At the height of the Korean War, nearly 10,000 Marines of the 1st Marine Division found themselves surrounded by more than 100,000 Chinese troops near the Chosin Reservoir. Their only route to safety ran through a narrow mountain pass known as Toktong Pass. If that road fell, thousands of Marines would be trapped.
The mission to hold the pass was given to Captain William Barber and the 246 men of Fox Company. Exhausted, hungry, frostbitten, and facing temperatures that plunged to 30 degrees below zero, the Marines climbed into the mountains and dug into frozen ground. Their orders were simple: hold the position for one night.
Instead, Fox Company would commit to one of the most remarkable last stands in American military history.
For five days and nights, Fox Company fought repeated attacks by thousands of Chinese soldiers. Running low on ammunition, food, and medical supplies, the Marines endured relentless assaults, subzero temperatures, and impossible odds. Men fought with frozen hands, wounded Marines refused evacuation, and young reservists found themselves performing acts of extraordinary courage.
Tom Clavin, author of The Last Stand of Fox Company, tells the story of Captain William Barber, Medal of Honor recipient Hector Cafferata, and the Marines whose stand at Toktong Pass helped save the trapped 1st Marine Division.
📖 Read the Transcript
Lee Habeeb (00:00:14):
And we continue with our American stories. Shortly after General Douglas MacArthur pushed his forces deep into North Korea, his ten thousand First Division Marines found themselves surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by one hundred thousand Chinese soldiers. Their only chance for survival fight their way south through a narrow gorge needed to be held open at all costs. The mission was handed to Captain William Barber and the two hundred and thirty four Marines of Fox Company. Here to tell the story is Tom Claven, author of The Last Stand of Fox Company.
Tom Clavin (00:00:54):
Let's take a listen. The onset of the North Korean winter had been harsh. They were froze in it, exhausted when it snowed, and they were frozen and exhausted when it didn't snow. As referring to the members of Fox Company, and unremitting wet gale blew constantly. The Marines took to calling at the Siberian Express and glazed every rock with ice.
Their knees, knuckles, and elbows were covered with bloody scams when continually slipping on treacherous slopes, and their feet and hands were always numb hours during the day were hardly noted, as they set their body clocks only by daylight and darkness, and aside from a vague awareness that Thanksgiving had just passed and Christmas was coming, many had no idea what date it was, much less what day of the week. Moreover, because canteen water had to be thawed over campfires stateside, notions of hygiene had been abandoned from almost the moment they had set foot on Korean soil.
A twig I had to do for a toothbrush, and they could barely lay their heads down for the night in an abandoned hooch without waking up with a scalpful of lice. Most had given up trying to wipe their running noses with anything other than the sleeves of They're filled the uniforms, and anyone who grew a mustache soon had a revolting mass of frozen mucus later across his upper lip. They bitched in grouse, but they never shirked a command, remaining true to the Latin motto above the eagle and the marine emblem Semper fidelis always faithful. And so just past noon, while Fox Company mustered in the village of Hagaroo Rie.
Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Lockwood, commanding officer of the seventh Renement, second Battalion, summoned his subordinate, Captain William Edward Barber, Fox Company's new COO, for a trip in the company jeep to scout toc Tong Pass. Now this is the condition they were in before the Battle of Fox Hill on toc Tong Pass. So these are not marines who had been well fed and well cared for and rested when the time came to fight what would be an almost unimaginable odds against the Chinese.
In June of nineteen fifty, as many of us know, the North Koreans crossed the thirty eighth Parallel and invaded South Korea and almost pushed the American forces there in South Korean Army into the sea. There were reinforcements were sent as quickly as possible by President Truman and MacArthur, and the UN forces started to push back and push back the North Korean troops, and they even pushed them back beyond the thirtieth parallel and kept pushing, and they started to up by the Chosen Reservoir. They were getting closer and closer to the Yalu River, which was the border with China, and the Chinese were getting a little bit nervous.
