little detail that's interesting that I'm glad I remembered is that a benefit to the cold is that in many cases when one of these Marines was shot and the wounds started to bleed, because of the intense cold, the blood froze. It stopped the bleeding.
So some of the fellows alive today are because they did not bleed to death. The other thing about the corpsmen is they were going around treating people who had gotten wounded. They had to keep these morphine syrettes. They kept them in their mouths to keep them from freezing.
So when they found somebody who was wounded, they would take something out of their mouth and inject it so that they can get that relief, because if they didn't, the morphine would freeze and it would be no good. So they got through the first night. There's the next day where they're trying to regroup.
They had to contract their perimeter a little bit. Captain Barber is going around to the men in the different platoons. He said to them, he said, We'll be okay as long as we fight like Marines.
That's what he kept saying to them, to sort of rally them and keep their spirits up. Now, while he's doing this, of course, the Chinese snipers are after him, and his bullets pinging and bouncing off all over the place. And a couple of his men kept saying to him, Captain, would you get down?
I mean, you're exposing yourself to the enemy fire. And he made this declaration that I know sounds like maybe silly bravado in a way. But he said to his men, he said, They haven't yet made the bullet that can kill me. And they were like, oh, wow, this is a captain.
And he turned out to be right. So he's going around rallying the troops, having them try and dig in some more, if they can get some rest in some ways. And the Chinese second night came, and the Chinese attacked again. And they had since been reinforced. So there were more of them, and they came at Fox Hill again. And sometimes what it came down to was individual Marines or small groups of Marines deciding that we might be surrounded, we might be overrun, but we're not leaving our position.
And that's what happened in many of these cases. They were not necessarily ordered by somebody, you have to stay here until you die or until you can't do anything else. These young men decided, we're not giving up.
We're going to hold our position. You're not talking about long-term regular Marines who made up the majority of Fox Company. A lot of these guys were reserves that were called up and sent overseas when the Korean War broke out. So they were not people that had this great experience, this battle-hardened experience.
The youngest was 16 years old. He had sort of snuck in, and here he is, finds himself in Korea. There's a fellow named Hector Cafferata, who is a screw-up, who would get a promotion and then do something wrong, get busted again, and do something good, but then get busted again. And his friend, Kenny Benson, both from New Jersey, Kenny Benson was a guy who wore these big, thick glasses and, like Hector, always did the wrong thing and always was getting in trouble from his commanding officer. They were sharing what they could call a foxhole together, and there came a point where the Chinese attacked, were coming up from up the hill at their position, and Cafferata, what would happen is that the Chinese were throwing grenades, and one of them went off as Benson was trying to reach for it, and it went off, and it shattered his glasses and pieces went into his eyes, and he was blinded. He couldn't see. There was another grenade that came up there that Cafferata went to toss away with his left hand, and just as he left his hand, it exploded. It cost him a couple of fingers.
This made them angry. And so what happened was Cafferata just got out of the foxhole, and he just started firing at these advancing Chinese soldiers. When his gun ran out of ammo, he gave it to Benson.
Benson is blind, but he's a Marine who trained as a Marine. He could reload without being able to see. He reloads. Cafferata is firing away, kills some more.
This is going on. Then the Chinese decide after countless numbers have fallen down being shot, what do we do in charge of this guy? Why don't we throw grenades at him and blow him up? So they start throwing grenades. Now Cafferata, the only sport he was interested in at any time in his life was hunting.
He didn't know baseball, football, or anything like that. He picks up a spade, and he starts batting the grenades. The grenades go back and start blowing up the Chinese that are running up the hill.
It sounds funny, but this is what happened. Not only the eyewitness accounts, but again, getting ahead of the little story a little bit, but it was this description which was by his commanding officer, Lieutenant of his platoon, witnessed this going on in addition to a few others, which is why Hector Cafferata was one of the three winners of the Medal of Honor for the Battle of Fox Hill. The man who put him in for the Medal of Honor, Lieutenant Robert McCarthy, listed that during the course of that night that Cafferata killed something like 41 Chinese. The actual count by those at Fox Hill that day was that over 100 Chinese were dead thanks to Cafferata between his guns. But when McCarthy was asked about it, he said, no way any would have believed me.
