The Battle Of Chosin. Part 5: The Destruction Of Faith’s Battalion

The U.S. 7th Army Division’s regimental combat team, dug in on the east side of the reservoir, was feeling abandoned. For four days they’d fended off Chinese attacks by waves of infantry that often out-numbered them ten-to-one. Now under the command of Lt. Col. Faith, they had no orders and had lost contact with the rest of X Corps. They were desperately short of ammunition and food, and the casualties were mounting…as were the Chinese. At one point their division commander flew in by helicopter, which gave the men hope that help must be on the way. Instead he delivered the grim news. There would be no reinforcements. They had to fight as best they could on their own. This was enough for Faith, who decided that it was time to get his shot up, frost-bitten, and exhausted people out of there and link up with the Marines at Hagaru before his forsaken command was destroyed.

With a column of trucks loaded with wounded, Faith’s Battalion began its forlorn march south along the east bank of the reservoir. The appearance of Marine air support gave them a morale boost, but then, due to a malfunction, one of the friendly aircraft dropped its payload of fiery napalm right on several of the Army trucks loaded with wounded GIs. Survivors would take the awful screams of the burning men with them to their graves. It was an ill-omen. As courageous as they were, Faith’s men, after fighting for over eighty hours with no shelter, little food, and taking a steady toll of casualties from unrelenting enemy onslaughts and excruciating cold, simply lacked the strength to make an orderly retreat and it soon degenerated into an every-man-for-himself situation. Faith was killed, and many of the wounded left on the trucks, as well as their brave comrades who felt morally bound to not abandon their buddies, found themselves Chinese POWs. Others crossed over the frozen reservoir and staggered southward as best they could. By the time what was left of Faith’s Battalion made their way into Hagaru, they could only count 670 out of the original 2,500 G.I.s, of whom barely half were fit for duty. The Marines watched them stagger into their encampment with a mixture of admiration for their perseverance and pity for the hell they’d been through. Said one Army survivor, “When we walked into Haguri [sic] we were like walking corpses, having been neglected for five days.”