Narrator:
Wisconsin Korean War Stories is a partnership of the Wisconsin Historical Society and Wisconsin Public Television in association with the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs.

Frank Stueber:
I see this TV show a while back, MASH. Unbelievable. You know, they don’t tell the whole story. A lot of things that the general public don’t hear about. They don’t say all the atrocities that were committed, a lot of GIs froze to death up there in North Korea.

Elroy Roeder:
When I got home, I offed that ship, I took my uniform off already, because people looked down on you, they really did, just like Vietnam.

Frank Stueber:
Didn’t ever talk to anybody about it. Never. You cant tell people about some of the situations that you ran into, first off, they wouldn’t believe you.

Elroy Roeder:
I never talked to my wife, or my mother and dad, or nobody else about that. They questioned me a couple of times. But you talk about it, they don’t believe you anyway. They think that you’re making it up, the stories and all. The stories are unbelievable. They think it can’t happen that way. That’s how it is.

Frank Stueber:
I can’t imagine myself being back there. But I was there. It’s really something.

Narrator:
It was a war as bloody as they come. Though at the time, they would only call it a conflict. And if Korea is a forgotten war, it is perhaps because so many people in America chose to forget it, even while it was raging on. But the young men and women who came home to Wisconsin from that war never forgot. Wisconsin Korean War Stories.

Major funding for Wisconsin Korean War Stories was provided by the John and Carolyn Peterson Charitable Foundation; the Krause Foundation; Joseph and Patricia Okray; John and Sherry Stilin, in honor of her father, Robert Kossoris; Duard and Dorothea Walker; the Okray Family Foundation; and the Wisconsin History Fund, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

North and South – June 1950
Dale Aleckson:
I graduated from high school in 1947. The Army was recruiting pretty heavily to fill in replacements for the GIs that were coming out of World War II. And I was slightly disappointed that the war had ended. So, I was excited to be there. And when we finished. Basic Training, it was announced the following soldiers will go to cold Korea. I’m thinking, where is that? I wonder where that is, because I never heard it. And the first name he called off was Dale Aleckson. Japan had invaded and taken over Korea in the early 1900s. So, everything there was Japanese, really.

Eui Tak Lee:
The Japanese motto was, “Japan and Korea: One Body.” They banned the Korean language. Also, they had a policy of changing the Korean names into Japanese, like, my name is Lee, Eui Tak Lee, I had to change it, our family changed it to Nishimura, so no more Lee.

Dale Aleckson:
The Truman administration wanted Russia to declare war on Japan very badly, to bring World War II to an end quickly. And one of the carrots was to allow Russia to come in and occupy the north half of Korea. Here’s this little peninsula, that one time was a country by itself, and we just didn’t seem to learn that that just created all kinds of problems over in Europe. And these nations of people, they don’t want to be divided.

Eui Tak Lee:
In the south, the republic of Korea was established through the free election. In the north, the Russians built a Communist regime. And the Russians, they gave tanks and artilleries to North Koreans. As you know, the Communist want to make everybody Communist.

Dale Aleckson:
I was billeted in with G-2. Now, G-2 is the intelligence arm of the Army. They were doing the undercover secret stuff. And a couple of the guys would infiltrate into Pyongyang, which was the capital of North Korea. And we talked, weekly, about the North Koreans and the Russians coming south. When I got home, I told some of the people in my little community, we’re going to be in war again. Most of them had never heard of Korea, and what does this 18-year-old kid know?

Eui Tak Lee:
A rumbling, a clearing noise, and flashing skies when the war broke out. North Korean tanks rolling in. I went up to the big street and I saw them passing by toward the south. And the South Korean Army, no tanks, no heavy artilleries. Troops were still with their patriotic zeal. They fought back with rifles.

Dale Aleckson:
It was not a fair fight. There were all these Russians, in my mind, because that’s who was in the north training the North Korean Army. They trained an army to fight. We trained an army in the south, but it wasn’t really very much. A lot of these things that happened, that take the lives of young men and women, are political decisions. That’s the way I look at it, the desire of the United States to get Russia to declare war on Japan. But then we gave away some things to do that, and Korea was one of them. I’m a 75-year-old-guy now, getting, you know, getting to the end of the line, but I still look back and I think that could’ve all been avoided.

Eui Tak Lee:
At that time, airplanes started bombing, like radio stations, so I knew the American was helping us. And I want to thank President Truman for his difficult decision to stop the aggression. And I admire him for that.

Taejon July, 1950
Valder John:
I joined in 1948. I finished my training and wanted to go overseas. I was too young, so I had to come home and get my parents’ permission to go. They signed the paper and I went to Japan, the occupation duty there. A good duty, I liked it.

Darrell Krenz:
That’s it, I’m 17-years-old, and I’m going into the service. They wanted me to go to advanced training in the states here. And I said no, I’ll join the Army. I want to go overseas. So, I had a choice, actually, Japan or Germany. So, I said I’ll go to Japan. I was there 14 months when the Korean War broke out. We went on alert immediately on the 25th of June, 1950. On the fourth of July, we were shipped to Korea.

