The Chosin Reservoir and the Marines Who Attacked in Another Direction

Somewhere in the retelling, a Marine general in the hills of North Korea got the credit for the best line of the war. Asked about the situation by a reporter, Major General Oliver P. Smith is reported to have said that they were not retreating, they were simply attacking in a different direction. Whether it came out exactly that way I cannot swear. The attribution is old and it has been repeated for seventy years. But I can tell you this much. The line is only funny because the Marines made it true.

What happened at the Chosin Reservoir in November and December 1950 is one of the most extraordinary fighting withdrawals in American military history. About thirty thousand United Nations troops were surrounded by Chinese forces several times their number, in a mountain winter in which men's rifles froze, and a Marine division fought its way to the sea in good order, with its wounded, its dead and most of its equipment. I want to tell it carefully, in order, with the names of the places that the survivors still say like a roll call. Then I want to ask what it is that a country should take from it.

How the Marines got there

The campaign grows out of the Inchon landing and its aftermath, which is told in Inchon in September 1950 and the Landing Everyone Said Could Not Work. After the recapture of Seoul in September, United Nations forces drove north, crossed the 38th Parallel and advanced toward the Yalu River, the border with China. X Corps, commanded by Major General Edward Almond, was assigned to the northeast of the peninsula, and in late October it landed at Wonsan and began moving north into the mountains.

The 1st Marine Division, under Major General Smith, was assigned to advance on a single mountain road toward the Chosin Reservoir, a man-made lake in high country, with the aim of pushing on to the Yalu. On the map it looked like a straightforward advance. In the field it was a road, one road, running through narrow passes and climbing from the coastal plain to a high plateau.

Smith's preparations

Here is the first thing to know about the Marines at Chosin. They were ready, and the reason is one man's caution.

Smith had no confidence in the plan. He was uneasy about the long, thin line of advance, the lack of any strong force on his flanks and the signs that large Chinese forces had entered Korea. Chinese prisoners had been taken, the first clash with Chinese troops had happened in late October and early November, and the Chinese had broken contact and vanished into the hills, which struck him as an ominous thing. The corps commander urged speed. Smith slowed the pace.

Without making a speech of it, he did several practical things.

1. He kept his regiments close together. Instead of letting them string out along the road, he insisted that the three regimental combat teams stay within supporting distance.
2. He built a base and an airstrip. At Hagaru-ri, at the southern end of the reservoir, he had his engineers build an airstrip in the frozen ground, so that wounded men could be flown out and supplies flown in. That airstrip was a lifeline.
3. He set up supply points along the road. Stocks of ammunition, food and fuel were placed at Hagaru-ri and Koto-ri, so that the division would have something to fall back on.
4. He held the road. He placed detachments at the key points on the route, which would later become fortresses in their own right.

Careful men are often unpopular until the day they are needed. There is a lesson for anyone who has ever worked in an organization with a superior who is in a hurry. Smith disliked the plan, he said so, and he did the careful things within his own authority. When the Chinese attacked, the preparations he had made were the difference between a withdrawal and a catastrophe.

The Chinese enter

On the night of November 27, 1950, the attack came. Chinese forces under Song Shilun, a force of many divisions that had crossed the Yalu in secret, swept down from the hills in the dark, in bitter cold, and hit the American positions at Yudam-ni on the west side of the reservoir, at the east side, and along the road.

The numbers were against the Americans. About thirty thousand United Nations troops, Marines, soldiers of the Army's 7th Infantry Division, British Royal Marine commandos and some South Koreans, faced a force that outnumbered them by a wide margin. Estimates of the Chinese strength at the reservoir run from about sixty thousand to about a hundred and twenty thousand. The advantage of the defenders was the high ground in some places, the airstrip and air support, and their training.

The temperature fell to about thirty-six degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale in the worst nights. The cold froze food, jammed weapons and froze blood plasma in the bottles. It cracked the hands of the men who had to handle metal. Frostbite took thousands of men out of the line. Frostbite, frozen supplies and weapons that would not work were the daily conditions of the fight.

