Photographs by Chris Von Holle
It was really cold. So cold that you had to will your bones and muscles to move. Only the fear and the rush of adrenaline kept you from falling into a fatal slumber. Russ Carlson, then an 18-year-old kid from suburban Cincinnati, pounded the North Korean hillside with his entrenching tool. It was no use. The ground was frozen solid, and, in the dimming light of a setting sun, he managed to scrape out just a shallow impression that offered him little protection.
Carlson and his unit of the First Marines/Third Battalion/Fifth Regiment were holding ground 40 miles south of the Chinese border, expecting orders to continue their push north to the Yalu River. This was the Korean War—the “forgotten war” as history has dubbed it. But for Carlson, John Murray, and Jules Freedman, Cincinnatians now in their 90s, the memories are still fresh. Their war is far from forgotten.
Carlson, Murray, and Freedman don’t share war stories when they and more than a dozen others who served their country in Korea get together each month. The Korean War Veterans Association meeting at the Sharonville VFW starts with a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by an orderly transaction of business. Memories of death and carnage are better left unspoken.
The North Korean army invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, with the goal of uniting a peninsula few Americans could find on a map. The South Korean military was overwhelmed, and Seoul fell in three days. The U.S. had only advisers in the country at the time, but that soon changed. By the time Carlson, who had joined the Marine reserves as a 16-year-old high school junior, was called up, fortunes had turned. Technically, it was the United Nations that voted to intervene, but in reality the U.S. led the charge. Within five months, North Koreans had been expelled from South Korea and U.N. troops had raced north of the 38th Parallel, steadily approaching the Chinese border.
“I landed at the port of Wonsan,” recalls Carlson, now 93 and living in Blue Ash. “It took us three days up and down the coast just to land because there were so many mines in the harbor. They jokingly called it Operation Yo-Yo.”
Although he’d been trained as a rifleman, Carlson was assigned to a machine gun unit, where he quickly learned how to load, fire, and strip the 30-caliber weapon.
U.S. Marines have had their unique touchstone moments. The Halls of Montezuma. The shores of Tripoli. The savage World War I Battle of Belleau Wood. Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. Khe Sanh and Hue. Fallujah and Ramadi. And the Chosin Reservoir.
“We were told there were no Chinese around and that if there were, they were just a bunch of laundrymen,” Carlson says with a wry laugh. “But then one of our platoons captured what we assumed was a North Korean soldier until our translator told us, No, he’s speaking Chinese.”
The Korean War killed 36,574 Americans and wounded more than 103,000. To this day, more than 7,400 remain listed as missing in action.
The first shots of the Cold War were fired in Korea. Americans heard the term “domino theory” for the first time. If Korea fell, we were told, all of Asia would come under Communist control. It’s the only U.S. war that didn’t end in a peace treaty.
“I believe it was the right war to fight,” says Murray, who’d just graduated from Purcell High School when he landed in Korea in late 1952. “We needed to make a stand, and we did. Millions of people today have better lives because of what we did.”
Photograph by Chris Von Holle
China’s leaders, alarmed as the United Nations troops approached their southern border, had quietly mobilized nine divisions and crossed the Yalu River into North Korea under the cover of darkness in November 1950. Their plan was to surround and destroy the U.N. troops.
Winter came early that year, and it was already bitterly cold in the mountainous terrain surrounding the reservoir. Russ Carlson knew there was danger on the ridges above his position, but it was too late in the day to move to higher ground.
It was pitch black when the bugles sounded. Mortar explosions blasted the American line, followed by waves of Chinese soldiers, screaming as they attacked. The noise was deafening, and the landscape was illuminated by the pinprick glow of thousands of tracer bullets—ours flashed red, theirs green.
A Marine next to him fi red a burp gun, mowing down several Chinese just feet away. Another used his rifle butt to fend off attackers. Carlson kept up steady fi re from his machine gun as a grenade exploded nearby and shrapnel tore into his back. He kept fighting.