Malsetung and chuan Lai were giving out warnings, don't come any closer, don't try to initiate a war with us. If you make us more nervous, we'll enter the war. And I guess it was kind of hard for MacArthur, who was a string of victory after victory going through the fall of nineteen fifty to say stop. They also didn't believe the Chinese went enter the war. They thought that the Chinese were maybe in a vulnerable position then because it had only been the year before that they defeated chan Kaishek and assumed the control of the country, so they must be tired and depleted the Chinese armies and maybe couldn't really put up much of a fight.
They were wrong. What happened was the Chinese sent something like three hundred thousand troops across the Yalu River to engage the UN forces, most of whom were American soldiers, army and marines, and the First Marine Division. Some of its forces were down in a place called hagarou Ri, which was south of the chosen reservoir and where the UN was setting up UN forces was setting up a perimeter that presumably would stop the Chinese from getting any further. But the rest of the first Marine Division was up in a place called Yu Damni, and they had at most maybe eight thousand marines up there.
They were being approached by one hundred thousand Chinese soldiers. Those are not good odds. And there is a place called Taktang Pass, which was the only escape route for those remaining members of the first Marine Division, and the Chin Chinese realized that, so they decided they were going to try and close down that pass, which would block off the escape route. And a couple of the American officers, Colonel Litzenberg had the seventh Regiment, realized, we got to keep that pass open. Unfortunately, they weren't a surplus of American troops to go around.
What they had was Fox Company, two hundred and forty six men, and the orders were given for Captain William Barber and his men to go either by truck and by walking and hiking seven miles up into the mountains to reach Tac Toong Pass, and when they did, they were supposed to hold it for at least one night. Maybe if you hold it one night, we can get enough people out that everything's okay. So that was basically their mission, and so Fox Company went up there. It was the night of November twenty seventh, nineteen fifty. The temperature when they reached the top of talk Tong passed and this is seven miles uphills. Is not fun for any of us.
The temperature when they reached the top of tak Toime Pass was thirty below zero. This it's not windshill. There was a temperature thirty below zero. I would just referred to here the Siberian Express, that wind that came off Siberia right across Korea. And they got up there and they tried to dig in. And so as night is falling, they're trying to dig a trench or dig a foxhole or dig something, and their spades are clanging off the ground and pitting themselves in the head. They're knocking themselves out trying to dig in.
So they just did the best they can and they settled in for the night, hoping that maybe the Chinese would decide not to come their way. What they had no idea of knowing. These two hundred and forty six men. That was only discovered later on is that the Chinese assigned ten thousand troops to take that pass. Again, let's do the math. Not good. Actually, it's very fortunate they did not know what they were facing. So this is where it all began. The Chinese attacked the Fox men of Fox Company withheld as best they could all during the night until dawn. Captain Barbara had set up a perimeter as best he could.
That our understanding is is still being taught in some classes at Quantico, because it was extremely effective at not leaving much of any gaps for the Chinese to get through, and covering fire from different positions, and they made it through the first night, which was supposed to be their only night, if they could hold it for one night, they made it through the first night. When dawn came, the Chinese retreated, the attacks stopped, And the reason for that was that the Chinese were very afraid of the American and Australian pilots air force.
They had a certain kind of swagger to them and they could inflict a lot of damage and the Chinese, who did not have an air force, really were kind of exposed in the daytime, so they would only attack at night. As Fox Company learned, if you can make it till dawn, you've survived, because the Chinese will retreat. So this first night of battle, they made it to dawn and they survived. And then they had to count well who was left and how many were left, and out of the original two forty six, after the first night, Captain Barber was able to ascertain that he had about one hundred and seventy five what he called effectives.
These were men who hadn't been killed and who were not seriously wounded. They may have been Some of them may have been wounded, but not as seriously that they couldn't maintain their position. So during the daytime they still had the problem with snipers. The Chinese would be up in the hills and sniping on them. There would be air drops made of supplies. But it turned out that what Fox Company received was ammunition but no food, and it might not have mattered anyway because they couldn't eat the food. The rations that they were given were frozen.
