Coshocton veteran recalls Chosin and beyond

When you walk into the quiet room of a retirement home in Coshocton, you don’t expect to find a man whose life reads like a map of the 20th century. Yet there sits Gywnn William Griffis, born Dec. 27, 1931 — a Marine of the Korean War, a survivor of the Chosin Reservoir, a Cold War Air Force policeman, a trusted fixer for Hollywood epics in Franco’s Spain and a widower turned husband again, living out his days alongside his wife Marilyn.

He is 93 years old. He says he was “just one of the troops.” He shrugs at words like hero.

“I wasn’t special,” he said. “I was just doing my job.”

But the long thread of his life tells a different story — the story of a boy who couldn’t legally vote or drink when he was sent into one of the coldest, deadliest campaigns in American military history, who later found himself building chariots for the movies and guiding world-famous actors across Spain, and who eventually settled down in small-town Ohio with a woman he first met behind a jewelry counter.

It is the story of a man who embodies the best of what we now call the Greatest Generation — and whose example is needed today.

In 1950 roughly 15,000-30,000 American and allied troops fought their way out of the Chosin Reservoir against eight to 10 times their number. Today, 75 years later, demographic estimates suggest only a few hundred — at most perhaps a thousand — of those men are still alive, nearly all of them in their 90s.

Men like Griffis are not just veterans; they are among the last living witnesses of one of the most brutal campaigns in American military history. Very soon they will all be gone.

A Columbus boyhood and a Welsh name

“I was born in Columbus, Ohio,” Griffis said, “went to Fifth Avenue Elementary School. Then I moved up to Ninth Avenue. That’s where I was when I went into the Marine Corps.”

He grew up in a good home, with a sister and a brother who later died of a heart attack. Holidays often meant going down to Wellston, Ohio to his grandmother’s place.

“I had a very good home life,” he said. “I used to go to Wellston and spend my holidays down there with her.”

Seventeen and a Marine

In 1950 the world still reckoned with the aftermath of World War II, but for American boys like Griffis, there also was something else: the romance and reputation of the United States Marine Corps.

He was 17 when he enlisted, and his dad signed for him. In those days a 17-year-old could not legally vote. In most places he could not legally drink. But with his father’s signature, he could join the Marine Corps and be sent to war.

“I wanted to be with the best,” Griffis said. “The Marines have a history that goes back to the founding of this country.”

He was sent to boot camp in San Diego. It was the “Old Corps,” a world away from modern training standards.

“Oh, it was pretty tough,” he said. “You stood tall, and if you goofed up, you got your ass knocked off. They didn’t soft-pedal anything. When that drill instructor told you to do something, you did it. If you didn’t do it the right way, he educated you how to do it. Whether you got a fist in the belly or not — that was up to him.”

Today, such treatment would be front-page news. To Griffis, it was just the way the Marine Corps forged fighters.

“If you’re going to be a fighter,” he said, “you gotta be tough, and you gotta train to be a fighter.”

He finished boot camp and was assigned to a guard company in California — he calls it “Barthville,” — and then briefly to Alaska. But history interrupted his life.

Because in June 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel and invaded the south, launching the Korean War.

The road to war: trains, orders and seasickness

Once the war began, life moved quickly.

“I was on leave,” Griffis said, “15 or 20 days. When I came back and reported in, there was nobody there. The CO said, ‘We’re forming up. We’re going back to San Diego, and we’re going to pick up all the reserves on the way so we can form up the division.’”

He traveled by train down the west coast, stopping at bases along the way.

His unit was Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, with 81mm mortars.

Soon he was on a ship heading across the Pacific. He had never been on a ship before and got seasick.

Their destination was Inchon on Korea’s west coast — the site of what would become one of the most daring amphibious operations in U.S. history.

Inchon: cliffs, tides and an audacious plan

By September 1950 the war looked grim. South Korean and U.S. forces had been pushed back to a small perimeter near Busan in the southeast. Gen. Douglas MacArthur proposed a bold solution: a landing at Inchon, far behind enemy lines.

Inchon, however, was a terrible place for a landing. It had tides that rise and fall nearly 30 feet, treacherous mudflats and stone seawalls up to 15–20 feet high.

Success was far from guaranteed. But surprise was everything.

“We landed at Inchon,” Griffis said. “There was a wall. We had to climb up. We had a ladder.”

He and the others climbed down rope nets into landing craft, then toward the shore. The tide dropped quickly, exposing sticky, brown mudflats. Marines ran or slogged along through the deep harbor mud as best they could.

They climbed ladders over the seawall into the city. Within days the Marines cracked the North Korean lines and recaptured Seoul. The enemy forces in the south were cut off and routed.

