Hagaru-ri

The situation was most precarious at Hagaru-ri. The high ground, called East Hill, that dominated the town and also the exit south to Koto-ri had been lost to the Chinese. The unfinished twenty-nine-hundred-foot airstrip had been penetrated and although the line there was restored the strip continued to be fireswept. (Transports, mostly Marine R4Ds, a military version of the Douglas C-47, would begin using the strip on 1 December, bringing in supplies and taking out the wounded. Five hundred replacements were eventually flown in, many of them direct from hospitals in Japan, barely recovered from earlier wounds.)

On 28 November, 0. P. Smith flew in to Hagarn-ri and opened his command post there. He ordered the 5th Marines to hold where they were and the 7th Marines to reverse direction, attack southward, and clear the MSR from Yudam-ni to Hagaru-ri. On the twenty-ninth, the remnants of three Army battalions, badly cut up east of the reservoir, were attached to the 1st Marine Division.  Few of the survivors, limping across the ice into Hagaru-ri, were in fit condition to fight.

Hagaru-ri had to be held until the Division could be reconstituted. On the twenty-ninth, Puller at Koto-ri, at Smith's instruction, put together a relief column to come up to Hagaru-ri. Lieutenant Colonel Douglas B. Drysdale, RM, had reported to the 1st Marine Division on 20 November at Hungnam with the 41 Independent Commando, Royal Marines. In addition to the Commando (14 officers and 221 enlisted men) there was Company G, reinforced, 1st Marines, on its way to rejoin its parent battalion at Hagaru-ri; Company B, 31st U. S. Infantry; two Marine tank companies with 29 tanks; altogether over 900 men and a headquarters train of some 141 vehicles. Twice Task Force Drysdale was ambushed and halted. The armor could cut through and the infantry could handle itself; the truck convoy got the worst of it. Drysdale was told to push on. By midnight on the twenty-ninth he was in Hagaru-ri with 41 Commando, Company G, and one of the tank companies. On the road behind them the truck column had been cut up into four different segments. Their situation was hopeless and by morning (except for a few hardy individuals who made their way either back to Koto-ri or forward to Hagaru-ri) all were killed or captured.