Fox Company at Toktong Pass

The most famous single action of the campaign was fought at a mountain saddle called Toktong Pass. The road from Hagaru-ri to Yudam-ni crossed it, and whoever held the pass held the road. Fox Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, commanded by Captain William Barber, was sent to hold it, a company of fewer than two hundred and fifty men on a hill above the road.

From the night of November 27 and 28, Chinese forces attacked Fox Company repeatedly over about five days, and the company held. Barber was severely wounded in the leg early, and he continued to command, as his citation says, moving about the lines on a stretcher. They were cut off from the other Marine units. They fought off attack after attack, in the cold. By the time a relieving force reached them, on December 2, they had held the pass for five days against force many times their number. Barber received the Medal of Honor for it.

I want to dwell on one detail. The relief came from a battalion of the 7th Marines, under Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Davis, which marched over the mountains at night, in the dark and the snow, to reach them. Davis later received the Medal of Honor for that march and the actions around it. The story is more than one of men holding. It is a story of men going to get them.

The reservoir, east and west

On the east side of the reservoir the story was different and harder. A regimental combat team of the Army's 7th Infantry Division, Task Force Faith, taken over by Lieutenant Colonel Don Faith when its colonel, Allan MacLean, was shot and captured, had been placed there, and it was hit by overwhelming force. It tried to fight its way south to Hagaru-ri beginning on December 1. The retreat was costly. Faith was killed, and much of the force was lost, though some survivors reached the Marine lines over the ice of the frozen reservoir, and fewer than four hundred of about twenty-five hundred men reached Hagaru-ri fit to fight. Faith received a posthumous Medal of Honor. The soldiers of that force deserve to be remembered in any honest account of Chosin. They fought in worse circumstances than the Marines, with less support, and they paid for it.

On the west, at Yudam-ni, the Marines concentrated and began to fight their way south along the road to Hagaru-ri, over several days, in the cold, with the Chinese attacking the column. They brought out their wounded, and they brought out their dead, because the Marines made a point of not leaving any behind. That is a matter of principle in the Corps, and it made the withdrawal harder and slower. They did it anyway.

The breakout

The Marines gathered at Hagaru-ri, where the airstrip allowed the wounded to be flown out, and by December 6 they were ready for the last stage, from Hagaru-ri to Koto-ri and then down the mountain to the coast.

Here the Chinese made a clever move. At a place on the road called Funchilin Pass, a bridge crossed a gorge over a set of pipes that carried water down to a power plant, a drop that no vehicle could cross. The Chinese blew the bridge, and the Marine column was stuck on the mountain, with a gap in the road.

This is the part of the story that sounds like an invention. Sections of a portable steel bridge, the Treadway type, were gathered, and Air Force C-119 transports parachuted eight of them to the Marines on the mountain on December 7. Enough survived the drop to be usable. Engineers assembled the sections in the cold, and the column crossed. A bridge was delivered from the sky, in pieces, to a stranded force in the mountains, and put together by men with numb hands in a matter of hours. It is hard to imagine a better demonstration of the Air Force, the Army and the Marines working as one team.

By December 11 the last elements of the Marine division were off the mountain and in the Hungnam perimeter.

Hungnam

The next stage was the evacuation, and it was a great operation in its own right. Hungnam, on the coast, was turned into a defended perimeter, and the UN forces were taken off by ships over about ten days, ending on Christmas Eve. Something on the order of a hundred thousand military personnel were evacuated, with their vehicles and a large amount of supplies.

And a second group went with them. Tens of thousands of North Korean civilians, who had fled south ahead of the Chinese and feared the Communist government, crowded into the port, and the Navy and merchant ships took them off as well, more than eighty-six thousand from Hungnam itself and nearly a hundred thousand counting the other ports. The most famous of the ships was a merchant vessel, the SS Meredith Victory, which carried some fourteen thousand refugees from Hungnam in a single voyage, and on the passage, the account runs, there were no deaths and five births. The numbers are approximate, and I would ask you to check them against the Navy's records, but the outline is well established.