“I think it was a smart move,” Griffis said. “We did the best we could. It worked.”

For about 10 days, they pushed north and west, fighting and clearing enemy remnants. Then orders changed again.

The Marines were pulled out, loaded back onto ships and sent around the Korean peninsula to the northeast coast, near Wonsan and Hungnam. MacArthur had a new idea: push all the way to the Yalu River, the border with China, and end the war by Christmas.

The victory at Inchon should have been the end of Griffis' fighting. But the war was shifting. MacArthur, convinced the North Koreans were finished, ordered the Marines redeployed by sea around the peninsula to Korea’s northeastern coast. From there he intended to push all the way to the Yalu River and “end the war by Christmas.”

It was a bold plan — and a fatal one. The terrain changed from coastal cities to razor-backed mountain roads. The weather shifted from autumn chill to the first touch of a Siberian winter. And somewhere in those mountains, unseen, the Chinese Army was already waiting.

The march north: narrow roads and high ground

From the east coast, Marines trekked inland along narrow mountain roads toward the Chosin Reservoir — a man-made lake high on a plateau, ringed by steep ridges and plunging valleys.

On Oct. 19, 1950, units of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army started slipping into North Korea in large numbers. They avoided main roads, moved at night and hid in the mountains by day. By late November over 100,000 Chinese troops were in position in the hills and valleys around the Chosin Reservoir and the approach roads leading to it.

Marines like Griffis could not see them. But they saw clues: strange movement on ridges, abandoned camps and eventually Chinese prisoners — starving, half-frozen, sometimes surrendering just to get food.

“They were hungry,” Griffis said. “Some were surrendering so they could get something to eat. We were getting prisoners, and it got to the point we couldn’t handle it.”

He recalls men being taken down the hill, given a last cigarette and then shot because there was no way to spare rifles and manpower to escort and feed long columns of prisoners while his own unit was encircled and under attack.

“War is horrible,” he said.

Intelligence reports warned of Chinese units. MacArthur dismissed them, insisting China would not intervene.

The coldest winter and the encirclement at Chosin

Winter 1950–51 in North Korea is still remembered by meteorologists as one of the coldest winters in a hundred years. A Siberian air mass settled over the mountains. Temperatures plunged to -25 F, even -40 F at night. Wind chills reached -60 F or worse. Snow drifted chest-high in places, then blew into swirling whiteouts.

The Marines had no proper winter gear at first.

“We landed in North Korea with no cold weather gear,” he said, “just regular stuff."

They improvised. They took extra layers from the wounded who were being evacuated.

“We’d go by, and the wounded would be laying there,” he said “and we’d take garments off them. They didn’t need ‘em anymore. We did.”

Weapons jammed in the cold. Oil congealed. Bolts froze solid.

“Batteries didn’t last very long,” he said.

Plasma froze in blood bags before it could reach the wounded.

Touching metal with bare skin could rip flesh away.

Marines from the time recall that it was so cold water would freeze before you could pour it from your canteen into a cup.

In this environment, hidden Chinese divisions closed the trap.

On Nov. 27, 1950, Chinese forces launched a massive nighttime offensive all around the Chosin Reservoir, striking Marine positions west of the lake and along the sole mountain road leading south. A force of roughly 20,000 Marines and attached Army units suddenly found itself under attack by an estimated 120,000 Chinese.

“We were surrounded,” Griffis said. “You had so damn many troops on you. One day there’s nobody, next day row after row.”

Chinese attacks came at night, in waves.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “we’d hear the bugles — first wave, then another and another. They’d come over — couple hundred at a time. Some of ‘em didn’t even have guns. They’d pick up the guns off the ones that got killed.”

He was in 81mm mortars, positioned just behind the front-line rifle units, close enough to be overrun.

“There were times the Chinese overran us,” he said. “We were firing those mortars straight up almost.”

Along the ridges Marines dug into frozen ground. In the valleys some positions sat near rice paddies frozen solid into rough, glassy fields. At night when the wind died, the silence was eerie — broken only by occasional animal sounds, the crack of ice and the distant murmur of movement in the snow.

“You knew they were out there,” he said, “even if you didn’t see them.”

Marines don’t surrender

In Tokyo, MacArthur’s headquarters realized just how bad things were. The 1st Marine Division was deep in the mountains — outnumbered, cut off and under attack from all sides.

Within the ranks, word filtered down that the high command in Tokyo would have preferred the Marines to abandon their heavy gear and surrender rather than attempt a breakout. Whether that was ever a formal order on paper, it captured exactly how the men at Chosin felt about “Dug-Out Doug.”

