A Frozen Thanksgiving: Bill Boldenweck

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Bill Boldenweck, who served in the Korean War with the Marine Corps. In this interview, he talks about the harsh conditions of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, which he was sent to the day after Thanksgiving.

Bill Boldenweck:

I was in the weapons company of the Second Battalion, First Marines. We were at the tail end of the advance as far as it went. When we came up from the coast, we came up by truck. The other regiments had had to walk up and fight their way up. And when we settled in, the ground was frozen pretty hard. There were remnants of the turkey dinner that the troops we replaced had eaten the day before. So it was the day after Thanksgiving when we went up there.

But when we moved into our positions, there were a lot of very shallow foxholes for us to get into and there were a lot of metal entrenching tool blades around but no handles. So this indicated to us that they had broken the little miniature shovels. They'd broken them all trying to dig in the frozen ground, and naturally if you've got a piece of wood and it's cold, you put it on the fire, but you can't burn the blade. So it gave us a good idea how cold it was going to be up there. It got worse.

Well, oil either, quote, froze, unquote or got very, very sludgy, so you had to keep the oil off your weapon, which is contrary to general practice. And the heavy machine guns had water jackets to cool them. The water in them tended to freeze up even despite being laced with antifreeze. They would generally fire if you kept them clean and kept them dry. I've heard of other people having hang-ups with them but, generally speaking, they worked okay but rapid fire was not as rapid as it's supposed to be. Put it that way.

As we went up the hill in the trucks, all the trees had beautiful little silver fingers on them and the sun was on them. And then I realized that the limbs were all covered with ice and you could feel it. We had long underwear, we had shoe packs, we had parkas.

Well, the main thing in my outfit was basically just keeping ourselves warm. We had rockets and rocket launchers, which there wasn't much use for up there. Other parts of my company had heavy machine guns, as I mentioned, and had 81 millimeter mortars. The mortar guys were the rich guys because on the mortar rounds, they look like little bombs, not that little, 81 is a big round. They have little bags of powder which you call increments, which speed the little bombs on their way, and you tear off increments to get the right range. So you've got all these little bags of powder left over and they're great for heating coffee, so you could thaw your canteen out and get some drinking water and that sort of thing with those mortar increments. So they were very valuable.

I had zero cold weather training. Neither did any of the rest of us, as far as I know. The Marine Corps at the time was not set up for fighting in wintry climes. Actually, as far as training is concerned, I was 45 days between Treasure Island and the Inchon Landing and there wasn't time for much any kind of training and getting ready and getting over there.

They now have fine weather training at Pickle Meadows, but you understand that Marines in Florida fought mostly a four-year war in nothing but tropical places so they weren't ready. It's not the Marine Corps' fault so much as the Congress and the administration.

Looking back, I'm not sure I'd call it suffering, but it was a real pain. I realized at some point that I didn't have any feeling in my fingers or my toes. We had a great corpsman guy named Jim Olin from Wales City, Pennsylvania. He was a third class corpsman, and he told me to go over to EZ Med, which is EZ Company First Medical Battalion, which was the regimental hospital, field hospital and ask for so-and-so. And I did and it wasn't too busy there at the moment, and this man came out. He was either a first class or second class corpsman, which is senior to Jim. I told him what Jim had sent me over to see about and he said, "Okay, get your shoes off and take your mittens off and don't waste any time." He then took my hand and had me look away and he poked my fingers and my toes with a needle or a pin or something like that. And I was supposed to tell him when it hurt. And it wasn't until he got kind of high up into my hand and high up into my foot when I could feel it. I said, "What are we going to do about this?" And he said, "Well, actually, we should fly you out of here, but we can't fly you out because there's a very few planes and they're full of casualties, really bad casualties."

So what he told me was stomp your feet as much as you can. When you can, get your shoes off and rub your feet like mad. Keep rubbing your fingers together. Pull them out of the mittens and rub the palms against the fingers. And so I've still got numbness 50 years later in the toes end fingers, but it could have been a lot worse. They could have turned black and I would've lost them.

It was very hard on the Chinese. I didn't have a lot of sympathy for them although some of them, when you saw them there with their frozen clothes and ice hanging off their feet, you could say, "Geez, that's terrible. I feel for that guy." But it was as tough for them, it was as cold for them as it was for us, and we had better cold weather gear. I think that's true.

I don't know if they could court-martial Jim for this 50 years later, but he went over there and he had connections at Easy Med and got his large bottles of Benzedrine, what they called today speed, cook in motel rooms and sell to children. But it's to keep you awake and so we were strung out on this stuff, because you'd work all day in the drop zone getting the supplies together and getting them out and dodging the parachutes as they came down with the pallets full of gear on them when the weather was clear enough so the planes could get in. And so you'd work all day and then at night you were out on the line 50% of the time, and if you were getting anywhere near an attack or an alert, that's all night on that. So you'd go 24, 48 hours without sleeping. And that still kept us up.

