Medal of Honor – Cold Feet and a Hot Garand: Hector Cafferata

Hector Cafferata died at 86 in a hospital in Venice, Florida, in April of 2016. He was a big man who had once aspired to a career in professional football. Cafferata spent most of a lifetime in New Jersey selling hunting and fishing licenses. He owned a bar for a while. Cafferata retired to Florida because of the weather. Mr. Cafferata had really good reason to despise cold weather.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside…

On November 28, 1950, Hector Cafferata was asleep in his sleeping bag in a mountainous area near the infamous Chosin Reservoir in Korea.

The ground was frozen too hard to dig foxholes, so he and his fellow Marines simply covered themselves in tree branches in an effort to approximate some modest degree of cover. At around 0130 Cafferata was shocked awake by small arms fire nearby.

The Chinese were particularly adroit at nocturnal operations, and this nighttime ambush was horribly effective. The rest of Cafferata’s rifle squad was either killed or wounded in the opening stages of the attack.

In the chaos that ensued, Cafferata had no time to retrieve his coat or boots. Gathering the few injured survivors and maneuvering through the frigid snow in nothing but his sock feet, Hector Cafferata prepared for the fight of his life. He shared his fighting position with a fellow Marine named Kenneth Benson who was so badly wounded as to be rendered combat ineffective.

Things Heat Up

As darkness gradually turned to dawn, Hector Cafferata hurled grenades at the assaulting infantry. Benson was hurt too badly to fight, but he reloaded Cafferata’s M1 in the dark by feel. For five hours these two Marines battled an overwhelming number of attacking Chinese troops.

Under constant assault by small arms, grenades, and mortars, Cafferata fired his M1 until the forearm actually burned to charcoal. He packed snow around the weapon to cool it down.

“I was the World’s Worst Baseball Player”

At contact ranges one of the primary tools used by the attacking Chicom soldiers was the hand grenade. Hector Cafferata unlimbered his entrenching tool and used it like a baseball bat to swat grenades back at the attacking Chinese. He did this for five hours. When asked how many times he had returned Chinese grenades to their previous owners he estimated maybe a dozen. I simply cannot imagine.

One grenade dropped into the depression where Cafferata and his wounded buddies had taken refuge. Cafferata scooped up the sputtering bomb and hurled it back, saving his friends in the process. However, the grenade detonated just as it left his hand and ripped into Cafferata’s fingers. It also left his right arm liberally peppered with shrapnel.

Finally, Hope

Throughout it all, Cafferata fought like a man possessed. He killed Chinese soldiers at ranges as close as fifteen feet. Once the sun came up and visibility improved, Cafferata was hit and badly wounded by a Chinese sniper.

Supporting Marines eventually reached his position and evacuated the exhausted man to an aid station. His feet were by now white with frostbite. Hector Cafferata had defended his position and his blinded friend throughout the frigid night with neither boots nor a coat.

Follow on forces later counted more than one hundred dead Chinese soldiers around the shallow ditch that had served as Hector Cafferata’s one-man Alamo. The number was officially reported as fifteen because the officers involved did not feel that the true number would be believed.

The Rifle

The M1 Garand rifle was the standard service rifle for the United States Army from 1936 until 1959. Designed by Canadian gun designer John Cantius Garand, his eponymous rifle represented the state of the art in autoloading Infantry weapons throughout World War 2.

While we frequently refer to this weapon as the Garand in deference to its designer, vets who served in WW2 and Korea have told me the gun was always just the M1 to them. The M1 Carbine was the Carbine, and the M1A1 submachine gun was called the Thompson. However, there was only ever one M1.

The M1 is a gas-operated weapon with a rotating bolt that feeds from an internal 8-round en-bloc clip. En-bloc simply means that the spring steel clip remains a part of the weapon during its operation. An internal mechanism forcefully ejects the empty clip on the last round fired. The distinctive ping sound it makes is like fine music to any proper gun nerd.

Nearly 5.5 million copies were produced. The gun cost the government around $85 apiece during World War 2. That equates out to about $1,200 today. The M1 saw service with more than forty nations, and copies have been captured in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

 

 

The basic action served as inspiration for the Japanese Type 4, the Beretta BM59, the American M14, and the Ruger Mini14 sporting rifle.

The Grenade

The Mk 2 “pineapple” grenade was a World War 1-era design. Originally designated the Mk II, The name was changed to Mk 2 in April of 1945. This classic American close quarters weapon replaced the failed Mk 1 grenade of 1917. The Mk 2 earned the pineapple moniker based upon its heavily serrated exterior.

The cast iron Mk 2 sported forty heavy knobs in five rows of eight. While it was found in practical testing that these knobs did not substantively enhance fragmentation, they did make the little bomb easier to handle. Fillings included TNT, Trojan, Amatol, or Grenite. Some of these grenades were even packed with loose EC smokeless powder. The Mk 2 was fired via a variety of fuses that typically offered a delay of four to five seconds.

The definitive model of the Mk 2 was painted olive drab with a thin yellow band at the top of the grenade body. The US military consumed Mk 2 grenades by the tens of millions.

The Mk 2 was not fully phased out until the 1960s. It can still be encountered in some of your less well-funded war zones even today.

Aftermath

Hector Cafferata subsequently spent a year and a half in military hospitals recovering from his ordeal. In November of 1952, Harry Truman presented Hector Cafferata with the Medal of Honor, his nation’s highest award for valor in combat against a hostile enemy.

Though Cafferata occasionally attended events for Medal of Honor recipients, he seldom spoke of his experiences from the war.

In 2014 Hector Cafferata was interviewed for an article in the Sarasota Herald Tribune. He had this to say of the long cold night that so defined his life, “I did my duty. I protected my fellow Marines. They protected me. And I’m prouder of that than the fact that the government decided to give me the Medal of Honor.”

He remained humble to the end. At the time of his death, Cafferata left a wife of more than fifty years, four children, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Cafferata formally petitioned to have his comrade Kenneth Benson awarded the Medal of Honor as well. Benson was ultimately given the Silver Star in 2000 for his actions that fateful evening.

A section of Interstate 287 as well as an elementary school in Cape Coral, Florida, were named in his honor. In 2014 Cafferata’s likeness was included in the folio of a two-stamp set commemorating Korean-era Medal of Honor recipients.

Valiant in war, industrious in life, and humble throughout it all, Hector Cafferata was a normal American who found himself in some decidedly abnormal circumstances. This regimental-sized attack by all accounts should have overwhelmed his unit and inflicted strategic damage on American forces positioned around the Chosin Reservoir. However, PFC Cafferata picked his place and fought the hundreds of attacking Chinese literally to a standstill. His superhuman stamina and courage held the line against overwhelming forces and showed the world exactly what a single determined Marine with a rifle was capable of.

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