Lee Habeeb (00:08:47):
And you've been listening to Tom Claven, author of the Last Stand of Fox Company, Go to Amazon or the usual Suspects and pick up a copy. North Korea is a war that's sort of forgotten. Is a lot written about World War II to a whole lot written about Vietnam. But we lost fifty thousand men in Korea, and we lost it for a reason. I mean, look on a map today and there's North Korea and there's South Korea. When they say our wars had no purpose in the Far East after World War Two, we have only one shining example to point to the freedom enjoyed in South Korea and the nightmare that is living in North Korea.
When we come back, we'll find out what happened to Fox Company under the able leadership of Captain William Barber. Here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories and with Tom Claven, author of The Last Stand a Fox Company. We just learned that of the two hundred and forty six original troops there to defend Doc Tong Pass, only one hundred and seventy five after Night one were quote effective, that is, not killed or seriously wounded. Let's continue the story, here's Claven.
Tom Clavin (00:10:34):
They couldn't life fires. I mean maybe during the day sneak in a few fires to try and heat something up, but certainly at night to give away their positions. So what was happening is as time was going on, these men were not able to eat any food. Maybe they would be able to melt a tutsi roll. A little detail is interesting that I'm glad to remembered, is that a benefit to the cold is that in many cases, when one of these marines was shot and the wound started to bleed, because the intense cold, the blood froze. It stopped the bleeding. So some of the fellas alive today or because they did not bleed to death.
The other thing about the coremen is they were going around treating people who had gotten wounded. They had to keep these morphine thurreats. They kept them in their mouths to keep them from freezing. So when they found somebody who was wounded, they would take something out of their mouth and inject it so that they can get that relief, because if they didn't, the morphine would freeze and they would be no good. So they got through the first night. This is the next day where they're trying to regroup. They had to contract their perimeter a little bit. Captain Barber is going around to the men the different platoons.
He said to them, he said, it will be okay as long as we fight like marines. That was what he kept saying to them, to sort of rally them and keep their spirits up. Now while he's doing this, of course, the Chinese snipers are after him and his bullets pinging and bouncing off all over the place, and a couple of his men kept saying to him, Captain, when you get down, I mean you're exposing you off to the enemy fire. And he made this declaration that I know sounds like maybe silly bravado in a way, but he said to his men, he said, they haven't yet made the bullet that can kill me. And they were like, wow, you know this is a captain.
And they turned out to be right. So he's going around, you know, rallying the troops, having them try and dig in some more if they can get some rest in some ways. And the Chinese second night came and the Chinese attacked again, and they had since been reinforced, so there were more of them, and they came at Fox Hill again. And sometimes what it came down to was individual marines or small groups of marines deciding that we might be surrounded. We might be overrun, but we're not leaving our position. And that's what happened in many of these cases.
They were not necessarily ordered by somebody you have to stay here until you die or until you can't do anything else. These young men decided, we're not giving up. We're going to hold our position. You're not talking about long term regular marines who made up the majority of Fox Company. A lot of these guys were reserves that were called up and sent overseas when the Korean War broke out, So they were not people that had this great experience, the battle hardened experience. They were eighty there was the youngest was sixteen years old. He had sort of stuck in and here he finds himself in Korea.
There's a fellow named Hector Caffarata, who is a screw up who would get a promotion and then do something wrong, get busted again, and do something good, but then get busted again. And his friend Kenny Benson, both of New Jersey. Kenny Benson was a guy who wore these big thick glasses and like Hector, always did the wrong thing and always was getting in trouble for his commanding officer.
They were sharing what they could call a foxhole together, and that came a point where the Chinese attacked were coming up from up the hill at their position and Cafferrata what would happen is that the Chinese were throwing grenades and one of them went off as Benson was trying to reach for it, and it went off and it shattered his glasses and pieces went into his eyes, and he was blinded. He couldn't see. There was another grenade that came up there that Cafferata went to toss away with his left hand. Just as he left to hand, it exploded, cost him a couple of fingers.
This made them angry, and so what happened was Caffarata just got out of the fox hole and he just started firing at these Chinese, advancing Chinese soldiers. When his gun ran out of AMMO, he gave it to Benson. Benson is blind, but he's a marine who trained as a marine. He could reload without being able to see. He reloads. Caferata is firing away, kills some more and they did. This is going on. Then the Chinese decide, after countless numbers have fallen down being shot, what are we do in charge of this guy? Why don't we throw grenades at him and blow him up? So they start throwing grenades.
