Musical on yuletide miracle, Operation Christmas Cargo

By Lee Sun-ho

The concert opera named “The Miracle of the SS Meredith Victory” was jointly performed for 90 minutes (back-to-back in two acts) by the National Chorus of Korea, the Gaon Philharmonic Orchestra and the Geoje City Boys and Girls Choir on the evening of Dec. 7 at the Haeoreum Grand Theater in the National Theater of Korea in Seoul. It was performed on the occasion of the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and the United States to commemorate the evacuation of 14,000 refugees via a single merchant ship, which had been designed to carry only 12 passengers and a 47-person crew, carried out 72 years ago.

Boarding from the afternoon of Dec. 22 until the next morning during a snowstorm at the pier of Hungnam in North Korea, the cargo ship departed shortly after 11 a.m. and, after a difficult three-day voyage, the vessel at last arrived at Jangseungpo Port of Geoje Island in the South on Christmas Day, before it could disembark its passengers on Dec. 26, amid a friendly mood and the hospitality of the sympathetic compatriots of Geoje Island.

The opera began with a storytelling dialogue between a father who was evacuated as a refugee in December 1950 and his son, about the former's unprecedented life-or-death refugee experiences during the Korean War's winter period.

Act 1 opened the musical, with a documentary film screen illustrating Korean history from the 1945 liberation from Japan through the 1950 winter war at Changjin Lake in North Korea, where South Korean and U.S. armed forces fought against the attacks of North Korea and China, resulting in the incredible Hungnam evacuation. The most dramatic scenes were the historic decision-making processes for the mass rescues among Gen. Edward Almond of U.S. Army 10th Corps, Korean interpreter Hyun Bong-hak, Gen. Kim Baik-il of the Korean Army 1st Corp., Captain Leonard LaRue of the cargo ship deployed in the Korean War and USMC Col. Edward H. Forney, evacuation control officer.

The most emotional scene during the three-day voyage, in which the evacuees faced death by a possible Soviet air raid together with hunger and blizzard conditions, was shown in Act 2. The birth of Choi Duk-ja's baby on board the ship was an exciting moment for all audience members. In fact, there were five such baby deliveries during the three-day passage to safety, and they were each nicknamed “Kimchi 1” to “Kimchi 5.” A refugee girl named Kang Geum-soon reminded elderly Koreans of the popular song “Fighting, bravo, Geum-soon,” which encouraged her to confront the snowy adversity of life.

With appreciation for those who organized this heartwarming, one-time performance about the “Operation Christmas Cargo” evacuation in December 2022, all fellow Koreans should convey their sense of gratitude to those deceased humanitarian Americans and Koreans alike, whether civilians or military personnel, who dared resolutely to save more than 86,000 Korean people, aiming for hope, dreams and freedom, and succeeded without serious injuries or casualties, even though there was very little food or water. Their packed and desperate evacuation during that cold Christmas could be thought of as perhaps the greatest rescue mission in the history of mankind.

The writer (wkexim@naver.com) is a freelance columnist living in Seoul.