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

by Hampton Sides

God created war, Twain wrote, so that Americans would learn geography,

after a few days in Tokyo, he decided that much about the supreme commander’s world was weird and cultish. 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.

President Truman had larger implications to mull over. Not only had the Chinese actively entered the war; now, quite possibly, so had the Russians.

The cargo in question happened to be a Mark IV atomic bomb, a revised version of the “Fat Boy” that had obliterated Nagasaki five years earlier. The crew set the squat, five-and-a-half-ton device to detonate at an altitude of 2,500 feet. Mercifully, the bomb was missing its plutonium core, so no nuclear reaction occurred. But the resulting explosion was massive nevertheless, and it rained more than a hundred pounds of moderately radioactive uranium over a wide arc of the Quebec countryside. The shuddering blast woke residents on both shores of the river for many miles. Soon afterward, the stricken bomber managed to land at Loring Air Force Base, in Maine.

Not until the 1980s would the United States Air Force acknowledge that this was a case of a lost nuclear bomb—there would be several during the Cold War—an incident category known in military parlance as a “broken arrow.”

At the mess tent, a cup of scalding coffee would accumulate a skim of ice within minutes. Canteens and C rations froze solid. Fingers stuck to metal. Helicopters refused to rise. Truck engines balked. Rifles seized. Batteries fizzled. The cold seemed to come with only one upside: It had a cauterizing effect on wounds. Blood from bullet holes or shrapnel tears simply froze to the skin and stopped flowing.

they were the tip of the division spear. They had advanced the farthest north, the farthest west, higher and deeper into the mountains than any of Smith’s forces. As the sun sank toward the ridgeline, the men knew how far removed they were from help. Exposed as they were out here, they felt they’d become, said one account, “the plaything of the old men who directed them, the old men who were always fighting the last war.”

The Chinese fell in long rows, but new waves of soldiers were rushing right behind. They blasted away with their burp guns and Thompsons, kicking up the snow in stutters. When one phalanx was cut down, the next would crawl over the bodies, sometimes grabbing a dead comrade’s weapon. Yancey’s Marines couldn’t comprehend them: Either they were inordinately brave, inordinately stupid, or inordinately fearful of their own superiors, for they kept advancing, with no apparent regard for their staggering casualties. “There was just so many of ’em you could kill,” said Easy Company private Robert Arias, who was part of a machine-gun crew. “If you had a conscience it was hard, because you knew they had a family back home. But you had to kill them—sometimes at point-blank range. Just as soon as you mowed them down, they’d come back in another wave.”

The platoon was faltering. More than half the ranks were either dead or wounded. Yancey, brandishing a .45 revolver now, kept trying to rally the platoon. Repeatedly, the Chinese burst through the lines, only to be driven back in spasms of close-in fighting. The battlefield was all clamor and confusion, with random scrums of men locked in mortal combat. Yancey’s boys were using their bayonets and firing point-blank. They were fighting with fists and pistols, knives and entrenching tools. But the Chinese kept boring in.

In back of his fury, Cafferata felt sorry for the Chinese. He couldn’t understand why they kept running headlong to their deaths, as though they wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. Some of them charged at him with quaintly crude weapons, almost archaic in some cases. One enemy soldier had a long pole at the end of which a knife had been attached with string. In other cases, they charged with no weapons at all. He wondered where that kind of bravery and fanaticism came from. Did they do it for love of country? To defend an ideology they held dear? To assert some principle held deeper within their society? Or did they do it because their officers compelled them to?

A hero, he’d once heard, was a person caught in the right place at the wrong time. It was more a matter of luck than anything else. He and Benson did what they did because they had no choice.

If it is true that a fish rots from the head down, then MacArthur did not know it. His organization in Tokyo, which had put so many American troops in harm’s way, was a nearly perfect reflection of himself. Yet 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.

When Kim Il Sung invaded South Korea, Truman administration critics recalled that Acheson, in an important speech he’d given at the National Press Club back in January, had failed to single out Korea as one of the Asian nations the United States was committed to protecting under its broader security umbrella. Some asserted that Acheson’s omission had so emboldened Kim that it may well have been one of the precipitating factors of the invasion. Once Kim attacked, it was Acheson, against the recommendation of many other Truman advisers, who had convinced the president to commit troops to the Korean Peninsula—scarcely guessing that this fateful decision would lead the United States into war with China.

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 allies, satellites, and puppet states around the world. Above all, NSC-68 captured the dire tone of the times: “The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.”

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. Though Mao could technically claim a victory in the Chosin engagement—and he loudly did—it was a Pyrrhic one at best. Mao, said one account, had “committed the unforgivable sin, of defeating an enemy army while failing to destroy it.”

The Korean War carried on until July 1953, when an armistice was signed. The conflict had ended in a virtual stalemate: The boundary between North and South Korea stood essentially where it had when the hostilities began. A “demilitarized zone” was established not far from the thirty-eighth parallel. According to the Pentagon, 33,651 Americans had died fighting in the war, as did 180,000 Chinese. An estimated 2.5 million Korean civilians lost their lives. Technically, the war is still not over. The armistice provided for “no final peaceful settlement.” The two Korean nations have been poised on the brink of war ever since.