Near the end of November in 1950 we had soldiers and Marines on the
ground who were driving up in the vicinity of the Chosin Reservoir,
heading on up towards the Yalu River,
which is the dividing line between Manchuria and North Korea.
Chinese were pouring across the Yalu River in great numbers and were
attacking our troops and surrounding them.
And they needed help desperately.
NARRATOR: On December 4th, 1950,
as Chinese forces stormed American troop positions along North Korea's Yalu River,
26-year-old Thomas Hudner was one of a flight of six fighters taking part in an
armed reconnaissance mission in support of the embattled Marines on the ground.
Flying alongside Hudner was 24-year-old Jesse Leroy Brown,
a squadron veteran and the Navy's first African American aviator.
The routine mission would soon become anything but.
And the two friends would find themselves struggling to
survive on an icy mountainside deep within enemy territory.
We were flying above the mountains.
The map showed the terrain in this area to be as high as 6,000 feet.
The flight was going on with nothing unusual
when Jesse called out that he was losing power,
couldn't maintain altitude,
and he thought he was gonna have to crash land his airplane.
When the plane hit the ground,
it was bent at the cockpit at about a 30-degree angle.
And the engine was torn off the airplane.
Then we saw that the canopy of the aircraft had opened.
Jessie had opened the canopy of the airplane
and waved to us to let us know that he had survived.
But he didn't get out of the airplane.
And then we saw that smoke was coming out from under the cowling of the airplane,
indicating there was some sort of fire.
Dick Savoli came back on our frequency and
said that a helicopter was on the way up,
but it might be half an hour before it could get up there.
And when I realized that Jesse's airplane may
burst into flame before it could get there,
I made a decision to make a wheels up landing,
crash close enough to his airplane,
and pull him out of the cockpit and wait for the helicopter to come.
The snow was about a foot and a half deep.
And when I got over to Jesse's airplane,
I could see that the reason he hadn't gotten out of
the aircraft was because as the fuselage had buckled,
it had pinned his knee in the plane.
And on the Corsair there isn't a horizontal surface on the whole airplane.
The wings come down from the fuselage and then
go up about six feet out from the fuselage.
So getting up to look into the cockpit was difficult.
I had to hold on with one hand just to hold onto the cockpit.
I scooped up a handful of snow and threw it up under the
cowling trying to... I knew I wouldn't put the fire out if there was a fire,
but at least to dampen anything that was in there.
And after about half an hour of this a helicopter arrived on the scene.
The pilot came over to help.
His name was Charlie Ward, a Marine first lieutenant.
So Charlie and I worked for about 15 to 20 minutes seeing
that there was absolutely nothing that we could do.
The fire extinguisher, after a few squirts under the cowling,
did no good whatsoever.
And the ax just bounced off the fuselage.
It did no good at all.
So then Charlie called me aside and he said that
those helicopters were not equipped for flying at night.
And he couldn't stay. He had to go.
And he gave me the choice of staying with Jesse or going with him.
It would have been suicide to have stayed.
Jesse had been wavering in and out of consciousness.
I wasn't sure when he was conscious and when he wasn't.
The temperature was at least around zero and
went as low as 35 degrees below zero at night.
And I made the decision to go with Charlie.
I told Jesse we were going back to get equipment.
We couldn't get him out of the airplane as it was.
I don't know if he heard me. I don't know if he was alive at the time.
NARRATOR: With day plunging rapidly into night,
Hudner and Ward reluctantly made their way
through the mountains back to the ship.
By morning there was very little hope that
Jesse Brown could have survived the night.
When I got back out to the ship
the captain called me to the bridge right away.
And he had the helicopter ready, with the ship's flight surgeon,
and he had a number of aircraft.
He was gonna take that carrier into as close offshore as he possibly could,
send the flight surgeon in the helicopter to the site of the wreckage,
cut Jesse's body out of the airplane, and bring him back to the ship.
And I told him it was a very humane but only a symbolic gesture
because it was much, much too dangerous to do so.
So there was a flight of Corsairs that went in with napalm
with other aircraft flying escort and support for them.
And they found our two airplanes and dropped napalm.
And they destroyed his airplane and my airplane.
So Jesse died a warrior's death in a funeral pyre.
And I think in retrospect it was almost a natural thing
for guys in combat to do for shipmates and comrades.
Had I been on the ground I think I would have had enough
faith in my shipmates for somebody to do something.
And I felt that, yes, there was a chance that I
wouldn't, but to save Jesse's life was worth it.
And I do feel very strongly about our doing this for freedom.
But, you know, the bottom line is that freedom doesn't mean
nearly as much as spending a lot of time with these guys,
especially under times of stress and everything.
Guys will do anything for one another.
Looking back, ever since I got the Medal and seeing
some of those people who are no longer with us, what they did,
maybe there are ten times as many people who should have gotten the Medal.
Maybe it's only twice as much. I don't know.
But, by God, we're not the only people that earned it.
All these guys have stories.
The music may be different, but it's all the same story.