“MacArthur wanted us to surrender,” Griffis said.. “But Gen. Smith said, ‘Marines don’t surrender.’”

Maj. Gen. Oliver P. Smith, commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, refused to give up. He saw another way.

He famously told his officers, “Retreat, hell, we’re just attacking in another direction.”

The plan: break out south, fighting through Chinese roadblocks and ambushes, and bring out as many wounded and dead as possible.

MacArthur stayed in Tokyo. The Marines stayed in the mountains.

Two men in a foxhole

There was no hot shower, no change of clothes in the field.

“You didn’t bathe,” Griffis said. “You can’t bathe in temperatures like that — too cold. Everybody stunk. Nobody cared.”

Food was C-rations — canned stews, meat, crackers, cigarettes.

When his unit managed to rotate into a reserve position for a short spell, they might get a hot meal and a chance to strip off filthy uniforms and exchange them for new ones.

“You’d go into a tent,” he said, “take your old clothes off. They give you new ones.”

Mail arrived only when they were pulled back to a reserve area, and there was no real “leave” in Korea for men in his position. They did not get to Japan or rest areas until they were wounded badly enough to be taken out of the line.

Most of the time, they lived outside — in the wind and snow, under the roar of artillery.

Ghosts in the snow

The terrain around Chosin is a brutal mix of steep ridges, narrow defiles, frozen gorges and high plateaus. The road south — from the plateau down through Hagaru-ri, Koto-ri and on toward Hungnam — clings to mountainsides where a misstep could mean falling hundreds of feet.

Chinese soldiers and North Korean irregulars used the terrain to their advantage, infiltrating close at night, hiding in hollows and behind rocks and trees. Marines sometimes heard only the soft crunch of snow or a bugle call before a new assault.

“You couldn’t see them,” Griffis said. “They were already there. They’d hide in the grass, down below, in the dark. Once the bugles started, you knew they were coming.”

The attacks were ferocious and relentless. Units were cut off, surrounded, forced to fight their way to the next position.

The bodies stacked high in the snow

Chinese attacks came in waves — sudden, violent and unending. Griffis remembers the sound before he saw anything: the thin, eerie call of bugles floating through the dark, the crunch of feet in snow, the snapping of ice under hundreds of boots.

The fighting was so close, so cold and so relentless that the dead never had time to fall properly. Bodies froze where they dropped — arms stiff, eyes open, uniforms crackling with ice. Marines at Chosin often spoke of the way corpses stiffened upright, frozen into grotesque silhouettes by morning.

“You killed so many of them they were stacked up in front of you,” Griffis said. “Then they couldn’t get over their own dead.”

The long road out: helping the wounded, saving the dead

The breakout from Chosin is now legendary — a fighting withdrawal over roughly 70 miles of mountain road, under constant attack, through blizzards and sub-zero temperatures, ending in evacuation at the port of Hungnam in mid-December 1950.

Night and day the column moved: infantry, tanks, trucks loaded with wounded, artillery, engineers and mortars. Mortar crews like Griffis' fired when needed, then packed up and moved quickly before Chinese forces could mass again.

But his own body began to fail him. His feet, exposed too long to the cold, began to freeze.

“I got to the point where I couldn’t walk,” he said, “so they had to do something with me.”

He became a casualty. He was flown out of Korea to Japan, then to Wake Island, then Hawaii and finally back to the States.

By the time the Chosin campaign ended, the Marines had fought their way out, saved thousands of wounded, inflicted massive casualties on Chinese forces and preserved the 1st Marine Division. Historians still regard it as one of the most extraordinary fighting withdrawals in military history.

When the breakout finally reached Hungnam, the Marines were evacuated by ship.

Griffis was 19 years old. He had already lived through more than most men ever will, but his service wasn’t finished.

After recovering, Griffis completed his Marine enlistment, and on Aug. 1, 1955, he began a new chapter in uniform — this time with the United States Air Force.

Meeting Loloy in Spain

After Korea and after completing his enlistment in the Marine Corps, Griffis transitioned into the United States Air Force, where he served as an air police supervisor, working security and law enforcement on base.

At the time he was a California man — living, serving and stationed from bases tied to the West Coast. When the Air Force sent him to Spain for a three-year tour near Seville, the assignment would change the trajectory of his life.

It was in Seville in the early 1950s that he walked into a local pub and met María Dolores Rocha-Rodríguez — “Loloy,” as he always calls her.

“She was just 18,” Griffis said, “a hostess — sweet girl.”

They married in Seville in 1951, two young people on opposite sides of the Atlantic now joined in a country still under Franco’s rule. In 1963 they welcomed a son, Juan William Griffis.

