‘CHOSIN FEW’: Veterans work to name peak

WASILLA — In 1950, Allied forces in the Korean War had successfully landed at Inchon and smashed the communist forces.

Though the war was only months old for the United Nations forces, victory was in sight. The Allies sent 18,000 men from the First Marine Division along with a smaller force of troops on a trek over the Taebek Mountains to capture the northern end of the peninsula.

On Nov. 27, 1950, at the Chosin Reservoir, the Marines were surprised by a Chinese force multiple times its size — by some estimates four or five times. The Marines were quickly surrounded.

In fighting that is among the most brutal in modern times, with temperatures well below zero — between minus 20 and minus 40 for most of the two-week campaign — the Marines fought to break the encirclement and make it back to the sea.

Among those who made it out was Richard Lilly of Wasilla. He and his fellow survivor, John Beasley of Palmer, are trying to get a mountain named after the campaign — Mount Chosin Few. Beasley and Lilly are two of only three survivors of the battle who live in Alaska. They haven’t been able to contact the third. There was a fourth, but he passed away a couple years back.

Lilly is soft spoken, not particularly interested in the limelight. He says naming the currently unnamed peak is personal; it’s for the guys who didn’t make it back.

Overall, 3,000 Allied soldiers died in the battle and 17 soldiers who fought there received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the military’s highest honor.

Lilly and Beasley have an unnamed mountain already picked out. It’s 28 miles northeast of Cordova. You can’t see it from Cordova, but you can if you fly over it. Lilly said it’s a nice mountain with a glacier nearby.

He’s received letters of support from Jack L. Nolan, who heads up The Chosin Few Inc., a network of survivors of the battle, and Vic Voltaggio, national commandant of the Marine Corps League. He and Beasley have talked to Sens. Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski as well as Rep. Don Young. All seemed supportive. Mat-Su Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss also has inked a resolution of support that’s on the agenda for consideration at Tuesday’s assembly meeting.

Lilly said everyone who was at the Chosin Resevoir has a story to tell. His own, told bit by bit in well-remembered anecdotes, begins in Fairbanks a few years before the war started.

“These guys were going to go down and join the Navy. I said, ‘Wait, I’ll go with you,’” Lilly said.

There wasn’t a Navy recruitment center in Anchorage, so they went to Seattle. Lilly was assigned to Camp Lejune in North Carolina. He was about to end his tour when the war began.

Lilly, a radio operator, said he was happy to have a man like Gen. Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller in charge of his unit. Puller insisted on new equipment for his men heading to Korea.

“He got me a new radio, I loved that,” Lilly said. With the new model he could crank the radio’s generator with one hand and send code with the other. On the older model, “If it was a long message, you had to be relieved on that generator.”

He said his unit was green when it landed at Inchon, but got experience in a hurry prior to the battle at Chosin.

Combat experience included an incident that won Walt Monegan Jr., whose son would grow up to be chief of the Anchorage Police Department and Alaska’s director of Public Safety, a posthumous Medal of Honor. Exposing himself to fire, Monegan took out multiple enemy tanks with a bazooka, confusing the attack, his Medal of Honor citation says.

Lilly knows that Monegan saved his life that day. He recalls feeling the ground shake violently as the tank rounds exploded.

At Chosin, Lilly said he remembers well just how cold it was.

“I was having a heck of a time keeping my nose from freezing,” he said. “Just about everybody had some degree of frostbite.”

And it was much worse for the guys out on the firing line living in sleeping bags, the pads beneath them freezing to the ground.

Lilly remembers mortar rounds raining down on enemy positions, bullets whizzing past his head as he was heading to dinner and a bullet taking out his radio switchboard.

He recalls spotting a Chinese soldier in a hole. Lilly crept up on it warily to make sure the enemy soldier wasn’t going to shoot him. The soldier, as it turned out, was frozen solid.

“They were stacking up bodies for sandbags, the Chinese were,” Lilly said.

But Lilly said his unit made it out as a whole. They didn’t break up in the retreat.

In historical accounts of the battle, a lot of veterans say that at the time it didn’t feel like a retreat.

Referring to a famous quote about the battle by legendary Gen. Chesty Puller, Lilly said, “We weren’t retreating, we were fighting in another direction.”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.