“It was a hard fight because you couldn’t see them until they were right on you,” he recalls. “It was so cold that the light coat of oil for our weapons froze and the guns weren’t working very well.”
The American line held and, when dawn broke, Carlson counted 17 dead Chinese soldiers just feet from their crudely scraped firing holes. He remembers how lightly dressed they were considering the weather conditions. “They were even less prepared for the cold than we were,” he says. Their food supply, too, was meager—each dead soldier carried seven small bags of rice tied to his cartridge belt, each “the size of a garlic clove.”
The Chinese, though, had closed the vise. The Marines were surrounded and had to fight their way south to safety. Or as the commanding general, Oliver P. Smith, famously said, Retreat, hell! We’re advancing in a different direction.
It was a grueling, dangerous withdrawal down a narrow, ice-covered road with ridges and cliffs, hairpin curves and steep drop-offs. Snow swirled, and the temperature plunged to 40 below zero. Frostbite and hypothermia dogged the bedraggled Marines who struggled in the mountainous terrain.
The convoy frequently stopped due to roadblocks or choke points where Chinese snipers had to be cleared from the high ground. The bitter cold stalled truck engines. Sometimes they slid off the road.
Carrying boxes of ammo or the 45-pound machine gun and tripod, Carlson and his team patrolled the ridges to the right of the convoy, trying to clear Chinese from high ground. “I never expected I’d survive,” he says. He credits Marine Corsair fighter aircraft with softening up the enemy just enough for the convoy to make it to safer ground at Hagaru and eventually to be evacuated by sea at Hungnam.
“When we got to the port, we were called to attention and marched in together singing the Marine Corps hymn,” he says proudly.
Carlson’s war wasn’t over yet. He served through most of 1951 in South Korea, participating in several battles before finally shipping out.
Photographs by Chris Von Holle
By the time John Murray’s troop transport ship landed at the port of Pusan in fall 1952, the war had entered a static phase.
Peace negotiations had been off -and-on for a year. Blood was still being shed every day as each side tried to gain a mile here or a ridge there to enhance their positions at the negotiating table.
Back home, the war was playing second fiddle to the presidential campaign, the Dodgers-Yankees World Series, and the impending birth of Little Ricky on I Love Lucy. Americans were tired of war.
Murray, now 92, had just graduated from Purcell High School and was the proud owner of a 1940 Ford convertible he describes as “a hot rod which, of course, you had to drive with your arm hung out and a pack of cigarettes rolled up in your T-shirt.” He had a good job, but the Marines offered him something he knew he lacked: discipline.
He trained to be a mortarman and had every expectation, as the war heated up, that he would be bound for Korea. But first came the chance for an unexpected detour.
The Marines put out the word asking for volunteers to, as Murray puts it, “learn the ropes about atomic warfare.” Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just a few years in the rearview mirror, and the military was steadily testing and improving the lethal efficiency of its atomic weapons. “Learning the ropes,” as it turned out, was being a witness to a nuclear blast and seeing how you fared. So Murray shipped out to Nevada as a human guinea pig to crouch in a bunker and wait.
“It scared the hell out of me,” he recalls. “I was 4,500 yards from ground zero, and they told us to get down and, once we felt the air temperature rise, stand up and look at it.” Murray saw the fearsome mushroom cloud rise and then watched in shock as “the ground started coming at me.” Jeeps, mannequins, tanks, and discarded automobiles had been placed at different intervals, and Murray walked with his fellow Marine volunteers about a third of the way toward the blast zone, dressed only in civilian clothes, to examine the explosion’s effects.
“They put a Geiger counter on all us afterwards and nothing clicked, so I was fine,” he says, laughing. In the month following, before boarding a troop carrier to Korea, he received a 30-day pass. “I swam at Coney Island’s Sunlite Pool every day, ate Big Boys, drank beer, and broke up with my girlfriend,” he says.
