The Funchilin Pass in the Korean War

[william]

I did not know this. Quite a story.

When the Marines were fighting their way out of the Chosin Reservoir in December 1950, the Chinese blew up the one bridge they absolutely had to cross, over a chasm with a sheer drop and no way around.

So the United States Air Force did something that had never been done in the history of warfare. It parachuted a bridge to them.The escape from Chosin came down to a single terrible bottleneck called Funchilin Pass. The only road out ran along a mountainside, and at one point it crossed a deep gorge, a spillway from a power plant, on a bridge. There was no bypass. The mountain fell away sheer on one side and rose straight up on the other. If you could not cross that gap, you were finished, and so were the more than fourteen thousand men and all their vehicles, tanks, trucks, guns, and wounded, backed up on the plateau behind it.

The Chinese understood this perfectly, and they blew the bridge. Not once. They blew it, the Americans patched it, they blew it again, over and over, three times in all, determined to trap the whole force in the mountains and destroy it in the cold.

Somebody had a wild idea. If you cannot fix a bridge, fly one in. So the Air Force loaded huge steel Treadway bridge sections, each weighing over two tons, onto C-119 Flying Boxcar cargo planes, rigged them with parachutes, and flew over the trapped Marines at Koto-ri. And they pushed the bridge sections out the back, dropping enormous pieces of steel bridge down onto the snow by parachute, right to the men who needed them. It had never been done before. Nobody had ever airdropped a bridge in combat. They had to get it right, because there was no do over and no time.

Enough of the sections landed intact and were recovered. Then Marine engineers dragged them forward with bulldozers to the blown gap, in subzero cold, under enemy fire, and pieced them together across the chasm. By the evening of December 9, the bridge was in place. And across that impossible span, a bridge that had literally fallen from the sky, the entire column began to move, thousands of men and hundreds of vehicles crossing the gorge one at a time and continuing down the mountain toward the sea and safety.

It is one of the most astonishing feats of the entire war, and most people have never heard a word about it. The breakout from Chosin, one of the greatest fighting withdrawals in military history, was made possible in its final hours by engineers and airmen who solved an impossible problem by inventing something new on the spot, and dropped a bridge out of the clouds to save an army.

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