Three miles from the city of Koto on the narrow mountain road which led to safety, encircling Communist troops had blown the only bridge across a reservoir. With the bridge gone, the 20,000 men of the 1st Marine Division and the Army's 7th Infantry Division last week apparently had no choice but to abandon their vehicles, take out on foot and make a 20-mile detour through enemy-infested hills.
Had they been members of any other army the marines and soldiers would have made the detour and perhaps been annihilated in the process. As it was, even before the crucial crossing was reached, eight spans of a 16-ton bridge had been parachuted down out of the sky to the U.S. troops seemingly isolated in the midst of the enemy. Eight C-119s of Major General William H. Tunner's Combat Cargo Command, each hauling a single span, had carried out the world's first airdrop of a bridge. The retreating column was free to move ahead, vehicles and all.
Symbolically, the Combat Cargo Command had repeatedly provided the beleaguered troops with an aerial bridge to their bases. Day after day "flying boxcars" had swung low over the column to drop ammunition, medical supplies and rations. And eight miles back up the road at Hagaru, C-475 had set down on an improvised airstrip to pick up long lines of wounded and frostbitten men. Said Combat Cargo Command Pilot Lieut. James Wood: "The marines scraped out the field at Hagaru one afternoon while we circled over it." Every plane in Wood's squadron was damaged by enemy small-arms fire during operations in the northeast, and on one flight Wood himself was forced to fly back to base on trim tabs after Chinese ground fire had crippled the control surface of his elevators. But in four days Combat Cargo Command lifted 2,650 casualties off the improved airstrip at Hagaru and whisked them off to hospitals in Japan.
"Anything, Anywhere." What had happened in northeast Korea was proof that even in disaster and defeat the most significant element of U.S. power was mobility. In the amphibious campaigns of World War II the U.S. had developed with stunning success the techniques of transporting power by sea. Those techniques were by no means obsolete, but they were faced with a formidable new obstacle. Amphibious landings on the World War II model required vast supply dumps in ports or beachheads which would present an irresistible target to an enemy with the atomic bomb. Said General Omar Bradley, not long ago: "The atomic bomb, properly delivered, almost precludes . . . another amphibious operation like the one in Normandy."
Most U.S. military men agreed that greater reliance on direct air supply would be a vital supplement to sea and land transport in any major future war. The most extreme advocates of air supply maintained that it was already possible to fly combat forces to any point in the world and keep them supplied. Nobody had argued along these lines more persistently than Combat Cargo Command's General Tunner, who believes that "We can fly anything, anywhere, any time."