Christmas 1951: On a hill in Korea
Warren Hanson of Pewaukee has received many Christmas cards throughout his 81-year life, but one in particular stands out above the rest.
It was Christmas Eve in 1951, when Hanson, then a 22-year-old corporal serving with Fox Company, 9th Infantry Regiment in the Army's famed 2nd Infantry Division, stood watch over an American outpost on an unnamed hill somewhere along the 38th Parallel in war-torn Korea. The American position, surrounded by barbed wire and crude fortifications, stood between tens of thousands of Chinese forces and what is now South Korea.
Likely dreaming of Christmas back home in Minnesota, Hanson laid freezing in his foxhole watching the American perimeter for any signs of enemy movement.
As the dawn began to break, he noticed something hanging on the barbed wire about 30 yards in front of him. He decided to take a closer look. After crawling on his belly out of his foxhole and exposing himself to enemy fire, Hanson drew close enough to see what hung flapping in the frigid Korean breeze - a Christmas stocking.
Looking up and down the perimeter, the young corporal from Hector, Minn., saw nothing else hanging on the wire.
When he returned to his position, he found the stocking contained a few pieces of candy and an envelope with what appeared to be a Christmas card from the Chinese. Hanson opened the card.
"Greetings from the Chinese People's Volunteers," it read. "Whatever the colour, race, or creed, all plain folks are brothers indeed. Both you and we want life and peace, if you go home, the war will cease."
Hanson conjectured that a Chinese soldier had to have crawled up to the American perimeter and placed the card on the wire during the night, but neither Hanson nor any other soldiers saw or heard any movement.
He hung onto the letter, but threw away the candy.
"This Christmas card I am sending, please try and save it as it was brought up to our lines on Christmas Eve and hung on the barbed wire fence by the Chinese. They were so careful that no one heard them, and they were only 30 yards away," Hanson wrote in a Jan. 5, 1952, letter home to his parents in Minnesota. "At present there are supposed to be 20,000 Chinese on a hill in front of us and 70,000 in reserve. This had better end."
Now, almost 59 years after that day in Korea, Hanson is curious about this Christmas card.
"I would dearly love to see the Chinese soldier that did that," Hanson said.
Explaining the letter
Oftentimes in warfare, belligerents engage in psychological operations to demoralize their enemies. The Chinese Christmas card that Warren Hanson found in 1951 was likely the product of a Chinese propaganda machine. In fact, Chinese characters in the lower-left-hand corner of the card read, "propaganda sheet - 120", but Hanson never met anyone else who had the same card.
American soldiers have returned home with similar letters and cards from different conflicts, and their motives seem clear. The cards generally attempt to make American servicemen miss home during the holidays, often invoking images of family, friends and holiday cheer, and more notably, the soldier's absence. At other points during the year, soldiers would receive cards with images of girlfriends and sweethearts left behind missing their soldiers away at war.
The tactic makes sense. For many Americans, Christmas is a special time of year, and to servicemembers in distant corners of the globe, far from home, family, pumpkin pie and presents, the holidays can be difficult to bear. There is a reason why Bing Crosby dreams of a White Christmas.
Enemy tacticians in the 1950-53 Korean War pounced on this reality just as the Germans and Japanese did during World War II and other enemies did in future conflicts. The goal was simple: to demoralize American soldiers and destroy their will to fight.
While Hanson has not seen the card he found anywhere else, it appears that Canadian soldiers, who also served in Korea in 1951, came across the same card. A copy of it is archived as part of the Canadian Letters and Images Project at Vancouver Island University in British Columbia.
An American website that chronicles psychological warfare against Americans, psywarrior.com , also documents the same card, along with similar pieces from other American wars in the 20th- century, meaning that other American soldiers must have found the card in 1951 as well. Nonetheless, Hanson hopes to connect with someone who knows more about the card and its origins.
Hanson's war
Hanson, who moved to Wisconsin from Minnesota in 1974 to take a job as a real estate manager for the Wisconsin Lutheran Center, was drafted into the military as a 21-year-old kid in 1951. After receiving infantry training at Fort Lewis, Wash., and Fort Ord, Calif., Hanson was sent to the Far East, where he arrived in July 1951.
Shortly after arriving to Korea, Hanson found himself thrown into some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Months before receiving the Christmas card, the Pewaukee resident fought in several major battles along the 38th parallel, the pre-war boundary between North and South Korea.
In an area of Korea known as the Punch Bowl, Hanson and his unit, the Army's 2nd Infantry Division, fought in the battle of Bloody Ridge from Aug. 18 through Sept. 5, 1951, where Allied forces sustained 2,500 casualties and inflicted 15,000 communist casualties. Just over a week later, Hanson got embroiled in a monthlong battle with communist forces at the battle of Heartbreak Ridge, which claimed an additional 3500 allied casualties and 25,000 communist casualties.
While finding the Christmas card is a unique story, like many other Korean War veterans, Hanson persevered through his share of harrowing experiences in what many dub, the Forgotten War.
He watched as a fellow soldier stepped off of a path during a foot patrol only to lose his legs to a landmine. He watched as another lost his life to shrapnel from an artillery round that hit within yards of their foxholes.
In another instance, the young infantryman captured a 17-year-old Chinese prisoner, who only seconds before had his weapon trained on Hanson. To this day, Hanson keeps his dog tags and the cartridge he found in the chamber of the weapon of that Chinese soldier on a key chain as a reminder of how close he came to losing his life.
"That sucker had my name on it," he said of the cartridge.
Like many other veterans from his generation, Hanson, never talked too much about his experiences in Korea.
"I don't think I was any different than any of the other guys that were over there," he said. "I wasn't looking for glory. I wasn't looking for rank or anything. I was just there to fulfill my obligation and my duty. We were all in the same boat."