Stewart Sizemore:
We were on maneuvers when the Korean War broke out, platoon training which wasn’t that intense, to be really qualified to go into combat at that time. Our weapons were Second World War weapons. A lot of them were not very good. A lot of the barrels were worn out. But when the war broke out, we were saying, well, wait till they see the Americans and we’ll be back in Japan in three days and continue what we were doing. Unfortunately, that wasn’t true. Never happened.

Darrell Krenz:
We figured that when they saw the United States soldiers that they’d run like hell, but they didn’t. Theyd run, all right, right over us.

Valder John:
We were told, you know, there wasn’t going to be many fighting forces, their fighting force wasn’t that strong. They were farmers who weren’t armed with nothing but pitchforks. The next thing you know, we were surrounded by them, thousands and thousands. They looked like ants coming over a hill, just come down. They started attacking us, and we didn’t have nothing much to hold them back with then, as far as big guns, or anything like that. So, we just had to retreat.

Darrell Krenz:
It was chaos. Nobody knew what they was doing there. We found rifles and stuff just laying there where GIs had left them lay and run, I guess, I don’t know. I found a 60mm mortar, a whole bunch of white phosphorous rounds. You could see the North Koreans coming. I propped it up against a railroad track, and we started shoving them in there. I was just going like this. So, we got a lot of them with that white phosphorous.

Stewart Sizemore:
We found out after that battle, we weren’t there to win the war, we were there to try to delay until we got more forces there, see. We were buying time with blood, basically, is what it amounted to. And all we do is fight and walk, fight and walk. When we came up to our main line of resistance, and we had a battle, then we’d fall back again. Because that was the only option until we hit Taejon. And Taejon was our downfall.

Valder John:
The day we walked in there, we didn’t know it, but we were already surrounded. We got word back from the Commanding General saying that we were going to be there at Taejon, that we were going to hold it at all costs. No retreating, this is it. We were going to fight till the last man.

Darrell Krenz:
We were on an outpost. There was, you know, hundreds of them coming at you. There was only like ten or 12 of us. So, we jumped on the truck. We went back into town not knowing the town was surrounded already. We drove right into them.

Valder John:
There weren’t very many of us left. So, we were going to try to break out. I don’t know how many vehicles I got on, and then knocked off, the driver shot. They were just machine gunning everybody. I got hit. A big truck, they had about 60 of them on there. And they’d reached out and grabbed my hand as they went by, and I pulled up on it. They got the driver and we smashed into a building. They were just slaughtered. All those guys on the truck, were just slaughtered.

Darrell Krenz:
There was four of us left in the back of the truck then at that time that were alive. We jumped out. And we run into this big ditch. We crawled away and we got into the heavy grass. We could hear them talking and hollering, screaming, but they never found us.

Valder John:
I managed to fall into a rice paddy. I just laid there. They were taking pot shots at me all afternoon, coming close. I guess whoever was doing that finally got tired or convinced that I was dead, so he stopped shooting.

Stewart Sizemore:
So, then it was getting dark. Myself and two other guys started up into the mountains. You could see down below, Taejon
just burning, on fire.

Valder John:
Nobody else was around there, so I started up the hill, towards the mountain. And I ran across another guy, he was wounded. And here we ran across the General Dean and his staff. We couldn’t keep up with them, so we stayed behind.

Darrell Krenz:
He got captured about a week later and held out in the weeds I guess, or something probably. That was a big thing, to have a General captured.

Valder John:
The shrapnel hit us in the legs, my buddy in the foot. And we couldn’t go any further. We couldn’t run. They captured us. I thought they were going to kill us right there, but they didn’t.

Darrell Krenz:
We had nowhere to go, this friend, he says, “I don’t have no ammo left. What are we going to do, Krenz?” You know. I says, Well, I guess we gotta try it. Wed seen these GIs all laying around in these ties, hands behind them and all that. We put our hands up.

Stewart Sizemore:
Came out into an apple orchard. That’s where our regiment, what was left of it, was forming up. At the time, I can remember our company had 12 men left, out of 206. So, we ended up on the Naktong Bulge where they were trying to shove us off into the ocean. That, basically, was the last stand for us. We either died or lived, because the fighting was so intense down there, and bloody, that you just kill or be killed all the time.

Darrell Krenz:
I guess I made a mistake. I had a South Korean flag in my pocket. And that really ticked the guard off, the North Korean guard. He put his burp gun to my head and was just about ready to pull the trigger, I could almost see it. And I said goodbye to my family, my little sister.

Valder John:
They took us back into Taejon again. They put us in the jail. These little characters would come in there ten times a day, threatening to kill us, take their weapon and stick it towards our heads, and it was just– I was ready to give up and say shoot me, you know, stop this crap.

Stewart Sizemore:
After a while, you see all these dead people, and you might not believe it, but after a while, you begin to envy these people. They’ve got eternal rest, and you’re going to keep right on going until you get it. And you know the odds are going to catch up with you.

