Edward
Halcomb with medals from his time in the Army photographed in the
office of his Clay County home. Clay County resident Edward Halcomb has
been nominated for the Distinguished Service Cross for his service
during the Korean War. He and the surviving members of his Army unit
were taken as prisoners and marched 300 miles to Pyongyang. After 85
days in captivity he and several others escaped and days later, the
remaining prisoners were moved into a rail tunnel and massacred by the
North Koreans.
In 1948, no one would have believed Edward “Grady” Halcomb would end up receiving the nation’s second-highest award for heroism.
If former Hawaiian Senator Daniel Akaka and U.S. Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Tampa, get their way, that’s exactly what will happen.
Halcomb lied about his age, dropped out of school and enlisted at the age of 16 in 1947.
But after being returned by armed guards to Ft. Sam Houston following
a second AWOL excursion, the wayfaring stranger wanted out.
“When I got there I called my mother and said, ‘Mom, get me out of
this Army,’” Halcomb said. “I told her to send my birth certificate and
she did.
“I got out of the stockade on Tuesday and on Thursday they handed me a
minority discharge and gave me a bus ticket to Hamilton, Ohio — that
was in June of 1948.”
Just six months later however, Halcomb was standing yet again in
front of an Army recruiter — “A different one,” he said with a laugh.
His mother, who just wanted her son to stick to something, told him he better be serious.
“I told her, ‘I’ll see you in 20 years, Mom,’” said Halcomb, now 84 and a resident of Lake Asbury in Clay County.
Halcomb completed medic training and spent 13 months on the new American base at Okinawa.
A week before his tour was up, Halcomb was told he and some other soldiers wouldn’t be going home after all.
It was early June, 1950.
“They loaded us up on a Japanese tug and we took off,” he said. “After we got out to sea, they told us where we was going.
“Everybody said, ‘What the hell is in Korea?’
“Well, we found out real quick like.”
On June 25, 1950, 135,000 North Korean soldiers — hardened from years
of Imperial Japanese occupation, fighting with Soviet weapons and
planning — poured across the 38th parallel in South Korea.
The ill-equipped and ill-trained post-WWII American and ROK (Republic
of Korea) soldiers, though they many fought fiercely, were quickly
pushed back.
Halcomb, now a medic with the 1st Batallion, 29th Infantry Regiment,
found himself in the middle of a horrifying bullet-point in history.
“We hit Pusan and then they loaded us up in trucks and took us up to
Chinju and on the 26th of July, they sent us to a little town called
Anui,” he said. “At the same time they told us we were backing up the
3rd Battalion of the 29th, which was 45 miles away.
“That was a hell of a backup. They evidently told them that they were backing us up.”
Halcomb’s situation, along with the rest of the American soldiers,
quickly deteriorated. “Well, they hit us both at the same time and
anihilated both battalions,” Halcomb said. “There was 11 of us left at
one o’clock in the morning on July 27.”
Halcomb and a handful of other survivors made a last stand at Anui’s
schoolhouse. “They was throwing grenades down the hall at this school,
and we were picking them up and throwing them back,” he said. “We’d run
out of ammunition.
“At 1:30 in the morning, we surrendered to them.”
The war had only been on for one month, so the men, who would be
among the first POWs of the war, had no idea if they would be summarily
executed, treated humanely or something in between.
“That morning, they came in and took our nice, pretty combat boots
from us and give us their little old short shoes,” Halcomb said. “We had
to cut the toes out of them in order to be able to fit and our toes
were hanging out of the front of them. That’s how we started our march
north.”
As Halcomb’s group, that moved from Auni, to Taejon, to Seoul, was
joined by hundreds of other American POWs, bringing the total 376.
The senior medic in the group, Halcomb’s job was to set up a sick
room wherever the men ended up. “That’s a lot of what kept me going
during that time,” he said. “I knew I had a responsibility as the senior
medic to look after the rest of the men.”
The group was force-marched all the way to Pyongyang, North Korea’s
capital, after American-led U.N. forces began to turn the tide and kick
the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel and beyond.
