Valley Forge, Bastogne and Chosin as Three Winters That Tested Americans

Winter is the one enemy that has never signed a treaty, never surrendered and never been outvoted. Armies in cold weather have to fight two opponents at once, and the second one does not care who has the better cause.

Americans have met that second opponent three times in their history on a scale large enough to name: at Valley Forge in 1777 and 1778, at Bastogne in December 1944, and at the Chosin Reservoir in the last weeks of 1950. The three are separated by decades and by changes in weapons so great that a Continental soldier would not have recognized a Sherman tank. And yet the three winters resemble one another so closely in what they asked of men that I think they belong in a single frame. I will set them in a table first, then draw the lessons, and I will not retell each campaign in full, because other posts here do that. The point is the pattern.

The three winters side by side

I have been careful with the cost row. Casualty figures for all three vary by source and by what is counted, and where I give a number it is the sort of figure historians generally accept. If you need a precise count for any of the three, take it from the official histories.

One: Valley Forge, 1777 to 1778

The Continental Army marched into Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on December 19, 1777, after a hard campaign that had cost it Philadelphia. About twelve thousand men built a camp of log huts on high ground, within reach of the enemy and out of his easy grasp. The winter that followed has become the symbol of American endurance, but the facts are plainer and more instructive than the legend.

The army's problem was supply. The country was not poor, and the farms around Valley Forge were not empty. The problem was a government that could not raise money, move food or pay for clothing in a coordinated way. The Continental Congress had no power to tax. It could ask the states for money, with roughly the success rate of a teenager asking for the car keys. The supply system ran on paper money that was losing value and on a quartermaster's department in disarray. The soldiers were hungry and ragged, and many died of disease, typhus and dysentery among them, more than of any wound. The estimates run from about 1,700 to 2,000 deaths.

Three things turned the winter around, and none was a battle.

• Supply reform. Nathanael Greene took over as quartermaster general in March 1778, and the army's supply began to improve.
• Training. Baron von Steuben, a Prussian-trained officer who volunteered his services, drilled the army in a simple, uniform manual of arms and in maneuver, beginning in the late winter. The Continental soldiers came out of the camp better able to fight in line than they had ever been.
• Leadership and resolve. Washington held the army together by character and persistence, and he wrote repeatedly to Congress about its needs. The record of those letters is the best evidence of how a leader holds an army through hardship.

When the British left Philadelphia in June 1778, the Americans followed, and they met them at Monmouth on June 28. There they stood in the open field against British regulars and did not break. Valley Forge Was a Winter of Hunger That Turned Farmers Into an Army tells the winter in full, and Thomas Paine's The Crisis and the Words Read Aloud to a Freezing Army tells the earlier winter that led up to it.

The Founders drew a lesson from it, and it is a constitutional one. The weakness of the Continental Congress, which could ask the states for money and could not compel it, was one of the reasons they later wrote a national government with the power to tax. That is a reading of history I would defend. The hungry army was an argument for the Constitution.

Two: Bastogne, December 1944

On December 16, 1944, the Germans opened their last great offensive in the west, striking through the Ardennes forest in Belgium and Luxembourg, in thick fog and snow that grounded Allied aircraft. The road network of the region converged on the town of Bastogne, and whoever held Bastogne controlled the roads. The 101st Airborne Division, which had just come out of the line in Holland and was resting and refitting, was sent in by truck, together with elements of other units, including Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division.

By about December 20 the town was surrounded. The defenders were short of ammunition, medical supplies, winter clothing and food, and the weather kept the supply aircraft away. The acting commander of the 101st, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, because the division commander was away in the United States, received a German demand for surrender on December 22. His reply was a single word, "Nuts," a reply that has been treated ever since as the model of the plain American answer. The German officers who took the message needed an explanation of what it meant, and the explanation they got was blunt.

I want to be careful here. The word is in the record, the circumstances are in the record, and I have no need to decorate it. What the defenders did next is what mattered. They held the perimeter against repeated attacks. The skies cleared on December 23, and transport aircraft dropped supplies. On December 26 the lead tank elements of the Third Army, under General Patton, broke through from the south, and the ring was opened.

The whole campaign, called the Battle of the Bulge, cost the Americans roughly 19,000 dead, by the Army's own count. It was one of the largest and bloodiest battles the U.S. Army fought in the war. And it was held, in a critical place, by soldiers who were cold, short of everything and outnumbered, and who had decided that there was no place to go.

Three: Chosin, 1950

In late November 1950, X Corps, a force of American Marines and soldiers with some British Royal Marine commandos and South Korean units, was advancing toward the Yalu River in the northeast of Korea, around the Chosin Reservoir. On the night of November 27, large Chinese forces, which had crossed into Korea in secret, struck from the hills. About thirty thousand UN troops were cut off in mountains where the temperature fell to thirty-odd degrees below zero Fahrenheit, a cold that froze rations, jammed weapons, and froze blood plasma in its bottles.