Basically, we had C rations which come in a box. They have cocoa powder if you got water and you got heat or you can drink it cold, crackers, jam, and a hot meal and some fruit. The only problem is if you carried them in your pockets or in your pack, they'd freeze.So you would try to find some way of heating them, basically more thawing them, so they were edible. Something like spaghetti, for example, is very densely packed. So if you tried to thaw it under a fire, if you got a fire going or some of those mortar increments, a C ration can is about yea big and so this part down would be burnt black, the top would be still frozen and you'd dig it out with a bayonet and throw it away. But an inch and a half, two inches in the middle, it was all edible. If you were lucky enough to have something like canned sausage patties or hamburger patties, they are frozen in the broth. And once you got that broth melted, you could drink it and eat the meat. It was not a gourmet paradise.

The casualties were very heavy and they were lugged in jeeps, boxed back ambulances, by hand. Some of them over the hoods of trucks just stacked on them. The corpsman and the doctors did the best they could, but there was a terrible crush for their services. Incidentally, we were talking about the cold. The corpsman, when they were up on the line, would carry the morphine syrettes in their mouths. It's just a little one-shot thing about so, like a little tube of salve or something like that with a needle on it, and then a cap on the needle. So they'd put these in their mouths and hold them between their teeth and their gums so they wouldn't freeze. So when the wounded man needed them, they could pull them out of their mouth and use them.

You just get so damn tired that if there's not some impetus, like somebody shooting at you or a sergeant telling you to get your ass in gear, you could just sleep anywhere. You could sleep hanging over a fence, you could sleep ... I don't know. I've slept in some weird places. There were times later on in the war that I can recall sleeping on limbs of trees and just bracing my feet and just passing out.

Naturally, because it’s euphonious, and it was cold, it became The Frozen Chosin. Chosin, C-H-O-S-I-N, I believe is a Japanese word. And the Koreans don't particularly like that. You might say that the Japanese were not good guests when they were in Korea. And the Korean word apparently is Changjin, but we didn't learn it that way. That's one thing. So the emblem is a C and superimposed on a star, sort of like the star of Bethlehem. And there was apparently one night that many saw, while we were all tied up up there, saw a very large particular star, maybe a nova or something, or maybe a good shot of Venus, I don't know. But that's what came to be the chosen few emblem.

Oh, well, people that were wounded and had to lie there because they couldn't get them out during the battle. They're just lying in the cold. They didn't have the opportunity that the other guys had to at least be up and running around or something, and all they could do is just lay there quietly and feel themselves freezing.

Nobody ever seems really interested in this but down beneath our position, we were up on a hillock, not really a hill, and there was a road that crossed in front of our position. And on it, the day we got up there, was a dead Korean woman with the baby in her arms also dead. And somehow, when I think about the reservoir, that's one of the first things that come to light in the surface of my memory. She was still there, what, 10 days later when we left, we pulled out.

As far as I know, there was nobody between us and Koreans. There was a thick line of Korean people and we were sort of a reverse skirmish line facing them. And the word we got is if they keep advancing on us, fire over their heads and if they still keep on coming, fire into them. The fear was that there were a lot of Chinese troops in there and amongst them pushing the civilians in front of them. A question of firing at civilians, people say, "Oh my God, how could they do that? That's not fair." Well, war is not fair. War is not fun. If you want to have a nice, neat war where all the rules are followed, the only way to do that is just not have the war.

I'll tell you something else. There's a tendency for people to get all mushy and talk about fighting for mom's apple pie and your family at home. Screw all of them. You're fighting for Danny Esparza and Abe Foreman in the foxhole on your right and Verne Falstic on your left. And that's about it.

I have said to other people who were up there, particularly these guys in the fifth and seventh that did the most of the fighting, I told them while they were up there fighting, I'm kind of sorry to say I was sort at Miami Beach at the reservoir. And they said, "Don't be. You went. You were sent where you were sent and you did what you were told to do." And, as a matter of fact, I did. So I don't know. Eric's got a line about those of us who were there and how do you interview a room full of heroes that think everybody's a hero but them. I mean, I just did what I was supposed to do as much as I could and coped with what is as much as I could. So there you are.

My job was a reporter for the paper here, and I went out on a destroyer one day where they're going to throw a wreath on the ship. And I talked to a man who was called into the army before Pearl Harbor and didn't get out till after it was over and saw a lot of combat. And I said, "Well, would you want to do it again?" And he said, "I'll tell you this. I had six daughters and I feel the same way about six daughters and World War II. I wouldn't do it again for a million dollars, but I wouldn't take a million dollars for the experience." So that's just for fun.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Bill Boldenweck.

Thanks for listening to Warriors In Their Own Words. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We’re always looking to improve the show.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.