The entire march American POWs ,who too injured or too sick to keep
up, were shot in roadside ditches and alongside mountain trails. They
were also strafed by some U.S. aircraft.
By the time the group finally reached the North Korean capital, 296
POWs clung to life, according to W. Thomas McDaniel’s book, “The Major.”
“We were losing eight or 10 a day on the march and after we got into Pyongyang,” Halcomb said.
The starvation and deaths continued in Pyongyang, but the remaining
POWs began to spot B-29 Super Fortress bombers, indicating U.S. forces
were closing in.
Halcomb was put on burial detail. The North Koreans allowed the
Americans to bury their dead in a Christian village about a mile or so
from the school where they were held. “When we’d leave, I’d tell them
maybe tomorrow I’d need three or four more graves and they’d dig them
for us that night and have them ready for us when we got there,” Halcomb
said.
But the sympathetic civilians also provided something else of value: information.
They gave Halcomb and the others on the burial detail updates on the approaching U.N. forces.
One day in early October, the burial detail came back to a
stomach-churning site. “We came back to the compound and they had all
the troops lined up and ready to head out for Manchuria,” Halcomb said.
With the frigid Korean winter fast approaching and most of the POWs
too weak to make such a march, hopes for surviving and finding some way
to once again reach U.S. soil were all but gone.
“We had talked about escaping,” he said. “There was five of us on the
burial detail. As it all wound up, we left out down this little roadway
about wide enough for four abreast and all the guards lined up in the
rear or up at the front of the column.”
It was now or never for Halcomb.
He and his four pals from the burial detail waited for their opening.
“We came to this little entrance way between two buildings and the five
of us ran up in there,” he said. “It was a dead end about from here to
the wall, so we ran out and fell back in with the group.
“We went about another 50 yards and did it again and they were
marching this way so we just hugged that wall. They marched right on
past us.”
Halcomb, 1st Lt. James B. Smith, Cpl. Jack Arakawa, Sgt. 1st Class
Robert Morris and Sgt. William Jones hid in an abandoned house for five
days.
“At the Christian settlement, they told us that the Americans were
going to be there on the 20th of October,” Halcomb said. “So we got on
the outskirts of Pyongyang and broke into this house that was deserted
because that whole part of the village had headed for the hills
evidently.
“Luckily, there was a big urn full of water and a couple of small ones, one with flour and the other had sesame seeds in it.”
Five days later, Halcomb spotted a South Korean flag.
They were saved.
Just what they were saved from, Halcomb would not yet know.
In January 1954, the world learned when the U.S. Senate issued its report on Korean War crimes.
“In October 1950, at Pyongyang, when the fall of the city appeared
imminent, the Communists loaded approximately 180 American prisoners
into open railroad cars for transport northward,” according to the
report. “These men were survivors of the Seoul-Pyongyang death march and
were weak from lack of food, water and medical care.
“They rode unprotected in the raw climate for four or five days, arriving at the Sunchon tunnel on October 30, 1950.”
Halcomb knows the story well. The men killed in the Sunchon tunnel massacre were friends.
“They took the major and all the prisoners that was left and told
them to go up in this train tunnel and they was going to go get them
some food,” he said. “So the major took them all and told them to go in,
sit down and rest.
“The North Koreans set up machine guns and just opened fire, fanning fire, into the tunnel there.”
A handful managed to play dead and elude the North Koreans.
“With all of them that had escaped and the ones that played dead
there in the tunnel, there was 52 of us left out of the 376,” Halcomb
said.
Right after the massacre, U.S. Army paratroopers landed in the vicinity of the Sunchon tunnel.
“My brother happened to be one of the troopers,” he said.
Halcomb’s brother Earl knew Grady was missing in action and hadn’t yet learned of his escape.
“He went through that tunnel,” Halcomb said as his lips quivered,
“rolling boys over … looking for me. A day or so later, he seen the
Stars & Stripes — I don’t know how in the hell he got one up there
in a foxhole, but he got one — there was a picture of me.”
Halcomb retired from the Army as a sergeant first class after more than 20 years of service.
Of course, he saw his mother when he got home.
Clifford Davis: (904) 359-4103
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