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March 9 - March 13, 2020
Chinese had succeeded in at least one of their objectives: They had largely seized control of the road, and now they were erecting substantial barriers on both sides of Toktong Pass. They hauled down tree trunks, they rolled boulders into place, they blew up sections of the road. Barber understood that he was truly cut off.
The most common weapons of all were Thompson submachine guns, the “Chicago typewriters” made infamous by Al Capone’s gangsters. The United States had supplied Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces with Thompsons for decades.
American weapons, carried by once pro-American troops, were being used to kill Americans.
As Smith’s helicopter flew along the path of the MSR, it passed over nine separate Chinese roadblocks. The situation, he had to admit, looked “grim.”
The mark of a great general, Wellington once said, was “to know when to retreat, and have the courage to do it.”
Then they appeared—as they had the previous night at Yudam-ni and Toktong Pass. Here came the smashing cymbals, the blatting bugles, the shrilling whistles—an “exotic concert,” as one Marine put it. And then masses of men, moving through the night, throwing themselves at the Americans. Said one Marine: “It was as though a whole field got up on its feet and walked forward. I never saw anything like it.” Said another: “A hell of a lot of Chinese went down, but a hell of a lot more kept coming. You got the impression the waves were endless, like surf lapping on a beach.”
the man was incapable of accepting blame, or assuming responsibility, for the mistakes that had been made. Already he was beginning to cover his tracks, to write his own posterity papers. He had started to formulate a defense for himself, a counter-narrative that, in many ways, would appear to be delusional. He would argue that he had known all along that the Chinese were going to intervene en masse. He had seen it coming for many weeks.
hmmm, sounds like Trump.
The sophistry emanating from Tokyo was dazzling in its desperation. MacArthur, wrote journalist and historian David Halberstam, had “lost face not just before the entire world, but before his own troops, and perhaps most important of all, before himself.” And so, to preserve the illusion of omniscience, MacArthur had spun an elaborate retroactive fiction. Reconnaissance in force—that was Tokyo’s new incantation.
“This is the worst situation we have had yet,” Truman said. “We’ll just have to meet it like all the rest.” He seemed to find solace in the making of concrete plans. He would declare a state of emergency. He would deliver a speech to the nation. He would triple the Pentagon’s budget. “I’ll have to ask you all to go to work and make the necessary preparations,” he said. His appointments, on that day and the days ahead, would need to be canceled. “We have got to meet this thing,” he repeated. “Let’s go ahead now and do our jobs as best we can.”
With China’s incursion into the war, Acheson said he perceived the hidden hand of Stalin. “We must consider Korea not in isolation,” he warned, “but in the worldwide problem of confronting the Soviet Union as an antagonist.”
Euripides: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”)
“We can’t beat China in Korea. They can put in more than we can. Our one imperative step is to find a line that we can hold, and hold it.” Then, he said, “we must terminate the fighting, turn over some area to the Republic of Korea—and get out.”
MacArthur had blundered badly. He had been outwitted and outflanked by a guerrilla army with no air force, crude logistics, and primitive communications, an army with no tanks and precious little artillery.
by a committee of policy mavens under the direction of Paul Nitze, NSC-68 was a sweeping analysis that would become one of the most influential documents in American history. It would guide and define United States foreign policy for the next twenty years. Seeing the containment of Soviet expansionism and the hydra-headed Communist threat as the paramount concern of American statecraft, the highly classified fifty-eight-page paper advocated, among other things, a dramatic increase in the military budget of the United States, the development of the hydrogen bomb, and expanded military aid to
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What had happened here was remarkable to contemplate. A single company of surrounded men, outnumbered ten to one, had held on in arctic weather for five days and five nights. And not only held on: They had slaughtered their foe. The magnitude of the carnage filled the Ridgerunners with awe as they marched down through it. The field was littered with hundreds and hundreds of Chinese corpses. “I swear to God,” said Owen, “you could have walked without touching the ground, using those bodies as a carpet.” The faces on many of the Chinese dead, he said, “were frozen in spasms of pain.”