I think the evacuation of the civilians says as much about the cause as the fighting. A force that is withdrawing from a defeat does not ordinarily take the time to carry thousands of refugees. The men who made the decision, including some of the Korean and American officers on the spot, did so out of a sense that these people were their responsibility, and many Korean families trace their American connection to that week.

The strongest objection

Now the harder question, and a fair statement of the objection.

It runs like this. Chosin is celebrated, but it was a defeat. The United Nations forces went into the mountains of North Korea against a warning that was visible, and they were driven out by an enemy they had not believed was there. The grand strategy that sent X Corps north in separate columns, and General MacArthur's confidence that the Chinese would not intervene, were failures of judgment that cost thousands of lives. To make a legend of the retreat is to forgive the failure that made it necessary.

That is a serious point. I agree with part of it, and I disagree with the conclusion.

1. The strategic failure was real, and it was not the Marines' fault. The advance to the Yalu, the dispersal of forces and the dismissal of warnings were decisions at a high level. A competent account of the campaign should not hide them, and the comparison in Valley Forge, Bastogne and Chosin as Three Winters That Tested Americans puts the three winters side by side without flattering anyone.
2. A withdrawal that is done well is a victory of a kind. A force that is surrounded by superior numbers and comes out with its wounded, its equipment and its unit intact, and which inflicts heavy losses on the enemy, has accomplished something that most forces in its position do not. The Chinese forces suffered severely in the campaign, in battle and from the cold.
3. The test of an army is what it does when the plan fails. The planners got it wrong, and the Marines made it right. That is not a reason to forget the planners' error. It is a reason to honor the men who recovered from it.
4. The story teaches discipline, not glory. The lesson is Smith's caution, the engineers' bridge, the airstrip, the principle that you do not leave your own behind. Those are the habits of a force that survives its leaders' mistakes.

The Chosin Few

The men who fought at Chosin are known as the Chosin Few, and the association of survivors keeps the name. It is a wry name, since the "few" were thousands, and it was bestowed by themselves. Many of them came home to ordinary lives and did not talk about it much. The Korean War was fought in the shadow of the Second World War and was overshadowed afterward by Vietnam, and it was long called the "forgotten war."

I think it is the job of a grateful country to see that it is not. A Korea that is free, prosperous and allied with the United States stands on the ground that those men held. They fought in a war that was never declared, for a cause that was never fully explained to the public, and the result is that tens of millions of people have lived free lives in the South ever since.

For the fullest account of what a nation owes those who return, Seven Myths About Veterans That Shape Bad Policy, and the Facts is a good next read, and The Four Chaplains Gave Away Their Life Jackets When the Dorchester Went Down tells a story of sacrifice from an earlier war with the same moral shape.

What the Marines teach

Let me draw three lessons.

Preparation is courage's partner. Smith's airstrip, his supply points and his insistence on keeping the division together did not make a good story, and they saved the division. Boldness gets the headlines, and preparation gets the men home.

Never leave your own behind. The Marines took out their dead as well as their wounded, at great cost. A country whose soldiers know that no one will be abandoned can ask a great deal of them. A country that breaks that promise will find the asking harder.

Honor the failure's victims along with the victors. Task Force Faith and the soldiers east of the reservoir paid in full for decisions that were not theirs. A grateful nation does not rank its dead by the outcome.

The case in brief

1. In late November 1950, about thirty thousand UN troops at the Chosin Reservoir were attacked by a Chinese force that vastly outnumbered them, in temperatures far below zero.
2. General O.P. Smith's earlier caution, an airstrip at Hagaru-ri, supply points and regiments kept close together, made the 1st Marine Division ready for the attack.
3. Fox Company held Toktong Pass for five days, the Marines fought down the single road with their wounded and dead, and Air Force transports dropped bridge sections that let the column cross the gap at Funchilin Pass.
4. The evacuation from Hungnam in December took off roughly a hundred thousand troops and a similar number of Korean civilians.
5. The campaign was a strategic failure and a tactical triumph, and the honest verdict honors the men who recovered from their leaders' error, including the soldiers lost east of the reservoir.

What you can do: ask your local veterans' organization whether a Korean War veteran in your community would speak to a school or a church, and invite one.