So I put a lower number so that they wouldn't think I was making it up. Anyway, that position held throughout the night, and Cafferata only realized towards morning that he had left his sleeping bag when the attack began without putting his boots on. So he's there in his stocking feet and 30 below zero fighting these guys off, as if the odds weren't bad enough. Dick Benelli, the guy who stole a car and ended up in Fox Company, there's a point where he has to take over a machine gun because everybody around him, he's the only one left, everybody else has died. He hasn't used a machine gun since Basic, but his lieutenant says to him, you either man that position or I find you dead over that gun. And so he does. He keeps his position, and then the point comes where they're starting to surround him and they see some other people surrounding. He actually, what we would call now a Rambo moment, he just puts the bandoliers over his chest, picks up the gun, and starts working his way down the hill.
As he's mowing down the Chinese, he ended up with the Silver Star. The other thing, which we didn't mention but is also relevant to this, is that they discovered when they started to count the Chinese dead and looked them over the bodies that many of the Chinese soldiers had already tied tourniquets on their legs and their arms so that if they got shot in those areas, their legs and the arms, they would not bleed to death. They could keep coming. They could keep fighting.
So they like pretreated themselves for wounds to their limbs. So pretty fanatical, and as you can imagine, it's even more amazing that any of Fox Company survived because not only were they trying to hold back 10,000 troops, but some of them just got up and kept coming again. There's another story of what happened to another one of our characters, Walt Hiscott, born and raised in Chicago. He gets wounded the first night, very seriously wounded, and he's in the med tent that they set up. At some point on the second night, a sergeant comes in the medical tent and says, listen, fellas, we're being overrun. We don't know who's going to come the next one in this tent is going to be. If it's Chinese, maybe if you just lie there, don't pick up a gun or anything, they'll let you live.
I don't know what to tell you, but start praying. He runs out again. So for the next few hours of the night, different prayers are being said. They hear all kinds of sounds and the noise outside of the fighting and the bullets and the grenades and the mortars and everything else.
There's all kinds of bullets that are flying through the tent because of the crossfires going on. And then Walt Hiscott had this wonderful story of when he's lying there, and this is after he said to the guy next to him, he says, I tell you what, he's not a religious guy. He said, if I make it through tonight, I'm going to dedicate my life to God.
And he meant it very sincerely. Anyway, he's lying there, and they know if they make it till dawn, they've survived. And then all of a sudden, they start to see these thin beams of sunlight come through the bullet holes in the tent because the sun is rising.
I just love that image. Then beams of sunlight coming through, and everybody knows the wounded know, we've survived. We've made it through another night. And you're listening to Tom Clavin, author of The Last Stand of Fox Company. And what a story he's telling us. And my goodness, the story of just what some of the reserves did, particularly Hector Albert Cafferata, Medal of Honor winner.
He killed over 100 Chinese, but they had to lower the number because no one would have believed he could have killed that many enemy soldiers. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of The Last Stand of Fox Company, here on Our American Stories. And rather than hearing from us, we want to hear from you. Do you work with businesses, products, events, or causes that could benefit from free promotion on podcasts in the coming month? Or dynamically change ads for a society and culture podcast like this versus science, music, or even comedy? Go to audiostack.ai forward slash contest, and your company could be heard by millions.
See web page for T's and C's. A web of manipulation and terrifying abuse. If you'd have said to do anything, I would have done it. With a powerful religious figure at its center. There was no safe place.
You don't say no to him. World of Secrets from the BBC World Service is back with a brand new season, investigating allegations surrounding the preacher, TB Joshua. The culture of secrecy needs to be broken. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
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Shop BananaBoat 360 mists at Walmart, Target or Amazon. And we continue with our American stories and with Tom Klavan. And he's the author of The Last Stand of Fox Company. Let's pick up where we last left off. What ended up happening is Colonel Litzenberg had radioed Barber and said, listen, we're sort of out of harm's way. We're not going to do this. We're not going to do this. We're not going to do this. We're not going to do this. We're not going to do this.
