Entertainment, Books - Marine Corps Times

‘Last Stand’ puts you in throes of battle

The battle for Fox Hill began on a frigid November night in 1950 in the rugged mountains of North Korea. It ended Dec. 2 and instantly became, like Iwo Jima, a “signature” event in Marine Corps history.

In “The Last Stand of Fox Company,” a gut-clenching and meticulously detailed account, writers Bob Drury and Tom Clavin take readers into the Nangnim Mountains, where an undermanned unit of the Seventh Marine Regiment, the 246-man Fox Company, suffered unimaginable hardships to keep open the Toktong Pass.

“No Marine unit — or any other unit — fighting in Korea in 1950 held a more strategic piece of land against more crushing odds,” the authors write.

Consider their challenge. With nighttime temperatures dropping to 30 degrees below zero, Fox Company faced a near impossible task: keep the pass open so that 10,000 Marines surrounded by 100,000 Chinese soldiers near the Chosin Reservoir could use it as they fought their way south.

Fox Company, led by Capt. William Barber, began its fight against the Chinese from a rocky rise high above the pass. By battle’s end, three-fourths of Fox Company would be dead, wounded or taken prisoner.

The Marines’ sacrifices were great, and the battle conditions were savage. The men slept atop the ice and snow, they survived mostly on crackers and candy, firing pins on many of their weapons were frozen solid, tossed grenades didn’t explode. Frostbite was rampant. As the battle continued, the Marines, many of them teenagers, scavenged for weapons and ammunition from the bodies of Chinese soldiers.

There were no antibiotics for the wounded, who were rotated in and out of medical tents because there wasn’t room to accommodate all of them. Those tending the wounded had to warm frozen morphine syrettes in their mouths before they could be administered.

Using the journals, letters and memories of Fox Hill survivors, Drury and Clavin tell a story so realistic that many readers will have to stop and take deep breaths as the story unfolds.

The authors’ ability to make individual Marines come to life makes their heroics and sacrifices all the more compelling.