Like Carlson, Murray was told he was to be a machine gunner. And like Carlson, he was assigned to First Marines/Third Battalion/Fifth Marine Regiment. But Carlson and Murray were ships passing in the night, never serving together. They finally met each other just two years ago.
Murray was sent to the front right away and saw action. His platoon was on a reconnaissance patrol at the base of a hill the Marines occupied when they ran into a Chinese ambush. “They were hidden in a V-formation,” he says, “and we walked right into the V.”
Murray picks up a fuzzy black and white photo of his fellow squad leader, A.C. Clark, a grinning, virtually toothless platoon sergeant who won a Silver Star that day for leading the men out of harm’s way.
In late 1952, the war was focused on a series of hills around the 38th parallel, which the Marines had named after movie stars. The hills—actually behind enemy lines and known as outposts—were critical because of their elevation, providing the Marines with a 360-degree view of Chinese movements. Murray was on a hill named Esther, named for Olympic swimmer and movie star Esther Williams.
He and his comrades were on high alert, crouched in trenches and bunkers, listening for the crackle of a snapped twig or a muffled footfall. The Chinese always attacked at night, using the cover of darkness to keep American air power at bay.
Out of their line of sight, the Chinese had bellied their way up the rocky terrain and cut the concertina wire that formed Esther’s outside defense. A bugle suddenly sounded, bells clanged, and a wave of Chinese soldiers called from beyond the darkness, Marines, tonight you die!
“I took a bullet through my shoulder and one through my thumb, and they had to drag me back to the trench,” says Murray. “I ended up in a MASH unit for four weeks, and the boredom was the worst.”
The subsequent Battle for Outpost Vegas triggers Murray’s deepest memories. In March 1953, peace talks seemed to be entering a critical phase when China launched an offensive focused on a series of hills named after Nevada cities.
The sky lit up with an artillery barrage that was deafening. Murray was lucky—he was on the back side of the hill when the barrage ended and the Chinese sent waves of soldiers up the hillside. “We had 42 guys up there, and they were overrun,” he says. “They shot and killed as many of our guys as they could and took prisoners who today are still missing. My best friend was killed.”
Murray transported ammunition and evacuated wounded soldiers from the combat trenches while avoiding mortars and bullets. He remembers a frantic Marine pleading with him to help rescue his twin brother who was stranded on the crest behind Chinese lines. “He kept saying, My brother, my brother, and we tried but they drove us back. I told him there was nothing we could do and we’d try again tomorrow.”
Tomorrow never came, Murray says sadly, noting it was three days before the Marines reclaimed Vegas. He doesn’t know if the twin brothers were ever reunited.
On another mission to rescue a fallen comrade, Murray faced a line of mortar rounds that landed sequentially closer and closer to him. He had just seconds to dive behind a rice paddy dike and place a stretcher over his head as shrapnel ripped into the canvas, but not him. “Corny as it sounds, that’s when I found Jesus and Jesus found me,” he says.
He enlisted the help of a sergeant and placed the wounded Marine on the stretcher. The soldier looked not a day over 16, Murray recalls, saying he knew the man’s head wound would be fatal. “We walked him a mile or so back and we had to stop and put the stretcher down a couple of times because I was just beat,” he says. “We finally got back to the command post, and I saw him take his last breath.”
Photographs by Chris Von Holle
Both Murray and Carlson have Purple Heart medals, and each used the G.I. Bill to further their education when they returned from the war. Carlson still carries a piece of shrapnel in his back; Murray’s hearing was impacted by the artillery barrages.
Neither thought much about the long-term effects of what they saw and did in Korea. Because of the extreme freezing temperatures, Carlson was diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy—nerve damage causing weakness, numbness, and pain—in his upper and lower extremities. Decades later was Murray diagnosed with PTSD and became eligible for the appropriate VA benefits package.