We're sort of out of harm's way. You can leave now. And then Barber looked around and he said, we're surrounded. He didn't know the exact number.
It turned out that there were 10,000 Chinese around him. There's no place for us to go. Basically, he was not saying it, but he knew this had turned into a suicide mission. And he said goodbye and good luck.
We will hold as long as we can. And that was how he signed off. Well, they held.
First night, the second night, the third night. When they ran out of ammunition, they fought with knives, with rocks, with their helmets. And Barber at one point was shot, took a bullet in the groin, ouch, of all places. He refused to lie down. He refused. They offered to make a stretcher for him. He grabbed a tree branch, and he would go from position to position, limping on his tree branch to encourage his troops, to tell them, we will hold, we will hold, we will hold.
That became like his mantra. Now, after three nights of this, and contact had eventually been lost with regimental headquarters, a character comes into the story, a gentleman named Raymond Davis. He was a lieutenant colonel at the time. He was the head of the 1st Battalion, 7th Regiment. And he and his men had made it to debt to Hagaruri and were basically safe. But he said, we can't leave Fox Company behind.
Maybe we can get enough guys to relieve them. So he raised 400 marines, and they did something. Instead of going the main route, where they would be totally exposed to the Chinese, they went over the mountains, basically, over the ridges.
Sometimes the snow was chest deep. And they did it to try and avoid engaging the Chinese. They wanted to sneak past them to get to Fox Company, to relieve them if they could. There were some firefights.
They stumbled upon some Chinese positions. But otherwise, they went, it took them two nights to do this. And sometimes they went off course.
Sometimes they were so exhausted they couldn't see what they were doing. But they kept plunging on in the snow, trudging, trudging, trudging. And finally, on what turned out to be the fifth day, they get to, they would eventually be called the Ridge Runners, because that's what they did, as fast as they could up and down the ridges. And they came over the hill where Fox Company was, not knowing if they were going to find anybody alive. And there was an astonishing sight that they saw. And there's a character in the book named Joe Owen, who was one of the Ridge Runners, who described it for me. He got to a certain point where he could see, you know, the Fox Company guys were waving.
We're still here, we're still here, some of them anyway. And he got to the point where they were advancing so that they could walk to where the Fox Company perimeter was, the little bit that was left of it. And he walked something like the last hundred yards or so.
His feet never touched the ground. The reason why, it was littered with Chinese corpses. It turned out to be there were 2,000 of them. They were all over the place. And they had just been mown down over the three, three, four nights of fighting by Fox Company. And there was this rather emotional meeting between Colonel Davis and Captain Barber, because they didn't know if they'd see each other alive. And Davis was very emotionally affected by seeing Barber, you know, standing there staggering on his tree limb, and the few guys that were left in this little perimeter, you know, had become like the Alamo but with a few survivors. And Barber was thinking, oh, my God, you guys came back for us. You know, you didn't abandon us. You know, Marines don't leave other Marines behind. And so there's kind of this emotional meeting in which it was emotional for the people witnessing it, but they couldn't say anything to each other.
They couldn't find the words. So anyway, out of the 246 that went up that hill, let me mention something about the Chinese, too. After the fifth day, the commander of the Chinese was saying, you know, we've been trying to dislodge these guys, and it's not going to happen. I can't afford to lose any more guys.
I mean, I've lost 2,000 soldiers already. So they turned around and left, you know. And so Fox Company, excuse me, Colonel Davis' men could make stretchers and stuff like that.
Out of the 246 that went up Fox Hill, 60 were able to walk off it. The rest were either dead or had to be carried off in stretchers, including the point finally came where Colonel Captain Barber couldn't stand anymore, couldn't walk. So they put him on a stretcher, and he had to turn over command of the company to Elmo Peterson. Elmo Peterson was, by this point, he had not eaten or slept in like five days, and he had, by this point, had three bullets in him. He refused to lie down.