Inchon – September, 1950
LeRoy Schuff:
They formed a troop train, on the East Coast, picking up Marine reservists, in cars all the way across the country. Our train went right onto the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, California. I would say about 60 percent of the troops that went aboard the ship to go to Korea were World War II veterans, that were called back to active duty, and you know, of course had experience and were trained and took leadership roles. So, we had some pretty experienced people along with us.

Robert Graves:
Shortly after it started, they asked for volunteers for this Raider Company. It was very much a cloak and dagger kind of a thing. There were 600 of us that volunteered to go. And they chose about 120 of us out of the 600. We trained off of submarines. We did a huge amount of swimming, demolition, hand-to-hand, that whole sea course of things that Raiders and commanders are trained for.

LeRoy Schuff:
We sailed to Japan and we docked at Kobe the day before Typhoon Jane hit. General MacArthur had a real tight time frame for the landing at Inchon. And it was impossible to send the ships to sea, to weather the typhoon, so we stayed in the harbor. The ship that I was on almost sunk. I joined Dog Company at Pusan, I then sailed up to Inchon
for the Inchon landing.

Robert Graves:
We headed out to Kunsan, just prior to the Inchon invasion. We went in about 9:00 at night, and interestingly enough it turned out that the beach was just the purest white sand you ever saw. It was just almost ridiculous that we were going in there. The moment we hit the beach, we were greeted with a huge amount of fire from the North Koreans. We could hear the bullets hitting the boats and all that sort of stuff. And of course, we were all scared spitless. What we didn’t know was that we were really decoys, to pull the North Korean troops away from the Inchon area.

LeRoy Schuff:
We went down the rope nets into the landing craft and headed for the beach. We took a little small arms fire, but not a great deal of resistance. We moved on into the city. Inchon was burning like one big inferno from the ship-to-shore bombardment. We got in maybe 1,000 or 1,500 yards into the city, and we had some pretty stiff resistance. The enemy was completely surprised and they were routed, you know, they just had no idea of what kind of force they were up against.

Robert Graves:
Inchon had been a huge success in terms of MacArthur. We then were suddenly working as anti-guerrilla forces up north of the border. We spent days walking. It was at that time we burned villages, or were ordered to burn. I don’t like to say we did that kind of stuff. But the fact of the matter is we did burn whatever there were, I though there were three villages we burned down. But we had no idea what was in them.

LeRoy Schuff:
We took positions on those hills, on each side of the road. And the following morning, we woke up to the sound of tanks. It turned out to be six enemy Russian tanks, and about 250 troops. They were led by a truck that was loaded with soldiers. They just came up the road in the cut between the two hills. I have to say, the fire discipline was just amazing. No one made a sound. No one appeared over the top of the hill, just waited for them to get in between us. And then when the truck got around the corner by the hill, we had a tank. And the signal to open fire was when that tank open fired on the lead vehicle. And he did. After about maybe a 30-minute fire fight there, we had no casualties, all of the enemy were dead, and all six tanks were destroyed. About a half-hour later, General MacArthur and a bunch of his aides appeared on the scene. And he walked up, he actually had tears in his eyes. He says, “This does an old soldier’s eyes a lot of good,” when he saw the results of the battle. A few minutes later, when he left that area, some of the Korean soldiers that were along with us, jumped down into our culvert, and took six prisoners out of the tunnel. Any one of them could’ve reached out and thrown a hand grenade up and got himself a lot of brass. There were admirals and generals and quite a bit of brass up there.

Robert Graves:
A lot of that country was really quite beautiful, a little reminiscent of some of our country around here. I remember deciding one time that we came into a valley where there were corn shucks, I thought, boy if there was a place that I’m going to get it, this would be a beautiful valley to let it happen, because it was really very reminiscent of the valley at home.

LeRoy Schuff:
On the day that we were to enter the city of Seoul, at about 5:00 in the morning, we got up and we were ready to move out. I went over to reach down to pick up the machine gun, and at the time I stood up, then I got shot through both legs. I presume by a sniper. It knocked me down. A Marine came over to stop the flow of blood, to see how bad it was, Paul was his name. As he was kneeling in front of me, he was shot in the head. He fell on me. Someone came and pulled him out. The Corpsman came shortly after that and looked at him first and said there’s nothing I can do for him. And he had to leave, because there was a lot of activity going on. I was on that hill for about eight hours.

Robert Graves:
You knew you didn’t want to be there. And you knew your chances of getting out were not all that terrific. And I remember very well a thought that I had. We were surrounded, a friend and I were to cross this river bed to get an intelligence report. It was the middle of the night, there were tracers just all over the place. And you think you’re ducking them, you don’t have a clue as to which one’s going to. We thought about there’s just no way. I thought about my family. I remember feeling terribly sorry for what this would do to my mother and father.

