Running the Gauntlet
On the morning of November 30 after a night of attacks and mortar strikes on the units at Kunu-ri, the 2nd ID began its attack from the north while the British began their assault from the south to open the road. General Keiser believed that the Chinese only had the one roadblock four miles from his division’s position to break through, however, the Chinese had actually had a series of reinforced roadblocks placed throughout the entire valley. By mid-day the division had not been able to eliminate the Chinese opposition in the valley and it became evident to General Keiser how large of a Chinese element he was up against.

With such stiff opposition to the south, General Keiser considered using the road to the east and then south to Sinanju in order to complete the withdraw. However, the division had already moved four miles to the south down the valley and Colonel Freeman of the 23rd IN that was holding the northern front against the Chinese attack felt that his men could not hold off the Chinese attack from the north long enough for the entire division to drive back up the road and then head east on the road. Due to this fact General Keiser decided that the division was going to run the gauntlet through the valley in order to reach the British lines. An order of march was arranged with the 23rd IN being the last unit to travel down the valley as the division’s rear guard. The Turkish Brigade was ordered to travel down the valley before the 2nd Engineer battalion, the 503rd Field Artillery and Colonel Freeman’s 23rd Infantry making them one of the last element to go through the valley.

The route south between Kunu-ri and Sunchon.

At 1300 a column of American tanks would lead the charge through the valley. The tanks had come under intense fire and had to stop twice to remove barricades set up by the Chinese. The Chinese defenders had used the carcases of the destroyed Turkish trucks to block the road. The tanks successfully removed the barricades by using their tanks to push the wrecked vehicles off the side of the road. The removal of these barricades by the tankers probably saved the lives of many of the trucks that were following the tanks. The tankers had survived the intense Chinese ambush due to their armor and linked up with the British by 1400.

It only took the tanks an hour to run the gauntlet, but the stop and go effect of stopping to remove the barricades caused a similar effect on all the vehicles behind them. As the vehicles stopped they became easier targets for direct fire and many vehicle occupants jumped out of their vehicles in search of cover to return fire. The vehicles behind the tanks were mostly all soft skin vehicle and most could not survive the Chinese ambush. It was estimated that the Chinese had forty machine gun emplacements pointed on the road along with fixed mortar targets. This heavy concentration of fire power quickly disabled many light skin vehicles which further caused the road to become congested.

The Chinese launched an ambush on the 2nd Infantry Division on both sides of this road traveling south to Sunchon.

The most dangerous portion of the road leading south to Sunchon was an area simply known as the “The Pass”. The Pass was where the hillsides were the steepest and the road was at its most narrow point. This is where the majority of casualties was occurring as vehicles and soldiers entered this bottleneck. During any lull in gun fire, often drivers would jump back in their vehicles during a lull in the firing and not wait to reload their passengers thus leaving many soldiers stuck in the valley looking for rides on other vehicles. This caused all command and control to breakdown and at this point the 2nd Infantry Division was truly broken.

This image gives a good look at the elevation of the high ground over the road the Chinese were holding.

Drivers of vehicles had to make some truly gruesome decisions because the road was littered with dead and wounded soldiers. Drivers had to keep moving or risk making themselves easy targets for the Chinese, thus they drove right over many wounded troops. By the time the main column of General Yazici’s Turkish Brigade were able to move through the valley all road movement had been stopped because of the cluster of destroyed and abandon trucks on the road. General Yazici at this point only had control of two companies of Turks. The rest of his unit had disolved much like the entire 2nd Infantry Division that was shattered and became every man for himself. Even more depressing for Yazici was to see the bodies of Turkish soldiers lying in the valley that had been ambushed the day before. Some of the Turks were still alive and had been lying wounded for over a day with no medical help.

General Keiser was also stuck on the road and contemplated abandoning the equipment and running out of the valley, however by then American air support had arrived and strafed the Chinese positions. The strafing attacks gave Keiser time to order two of his remaining tanks to bulldoze through the wreckage and reopen the road. The tanks were able to clear the wreckage and the column of vehicles continued to move south. While this was going on General Yazici ordered his last two companies to fix bayonets and charge up the eastern slope of the mountains to engage the nearby Chinese firing on the column. The Turks were able to subdue the Chinese guns on the eastern side of the valley for now, but as the column continued south they began to take more enemy fire that continued to delay the withdrawal.