When Griffis' Air Force service ended in 1960, he returned briefly to the United States — to California, where he was from — long enough to complete his obligations and put the uniform away. Then as a civilian, Griffis and Loloy moved to Spain.

“I stayed in Spain for nine years,” he said.

After nine years in Spain, Griffis and Loloy moved back to California, where she died suddenly in 1996.

Hollywood comes to Franco’s Spain

In the late 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood discovered something about Franco’s Spain: It was cheap, visually spectacular and financially convenient.

Spanish law restricted how much profit foreign companies could pull out of the country, but film studios realized there was a loophole: They could spend money in Spain making movies, take the film reels out and make their profit later in foreign box offices.

They needed local interpreters, fixers, buyers and builders, and they needed someone the Spanish authorities trusted.

One day a friend in the Spanish police told Griffis, “There’s a company in town looking for interpreters.”

“So I went down,” he said, “and I got a job with them.”

At first his job was simple: interpret, go into town, buy what the crew needed — heaters, supplies, equipment. But he soon realized he was being paid a 10% commission by the Spanish vendors for everything he bought.

“When they came in and dropped a big wad of money on me and said, ‘This is your commission,’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah?’ That didn’t last long. I cut out the middle men.”

His knowledge of Spanish, his connections with the police, his reliability and work ethic — all of it made him invaluable. He wasn’t just a translator. He was a logistics man, a problem solver, a go-between for American studios and Franco’s bureaucracy.

And he was still a Marine at heart: disciplined, quiet, efficient.

Stephen Boyd and "The Fall of the Roman Empire"

One of the biggest films shot in Spain was "The Fall of the Roman Empire" (1964), a massive epic starring Sophia Loren, Alec Guinness, James Mason, Christopher Plummer and Irish actor Stephen Boyd, who took a liking to Griffis.

“Wherever he went, he wanted me along,” Griffis said. “I was his interpreter, guide, whatever he needed.”

Boyd gave him a sword used in the film — a prop that had hung at the side of a Hollywood star. Griffis also received a small carved wooden block featuring the film’s opening emblem of the Roman Eagle. Boyd also gave Griffis the great ceremonial key, one of the most visually memorable props in the movie, given to his character Gaius Livius by Emperor Marcus Aurelius played by Alec Guiness.

At one point the production needed historically appropriate chariots. The local options were too slow or too expensive.

So Griffis spoke up.

“I can build one,” he said.

He also encountered John Wayne briefly during a production but did not work closely with him. Wayne was in Spain in filming "Circus World" during much of 1964.

“I did something for him,” Griffis said. “I asked him if everything was alright. He said yes. That was about it.”

Ironically, his success in Spain angered some in Hollywood. American unions perceived Griffis as taking work that should go to union members. Studios eventually blackballed him from working on productions in the United States.

A second love: Marilyn and the jewelry store

Loloy’s sudden death in 1996 left Griffis adrift.

And then, as if life were giving him a second act, he ran into a familiar face in a jewelry store and back into the orbit of Marilyn, the woman who would one day become his second wife.

Marilyn had once helped him pick out jewelry for Loloy.

“Why haven’t you been in to buy anything for your wife?” she asked when she ran into him.

“She died,” Griffis told her.

Marilyn’s husband also had died recently.

“We went out, had dinner,” Griffis said. “And we haven’t been apart since.”

In July 2001 Marilyn wanted to move closer to her son Jim, who lived in the Akron-Canton area. Looking at a map of Ohio, she spotted a small dot labeled Warsaw.

“Being Polish, she liked the name,” Griffis said.

They visited. They fell in love with the area. They bought a house in Warsaw in 2001 and later moved to a retirement community in Coshocton, where they still live today.

Why this story matters

Today, the number of Chosin Reservoir survivors is down to only a few hundred — perhaps a thousand at most. Almost all are in their 90s. Many can no longer speak for themselves. But Griffis still can, and when he talks about that winter, the listener hears something no history book can reproduce: the voice of a man who was there.

He does not sanitize what happened. He does not change his language to suit modern ears. He speaks plainly — the way Marines spoke in 1950, when they were cold, surrounded, outnumbered and still fighting their way out. His memories give shape to a battle now drifting into legend: the bugles in the night, the endless waves of Chinese soldiers, the men he helped onto trucks, the fires shared with strangers, the stubborn belief they were going to make it, even when his own feet were freezing beneath him.

And through all of it, he insists, “I wasn’t special. I was just one of the troops.”

But that is precisely why his life matters. His story is not only about Korea, Spain, Hollywood or Ohio. It is about the character of a generation that accepted hardship without complaint, served without hesitation, endured losses without self-pity and built new lives without expecting applause.