The Korean War took a terrible human toll, claiming the lives of 5 million military personnel and civilians. It also caused 1.5 million North Korean citizens to flee their homeland.

About 14,000 of them made their escape at Christmastime in 1950 — on a single ship with a 59-person capacity.

The conflict, which had broken out six months earlier, was the culmination of tensions that had begun in August 1945, when Korea was occupied by opposing Soviet and U.S. forces and split into two zones. Five years later, following the outbreak of war, a United Nations Command force led by the United States was sent to assist the Republic of Korea in the south.

The UNC troops were soon driven to the port of Busan, at the southern tip of the peninsula. By October, the Chinese Communist Forces had joined the war, supporting the North Koreans to surround UNC forces at the Chosin Reservoir on Nov. 27.

Enter Capt. Leonard LaRue. LaRue was a U.S. Merchant Marine officer who as a child had been entranced by tales of service on the high seas. Enlisting at age 20, he served in the six-year Battle of the Atlantic between Allied and German navies from 1939 to 1945.

Having sailed into Soviet ports and across perilous Arctic waters and survived brushes with Hitler’s U-boats, LaRue was well placed when Merchant Marine cargo vessels were called upon to supply besieged U.S. forces in Korea.

His ship, the SS Meredith Victory, was an unarmed freighter with five cargo holds, each comprising three decks. Built by the California Shipbuilding Corp. and first deployed in 1945, it had formed part of the government’s Pacific and Atlantic cargo service.

In June 1950, the Meredith Victory was consigned to the James River Reserve Fleet, where it was due to be deactivated. A month later, with the Korean War underway, the U.S. Military Sea Transportation Service requested that all reserve ships be reactivated.

The Meredith Victory was redeployed as one of a network of military vessels that, alongside resources sent by the U.S. Army and Air Force, would deliver military materiel — fuel, trucks, ammunition — across the Pacific.

As its captain, LaRue found himself at anchor off North Korea when the Hungnam evacuation began. The attack by the North Koreans and the Chinese Communist Forces — who together numbered 250,000 — had driven 100,000 troops and 90,000 refugees from the mountains of North Korea onto the beaches. On Dec. 9, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the American commander in chief of the UNC, ordered an evacuation by sea.

“I trained my binoculars on the shore and saw a pitiable scene,” LaRue was later quoted as saying in Bill Gilbert’s 2000 book “Ship of Miracles.” The docks were teeming with North Korean refugees who had been threatened with beheading by Chinese Communist Forces personnel, who were accusing them of desertion and aiding the Americans.

Using booms and improvised hand-built elevators, LaRue filled the Meredith Victory — which was 450 feet long, 50 feet wide and designed to carry 35 crew members, 12 officers and a maximum of 12 passengers — with 14,000 fleeing civilians. Refugees stood chest to chest or lay on top of deck machinery and jet fuel drums.

In a 1960 interview with This Week magazine, LaRue described his ensuing 28-hour voyage to Busan. “We were facing waters mined by the enemy with a vessel that had no means of detecting them or destroying them,” he said. “We knew that Communist submarines, operating in the vicinity, could easily spot us and sink us with a torpedo.” Of the jet fuel against which refugees were resting, he observed, “A spark could turn the ship into a funeral pyre.”

After a journey of almost 450 nautical miles, the Meredith Victory arrived at Busan on Christmas Eve 1950.

The authorities turned the ship away because the city was overrun with retreating military personnel and evacuees who had arrived earlier. After requesting some blankets, food, water and interpreters — which took more than seven hours to arrive, according to the ship’s log — LaRue and his quarry were directed onward to Geoje Island, 50 miles to the southwest.

They reached its shores on Christmas Day, with not one life lost. Tank landing ships were attached to the hull of the Meredith Victory, and the 14,000 refugees were winched down into them, 16 at a time, in swelling, near-freezing seas.

Accounts describe the Koreans giving half-bows as they left the freighter that had carried them from certain death. Bob Lunney, a staff officer on board, stated, “There was no overwhelming joy on their faces because they had only begun their journey to freedom.”

Unaware of the trek ahead of them were five new additions to the 14,000 refugees: the so-called “Kimchi babies” who had been born to expectant mothers during the voyage. Their nickname came from one of the few Korean words that the U.S. crewmen recognized.

One of the Kimchi children, Lee Gyeong Pil, would remain on Geoje with his parents and go on to become a goodwill ambassador, as well as a veterinarian tending the island’s 3,500 cattle. Another, Sohn Yang Young, would grow up watching his parents lament the loss of his siblings, who had been left behind in North Korea with family members. They were never seen again.

LaRue remained in command of the Meredith Victory until its decommissioning in 1952. Two years later, he entered St. Paul Benedictine Abbey in New Jersey and became a Benedictine monk, taking the name Brother Marinus.

He stayed there until his death in October 2001, serving as a gift-shop worker, dishwasher and bell ringer. After a canonization cause was opened on his behalf in 2019, 99 percent of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted to confer sainthood upon him.

Their gratitude was shared by the son of two of the refugees he rescued: Moon Jae-in, who following his birth on Geoje in 1953 would go on to become president of South Korea from 2017 until 2022. During his first year in office, he attended a ceremony at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Va., and imparted a memory on behalf of his then-90-year-old mother.

“On the 24th of December [1950], halfway through the voyage, American soldiers handed out a candy droplet to each refugee on board as Christmas presents,” the president recounted. “Although it was but one droplet, I will always be grateful to the U.S. service members with such caring hearts for giving Christmas presents to so many refugees in the middle of a devastating war.”