POW – October, 1950
Tom Lucas:
I was a reserve officer, comfortable, just got a new job and I get a letter from Uncle Sam telling me to report for a physical. My wife was just ready to have a baby. And unfortunately, I passed the physical. I was on my way to Korea. And in Europe, I was single, and all I had to do was take care of myself, that was all. I’d be with these married men, they’d have families, showing pictures. In retrospect, a lot of these fellows were either killed or wounded. Sometimes something gets in the way, you say, should I go, well then, all of sudden, maybe the wife or family or something will come in and it’s too late.

Darrell Krenz:
They had 800 of us. And that’s when hell started. They told us that in the morning we were going to move out. So, that next morning, there was a big North Korean. And he called for an officer to come up there and Second Lieutenant Thorton from Texas went up by him and saluted him. And he’s hollering and screaming and talking about how the American aggression and all that, and he turned him around and shot him in the back of the head. He wanted us to know that he’s going to be the boss. Then, they lined us all up and he pointed way off over the horizon. He said we’re going over the mountains.

Valder John:
When the Inchon people were coming in, getting too close, we started to march north. And one day, there was the Navy planes there that saw us. And we just stood in the road and didn’t move. They came down, and they came down low enough to recognize us. They did the flips with the wing and stuff, I thought we were going to be free there for a second.

Tom Lucas:
That was MacArthur’s intention. The Koreans were going north and taking American troops. And his idea was to put a noose around them by dropping the airborne units in. The Commanding General announced the plan. They picked the units and take you an airport where we were all put in a hangar, go through the briefings. Most of us had big sand tables, so when you got on the ground, even at night, you had some idea
from the terrain, where you are, which is north, which is south, east and west, what the roads are.

Valder John:
Then they started marching us day and night. A lot of sick. If they couldn’t keep up, they’d shoot them, stick a bayonet in them to make sure they were dead. They wouldn’t let us bury them any more. It just, I don’t know how many people we’d lose a day. They just couldn’t keep up, or they’d just give up and rather die than keep on going.

Darrell Krenz:
I was helping a kid from Edgerton, his name was Bill Pierce. He just gave up completely, and we got behind, really getting behind, really getting behind. And pretty soon, we’re back by the guards. And the one guard wanted me to put him down, and I didn’t want to. He turned around with his rifle and he hit me in the knee. I had to put him down, or I went down, too. The big Korean put a pistol in my face, and there I go again. Get going. So, I got caught up to my guys again, eventually. Then I heard the gunshot go.

Tom Lucas:
I think the anxiety I had was could I get out of that dang airplane. Everybody has that, but it was five or six years after the last one. I had no trouble getting into the chute and I didnt lose any sleep. It all hit when that amber light came on. That was worse than the first one. I was a team leader, a Lieutenant, and I was first in the door, and had 24 men behind me. I just went out. And I said, oh, hell with it.

Darrell Krenz:
All of sudden, we seen the paratroopers dropping, and they were ours. They missed us.

Valder John:
We saw the airborne drop, but it was a long ways from where we were.

Tom Lucas:
Our mission was to secure the American prisoners, but we missed those.

Darrell Krenz:
So, I’m game about anything, we’re not going to go home anyway. We might as well just get shot doing something. I found a bunch of red peppers, so I stuffed my pockets with red peppers. Obviously, there was a guard. He grabbed the club and he started beating me. He took me in front of all the guys and beat me on the back. And every time he smacked me one he made me eat some peppers. He hit me so hard, just real high on the neck this time, it knocked me out. They thought they killed me. So, they dragged me out on their dead pile. After a while, I woke up and I crawled back in the building. All the guys just jumped on me right away, started rubbing me, trying to warm me up. So, they probably saved me.

Valder John:
They put us on this train and it went up into a tunnel. The train stopped. They took us out and said we’re going to eat. And they took us along the tracks into a wooded area. They sat us down. It was ditch-like. I looked around and here all of a sudden, the guards come up with machine guns on all sides of us and just started shooting. I got hit and I hit the ground. And I still believe what saved my life today was this guy next to me got shot in the leg. His leg was right next to me, and it blew all that flesh and blood all over my face, so when they come to look at me, pounded on my back, broke three of my ribs, they stuck a bayonet in me, on the right side. And I didn’t move. So, they just walked away and thought I was dead and started pounding on other ones. The ones that made noise, they’d shoot. Then they left.

Yalu River – November, 1950
DuWayne Lesperance:
I auditioned for Army band school. And I passed on both trumpet and tuba. And there was a Sergeant that all of a sudden got orders to go to Korea, and he switched his orders with me, which I didn’t know that. All of a sudden, I got a notice that I’m not going to be going to Texas, I’m going to be going to Korea. I couldn’t believe it. I was initially to go to the first cavalry to be a 30-caliber machine gunner. So, I’m with this group, and this guy walks by me, and he looks, he says, “DuWayne, what are you doing here?” I told him what happened. We’ve got to do something about that. We were both in band school together. So, he took me to the Commanding Officer of the 25th Infantry Division Band. That probably saved my life. I passed the audition, whew, and they said, “We’ll cut orders for you right now.” On the spot. I said, “Why is there an Army band in Korea?” He said every division has an Army band, because you have to play for ceremonies and you have to give concerts. You have entertain the troops, plus youll have other duties. One of my other duties was I was put in charge of the 30-caliber machine gun for the Army Band. With the Army, you just can’t win.

