Reading the American Past: Printed Page 225

DOCUMENT 26–5

A Veteran Recalls Combat in the Korean War

Marine Staff Sergeant Donald M. Griffith was a squad leader in a racially integrated platoon that landed behind North Korean lines at Inchon in September 1950. Griffith remained in combat until December when he was captured during a massive Chinese attack at Chosin Reservoir that overran American defenders. In an interview in 2003, excerpted below, Griffith recalled his wartime experience, including the thirty-three months he spent as a prisoner of war (POW). Griffith's memoir illustrates the brutal military conflict in Korea inflamed by the global tensions of the Cold War.

Donald M. Griffith Interview, 2003

And the next morning we woke up and all you could see was ships all around. ... I never seen so many ships at one time. And about this time ... our airplane started rocketing ... these [concrete] walls to tear them down because we were going to go in and make the landing there. ... That's Inchon. And I went in on the second wave at Inchon, and they were shooting at us going in. And we got on the shoreline, and I was really upset because the first wave was supposed to get in and move out, and I started really losing my temper and swearing quite a bit. ... And about that time, they started dropping mortars in on us, and one of my kids, a black kid, got hit with a mortar. And, oh, what I forgot to tell you is when we were going in I went out first and I had my carbine up like this, and they shot the front handguard off my carbine. So when Baker, the black kid that got hit there from the mortar, when he got hit I picked up his M1 rifle, and I carried that until the firing pin broke on it when I got captured. ...

So we're in there and finally we get within Inchon, inside the city, and troops are still coming in, landing craft are still coming in, and our planes had hit some of the warehouses, and they were burning, that's all the light that we had. ... I made it a policy to every night be in the fox hole with a different man in my squad. I was the squad leader there. And as it so happened, we had an experimental platoon. Our platoon was one of the first Marine platoons that had blacks, whites, Spanish, Indians, and even a Polish DP [displaced person] was in my squad. ...

So the next morning things kind of quieted down. We had taken the city of Inchon. So we started marching, we were going to capture Kimpo airfield. ... [A]ll of a sudden a runner comes back, and he said, There's three Russian tanks coming in towards us. So they told us all to get on the high ground. So we got on top of these mountains and we're watching — we're looking down, and sure enough, here comes the first tank around the corner there. And our bazooka man, he fires one round and, boom, he knocks the old tank out with one round. And the soldiers, we usually called them gooks, were bailing out of the tank. And when they did, why, our machine gunners had crossfire, and they annihilated them, you know. And here comes the second tank, and one round, boom. He missed. Second round, boom, he got it. And the same thing happened, they bailed out. And then the third tank came around and one round, he got it. So he got three tanks with four rounds. And he did a heck of a job. He got the Medal of Honor, and he went back to the states, and didn't have to finish the war out.

... [W]e got on tanks, and ... when we got just outside of Kimpo, we run into some ... weapons fire ... and we went into the attack. And when we arrived there, why, here's all these civilians, and they had the North Koreans behind them pushing them toward us yelling bonsai, bonsai, you know, and we didn't have any choice because we had to get at those North Korean soldiers. So we had to open fire, and it wasn't pleasant, you know. But that was war. And we took the airfield. ... And after we took Kimpo airfield, why, then we headed toward the city of Seoul. ... And we had to cross the Hahn River. ... So we went down and we got on these ... amtracks. They can go in water or on the land, you know. And we went across [the river] on the amtracks. And we went into the attack, on Hill 51. We hit the main line of resistance going into Seoul. And our platoon strength was — we had 39 men, that includes the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant, and squad leaders and fire team leaders, and three Navy corpsmen. And when we hit that main line of resistance, when we come out of there, there was only ten of us left: The platoon leader, platoon sergeant, myself, and a couple corporals, fire team leaders. But that's all that was left out of the 39. And then we went back to Inchon from there. We secured Seoul. ...

[A]fter Thanksgiving, we moved ... to the western side [of the Chosin Reservoir], and we went into the attack immediately because the Chinese had moved in. And I remember this day vividly because it was cold. The temperatures had gone down as low as 30 and 40 below zero, and that's not chill factor. ... And when we went into the attack, why, of course the Chinese are shooting at us, and we're running up this mountainside, ... and there goes my sleeping bag down the hill. I said oh, no. And I wasn't about to go down there because they were shooting at us down there. So we finally took the hill. There was a pill box there, and we cleaned that out, and went on up. And we could see the Chinese coming in. I mean, there was boucous [many] of them, you know. So that night I nearly froze to death, because I didn't have a sleeping bag and that temperature must have got down to 40 below. ... So finally ... the Chinese hit that night and they got down in with our headquarters, and we couldn't shoot down there because we were afraid of shooting our own people. But they broke through on, well, beyond our flank. ... And they had quite a battle down there. ...

