Above: Marines arriving at Hungnam, their fight out of Chosin over. Photo courtesy ofUSMC Archives
It’s been 68 years since the end of the Korean War, but it’s a time that Grand Marais resident Pat Finn will never forget.
Finn was recently invited to South Korea where he and 48 other U.S. Korean War veterans were honored by the government.
The celebration was part of the Korea Revisit Program begun in 1975 in Seoul by the Korea Veterans Association as a way to honor the sacrifices of the U.S. soldiers who fought in the war.
During the program, Finn was singled out and recognized for his involvement with the Chosin Reservoir incident, one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
At the end of that battle Finn and what was left of his battalion were making the 70-mile walk to Hungnam. Along the way they came upon a group of 50-60 refugees who were trapped along the Manchurian border.
“We had to take them with us,” said Finn. “They were starving and if we had left them the Chinese would have killed them.”
Photo courtesy of Pat Finn
Among those refugees Finn helped was a husband and wife. They were among a large group who were later evacuated from Hungnam, North Korea during what was called the “Christmas Cargo,” a large sealift that marked the end of the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir.
But we are getting ahead of the story. Below is a recounting Finn told to author Ned Forney.
“For 19-year-old Pat Finn, a Minnesota Marine with Item Co, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, the night seemed colder and darker than any of the others he’d experienced since landing in Korea. His battalion had just arrived at a desolate, frozen lake he would remember for the rest of his life: the Chosin Reservoir.
“As the sun went down on November 27, 1950, and temperatures sank to 20 degrees below zero, Marines at Yudam-ni, a small village on the west side of the Chosin Reservoir, hunkered down for what they hoped would be a quiet, uneventful night. “The war was all but over,” Finn recalled in his diary written weeks later from a hospital bed in Japan. “You’ll be home by Christmas,” he’d been told.
Left: Pat today, thankfully happy and okay. Staff photo/Brian Larsen
“But his buddy, Eddie Reilly, wasn’t buying it. In his usual pessimistic tone, he told Finn, “Pat, I don’t like the look of all this, it sounds too good.” For the next four hours the two Marines scraped and dug into the frozen, rocky ground, Reilly constantly reminding his friend that if something went wrong a fighting hole would save them from flying bullets and shrapnel. “I hate this place,” Reilly said for what seemed like the hundredth time, “but we’re not going to get caught with our pants down, keep digging!”
“When the hole was finally finished, Finn and Reilly, both exhausted, squeezed into what they believed would be a safe haven for the night. Minutes later their lieutenant yelled, “Saddle up!” Their platoon was heading to higher ground.
“Nothing, not even a foxhole, would save them from the horror that unfolded over the next eight hours. Finn, Reilly, and hundreds of their fellow Marines were attacked by thousands of Chinese. In the first onslaught of a major Communist offensive that would alter the course of the war, Chinese soldiers, under direct orders from Mao, had launched a vicious attack to annihilate the 1st Marine Division. Wave after wave of Chinese descended on the Marines.
They Just Kept Coming
“Overwhelmed and outmanned, Finn and his buddies were overrun by the Chinese. With enemy soldiers breaking through their defenses, close-in fighting, sometimes hand-to-hand, erupted. “They were mixed in right with us,” Finn remembers. Hundreds of white-clad Chinese, oozing a pungent garlic smell, swarmed over Finn and Reilly’s position.
“About that time Pat Garvin from Detroit threw an illumination round,” Finn recalled. The Chinese “with their white jackets looked like ducks in a shooting gallery.” Silhouetted against the lit sky, they were mowed down by machine gun fire, but as soon as they fell, men running behind them grabbed their fallen comrades’ weapons and charged ahead. “They just kept coming,” Finn remembers.
“In the chaos of the attack, the young Marine ran straight into a Chinese soldier. “I went to shoot him and ‘click’ my rifle was frozen.” Stunned and realizing he was about to get hit, Finn yelled, “He got me!” A Marine heard Finn scream and fired a round at the Chinese fighter. The soldier died instantly.
“When the sun came up the next morning, an estimated 300 frozen, grotesquely twisted Chinese corpses littered the snowy North Korean hillside. Famed Korean War historian Roy Appleman, in his seminal work on Chosin, Escaping The Trap, wrote, “Silence prevailed on the hill.”