The 1st Marine Division, under Major General Oliver P. Smith, fought its way south from the reservoir to the sea over some seventy miles of single mountain road, bringing out its wounded, its dead and most of its equipment. Elements of the Army's 7th Infantry Division east of the reservoir were overrun, and the story of that sector is painful. The evacuation from the port of Hungnam followed in December. The full campaign has its own post, The Chosin Reservoir and the Marines Who Attacked in Another Direction, and I leave the details to it.

The cost was heavy: thousands of battle casualties and thousands of cases of frostbite. The Chinese forces, which had far greater numbers, took heavier losses of their own, by most estimates.

What the three share

Here are the common lessons, and I will number them, because the argument is a chain.

1. The enemy was partly the weather, and the weather was a test of organization. In each case the cold exposed whether the army could feed, clothe and supply its men. At Valley Forge it could not, and the fix was administrative. At Bastogne it could not at first, and the fix was an airdrop and a relief column. At Chosin the Marines had prepared, and it showed.
2. Isolation turned the question into one of morale and discipline. An isolated unit cannot be rescued by a better plan elsewhere. It lives or dies on its own cohesion. In each of the three the units were cut off or nearly so, and the thing that held them together was training, trust in the officers and loyalty to the man beside them.
3. Leaders who shared the hardship earned the right to demand more. Washington stayed with his army at Valley Forge. McAuliffe stayed in the ring at Bastogne. Smith stayed with his Marines on the road at Chosin. That is the model of command in a free country, an officer who shares the risk.
4. Training carried what supply could not. Von Steuben's drill, the paratroopers' discipline and the Marines' preparation were force multipliers. They cost time and effort in peace and repaid it in war.
5. A free citizenry fed the army, and a civilian authority controlled it. In all three cases the army fought under civilian command, and in all three, once the crisis passed, the soldiers went home or went back to ordinary life. That is not a small point. Washington resigned his commission in 1783, as George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be tells it. The republic has never had a general who used a winter to take a throne.

The strongest objection

Someone will say that I am lumping together three very different events. Valley Forge was a camp, not a battle, and the army was not surrounded by an enemy that was shooting. Bastogne was a siege with an immediate relief. Chosin was a retreat, in the language of some critics, and a disaster, in the language of others, because the force went into a trap that its commanders should have seen. To bundle them as "tests of character" is to flatter ourselves and to skip the strategic errors that put the men there.

That objection is partly right, and I will concede the part that is. Command decisions matter, and the failures of command that preceded Chosin were real. The advance toward the Yalu in the face of warnings is a hard chapter, and Inchon in September 1950 and the Landing Everyone Said Could Not Work tells how the road to the reservoir began. A serious account does not excuse commanders by praising soldiers.

But the objection does not defeat the comparison, for two reasons. First, the comparison is about what the winters demanded of ordinary soldiers, not about whether the decisions that led to them were wise. A man can honor the endurance and still criticize the plan, which is the one thing a committee finds nearly impossible to do in the same sentence. Second, the pattern holds in spite of the differences. The causes of each winter were different, but the thing it took to get through was the same, and that is a fact about the American soldier and the institutions that formed him.

What this says about the national character

Americans like to say that they are an optimistic and practical people, and the three winters bear that out in a particular way. In each, the army was not a caste or a standing aristocracy. It was made of farmers, clerks and mechanics, volunteers and draftees, who had been taken out of ordinary life, and it behaved at the worst moments as a body of citizens, with a plain loyalty and a plain sense of the job.

A country gets the army its citizens make. If we want soldiers who can hold at Valley Forge or Bastogne or Chosin, we have to raise citizens who understand what is being protected. That is a civic job as much as a military one, and it begins in schools and families and churches, which is why the stories deserve to be told.

For a fuller account of what a nation owes those who serve, Seven Myths About Veterans That Shape Bad Policy, and the Facts is a good place to continue.

The case in brief

1. Valley Forge, Bastogne and Chosin were three winters in which American soldiers were tested by cold, hunger and isolation, in 1777 to 1778, 1944 and 1950.
2. In each the weather exposed the quality of supply and organization, and isolation made the outcome depend on discipline, training and trust.
3. In each, leaders shared the hardship, and in each the army stayed under civilian authority and returned to civilian life.
4. A fair account admits that command errors put men in two of the three situations, and still honors what the soldiers did.
5. The pattern says something about the American character: citizens in uniform who hold when there is no good reason to expect it.

What you can do: visit a battlefield or museum near you, or read one primary account of a winter campaign, and tell a young person why it matters.