A close up of “The Pass” today. Notice how the North Koreans have now built a tunnel through this narrow portion of the valley.

Meanwhile Colonel Freeman bringing up the division’s rear quickly understood the debacle that was taking place in the valley to his rear and very wisely decided to take his unit through the road to the east realizing there was no way his unit would survive the gauntlet south intact. Freeman’s 23rd Infantry Regiment made it through the eastern valley with little resistance and was successfully able to withdraw south. However, the other units of the 2nd ID were not so lucky.

As night fell, General Keiser lost his air cover and the Chinese crawled down the hillsides and opened fire on the column from even closer range. The units that took the brunt of the attack were the 503d and 38th Field Artillery Battalions and the 2d Engineer Combat Battalion. These units could not move any further down the road due to destroyed vehicles blocking the road and thus made the decision to abandon all equipment and fight through the gauntlet of Chinese fire on foot. The majority of these soldiers would either be killed or captured.

The withdrawal through the valley had begun at 1300 on November 30th and the last stragglers of the division didn’t make it through the valley until the next morning. Everyone that made it through the valley became broken men due to the massacre they had lived through. Colonels that had fought in World War II were crying and staring off into space with shattered spirits just as much as the lowest combat inexperienced private was. The ambush of the 2nd Infantry Division column had been so bad that even the hardest of men had their spirits shattered from the fight.

This image provides a good look at the rugged terrain that composes “The Pass”.

The Aftermath of the Gauntlet
At the conclusion of the withdrawal through the valley that became known to soldiers as simply “The Gauntlet”, the 2nd Infantry Division suffered the following casualties:

A count rendered on 1 December listed 2d Division battle casualties at 4,940 for the last half of November. Of these, 90 percent, or about 4,500, had been incurred since the 25th. Officer casualties alone numbered 237 and touched most grades and branches. These losses represented one-third of the division’s actual strength of 15,000 on 15 November, and when reconciled with nonbattle casualties, replacements, and returnees, left the division 8,662 men short of authorized strength, Equipment losses were equally heavy. In addition to hundreds of trucks and trailers, the major losses included 64 artillery pieces, almost all of the 2d Engineer Combat Battalion’s equipment, and between 20 and 40 percent of the signal equipment carried by the various division units.

No unit was hit as hard as the 2nd Engineer Battalion. Ironically their commander Colonel Alarich Zacherle had actually asked the 2ID commander General Keiser days before the Chinese offensive to redeploy his battalion south to Pyongyang because the heavy engineer equipment of bulldozers and bridging equipment was not needed this far north in the mountains. General Keiser refused his request and Colonel Zacherle and his men found themselves instead of being the first ones out of Kunu-ri, but the last ones. They had lost nearly all of their equipment in the ambush and were forced to burn their unit colors to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Chinese. The 2nd Engineers had went to Kunu-ri with roughly 900 soldiers and returned from Kunu-ri with only 266 men. All the rest were either dead or captured to include their commander Colonel Zacherle. Zacherle would spend 2.5 years in a Chinese prison camp before being returned as part of the Armistice Agreement. He was one of the few 2nd Engineer soldiers to make it back from captivity alive; most were never seen again.

The infantry regiments did not fair much better. At the time a US infantry regiment was authorized 3,800 men. The 9th Infantry lost a total of 1,474 men, the 38th Infantry lost 1,178 men, and the 23rd Infantry lost 545 men The number includes non-combat casualties such as frost bite as well. The difference in casualties between the other units and the 23rd Infantry is staggering. The 23rd was able to have over half as less casualties than the other regiments despite being the rear guard unit in constant contact with the Chinese, simply because Colonel Freeman made the decision on his own to take the western road out of Kunu-ri. If General Keiser had made the decision to use the western road instead of the southern Sunchon road, the 2nd Infantry Division along with thousands of American lives would not have been lost that day.

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