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March 9 - March 13, 2020
On this warm, humid morning of September 15, 1950, the Marines had arrived at their destination halfway around the world, to stun their foe and turn the war around: a surprise amphibious attack, on an immense scale, deep behind the battle lines.
God created war, Twain wrote, so that Americans would learn geography, and the men of the First Marine Division were about to learn a lot about this tough, sorrowful scrap of land.
Oliver Prince Smith, commander of the First Marine Division, one of the great underrated generals in American history.
In his own experience, it was overconfidence, more than any other single factor, that caused men to die.
Smith found the supreme commander initially impressive, occasionally entertaining, but ultimately insufferable. MacArthur, he said, is “a born actor” who “puts a lot of drama into his conversation.” He “has to his credit many outstanding accomplishments,” Smith allowed. “However, the pomposity of his pronouncements is a little wearing.”
Smith also happened to be one of the country’s preeminent experts on the tactics and logistics of amphibious warfare. He had practically written the book on the subject.
On June 25, 1950, with little warning, North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung had invaded South Korea with his Soviet-trained, Soviet-equipped army. He quickly took Seoul and steamrolled south in hopes of seizing the entire peninsula. General MacArthur, in Tokyo, did not seem worried at first. “I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back,”
the late summer of 1950, the United Nations forces had been driven down into the southeastern tip of the Korean Peninsula, their backs against the sea.
Douglas MacArthur, it was said, didn’t have a staff—he had a court. Smith saw this firsthand.
Though he occasionally flew over to the peninsula for a morning photo op or a quick afternoon reconnaissance, he would not spend a single night on Korean soil during the conflict.
MacArthur surrounded himself with yes men, many of whom dated back to his days in the Philippines. He appeared to have insulated himself from facts he found inconvenient or unpalatable. He dwelled in a hermetic universe of his own making.
Corps commander that was far more concerning: an impetuosity, a tendency toward snap judgments, a willingness to ignore on-the-ground realities in favor of abstract goals. Those who knew Almond’s style from his days in Europe viewed him as a whirling dervish—someone who thrived on adrenaline-soaked chaos.
The Truman administration issued only one caveat: MacArthur must remain vigilant to any indication that Red China or the Soviet Union might enter the war. At the first sign of their involvement, MacArthur was to halt his advance.
master strategy seemed dazzlingly complex—with two huge forces, separated by a nearly impassable mountain range, simultaneously working their way north—but
through most of its history, Wake had been uninhabited, the island boasted at least one modern virtue: It was the only piece of land for a thousand miles in any direction that could accommodate an airstrip, and so it had become the mid-oceanic refueling station of the far-flung American empire.
“Is there any danger of Chinese interference?” MacArthur brushed away Truman’s question just as he had in private. “We are no longer fearful of their intervention,” he replied. “The Chinese have 300,000 men in Manchuria. Only fifty to sixty thousand could be gotten across the Yalu River. China has no air umbrella. There would be the greatest slaughter.” The Yalu, he suggested, would run red with Chinese blood.
“The U.S. occupation of Korea, separated from China by only a river, would threaten Northeast China,”
Peng and Mao agreed on a strategy to entrap the Americans—an enemy that, they fully realized, had far greater firepower. Peng wrote, “We would employ the tactic of purposely showing ourselves to be weak, increasing the arrogance of the enemy, luring him deep into our areas.” Then Peng’s far more numerous armies would “sweep into the enemy ranks with the strength of an avalanche” and engage at close quarters. This strategy, Peng thought, would render “the superior firepower of the enemy useless.”
on October 19, large formations of Chinese troops, the People’s Volunteer Army (PVA),
A week later, Mao ordered 200,000 more troops to enter North Korea.
rankled Mao that neither the United States nor the U.N. would accept Red China’s nationhood.
weeks earlier, Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai had personally told India’s ambassador to China, K. M. Panikkar, that if American troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, China would certainly intervene. Zhou’s ultimatum could not have been stated in more emphatic language. India was one of the few non-Communist countries that had formally recognized Mao’s regime as the legitimate government of China, so Panikkar served as a crucially important diplomatic channel. The ambassador immediately cabled Zhou’s words to Prime Minister Nehru in New Delhi, who forwarded the statement straight to
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Mao also had an apparently unslakable sexual appetite and believed that orgasms directly halted the aging process. To ward off impotency, he received frequent injections of an extract made from pulverized deer antlers. Although he was married, he had his staff secure him beautiful young women to sleep with—sometimes as many as a dozen liaisons in a single day. He had hideous teeth, rendered dingy brown from chain-smoking and his refusal to practice the most rudimentary oral hygiene—he would only rinse his mouth, once a day, with dark tea. His sour breath was made worse by an infected abscess
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South Korean troops, newly arrived in Wonsan, came up with a brutal solution to the problem: They press-ganged a group of North Korean prisoners and, working in a grid, systematically marched them along the beach. “It was a surrealistic scene,” recalled Alexander Haig, who witnessed it, “with men stepping on mines and being blown to bits and the others closing the interval and marching stolidly onward.” Eventually, nearly every one of the prisoners had been killed by their own army’s explosives.
on October 31, five days after Smith had landed at Wonsan, the first hard report trickled in.
Upon reaching the village of Sudong, about twenty miles inland at the base of the mountains, one of these patrols met a unit of South Korean troops and found them positively rattled. They reported that they had just engaged in a firefight with the Red Chinese—more commonly referred to, among American commanders, as Communist Chinese Forces, or CCF. When asked how large a force they had encountered, the South Koreans would say only that there were “many, many.”