“These people were former Nationalist soldiers who had fought under Chiang Kai-shek,” Lee later said. “They did not parrot the usual boring Communist propaganda.” What really motivated them, he learned—and, according to them, what motivated their most devoutly Communist comrades, too—was the sense that they were “defending the border, the frontier, from the aggression of foreign imperialists,” Lee said. “You heard hardly a word about Communism, or Stalin, or Lenin, or even Mao. They considered our coming to the border a genuine threat to the motherland.”
“Retreat, hell! We’re just attacking in a different direction.” Smith later denied that he’d said it quite this way, but the quote caught on as reported and would live on as Smith’s most famous utterance. The more nuanced point that Smith sought to make was that he anticipated that their march to the coast would be a battle the entire way. When you are surrounded by overwhelming numbers of enemy soldiers who are trying to kill you, movement in any direction becomes, by definition, an attack.
“Death was all around us,” said Bob Harbula, a George Company Marine from the Pennsylvania steel country. “It was like a shooting gallery up there. Killing all those people—I felt like a mass murderer. Often we didn’t have time to reload, so we wielded our rifles as clubs. Other times, we used our entrenching tools, even our helmets, as weapons.”
Whoever had packed the order, apparently not familiar with the code name, had stuffed the boxes with actual Tootsie Rolls, enough candy for many thousands of men.
The Marines found that the confection not only provided quick fuel; it had a practical use, too. The rolls were the perfect size and consistency for plugging bullet-riddled gas tanks, fuel hoses, and radiators. The men would warm the candies in their mouths until they softened, then “precision-mold” them to whatever shape was required.
Partridge needed ballast to stabilize it. The engineers, having run out of sandbags, tried to gather sufficient quantities of dirt, yet the frozen earth proved impossible to excavate. Then a solution, grotesque but perhaps inevitable, took shape: They would fill in the gaps with human bodies.
A work detail began the grim task of collecting bodies and dropping them into the span’s interstices. It seemed strange but not so terrible at the time. It was another horror to add to those they’d seen and done, and had done to them—another bruise to the soul. The lattice crib was filled with human ballast, and the engineers declared the structure stable enough to accept the full weight of the bridge pieces.
Stretching to Koto-ri and back toward Hagaru, a convoy numbering more than a thousand vehicles had been waiting for this moment, fighting off the Chinese all the while. It was a snake of rolling machinery, bumper to bumper, ten miles long: ambulances, transport trucks, half-tracks, artillery pieces, tractors, bulldozers, snowplows, tanks. Some fourteen thousand Marines and Army soldiers, as well as Royal Marines, would be marching or motoring down the mountain.
Partridge’s unlikely construction—a bridge delivered by parachutes, assembled by acrobats, and buttressed, in part, by the enemy’s frozen flesh. “I’ll get you a goddamn bridge,” Partridge had said—and he’d made good on his promise.
“If you could be granted any wish, what would it be?” Henry thought about the question for a while. Then, prodding his beans again and adopting an idiom reminiscent of the last war, he said, “Give me tomorrow.”
The way most Marines would come to view it, the decision to push to the Chosin Reservoir had been strategically disastrous. But the battle, once set in motion, had unfolded as an impressive succession of tactical victories. Whether one called it a fighting retreat or an attack in another direction, the First Marine Division had sliced its way through seven Chinese divisions and parts of three others. General Song’s Ninth Army Group had been rendered ineffective as a fighting force. Two of his divisions were entirely destroyed, never to be seen on a battlefield again.
The Marines had inflicted astonishing casualties: Song’s forces had suffered an estimated 30,000 killed in action and more than 12,500 wounded. The Marines, on the other hand, had lost 750 dead, with 3,000 wounded and just under 200 missing.
In the months after China’s intervention in the Korean War, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur made increasingly strident calls for dropping atomic bombs on Beijing and other Chinese cities and even suggested sowing a permanent radioactive zone, a kind of nuclear fence, along the Manchurian border. In April of 1951, he was relieved of his command by President Truman. “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was,” Truman later said. “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the president.”
