Bright Triumphs From Dark Hours: Turning Adversity into Success

6 The Frozen Chosin

The safest place in Korea was right behind a platoon of Marines. Lord, how they could fight. —MAJ. GEN. FRANK E. LOWE, U.S. Army 6 THE FROZEN CHOSIN © co rbis At the Chosin Reservoir on the frozen Korean peninsula, the U.S. Marines escaped the deadly fog of war to fight another day. 107 SEMPER FI. The few, the proud. From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli. Once a Marine, always a Marine. The United States Marine Corps, with its 233-year tradition of excellence in combat, its hallowed rituals and its unbending code of honor, represents what is arguably America’s most revered fighting force. From once-obscure places such as Belleau Wood, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Hue, and Fallujah, Leathernecks have proven their mettle time and time again. Inspired by the likes of Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, long considered the greatest of them all, Marines would triumph even in retreat—“an attack in a different direction,” the command later called it. And they were right. Against overwhelming hordes of Red Chinese regulars, Puller helped to lead 8,000 Marines, along with their dead and wounded, through blinding snow and subzero temperatures, on a harrowing seventy-six-mile withdrawal from Korea’s Chosin Reservoir down a tortuous two-lane road to the port of Hungnam, where they were evacuated in the winter of 1950. “This was no retreat,” Puller bellowed. “All that happened was we found more Chinese behind us than in front of us. So we about-faced and attacked.” No matter how one labels it, the Marines’ perilous two-week retrograde highlights the merits of how and why to overcome the darkest hours to fight another day. A tortuous series of miscalculations had brought Puller and his courageous combatants to the frozen Korean peninsula in what military historian S.L.A. Marshall would call “the twentieth century’s nastiest little war.” A conflict that would claim the lives of 33,000 Americans, 415,000 Koreans, and roughly 1.5 million North Korean and Chinese troops. On 108 bright triumphs June 25, 1950, nearly seven divisions of the elite North Korean People’s Army (NKPA)—many of them bloodied in the great Russo-German battles of World War II, including Stalingrad, and the Chinese Civil War—invaded South Korea, with the intention of conquering the entire southern half of the 575-mile peninsula in three weeks. Supporting the 120,000-man force was a mass of Soviet muscle: 122mm howitzers, 76mm self-propelled guns, 100 Yak and Stormovick fighter planes, 150T34 tanks, and a host of well-seasoned advisers. The NKPA, said Marine Col. Robert D. Heinl Jr., an expert in military history, “was, among the armed forces of the Far East, probably better trained and equipped for its intended work than any army but Russia’s.” The roots of the Korean War were planted in an earlier agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to partition the country, with the Soviets north of the 38th parallel and the U.S. taking the south. Supposedly, once the war-torn country recuperated, Koreans would establish their own governments through United Nations–supervised elections. In 1948, however, the Soviets recanted, installing Kim ll Sung as leader of the communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in Pyongyang. Shortly thereafter, the United States endorsed the election of Syngman Rhee, a Korea-born resident of the U.S., as the president of the Republic of Korea (ROK) in Seoul. However, the Truman administration had been reluctant to provide the fledgling Rhee regime with tanks and heavy artillery for fear it would mount an invasion of North Korea. The North Korean blitzkrieg quickly overwhelmed ROK army units. With rapidly advancing armored columns moving almost at will, Seoul fell in less than four days. Roughly half of the republic’s forces were missing . It was clear to U.S. military intelligence and to Gen. Douglas MacArthur , commander of all U.S. forces in the Far East, in Tokyo, that without immediate American assistance, the NKPA would seize the entire peninsula in weeks, not months. On June 27, the United Nations Security Council authorized member nations to help repel the invasion. President Harry S. Truman immediately ordered American forces under MacArthur to come to the rescue of the besieged ROK troops. The arrival of the U.S. Army units in Korea, however, failed to turn the...