Cornelius Hill:
I was about 15 or 16 years old. My guardian was a judge in Green Bay. I was kind of wild inside, in trouble, it was either me going to a reformatory or he suggested going into the service. I took the service. I was 16 years old, and he signed for me and I went.

Chet Kesy:
We made a landing way up in North Korea, never even had a shot fired at us. They loaded us aboard trucks there, and we started out way up in North Korea. And as we were going through these little towns, there’s kids out there with little American flags waving at us, and you’d think there was nothing going on anymore.

Don Kostuck:
We crossed the 38th parallel, and we started heading north. We had very little contact with the North Korean Army at that time. We got up to Pyongyang, and they told us the war was almost over, you know, there was rumors about we’d be turning in our ammunition, we’re going to go to the states, have a big parade in New York, and all this. So, as far as we knew, the war was over. After that, they told us we’re going north, we’re going to the Yalu River.

DuWayne Lesperance:
General MacArthur was ordered by Truman not to go any further than Pyongyang, which is the capital of North Korea, and he did anyway. He said, I think we have to go up there and take that Yalu River and push them to China, and then we’ll be done. And the Chinese says, don’t you come up, because if you come up to the Yalu River, we’re coming in.

Chet Kesy:
And we made our way to the Chinese border, on the Yalu River. One night, the Radio Sergeant and I slid across the river, just to say that we were in China. Which we wasn’t supposed to do. Everybody said, oh, you’re going to be home by Christmas. All of a sudden, the Lieutenant come to me and he said, we’re going to go back. They claim the Chinese are into the war.

Cornelius Hill:
All of a sudden, the Chinese came down and we were overrun, we was on the go, backing up all the way. And we would move. They were going the way the crow flies, and we were going by vehicle and going around the mountain. We had no more than stopped and they were right on us already again, so. We lost a lot of guys over there.

DuWayne Lesperance:
So, we were always right up in the front. Sometimes, we’d all of the sudden have to pack up and start running to get the heck out of there, just grab everything and throw everything in the truck. They said, if you have to leave stuff, then you leave stuff, but they wanted your weapons and they wanted your instruments. If that’s all you could take, that’s all you took.

Don Kostuck:
MacArthur wanted to bomb the Chinese staging areas, and Truman wouldn’t let him. I guess he was afraid that he would start World War III. I think it was a big mistake, because if the Chinese hadn’t entered the war, Korea would be unified today. So, I blame Truman for that. I also blame him for killing half the people in my company.

Cornelius Hill:
You didn’t know what company you were with, or who was who in that miles and miles of troops going down the road. They had all units just mixed up in there, trying to find their outfits, ’cause at nighttime it was chaos. But the Chinese let you know they were coming. They’d start ringing those bells and clanging cans, and everything else, making you think there was a million out there. The way they came. Some didn’t even have any guns, they just had knives and hand grenades.

Chet Kesy:
It was really demoralizing at night when they’d start yelling and hollering, and blowing whistles and bugles, and everything else. We was really killing a lot of Chinese then, I mean there was no end to them.

DuWayne Lesperance:
There were just Chinese and Korean dead all over. And it was pathetic, because I’d be looking at these guys, and they were younger than me. I was 17. I mean, really young kids. And sometimes, even in winter, they didn’t have shoes. And they were all over the place. We’d push up and they’d push us down. We’d push up and they’d push down. They’d be fighting over here, and they’d need us over there. And also, it was a pretty bad experience.

Chet Kesy:
I heard a rumor that the Chinese lost over two million men in the Korean War. Men didn’t mean nothing to them. They’d run you out of ammunition is what they’d do. They just kept coming, and coming, and coming till you didn’t have no ammunition left. You better start going the other way. You didn’t have a chance.

Don Kostuck:
We set up our positions. And my buddy and I were in a forward position, called listening position. Just before midnight, one of our mortar units started sending up star shells. And they’re a real bright magnesium coming down in parachutes. And there was just literally thousands of Chinese troops coming up that valley. So, we started shooting. They just kept coming and kept coming. I must’ve shot a couple thousand rounds of ammunition. You fire until the clip bangs up and then you load another one and you just keep shooting. I called ammo, I said, “Somebody give me some ammo.” The next thing I know, I got three Chinese troops standing in front of me. One of them shot my buddy in the head. He was reloading. And I was out of ammo and I didn’t know what to do. There was an entrenching tool laying behind me. So, while he was reloading, I picked it up and I smacked him in the head with it. And he went down. Then, one of his buddies shot me in the thigh. I hit him in the head with the entrenching tool. Then I jumped out of the hole. And I was going to try and get back up the hill. And another one of these little Chinese guys grabbed me and we were wrestling. And I had him in front of me, and another Chinese soldier came up and he pointed a rifle right at my head. He wasn’t more than three feet away from me and he fired. That’s the last thing I remember.