Well, then the next day I was called down to go to a meeting with the company commander. And I went down, and he's telling us that things are bad, and we're going to be fighting in a different direction. He said, We're not retreating, he said, Some people will say we're retreating but we're not. He said, We're just fighting in a different direction. I said, Sir, I said, You know, our rations are getting kind of low, and our ammo is getting kind of low. I said, When will we have some airdrops? You know, we were getting airdrops during all the time that we were up there. He said, Sergeant, I want to tell you something. He said, We're 24th on the priority list for an airdrop. I said, excuse me? And he said, We're 24th on the priority list for an airdrop. I said, Now wait a minute. I said, ... You mean that they've got all of us surrounded? He said, We're not the only ones surrounded, he said, They've got 23 other outfits that are surrounded. ...

By the Chinese. Of course, ... our numbers were about 11,000; their numbers were 110,000. So we started moving back. And our platoon was the last platoon; we were the ones that stayed last. And everybody was going through us back, leapfrogging back, you know. And on this particular night ... [o]ne o'clock in the morning, bugles started blowing, whistles started — they [Chinese soldiers] started yelling and screaming, and they hit us. I mean they hit us hard, too. And I had two grenades, and I threw them, and I started firing my M1 and the firing pin broke. It was so cold, you know, the firing pin broke. So I took the trigger housing out and threw that away, and threw the rest of the rifle away. And I had — Romero was an Indian boy in my fox hole with me. And the grenade went off in front, and it hit me in the eye, and cut my nose down here, and my lip, and I got a chunk in my muscle, my calf, you know. And I told him, I said, Romero, you go back to tell the company commander what's happening here. So he made it back, but he had this finger and thumb shot off, and he was bayonetted in the neck, but he made it back. ...

November. That's when they [the Chinese] started coming across the Yalu River. ... On December the 1st, I'm ... out here on this ledge. I've got my squad around here. ... And that's one of the few nights we didn't have any machine guns attached to us because we were supposed to move out and they had already moved out. But they hit. And when they threw that grenade and got me, it kind of dazed me, and I had my fur-lined parka on with a hood, and I had my metal helmet on, and I had the hood up over my helmet. And this chinaman that came in first, he hit me in the head with the stock of his rifle. And thank God I had that helmet on, because he really rung my bell even though I ... had the hood and the helmet on, you know. And then he took off. And I'm laying there, and I'm bleeding, but the blood is starting to freeze on my face, you know. So I'm thinking, boy, what if the next one jumps down in and sticks me with his bayonet, you know. So the next guy, he jumped down in the hole, and when he jumped down I jumped up and I scared the hell out of him. But they — he let out a yell and about ten of them came over, and the first thing they did was take my fur-lined parka away from me. And man, I was cold. ... I myself and the two brothers, the two Dowling brothers started — they took us down the mountain. They marched us for two days and three nights without any food, no water, or nothing, getting us out of there. And we would fall down and grab a handful of snow and put that in our mouth for moisture, you know. And if they caught us they would knock it out of our hands, you know. ...

My wounds, I still had my wounds. They never did a thing for my wounds in all the time that I was a POW. I was blind in the right eye, and the scabs would fall off. Well, we never even got to wash. ... They took us to this village, which we called Death Valley. And while there I ... escaped. ... And they got me back there, and they made sure that the other POWs in the Death Valley seen that they recaptured me. So ... this North Korean kid [who captured me], he couldn't have been more than 17, but he was a big deal.

And then he threw me in the pig pen. I was in the pig pen for about 33 days and there was a GI in there, a guy from the Army, and he went insane. He kept saying that the pig manure was steak, and he was eating that he was so hungry. And I woke up one morning and rigor mortis had set in, he had died during the night. ... And eventually after a while I — after 33 days they put me back in with the rest of the guys. Meantime, the guys are dying. Boy, three or four a night were dying, you know. And ... they had a big hole dug, and it was a mass grave really. ... We never covered it up because there was more guys dying, you know.

We lost 51 percent of our prisoners that were over there.

From 30 Below on Christmas Eve: Interviews with Northwest Ohio Veterans of the Korean War (Toledo: University of Toledo Press, 2011).