When this alarming report and several others like it were sent up the chain of command, Almond’s intelligence people reflexively disputed their accuracy. “This information has not been confirmed and is not accepted at this time,” a X Corps intelligence memo curtly responded. Almond’s headquarters admonished officers in the field to stop conveying the “erroneous impression that CCF units may be engaged.”
Thousands of young Korean women were mobilized into something called the Volunteer Service Corps, ostensibly to work as nurses on the front. In reality, these women had been abducted to service Japanese soldiers in mobile brothels—“comfort women,” these sex slaves were called.
sadistic medical experimentation program, based in Manchuria, known as Unit 731.
The Soviets proved as ruthless as the Japanese, and the prospect of a free and independent Korea, that fervent hope that had animated generations of patriots, faded. Rampant were the stories of corruption, of executions without trial, of drunken Russian soldiers looting shops, ransacking homes, and raping Hamhung women. Traumatized girls and women began disguising themselves as boys and men in hopes of eluding sexual assault.
The Soviets systematically dismantled the factories of Hamhung and Hungnam, loading the most valuable equipment onto trains and hauling it off to Vladivostok.
the CIA report spoke with the clarion voice of authority: “This pattern of events and reports indicates that Communist China has decided, regardless of the increased risk of general war, to provide increased support and assistance to North Korean forces.” Smith suggested that the “Chinese Communists probably fear an invasion of Manchuria despite the clear-cut definition of U.N. objectives.” The possibility cannot be excluded, he warned, “that the Chinese Communists, under Soviet direction, are committing themselves to full-scale intervention in Korea.”
just like that, it began. Close to midnight, the men heard a cacophony of bugles and horns, and the Red Chinese fell upon the gorge—“flights of them,” said one account, “like flocks of blackbirds.” They attacked the Seventh Regiment’s two leading battalions and infiltrated the gap between them. A battle raged through the night and, in fits and starts, for the next several days. By the time it was over, sixty-one Marines, and an estimated one thousand CCF soldiers, had been killed. Smith, often prone to understatement, called it “quite a fight.”
Whatever had happened at Sudong, whatever larger lessons might have been learned, Ned Almond didn’t consider the engagement worthy of contemplation or analysis. The X Corps general didn’t mention the battle in the command diary he regularly kept.
However, there was no doubt in Almond’s mind that these were, in fact, Chinese, and he radioed Tokyo to alert MacArthur of their presence. MacArthur, in turn, dispatched his intelligence chief, General Charles Willoughby.
on November 9, an incident over the Yalu River captured the full attention of the Truman White House, and the Pentagon as well. A U.S. Navy fighter pilot, flying a Grumman Panther, was on a mission to bomb several bridges near the river’s mouth, at a place called Sinuiju. The pilot of the jet, Lieutenant Commander Bill Amen, had taken off from the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea and was flying over the river when he encountered an enemy aircraft boring in on him: a Soviet MiG-15 that was piloted, it would later be learned, by a Russian captain, Mikhail Grachev.
was aviation’s first jet-on-jet kill. It also provided hints that the vaunted MiG was not invincible.
The Soviets had stationed a number of MiG squadrons at a Chinese air base in Antung Province, Manchuria, and now it was clear that they intended to use them. In the days ahead, encounters with Soviet jets would become so numerous that this stretch of the Yalu would acquire a new nickname: MiG Alley.
Not only had the Chinese actively entered the war; now, quite possibly, so had the Russians.
On the twenty-first of November, the leading battalions of the Army’s Seventeenth Infantry reached the river at the North Korean town of Hyesanjin, and Almond flew in for the historic occasion.
A few days later, another unit from Almond’s X Corps, Task Force Kingston, reached the Yalu at a place called Singalpajin, where they engaged in a brutal house-to-house fight, rooting out the remnant North Korean enemy.
More than a quarter million Chinese soldiers had crossed into North Korea, while another half million were massed north of the border in Manchuria.
Mao and Peng had decided to send one of their best armies, the Ninth Army Group, to the Chosin Reservoir to confront the First Marine Division, which they believed to be the strongest of all the U.N. forces approaching the Manchurian border. “It is said,” Mao wrote to Peng, “that the 1st Marine Division has the highest combat effectiveness in the American armed forces. Your generals should make its destruction their main effort.”
The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue. —MAO ZEDONG
Something momentous was happening in the mountains around Yudam-ni, and the villagers knew it. Plays of shadows. Human voices murmuring through the hollows. Deer bolting down from the ridges in large numbers, as though spooked.
“Luck in combat is fickle,” Barber once said. “But I’ve noticed through the years that those who make the best preparations enjoy the best luck.”
Then it started. Shortly after midnight, Yancey heard a mashing noise, a queer and disconcerting sound that was both delicate and huge. It sounded, he thought, like thousands of feet walking across a carpet of cornflakes.
Some Chinese drill sergeant was down there, crying out in the night, and his chant spread among hundreds of approaching enemy soldiers. The words were uttered in heavily accented English: Son of a bitch, Marines. We kill! Son of a bitch, Marines, You die! Nobody lives forever.
“They came in a rush,” said one Easy Company rifleman, “like a pack of mad dogs.” Another said it was as though the snow had “come to life.”
Across the larger Chosin battlefield, the casualty totals for General Song’s troops would be even more astonishing: His Ninth Army Group had lost ten thousand men during the first night of battle, a rate of more than one thousand casualties an hour.