He refused to, he was going to command his platoon and co-command the company. What Fox Company had to do at this point was they had to walk, hike down the MSR, the main supply route, to the American perimeter, the newly established American perimeter in Hagaru-Ri, which was a safe point and which was fortified enough that the Chinese would not attack it. They had tried a few times and been repelled.
And so that's what they did. It took them something like 20 hours of hiking. These guys are frostbitten, and they get to like about whatever it is, a hundred yards of the American perimeter. And that's when Elmo Peterson finally falters.
Like I said, by this point, it's six days he hasn't slept or eaten. He's got the bullets in him and everything. And he finally gets to a point where he just goes like this and he falls to his knees in the snow, and then he goes over on his face. And a couple of the guys at Fox Company who we, of course, we interviewed for this, went over to him. They pick him up. They think there's still a pulse.
They put his arms around their shoulders. They're dragging him towards the American perimeter. And then he gets closer to it, and he regains consciousness, and he says, no, I'm walking.
I'm walking in. So meanwhile, the rest of the company, they're not in great shape either. You think of the painting, The Spirit of 76. One guy's got a bandage around his eye, and the other one's got the... That's what these guys look like, in awful shape. And they actually get to the point where they're about to cross into the perimeter, and Peterson and a couple of other officers say, no, we're going to enter like Marines. They actually have these guys, the 60 guys who are left, Fox Company, straighten up, get back erect, and as they cross into the American perimeter, they sing the Marine Corps hymn.
You know, even Hollywood couldn't make this up. We really felt that people would want to know, okay, we've been spending, whatever it is, 285 pages with these guys, and all the things they went through, what happened to them? I won't go into everybody, but Walt Hiskin, because it leads to the next thing I'm going to say, an amazing story. He did survive. He goes back to Chicago, gets a job in construction, finishes his high school equivalency diploma, goes to college, finishes college, goes to seminary, becomes a minister, and then he was out of the Marine Corps by this time. He enlisted in the Navy, and he spends 24 years in the Navy as a chaplain. When he retires, he is the head of the Marine Corps chaplains of the Navy, and in 1967 and 1968, he is the chaplain for Fox Company when it was deployed to Vietnam. This is an amazing story of Walt Hiskin. I'm glad to report he's alive and well, living in Arizona.
He's a wonderful, wonderful man. Most of the surviving members of Fox Company to this day still suffer from the consequences of the frostbite they suffered during the Battle of Fox Hill. Dick Bonelli joined the U.S. Postal Service when he came back to the United States, and during his career there, he could not work in a facility in which the temperature fell below 68 degrees. He just couldn't. His hands would stop working because of the frostbite that he suffered. And so he sometimes had to be transferred.
He ended up in Florida, which worked better for him. He and Hector Cafferata are practically neighbors. I should mention, I think I forgot, that Hector Cafferata, I did mention, I think at the Medal of Honor, so did Captain William Barber and so did Colonel Raymond Davis. So there were three Medal of Honor winners out of this event. A lot of times when authors write their books, they'll say this is dedicated to my wife or my children or my this, but our dedication is to the United States Marines who fought and died on Fox Hill. And a terrific job on the editing of this story by Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Tom Klavan and his co-author, as always, Bob Drury, for telling this story in the first place. We care about these stories here in Our American Stories. Americans care about these stories.
That's why their books are bestsellers. Hearing stories like this, these stories of valor, honor, courage, and my goodness, the idea that you're going to leave no Marine behind, and how breathtaking it is to see that in action. Even these Marines were stunned that others were coming to their aid under such treacherous circumstances and that we'd all want something like that in our life, that someone would do something like that for us, risk all for us. Three Medal of Honor recipients, Captain William Barber, Colonel Raymond Davis, and of course, Hector Albert Cafferata. And Cafferata was a Marine reserve, and so many of these guys were reservists, with not a lot of military experience. Boy, they got it quick.
246 started the mission, 60 were able to walk off. The story of the last stand of Fox Company, a beauty here on Our American Stories. Sound is personal, intimate, and emotive. Just like this podcast. We are audio stack.ai. We combine AI writing. The best synthetic voices like ours.
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