Affarata the only sport he was interested in at any time in his life was hunting. He don't know baseball, football or anything like that. He picks up a spade and he starts batting of graades. Mcgreades go back and start blowing up the Chinese that are running up the hill. It sounds funny, but this is what happened, is and not only the eyewitness accounts, but as I again getting ahead of the little story a little bit, but it was this description which was by his commanding officer.
A lieutenant of his platoon witnessed this going on, in addition to a few others, which is why Hector Kaferata was one of the three winners of the Medal of Honor for the Battle of Fox Hill. The man who put him in for the Medal of Honor, with Lieutenant Robert McCarthy, listed that during the course of that night that Cafarata killed something like forty one Chinese. The actual count by those at Fox Hild that day was that over one hundred Chinese were dead. Thanks to caffarata between his guns.
And but when McCarthy was asked about it, he said, no way any would believe me, so I put a lower number so that they wouldn't think I was making it up anyway. That position held throughout the night, and Confarado only realized towards the morning that he had left his sleeping bag when the attack began without putting his boots on. So he's there in his stocking feet and thirty blow zero fighting these guys off, as if the odds weren't bad enough. Dick Bonelli, Dick Bonelli, the guy who stole a car and ended up in Fox Company. There's a point where he has to take over a machine gun because everybody around it he's the only one left.
Everybone else has died. He hasn't used the machine gun since Basic. But his lieutenant says to him, you either man that position or I find you dead over that gun, and so he does. He keeps his position, and then the point comes where they're starting to surround him, and they see some other people surrounding. He actually what we would call now a rambo moment. He just puts the bandoliers over his chest. Picks up the gun and start working his way down the hill. As he's mowing down the Chinese, he ended up with the silver Star.
The other thing that they which we didn't mention, but is also relevant to this, is that they discovered when they started to count the Chinese dead and look them over the bodies, that many of the Chinese soldiers had had already tied tourniquets on their legs in their arms, so that if they got shot in those areas, their legs in the arms, they would not bleed to death. They can keep coming, they could keep fighting, so they like pre treated themselves for wounds their limbs.
So pretty fanatical, and as you can imagine, it's even more amazing that any of Fox companies survived because not only were they being, you know, trying to hold back ten thousand troops, but some of them just got up and kept coming again. There's another story of what happened to of another one of our characters, Walt Hiskett, born and raised in Chicago. He gets wounded first wounded the first night, very seriously wounded, and he's in the mid tent that they set up, and at some point on the second night, a sergeant comes in the medical tent and says, listen, fellas that were being overrun. We don't know who's going to come.
The next one in this tent's going to be. If it's Chinese. Maybe if you just lie there, don't pick up a gun or anything, they'll let you live. But I don't know what to tell you, but start praying. He runs out again. So for the next few hours of the night, different prayers are being said. They hear all kinds of sounds and the noise outside of the fighting and the bullets and the grenades and the mortars and everything else. And there's all kinds of bullets that are flying through the tent because of the crossfires going on.
And then, well, Hisskott had this wonderful story of when he's lying there, and this is after he said to the guy next to him, he says, tell you what, he's not a religious guy. He said. He said, I might make it. I might make it through tonight. I'm going to dedicate my life to God. They meant it very sincerely. Anyway, he's lying there and they know if they make it till dawn, they've survived. And then all of a sudden they start to see these thin beams of sunlight comes through the bullet holes in the tent because the sun is rising. I just love that image, thin beams of sunlight coming through, and I know everybody knows the wounded.
No, we've survived, We've made it through another night.
Lee Habeeb (00:18:55):
And you're listening to Tom Claven, author of The Last Stand of Fox Company, and what a story he's telling us, and my goodness, the story of just what some of the reserves did, particularly Hector Albert Caferata Medal of Honor winner. He killed over one hundred Chinese, but they had to lower the number because no one would have believed he could have killed that many enemy soldiers. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of the Last Stand a Fox Company. Here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories and with Tom Clavin, and he's the author of the Last Stand of Fox Company.