“In a bloody, 24-hour period, the Korean War had changed. General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of UN Forces in Korea, was shocked. He had previously told President Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Chinese would not enter the war. They wouldn’t dare, he had boasted. With “135 [American] dead, 725 wounded, and 60 missing” in just one day and thousands more dying over the next month, the American public was also stunned.
“Finn and his buddies would eventually fight their way 14 miles to Hagaru-ri, where they would link up with remaining American units in the area and then “attack in another direction” to the port of Hungnam nearly seventy miles away.
The Long Road to Hungnam
“On the first night of the breakout from Yudam-ni, the Chinese attacked again. When the fighting ended the next morning on Hill 1520, only 20 Marines out of a company of nearly 250 were still standing. The rest were dead, wounded, or missing. Finn was amongst the survivors.
“He had lived through one of the most terrifying nights at Chosin. In a brief lull in the fighting that night, he had tried to save a group of Marines hit by mortar fire. “They were all close to death,” he remembered. “One was still conscious. He asked me to give him a cigarette and cover his legs because they felt frozen. He didn’t have enough legs to cover.” There was nothing Finn could do. The man died minutes later.
“Before daybreak, another mortar attack took place. A round landed “about four feet” from Finn’s foxhole. “I was protected from all the shrapnel,” he told his father, “but the blast threw me right out of the hole.” The Marines behind him, mortally wounded, lying on the ground, and begging for help, didn’t make it. “It was good in a way, it put the four boys behind me out of their misery. They were really in misery, believe me,” he wrote.
All My Buddies Were Killed
“All of my buddies were killed,” Finn continued in a letter to his father dated December 10, 1950. “Remember me telling you about Eddie Reilly? He was killed. That really hurt. He treated me like a big brother. All night long he would keep coming out of his foxhole to see that I wasn’t wounded or anything.” That was the last time he saw his friend. PFC Edmund H. Reilly was listed as “Killed In Action” on December 2, 1950.
He also lost his buddy, Jerry “Peanuts” Caldwell, a 17-year-old high school football standout. “He was a great guy. He would stay in the barracks writing and reading the Bible while we were at the slop shoot,” Finn recalled. Another good friend, David Flood, went missing, and three days later a Chinese soldier was killed wearing the Marine’s jacket. “It was one of the eeriest feelings I had during the entire war,” Finn explained. “Knowing my buddy had died and his body had been stripped of its clothes was hard to take.”
By December 9, Finn was in Japan. He had made it down the MSR and had been evacuated by air to a U.S. military hospital where he was being treated for severe frostbite. In typical Marine bravado, he said, “You and mother will never know how close you came to collecting that $10,000 I used to joke about.”
Looking back on his Chosin odyssey, Finn realizes the epic 10-day breakout to the coast was a defining moment of the Korean War and his life.
Coming Home
“After recovering in Japan and returning to the U.S., Finn married, started his career, and had five sons. He worked for the same company for 48 years and retired as its CEO in 2000. After a divorce from his first wife, he remarried. His second wife, Arlene, was with him when we met in Seoul last month. During my interview with the couple, I asked Pat how he coped with what he’d been through at Chosin. “I drank,” he answered matterof factly.
“For so long,” he told me, “I tried to put the war out of my mind, lock it away, or erase it. But it was always there.” His life eventually changed, and he has been sober now for 45 years.
“As I talked with his wife, it was obvious how empathetic she is towards her husband and how knowledgeable she is of what happened to him during his time in Korea. She’s a psychologist, and her understanding of what he experienced at Chosin and how to deal with it shines through in her words and actions. “For so many years,” she explained, “he coped by avoiding memories, thoughts, and feelings related to his war experience.”
Thankfully, Pat can now talk about the war with his family and friends, go to Chosin Few reunions, and even allow complete strangers who sit next to him during a bus tour to interview him. “He can actually enjoy the present,” Arlene said enthusiastically.”
So why was Finn singled out while he was on his recent visit to South Korea? The son of the couple he helped save while he was leaving Chosin wanted to thank him, but Moon JaeIn, the president of South Korea, said his flight back home was delayed and he couldn’t get to the celebration in time.
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