Word: hagaru
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...steep hills to drive out the Chinese and protect the column of vehicles; their feet would perspire, then they would be pinned down and the sweat would turn to ice. They had no facilities for drying socks and even changing them must have been difficult. Men arrived in Hagaru [a clearing station] with a shell of ice around their feet inside their boots...
...exclusively a marine show, although the marines were accompanied to safety by two 7th Infantry Division battalions (seriously depleted by losses). When the Chinese first struck in the Changjin area, Smith had two regiments at Yudam, west of the reservoir, and a third strung out along the road from Hagaru to the south. The Chinese hit the two regiments at Yudam with no less than three divisions, but wilted under counterattack. They next failed to knock out the headquarters garrison at Hagaru, which would have prevented the division from assembling at that point. Finally, they failed to overrun the garrison...
...battle from Hagaru to Koto was marked by heavy casualties on both sides. After that, the Chinese tried to stop the marines by blowing a dam and a bridge, and by sporadic shooting from the sides of the road. Not once from Koto to the sea did the marines run into a massively defended roadblock. This, of course, was partly due to effective air help and to the 3rd Division's rescue force, which came up from Hungnam and cleared the lower part of the road. Nevertheless, the U.S. column was a force of 20,000 traveling through territory...
...crawling vehicles ran into murderous mortar, machine-gun and small-arms fire from Communists in log and sandbag bunkers. The U.S. answering fire and air attacks killed thousands of the enemy and held the road open. When the lead vehicles reached Koto, the rearguard was still fighting near Hagaru to keep the enemy from chewing up the column from behind...
Symbolically, the Combat Cargo Command had repeatedly provided the beleaguered troops with an aerial bridge to their bases. Day after day "flying boxcars" had swung low over the column to drop ammunition, medical supplies and rations. And eight miles back up the road at Hagaru, C-475 had set down on an improvised airstrip to pick up long lines of wounded and frostbitten men. Said Combat Cargo Command Pilot Lieut. James Wood: "The marines scraped out the field at Hagaru one afternoon while we circled over it." Every plane in Wood's squadron was damaged by enemy small-arms...