Leonard LaRue was born in Philadelphia and was part a large Catholic family with five children. As a little boy, he loved tales of the sea so it was no surprise that when he was old enough he attended the Pennsylvania Nautical School, graduated in 1934, and joined the U.S. Merchant Marines.
During WWII, while naval battles were going on around the world, LaRue and his ship ran dangerous missions to and from the Soviet port of Murmansk.
Then, during the Korean War, LaRue and the Merchant Marines transported troops and supplies around the Korean peninsula.
But then, in 1950, he received orders to skipper the SS Meredith Victory, a 455-foot cargo freighter that was docked at Hungnam, in northeast Korea. When Captain LaRue arrived at Hungnam three days before Christmas (1950), he wrote about the desperate situation he found there, comparing it to Dante’s Inferno. “I trained my binoculars and saw a pitiable scene… refugees thronged the docks. With them was everything they could wheel, carry, or drag. Beside them, like frightened chicks, were their children.”
Why was the situation so desperate? Because UN forces, who had been pursuing the North Korean Army, had been surprised by the large number of Chinese troops who’d joined the fight. The Chinese Communist Army surrounded the UN forces in what is now called the “Battle of Chosin Reservoir.” Over 105,000 U.S. marines and soldiers, along with close to 100,000 Korean refugees, were pinned against the sea. As the Chinese Army moved in, orders came down to evacuate the U.S. military. But the U.S. Army command, believing the Chinese Army would slaughter the Korean refugees, requested that the refugees be evacuated as well.
Hungnam was then designated as an evacuation point for these American troops and Koreans who were fleeing the Communist Chinese Army. The Meredith Victory, carrying 300 tons of flammable jet fuel, navigated the 30-mile minefield around the Hungnam harbor. The Meredith Victory could only hold 60 people and it had 37 crew members. So Captain LaRue ordered almost all the supplies (except for the jet fuel) unloaded in order to fit 14,000 refugees on board. It was the last of 200 ships to finish loading refugees, and it did so just as the Chinese Army appeared 4,000 yards from the beachhead. While they finished loading refugees, naval and air bombardments hit the beach while demolition teams placed explosives within the harbor.
In the middle of a terrible war zone, the Meredith Victory now had no mine detector, no weapons (except for Captain LaRue’s pistol), no doctor, no interpreter, little water, and almost no food. And they were running low on fuel, while still carrying the flammable jet fuel. The ship was headed to Busan (formerly Pusan), over 500 miles away, with over 14,000 passengers who spent two freezing-cold nights sleeping on the upper deck with no blankets, no food or water, no sanitary facilities, and little warm clothing.
The ship had no escort and no way to protect itself from aerial bombardments or other attacks.
On Christmas Eve, the Meredith Victory reached Busan only to be turned away since that port was also overwhelmed with refugees. They went another 50 miles southwest, to the island of Kobe Do (now Geojedo) only to be turned away again. It was Christmas, and all the souls on the Meredith Victory were forced to spend another desperate night on the open seas.
The next day, two navy ships found the Meredith Victory and they were able to evacuate everyone to safety. Despite the desperate conditions, no one died and, miraculously, 5 babies were born and survived.
(Two of the survivors eventually got married and had a child, Moon Jae-in, who became the President of South Korea in 2017.)
The Guinness Book of World Records named Captain LaRue’s rescue efforts as the “largest evacuation from land by a single ship in the annals of the sea.” But when the war ended, Captain LaRue left the Merchant Marines and became a Benedictine monk at St. Paul’s Abbey in Newton, NJ. After twenty years of being at sea, Brother Marinus LaRue lived at the abbey for another forty-six years, until his death.
Years after leaving the military, he said, “I think often of that voyage. I think of how such a small vessel was able to hold so many persons and surmount endless perils without harm to a soul. The clear, unmistakable message comes to me that on that Christmastide, in the bleak and bitter waters off the shores of Korea, God’s own hand was at the helm of my ship.”