Let's pick up where we last left off.
Tom Clavin (00:19:50):
What ended up happening is Colonel Listenberg had radio Barber and said, listen, we're sort of out of harm's way. You can leave now. And then Barbara looked around and he said, we're surrounded. You know, he didn't know what the exact number turned out that they were, you know, ten thousand Chinese around them. There's no place for us to go, you know. Basically he was not saying it, but he knew this had turned into a suicide mission. And he said, goodbye and good luck. We will hold as long as we can, and that was how he signed off.
Well, they held first night, the second night, the third night, when they ran out of ammunition, they fought with knives, with rocks, with their helmets, and Barbara at one point was shot, took a bullet in the groin. Out of all places, he refused to lie down. He refused. They offered to make a stretcher for him. He grabbed a tree branch and he would go from position to position, limping on his tree branch to encourage his troops to tell them, you know, we'll hold, we will hold, we will hold. It became like his mantra.
Now, after three nights of this and contact that have eventually been lost with regiment a headquarter, a character comes into the story, a gentleman named Raymond Davis. He was a lieutenant colonel at the time. He was the head of the first Battalion, seventh regiment, and he and his men had made it to death to Hagaroorie and were basically safe. But he said, we can't leave Fox Company behind. Maybe we can get enough guys to relieve them. So he raised four hundred marines and they did something. Instead of going the main route where they would be totally exposed to the Chinese, they went over the mountains, basically over the ridges.
Sometimes the snow was chest deep, and they did it to have try and avoid engaging the Chinese. They wanted to sneak past them to get to Fox Company to relieve them if they could. There were some firefights they stumbled upon some Chinese positions, but otherwise they went. They took them two nights to do this, and sometimes they went off course.
Sometimes they were so exhausted they couldn't see what they were doing, but they kept plunging on in the snow, trudging, trudging, trudging, and finally on the fit would turned out to be the fifth day they get to They were called eventually be called the ridge runners because that's what they did as fast as they could up and down the ridges, and they got to came over the hill where Fox Company was not knowing if they were going to find anybody alive, and they there was an astonishing site that they saw.
And as a character in the book named Joe Owen, who was one of the Ridge runners, who described it for me, he got to a certain point where he could see, you know, they Fox Company guys were waving. Was still here? Was still here? Some of them anyway, And he got to the point where they were advancing so that they could walk to where the Fox Company perimeter was a little bit that was left of it. And he walked something like the last one hundred yards or so. His feet never touched the ground. The reason why it was littered with Chinese corpses. There were one hundred it turned out to be there were two thousand of them.
They were all over the place and they had just been mown down over the three three four nights of fighting by Fox Company. And there was this rather emotional meeting between Colonel Davis and Captain Barber because they didn't know if they'd see each other alive. And Davis was very emotionally affected by seeing Barber, you know, standing there staggering on his tree limb, and the few guys who were left and this little perimeter you know, had become like the Alamo, but with a few survivors. And Barbara was thinking, oh my god, you guys came back for us. You know, you didn't abandon you know, Marines don't leave other marines behind.
And so this was kind of this emotional meeting in which it was emotional for people witnessing it, but they couldn't say anything to each other. They couldn't find the words. So anyway, out of the two hundred and forty six that went up that hill, let mention something about the Chinese too. After the fifth day, the commander of the Chinese was saying, you know, we've been trying to dislodge these guys and it's not going to happen. I can't afford to lose any more guys. I mean I've I've lost two thousand soldiers already.
So they turned around and left, you know, And so Fox Company, excuse me, Colonel Davis's men could make stretchers and stuff like that. At the two hundred and forty six that went up to Fox Hill sixty, we're able to walk off it. The rest were either dead or were had to be carried off in the stretchers, including the point finally came with Colonel Captain Barber couldn't couldn't stand anymore, couldn't walk, So they put him on a stretcher and he had to turn over command of the company to Elmo Peterson. Elmo Peterson was by this point he had not eaten or slept in like five days, and he had by this point had three bullets in him.