Cornelius Hill:
We had orders to move out. They were coming on us. And they didn’t say how many, or which direction, or anything like that. Just all of a sudden, they were right on us. We got orders to retreat and get out of there, and pick up what we had. We kept moving and moving, and all of a sudden, more coming, and all hell broke loose. We tried to fight them off and we couldn’t. I don’t know if you remember, or ever heard of Red Cloud, he’s from Friendship, Wisconsin. He grabbed a gun from one of the guys and told him to get the hell out of there. He’d hold them back. He actually hollered, “Get the hell out of here.” He ended up by a big tree, just a stump of a tree there. He braced himself up against it. That’s the last I seen of him. A guy like that, he saved a whole company from getting run over. He just backed himself up against the tree with a BAR and kept firing until he couldn’t go anymore.

Chosin – December, 1950
Donne Harned:
The F-51 was just a marvelous, marvelous aircraft, very prominent in World War II as a fighter aircraft. The word came down immediately that they needed F-51 drivers. Ten of us volunteered. And we had to tell everybody where we were and leave our telephone numbers with the Ops Officer, and so forth, because we never knew when we were going to get the word. So, I was at a cocktail party. The telephone rang. “Harned, you better get down here quick, you’re leaving.”

Ray Hendrikse:
Going in at Inchon, going in through Seoul going in through all of that, I never had any fear of anything ever happening to me. Chosin was an eye-opener. There was three places up there, Yudam was the one that was the furthest north, and then Hagaru, then Koto. I think we had about 15,000 Marines that were up in that area, 150,000 Chinese. We lost a lot of people up there.

Jim McConnell:
One of my units went up to the Chosin Reservoir to dig the Marines out. Of course, they encircled them, too. I mean, they had them all pushed up against that reservoir and we went up there and we’re killing off the goddamned Chinese. Gosh, you could see them to get the troops out. I don’t know how many hundreds were killed, but it didn’t make no difference, you know, there was so damned many of them.

Bob Kachel:
I was an intelligence man. Up there, we were supposed to be gathering intelligence on what was coming in. We’d go out on patrol and plotting, and coming back in and telling what we saw, what we found. And if we had any prisoners, we’d be there to interrogate the prisoners. That was mainly our job there until we got hit, then we would be riflemen. At Koto, we formed up into another group because at Yudam, they were surrounding us there. We were trying to break through, get them some more people up to Hagaru to hold that out. It didn’t make any difference where you were, we were all surrounded. Three different areas, I mean, we were approximately 11 and 15 miles apart, but it would take you two weeks to fight your way back.

Donne Harned:
The first Marines in the Seventh Army Division had to, I’ll take that back. As General Smith said, “We’re not retreating, we’re attacking in a different direction.”

Bob Kachel:
They were all around us. We didn’t retreat. I don’t know how you can say we retreated, because they were in front of us, behind us and on both sides. So, it wasn’t a retreat, we were still going.

Ray Hendrikse:
We were pretty much unfamiliar with where we were, and everything, so we stayed as close as we could to roads and things. And Chinese know that. They know where the cutoffs are, and where to put their people to stop us from getting through. They had gotten us all in a position where now they could knock out the lead tank, the lead vehicle, whatever it was, stop the whole convoy and open fire. And when they did that, of course, a lot of the people who were on trucks and jeeps and that kind of stuff, headed for the ditches on either side. Well, what they had was 50-caliber machine guns on each end of those ditches. And it was slaughter. And the enemy could be people, or it could be temperature. There were a lot of enemies.

Jim McConnell:
The worst part of it was cold.

Bob Kachel:
I hear it was 30-40 below.

Jim McConnell:
It was over 30 below.

Ray Hendrikse:
Youd throw a wind chill on that, and you’re up in those mountains and it’s cold.

Bob Kachel:
Your canteens, everything, was freezing.

Ray Hendrikse:
I think I’m the only one on that tank that didn’t freeze my feet off, you know, it was cold.

Bob Kachel:
The weapons froze. They didn’t operate.

Jim McConnell:
You can’t take your gloves off, your fingers would stick to the trigger at 30-some below zero, you know. You’ve got them heavy gloves on, and your hands will sweat. You take them off, and you put them on a cold trigger, they’re going to freeze there.

Bob Kachel:
You couldn’t go indoors. You had to be outdoors 24 hours a day.

Donne Harned:
We slept in a large room, warm. We really felt guilty. We even felt worse when we saw the Marines at the reservoir. I saw a young Marine who was evacuated, and his face was completely black with frostbite.

Ray Hendrikse:
Charles was at Hagaru with me. And if he had the watch, I sat with him that night, in that fox hole with his feet in my armpits and mine in his, so we wouldn’t freeze our feet. And if I had it two nights later, he did the same for me. There, you’re close.