Jules Freedman almost seems embarrassed to be talking about his service in Korea. “I am in total awe of Russ and John because I know what they went through and what they did,” the Brooklyn native says quietly and reverently. “I don’t know if I could have done that.”
When Freedman, now 92, arrived in Korea, the war was all but over. His troop transport landed in Pusan harbor just five days before the armistice was signed to end hostilities. He missed the war thanks in part to a records mix-up or, as the military would call it, a snafu.
After basic training, Freedman—who was drafted for Army duty in January 1953—and his unit were transferred to Ft. Lewis near Tacoma, Washington. “And they lost us,” he says, chuckling. “Somehow our papers got lost and the Army didn’t know where we were.” As the war wound down with a series of bloody battles, he adds, “We spent our days picking up cigarette butts.”
When Freedman’s unit finally made it to Korea, they were held in reserve at the 38th parallel as the fighting ended, where he saw burned-out villages, gutted tanks, massive artillery craters, and refugees looking for some place to go. But no bodies. The war had moved north, and so had death.
It was late summer, and the armistice, signed on July 27, 1953, was just a few weeks old. An uneasy quiet had fallen over the mountains that, at long last, looked more beautiful than menacing. The opposing armies had moved a mile back from their original positions, and both sides were digging in. “We had no idea if the armistice would hold, so for several weeks we dug bunkers, cleared land, and set up artillery positions,” says Freedman.
At a morning muster, the lieutenant barked out, Are there any college boys in this group? Freedman, with one year of pharmacy school under his belt, raised his hand, which earned him assignment to the Army Counterfire Unit—a forward observation listening post close to the enemy lines.
Armed with two 20-foot-tall microphones, a recorder/transmitter, and two 6-volt lead batteries, Freedman recalls that his M-1 rifle almost seemed superfluous. No one was firing at anyone, although he’d briefly experienced an artillery duel and small arms fire when he first arrived at the front. His job was to go forward, find the highest point on a peak, set up his microphones, and listen.
If anything moved—tanks, artillery pieces, Jeeps, troops—he strained to hear it through the microphones aimed at the enemy on the next ridge. “I could see them sometimes, and they could see me,” says Freedman.
It was lonely and uncomfortable duty. He was exposed even though the Army had issued camouflage for his position. Those microphones, though, had to be high and clear. He was sure the Chinese and North Koreans knew where he was, and it was especially unnerving when he had to haul the heavy lead batteries to the rear to be recharged.
But there was one moment of levity Freedman is happy to share. He thumbs through a diary and locates a photograph he took of Marilyn Monroe. The movie starlet was taking a USO trip along the now-quiet front, and Freedman snapped the picture. He still smiles as if it just happened. “It was just about my 21st birthday, too,” he says. “What a present!”
Photographs by Chris Von Holle
Carlson thumbs through a series of letters he sent to his family from Korea. His sister saved them. Sixty years later, they’re preserved in protective plastic sleeves, and he treasures them.
“I wrote this one on board the U.S.S. Randall,” he says of the troop carrier that evacuated him after his frozen Chosin ordeal. He tells his family he doesn’t know where he’s headed but hopes it’s Japan. He reveals that he’s wounded but alright and that, if they get a telegram from the Marines saying he’s injured, pay no attention to it.
Carlson discovers why he was covered with feathers that morning. “My sleeping bag was full of bullet holes,” he says, “because I hooked it up to the cartridge belt on my hip when I walked those 70 miles from Chosin. I guess I almost got killed several times and didn’t even know it.”
Today, the 160-mile-long Korean Demilitarized Zone is one of the world’s most fortified borders. The listening posts that Freedman manned in the first weeks of the armistice are still manned. There are occasional skirmishes. The most recent happened in early April when a North Korean patrol crossed the Military Demarcation Line, which lies in the center of the two mile-wide DMZ.
It’s a reminder that, technically, the Korean War goes on. After 71 years, the armistice is still just a temporary pause.
Facebook Comments