The U.S. Army soldier had planned to save the box of Whitman’s chocolates for Christmas; amid the frozen desolation of the Chosin Reservoir, North Korea, those little pieces of candy would bring a small taste of home to the front-line on Christmas morning.

It was early December 1950, and the members of the 3rd Logistical Command, attached to the 3rd Division, were socked in by mountains to the east and west, and the communist Chinese forces to the south and north. It was 20 to 30 degrees below zero. Supplies were running dangerously low. The men knew their time would come soon, all at the will of their enemy, who greatly outnumbered them. Christmas was days away, but there was no sense in waiting.

“Anybody want candy?” the young GI asked, passing the box around. “I’ll be damned if I’ll let the Chinese have it.”

Carl Oxley, still a teenager, took a frozen chocolate from the box and tried to eat it. “I could not get the saliva in my mouth to eat it because of the fear,” says Oxley, a North Kingsville resident. “It was just a matter of time. We didn’t know when or how we were going to die, but we knew it was coming.”

Oxley had enlisted with his brother Bill on the same day back in 1949. They signed paperwork to stay together throughout boot camp and wherever the Army took them, including Chosin Reservoir. Carl ended up at the front, his brother at the rear, where the supplies were. The Chinese stood between them.

Then it happened: An Army truck carrying supplies successfully made the suicidal 10-mile journey up the narrow mountain road, its ditches filled with the frozen bodies of Chinese soldiers. Riding shotgun on the vehicle was Bill Oxley.

He was that type of guy, Carl Oxley said of his late brother, whose military career spanned 38 years and included command of the Ashtabula National Guard post.

If he had it to over again, Carl says he never would have signed the papers to stay with his brother throughout their enlistment. Carl Oxley says it was just too stressful having to worry about your blood brother in addition to your military brothers during a time of war.

Then again, with the exception of the Cold War, the world was at peace when Carl and Bill enlisted.

“It was going to be a gravy train,” Carl says. And it was. The first few months were great; Carl was seeing the world, warm parts of it in the middle of winter, at that.

Then the North Koreans invaded the South in late June 1950, and everything changed.

“The Korean War started five days after I turned 18,” says Carl Oxley, who had been trained as a smoke generator operator. “We went to Korea as infantry because they needed infantry.”

He landed at Inchon Sept. 17, 1950, as Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s invasion via that port was under way. Oxley was held in reserve and guarded North Korean prisoners at the island in Inchon Harbor. “You couldn’t pay those guys to escape,” he says. “Why would you want to escape?”



Bronze stars

From Inchon, Oxley’s unit went to Seoul, a deserted city ravaged by war and poverty and, from Seoul, to Pusan, where they oversaw the unloading of supply boats. From Pusan, they headed north, north to the Chosin Reservoir, where the U.N. forces encountered the communist Chinese, hundreds of thousands of them and the course of the war changed — again. U.N. troops were forced to retreat.

Oxley saw battle at least six times and has the Bronze stars to prove it. He became a platoon sergeant at the age of 19, and his platoon emerged relatively unscathed through the battles and day-to-day hazards of living in a war zone. Oxley says he survived the war as a matter of luck, not training.

“All the training in the world is not going to protect you if that shell lands on you,” Oxley says. “It’s all luck. The Chinese would attack a convoy behind us and in front of us, but not us. It’s luck.”

Smarts also played a role in his survival. For example, when they were suffering the 30-below temperatures, Oxley slept in his sleeping bag with his rifle and the felt liners from his boots. During the day, while wearing the liners in his boots, the felt absorbed moisture from his body. The liners would have frozen to his feet had he left them in the boots at night. By removing them, he could use the warmth from his body to evaporate the moisture.

“I didn’t get frostbite. I was smart enough to dry out those liners,” he says.



Telling the story

Oxley, who was mayor of North Kingsville 12 years and the village’s fire chief for a decade of the 21 years he served with the volunteer department, is an anomaly among Korean War veterans. He talks about his experiences there freely, including with students.

“I want people to know about it,” Oxley says. “It is the Forgotten War.”

Oxley says he suffered very little in way of lasting psychological effects, aside from when he went rabbit hunting after getting home.

“I didn’t see a single rabbit because I was looking for trip wires and booby traps the whole time I was in the woods,” he says.

He attributes his immunity against psychological effects to the attitude he adopted when he first began to witness the horrors of war. “I said ‘Oxley, if you are going to survive this war, you better not let it bother you,’” he says. “You got to separate yourself from the emotional stuff.”

That’s not to say Oxley has no feelings about the war, the men he fought with and even the enemy they were assigned to kill. Oxley feels the war was necessary and helped draw the line on communism’s spread by demonstrating the Free World’s resolve to stand against it at all costs. He also feels it was a war poorly executed by MacArthur, whose Olympian attitude cost many American lives.  On the other hand, he has great respect for Gen. Matthew Ridgway, who succeeded MacArthur and changed the course of the war, which 57 years after the armistice was signed, remains a stalemate.

Oxley says knowledge of this war is minuscule among public school students. He recalls speaking to an honors history class about the war and the students posing only two banal questions, one of them what is his favorite war movie? If he speaks to younger students, he’s often asked whether he killed anybody.

The Oxley brothers answered the call of their country to serve in three wars. Carl’s oldest brother, Dave, served in World War II on an aircraft carrier. Bill and Carl went to Korea, and their brother, Ed, was a gun operator in the Navy during that war. A brother, Ed, served in Vietnam.

Oxley has become a student of the war and read every book about it. His top pick is “The Coldest Winter” by David Halberstam.