On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle

by Hampton Sides

Ziggurats of war stuff swelled upon the docks—food and fuel, medicines and generators, radio equipment, rifles and grenades and shells—the steady streams of supplies coming in, said one British journalist, “as fast as the brilliant large-scale organizational genius of the Americans could bring them.”

Right beneath the lighthouse is the place where it is darkest.

While the battle progressed in and around the church, bullets clanged off the large bell that hung on a wooden beam outside the edifice. When the firing began to subside, four brave Korean civilians climbed the tower and tiptoed onto the beam. They stood “boldly against the sky, swinging the bell,” wrote Marguerite Higgins, and it resonated “clearly over the racket of the battle…a strange, lovely sound there in the burning city.” The bell ringers crawled down, and one of them explained to the American troops, “That was for thank you.”

Smith’s reasoning was stark in its simplicity: Once a man entered the ranks of the Corps, race played no role whatsoever. A Marine, he said, was a Marine.

Yet, privately, Chairman Mao was surprisingly enamored of much about American culture, and in some senses he wanted China to mimic America’s energetic spirit of innovation and technological prowess.

“Shadow and shade, a gloom, a darkness, over the snow and the land.”

It was Marines serving in China during World War II who took a local industrial expression and popularized it, creating what became the definitive adjective capturing the special quality Marines were supposed to have: gung-ho. Its Chinese characters literally meant “work together.”

One Marine journalist described the cold there as “wet, raw, devouring…a howling beast.”

For the first time, Smith was starting to see the situation whole: the terrain, the weather, the pressures from below and those from above, the enemy before him and the enemy within. As the pieces slowly came together, he could intuit the battlefield for what it would become—a perfect trap. It was starting to feel reminiscent, he thought, of Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 campaign into Russia, in which the French Grande Armée pushed ever deeper into hostile country, distancing itself from its supply lines as winter steadily approached.

“Stand fast and die like Marines!”

“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.”

A fine, powdery snow began to fall, coating everything, dampening the miscellaneous noises of the valley. Then the night grew silent. The snowflakes made tiny ticking sounds as they accumulated on rifle barrels. Everyone could sense that the Chinese were close at hand.

“This is the worst situation we have had yet,” Truman said. “We’ll just have to meet it like all the rest.”

Davis’s choosing him, Lee thought, seemed “sort of logical.” Not because he was Chinese American, not because his language skills might come in handy, but because he was the best.

Joe Owen, of Baker Company.

A few minutes later, when Davis had gained the top of the ridge, his radioman reached Barber again. “Fox Six, can you see us?” “Yes, we can see you,” Barber affirmed. Across the hill, the men of Fox Company crawled from their pits and hideouts to salute the figures assembling high on the ridge. Many of Barber’s men produced scraps of parachute cloth, and the snowfields were aflutter with streamers of blue, yellow, and red.

But it was as though they had entered a kind of Valhalla, a hallowed place in which every inch of ground spoke of some profound strife and sacrifice. Lieutenant Joe Owen described it eloquently. “We stood in wonder,” he wrote. “Men bowed their heads in prayer. Some fell to their knees. Others breathed quiet oaths of disbelief.” Tears welled in their eyes as they contemplated the savage ordeal that had transpired in “this place of suffering and courage.”

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.

One of the patients Dr. Arioli had to attend to was the eighteen-year-old Texan who said he’d had it and wasn’t going to take another step. The straitjacketed kid was carried into one of the aid tents on a stretcher. His condition had deteriorated throughout the early morning. Arioli examined him but still could find no visible injuries. Then, a few hours later, to the incredulity of everyone, the young Marine passed away. The cause of death was never determined. He just stopped living.

Korea? “Mei yu fatzu,” one of them replied. It was an idiomatic expression used throughout China. It meant, basically, “We don’t know. It can’t be known. It’s out of our control.”

Marguerite Higgins,

Time-Life’s David Douglas Duncan,

“Look at those bastards, those magnificent bastards.”

Ed Reeves

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.

But more than that was required. One of my regimental commanders summed it up in this fashion: He stated that he was not a religious man, but he felt that we had walked in the hand of God.”

Military historians would place much of Chosin’s success squarely on the shoulders of one man: Oliver Smith himself. S. L. A. Marshall, a noted Army combat historian, would come to regard Smith as one of American history’s most underappreciated generals. “The Chosin Reservoir campaign is perhaps the most brilliant divisional feat of arms in the national history,”

out of great faith can come a miracle.”