Word: hagaru
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...running fight of the marines and two battalions of the Army's 7th Infantry Division from Hagaru to Hamhung-40 miles by air but 60 miles over the icy, twisting, mountainous road-was a battle unparalleled in U.S. military history. It had some aspects of Bataan, some of Anzio, some of Dunkirk, some of Valley Forge, some of the "Retreat of the 10,000" (401-400 B.C.) as described in Xenophon's Anabasis. The retreat of the 20,000 in Korea would not have been possible without General Tunner's ultramodern airlift, which supplied them with...
Bulldozers for the dead. Assembled in Hagaru, south of the frozen, blood-stained beaches of the Changjin Reservoir, the 1st Marine Division and the 7th had already suffered heavy casualties in battles with the encircling Communists. They had heard the screams of their comrades when the Reds lobbed phosphorous grenades into truckloads of U.S. wounded. When the order came to start south, the enemy was already closing in on Hagaru's makeshift airstrip, whence thousands of wounded and frostbite victims had been flown out. The last plane waited an extra hour for one desperately wounded...
...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...