The troops were hungry. They ate cold food, and some had only a few potatoes in two days. They were unable to maintain the physical strength for combat; the wounded personnel could not be evacuated.... The fire power of our entire army was basically inadequate. When we used our guns there were no shells and sometimes the shells were duds.
The enemy’s tactical rigidity and tendency to repeat costly errors are charged by the 20th Army to inferior communications:
Our signal communication was not up to standard. For example, it took more than two days to receive instructions from higher level units. Rapid changes of the enemy’s situation and the slow motion of our signal communication caused us to lose our opportunities in combat and made the instructions of the high level units ineffective....
We succeeded in the separation and encirclement of the enemy, but we failed to annihilate the enemy one by one. The units failed to carry out the orders of the higher echelon. For example, the failure to annihilate the enemy at Yut’an-ni [Yudam-ni] made it impossible to annihilate the enemy at Hakalwu-ri [Hagaru]. The higher level units’ refusal of the lower level units’ suggestion of rapidly starting the combat and exterminating the enemy one by one gave the enemy a chance to break out from the encirclement.
One of the most striking instances of the tactical inflexibility which stultified Chinese efforts was found at Hagaru. With only a depleted Marine Infantry battalion and service troops available to defend a perimeter four miles in circumference, the enemy needed mere daylight observation to ascertain and avoid the most strongly defended positions. Yet these were just the positions chosen for the attack, not only on the first night but also the second occasion 48 hours later.
“The [CCF] tactics were mechanical,” commented the 27th Army. “We underestimated the enemy so we distributed the strength, and consequently the higher echelons were overdispersed while the lower echelon units were overconcentrated. During one movement, the distance between the three leading divisions was very long, while the formations of the battalions, companies, and units of lower levels were too close, and the troops were unable to deploy. Furthermore, reconnaissance was not conducted strictly; we walked into the enemy fire net and suffered heavy casualties.”
Summing up the reasons why the Marines at Yudam-ni were not “exterminated promptly,” the 27th Army concludes that it was “because our troops encountered unfavorable conditions during the missions and the troops suffered too many casualties.” This would seem to be another way of saying that the Chinese failed to destroy the 1st Marine Division because they themselves were nearly destroyed in the attempt. At any rate, evidence from the enemy documents points overwhelmingly to crippling losses both from Marine fire power and non-battle casualties chargeable to lack of equipment and supplies.
The 20th Army had a hundred deaths from tetanus caused by improper care of wounds. Hundreds of other soldiers were incapacitated by typhus or ailments of malnutrition and indigestion.
More than 90 per cent of the 26th Army suffered from frostbite. The 27th Army complained of 10,000 non-combat casualties alone out of a strength of four divisions:
The troops did not have enough food, they did not have enough houses to live in, they could not stand the bitter cold, which was the reason for the excessive non-combat reduction in personnel (more than 10 thousand persons), the weapons were not used effectively. When the fighters bivouacked in snow-covered ground during combat, their feet, socks, and hands were frozen together in one ice ball; they could not unscrew the caps on the hand grenades; the fuses would not ignite; the hands were not supple; the mortar tubes shrank on account of the cold; 70 per cent of the shells failed to detonate; skin from the hands was stuck on the shells and the mortar tubes.