Jim McConnell:
We got attacked every night, practically. I used to get out of my hole and go down the length of my platoon one way and the length the other way, checking on them. Some of them kids, they’re not used to sitting up after dark, and they’d go to sleep. If anybody was sleeping, you might as well be dead. If I had to wake a guy up any more than once, I’d move him right behind one of the guns. And the minute I could hear that guy start to snore, I’d aim right behind his ear. That’s a good pop going by your head, especially when you’re sitting there half asleep, and your head’s bobbing. It works, though, because that guy will never go asleep again.

Bob Kachel:
That’s when they’d usually attack, was at night. That’s why you’d always pray for daylight. You could at least get up out of your hole and walk around and try to keep warm. At nighttime, you couldn’t do that because somebody would shoot you, whether it was your own man or the Chinese. Hey, there’s somebody is moving over here, shoot, don’t ask questions. Shoot.

Ray Hendrikse:
And then we got to Koto, picked up the people that were in that area that never got to Hagaru. And from there, we had another opening up to fight our way through to get out. And so, we depended an awful lot on what the infantry could do to keep those passes open. Of course, the airplane was very helpful for that, because they softened up a lot of stuff.

Donne Harned:
It was snowing quite heavily at the air field. Marines were calling for air support, they were quite desperate. We took off in the snowstorm, and to get to the reservoir, we had to find the pass. He tried three times, and I was number two. And I’d see the pine trees coming up and I’d say, “Well, I’ll see ya later.” But he did find the pass. We went down in the bowl and flew air support for the Marines. They’re directing us. And this one Marine said, “I want you to hit that line of bushes over there.” And I said, “Is it clear of the troops?” Oh he said, “Yeah, they’re a hundred feet away.” That’s how close we were operating.

Bob Kachel:
The controller would give them the coordinates and that. Our fighters would come in and they would strafe them, and then they would drop napalm on them.

Donne Harned:
Three hundred miles per hour was the optimum air speed. It had to be dropped at a very, very low altitude. And by low I mean cutting grass, 20 feet or ten feet.

Bob Kachel:
And after that was done, we’d charge up the hill. They were always there to help us.

Donne Harned:
I’ve had some Marines tell me they wouldn’t have made it out of there if it hadn’t been for the close air support, Air Force, Navy and Marines.

Ray Hendrikse:
When we got to Hamnung, Baker Company, which normally carried 22 tanks, we had three left.

Jim McConnell:
Of course, you lost a lot of guys in between. They lost a lot. We lost a lot. I was standing right next to my platoon Sergeant and he got hit. He just came back to the front line again, and I told him, I said, “Don’t walk up…” But he, uh…I don’t like to talk about it.

Ray Hendrikse:
One of the things, even coming out of that Chosin, the Marines didn’t leave anybody. I mean, I don’t care if they were dead, whatever, you never left them. You went in after them all the time. And I always had that feeling, okay, so I’ve got to go in after you. But if the same thing happens to me, they’re going to come after me. And I took a lot of comfort in that.

Bob Kachel:
We’d never leave anybody, if possible, we’d never leave a dead or wounded person. If a wounded Marine was there, we’d always bring him out. They came with us. They were buddies and they deserve it.

Hungnam – Christmas, 1950
W.O. Wood:
I set up the gun where they wanted, and was sitting out there, it was getting darker. I see some guy walking across this open field, and I stopped him, halted him. He says, we got overrun just about two miles up the road. The next thing we know, there was bugle blew, screaming, yelling. And oh, man, up over the hill, a bunch of them coming. You could pick your machine gun up if you had to, to walk with it. I just picked it up, jumped up on top of a three-quarter ton truck, got the fire out in front of me, and we cut loose. We were first firing point blank. And I see puffs of smoke come up over. We were getting mortared. Oh, it was coming. The next thing, “Cease fire, cease fire!” I cease fire and I looked around. And what’s that like, you know, just like someone snapped their fingers and everything stopped. I sat and I shook. I remember that I shook, and shook, and shook. I took my canteen of water and drank the whole thing. So, then the Captain said, “I’ll put you in for a medal.” “For what?” “For what you did.” I said, “What did I do?” And the first thing that came to my mind is that I’ve got to go see if Simpson is there. I went up there and he was laying there bleeding. And I talked to him, I talked to him. We said the Lords Prayer. I think I got it all out, but I think the Lord knew what I was talking about.

Stewart Sizemore:
I got a concussion from a machine gun blast. It blew me and my buddy out of it. We were bleeding from the ear and the nose, and had a concussion. And then I got hit in the face with a Chinese rifle butt. And they left us. They didn’t even stop. But had it not been as cold as it was, and the blood congealed up, I probably wouldn’t be here today. We made it back down to our own units. They were all on the move back. And it being so cold that the snow hampered your movements also, see. Your unit is so disorganized, you don’t know where your company is. You don’t know where your platoon is, your squad is. You don’t even know if you have one.

Chet Kesy:
I never thought I’d make it out. Never, never. You know, I thought that was it for me. We were going to a place called Hungnam, where they were going to evacuate us out of there. But we was pretty lucky. Another outfit was up at the Chosin Reservoir, they lost pretty near every man in the whole regiment.