He refused to lie down. He refused he was going to command his platoon and co command the company. What Fox Company had to do at this point was they had to walk hike down the MSR, the main supply route to the American perimeter, the newly established American perimeter in hagar Ure, which was a safe point and which was fortified enough that the Chinese would not attack it. They tried a few times and been repelled, and so that's what they did. It took him something like twenty hours of hiking. These guys are frostbitten and they get to like about whatever it is one hundred yards of the American perimeter.
And that's when Elmo Peterson finally falters. Like I say this, by this point is six days, he hasn't slept or eating, He's got the bullets in them and everything, and he finally gets to a point where he just goes like this, and he falls to his knees in the snow, and then he goes over on his face, and a couple of the guys in Fox Company, who we have, of course we interviewed for this, went over to him. They pick him up. They think this is still a pulse, so they, you know, he put they put his arms around their shoulders.
They're dragging him towards the American perimeter and then he gets he gets close, he gets closer to it, and he regains consciousness and he said, no, I'm walking, I'm walking across, I'm walking in. So meanwhile, the rest of the company, they're not in great shape either. You think of the painting of the Spirit of seventy six. One guy's got a bandage around his eye and the other one's got this. That's what these guys look like, you know, in awful shape. And they actually get to the point where they're about to cross into the perimeter, and Peterson and a couple of other officers say, no, we're going to enter like marines.
They actually have these guys, the sixty guys who were left Fox Company, straighten up, get back erect and as they cross into the American perimeter, they sing the Marine Corps him. You know, even Hollywood couldn't make this up. We really felt that people would want to know. Okay, we've been spending whatever it is, two hundred and eighty five pages with these guys and all the things they went through, what happened to them. I won't go on to everybody but Walt Hissken Is because it at least to the next thing, I'm going to say, an amazing story. He did. He did survive.
He goes back to Chicago, gets a job in construction, finish this is his high school equivalencely diploma, goes to college, finishes college, goes to the seminary, becomes a minister, and then he was out of the Marine Corps. At this time. He enlisted in the Navy and he spends twenty four years in the Navy as a chaplain. When he retires, he is the head of the Marine Corps Chaplains of the Navy, and in nineteen sixty seven and sixty eight he is the chaplain for Fox Company when it was deployed to Vietnam. This is an amazing story of Walt Hiskett. I'm glad to report he's alive and well, living in Arizona. He's a wonderful, wonderful man.
Most of the members, surviving members of Fox Company to this day still suffer from the consequences of the frostbite they suffered during the Battle of Fox Hill. Dick Bonelli joined the US Postal Service when he came back to the United States, and during his career there he could not work in a facility in which temperature fell below sixty eight degrees. He just couldn't. His hands would stop working, you know, because of the frostbite that he suffered, and so he had sometimes had to be transferred, you know, and he ended up in Florida, which worked better for him. He and Hector Cafferat are practically neighbors.
I should mention I think I forgot that Hector caw fraud. I did mention. I think up the Middle of Honor, so did Captain William Barber, and so did Colonel Raymond Davis. So there were three Medal of Honor winners out of this event. Yeah. A lot of times when authors write their books, they'll say, this is dedicated to my wife or my children or by this, but our dedication is to the United States Marines who fought and died on Fox Hill.
Lee Habeeb (00:28:37):
And a terrific job on the editing of this story by Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Tom Claven and his co author is always Bob Drury for telling this story in the first place. We care about these stories here in now American stories. Americans care about these stories. That's why their books are best sellers hearing stories like this. These stories are val honor, courage, and my goodness, the idea of that you're going to leave no marine behind, and how breathtaking it is to see that in action.
Even these marines were stunned that others were coming to their aid under such treacherous circumstances, and that we'd all want something like that in our life, that someone would do something like that for US risk golf for US three Medal of Honor recipients, Captain William Barber, Colonel Raymond Davis, and of course Hector Albert Caferata, and Caferata was a marine reserve, and so many of these guys were reserves, were not a lot of military experience. Boy, they got it quick. Two hundred and forty six started the mission. Sixty were able to walk off the story of the last stand of Fox Company A beauty here on our American stories. Yan
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