W.O. Wood:
We finally got into Hungnam, it was about 4:30, just about dusk, and we were coming in, all of a sudden, someone challenged us, “Who are you?” And the Captain says, We’re from B Company, 17th Regiment. Can’t be, you guys are all wiped out. He says, Oh, you have stragglers. I thought, 9,000 troops gone, there’s something wrong. Something wrong.

Stewart Sizemore:
We lost a lot of men there coming back from the Chinese. The people that I went to war with are more like my brothers than my brothers. If this camaraderie, even to this day, you’ll never find a camaraderie like you had, because you lived and died by these people.

W.O. Wood:
Pretty soon a full colonel come through and a guy taking pictures, there were a bunch of guys lined up. I was on the right hand side, second one in. What’s going on here? And the Captain said he’d see what it is. I’ve seen this before, World War II. So, he had some inkling what was going on. And the guy came through and said “Major,” handed him a pin, and pinned something on, and walked on to the next guy and put on a pin, and walked on to the next guy, next guy. Got all done, saluted us all. We saluted back. I looked down. A silver star. I’ll be damned.

Chet Kesy:
They brought these LSTs in there to haul us out of Hungnam. The Battleship Wisconsin, and a whole bunch of battleships were keeping the Chinese off, so we got organized and loaded up on the LSTs.

W.O. Wood:
And here our guys are coming out of the hill, the Marines, looked out and thousands and thousands of refugees all on these LSTs, jam-packed. You couldn’t have put a sardine between the two of them, there was so many of them.

Eui Tak Lee:
The Hungnam evacuation was an event the Korean people never forget. Because the tens of thousands of North Korean refugees was evacuated to the safety of the south by the help of the American ships. And there’s even a very popular song about the Hungnam evacuation. I like that song. Through the flurry of snows, we came south. But the singer lost his sister. They got separated, so he was singing about that.

W.O. Wood:
I got on the Breckenridge, the last ship to leave. And they had ammunition, 105, 155 as high as you could reach, on the beach. They must have had a Quonset hut size full of gasoline drums, and the guys are setting satchel charges on it.

Chet Kesy:
The Army engineers wired up the whole harbor with TNT, and stuff like that. When we were about a mile out to sea, the engineers blew up the harbor.

W.O. Wood:
Oh, it was just fabulous. The biggest fireworks I ever saw, just one after another of explosions.

Chet Kesy:
It was a fantastic sight to see, I’ll tell you. That whole harbor was blowed to smithereens.

Narrator:
The American forces and their United Nations allies would never again be as far north in Korea, though the fighting would continue for another two and a half years. What had been a war of invasion would now become a war of attrition. Lines would be drawn and redrawn with blood. And there would be talks of a peace that never came. The shooting and dying would go on and on.

Stewart Sizemore:
I think a lot about it. In fact, I think about it all the time. What happened, and how come I made it through, you know, where a lot of the other guys didn’t. The first people there really fought the offensive war because we went all the way up to the Yalu and all the way back. A lot of your people that went in ’51, that’s an entirely different war than what we fought. None of them saw what I saw. So, their concept of what happened, or how the war went is a little different than ours.

Chet Kesy:
Still 8,000 prisoners that are unaccounted for, 56,000 dead. A lot of people don’t realize how bad the Korean War was. It was a terrible war. It’s the most forgotten war of any of them. You don’t hear nothing now about the Korean War, very little.

W.O. Wood:
My buddies that are gone, and I always say the heroes are up there. We’re just put in their place. We may ask why did he die? For what reason? Wars are just, nobody wins, nobody wins a war. It’s just one heck of a thing. It’s easy to talk about, some of it, some of it’s not. But if I gave a little information to some people that don’t understand the war in Korea, I hope I’ve settled their thoughts. I don’t know.

Roger Lewison: I wrote this poem in 1950. I was sitting about 100 yards from my tank. We had just had Christmas dinner. Very cold. The weather was very cold. The food was very cold. “Christmas in Korea.”

He crouches
In his foxhole, cold
And stares at mountains
Bleak and old
Around the snow
Lies thick and white
It is a soldier’s
Christmas night
For angel’s songs
A whistling shell
No peace on earth
The hellish yell of killers
Drugged in assigned hate
Dear God
Did Christmas come too late?
Oh little town
The thought is blurred
His childish memories
Are stirred
While well taught hands
The death march play
Our guest the foe
This Christmas day
The dead ask why
At Christmas tide
Some strangers fought
And some of them died
For peace on earth
Goodwill toward men
The homesick boy cries
Where or when

(sighs heavily) How to make an old guy cry, you know.

Narrator:
Major funding for Wisconsin Korean War Stories was provided by the John and Carolyn Peterson Charitable Foundation; the Krause Foundation; Joseph and Patricia Okray; John and Sherry Stilin, in honor of her father, Robert Kossoris; Duard and Dorothea Walker; the Okray Family Foundation; and the Wisconsin History Fund, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.